Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [121]
Rickard scheduled a rematch for 364 days after the two boxers’ first meeting, for 22 September 1927, this time in Chicago. Dempsey’s final training camp was “the quietest and dullest of all,” said Gallico. Estelle was heavily medicated, teetering on the brink of a nervous breakdown; Dempsey just wanted to win.
Dempsey met the young heavyweight Jack Sharkey in an elimination round for the title bout in July. He knocked Sharkey out cold in the seventh round. Damon Runyon was more impressed by the audience which included an Indian maharajah, the circus impresario John Ringling and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. As Runyon made his way to his seat, he said, he “fell under the hurrying hoofs of fourteen kings of the world of finance, twenty-nine merchant princes, six bootleggers and five ticket speculators, all owners of estates on Long Island and of Rolls-Royce cars.”
Given that the Dempsey-Tunney rematch was taking place in Capone’s Chicago, Rickard’s greatest challenge was finding a straight referee—and there are still questions about whether or not he managed to. Capone had been a fan of Dempsey’s since 1919, when he had offered him whatever he wanted to stage an exhibition fight at his private club. This time he offered to ensure Dempsey’s win. As Jack told it, when he refused, Capone sent him an extravagant bunch of flowers. The note read, “In the name of sportsmanship.” Capone was rumored to have bet $45,000 on Dempsey to beat Tunney. It was said that $2 million was wagered on the fight in New York alone.
Just before ten o’clock on the evening of 22 September 1927, the honeyed baritone of Graham McNamee came over the wire: “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen of the radio audience. This is the night.” Seventy independent stations across the country had bought rights to McNamee’s presentation of the fight; even the inmates of Sing-Sing prison had been given permission to listen. The fight was the first radio program to be broadcast worldwide, bringing in an estimated total audience of fifty million people. The trajectory of Dempsey’s career had run in parallel to the burgeoning radio industry. In 1920, when fewer than one house in ten thousand had a radio set, the first radio station received its license in Pittsburgh. Two years later, 576 stations were transmitting and the industry was worth $60 million annually. Tens of millions of Americans heard Dempsey floor Firpo in 1923.
Once again the huge audience of over a hundred thousand was packed with celebrities, many of them Dempsey’s friends from Hollywood, including Charlie Chaplin, the disgraced Fatty Arbuckle, W. R. Hearst, Gloria Swanson, Irving Berlin, Doug Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. Auto-magnate Walter Chrysler was there, as was Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon. Al Capone sat with Damon Runyon. The box-office take was $2.5 million.
Perhaps for the first time, the public were overwhelmingly pulling for Dempsey to win. Boxing fans had begun to tire of Tunney’s know-it-all attitude, his use of over-long words, his self-regarding superciliousness; they were no longer impressed by the volume of Omar Khayyam’s poetry that he liked to carry around with him to show that he was something more than a mere boxer.
Dempsey was better prepared for this second fight, in better health and hungrier to win, but once again Tunney outboxed him, exploiting Dempsey’s raw, undisciplined style. Dempsey was losing on points when he knocked Tunney to the ground with a left hook to the chin in the seventh round. As he always had done, Dempsey instinctively stood glowering over his opponent, waiting for him to get up so he could knock him down again.
But a recently introduced (and not yet universal) rule specified that when a boxer was knocked down, his