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adversary must retreat to a neutral corner before the referee began the count. Only after Dempsey had reluctantly allowed himself to be escorted to the corner did the official begin counting, buying Tunney additional time to recover from Dempsey’s blow. Tunney, after a few seconds seeming fully alert as he sat on the canvas, waited to get back on to his feet until the count of nine, although he had actually been down for between fourteen and seventeen seconds; he knew as well as Dempsey did that there was no need to get up before the official count reached nine. This controversial decision became known as the Long Count.

Back up, Tunney retreated before Dempsey’s furious advance, well aware that all he had to do to win was wait. “Over his swarthy, blue-jowled fighter’s face there spread a look which will never leave me as long as I live,” wrote Gallico of Dempsey as he sensed his victim slipping out of his grasp. “First it was the expression of self-realization of one who knows that his race is run, that he is old and that he is finished. And then through it and replacing it there appeared a glance of such bitter, biting contempt for his opponent that for the moment I felt ashamed for the man who was running away. With his gloves Dempsey made little coaxing pawing motions to Tunney to come in and fight. That was it. Don’t run. Come in and fight. This is a fight. For that is what Dempsey would have done.”

Tunney easily won the next three rounds and retained his title on points by the judges’ unanimous decision. Dempsey knew why he had lost: Tunney was such a formidable opponent because he lacked (or could control) the “fighting instinct” by which most boxers are governed. He couldn’t be tricked into the attack, wouldn’t take a chance, wouldn’t play to the crowd—just relied on being able to evade and outlast his opponent.

Some observers suspected that both fights had been fixed, although few dared to say so publicly. Anyone betting on Tunney in either fight would have made a handsome profit. Both fighters had criminal connections. Leo Flynn, the manager with whom Dempsey had replaced Doc Kearns, was thought to be an associate of Al Capone’s. Despite his clean-cut image, Tunney had borrowed large sums from the Philadelphia mobster Boo Boo Hoff. Having watched their first fight in Philadelphia, Ring Lardner said, “Tunney couldn’t lick Dempsey if Dempsey was trying.”

After his loss there was nothing else for Dempsey to do but retire. Tex Rickard died in his arms in early 1929, having refused an operation for appendicitis. Later that year Dempsey and Estelle were divorced. For a while he promoted fights for Al Capone, but when Capone “started giving orders [about] who was going to win and who was going to lose—and naming the round,” Dempsey quit.

The ballyhoo that had surrounded Dempsey abated and he managed to build a life after his boxing career. In the 1920s a hero one day could be a nobody the next, but Dempsey’s vulnerability, as much as his invincibility, had earned him a lasting place in American hearts. “Nothing ever went to Dempsey’s head—not his money, not his title, and not the amazing change in his social position,” wrote Paul Gallico. He always “remained unspoiled, natural and himself.”

Dempsey continued to fight in exhibition matches, wrote about boxing technique and, in the 1930s, opened a bustling chophouse in New York. He was luckier than some other sporting celebrities: the college football hero Red Grange, who in 1925 had been paid $12,000 for his first professional game with the Chicago Bears and soon afterwards signed a $300,000 movie contract, was by 1930 working at a Hollywood nightclub.

Looking back on Dempsey’s extraordinary career a decade later, Paul Gallico said that though Dempsey overshadowed his age, “we were all part of the Dempsey cult and we were blinded by our own ballyhoo.” Dempsey was a victim of the American dream just as much as a symbol of it, puffed up by his promoters, and the hunger of the decade for heroes, into an expendable commodity rather than a man.

“I have seen the coming