One Summer: America, 1927

struck. On 18 and 19 September 1926, a massive hurricane, the first of notable proportions in twenty years, crashed into Florida, laying waste to Miami Beach and much else beyond. Four hundred and fifteen people were killed. Eighteen thousand were made homeless. The bottom dropped out of the property market all over Florida, even where the storm didn’t hit. Carl Fisher, a businessman from Indiana who had more or less started the boom, saw his net worth fall from $500 million to less than $50,000. Also hit hard was Jacob Ruppert. When the storm passed, he was left with nothing but ‘ten thousand acres of alligators and seagulls’, according to one contemporary observer. Ruppert Beach was never built.
    In consequence of the hurricane, Ruppert entered 1927 in a fiscally cautious frame of mind and with heightened respect for the unparalleled earning power of America’s newest sporting infatuation: boxing.
    To a surprising extent, boxing was a 1920s phenomenon. Although people had been smacking each other around in rings for over two hundred years, prize-fighting in the 1920s acquired three things it had never had before: respectability, mass appeal and Jack Dempsey. Together they made it a sumptuously lucrative pastime. It was this that stirred the interest of men like Jacob Ruppert.
    The rise of modern boxing could be assigned any number ofstarting points, but a reasonable place to begin is with Jess Willard. Willard was a giant Kansas ploughboy, and would permanently have remained so except that a boxing promoter spotted him throwing 500-pound bales around as if they were scatter cushions and encouraged him to take up fighting. This was in about 1910. At six feet six inches and 225 pounds, Willard was certainly built for the game. He proved to be a terrifyingly powerful puncher. In his fifth bout, against a promising young fighter named Joe Young, he hit the poor youth so hard that the blow drove a piece of Young’s jaw up into his brain and killed him. Willard scythed his way through a number of opponents, then became heavyweight champion of the world by knocking out the great – but conspicuously black and recklessly outspoken – Jack Johnson in twenty-six rounds in Havana.
    Willard’s victory provided a crucial, if not laudable, milestone for boxing: it gave it a white heavyweight champion, a shamefully necessary prerequisite for it to become a popular mainstream sport. Before this time, boxing was virtually the only sport in America – indeed, pretty much the only activity – in which blacks could compete with whites on equal terms. It is an ironic point from a modern perspective, but part of the reason boxing was considered unwholesome and insupportably raffish before about 1920 was that it wasn’t racist. And a big part of converting it into a respectable entertainment in the 1920s was making sure that it was, like all other major sports, dominated by white people. No black fighter would get a crack at the heavyweight title for a generation.
    With only white boxers to fight, Willard began to look invincible. Then he met Jack Dempsey. Their fight, on the Fourth of July 1919 in Toledo, Ohio, attracted enormous attention. Dempsey was a hot young boxer from out of the west. Willard had actually killed a man in the ring. This was a combination the public could not resist.
    Toledo was chosen not because it was a popular place for boxing, but because it was a legal one, and in 1919 there were not so many of those. In most places – New York State, most notably –boxing was banned altogether or so ringed around with restrictions as to make it ridiculous. Prize fights, where they were allowed at all, had to be advertised as ‘sparring exhibitions’ or ‘illustrated lectures on pugilism’, with the participants sometimes described as ‘professors’. Because the matches were only exhibitions, it was forbidden for one participant to knock out another or for a panel of judges to declare one man the winner. In consequence, prizefighting remained a marginal sport and fights were held in (no disrespect to Toledo intended) marginal places.
    Toledo didn’t have a stadium sufficient to hold a crowd of 90,000 so one was built, to be used just once, then torn down. To keep gatecrashers out, Tex Rickard, the promoter, had it constructed with a single entrance and exit. Had fire broken out the consequences would have been unimaginable, but at least they had the wisdom to ban smoking for the duration of the