One Summer: America, 1927

contest.
    Willard entered the fight supremely confident. Dempsey was scrawny-looking for a heavyweight, slender and wiry rather than bulgingly muscled. Willard was a full head taller and sixty pounds heavier. ‘This will be one of the easiest bouts I’ve ever had,’ he assured reporters, adding with a dash of bigoted loftiness that was distasteful even then, ‘I am better today than when I restored the championship to the white race.’ As a demonstration of his confidence, he demanded to be indemnified in case he killed the challenger.
    This proved to be something of a misjudgement. Dempsey may have been scrawny, but he was built of iron – hitting him, it was said, was like hitting a tree – and he attacked with startling ferocity, flying at his opponents like a loosened pit bull and pummelling them with merciless intensity. He had just won twelve fights in a row, nine with knockouts in the first round, one in just fourteen seconds. He was an unbelievably destructive fighter, and he proved it now.
    Dempsey charged from his corner and smashed Willard’s jaw so hard that he broke it in thirteen places, then followed up with a hook that sprayed six of his teeth across the canvas. Dempseyfloored him seven times in the first round, then pounded away at him for two rounds more, cracking his cheekbone and at least two ribs. Dazed and disheartened, Willard failed to rise for the fourth round. For the rest of his life Willard insisted that the tape under Dempsey’s gloves had been coated with concrete. It appears that it merely felt that way.
    Dempsey’s purse for his title fight against Willard was $27,500. Within two years, he would be fighting for purses of nearly $1 million, and the whole world would be his audience. Boxing had just changed for ever.
     
    Damon Runyon dubbed him ‘the Manassa Mauler’, but the name was no more than partly correct. Dempsey didn’t maul, but struck with deadly, repetitious precision, and Manassa, a small agricultural community in southern Colorado near the New Mexico border, was his home for just the first ten years of his life. After that he grew up all over – in Denver and smaller towns in Colorado, Utah and West Virginia – as his alcoholic and ne’er-do-well father drifted hazily from job to job.
    He was born William Harrison Dempsey – his family called him Harry – in June 1895 (four months after Babe Ruth), into a clan that was unusually mongrel: part Cherokee, part Jewish, part Scots-Irish. Dempsey was the ninth of thirteen children, and the family was poor but close – a fact that would weigh heavily on him in the summer of 1927. As a youth he made a living by entering bars and challenging anyone in the place to fight him for a kitty collected from the other patrons. It made him awfully tough. From there it was only a short step to boxing for a living. He began to fight professionally in 1914, using the name ‘Kid Blackie’. Along the way, he picked up a wife, Maxine Cates, a saloon-bar piano player and occasional prostitute fifteen years his senior. The marriage, not altogether surprisingly, didn’t last. They separated after just a few months. (She would die horribly in a fire in a brothel in Juarez, Mexico, in 1924.)
    As a fighter, Dempsey was instinctively brutal. ‘In the ring he seemed to enjoy hurting other people,’ writes his biographer Roger Kahn. Once, in a bad mood, he knocked out every one of his sparring partners. When the writer Paul Gallico, then sports editor of the New York Daily News , accepted an assignment to spar a little with Dempsey, to demonstrate what it was like to face the champ, Dempsey hit him hard enough to kill him. Gallico didn’t remember a thing, but reported afterwards that he felt like a building had fallen on him. The sportswriter Grantland Rice, who was present, wrote: ‘At the end, the head of young Mr Gallico was attached to his body by a shred. We only hope he is not asked next to cover an electrocution.’ Al Jolson, in a similar spirit, took a playful swing at Dempsey for photographers. Dempsey smacked Jolson so hard it split open his chin.
    Yet the instant a fight was over, Dempsey would often bound forward and solicitously help to his feet the person he had just made horizontal. Although he looked every inch a villain with his prison haircut and steely gaze, in private Dempsey was a pleasant, rather shy, surprisingly thoughtful and articulate individual.
    Nothing about Dempsey’s fight against Willard in