One Summer: America, 1927

Toledo did more to excite entrepreneurial spirits than the knowledge that Tex Rickard had spent $100,000 on a temporary arena and still made a fortune on the undertaking. The crowd of 90,000 was the biggest ever to attend a sporting event anywhere on the planet – and in Toledo, Ohio, for goodness’ sake. Boxing was clearly too lucrative to be left to marginal cities in the distant west, especially when existing venues like Yankee Stadium and the Polo Grounds stood unused for 250 days or more a year. Almost at once, New York State Senator (and soon-to-be New York City Mayor) Jimmy Walker shepherded a bill through the legislature making boxing fully legal in New York. Other states quickly followed.
    Boxing still faced a great deal of opposition in some quarters, however. Many people were horrified by its violence and brutality. Others fretted that it was an incitement to gambling. The ReverendJohn Roach Straton saw a worrisome threat to morals in allowing members of the weaker sex to gaze upon ‘two practically naked men, battering and bruising each other and struggling in sweat and blood for mere animal mastery’.
    In fact, as it turned out, that was very much what women wanted, and the person they most keenly wished to see glistening and lightly clad was the French boxer Georges Carpentier. He was, by universal female consent, an eyeful. ‘Michelangelo would have fainted for joy at the beauty of his profile,’ wrote one smitten female observer, and her comments were echoed in ladies’ magazines across the land. Women simply adored him. When Gene Tunney beat Carpentier in a later fight, a distraught blonde leapt into the ring and tried to scratch his eyes out.
    Carpentier was not a great fighter, and occasionally resorted to a helpful fix. This didn’t always work out quite as planned. In 1922 in Paris, a Senegalese fighter known as Battling Siki agreed, for a generous consideration, to take a fall against Carpentier. Unfortunately, Siki forgot his commitment and instead knocked out the dumbfounded Frenchman in the sixth round. For Siki it was the high point of a mostly disappointing life. He never won another important match, and in 1925 was shot dead for no apparent reason on a Manhattan street. The murderer was never caught.
    Carpentier landed a fight with Dempsey based almost entirely on three considerations: that he looked strong, made the ladies swoon and was a war hero. (He had been a decorated aviator in the First World War, in which capacity he became great pals with Charles Nungesser.) The fight attracted unprecedented levels of public interest. Reporters came from across the world. The New York American hired George Bernard Shaw to comment. H. L. Mencken, in an essay, expressed his satisfaction that it was a fight between white men.
    Carpentier claimed to have developed a secret punch that would catch Dempsey by surprise. Damon Runyon suggested that he would be better off practising taking ten-second naps sincethat was mostly what he would be doing during the fight. Before the bout, Rickard beseeched Dempsey: ‘Don’t kill the son of a bitch, Jack.’ Rickard wasn’t concerned about Carpentier’s well-being, but about what a death would do to boxing just as it was getting lucrative and respectable. ‘The best people in the world are here today,’ he said. ‘If you kill him, all this will be ruined. Boxing will be dead.’
    It did not take long for Carpentier to discover how outclassed he was. Dempsey broke his nose with his first punch. Soon afterwards, Carpentier hit Dempsey in the face with the hardest punch he could throw. Dempsey barely blinked. Carpentier broke his thumb in two places. Dempsey took just four rounds to demolish the Frenchman and leave him unconscious on his back in the middle of the ring. From beginning to end, the fight lasted twenty-seven minutes. The gate was $1,626,580 – a fourfold increase from the Dempsey–Willard fight of just two years earlier.
    The problem for Dempsey now became an absence of opponents rash enough or worthy enough to climb into the ring with him. Boxing might well have lost its momentum had it not been for the timely arrival on American soil of an Argentinian giant named Luis Angel Firpo – ‘the Wild Bull of the Pampas’, as he was extravagantly but accurately dubbed. A poor youth from Buenos Aires, Firpo arrived in America in 1922 carrying a cardboard suitcase that held one spare shirt collar, a pair of boxing trunks and nothing