One Summer: America, 1927

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    He was not a stylish fighter – ‘he punches like a man throwing rocks’ is how one observer put it – but he was huge and powerful, and he now proceeded to club to the canvas one opponent after another. By the time he met Dempsey at the Polo Grounds in September 1923, he had won twelve fights in a row – nine by knockout. Like Dempsey, he was a fighter who was prepared to stand in one place and slug it out. The world couldn’t wait to see what Dempsey would make of him. What followed was perhaps the most exciting four minutes of slugging ever seen in the ring.
    Firpo brought a gasp to 80,000 pairs of lips by dropping Dempsey to one knee with his very first punch. Dempsey responded furiously and knocked down Firpo seven times in the first round, but Firpo got up each time swinging. After the seventh knockdown, Firpo reached back and caught Dempsey with a right hook so ferocious that it knocked the champ through the ropes and clear out of the ring. Dempsey fell into the crowd at ringside, and was pushed back by many sets of eager hands – ‘so many that it looked like he was getting a back massage’, Firpo recalled later. Among the enthusiastic pushers was Babe Ruth, beaming all over. Dempsey should have been disqualified for receiving assistance, but the referee let the fight continue.
    In the first minute of the next round, Dempsey hit Firpo in the head with two mighty blows and Firpo slumped to the canvas not to rise again. Most reporters declared it the most exciting fight they had ever seen. Grantland Rice thought it the most exciting fight there had ever been.
    And then Dempsey stopped boxing. Fights were mooted and even negotiated, but in every instance came to nought. From September 1923 to September 1926, Dempsey didn’t fight at all. Instead, he settled in Los Angeles, acted in a couple of movies, had his nose fixed, married a minor movie star named Estelle Taylor (and slept with several others), and became pals with Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks.
    Dempsey’s brother Johnny, who nurtured dreams of being a Hollywood star himself, was in Los Angeles already and had formed friendships of his own with several well-known figures, in particular a matinee idol named Wallace Reid, then one of the biggest box office draws in movies. Reid had the wholesome good looks of the boy every mother wants her daughter to marry, but in private life he was secretly and deeply addicted to narcotics. From Reid Johnny Dempsey learned the dangerous pleasures of cocaine and heroin. Reid died from the cumulative effects of dissipation in 1923 at the age of just thirty-one, but not before he had madeJohnny Dempsey an addict, too. The young Dempsey’s drug problems and deteriorating mental state would be a prolonged and painful distraction for his brother Jack.
     
    In 1926, Philadelphia held a world’s fair, called the Sesquicentennial Exposition, to mark the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The enterprise was a fiasco from the start. The site chosen was marshy and difficult to build on. The vision for the fair was grand, but the funding meagre. The state of Pennsylvania declined to contribute anything to the costs.
    Construction efforts fell so far behind that hardly any exhibits were finished when the fair opened on 31 May 1926. President Coolidge declined to attend and sent his secretary of state, Frank B. Kellogg, and omnipresent commerce secretary, Herbert Hoover. The park that greeted them was embarrassingly incomplete. An eighty-foot-high Liberty Bell, the exposition centrepiece, was still shrouded in scaffolding. Work hadn’t even started on the New York State pavilion. The tardiest exhibition of all was Argentina’s, which was dedicated on 30 October, just in time for the exposition’s closing.
    It rained almost all summer and into the autumn, depressing crowds in every sense of the word. The exposition had just one successful event. On the evening of 23 September, in a stadium otherwise rarely used, Jack Dempsey squared off against an up-and-coming young boxer named Gene Tunney in Dempsey’s first fight in almost exactly three years.
    After Dempsey’s long layoff, interest in the fight was huge. One reporter, with just a hint of excess, called it ‘the greatest battle since the Silurian Age’. The paid attendance was 120,000, but it is believed that as many as 135,000 packed in. Tunney was an intelligent boxer but a light hitter, and it was widely agreed that he would be