One Summer: America, 1927

overwhelmed by Dempsey’s power. In fact, Tunney fought a brilliant and perfect fight, jabbing sharply, then wheeling away from Dempsey’s killer right hand. Dempsey stalked him all night,while Tunney stung him repeatedly with sharp but wearing jabs. The effect was cumulatively formidable. By the seventh round, Dempsey’s face was a swollen mess. One of his eyes was sealed shut and the other wasn’t far behind. He chased Tunney all night, but managed to land just one good punch. Tunney won easily on points.
    When the bruised and puffy-faced Dempsey arrived home afterwards, his horrified wife asked what had happened. ‘Honey, I forgot to duck,’ Dempsey famously replied.
    Dempsey’s defeat caused near universal dismay, but set the scene for the biggest rematch in boxing history. A small round of qualifying bouts was arranged as a way of maximizing excitement while milking the situation for every cent it would yield. The first qualifying bout was between Jack Sharkey and Jim Maloney. (This was the fight, mentioned on p. 106, at which 23,000 people paused to pray for Charles Lindbergh, who was at that moment alone over the Atlantic.) The winner of that fight – which in the event was Sharkey, easily – would then face a grand qualifying match against the ageing but formidable Jack Dempsey on 22 July. The venue for both qualifying bouts was Yankee Stadium – a matter that naturally warmed the heart of Jacob Ruppert.
    So as July dawned on America – in the week that Richard Byrd and his team splashed down off the coast of France, that New York suffered its first heatwave, that Calvin Coolidge celebrated his fifty-fifth birthday by donning cowboy apparel, that Charles Lindbergh took off for Ottawa, that Henry Ford’s minions prepared his apology to Jews, and that the world’s leading central bankers assembled in secret conclave on Long Island – the story that preoccupied the nation was how fit and eager Jack Dempsey was. Scores of reporters filed daily reports from his training camp at Saratoga Lake, New York, suggesting that he was looking menacing and resolute and that his punches had a snap to them not seen in years.
    Then came terrible news. On 2 July, a police car arrived at Dempsey’s camp to inform him of a family tragedy. Dempsey’s brother Johnny had gone increasingly off the rails in recent months,so much so that his young wife, Edna, had fled to the east with their infant child. Johnny Dempsey had tracked them to a boarding house in Schenectady, just twenty miles from his brother’s training camp, and there he had shot and killed Edna, then turned the gun on himself. He didn’t harm their child.
    Jack Dempsey was devastated. The police drove him to Schenectady to identify the bodies. Then Dempsey returned to his camp, retired to his cabin and would not respond to knocking, leaving everyone to wonder what would become of the fight. To universal relief, after two days of seclusion Dempsey emerged from his cabin and grimly resumed training.
     
    In Paris, Commander Byrd’s crew, their formal commitments dealt with, celebrated their last night in the city a little more colourfully than Lindbergh ever had. Bert Acosta – or ‘sleek, swart Bert Acosta’, as Time magazine called him – took George Noville to some of the seamier night spots of Montmartre for an evening of jazz and cheerful abandon. Bernt Balchen was taken out for a drunken Viking evening by a group of Scandinavians based in Paris. Byrd declined to join either party and instead had an early night.
    Levine and Chamberlin were in Paris at the same time, but seem to have been somewhat excluded from the celebrations. Levine, belatedly realizing the importance of public relations, abruptly gave 100,000 francs, or $4,000, to the Aéro-Club de France to build a clubhouse at Le Bourget. He also called on Madame Nungesser, who was now getting more than a little creepy in her stout refusal to accept that her son was gone for ever and not afloat on the North Atlantic, surviving comfortably on fish that he and Coli hauled gleaming from the sea while awaiting rescue from a passing ship.
    Levine proposed to the other Atlantic flyers that they fly home together in their two planes, but the invitation was declined, partly because the Byrd plane was a wreck (it would never fly again), partly because a westward flight against the prevailing winds wasinsanely risky, and partly because no one wanted to be that close to Levine. Chamberlin decided that