One Summer: America, 1927

fifteen games even though they didn’t need to. They couldn’t help themselves.
    Ruth was majestically imperturbable. On 16 September he was called into court in Manhattan, charged with the alarming crime of punching a cripple. The reputed victim, Bernard Neimeyer, claimed that on the evening of 4 July he had been walking near the Ansonia Hotel when a man accompanied by two women accused him of making an inappropriate remark and punched him hard in the face. Neimeyer said he didn’t recognize his assailant, but was told by onlookers that it was Babe Ruth. Ruth, in his defence, said that he had been having dinner with friends at the time, and produced two witnesses in corroboration. In court, Neimeyer seemed to be a little crazy. The Times reported that he frequently ‘rose excitedly to his feet, waving a book of notes which he added to from time to time as the hearing proceeded. He was often cautioned by the clerk of the court not to talk so loudly.’ The judge dismissed the case to general applause. Ruth signed a bunch of autographs, then went to the ballpark and hit a home run, his fifty-third.
    Two days later, in a doubleheader against the White Sox, heswatted his fifty-fourth, a two-run shot in the fifth inning. Three days after that, on 21 September, Ruth came to the plate in the bottom of the ninth inning against Detroit. The bases were empty and the Tigers were up 6 to 0, so Sam Gibson, the Tigers’ pitcher, didn’t need to throw him anything good, and dutifully endeavoured not to. Ruth caught one anyway, and hefted it deep into the right-field stands for his fifty-fifth homer. A new record was beginning to seem entirely possible.
    The next day Ruth hit one of his most splendid home runs of the season. In the bottom of the ninth inning with Mark Koenig on third and the Yankees trailing 7 to 6, Ruth came to the plate and lofted his fifty-sixth home run high into the right-field bleachers for a walk-off 8–7 victory. As Ruth trotted around the bases – carrying his bat with him, as he often did, to make sure nobody ran off with it – a boy of about ten rushed in from right field and joined him on the base paths. The boy grabbed on to the bat with both hands, and was essentially carried around the bases and into the dugout, where Ruth quickly vanished down the runway, pursued by yet more jubilant fans. The game was the Yankees’ one hundred and fifth victory of the season, tying the American League record for season victories.
    Beyond Yankee Stadium, the world hardly noticed. Halfway across the continent in Chicago something much more exciting was about to happen.
     
    It was the Dempsey–Tunney rematch. Chicago was even more abuzz than it had been for Lindbergh’s recent visit. People poured into the city in numbers never before seen. It was impossible to find a hotel bed, hard enough to get a seat in a restaurant. Chartered trains streamed in from every point of the compass – from Akron, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, the distant west. In three days, more than a hundred extra trains arrived in the city. Scheduled trains were made longer – in some cases much longer. The Twentieth Century Limited that pulled in on fight day was three times its normal length. Amongthe arriving multitudes were Al Jolson, Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Harold Lloyd, Florenz Ziegfeld, Gloria Swanson, Walter Chrysler, Ty Cobb, nine US senators, ten state governors, mayors beyond counting and business potentates from all over. David Sarnoff was there to make sure the radio hook-ups were all in order. The Marquess of Douglas and Clydesdale, a British adventurer who would shortly become the first man to fly over Mount Everest, attended as the guest of Gene Tunney, as did the British writer Somerset Maugham.
    Popular sentiment was overwhelmingly with Dempsey. Tunney had all the makings of a hero – he was clean-living, intelligent, polite, reasonably good-looking – but, like Lou Gehrig, he lacked the chemistry that stirred affection. He had grown up poor in Greenwich Village, the son of Irish immigrants, and weighed just 140 pounds when he took up boxing professionally. Even when he had built himself up to 190 pounds, he lacked power. He made up for it through deft feinting and jabbing. As Tunney explained it, Dempsey was a fighter but he was a boxer – something much more scientific. He won his bouts by out-thinking his opponents and wearing them down. The strategy nearly always worked. In sixty-six professional bouts