One Summer: America, 1927

Tunney was beaten just once, by Harry Greb in 1922. No one had ever knocked him off his feet.
    Tunney promoted himself as an intellectual and a gentleman. He didn’t drink or swear and refused to advertise cigarettes, but he made a lot of money endorsing other things – cars, hats, shoes, pyjamas and walking sticks, among much else. He had an unfortunate tendency to pomposity. He liked to carry a book around with him. When asked what it was, he would reply casually, ‘Oh, just a copy of the Rubáiyát that I am never without.’ This was largely why most people couldn’t stand him. The typical fight fan, as Paul Gallico of the Daily News put it, ‘wanted to see the book-reading snob socked back to Shakespeare’.
    One serious concern with staging the fight in Chicago was the city’s reputation for corruption. Al Capone had long been aDempsey admirer. He hated Tunney’s refined mannerisms. ‘A fucking pansy’ was how he characterized him. Capone let word get out that he would make sure Dempsey didn’t lose this time. Dempsey was horrified to learn this and wrote to Capone pleading with him not to interfere. ‘If I beat Tunney, or Tunney beats me in true sportsmanship, it will prove who really deserves to be champion,’ Dempsey explained. The next day he received three hundred roses and an unsigned card saying, ‘To the Dempseys, in the name of sportsmanship.’ Capone reportedly bet $50,000 on Dempsey to win, and bought one hundred of the best seats in the stadium at $40 a seat.
    On fight day Tunney and Dempsey both jogged five miles, then relaxed. Tunney passed the time examining rare manuscripts in a library with his new pal Somerset Maugham. Dempsey’s pastimes were not noted, but presumably were a little less intellectually ambitious.
    By early evening, Soldier Field was steadily filling and the atmosphere was growing electric. People spent most of the time before the fight picking out celebrities at ringside – though fans in the most distant seats, it must be said, could barely see the ring, never mind those gathered around it. Some seats were over seven hundred feet from the action.
    The most enlivening pre-fight moment was when Al Capone arrived, in overcoat and fedora, encircled as always by a protective ring of burly men. ‘Nothing smaller than a fieldpiece could penetrate his double-walled fortress of meat,’ wrote the New Yorker later. Accompanying Capone as special guest was Damon Runyon.
    The crowd was put at 150,000 – enough to fill Yankee Stadium twice over. Six thousand ushers attended to the throngs. Each wore an armband saying ‘Tunney–Dempsey Boxing Exhibition’ – a touch of gentility insisted on by Tunney. Never before had so many sports fans packed into a single space.
    In the centre of it all – a small, bright opening in an ocean of heads and enshrouding darkness – was the ring. Bathed in the lightof forty-four 1000-watt lamps, the ring was twenty feet to a side, the largest size allowed, which gave Tunney more room to escape. A crucial feature of the Dempsey–Firpo fight had been that Dempsey was able to stand over Firpo and clobber him anew each time Firpo tried to haul himself to his feet. It was this that led the Tunney camp to insist on the rule of retiring to a neutral corner after a knockdown – a consideration that would give boxing its greatest moment of controversy before the night was out.
    The National Broadcasting Company linked eighty-two stations to form a national broadcast. More people listened to the fight that night than had witnessed any other event in history. For Lindbergh’s homecoming in June, the audience had been 30 million. This time it would be 50 million. As ever, Graham McNamee’s was the warm voice to which nearly half the nation turned.
    The most striking feature of the fight was its lateness. The scheduled starting time was 9.45 p.m. in Chicago – 10.45 p.m. on the east coast – and proceedings were running about fifteen minutes late when the two robed competitors finally emerged, to a stupendous and appreciative roar from the crowd, and climbed into the intensely bright ring. Both fighters looked calm and prepared.
    The referee, Dave Barry, gave the customary lecture at the centre of the ring, the men retired to their corners, a bell clanged, and the most eagerly anticipated fight in America to that time – possibly ever – began. Dempsey came out swinging and hit so hard that McNamee said he could see the ring trembling. But