One Summer: America, 1927

Tunney dodged and danced expertly, and Dempsey’s blows mostly fell harmlessly against his arms.
    Tunney at the same time began picking Dempsey to pieces – jabbing and parrying, then dancing away. The strategy had a devastating cumulative effect. Dempsey’s face became more and more swollen with each passing round – eventually, it seemed, with each passing blow. Cuts opened above his eyes and he bled from the mouth. But still he marched on, ‘tirelessly, relentlessly, savagely,viciously, desperately’, in the words of New York Times reporter James P. Dawson.
    Tunney was cruising to victory when, in the seventh round, Dempsey stopped him in his tracks, and brought 150,000 people to their feet, with a sudden, violent flurry of punches that left Tunney sitting on the canvas in a helpless daze, his left arm resting on a rope. He was almost certainly no more than a punch or two away from oblivion. ‘I am free to say I found the canvas a pretty comfortable place just then,’ Tunney joked to reporters afterwards, but he was in serious trouble and 50 million people in America knew it. At least ten radio listeners, it was later reported, dropped dead from heart attacks during the seventh round, though surely any such figure was drawn from thin air.
    Dempsey, his blood up, failed to withdraw immediately to a neutral corner as required, but hovered, waiting to clobber Tunney when he rose again. The referee, Barry, had to shoo him back to neutral territory before starting the count. This gave Tunney a few precious extra moments to recover. How many exactly has been a matter of intense debate ever since, but it was something in the region of five or six seconds.
    At the count of nine, Tunney clambered back to his feet and, with surprising lightness, managed to dance his way out of further trouble. In fact, he had little idea what was going on. ‘I was oblivious … and had to be told later on what happened,’ he admitted years later.
    Dempsey had blown his chance. The exertion left the former champ exhausted. In the next round, Tunney floored him with a sudden sharp hook of his own. Dempsey bounded back up, but he seemed to have little left. Tunney dominated easily thereafter and won on a unanimous decision.
    Dempsey supporters have always felt that their hero was cheated, as did Dempsey himself. ‘Intentionally or otherwise, I was robbed of the championship,’ he told reporters in his dressing room immediately after the fight. ‘I am not an alibi artist, but I knowdown in my soul that I knocked Tunney out tonight and what’s more chased him all around the ring and should have won on points at least.’
    According to Roger Kahn in his 1999 biography of Dempsey, A Flame of Pure Fire , the referee didn’t enforce the neutral-corner rule when Dempsey went down. Kahn said he was ‘consumed by outrage’ when he first reviewed footage of the two key moments of the fight. ‘Two knockdowns, one round apart, and two different sets of rules. The explanation, I believe, is not complicated. In my tape of Chicago 1927, I am looking at a crooked referee,’ Kahn wrote.
    In fact, a viewing of the footage – now available to everyone with access to the internet – is not nearly so clear cut. When Tunney fell in the seventh round, Barry pushed Dempsey out of the way, clearly ordering him back to his corner, then turned and began the count immediately while Dempsey was still withdrawing. Barry could hardly have acted more quickly or decisively. In the following round when Dempsey fell, Barry didn’t send Tunney to a neutral corner because there wasn’t time. Dempsey jumped up immediately, like someone rebounding off a trampoline, and began swinging again before the referee could step forward or even raise his arm.
    The long count was unfortunate, but no one was to blame for it more than Jack Dempsey. Tunney chose to look at the bigger picture. ‘We have fought twenty rounds and I think I beat him in nineteen of them,’ he told reporters.
    Tunney earned $990,000 for the fight, which someone calculated included $7,700 for time spent horizontal during the long count. Dempsey made just under $450,000. Tunney was eager for yet another rematch, but Dempsey declined. He never fought again. Tunney had just one more fight himself. He shunned the obvious challenger, Jack Sharkey, and instead fought a New Zealander named Tom Heeney at Yankee Stadium. Tunney won in eleven rounds and made $500,000 for his efforts, but what was most