Even if you love Dempsey, it is time for a generation to accept -

When Will stepped up he got ko'd by Sharkey and Uzcudum, how is he great? He is one of those guys overrated cause of mystique and race, that is all.

 

Which is why they kept saying they'd make it before making up excuses and then saying Wills would never get his title shot. All the papers mocked Dempsey and his management for not having having the ***** to make the fight. Dempsey even gave his right to be sanctioned in NYC for world championship bouts in order to avoid the fight with Wills.

I read something to the extent that Wills threw him in the clinch and/or hit him inside after being made to look foolish. Either way he was rank novice sparring with Johnson and when he lost to Cotton. Dempsey was beat plenty when a novice too and sparked cold in the first himself.

Some papers considered Wills as good as Johnson, we don't know how many fights of Wills Johnson actually witnessed.

In boxing Johnson tended to only speak well of his friends, he didn't think much of Dempsey either and seemed to consider everyone from his era better, also calling him a 4 round fighter.

This is bull****, Wills was documented to be the second biggest draw in HW boxing by far at this stage. Loads of big money was available for this fight, even outside of America.

 

As it turned out, any fight involving Jack Dempsey most likely would have drawn a huge gate in a major city after his bout with Georges Carpentier. This includes his bout with Tommy Gibbons, which was staged in the middle of nowhere by individuals in a promotional group which didn't have enough money to pay Dempsey his guarantee upfront and had only staged boxing shows on a very small scale in the past.

I agree that a bout between Dempsey and Harry Wills would have drawn a massive gate unless there was a huge mistake by the promoter. It is silly to think otherwise.

- Chuck Johnston

 

The very same NYC that refused to sanction a bout between Dempsey and Wills in their own state.

However strongly you might have made up your mind, the politics behind the fight are a lot more complex than you are allowing for.

 

Well as i have previously stated Kearns and Rickard were fiscal warriors, they made money, if it was there then they took it.

We cannot forget that certain powerful folk in boxing like William Muldoon. Chairman of the New York State Athletic Commission, put commercial 'hurdles' in the way that would prevent the biggest profit being made, and 'allegedly' powerful forces from Washington told Rickard to not promote the fight.

Let us be honest the colour of Wills was the issue, and most certainly it was in Heavyweight boxing post Jack Johnson, so that combined with those who had control of things, the mega money would not have been made.

Did the boxing world want to risk having another black Heavyweight Champion?

 

Same here. Wills did not look as good as his reputation suggested on film. Dempsey did very well vs. the bigger opponents who lacked speed. I’d pick Dempsey vis TKO

Did Langford, Johnson, or Jeannette comment on the potential Wills vs. Dempsey showdown?

 

They didn't refuse to sanction a Wills fight at all, yet again you lie to protect your hero Janitor. Wills was made the mandatory and Dempsey couldn't defend his NYSAC World Title in NY until he fought Wills.

Dempsey-Tunney and any other defense was barred from NYC though and not sanctioned as a title fight I believe. Any fights after around 22/23 were barred from NYC. They made an exception for Firpo partly due to shuffled in the power structure. But this is why Dempsey was so inactive.

Rickard, Dempsey's promoter is the person who said he didn't want interracial bouts, while promoting Wills ofcourse.

They put hurdles in '23 I think it was, I'm not sure it made it impossible. They demanded a 100,000 crowd with 40,000 $2 seats. Well if the $2 seats are at the back, there's still allot of scope for a huge gate

The best way to make money ofcourse is to stay in business, losing a title means going out of business if another fighter doesn't fight under your control.

 

[Sports writers like Tad Dorgan, Joe Villa, George B. Underwood, all famous writers of their day, calling Dempsey ‘a second rater’ because he wouldn’t fight Harry Wills.]
Here is a tribute by sports writer W. Rollo Wilson to one of the greatest sports writers in history, the great George B. Underwood.

*************************************************************************************

THRU THE EYES of W. Rollo Wilson - 1943

A MODERN DON QUIXOTE JOUSTING at windmills was George B. Underwood, a former New York sports editor who died last week in Winchester, Mass. Friends and intimates mourned, but none regrets his passing more than Harry Wills, famed “Brown Panther” of two decades past. In his youth he had been an athlete and was a middle distance runner of Olympic Fame and this was the background for his sense of fair play.

Underwood’s writing career was at the peak in the days when Tex Rickard was arrogantly lording it over boxing and was aided in his prejudice by William Muldoon, boss of New York triumvirate, between them they had decided that no Negro should ever again succeed to the heavyweight boxing title and this was the stone wall which Underwood tried to shatter in his fight for a championship match with Harry Wills. The misdeeds of Jack Johnson were “blown up” by the bigots of boxing and this was the goblin which was handed to the writing propagandists to frighten the public.

It was George Underwood’s self-imposed task to lay this ghost and to secure a title bout for Wills. Day after day and month after month his was the only voice crying in the newspaper wilderness for justice. Undismayed he pushed a powerful pencil in pursuit of the politicians and racketeers who were running the ring game. The first to be converted was the politically-minded Jim Farley who, as a member of the commission, insisted that Wills should have his chance. But the roots of evil were sunk too deeply in the rocky soil of Manhattan Island lightly to be uprooted and “Big Jim” was not then the power he became in later years. Harry did not get his opportunity but the fight George Underwood made in the turbulent twenties softened up the situation for the advent of Joe Louis.

And so to another grand guy, who more often than once earned the congratulations of this column in the days of its youth, I say --- “So long!”

http://www.joejennette.com/GeorgeUnderwood.html

 

I'd put money on the fact I've read more newspaper reports than yourself and I haven't come across it in the Dempsey biography I read. If you want cite a source that says the fight was barred at one stage do so. If it was barred, I've never come across anything that said it was, it certainly wasn't barred for the majority of the time. However I think you're making things up to suit an agenda here.

Now I have read they put conditions in the fight, that isn't barring it.

Different commissioners had different agendas. But even Muldoon who was against interracial bouts, was against the champion avoiding . Muldoon thought Dempsey shouldn't face Wills before proving his fitness against Tunney.

Most of the press wanted fairness in the sport, some I'm sure racially degraded Wills, as we saw them degrade Louis later.

Yes he was, but NYC was the economic and fight capital and hence the NYSAC carried the most weight or we wouldn't be talking about them.

I thought only Firpo and were Wills eliminators? Either way I doubt Tate got the better of any Wills bout, he'd been stopped by Wills twice before

Either way none of those fights were eliminators, it was a broken promise of an eliminator. He was happy to cash in on the number 1 contender who was black against white contenders while also milking the big cash cow HW champ at the same time while denying the best HW fight of the era.

 

The fight surely would have genrated some money, and of course it would have been great for Dempsey's legacy. But alot of people seem to believe that Dempesy and his management was under immense pressure to fight Wills, this is a misconception. Sure Wills had some support from the press, but huge part of the establishment in America did not want to see the fight made. With Dempsey, boxing won societal acceptence, before him, weird as it may seem to us, it was frowned upon partly because it was one of the few sports that wernt racist!

Of course it should affect his legacy, but alot of people make it seem that Dempsey was under huge pressure to take the fight but cowardly refused, this was not the case!

As for the thread topic, yeah I guess Wills had a better carreer, even though I believe that Dempsey would have flattened him.