How good was Jack Dempsey's win resume?

I always felt Dempsey showed more of what might have been in the Sharkey and second Tunney bouts than his previous wins .. the Wills fight is a huge asterisk to me ..

 

The Sharkey ko and the Long Count episode showed that Dempsey was like an old rattlesnake....dangerous to the end.

 

McGrath????

 

S, do you honestly think that if Dempsey had fought and most likely ko;'d Harry Wills and the much smaller Harry Greb, it woud have made a difference to the Dempsey Detractors on ESB ? A resounding Hell NO, I say. I feel when the name Dempsey is mentioned on ESB, it is akin to waving a red flag in front of a bull. For one poster to say Dempsey was a "publicity hype job" is so ludicrous to spout. As if the hundreds of thousands of fighters, trainers, boxing writers, and fans like my dad were not as intelligent and discerning in the 1920s, and hardnosed as the
deniers of today 90 long years after Dempsey tore through the heavyweight division, from 1918 to 1923, when Dempsey loaded with moolah after a lifetime of poverty, chucked boxing to go to Hollywood to bed as many silent screen stars as he could. I can't blame him...He beat at his best all he fought, gave no quarters and asked for no quarters, and I make him as good as any heavyweight H2H in history..."Sue me , sue me, sue me, whatcha gonna do me ", as the song goes in Guys and Dolls...

 

I'll buy that.

 

If Fulton and Firpo were so awful when Dempsey beat them, they must have been truly dreadful by the time Wills got them.
It makes me wonder what they'd be saying if Dempsey HAD fought and beat Wills.
Fulton has win over Langford too, just a year or so after Langford was still capable of beating Wills.
Any "chinny" fighter who beats Langford must be doing something right.

Maybe the whole era was sh!t, and then I guess it doesn't make much difference that Dempsey didn't bother fighting anyone.

His win resume is pretty good for a guy who didn't bother fighting anyone.
Fulton, Gibbons, Sharkey ... they are good.
Willard even, you'd have to figure even inactive, was no easy feat to be treated like that in the first round.
Miske, Brennan, Levinsky, Carpentier, Firpo - they were okay.

 

He beat the champion, held the title, then lost it.
That's not a "carefully constructed fiction", it actually happened.

As far as I know, it's true that Rickard wasn't at all confident Dempsey would be a match for Willard, and of course we know for a fact that Rickard chose Tunney as his challenger.
So it's hard to argue that Rickard was fabricating the Dempsey reign.

 

Rickard put forth a series of trumped up no-hopers while sailing clear of the two best and most remarkable challengers... Tell me exactly who Brennan and Carpentier and Firpo beat in order to get their title shots? The Miske defense was to help out a sick friend but all parties knew Miske didn't have a chance given his health. And then Dempsey decided to take a time out for three years and sit on his ass with the belt.

 

They beat the key contenders in the division.

It is that simple!

 

Who did Brennan beat? He had been beaten by Greb FIVE TIMES since the last time they met. But which top contender did he beat to get the title shot?

Firpo beat a 42 year old Jess Willard in his final fight.

Carpentier's only significant win in the division occurred seven years before. So, obviously, he was more deserving than Greb or Wills.

 

Brennan beat no one.
Carpentier beat Levinsky for the light-heavyweight championship.
Firpo beat Brennan and Willard.

As soon as Rickard was in real charge of Dempsey's opponents - ie, when Kearns was out of the picture - he matched Dempsey with Tunney.
How do you explain that ?

 

This is a truly extraordinary statement, which requires something extraordinary to back it up.

Are we going to argue that any champion who is well managed is a farce?