Harold Johnson vs Jack Dempsey

:good

 

Looking better on film is not enough in itself to get you ranked over somebody, and neither is beating better competition.

Whatever Dempsey's failings, he was a dominant heavyweight champion.

this makes it hard to rank Charles over him, and almost impossible to rank Moore over him.

In order to justify picking Johnson over him, you would need a blinding stylistic argument.

 

I think that the second Brennan fight, was the night that Dempsey really dropped the ball.

It is his Tyson Douglas moment, but it doesn't get seen as such, because he found a way to win.

 

I agree .. from many sources I have read he played too hard before that fight , young champ in NY, a bit full of himself after Willard and then Miske .. it smells like a classic over confident young champ .. that being said to his credit he showed terrific heart and late round KO power flattening Brennan the way he did ..

Jack regrouped and looked pretty terrific vs Carpentier but really was already on his downward slope .. too much inactivity and too many distractions ..

 

How can anyone call a champion who ducked his top two contenders and spent 2 years and 3 years of his 7 year reign inactive "dominant"?? His defenses consisted of 1. a guy who he had already defeated that was dying who he was simply helping out financially. 2. A guy who he had already defeated who was viewed as a third rater (see above) and he barely s****ed by. 3. A LHW whose only world class win in nearly a decade was a possibly fixed fight against another LHW that Dempsey had easily knocked out 3 years earlier. 4. A LHW who won a shot at Dempsey's title by losing his HW elimination match. 5. A big, totally unskilled guy, who Rickard had brought up from South America solely for the purpose of promoting into a Dempsey victim. And thats all on top of the fact that he won his title from an ancient fighter who hadnt fought in 3 years trained like he was going to an eating contest instead of a boxing match and basically looked at boxing as a $$ proposition and literally nothing else. I just cant call that a dominant champion.

 

Brennan would have kicked Carpentier's ass. Thats why Jack looked good against Carpentier (and even then he got badly hurt in the second round of that fight also).

Ive seen you say before that Dempsey "played too hard." Nothing could be further from the truth. In immediately after the fight Dempsey said he was trained too fine because he had been in camp almost non stop since July. I guess we need to settle on an excuse for our hero, either he was out of shape (which he clearly wasnt) or he was trained too fine, because to me he looked like a guy who showed the exact same flaws against Tunney, which is what you would expect since it was the same guy with the same flaws.

 

Truthfully?

Charles and Moore's era wasn't a particularly strong heavyweight era itself, so it is probably more or less even.

 

Simple, he dominated a definable era.

Even if he had lost to Harry Wills at some point, he might still have been regarded as one of the great heavyweight champions.

 

If you avoid your #1 and #2 you havent dominated anything. Could we say the Roman's dominated the Mediteranean if they hadnt wiped out the Greeks or Carthage? Hardly.

 

A lot of dominant champions either failed to fight couple of key rivals, or lost to them.

There is no need to single Dempsey out in this regard.

 

And the same guy that iced Brennan the time before .. I think Greb was lucky he didn't get Dempsey .. he could not get past Norfolk twice and Dempsey was bigger, stronger, harder hitting, as well conditioned and as fast as Norfolk ..

How good do you Tommy Gibbons ? Ever notice that Dempsey was boxing him as a lefty at the start of their bout .. ?

 

Dempsey is being criticized for the second Brennan fight, and rightly so, but it would be plain wrong to imply that Brennan was successful because he was better than Dempsey's other opponents.

He was clearly a class below Tommy Gibbons, Billy Miske, and possibly even Battling Levinsky, and look what Dempsey did to them.

I think we have to attribute his success to either a lapse on Dempsey's part, a clever fight plan on his part, or possibly even both.

 

The question is based on a false premise and as such is redundant.