Was Demspey's duck of Greb even more blatant than his duck of Wills?

The odds are fairly good that it can.

Hell Dempsey was able to make the Sharkey non title fight a million gate.

Dempsey was a big draw, and Greb was a great draw also. I belive the odds are fairly good for a million with Greb.

 

Was Greb that great of a draw? What were his 5 highest gates? He practically fought every other weekend.

Ideal for a gate, from the champ's perspective, is a great story that gets asses in seats but allows the champ to stay champ.

He only fought a guy as good as Sharkey because he needed to do so to get back to Tunney. Otherwise, he would have gone against Tom Heeney.

 

With the ducking of Wills, I really dont think the man on the street considered it any sort of big issue until the last year or two of Dempsey's reign when they had grown tired of Dempsey's inactivity and the press and influential people in New York got heavily behind Wills.
Even then, when Dempsey fought Tunney many were happy to see that fight and the protestations by New York was at least in part politically motivated. And perhaps Tunney was considered as having a fairly strong claim in his own right, by people who knew boxing too.
(I also think the man on the street - at least in the early years of Dempsey's reign - "understood" that unfortunately a black v. white championship fight was potentially a bad idea, for a number of reasons.)

The point is, Dempsey was perceived as a superior champion, and whoever was number one contender was almost an irrelevance to most people who would pay to see him fight or buy a newspaper to read about him.
It's like the men in the street who liked Tyson, 85% of them would just want to see Tyson fight someone, 10% would want to know that the opponent was worthy, and 5% would actually know enough to say "nah, he should be fighting Spinks" or "really he should be fighting Lewis".

None of this excuses or exonerates Dempsey's legacy in regards of him fighting the best available contenders.
But it's a bit unrealistic to expect otherwise.

Some here as saying he should have cared about his "legacy" but there's nothing to suggest that his "legacy" ever looked like it was being undermined.
Dempsey had no crystal ball or clairvoyancy so he could compare himself with Joe Louis fighting once a month or Muhammad Ali fighting every worthy name of his era, Dempsey had greats like Jack Johnson, Jim Corbett, Bob Fitzsimmons to compare to. Most heavyweight champions before him had sat on the title and cashed in with theatre shows, picked their fights and demanded high purses to even think about defending the title.

 

Nothing Wills did captured headlines like the Dempsey-Willard title fight though. Copies of the Dempsey-Willard film fight were shown across the land, newspapers ran pages and pages of stuff on Willard and Dempsey. Wills could beat Langford a dozen times in the small print or on the sports pages and a dozen reporters could say "these colored fellows are the world's best fighters" year after year but it still doesn't have the same cultural impact as the coverage of a championship fight, including photographs and moving pictures.

 

What?

 

I think Dempsey was afraid of losing to Greb.

 

And a few weeks later Dempsey-Firpo drew a massive crowd, massive gate and massive coverage in Polo Grounds, New York.

Mullins can "claim" whatever he likes for Wills, but that doesn't say anything about how the rest of the world perceived things.

But there are many reports between 1920-23 about who Dempsey will fight and when, and most often none of those fights were made.
There was public demand for any Dempsey fight.
And clearly the public would want the best available challenger preferably, ie. Wills. I dont dispute that. But I dispute that it was a BIG issue for most fans. The support for Wills case was often written as an aside, a token gesture, a mere mention in the story that was Jack Dempsey, until very late.
It was only late on when the press really began to question the Dempsey's status in regards to Wills (ironically when Wills was an aged fighter) and hammer home the fact that Wills had been the victim of unforgivable neglect. And let's not assume all those New York pressmen were motivated by a concern for the integrity of championship boxing.

But there's always a way to "enhance" your legacy this way IN THEORY. But obviously in practice such ways run more risk of defeat and therefore dont guarantee a stronger legacy at all.
If Dempsey's predecessors, the "greats" hadn't always fought the best, or fought at all, then why should he care so much about fighting the best if he's already considered up with those legends ?
Few great fighters fight the best all the time, in fact almost every good or great fighter has been helped along with shrewd management and fighting the right people at the right time and lowering risks through much of their careers. That's boxing.
Dempsey's handlers went too far and it has backfired on his legacy in regards to Harry Wills, and perhaps Harry Greb too. And it's up to the individual historian to weigh what that means to his legacy. But that's with an incredible amount of information and hindsight.

 

Agreed.
And all I'm saying is that Dempsey was perceived through much of his reign, early years especially, as solidly superior to the rest of the field because of this impact. Rightly or wrongly. And therefore the title of "most deserving challenger" didn't mean an awful amount to people, certainly not enough to create the perception that someone good was out there undermining the champion's position.

Well, Dempsey was already regarded as the best, that's what I'm saying. I cannot see how that's even controversial. He was regarded as the best, end of story.

I'm definitely open to the idea that Harry Wills was possibly a greater fighter than Dempsey, based on his record. I'm open to the idea that Harry Wills was worthy of being regarded as the best heavyweight in the world through most or all of Dempsey's reign.

Of course there was money in it.
But you could also say that if the promoters had delivered that fight with a mega-purse guaranteed rock solid, then Dempsey would have fought Wills. It's always about money. We dont know exactly what happened. Dempsey says he was all signed up and ready to fight Wills with Floyd Fitzsimmons but the advance bounced. I dont believe Rickard really wanted the fight at all, and I believe Kearns, being a good manager, was always looking for easy fights. But I dont know 100% what happened. Just guessing. And it seems one-sided and a bit naive to always believe the challengers and their managers were never difficult or a stumbling block in negotiations.
After the Tommy Gibbons fiasco in Shelby, Kearns never promoted another Dempsey fight, and it's unlikely he could have.
What happened there showed how bad things can happen and people dont get paid, so Dempsey's concerns are believable, as is the idea that Rickard was ultimately the only guy who could deliver and ultimately he refused to match Dempsey with Wills and broke all box office records with the Tunney fights.
It's all right saying "there's money in it" but another actually making that fight.

 

Ok, I agree with that.
Although I will reserve judgment on the motivations of the New York press and the boxing commission and not take them 100% at their word.

Fair enough.

I do however think history involves understanding the standards of the time as well as how he stacks up against subsequent champions or all champions through some nowadays consensus paradigm. Of course, everything is done in hindsight. But if the legacies of Fitzsimmons, Jeffries, Johnson, Sullivan etc. dictated the standards of "greatness" at that time, and if Dempsey could be proclaimed great on the back of the Willard fight alone then I try to relate to that too.