Dempsey doesn't belong in HW top 5's. Perhaps not HW top 10's.

Champions sat on their titles back then and made money from them. Or they picked challengers that could be built up for big purses and then knocked down.

The championship was in many ways a way to make lots of money. Most of the champions from Tunney back to John L had their best days before becoming champion.

I think when champion Langford would not have been much of a challenger and Dempsey's quotes should be taken as a mark of respect. By the time jack was champ I think he's have taken Wills. I can't be sure but that's my take on it. Wills could have taken the Dempsey up to the Willard fight... of course, if Jack had beaten Wills then his standing would be very different today.

 

They are already, but the guys from the eastern bloc never proved they were top professional fighters anyway. I don't see criticizing Holmes because Stevenson never turned pro.

 

You may be confusing evaluation with criticism. Most here are not claiming Dempsey was not a good or even a great fighter. We are simply maintaining that he does not have the bottom line to rate ahead of some of the other champions and so does not deserve to be in the top five.
1. Louis--Champion 12 years with 25 defenses
2. Marciano--won every fight and knocked out the best of his time
3. Foreman--regained championship 20 years after losing it.
4. Lewis--cleaned out division when older and ended career by beating the huge Vitali Klitschko when he was almost 38.

All these men had better winning percentages than Dempsey. All had better knockout percentages. It is a tough sell that any of them failed to defeat at least one fighter better than anyone Dempsey defeated.
Dempsey might not be all hat and no cattle, but his herd does look a little scrawny next to some of the others on the heavyweight range.

 

How could they prove it though,when they were not allowed to turn pro?,to me ali and the rest would have had there hands full with some of these fellows,no need for the bum of the month club if the east euros had been around.

 

Wills and Langford and Greb were there to fight and these guys weren't. There is a difference between what really exists and what only might exist if things were different.

I would also point out that off the Olympic results there is not much evidence that the Eastern Europeans or Cubans would have made much impact in the heavyweight division until the mid to late 1970's. After that, perhaps.

 

How can you say with any level of certainty that fighters of the 1970's would have " had their hands full ", when we have no idea what the Eastern Euro countries may or may not have produced? I'm not claiming that if some of those fighters had been allowed to partake in professional boxing, that some of them wouldn't have been formidable foes, but again how do we know? Using today as an example, the Eastern block is doing very well, but I'm not entirely convinced that Wladimir Klitschko, Nikolay Valuev, Ruslan Chagaev, or Alexander Povetkin would have just walked into the 1970's and dominated the picture..

You also mentioned that there would be no need for a " bum of the month club ". How exactly does this expression apply to the 1970's era? Frankly, I do not consider many of the top contenders that the decade produced to be members of any such club.

 

Jack Johnson called him out at nearly 40 years of age and Dempsey wouldn't step into the ring with him. It certainly doesn't help his cause as an all time great when he was champion and not fighting Wills, Jeannette or McVey.

History says that Dempsey did sign to fight Wills but the fight never happened. Whose fault that is, is a mystery to me, but in reality Demspey's reputation as heavyweight champion is diminished for that very reason.

 

I'm not disagreeing with any of your points McGrain, and in fact I concur that Dempsey's common ratings by the fanatics are all too often ludicrous. My only point about him not fighting the best of his era, is that its probably not a clear cut - black and white issue ( no pun intended. ) There may have been other reasons that go beyond him having cold feet.

For whatever its worth, I don't even have Jack in my top 10 for many of the reasons that you yourself have provided. For me though, its probably more damaging to his legacy that he spent three years defenseless, for no apparent reason other than persuing the good life, while worthy challengers were giving their sweat and blood trying to earn a living.

 

You're being cute, here, but you're not being reasonable. I did not state or imply anything which was reasonably comparable to the sentiment you've attributed to me above. It just plain doesn't matter if one irrelevant four-round decision goes against him while fighting with an injured hand in the midst of a maelstrom of major fights during a year in which he is fighting more than twice a month. It is only silly revisionist nitpicking that makes this out to be something important.
As I think it is a great analogy to prove my point here, let us look at another major individual sport; Roger Federer is/was (as he seems to be declining now) arguably the greatest tennis player in the history of the sport. He has won 12 Grand Slam championships (two short of the all-time record of 14), had a run in which he reached 10 consecutive Grand Slam finals (the next most was 4), and has still currently reached at least the semifinals in all of the last 14 Grand Slam tournaments. In 2004-2006, he compiled an incredible and unmatched 247-15 match record, with season records of 74-6, 92-5, and 81-4. It is safe to say he was the most dominant and consistent world's #1 of all time in that period.
Yet even in those years, Federer suffered losses to the likes of world number 39 Albert Costa, world number 101 Richard Gasquet, and world number 21 Andy Murray- and I assure you, no tennis expert even considers saying "Federer can't be the greatest, because he lost to X opponent at that one tournament in Rome in 2004." Rather, it is understood that in tennis, a sport where world-class professional players maintain a schedule which requires them to have an average of better than a match every week for nine months out of the calendar year, no one, not even the best player ever to set foot on a court, is capable of maintaining world-class form in every single match for the entire season, particularly in small "in-between" tournaments. In those tournaments, the matches are shorter (best of three sets instead of best of five), you have to go out and play again the very next day after having had a match (no time to recover if you sprained an ankle or twisted a wrist or threw out your shoulder, or just from general soreness/tiredness), and you don't have the same motivation when it is a monotonous and insignificant tournament of the sort you play on a weekly basis. There has never been a tennis champion, no matter how great, who did NOT have a smattering of losses against ordinary players under that schedule.
Now, suppose that in 80 years, the structure of professional tennis will have shifted so that the players have but one tournament every several months, for which they haggle in contracts, carefully prepare and postpone if they should suffer an injury- then, the top players will probably almost never lose against run-of-the-mill opponents. But will that mean, in hindsight, that Federer and Sampras and all the other legends of our era and earlier were not really that great, on the basis of the aforementioned losses? Absolutely not. Only if one were a historical revisionist looking back in hindsight from the perspective of a completely different era would that appear to be the case.

Nat Fleischer's account was somewhat less flattering towards Tunney, but I digress. Dempsey's result against Gibbons is exceptionally good nonetheless.