Dempsey vs Wills article

Any fighter that doesn't meet a #1 contender at any point during his reign but is anointed great is going to receive vitriol about it.

I disagree that he was less hated then - although he finished up a legend and an icon, he was, at one time, reviled as a draught dodger and all that there. That's far more serious than what people are saying here about him not taking on his #1 contender.

Finally, it should be remembered that the internet has revealed information about Wills that generation after generation after generation post-Demspey's canonisation did NOT have access to. It's bound to create a little info-bomb.

Welcome to the new real, is my opinion.

 

Yeah, but they never had a fight.

It's like you just can't hear me or something. I'm not contradicting anything you've said. I'm not trying to run Dempsey down. I'm explaining it to you. It's this:

If a champion never fights his #1 contender, ever, in the course of a seven year title reign AND that champion is anointed great, people are going to denigrate that title reign. It is absolutely inevitable.

Now just deal with that in isolation^ but here's the second part.

When I was a kid I loved boxing history. I watched video tape, I read books like all kids that get into I loved the heavyweights. I never heard the name Harry Wills until the internet. I wasn't exactly brilliantly educated but I wasn't void either. But Wills wasn't someone I knew anything about. I'd never heard of him. Because he wasn't a part of the Dempsey story. People talk about "the intervening years" but the intervening years are a blank for Wills. He hardly gets a mention in that time. It's only with the explosion of learning in the internet era that he steps out of the shadows.

Of course that has consequences for the Dempsey legacy.

 

The fighter isn't "being blamed" (though I don't agree with your description). Just read what I wrote. No criticism of Dempsey is even implied in my post. It's just a description of what has happened.

It doesn't matter - at all - that Wills "exonerated" Dempsey (if he has that power, which he doesn't). People find it disturbing. People are disturbed by it. People feel duped, people feel that Dempsey never settled the matter of who was the best HW on the planet, like most champions anointed great do. The circumstances do not matter.

 

Yes, the circumstances are what i'm discussing. The circumstances whereby almost nobody described as non-expert knew anything about Wills prior to 1996 ish.

Now, everyone knows about him. The reaction has been visceral. This is what I mean when I say the new normal. Every reaction to Dempsey between his retirement and the internet is coloured by the absence of Wills in the repeated story.

I disagree with your appraisal of Wills-Demspey but that doesn't matter. What matters is that the history of Dempsey has been changed by new generally held information.

 

If the debate ended decades ago, why are you posting a blog written this decade in defence of the Dempsey critics? Why is Wills-Demspey the single most violently contested subject on this forum?

You are relatively new here so I am willing to give you the benefit of the doubt, but just so you know the page I'm on, that is a preposterous statement. If anything the opposite is true - this is the single most lively contested debate surrounding boxing history. It has literally no equal, and the only one that scales the same heights in this local does so because we have two obsessives on opposite sides of the arguments.

There is no historical argument more alive than Wills-Demspey and so you literally could not be more wrong.

Revisionism has many explanations, some good, some bad. It certainly isn't the dirty word it is made out to be. For your part, I have noticed a definite love for absolutism that makes you blind; anyone who disagrees with your pick on Dempsey-Wills doesn't know anything about boxing - anyone who sees history differently from you just wants to make a name for themselves.

For the most part, in my experience, these things are not true.

No, but information that wasn't available to "normal people" thirty years ago now is. It has changed quite a few conclusions. This is true of WWII. I have no idea why you think it wouldn't be true of boxing.

Wills does not have the power to exonerate Dempsey. It's that simple. If Dempsey's legacy represents an infraction against Wills, it also represents one against boxing. It is not only Wills who has been transgressed against. Wake up.

 

Yeah, and I, for example, didn't have those books.