Dempsey's greatness.

OR, "A beacon of objective intelligence in a wilderness of blind DENIAL ".

P.S. To deny the esteemed opinions of contemporaries of Jack Dempsey
over some of today's esteemed boxing experts, smacks to me of severe egotism...And if I err, I err along with a tremendous amount of boxing experts [not on ESB] who calibrated the pro's and con's of the prime
Jack Dempsey, BEFORE calling him a great heavyweight...cheers...

 

:rofl

 

Enlighten me please. Try as I may, some posters who to show why on ESB they
do not think much of Jack Dempsey, bring up his TWO bouts with Gene Tunney ?
What fighter can after a THREE YEAR layoff, WITHOUT ONE TUNEUP bout, without their manager and mentor {Jack Kearns} whom he is engaged in a court battle with, and on top of this, whose close brother just murdered his wife, and committed suicide , hope to beat a razor sharp Gene Tunney ? Tunney, who at this point in life was a great fighter, and Jack Dempsey was a 32 year old slow footed shell of himself who should not have taken this bout without a few warm up fights...I recall vividly in 1955, the greatest fighter I ever saw ringside Ray Robinson who did not fight for 3 years and with ONE tuneup bout was whipped soundly by a good journeyman fighter Ralph Tiger Jones,
but this defeat is never mentioned in judging Ray Robinson's true greatness, and rightfully so. But Mr. Dempsey has no such understanding with some posters on ESB.
This irks me no end. NO major fighter in history has gotten the shaft that Jack Dempsey is getting today on ESB...I have always been for fairness in my life, and I try to defend a great heavyweight who was considered one of the truly top heavyweights in his time
and after...At his best he was a combination of speed, power, and sheer resolve and
toughness seldom, if ever seen in a heavyweight, who was a beloved gentleman til he died in 1983...His memory deserves better I fervently believe....

 

Burt

I think John Dempsey shot his wife and himself in July of 1927, before the Sharkey fight, not the first Tunney fight.

 

"Ray Robinson's true greatness"

Many, including myself, think Robinson's credentials are much stronger than Dempsey's. If we had no film at all of Robinson, and just went by his record in the record book, we would know, as with Greb, that he was one of the best.

Dempsey laying off three years--

He wasn't unique. Sullivan was off three years before losing to Corbett. Jeffries was off six years before losing to Johnson. Willard was off three years before his fight with Dempsey.

All these men, as well as Dempsey, performed as one would expect and lost badly.

After the Carpentier fight, Dempsey's whole career was basically laying off.

I guess my position is why credit Dempsey for always being rusty or left-handedly penalize fighters who remained active and so were sharper for their fights and therefore have no excuses and in fact need none?

I don't think I'm trashing Dempsey. I rate him in the top ten, at number nine. Perhaps he could have rated higher if he stayed active and so maximized his potential. He didn't and so I rate him accordingly.

 

I dont see how Dempsey could recover his lost prestige short of coming back from the dead and fighting the ghosts of the two Harrys. :dead

 

Yeah, inactivity in his championship prime hurts Dempsey.

 

Burt, what apologists like you fail to accept is that Tunney was supposed to be the tuneup. He was accepted as opponent for the specific reason that he was considered a smaller, light hitting, and somewhat protected fighter. Its monday morning quarterbacking to all of a sudden say that Tunney was great (and most people say that based of his two wins over Dempsey and the mistaken belief that he won the Greb series) AFTER he defeats Dempsey.

 

Why is the onus on Dempsey to come back to life ?
Greb should come back to life, he's the one who bowed out early.

 

Yeah, but we do that all the time. Who said Cassius Clay was anything close to a great fighter in 1964 and 1965 ? Or that Holyfield wasn't washed-up and an easy night for Tyson in 1996 ?

 

tunney must be the worst tuneup fight it was possible to pick at that time.
from the film and his undefeated official decision record if; tunney wasn't great he was at least very close to it.

 

Tunney was no tune-up.
Kearns wouldn't have put Dempsey in with Tunney.
Tunney was Rickard's choice, because Tunney was a clean-cut ex-marine, it was the 'draft dodger v war veteran' box office thing again. I guess Rickard also figured Tunney to be more promotable as a champion than Wills, in the unlikely event that Dempsey was to lose, a possibility Tex would have acknowledged and insured against.
As it turned out, the public and press didn't warm to Tunney anyway.

 

"tuneup"

seems a bit extreme regarding Tunney

I think it reasonable that Tunney might have been/or is slightly overrated with many judging he proved himself better than Greb and Loughran overall which does not appear to have been the case.

Still, in the context of the time, and granted that he seems to have always drawn the color line, he did have an impressive and consistent record with a reasonable number of impressive wins over Greb, Gibbons, Weinert, Risko, etc

Which one of Dempsey's title opponents (or opponents at all) would you rate above the Tunney coming into the fight in 1926? I can't think of one. Gibbons? He beat him. Firpo? I personally can't really imagine him beating Tunney, but I suppose he might have landed a lucky one.

 

That was the opinion of Ray Arcel.