Even if you love Dempsey, it is time for a generation to accept -

Now would not a good percentage of those writers be significantly prejudiced & more likely to want a white fighter to be better, even if they were not KKK members?

It is highly implausible that with the level of racism there it would not color the judgement of many, no pun intended.

 

They probably just overrated Dempsey a bit, underrated Wills a bit.
I'm not sure that's racism.
Many of them would have said Jack Johnson beats Dempsey any day of the week ...
... and I believe Johnson was voted "least favourite colored gentleman" by the KKK boxing writers' association on eight consecutive years, but I'd have to check with my granddaddy.

 

What does it matter who you, I or anyone else thinks would have won? It's irrelevant in this discussion, and frankly saying he would have won anyway comes across as a justification for one of the most infamous ducks in boxing history. The only way to prove who wins a fight is for them to meet in the ring and it never happened. Hence the asterisk.

 

Not necessarily, they have been concerned that the fight would cause a race riot.

Not everybody who advocated the colour line did so for entirely wicked reasons.

 

Janitor, how dare you to utter the possible truth ? in this era of
political correctness,YOU have the nerve to seek the truth ?
The valid fear of race riots ala the Jeffries/Johnson fight in 1910
was one reason that promoters were hesitant to match a HW title bout between a white and black....My dad lived during the early
1920s and before and would mention to me this topic, and I would read about this growing up...I as a boy lived next door to a trainer of John Henry Lewis, and I would go next door every night to spar with stablemates of Lewis, one of which a WW named Tommy Jones, had to go to Australia to get bouts. Tommy Jones went to Australia with Jimmy Leto to put bread on the table, because of his colour, bouts were difficult to come by...
And this was about a decade after the Dempsey/ Wills brouhaha...

 

What a bunch of BS

 

The fight did not happen because it would not have made the mega money that Dempsey and Co were wanting/used to, race played its part but i see that more to do with societies racial issue rather than Dempsey and Co.

A certain John Arthur "Jack" Johnson having played his part in strengthening the race issue regarding the Heavyweight title

If Dempsey and Co could have made big money fighting Wills, and it did not impact on his popularity, then the fight would have been made.

Dempsey was a exciting fighter, but he and his entourage sure were not keen to put the title on the line too often, 6 defences in 7 years and a 3yr gap included in that with zero defences.

So if a big purse was not forthcoming, then what incentive was there for Dempsey and Co to take the fight.

Nowadays a Dempsey vs Wills matchup would be a massive fight, but in the 1920s it likely would not be, summed up not so eloquently by Tex Rickard as "A black Heavyweight Champion would not be worth a bucket of warm ****", the moneymakers were not going to allow their commercial interests to be impinged upon by such matters as fairness.

Who would have won Dempsey or Wills, we shall never know, but Wills should have had his chance.

 

I actually think that the fight would have been one of Dempsey's biggest gates, for whatever that is worth.

 

Rickard and Kearns were hard nosed fiscal warriors, if big bucks could be made i think they would have made the fight.

The Shelby incident springs to mind regarding Kearns love of the dollar.

I just think Jack Johnson was still too fresh in folks memory, if reported facts are true Joe Louis only got in the title frame, of course on ability but allied with him being 'advised' to be the exact opposite of Jack Johnson, regarding public image re his manner, his not being seen with white ladies etc etc.

 

Dempsey-Wills would have been huge. They were thinking of money, but it was more a case of not wanting to risk the Dempsey gravy train against someone who had a serious chance of beating him. Greb wasn't black, and he never got his deserved shot either.

 

For what it's worth, after spending the last years digging thru old newspapers, I happen to think most of the writers pre 1930 were pretty ****ty ****ysists of fighters, styles and trchniques. Guys got far better by 1950

 

Because MOST people thought during those days that Dempsey
would have ko'd Wills...Simple as that....Were they wrong, and you correct ? One hand you say people who favored Dempsey to beat Wills were not "racist", but are bound by "politics", which to me is another way to skirt the word "racist"...So what do you make of the fact that "racist" Nat Fleischer a product of those long ago days, chose Jack Johnson, Joe Gans, Barbados Joe Walcott as the best men of their respective divisions, though they were black ? You can't have it both ways, it seems to me...
One more thing. If you are so gung ho that Dempsey was a sub standard heavyweight, how do you account for the fact that Sam Langford, chose Jack Dempsey to beat Harry Wills after the signed for a fight which was cancelled, and also proclaimed
that "Jack Dempsey was the greatest heavyweight he had ever seen" ? Was Sam Langford also a "racist" or bound by "politics" ?
Or was it even conceivable that the Dempsey who tore through his division from 1918 to 1923, a helluva heavyweight as
multitudes thought those days ? No fighter ever has been so besmirched on ESB as Jack Dempsey has...T''aint fair or
accurate...

 

Well going by the available footage of Wills (limited though it is) I'd vote for Dempsey to knock him out without a seconds hesitation.

I remember when the footage of Wills vs Firpo and Madden first surfaced on youtube and people where oohing and ahhing about him and desperately trying to find hidden qualities that weren't there. The truth is he fought in a primitive hold and hit style, didn't make any use of his height advantages, had precisely zero head movement and his one example of a power shot was a blatant hit on the break against the crude and way out of shape Firpo.

I get that he was past prime in this footage but we can see enough as to make an assumption as to how he fought and whether that style would have been effective against a fighter who brought the aggression, two fisted power and more varied attack that Dempsey possessed and I think the answer is no.

As to who was the greater heavyweight I'll let others duke that out.

 

Most people's high estimation of Harry Wills is largely based on newspaper reports on him or his opponents, certainly not on the films.
And Greb, well, almost everything's newspaper reports and newspaper decisions with him.
If the writers were sh!tty ana1ysts it leaves us with a lot less to go on.

 

Yeah, I remember being quite surprised by the general reaction to those films. He looks very pedestrian in those fights, but most of the people who'd been bigging him up for years had to come up with how "skilled" and "slick" he looked. Kind of funny, since many of the same postors are keen to over-emphasize all the flaws in the white fighters of the same period, especially Dempsey.
Truth is, and to be fair, the Firpo and Madden fights were not Wills at his best, were mediocre performances at best, and seen as such, and some observers thought perhaps Wills had even carried them.