Fireman Flynn KO 1 Jack Dempsey

But realistically, Dempsey was no saint, and everything Maxine Cates alleged rings true to how desperate hobo prizefighters of the time would have been living.
Doc Kearns was a crook, convicted, I believe, for various, before meeting Dempsey.
Maxine Cates was a veteran wh0re by her own admission.
Jack Dempsey was probably a pimp and a bully and all those other things, if I had to guess.

 

Did Maxine Cates attend any of Jack Dempsey's bouts, let alone the first one between Fireman Jim Flynn and Dempsey? At many venues in the United States until after World War I, women weren't allowed to attend professional boxing cards.

During Dempsey's trial on the charge that he dodged the draft during World War I, there was quite a bit of testimony which seemed to be far from being truthful.

- Chuck Johnston

 

If she didn't make it up, I think it was more a case of hearing things.
Prostitutes tend to hear things, have good access to a lot of inside information, that's why they have been used by military intelligence and espionage agencies in the past.
She hung out in bars and bedrooms with gamblers and the like, no doubt.

Whether the information is true or accurate, who knows.

 

Thats splitting hairs. Steroids can be bought with a prescription that doesnt make them "legal" for someone to use them recreationally. For all intents and purposes if Dempsey was using cocaine as a PED without a valid reason it was illegal otherwise why would Cates have even made a big deal out of it.

 

It was probably a dive, but a fair few of Jacks wins were probably dives too. It sort of evens itself out.

 

Cocaine use was undoubtedly frowned upon or feared by polite society, that's why Maxine Cates mentioned it.
On the other hand, if she was "making it all up" who knows what was going on in her head.

Steroids are legal in the UK, as long as you are not selling them.
In the USA, I believe people can be arrested and imprisoned for possessing them ? But maybe it differs from state to state.
So perhaps that's too complex to get into.

 

Prizefighting was fairly disreputable at the time too, and the people who were trying to prohibit and stigmatize alcohol were holding a lot of sway in 1920 too, at the very least !

 

Which states even had a boxing commission in Dempsey's pre-title days ?
Unless drugs were explicitly banned in negotiations or contracts, I don't think sniffing a smidge on cocaine would have been considered cheating.
Not like, say, bashing someone's head in with a railroad spike or plaster of paris .. or the good ol' horseshoe.

 

Were drug-enhanced performances an issue during the early part of the 20th Century? I doubt it. But there claims about fighters losing bouts because they got doped by people with shady motives.

- Chuck Johnston

 

I've got an old training book (athletics and sports in general, not boxing) that mentions "cocaine lozenges", says they are overrated.

Performance-enhancing drugs were probably not much of an "issue" until the 1960s, when some cyclists died from going crazy with the amphetamines, and obviously because of the Cold War and the USA v. USSR ? East Germany at the Olympics, and all that sh!t.
I don't think PEDs were naturally thought of as out and out "cheating" until relatively recently.

Yeah, performance-sabotage doping was an issue, in boxing, at least since the old English prize ring days, as the whole sport was built around big gambling backers and side stakes.

 

If anyone has proof of a fix show it now. Otherwise accept the official line.

 

There is always option C:

Say that we don't know whether it was fixed or not.