Fireman Flynn KO 1 Jack Dempsey

Dempsey is my favourite fighter,I have an open mind on this fight.With no evidence to the contrary I'm inclined to believe Klompton's take on it .

 

I am just providing the source as you requested. It's up to the reader to draw their own conclusion. It would be nice if someone verified the Flynn quote as that is pretty intriguing evidence that the fight was not on the level. As it is Cavanaugh's book is now a second, independent source, from the Monte Cox Soderman piece that provides a diffrent narrative to the events on that day.

 

Dempsey always maintained in public from the time of the fight to his last breath that the fight unfolded just as reported. His ex-wife claimed otherwise. Maybe she had an axe to grind or maybe she knew the truth and wanted to sully his reputation.

 

Let me also state that I have found inaccuracies in the book: Tunney. I am not holding the tome up as irrefutable testimony on the subject, just reporting what I have read.

 

While I agree with what you wrote, are chins really pre-prime?

I think Dempsey was down a lot in the Sudenberg fight which happened nearly two years before the loss to Flynn.

 

So you accept Langford's chin was prime when Johnson dropped him 3 times?

 

Nonsense. Maxine Cates mentioned it at the draft-dodging trial not in any effort to boost Dempsey, but rather to harm him.

How much more than innuendo, rumour and conjecture have you got to ascert that Tunney-Madden, Gibbons-Norfolk and Carpentier-Levinsky were fixed fights ? (all of which you have claimed, have you not?)

 

Langford was down quite a few times, mostly due to his defense and aggressive style which left him open. But he was very hard stop stop, and could quickly recuperate, so there is the difference. Dempsey in this case did not get up in time.

At age 20, and just 156 pounds, Johnson should have finished Langford.

 

I do question every result, many results anyway. That's what I meant by one way or the other. Not just pre-1940 though.

I don't believe that these scallywags went their whole careers NOT throwing a few fights or doing some faking. It's preposterous to think these degenerate marginalized prizefighting men were all honest sports, at all times and always.

Some of Dempsey's WINS were probably fake too.

 

EXACTLY. Revisionists pretending here that saying he took a "dive" was protecting Dempsey's image.
At the very least, the negative damage to his rep by such a claim would cancel out whatever 'good' is supposed to come of it.

 

Is he? Odd, you spend a lot of time on racism, and critiquing white fighters for never fighting black ones for title fights, yet I have never seen you do the same for Dempsey, or for black fighters not offering title fights to other black fighters.

More double standards!

 

Maxine Cates said a lot of things. Not the least of which was that Dempsey took cocaine immediately before fights to give him a boost which accounted for his early round charges. Are we going to take the word of a ***** who was attempting to extort money from Dempsey?

So let me get this straight: You honestly believe that its worse for Dempsey that as a struggling young fighter with barely enough to feed himself and not even sure he would continue his career he may have taken a bribe to lay down against Flynn. Or that the great Jack Dempsey who was two years away from winning the title was actually knocked out cold by a 38 year old journeyman who was 10 years past his prime and whose record in his last 7 fights was a dismal 1-5-1. You honestly want to argue that the Dempsey nuthuggers here who subscribe to the notion that Dempsey threw the fight are doing so because they think its worse for his legacy? Whatever. Dont **** on my leg and tell me its raining.

I never said Norfolk-Gibbons was fixed. I said that Gibbons ducked Norfolk for nearly a decade before that fight was made and only took it when the risk was minimized. Big difference. Yes, there is a lot more contemporary evidence from THE DAY OF THE FIGHT that Levinsky-Carpentier and Tunney-Madden were fixed, whereas there is literally NO CONTEMPORARY EVIDENCE or even rumor that the Dempsey-Flynn fight was fixed. Like someone else said above, people are going to latch onto whatever narrative suits their particular brand of hero worship regardless of whether there is anything to support it or not.

As for whether or not chins can be prime or pre prime: 2 points, 1. A fighter who is pre prime hasnt put together all of the pieces of the puzzle that make up his style which can lead to gaps in preparation or in defense that can lead to a KO loss. In that regard it doesnt matter whether or not a chin alone can be "prime" but rather all of the things that lead to someone reaching your chin. 2. We know punch resistance can weaken as a fighter gets past his prime. Who is to say that a fighter who has not yet peaked physically has the same punch resistance before that he will later?

 

Critiquing????

 

Dempsey scaled inside the middleweight limit when he fought Andre Anderson a YEAR AFTER he fought Sudenberg. for which fights he was 19 years old!

In the absence of proof to the contrary,
I'm quite prepared to accept that Flynn stopped Dempsey legitimately.

Thats where we differ, I don't let my liking or disliking a fighter get in the way of objective evaluation of them. Langford quit in a couple of fights for which I do not castigate him.Johnson retired on his stool when he was an old man and you nearly wet yourself trumpeting it on here.

Since you have the capacity to dissapear up your own rectum when challenged to provide proof of your outlandish statements, you really should not talk about double standards.

 

No, I'm not saying I would take it as gospel but I wouldn't dismiss it she says either.
I think her stories about Dempsey are probably closer to the truth than the sanitized versions that middle America could relate to.

Yes, he might have taken cocaine.

The story has been out there since the 1920s. And I don't think everyone who ever said it was repeating it for the reasons you say. You may be right about "Dempsey nuthuggers" in 2014 on the internet, but that hardly accounts for the original motives.
Maxine Cates stated it in 1919 or 1920, I think, and you've already said she was trying to extort money, so she was being hostile, not trying to boost him

Ok, I'm mistaken. :good

Those were bigger fights. There seemed to be fix rumours surrounding lots of big fights, some that nowadays most historians view as just rumours.
I'm not saying those fights weren't fixed though, or knocking anyone who thinks they were.

IF the first verifiable rumours (in print) of Dempsey-Flynn don't occur until 1919, then, yes, we could surmise that it is because Dempsey's being ballyhooed as challenger and new champion, and the loss needs to be 'explained away' with an invented fix story, or perhaps just some crazy **** that his wife pulled out of thin air.
On the other hand, the Flynn-Dempsey fight - and any rumours that surfaced after it - wasn't necessarily significant enough to warrant much investigation or interest enough to surface in print before then. A fixed fight of middling importance isn't front page news - or even back page news.

There are limits to what we can say we know. All I know is that Dempsey lost by KO in round 1, and that some people have said that it was fixed, not always with intentions to 'protect' Dempsey.
To insist that it was on the level is no better than insisting it was a fix.
That's my take.