Full Timeline of Dempsey-Wills - Evidence of Dempsey-Wills Contract Photo Staged?

Of course. As is the case now, Mayweather-Pacquiao is not being pursued by London or Paris. But they want it.

This is covered in an earlier post.

 

This is the latest in a long line of presumtions you have made about me Burt (my favourite was that I am a rabid Ali fan) and once again you are wrong. I don't disregard the possibility. I expect something of that nature to occur. I suspect they would not have been so serious as they were for Jeffries-Johnson, even had Wills won, but I may be wrong.

My guess is they would have been worse than the trouble that would have met Burns-Johnson or Johnson-Willard but it is hard to be sure, of course.


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What a lot of horse-****.

None of this happened for any of the mixed-race HW bouts that went before it. The possibilities of its happening are, in the main, made up in your head here.


Furthermore, the argument that sports should not go ahead because of the threat of civil unrest or terrorist action is really, really shakey anyway.

The Olympics increases chances of a terrorist attack upon London, a city that saw some of the worst civil disturbances in years quite recently, vastly. And yet here we go.

 

Yeah, but in 1913 America was a paradigm of racial harmony that lent itself perfectly to one of the most controversial black men of his era fighting for and defending the HW title. When the band played "All Coons Look Alike To Me" as Johnson made his way to the ring for the Fight of the Century, Johnson was in on the joke and when blacks were attacked and killed in the wake of that fight, that was an aberration.


Of course America had its problems. Of course the fight was not easy to make.

Of course it could have been made.

 

This, I would agree with.

 

That makes perfect sense to me :good

I prefer the 18 though.

 

Is it justifiable to stage the Olympics which has heightened the security on the streets of London to such a degree that troops have been deployed there, rather like the Northern Ireland of the 80's?

I submit that the Olympics are a bigger risk to public safety in the UK than the Wills-Dempsey fight was to the public in the US.

Absolutely no further than Burns, Johnson, Willard, Kauffman, Ketchel and the other boxing stars that put on mixed race bouts for titles.

 

No, it would be far, far worse, a total **** storm, the Government itself would come under heavy fire of course, and they would wheel out some faceless spokesman who would say, over and again, that we cannot bow down to the terrorists and that sport is neutral. And do you know what? He'd be absolutely right.

But you are wrong, there are two crucial differences. The second one is that worst case scenario based upon Dempsey-Wills is perhaps 1,000 casualties of various different kinds.

The Olympics targetted by terrorists - what shall we say? One-hundred thousand? Is that conservative for an absolute worst case scenarion? Dirty bomb in a stadium or something like that?

Probably.

That's the more important crucial difference IMO.

It sounds very dramatic, but all he really has to do is say to Rickard "get me Wills. I'm not fighting anyone but Wills. It's Wills or i'm retired."

IMO that would have done it.

If it doesn't he can put out feelers to Cuba, Mexico (which he talked about actually), France, Britain, Australia, Canada....

But he doesn't HAVE to do any of this. I'm not that interested in the moral dimension. I'm interested in the absolute bottom line.

The absolute bottom line is Dempsey shared his time with ONE heavyweight in his class in terms of resume and he did not meet him. This means, in my opinion, that he never proved himself the best in his era. Because I believe Wills has a better resume, this has led me to rate Wills slightly higher.

Dempsey doesn't care about these things probably, or if he does, not that much. He's interested in money, primarily. That's fine and I have no beef with it.

I also don't like to see people white-wash the scenario with "Race-riots, race-riots".

 

Yes, which is why most of the examples I gave were of HEAVYWEIGHT TITLE BOUTS BETWEEN BLACK AND WHITE.

Who are you to make these moral judgments? You are prepared to risk the lives of thousands upon thousands of British citizens so people can watch the Olympics but not far fewer American lives so people can watch the boxing?

I don't think you are exaggerating the possibility of RIOTS at all. I thin you are exaggerating how the fall out would affect the principles involved.

You've intimated that clashes amongst Americans would END a promoters career. Many fights, including Schmeling-Louis I, Casimero-Lazarte, Burns-Johnson and Jeffries-Johnsonsaw serious, serious trouble afterwards.

In what way were these or other promoters made to suffer?