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

Bottom line for me is .

There is no doubt Wills deserved a title shot.

Was Dempsey intimidated by the thought of facing Wills? imo No .

Was Dempsey responsible for the fight not happening? imo.No.

Could he have done more to ensure it did? Probably.

Was race, ie colour the deciding factor why the fight did not happen ? imo Undoubtedly the big brass ,and Rickard were well aware of the uproar and lynchings that followed Johnson's thrashing of Jeffries , to take a chance on another occurence was anathema to them

Was Dempsey led by the nose by Kearns ,and Rickard? Well in his autobiography, I got that idea ,to some extent.

Did the powers that be want the fight? Emphatically no, they made all the appropriate noises about facilitating its coming to pass , but in private did all they could to block it.

Culpability lies heaviest with them ,imo

Who would have won ? imo Dempsey by ko .

 

All of this talk about Dempsey not getting paid enough to fight Wills is bunk and just an excuse to duck him.

Dempsey accepted a percentage, not a guarantee, to face Firpo, who was FAR less daunting than Wills, and far less qualified.

Everybody here has admitted that the Wills fight would have been massive, it was practically pre-promoted by the press. Print the tickets and people are going to show up. Had Dempsey accepted a percentage he would have likely made a purse that far exceeded his purses for Carpentier and Firpo. The fact is he chose not to.

Dempsey wasnt led around by Kearns or Rickard either. When he didnt like how things went with Kearns he fired him. When he wanted to branch out, he fought under different promotional banners (Mike Collins, and Floyd Fitzsimmons). When Dempsey fired Kearns did he try to force a promotion with Wills? Nope. Had Dempsey actually wanted to defend against Wills he would have and could have. He didnt.

Its also bunk that nobody would promote the fight. There were offers from promoters all over the country, and all over the world where the fight could have taken place and been successful. Dempsey and Kearns ignored them. Offers from reputable promoters such as Sunny Jim Coffroth to promote the bout in Mexico, or Dominic Tortorich to promote the bout in New Orleans. There were also offers from Cuba and Montreal to name a few among many many more. You think promoters were scared of controversy to the point they didnt want to make a guaranteed fortune? We are talking about promoters here, some of the most greedy men in sports.

It wasnt solely a race issue. Race conveniently gave Dempsey and Kearns the necessary excuse to avoid their most threatening challenge. In 1926 Tiger Flowers, a black southpaw, was Harry Greb's most threatening challenger and that fight was promoted in February of that year at Madison Square Garden which Rickard owned the lease to. Rickard had been willing to promote black fighters, and mixed race matches all along. The one he avoided like the plague was Wills. Why? Wills was a family man, dignified, and respectable. The same traits that made Flowers an "acceptable" challenger. Yet, we are supposed to believe that Dempsey wouldnt fight him because of the riots that would have happened? How many deaths and riots did you hear about when Flowers whipped Greb for the middleweight title, the second biggets prize in the sport at the time? Im sure it had nothing to do with the fact that Wills was a very big, very athletic fighter who just also happened to be beating the tar out of the top heavyweights. Anyone want to buy a bridge?

Later in the year (1926) the New York State Athletic Commission, you know those same
"powers that be" that everyone blames the fight on not happening, tried to force Dempsey to defend his championship against an old past his prime Wills and Dempsey refused only to have his license in the state revoked.

So what did Dempsey do when he couldnt fight in New York (where some here seem to think was the only place Dempsey could make money)? He went somewhere else and had a million dollar gate against a fighter who was only held in lukewarm esteem by the public. Something he could have done all along had he actually wanted to. He didnt. He chose a smaller white guy who couldnt punch and wasnt given much of a chance of beating him.

That is gist of the story. Was Dempsey solely responsible? No but he was more than willing to go along with ducking Wills and as such he bares the lions share of the blame and shame.

 

Mixed race championship fights in the lower divisions never met the resistance they did in the heavyweight one.The Heavyweight Champion was seen as the supreme male ,something the white population would not easily stomach if he was black. Jim Coffroth to all intents and purposes was finished as a promoter in 1910 when California outlawed boxing his power base vanished,he made one brief retry at the big time in WW1 then faded into obscurity ,switching to horse racing. Copffroth annouced he was putting Champ Willard against Challenger Dempsey ,it came to nothing, hot air.

I'd never heard of Dominic Tortorich had to look him up.I see he grandly announced that he would promote a fight betweeen Dempsey and Joe Beckett in 1919 ,it to happen in 1920. it came to zilch, which may have been the destiny of his proposed Demnpsey /Wills fight.More hot air.

 

Well I got the solution for the Dempsey / Wills fight not occuring though they did sign one fight contract...
Let us exhume the corpse of Jack Dempsey, and HANG him without a trial,
as he is already found guilty by the impartial fight posters on ESB...
Hoist him to the rafters , I say...For Dempsey was a coward, and a racist, and a silent member of the KKK. A scoundrel to the core, who did the
unpardonable, he listened to his braintrust, and the powers that be of his
time...How dare he do what he did 85 years ago...? And while we are at it, let us burn the newspaper accounts of the race riots and killings following
the Jeffries / Johnson fight in Reno...How dare those newspapers print stories of those riots following the fight in Reno ? They never occured...
So at last Dempsey is hung finally and justice was DONE...Hallelujah !!!

 

Pretty much the same way I view it. Damn shame it never happened.

 

Mr. Beinstock:

Post the contents of this contract Dempsey signed.

It obviously holds a lot more weight for you than the fact that Dempsey never actually fought Wills.

The devil is in the details so lets here what was written in to the contract, which is the reason it never came off. Nobody who has ever read the contents of the papers Dempsey signed to face Wills can, with a straight face, say he was genuinely working toward fighting Wills.

So go ahead, post the contents of those contracts for us since signing your name a piece of toilet paper (essentially what that "contract" was) means more to you than actions.

McVey:

So because two quality promoters pursued fights with Dempsey against other fighters and they didnt come off (no reason given by you as to why) that means they could not have successfully promoted a Dempsey Wills bout?

Dont assume because you have never heard of these men, 100 years later, that they couldnt have gotten the job done.

As I said before: When you start nailing down the edges of the argument against Dempsey vis-a-vis Wills the excuses seem to pile up exponentially. That right there should tell you that Dempsey doesnt have very sound footing in the debate.

 

Mc, I understand perfectly well that there WERE race riots, killings, burnings following the Jeffries/ Johnson fight in Reno...That is WHY I can honestly understand the VALID fears of those days and why Dempsey's entourage, and promoters of the day had GOOD reason to not sponsor such a bout...And Mc, what i read about your posts, I truly believe were YOU in
the Rickard promotion business you would not have RISKED your fortune and reputation and your money backers in such a risky enterprise...
So Mc if you admit there were "race riots" following the Jeffries/ Johnson bout ,as you just posted above it is YOU not I who is avoiding the DAMN truth...NOT I... Was Harry Wills a victim ? Freakin Yes he was....But we are all products of our time and all the actors of that sad time , were truly victims of their age...So knowing all the above, let us not villify a decent man like Jack Dempsey who by all accounts was a gentleman to the day he died...Darn it let him rest in peace...

 

Kearns was right to demand 100k for Greb at that time. He should have demanded more. They got a lot for for Carpentier and for Gibbons.
Greb was a tougher fight.

I don't expect Dempsey to have "demanded" anything from Rickard.
Rickard didn't want Wills fighting for the championship, that was that. Rickard always delivered the big purses. Dempsey reserved the right to turn down offers, Rickard reserved the right to say 'no I wont promote that'. They didn't control one another.
It's on record that Dempsey DID in fact telegram Rickard at least once asking him if he could deliver Wills and for how much. Rickard replied back that he wouldn't touch it, and anyone who says they could put such a fight on was full of it.
What more was Dempsey supposed to do ?
Was he really supposed to be crying about some newspaper men who were calling him names for not fighting Wills ?

Kearns really slates Dempsey there. I would take all that with a pinch of salt.

He obviously didn't fancy the job enough to do it for a cut-down price.
He obviously didn't care enough about press criticism as much as you would have liked him to.

 

Dempsey-Firpo was promoted by Rickard.
Rickard had proved what he could do with Firpo a few months earlier against Willard.
Rickard would not touch a Dempsey-Wills fight.

Who offered him ?

Which 80,000 + seat venues were secured with a promoter for this fight ?

 

LW, So why the hell did Harry Wills sign the bloody document ? All you Dempsey haters, to satisfy your agenda must always go one step further...
1 FIRST Harry Wills and Jack Dempsey did not sign a contract...
2 Now when you cannot deny the photos, you come up with an "invalid" document that Harry Wills and his lawyers signed...
3 WHAT NEXT ? Where is Sigmund Freud when we need him ? Good day...
4 FINITO !!!

 

The People Revolutionary Committee endorses this as the only viable solution.

Right on!

 

If you are Wills are you going to refuse to sign? Even if its meaningless? Why? So Dempsey can then say you refused to fight him?

Wills chased Dempsey across the country for seven years, not the other way around despite what you Dempsey worshippers might wish to believe.

Why did Wills sign? Because it was an easy $50,000 for nothing. Id sign my name to a contract anyone for $50,000.

Thats the point. It was payoff money. Thats what you dont get. The first time Wills and Dempsey signed it wasnt even a contract. That fact escapes you as well.

You realize that the "contract" you have seen photos of was signed in September of 1925 and stipulated that the bout wasnt to be held until a YEAR LATER. Right?

Have you ever seen a contract written like that, particularly in an era when promotions were abbreviated far more than today?

One month after signing the contract Dempsey's business manager quit Dempsey's services stating that he would not be a part of Dempsey's concerted efforts to break the contract. Dempsey quickly tried to deny the statement saying he intended to fight Wills.

November 1 Wills was paid the first payment of $25,000 promised by Fitzsimmons. Dempsey, Fitzsimmons friend, was not. Why?

Early the next year Wills was paid the other $25,000 and a month later Dempsey admitted that the $50,000 was money he paid. Despite having never recieved a dime from Fitzsimmons who spend several weeks with Dempsey in Los Angeles in early 1926. Sound like two guys who couldnt come to an arrangement?

While all of this was going on Rickard was actively planning a Dempsey-Tunney fight. Why, if there was ever a reasonable expectation of Dempsey fighting Wills? Doesnt that seem a bit optimistic when considering that Dempsey hadnt fought in 3 years and had stutter stepped past several proposed fights during that time? Hmmm.

At the same time as all of this was going on Dempsey was offered $500,000 by a group in Los Angeles to fight Wills there. Dempsey refused.

So you tell me: Dempsey couldnt find anyone to come up with the money to fight Wills? Dempsey signed a contract with his buddy Floyd Fitzsimmons to face Wills but got mad when Fitzsimmons couldnt pay him up front yet still pays Wills $50,000 of his own money AFTER Fitzsimmons had missed his payments to Dempsey and all the while he is negotiating for a fight with Tunney which actually did happen? Is that simple enough for you?

Do I need to spell it out that Dempsey paid Wills step aside money through his good friend Floyd Fitzsimmons so that he could continue being called champion and reaping all of the earnings that brought in outside of the ring and inside had he beaten Tunney as was expected.

You have a fanatical pro-Dempsey view which clouds any unbiased thinking in regards to this situation.

I dont need to fall back on something because there is a photo of Dempsey and Wills signing a contract because I know what that contract stated. It was well publicized. Read the New York Times or better yet the Chicago Tribune coverage of it. It was a hollow, meaningless document that was designed from day one to NOT be fulfilled.


We can go around and around about this but you have your belief, which is grounded in hero-worship, and I have mine which is grounded in what Ive actually read and seen. I doubt either will change the others mind.

 

If Wills was taking step aside money (I don't think for a minute he was), then wouldn't that imply that he was avoiding the fight as much as Dempsey?