Gene Tunney's heavyweight resume

When Wills was seeking and perhaps actually negotiating for a match with Dempsey. Tunney and Gibbons both jumped in to lobby for another elimination fight to divert Wills.

The first thing Tunney did when he became champion was draw the color line against Wills. This was before Wills lost to Sharkey. My take is this exposes Tunney's offer to fight Wills as just an empty maneuver and part of boxing politics. I don't think the fight would ever have actually come off if Wills had agreed to it.

Just on the color line in general, it appears to me the obvious reason for drawing it was fear of losing by either the fighter, his management, or the promoter.

Even the often stated fear of riots boils down to that fear. Would there have been riots if Jeffries had beaten Johnson?

 

Sounds like Tyson Fury may be taking this same road. Tunney made $1,000,000 in his second fight with Dempsey. That's a ton of money back in the day. If Fury fights Wilder then Joshua and retires, he'll have a whole lot of money in the bank. I've heard Fury say (wtih his wife alongside) maintaining he has two more fights and that's it. Then he wants to continue in boxing as a trainer or owner of a fight club.

With respect to Tunney....his record is of course tainted by the lack of black fighters on his resume, but there were maybe two or three at the time of that calibre. Kid Norfolk, Wills maybe. It's interesting to note that Greb absolutely demolished Tunney in their first fight in 1922, and most people thought Greb won the second fight (split decision). By the last fights Greb had only one good eye, but admitted Tunney had gotten too big for him and improved a lot.

 

They were racists. In case you didn't know it's racist action to discriminate against a person based on the color of their skin. Do you want to know what the race riots actually were? They were the Ku Kux Klan lynching black men. The KKK regularly lynched 1000s of black men anyway. The also burned down houses of black men who opened up businesses in order to keep all business to be white owned. They raped black women because they could. They also lynched young black men who may have flirted with a white girl or for no apparent reason. You are literally taking the position of a KKK apologist.

Calling them 'race riots' does them no justice. They were racist murder of innocent men by what we'd call today terrorists. A reasonable position is to bring murderers to justice. Not to discriminate against black men to 'keep them in their place'.

Were the lynchings when Greb lost to Norfolk and Flowers? Were there lynchings? When Wills beat Firpo/Fulton? Or when Louis won the title some few years after Dempsey and Tunney themselves drew the race line.

Not true. He ran from Johnson, Martin, McVea and retired in order not to face Johnson.

 

on potential black opponents, I think Kid Norfolk and Battling Siki at lightheavy,

and Harry Wills and George Godfrey at heavyweight would have been worthy tests for Tunney.

I believe Tunney is the only one of the "modern" champions (Sullivan and after) who did not ever meet a black opponent.

 

He was, unarguably, a racist. Dempsey gets grief for "toeing the color line", meanwhile he had black sparring partners, and fought at least one black fighter.

 

While I agree with most of the sentiment above, there is some skewing of facts, at least in direct relationship to boxing... Firstly, the Johnson-Jeffries riots were not solely or even predominantly under the control of the KKK. In Norfolk, VA, for example, the rioters were US Navy Sailors. In NYC, they seemed to be simple gangs of white thugs. In St. Louis, it was blacks threatening whites and police. 2 whites were stabbed to death in DC by blacks. A group of black workers was shot by whites in Georgia. I'm willing to believe that some of those incidences in the South or Midwest could have been the doing of the KKK. But many of these incidences look spontaneous. And the death toll of those particular incidences was somewhere around 25....

Also, it is interesting to note that 1/4 of the victims of lynching in the US during this "golden age" were white. Apparently, it was a popular method of violence in those days. Another reason to be glad to be alive today.

 

I thought the East St. Louis riots started when thousands of racist whites went on a rampage in the black neighborhood because they were angry that some black workers had been brought in as strike-breakers?

And the DC riot started when a mob of racist whites took to the streets amidst rumors and allegations that a black man had been attacking and jostling white woman in the area.

Yeah, the history of lynching is interesting. My understanding is that most of the white lynchings in that period took place out west, and involved alleged murderers and cattle thieves, etc. They apparently were a lot less barbaric than the black lynchings, where people were often cruelly tortured and castrated before being hung up and burned, and dismembered so that families could take their body parts home as mementos. I read somewhere that most of the white men lynched in the south were lynched for opposing lynchings and standing up for black rights. Sick times.

 

I'll have to look further into that St. Louis riot. That area (incl. Ferguson) has a pretty horrible past/present of racial strife.

I guess the bigger question is to what degree did these activities, either specifically from Jeffries-Johnson or the greater phenomenon of lynching, truly influenced fighters drawing the color line in the 1920's.

And by the 1930's, we had Louis, a relative embracing by the media and crowds celebrating in Harlem without the Man coming down on them...

 

I vaguely remember a thread about this a couple years ago where someone was saying that Tunney seemed too intelligent to be racist, or something....

 

Pre title Tunney offered a fight with Wills. Wills declined. What Tunney did after he became champion has doesn't change that fact.

Wills also declined a match with George Godfrey several times. That would have been a good one.

 

I've wondered about this. The media usually published extremely biased accounts of the riots, so I wouldn't be surprised if some boxing people sincerely worried about the possibility that a black man becoming champion would whip up unruly mobs of "uppity negro" fiends into a frenzy of rapacious violence. Still hard to believe that this alone would have deterred them from making the fights if the money was there though.

 

Common knowledge. In early 1926, Wills was offered $250,000 to fight Gene Tunney in a title eliminator, with the winner to meet the champion. Wills turned it down.

250K was a lot of money in those days.

 

This is correct, Jeffries had a few wins over top black opponents, including one who defeated Jack Johnson while he was champion.

The color line is a complex thing to understand, but the money line trumps the color line.

For example as Champion Jeffries fought a 4 round match with Hank Griffin who was black. Had Jeffries lost that match, Griffin is the new lineal champion. As it was Griffin was down a few times and not competitive with champion. So for the money and time, the color line at heavyweight was officially broken in this fight.

In 1904, Jeffries listed Johnson as a possible next opponent to the press, along with a few others. The Johnson vs Hart match was billed as a title elimination match. Hart won it. Jeffries said he'd fight the winner if there was demand for it ( Jeffries claims to have lost money in his last match with Monroe ) Most saw Jeffries vs Hart as a mis -match, so the fight never happened.

Had Marvin Hart been black. I guarantee you bad historians of fans not familiar with the times would say Jeffries was using the color line to avoid Hart, who after that fight was viewed as the #1 contender.

 

It was widely known and reported that Jeffries would not be willing to fight Jack Johnson. This is part of the reason why so many fans badly wanted Hart to win. In fact, some people even alleged that the desperation to produce a suitable opponent for Jeffries led to the outrageous decision in the Hart-Johnson fight.

 

Hart won the fight. Johnson didn't do much at all in the final 10 rounds. His own corner begged him to pick up the action, he didn't.

Jeffries came back partly for the money. If there a was a $100,000 Reno like purse for Jeffries to fight Johnson in 1905, who is to say he would not take it? What fighters say often changes once the money is up. That hasn't changed in 110 years.

Johnson himself has many poor results while Jeffries was Champion in the years of 1899-1905

Examples:

1899 KO'd by Klondike
1901 Drew with Jim Scanlan
1901 Ko'd cold by Joe Choynski
1901 Drew with Everett and Stift
1901 Lost a decision to Hank Griffin
1902 Drew with Griffin
1905 struggled with a mediocre Ferguson, winning via DQ
1905 Lost a decision to Marvin Hart
1906 Drew with a mediocre McCormick, who had him hurt in round 5.

My observation, Johnson had little chance of beating Jeffries while Jeffries was an active champion.