Harry Greb Best Man For Carpentier Bout, Says Edgren

Rickard more than made his money back on the $100,000 investment into Boyles Thirty Acres. You might factor in its cost for just this one fight but Rickard staged fights there for the next several years and most made a lot of money. However, if the point is that the cost to stage a fight between Dempsey and Greb was prohibitive the argument doesn't hold up because according to the articles in the link above several promoters had already calculated the cost, the first thing a promoter does, and then floated offers. The idea of a guy not being a big draw didn't stop Dempsey from fighting Tommy Gibbons and that fight only drew a gate of $55,000.

 

It's sad that Dempsey was afraid of one man because he was too Black and another because he was too skilled. Damn shame they didn't have therapists back in the day.

 

Lighten up. It's a f*cking joke. Some of you people (present company excepted) speak as tho you matter.

 

Forgive me if I misjudged but it goes in line with your general argument.

Rickard may not have offered Dempsey a fight with Greb, I don't know. But several other promoters did. Dempsey didn't only fight for Rickard, not before he was champion and not after. He fought for Floyd Fitzsimmons and Mike Collins as well. Ive seen a lot of people try to pretend that Dempsey wasn't his own man but when he didn't like the way Kearns managed him he fired him and when he wanted to fight for a different promoter he did. Its easy to hide behind the argument that fighters don't make fights but in reality if Dempsey really truly wanted to face either Greb or Wills he could have told Rickard "get me those fights" and they would have been made.

Aside from Rickard, that other post I referenced previously listed nearly a dozen different offers over a period of 7 years. You should really read those articles. They are interesting.

Floyd Fitzsimmons had two separate offers one in 1920 and one in 1925. Was Floyd Fitzsimmons a wanna be? If so why did Dempsey defend against Billy Miske in 1920 for Fitzsimmons?

Mike Collins was respected regional promoter yet Dempsey was willing to fight for him.

Those articles list offers from Fitzsimmons (twice), Charles Murray, T.S. Andrews, Frank Mulkern, John J. Bell, Tom Bodkin, among others who were all big name promoters at the time and several of whom had already promoted Dempsey fights. I don't see how anyone can say they were wanna bes.

I think its you who should read up on the Shelby fiasco. Mike Collins had been around promoting in the upper Midwest for years, since before Dempsey ever tried on a boxing glove in fact. He was not an amateur. He was one of the most successful boxing promoters and managers at the time and founded the magazine Boxing Blade. His promotion of Dempsey-Gibbons was actually going fine until Jack Kearns and Jack Dempsey began publicly waffling on whether or not they would go through with the fight. When they had what should have been a private contract negotiation conducted publicly through the press it caused a panic on those people who had bought special train tickets from out of town. This caused a massive cancellation of reservations and orders which killed the promotion. Remember, this was before the internet and before credit cards. Orders weren't prepaid. Reservations were made in advance and paid in person. Those reservations totaled more than half a million dollars one month before the fight. So the promotion was sound. The only mistake the promoters made was guaranteeing Dempsey all of his $300,000 up front before the time of the fight. That was their mistake to be sure but for a fight of that importance it was unheard of. Had Dempsey and Kearns not tried to hold up the promoters for the advance amount publicly through the newspapers and just waited to take their cut from the receipts they would have made more money and the promotion would have been successful. They were greedy though and as a result they literally took their money and ran while Shelby went bankrupt, Gibbons did not get paid, the referee was paid half of what he was promised, and Mike Collins lost money.

Nevertheless the point is that Dempsey was wasn't bound to Tex Rickard and he wasn't afraid to utilize "local" promoters if it suited him and still made money. Several of those offers made to him for a fight with Greb featured guarantees as well, so Dempsey would have made his money in that situation whether the people showed up or not. A percentage was added as a sweetener and given the much closer proximity to metropolitan areas for a fight in somewhere like Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, or even Buffalo one could expect a much larger and easier turnout than that which was seen in Shelby, meaning even more money for Dempsey.

 

If you admit that he wasn't owned by Tex and that he was willing, ready, and able to fight for the same promoters you just bashed as being too small time in your previous post then you all of your other points are pointless and you cant really hide behind the argument that he couldn't fight for those same promoters against Greb for any of the half dozen reasons you and Perry have trotted out, retreated from, and then rehashed when it suits you.

 

Staging a world heavyweight championship bout in Shelby, Montana was a harebrained idea, plain and simple. Shelby is a small town located in the middle of nowhere in a state with a massive land area and a population of only about 500,000. Also keep in mind that Montana took a huge hit economically during the 1920s and 1930s, especially in the agricultural areas of the state.

When the bout between Jack Dempsey and Tommy Gibbons took place in Shelby during 1923, the success of the promotion was very dependent on the gate receipts generated through ticket sales. As a result, the promotion had to draw a huge number of people who lived hundreds or even thousands of miles from Shelby. Think of the massive logistics involved or how many things that had to go right to have a financially successful major boxing promotion in Shelby under such circumstances. In the United States, major boxing promotions were staged in or near large population centers.

Mike Collins may have been involved in the promotion of the Dempsey-Gibbons bout, but I wonder how much input he really had. It seemed that people connected with American Legion Posts in Montana were more instrumental in getting the bout staged. Such people had some experience in staging local American Legion boxing shows, but on an extremely small scale. A crowd of two to three thousand people or a gate of $5,000. would have been considered terrific in bigger cities in Montana at the time. The American Legion people simply were over their heads staging a massive promotion in Shelby.

The Montana boxing people had connections with their counterparts in Minnesota at the time. As a result, there were a fair number of Minnesota boxers who fought in Montana during the 1920s.

I myself am a native of Great Falls, Montana. In preparation for his bout with Gibbons, Dempsey trained in a camp located short distance from the city.

You can point to having successful major promotions in the bout between Jack Johnson and Jim Jeffries in Reno, Nevada during 1910 and in the first bout between Joe Gans and Battling Nelson in Goldfield, Nevada during 1906. But Tex Rickard staged both promotions and seemed to have enough money to pay the fighters' purses well before the bouts took place. In the case of staging such a promotion in Reno, it was "Plan B" on the part of Rickard when the Governor of California prevented the Johnson-Jeffries bout from taking place in the San Francisco, California. Moreover, the Johnson-Jeffries bout was by far the biggest boxing promotion that took place before World War I in terms of its gate receipts, motion picture rights revenue and the media coverage.

- Chuck Johnston

 

Was it anymore hairbrained than staging a heavyweight title fight in C****n City Nevada in 1897 or Reno in 1910 or even the Gans-Nelson fight in Goldfield? That was an era that was very much beholdin to the idea of "if you build it they will come." Sometimes it worked out and sometimes it didn't.

The Shelby fight was actually selling well and on track to make a profit before Kearns and Dempsey went to the press threatening to call off the fight. So it wasn't the promotion that was a bad idea it was the wild notion that they would pay Dempsey $300,000 up front before he even worked off one second of that payday. He could have easily broken a wrist in training and literally killed the entire fight. That was the mistake. But that was only partially down to the naiveté of Collins and his associates, Kearns has to shoulder some blame there for making one sided demands or refusing to allow his champion to fight and Dempsey. When you didn't meet Dempsey or Kearns' demands he didn't fight in order to drive up demand. While some might chalk that up to just business I cant help but hold that against Dempsey, Kearns, and others just like them who have come and gone since. I see nothing honorable about that.

 

This may all be true but you were initially arguing logistics. The logistics for those fights didn't change because Rickard had purse money for those fights.

Kearns would have gotten paid the full amount had he not taken his grievance public. They had already made $200,000, his second largest purse and double the size of his third largest purse. Its not like Dempsey made nothing to begin with. To put that into perspective the average annual income in 1923 was $1,300. The average life expectancy in 1923 for a male was 56 years. So before even stepping into the ring for that one fight Jack Dempsey made by far more than average American male would make in his entire lifetime if he started working the instant he was pulled from the womb and never retired. After the fight he collected another $55,000 which would take the average American male 42 years to acquire.

The entire point of my post detailing Dempsey-Gibbons was that Dempsey was willing to fight for promoters other than Rickard when it suited him therefore the excuse ventured that no promoter was adept enough to promote a fight with Harry Greb just doesn't add up.

In addition to that the promoters who were willing to stage a Greb fight were doing so in much more metropolitan areas so the logistics argument doesn't hold up either. That argument can actually turned on its head to say that Dempsey was willing to take a chance, sign to fight a fighter who didn't have the marquee power of Greb, in a location that was chancy at best, for promoters who weren't as adept as Rickard, and for a purse that wasn't on solid footing. With all of those risks Dempsey still signed.

 

In regards to the size of Jack Dempsey's purses, the goalposts were moved dramatically because of Dempsey's bout with Georges Carpentier. Yes, Dempsey received a record guarantee of $300,000. for the bout, but without any option to receive a percentage of the gate. Dempsey's manager, Jack Kearns, undoubtedly was kicking himself because the gate receipts for the fight were about 1.7 or 1.8 million dollars.

If Dempsey had a option of getting 37.5 percent (the standard percentage for a world champion in Tex Rickard's championship bouts during the 1920s), his purse would have been over $600,000. But with Carpentier being such a big gate attraction, Kearns and Dempsey may have been willing to settle for 30% instead. Under such circumstances, Dempsey would have received about $500,000. In other words, Kearns' demand for a guaranteed purse of $300,000. for Dempsey to fight Gibbons wasn't absolutely outrageous at the time.

- Chuck Johnston