As some of you may know I collect Boxing memorabilia and periodically scan Ebay for some classic items. Well I got a massive shock today!! Some of you may know but apparently the Sports Cafe in London bought Jack Dempseys championship winning gloves and displayed them at their branch in Londons West End. This is some blurb I found on them ' In December 2001 Sports Cafe Holdings, then known as Coliseum Group bought The Sports Café Group, a recognized UK brand with the potential to be rolled out across major cities in the UK and franchised internationally, to form the core of a sports entertainment and leisure group. Sports Cafe venues have great appeal for sports enthusiasts, with an array of sports memorabilia, including motor racing bikes, Formula One cars, Jack Dempseys heavyweight championship winning boxing gloves, Mohammed Alis 1996 Olympic torch, and numerous signed shirts and photographsembracing the sporting world, on display.' So I'm in the West End a few weeks ago and I go in to take some pictures of them (everytime I've been in before I've forgotten to take a camera) well to my surprise the gloves and the display they were in was no longer there, just some shitty signed shirts and gloves that could have been bought off E-bay. No-one there knew what had happened to the display so I sloped offf Imagine my surprise whilst trawling ebay today this turned up http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Jack-Dempsey-...ZUK_Sports_Memorabilia_ET?hash=item23045a9d64 This is the exact same display cabinet with the gloves inside!!!! I recognised it immediately I sent a message off to the guy selling it asking if it came from the Sports Cafe, he replied he didn't know and would ask the person he was selling it on behalk of, sounds proper dodgy to me, £500?!?!?! those gloves should be worth thousands if genuine Wondered how they came to be in this guys posession??? I'm so tempted to stump up the readies and take a trip down to East Sussex to collect but am dubious as to how this was acquired Anywho just thought this may interest you Classic boys and any other Dempsey aficionados
I think they're nicked, plus I'd have to go and collect from East Sussex, but it is so tempting, sure they don't know what they have
Nat Fleischer mentioned in "50 Years at Ringside" that a glove of his old friend's stained with Willard's blood was hanging in his office at Ring Magazine. How likely is it that these are the exact same five ounce Sol Levinson gloves used in Toldeo, complete with a hefty dose of Willard's DNA? (Would any of Fleischer's successors at the Ring have possibly been **** headed and ignorant enough to actually sell off artifacts like this?) I'd like to know the provenance of this equipment.
Those gloves are being undersold by approx £21.000 If they are the genuine ones they are a steal , if not you are gonna win a great deal in court for fraudulent sales... either way its a great buy for £500..
They might have been the same ones that were displayed at The Sports Cafe, but what evidence was there that these were really the gloves Dempsey beat Willard with ?
