Let's talk about James Jeffries

As I said, AP was not always reliable. This is one such example, nobody, but the unnamed AP author reported that Jeffries was knocked down, no other report (in two Butte newspapers and in semi-local Anaconda Standard) confirmed that. As you posted yourself, it is most likely that this Clark Ball was the author of that AP report, used to hype Munroe up as a title contender.

 

You think anyone at all can put out an AP report. I would think it would take a correspondent, but I really don't know.

I quoted Gilbert Odd on Ball. He certainly implied Ball puffed up later reports on this fight, but this article reads as if it came from ringside. How could Ball get a reporter to wire out gross falsehoods in a ringside report?

At this point, I think a claim that this report was written by Ball is pure speculation without any real proof.

I might also wonder why, if Munroe was simply dominated, that Ball jumped from Fitz and Jeffries, the two top fighters in the world, over to Munroe to become his manager. If this report is accurate, that move does make some sense. He saw Munroe as a potential contender or even champion.

 

Okay. I will accept Dempsey was knocked out at once. I merely noted that in his 1959 autobiography, co-written if I remember, by Bob Considine and Bill Corum, he claimed to have gotten up several times and that the fight was stopped when his brother Bernie tossed in the towel. Thus Dempsey risked ringsiders (the fight was 42 years earlier) coming forward to say he was wrong.

Why did Dempsey do it. I think the most likely explanation is that he really thought it went the way he described it. He, after all, had been knocked out. It is certainly possible, if the AP writer is accurate, that Jeff was "going" as they put it and didn't even recall after the fight that he had gone down.

By the way, the AP report was not wrong in the Dempsey-Flynn fight.

 

Yep, that's why I said "except", there was no next-day report that wrote that he was knocked down three times and a towel was thrown. People are often coming up with excuses for shameful events in their life, and sometime they even start to truly believe that the story they thought up is how it really was. Obviously, with Dempsey he was told by his seconds that he was knocked out with one punch, or he could have read it in next-day newspaper, he ought to know what happened in that fight, but later he or somebody else made up a false story of what happened.

 

And the same could be true of Jeffries. Perhaps he came to believe for one reason or another that he had not been knocked down by the unknown Munroe, which was certainly embarressing.

The Associated Press was a national wire service with a national reputation to maintain. I would consider them on the face of it a better source than an obscure mountain newspaper.

I am waiting for the Butte reports to arrive in the mail.

 

Associated Press back then was different than it is now. I recall seeing some articles from the turn of the century where one of national US wire agencies was accused and proven of having been sending false reports (not boxing related, but either financial or political if I recall correctly) on several occasions.

 

Well, you would never see a report like that about the Anaconda Standard nor the Butte Miner as those papers have no national reputation to lose.

Can you give a boxing example of an obviously false AP report, not just one which differs in some details from a local newspaper.

This AP report does not differ in detail at all from the Anaconda Standard except on the issue of whether Jeffries was down. Even the claim that Jeff was in danger of a knockout was reflected in the Standard headline that "HE HAD JEFF GOING."

It does not surprise me as reporters are human that the AP has sent out false reports, but they do have a reputation for honesty and reliablity.

 

I'm not writing them down. The controversy about Joe Gans-Rufe Turner fight (details here) included a wire from the AP, I believe (considering the number of newspapers where that wire was printed).

 

It wouldn't necessarily be true that a story printed in several newspapers must be an AP report. You don't know it is an AP report unless it says so. These newspaper could be part of a chain (like the Hearst papers) and simply share reports.

On the Jeffries fight, the New York Times report did not say it was AP. I admit it might have been, but that is somewhat speculation.

On this fight, obviously some of these stories are inaccurate, but beyond that the rest is total speculation. Certainly observers frequently disagree about who won a fight or how the fight went. I would guess I would go with the majority of opinion, but it would be interesting to critique the majority of opinion in a fight for which film exists.

 

Most newspapers didn't mention who was the author of the wire. But here,


1905-03-28 Arizona Journal-Miner (page 5)
GANS GETS A LICKING
----
By Associated Press.

PHILADELPHIA, March 27.--In a six round bout here tonight Rufe Turner, of California, showed great superiority over Joe Gans, outfighting him at all times.


Just as I suspected. Washington Post often used AP wires, and like I said, if it was printed in so many newspapers, it's most likely the AP.

And this is not just disagreement on who won the fight, this was intentionally made up to hype Rufe Turner. Same as Munroe was hyped after the Jeffries fight. I'm not sure, but I think I once posted here a link to an article in one old Ring magazine, where they discussed the newspaper decisions era. Or did I not?

 

"And this is not just disagreement on who won the fight, this was INTENTIONALLY made up to hype Rufe Turner,"

This is your conclusion, not a fact, at least as far as I can tell.

There is a very great difference between the Turner report and the one on the Munroe fight. The Turner story is an extremely sloppy ringside report from top to bottom, whether he actually missed a knockdown or not or was wrongheaded about the result. I would describe this report as amateurish, even in its longer form.

The Munroe report, on the other hand, could be used as a model of how to construct a fight report. This seems to be the work of a professional who has covered boxing before. Yes, he has details which the Anaconda Standard does not have despite their having written a much longer piece, but are you claiming Munroe did not bleed from the nose because the Anaconda Standard failed to report that?

The Anaconda Standard was a mountain paper way out in Montana. I guess it is possible they had a sports reporter on staff, but I wonder if it was likely. This man may never have covered a fight before and perhaps knew little of boxing. There are several clues in the report, such as his comments on the Jeffries-Fitz sparring, which point in that direction. There were no replays. If he took his eyes off the ring to make notes, he could have missed something. I don't know how close either one was to the ring, but the blood comment does indicate the AP man probably was at ringside.

Bottom line here--each of us will make our own judgement on the facts in the matter, and mine AT THIS POINT is that Jeff may in fact have been hurt and/or knocked down in the second round, but he was clearly the better overall fighter over the course of the fight. I personally am going to withhold final judgement until all the evidence is in and then draw the best conclusion I can.

By the way, the SF public library carries microfilm of 5 SF newspapers from the turn of the last century era. I read them on several important fights, including those of Jeffries. There tended to be gross differences between them more often than not. I would not be surprised that if one did enough digging one could find odd reports from every newspaper of the era.

 

That's not just my opinion, but the opinion of Baltimore American and Washington Times sports editors too. The wording of the report in Phila Inquirer and Boston Journal (same report) is exactly the same, sometimes word for word, as the AP report, obviously both coming from the same author. And the fuller version of the report is extremely biased toward Turner, it is clearly hyping him as a world contender, that not only beat the champ, but is always avoided by everyone else, which was complete bull****, nobody avoided Turner because he was good, nobody just cared to fight him, because he was mediocre and beat nobody of notice.

Anaconda Standard of that time had very good reporting of Montana boxing, I can tell, as I have probably hundreds of sporting pages from it in my archive.

Punch by punch reports were common thing in those days, including a lot of AP reports that were giving similar pieces. Most newspapers, when reporting local events, first gave general impression of the fight, then had a round-by-round report where they described it punch by punch. I have hundreds of like reports from those times. How they did their notes, I've no idea, but it was very common way of reporting.

 

A question about the Jeff-Munroe fight. Do you think Munroe had a bloody nose? If not, why did the AP reporter make that up? It hardly puffed up Munroe. Why did the Anaconda reporter not mention it?

Your argument logically transferring evidence, good or bad, from the Turner-Gans fight to the Jeffries-Munroe fight is fallacious, in my judgement. It just doesn't wash for me. I can accept that AP was not always reliable. It does not follow that they were never reliable.

I would point out one thing about Turner-Gans. Gans was a famous, veteran fighter from Baltimore. He had been well known on the east coast for years. Turner was from California. It is possible that the Baltimore and Washington papers have a bias of their own. That said, I do think the stories backing Gans are much more professional and convincing. That is not true of the Jeff-Munroe fight off what I have been able to read so far.

 

Bloody nose is not very significant. Reporting the world heavyweight champion, who had never been down before (except in sparring with James Corbett many years earlier), dropping to his knees in the fight, was something no reporter would have failed to mention.

 

Unless he didn't see it because people were jumping up in front of him and he didn't have an unobstructed view, etc.

Still, I think this is a reasonable point.

Would this reporter, though, have known the significance of Jeffries never having been down? Was he a boxing writer or even a boxing fan? We don't know.

The AP man seems to have been, as he puts the fight into the context of the history of boxing in Butte.

"First blood" was important enough in those days to be often remarked upon. At the least, this shows that the AP writer was close enough to the ring to notice such things as a slight bleeding from a nostril.