Pontius debates Sonny - Jack Dempsey

Ok, I just posted this response on the other thread :

If you accept Dempsey's statement about being afraid of Langford as true, why dismiss his (IMO reasonable) assertion that he fancied his chances against Wills ?

Also, how can we neglect to acknowledge that black fighters being frozen out of the championship was down to a lot more than Dempsey ?

Seriously, Dempsey was some guy who'd been a hobo a few years earlier and its likely he would have fought Wills for the kind of purses he was getting. But he had a manager and a promoter, and there was a lot of finance riding on the booming boxing industry and a fear among some that a mixed-race-match and/or another black champion would sabotage boxing's new-found respectability and commercialism.
THESE ARE HISTORICAL FACTS.

To say that is was Dempsey himself who cheated Wills out of a deserved championship fight is ridiculous.
Fighters weren't running boxing in 1920.

The evidence you offer for Dempsey being scared of black
fighters is circumstantial, and very weak. When you consider all the various factors and the interests and motives of the promoters who wielding the power and owned the commodity of "big time boxing", Dempsey's failure to meet one of the few very good black fighters of the time is NOT an indication of fear of black fighters.

That's not to exonerate Dempsey. He didn't fight Wills and that can be seen as a weakness or a question mark over his dominance of the era, along with his inactivity as champion.
Those are valid criticisms.

Well, Patterson did NOT duck Liston.
Apparently D'amato wanted him to.

I think Dempsey IS called up on not fighting Wills, somebody mentions it pretty much EVERY TIME Dempsey's name comes up.

 

Its Saturday night in the Netherlands. If I lived there, I'd be cruising the redlite district for some action, rather than chatting about Jack Dempsey.

 

I was thinking about this as well, and fair enough. I'd rather ignore statements from fighters themselfs as they tend to say things that suit themselfs.

How is that a fact? No doubt that some people thought that way, but that doesn't mean that that's the sole reason Dempsey didn't fight Wills.

This however is a historical fact: Battling Siki and Tiger Flowers were world champions around the same period and they were black. Langford (black) was fighting plenty of white fighters. Norfolk (black) was fighting plenty of white fighters. Dempsey was booed when he walked out of the ring with a black man. Black men were even awarded decisions over white fighters (see Norfolk vs Miske for instance). These are facts and they show that a black man fighting a white man was no problem. The color line seems more like a convenient excuse and a stronger one than "there is no money", which was used by managers afterwards (Bowe vs Lewis for instance).

Again, i think it has always been a very convenient excuse to hide behind The Evil Manager and blame him. Do you really think Kearns would let his unique, winning goldmine go if Dempsey threatened to leave him? Kearns had the plan to not fight often and maybe Dempsey didn't like that, but obviously he didn't really mind it either. Who else would stay with his manager if he wouldn't let you fight for a full three years? Dempsey held the heavyweight championship of the world, not Kearns.

Fact remains that he never fought a decent black fighter and there were plenty of good ones out there. I think it's more than just circumstancial; all the evidence points in the same direction!

If you don't mind me asking, where do you rate Dempsey? Don't you think that doing nothing for three years as well as ducking the best challenger for 6 years and making half of your title defenses against lightheavyweights puts you at best at the bottom of the top10?

And what did Floyd do? He left D'amato. Who was more than just a promoter: he was his trainer and someone close to him. If Dempsey wanted to fight Wills so bad, why didn't he do this?

Well that's because i have a big mouth.


Seriously though, i've been posting here for more than two years, and rarely if ever did i see it mentioned. Which is remarkable considering he's not only much higher regarded than Patterson but the period of avoiding is much longer too and he never met him.
But ok, this is not really a point of debate but more a sidenote.

 

Yep, picking up some company from the station soon. I'll probably be gone for a few days, so don't think my manager (my mother in law) is making me avoid those colored posters!

 

Score some for me to.

 

Wayne Bethea was in the top 10 rankings by RING in 1958. Liston knocked him out in 1 round.

 

Different standards were applied to the heavyweight chanmpionship of the world.
Keeping the title in America - and before that, keeping the title in the hand's of a white man were seen as a moral imperative to many people, including many of boxing's power brokers.

The Jeffries-Johnson fight, and the experience of Jack Johnson, showed that big nationally-advertised inter-racial heavyweight championship bouts could have significant side effects.
Tex Rickard apparently believed a black heavyweight champion could run the risk of causing boxing to be abolished again or exiled back into the desert.

Many sources relay his attitude on this, and if Rickard believed so then it's reasonable to guess others in similar positions did so too.

Many hardcore boxing fans and writers may have accepted black fighters, and out of principle wanted the best fighters to get their shots, but the HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP OF THE WORLD was a symbolic entity that reached out wider than that.
Boxing was only just beconing mainstream acceptable, and it was booming, these Dempsey fights were enjoying massive coverage.

I've mentioned before the case of Joe Louis. His rise up the rankings provoked a debate whether he should be allowed to contest the title. His managers had to court the press, black and white, and assure them that he was of good character. The spectre of Jack Johnson was beginning to fade, but still hung in there.
Harry Wills however was caught up in the midst of it.
The other thing is, Joe Louis was a far more exciting fighter than Wills. Boxing needed Louis, whereas when Wills was around boxing had the biggest cash cow of all in Dempsey.

Why should Dempsey threaten to leave Kearns ? (Actually he did, eventually in 1925, over money).
Maybe you're imagining some sort of scenario where everyone in the country's mocking Dempsey for not fighting Wills. Actually, for most of Dempsey's reign Wills was considered a very good fighter but not an outstanding threat who was jeopardising Dempsey's championship claim. That may have come later, due to Dempsey's inactivity and Wills' having stuck it out for so many years, and as part of this revisionist/hindsight re-appraisal.

Dempsey was considered a strong champion with no outstanding rival in the early years of his reign, he's not going to consider leaving Kearns.

Boxing just doesn't work like that. Dempsey was being offered purses beyond his wildest dreams to fight Carpentier - a fighter who had caught the public's imagination - so why would he threaten to leave Kearns ?

Dempsey fought a few black fighters.
It's true that none of them were top names.

All the "evidence" points in whatever direction you want to point it towards, it is merely circumstantial.

Show me some contemporary accounts or ANY reliable source that agrees with you on Dempsey being scared of black fighters.

If the evidence is so strong then surely others picked up on it ? Surely some boxing insiders had something to say on it ?

There's no doubt that black fighters were frozen out, and that Dempsey went along with it - to his discredit - but no evidence that the driving force was his fear of them.

I'd put him in the top 5 personally.

Floyd Patterson was in the position of being considered a weakish champion and living in a time and place where the man in the street was aware of the invincible Sonny Liston knocking guys out on national Television.

Dempsey was in an almost opposite position for most of his reign.

Kearns was the same relationship to Dempsey has D'amato to Patterson.

I've never suggested that Dempsey "wanted to fight Wills so bad".
I dont think Dempsey's reputation rides at all on whether he wanted to fight him or not.
The fact is DEMPSEY DID NOT FIGHT WILLS, and it's valid to mark him down for that (though I prefer to judge him on who he DID fight).

 

And liston took one of the worst dives if not the worst ever in the history of boxing.If dempsey or marcaino had done the same,there would be people on here screaming it from the rooftops for ever.

 

Happy new year everyone.

No doubt that people wanted a white heavyweight champion.

But i can guarantee you that public opinion was that they wanted a white middleweight champion too, despite having Siki and Flowers who were black.



Louis may or not have been much more exciting; the key point here is promotion. Wills had little if any. Louis had great managing and promoting that gave him a tremendously quick rise to the top. It's no coincidence that no film is made of Wills in his prime.

I don't imagine the public mocking Dempsey for the Wills figh at all. In fact, back then the public knew **** all. Information wasn't as easily accessible as it is right now at all. A newspaper article described Dempsey as "a relatively unknown fighter" in 1918.

Good point, in fact almost all boxing insiders didn't pick up on Dempsey's record setting avoidance of Wills at all. But boxing insiders are the first to mention Patterson ducking Liston. Why? Dempsey is a frozen-in legend and very few touch or even question that legend. It was long ago.

Don't you think someone who is your top 5 heavyweight of all time should at least show championship behaviour?

 

Happy New Year, Chris Pontius.

Yes, but the efforts made to
prevent the HEAVYWEIGHT champion being another black man were far greater.

You either believe Dempsey himself was running things, or the promoters were. It seems to me as if the promoters and his manager were.
Which is usually the case in boxing.

That's true as well.

Well, I factor all that in when assessing the charge that Dempsey ducked Wills for 6 years.
We acknowledge the differences in the eras, so we shouldn't assume the same standards can be applied exactly.

I mean, Wills was a fighter with a very good record, but one of which most people couldn't really say how good, with no decent management/promotion.
Dempsey probably heard from some people that Wills was the best out there, but there were other opinions too, and knowing someone's the best and considering him the biggest threat are two different things, and it was harder to know and gauge these things. From Dempsey's point of view, similar to many fighters, he was probably aware that lots of fighters "deserved" a shot at his title, and many were not gonna get lucky, with Wills being the most deserving and the most unfortunate. No-one needs to lecture Dempsey on the cut-throat nature of the business.

From what I've read about Wills I can understand why Dempsey would fancy his chances against the big man, and since not many people (in the early part of his reign at least) cared much whether he fought Wills, it's hard to fathom what sort of "ducking" Dempsey was doing.
If the "public knew **** all", I'm guessing Dempsey's knowledge had a few holes too (he fought Gene Tunney after a 3-year break!), and surely couldn't be expected to know how Wills would at least look like the top challenger for the next six years in hindsight.

I make no excuses for Dempsey in later years (1925), but ironically Tunney was probably a far bigger risk, and Wills an aging fighter in need of that deserved big pay day. And that illustrates how and why I cant imagine Dempsey as anything other than a champ who fought whoever he was told to fight by the men who paid him.

Sure, Dempsey had knowledge of the game, but he had no knowledge of the standards and precendents we in the information-age and TV-era are able to judge him by.

The fact that Wills didn't get a shot is a DISGRACE.
The guy was getting screwed out of the title shot because he was black.
That's the bottom line.

Questioning is fine. But whatever answer you come up with shouldn't obscure the point that there are GOOD REASONS why Dempsey is a legend. Those things need to be acknowledged too.

Well, I'm not too hung up on all-time ratings. Lists change like the weather. It's mostly subjective.

As for championship behaviour, at least 3 or 4 of Dempsey's championship fights were very impressive. The way he won the title from Willard was championship behaviour, the way he proved his boxing ability against Gibbons, his resilience against Firpo, even the way he lost to Tunney was fitting of a champion.

The negatives are his inactivity and his not facing the a fighter who was almost certainly the leading contender. Those things can -and must - be considered. But they dont invalidate the positives.

Most of the great heavyweights have flaws and cracks in their "championship behaviour", if you want to interpret career circumstances, imperfect decisions and negative aspects as "behaviour".

If you can name 5 all-time heavyweights who dont have major negatives to consider, then I'd understand why Dempsey must be excluded.

 

John Lester Johnson was atleast among the top 10 black fighters of the time. If you think so highly of black fighters of the time, surely Johnson, who is atleast among the top 10, must have been something good, eh?

 

Butt lover :roll:

 

Maybe, maybe not. How can you be sure that it wasn't an excuse not to risk a fight against Wills? It was already established that Dempsey wanted no part of Langford.

It was a different era, but ducking a challenger is independent of era. I think it's just as inexcuseable in the 70's as it was in the 20's.

Boxers themselfs (and promoters alike) obviously know more than the general public. Especially back then.

That is not the bottom line, that may be the bottom line. We will never know for sure. We do know for sure that Dempsey missed out on the best contender who stayed on top for really long.

Being the heavyweight champion in a period when boxing is very popular and the heavyweight division is so weak that half of the major players are light heavyweights are not that good reasons too me.

Every heavyweight has major negatives. I just think Dempsey has too many to be included in the top5.