The Aspirin Age: When Jack Dempsey Warred with Bill Brennan

I wrote this article on Jack Dempsey and how his vaulting into celebrity status affected him. I think historical articles should be shared for debate, illumination, interpretation, etc.

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In the tenth, Brennan landed a slashing right that left Dempsey partially mutilated. His ear had been nearly shorn off by the blow, the kind of shot that had earned Brennan the nickname “KO” across the years. “Suddenly the whole side of my head was warm with my blood,” Dempsey recalled. “I touched my ear and it felt like it was hanging off. I was afraid that if Bill hit me with a solid punch, or even a glancing one, he might knock the ear off. I was afraid of losing my title, too, losing it in the first real test I had.”

With blood trickling down his neck, and with Brennan possibly leading on the scorecards, Dempsey became desperate and redoubled his fury over the final rounds. A last-second fusillade in the eleventh wobbled Brennan, and when the bell rang to start the twelfth, Dempsey once again exhibited that notorious killer instinct. Dempsey was one of the most devastating inside punchers in heavyweight history and when Brennan stayed close for a microsecond too long, “The Manassa Mauler” struck. “I dug a right into his solar plexus up to my wrist, and when he doubled over I got him on the ribs with a left hook that had everything I owned.”

Brennan collapsed in a heap but managed to rise just after the count of referee Johnny Haukop reached “ten.” Dempsey had salvaged his title.

When it was all over, when Dempsey staggered back to his corner, he resembled a man who had survived the Wellington disaster. His eyes were swollen, his face scraped and bruised, his lip was split, and his ear, mangled, encrusted with gore, flapped with every stutter-step. The white trunks with which he had entered the ring were now as bloody as a rag in an abattoir. And the worst of it? Dempsey knew that he was, at twenty-five, decelerating. “I was experiencing, in that fight, my first real premonition of age,” he wrote. “I felt that I was slowing up.”