Where do you rate Jack Dempsey and why?

One of the greats and most exciting heavyweight:

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqMi97-U7VI[/ame]

www.youtube.com/eslubin

 

wills v firpo was a big outdoor fight with a big gate, it should have been a springboard for the winner but it turned out to be a toilet chain flush for both careers. very sloppy, mauling clinch fest.

 

Fair enough. How do you see upon the coloured champion before Martin (Childs?) and his possible claim to challenge Jeffries for the title?

 

Childs would have made a fairly respectable challenger, but not as good as the people that Jeffries was actualy fighting.

Incidentaly, at least two newspapers indicate that Jeffries fought and beat Childs.

 

Ray Arcel had him in his top 3.

Ray knew more about boxing than anyone on this board. I'm not saying you have to agree with Arcel but to totally dismiss him would be total folly.

Dempsey's pre-title record is as good as anyone's. His chmapionship years were par for the course during his era.

Was he overrated by the people who grew up watching him? Definitely yes, but then the same can be said for any HW champion ever. Ali is overrated by his generation and Tyson by his. Doesn't make them poor fighters.

 

Please, Arcel is no Pachilles. :bart

 

Dempsey doesn't start heaving his punches at Willard until just before the 3rd knock down, at which point Wilalrd is ready to be hit with anything. Up till then, Dempsey's punching pretty tight.

Dempsey showed notworthy close in punching vs. Firpo, KO's Sharkey with a tight hook, KO's Carpentier with a very tight left hook ending a right heart punch/left hook combination.

 

In years past, I've exhaustively expressed my reasons for my top three and top five ATG HW ratings, so I won't revisit them here. Veteran posters and members already know them.

For more recent arrivals though, my top three (in chronological order) are:

Dempsey, Ali, Holmes

To make it a top five, I add:

Louis, Frazier

Corbett, Jeffries, Tunney, Marciano and Liston generally round out my top ten.

While I largely stopped following boxing with the abolition of the championship distance, but do consider Holyfield the top post Holmes heavyweight, with Tyson second.

Regarding Dempsey, I'm strongly influenced by the combination of expert eyewitness reporting and analysis from his rise to the title, and frame by frame movie film comparisons against his literary descriptions of how he did what he did. When I was a kid, I read Paul Gallico's account of actually stepping into the ring to spar with Jack, and remember being very pissed off years later when airhead college educated infant sports reporters ignorantly eulogized George Plimpton as the creator of participatory sports journalism. (Give me a writer who came up on the streets over somebody with only a degree any day of the week. I actually worked for a newspaper, the largest in my state at the time, where the owner and publisher would automatically disqualify any applicant with a college background. While I believe his bias against academia went a little too far, and do think it's possible for a college graduate to be a competent journalist, the fact does remain that this now deceased publisher's newspaper did achieve the highest circulation in that state. A degree is no substitute for a lack of talent, and sufficient talent renders any lack of college absolutely irrelevant. Dempsey and Tunney were both excellent writers by the way, and Gene did it with three years of formal schooling.)

 

I rate Dempsey as a Cruiser-Weight, cos thats what he was.

H2H at Cruiser -

1. Holyfeild
2. Marciano
3. Mikey Moorer
4. Qawi
5. Haye
6. Dempsey

 

I'd rate him in my all time top 20. The bottom half though. Was devastating against Willard,and a few others,then put the title on ice for three years. Comes back over the hill and rusty. Gets licked by Tunney twice. he was unlucky with the long count,but if he'd kept active it may have been different.

 

that seems fair:good

 

If you win the title from a guy as big as Vitally Klitschko then you are entitled to call yourself a heavyweight.

A cruiserweight is first and foremost sombody who is protected by a weight limit that his oponents may never exceed. There was no such thing as a cruiserweight in Jack Dempseys day. If you weighed more than 175lbs you had to fight as a heavyweight.

 

Dempsey is my number 3, I think he blows away my number 4 ,Louis, in 2 rds.

 

:good I always felt the best heavyweights weigh 180-210, maybe 220 tops. when the cruiserweight division expanded its limit I hoped it would outshine the heavyweights. instead it became a halfway house for enhanced lightheavyweights and natural heavyweights who could not make the grade.

I would put a cap on the heavyweight division anyway. If all heavyweights trained the same way as middlewights (like they used to) there would hardly be any heavyweights over 225 anyway.