Wills Firpo Report States Wills Has No Chance With Dempsey

Not entirely. It was testified in court proceedings.
Chicago Colisuem Club v Dempsey.

The case of Floyd Fitzsimmons was reported in the press. I have no reason to think it didn't occur, since most the same articles are quite anti-Dempsey in these matters concernng Wills. If we throw out all the press, Wills would come off worse than Dempsey. Contenders need the press more than champs do.

Like I said Dempsey wasn't blameless. He took bad advice, and broke contracts himself. But he did sign to fight Wills, and openly demanded monies up front that he never received. He was in the game for the money, obviously.

He wanted that payday. It was a big fight.
No, he probably didn't feel the need to "prove himself the best of the era". He was champion. He wanted to earn some dough.
That's all really.

 

delete

 

That's true.
But he did also end up choosing to fight Tunney instead.

 

And Tunney was the better fighter and greater challenge. Give him some credit for that.

 

Exactly right.
Tunney was almost certainly the tougher fight, and I think plenty of people in the game must have known or suspected that. Wills was an old man.
It's ironic. Dempsey could have taken the Wills fight in 1925 or '26, ducked Tunney, and reigned for longer and it wouldn't have looked nearly as bad to folks who like to assess the legacy or the era.

There's only so much credit I can give Dempsey for getting the beating of his life against Tunney though.

As far as I'm concerned, Dempsey was the best in the world in 1918 and 1919, and after that he was a part-time fighter. He didn't make his first defence of the title until 14 months after his title-winning effort. He didn't fight at all in 1922, or 1924, or 1925.
By 1925, neither he nor Wills were really the best in the world.
But boxing is full of such bull**** "super fights" and so on.

 

A young , prime Tunney proved to be a far too difficult opponent for Dempsey but he was not thought so by the vast majority of the fight crowd including Rickard at the time the initial fight was made .. prior to losing to Sharkey even the 1926 version of Wills was being avoided as too dangerous ..

 

Again, he turned out to be a too difficult fight ... very possibly a tougher match up than a 35 year old WIlls would have been but we'll never know will we ? Tunney was not expected to be that tough a fight .. Good point though about the end result of the ducking ... he ended up fighting a likely tougher opponent stylewise based on the age of all involved and suffered because of it ..

http://books.google.com/books?id=l78DAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA55&dq#v=onepage&q&f=false

 

Entertaining thread.

Burt was a lovely guy but he had tunnel vision on this issue.

Surely this forum could not have been conductive to his health at such an advanced age.

 

He’s still going dear Burt the last I heard.

I hope he’s still going strong. Lovely bloke, great insights and like the rest of us he had his biases. Nothing wrong with that.

 

Yeah ... I got into it with him about Dempsey. I probably should have left it alone.