Why Does Jack Johnson Get a Pass on Opposition while Marciano Does Not?

[Dempsey-Louis]

But since you wanted it, here you go. An entire article of the second round punch, quoting many people about it nearly putting Dempsey down.

Here is what actually happened, and why it became legendary when it was really just dismissive; the second round punch was never what EVERYONE purported it to be.

There was no big moment; the press needed one so they invented one; that's why it was easy for you to find an article to post.

This article will help explain why so many of the quotes everyone posts I hold to be meaningless; Mencken can make the argument so much better than me.

_________________________________________________

How Legends Are Made
H.L. Mencken

Baltimore Evening Sun/July 5, 1921

I

The late herculean combat between Prof. Dempsey and Mons. Carpentier, in addition to all its other usufructs, also had some lessons in it for the psychologist—that is, if any psychologist can be found who is not an idiot. One was a lesson in the ways and means whereby legends are made, that man may be kept misinformed and happy on this earth, and hence not too willing to go to hell. I allude specifically to a legend already in full credit throughout the length and breadth of Christendom, to wit, the legend that Mons. Carpentier gave Prof. Dempsey some fearful wallops in the second round of their joust, and came within a micromillimeter of knocking him out. Loving the truth for its own sake, I now tell it simply and hopelessly. No such wallops were actually delivered. Prof. Dempsey was never in any more danger of being knocked out than I was, sitting there in the stand, between the Hon. Henry Morrow Hyde and some anonymous Frenchman, with a very pretty gal just behind me and five or six just in front.

In brief, the whole story is apocryphal, bogus, hollow and null, imbecile, devoid of substance. The gallant Frog himself, an honest as well as a reckless man, has testified clearly that, by the time he came to the second round, he was already substantially done for, and hence quite incapable of doing any execution upon so solid an aurochs as the Hon. Mr. Dempsey. His true finish came, in fact, in the first round, when Dr. Dempsey, after one of M. Carpentier’s flashy rights, feinted to his head, caused him to duck, and then delivered a devastating depth-bomb upon the back of his neck. This blow, says M. Carpentier, produced a general agglutination of his blood corpuscles, telescoped his vertebrae, and left him palsied and on the verge of Cheyne-Stokes breathing. To say that any pug unaided by supernatural assistance, after such a colossal shock, could hit von Dempsey hard enough to hurt him is to say that a Sunday-school superintendent could throw a hippopotamus. Nevertheless, there stands the legend, and Christendom believes it as firmly as it believes that Jonah swallowed the whale. It has been printed multitudinously. It has been cabled to all the four quarters of the earth. It enters into the intellectual heritage of the human race. How is it to be accounted for? What was the process of its genesis?

II

Having no belief in simple answers to the great problems of being and becoming, I attempt a somewhat complex one. It may be conveniently boiled down to the following propositions:

(a) The sympathies of perhaps a majority of the intelligentsia present were with M. Carpenter, because (1) he was matched with a man plainly his superior, (2) he had come a long way to fight, (3) he was the challenger, (4) he was an ex-soldier, whereas his opponent had ducked the draft.

(b) He was (1) a Frenchman, and hence a beneficiary of the romantic air which hangs about all things French, particularly to Americans who question the constitutionality of prohibition and the Mann act; he was (2) of a certain modest social pretension, and hence palpably above Professor Dempsey, a low-brow.

(c) He was polite to newspaper reporters, the surest means to favorable public notice in America, whereas the oaf, Dempsey, was too much afraid of them to court them.

(d) He was a handsome fellow, and made love to all the sob-sisters.

(e) His style of fighting was open and graceful, and grounded itself upon active footwork and swinging blows that made a smack when they landed, and so struck the inexperienced as deft and effective.

All these advantages resided within M. de Carpentier himself. Now for a few lying outside him:

(a) The sporting reporters, despite their experience, often succumb to (e) above. That is, they constantly overestimate the force and effect of spectacular blows, and as constantly underestimate the force and effect of short, close and apparently unplanned blows.

(b) They are all in favor of prizefighting as a sport, and seek to make it appear fair, highly technical and romantic: hence their subconscious prejudice is against a capital fight that is one-sided and without dramatic moments.

(c) They are fond, like all the rest of us, of airing their technical knowledge, and so try to gild their reports with accounts of mysterious transactions that the boobery looked at but did not see.

(d) After they have predicted confidentially that a given pug will give a good account of himself, they have to save their faces by describing him as doing it.

(e) They are, like all other human beings, sheep-like, and docilely accept any nonsense that is launched by a man who knows how to impress them.

III

I could fish up other elements out of the hocus-pocus, but here are enough. Boiled down, the thing simply amounts to this: that Professor Carpentier practiced a style of fighting that was more spectacular and attractive than M. Dempsey’s, both to the laiety present and to the experts; that he was much more popular than M. Dempsey, at least among the literati and the nobility and gentry; and that, in the face of his depressing defeat, all his partisans grasped eagerly at the apparent recovery he made in the second round—when, by his own confession, he was already quite out of it—and converted that apparent recovery into an onslaught which came within an ace of turning the tide for him.

But why did all the reporters and spectators agree upon the same fiction? The answer is easily given: all of them did not agree upon it. Fully a half of them knew nothing about it when they left the stand; it was not until the next day that they began to help it along. As for those who fell upon it at once, they did so for the simple reason that the second round presented the only practicable opportunity for arguing that M. Carpentier was in the fight at all, save perhaps as an unfortunate spectator. If they didn’t say that he had come near knocking out Dr. Dempsey in that round, they couldn’t say it at all. So they said it—and now every human being on this favorite planet of Heaven believes it, from remote missionaries on the Upper Amazon to lonely Socialists in the catacombs of Leavenworth, and from the Hon. Warren Gamaliel Harding on his alabaster throne to the meanest Slovak in the bowels of the earth. I sweat and groan on this hot night to tell you the truth, but you will not believe me. The preponderance of evidence is against me. In six more days I’ll be with you, rid of my indigestible facts and stuffed with the bosh that soothes and nourishes man . . . Aye, why wait six days? Tomorrow I’ll kiss the book, and purge my conscience.

IV

Meanwhile, I take advantage of my hours of grace to state the ribald and immoral truth in plain terms, that an occasional misanthrope may be rejoiced. Mons. Carpentier never for a single instant showed the slightest chance of knocking out the eminent Dempsey. His fighting was prettier than Dempsey’s; his blows swung from the shoulder; he moved about gracefully; when he struck the spot he aimed at (which was very seldom), it was with a jaunty and charming air. But he was half-paralyzed by that clout on the posterior neck in the first round, and thereafter his wallops were no more dangerous to Dempsey than so many cracks with a bag stuffed with liberty cabbage. When, in the second round, he rushed in and delivered the two or three blows to the jaw that are alleged to have shaken up the ex-non-conscript, he got in exchange for them so rapid and so powerful a series of knocks that he came out of the round a solid mass of bruises from the latitude of McBurney’s point to the bulge of the frontal escarpment.

Nor did Dempsey, as they say, knock him out finally with a right to the jaw, or with a left to the jaw, or with any single blow to any other place. Dempsey knocked him out by beating him steadily and fearfully, chiefly with short-arm jabs—to the jaw, to the nose, to the eyes, to the neck front and back, to the ears, to the arms, to the ribs, to the kishgish. His collapse was gradual. He died by inches. In the end he simply dropped in his tracks, and was unable to get up again—perhaps the most scientifically and thoroughly beaten a man that ever fought in a championship mill. It was, to my taste, almost the ideal fight. There was absolutely no chance to talk of an accidental blow, or of a foul. Carpentier fought bravely, and for the first minute or two, brilliantly. But after that he went steadily downhill, and there was never a moment when the result was in doubt. The spectators applauded the swinging blows and the agile footwork, but it was the relentless pummeling that won the fight.

Such are the facts. I apologize for the Babylonian indecency of printing them.

[travestyny]

Here is what actually happened, and why it became legendary when it was really just dismissive; the second round punch was never what EVERYONE purported it to be.

There was no big moment; the press needed one so they invented one; that's why it was easy for you to find an article to post.

This article will help explain why so many of the quotes everyone posts I hold to be meaningless; Mencken can make the argument so much better than me.

_________________________________________________

How Legends Are Made
H.L. Mencken

Baltimore Evening Sun/July 5, 1921

I

The late herculean combat between Prof. Dempsey and Mons. Carpentier, in addition to all its other usufructs, also had some lessons in it for the psychologist—that is, if any psychologist can be found who is not an idiot. One was a lesson in the ways and means whereby legends are made, that man may be kept misinformed and happy on this earth, and hence not too willing to go to hell. I allude specifically to a legend already in full credit throughout the length and breadth of Christendom, to wit, the legend that Mons. Carpentier gave Prof. Dempsey some fearful wallops in the second round of their joust, and came within a micromillimeter of knocking him out. Loving the truth for its own sake, I now tell it simply and hopelessly. No such wallops were actually delivered. Prof. Dempsey was never in any more danger of being knocked out than I was, sitting there in the stand, between the Hon. Henry Morrow Hyde and some anonymous Frenchman, with a very pretty gal just behind me and five or six just in front.

In brief, the whole story is apocryphal, bogus, hollow and null, imbecile, devoid of substance. The gallant Frog himself, an honest as well as a reckless man, has testified clearly that, by the time he came to the second round, he was already substantially done for, and hence quite incapable of doing any execution upon so solid an aurochs as the Hon. Mr. Dempsey. His true finish came, in fact, in the first round, when Dr. Dempsey, after one of M. Carpentier’s flashy rights, feinted to his head, caused him to duck, and then delivered a devastating depth-bomb upon the back of his neck. This blow, says M. Carpentier, produced a general agglutination of his blood corpuscles, telescoped his vertebrae, and left him palsied and on the verge of Cheyne-Stokes breathing. To say that any pug unaided by supernatural assistance, after such a colossal shock, could hit von Dempsey hard enough to hurt him is to say that a Sunday-school superintendent could throw a hippopotamus. Nevertheless, there stands the legend, and Christendom believes it as firmly as it believes that Jonah swallowed the whale. It has been printed multitudinously. It has been cabled to all the four quarters of the earth. It enters into the intellectual heritage of the human race. How is it to be accounted for? What was the process of its genesis?

II

Having no belief in simple answers to the great problems of being and becoming, I attempt a somewhat complex one. It may be conveniently boiled down to the following propositions:

(a) The sympathies of perhaps a majority of the intelligentsia present were with M. Carpenter, because (1) he was matched with a man plainly his superior, (2) he had come a long way to fight, (3) he was the challenger, (4) he was an ex-soldier, whereas his opponent had ducked the draft.

(b) He was (1) a Frenchman, and hence a beneficiary of the romantic air which hangs about all things French, particularly to Americans who question the constitutionality of prohibition and the Mann act; he was (2) of a certain modest social pretension, and hence palpably above Professor Dempsey, a low-brow.

(c) He was polite to newspaper reporters, the surest means to favorable public notice in America, whereas the oaf, Dempsey, was too much afraid of them to court them.

(d) He was a handsome fellow, and made love to all the sob-sisters.

(e) His style of fighting was open and graceful, and grounded itself upon active footwork and swinging blows that made a smack when they landed, and so struck the inexperienced as deft and effective.

All these advantages resided within M. de Carpentier himself. Now for a few lying outside him:

(a) The sporting reporters, despite their experience, often succumb to (e) above. That is, they constantly overestimate the force and effect of spectacular blows, and as constantly underestimate the force and effect of short, close and apparently unplanned blows.

(b) They are all in favor of prizefighting as a sport, and seek to make it appear fair, highly technical and romantic: hence their subconscious prejudice is against a capital fight that is one-sided and without dramatic moments.

(c) They are fond, like all the rest of us, of airing their technical knowledge, and so try to gild their reports with accounts of mysterious transactions that the boobery looked at but did not see.

(d) After they have predicted confidentially that a given pug will give a good account of himself, they have to save their faces by describing him as doing it.

(e) They are, like all other human beings, sheep-like, and docilely accept any nonsense that is launched by a man who knows how to impress them.

III

I could fish up other elements out of the hocus-pocus, but here are enough. Boiled down, the thing simply amounts to this: that Professor Carpentier practiced a style of fighting that was more spectacular and attractive than M. Dempsey’s, both to the laiety present and to the experts; that he was much more popular than M. Dempsey, at least among the literati and the nobility and gentry; and that, in the face of his depressing defeat, all his partisans grasped eagerly at the apparent recovery he made in the second round—when, by his own confession, he was already quite out of it—and converted that apparent recovery into an onslaught which came within an ace of turning the tide for him.

But why did all the reporters and spectators agree upon the same fiction? The answer is easily given: all of them did not agree upon it. Fully a half of them knew nothing about it when they left the stand; it was not until the next day that they began to help it along. As for those who fell upon it at once, they did so for the simple reason that the second round presented the only practicable opportunity for arguing that M. Carpentier was in the fight at all, save perhaps as an unfortunate spectator. If they didn’t say that he had come near knocking out Dr. Dempsey in that round, they couldn’t say it at all. So they said it—and now every human being on this favorite planet of Heaven believes it, from remote missionaries on the Upper Amazon to lonely Socialists in the catacombs of Leavenworth, and from the Hon. Warren Gamaliel Harding on his alabaster throne to the meanest Slovak in the bowels of the earth. I sweat and groan on this hot night to tell you the truth, but you will not believe me. The preponderance of evidence is against me. In six more days I’ll be with you, rid of my indigestible facts and stuffed with the bosh that soothes and nourishes man . . . Aye, why wait six days? Tomorrow I’ll kiss the book, and purge my conscience.

IV

Meanwhile, I take advantage of my hours of grace to state the ribald and immoral truth in plain terms, that an occasional misanthrope may be rejoiced. Mons. Carpentier never for a single instant showed the slightest chance of knocking out the eminent Dempsey. His fighting was prettier than Dempsey’s; his blows swung from the shoulder; he moved about gracefully; when he struck the spot he aimed at (which was very seldom), it was with a jaunty and charming air. But he was half-paralyzed by that clout on the posterior neck in the first round, and thereafter his wallops were no more dangerous to Dempsey than so many cracks with a bag stuffed with liberty cabbage. When, in the second round, he rushed in and delivered the two or three blows to the jaw that are alleged to have shaken up the ex-non-conscript, he got in exchange for them so rapid and so powerful a series of knocks that he came out of the round a solid mass of bruises from the latitude of McBurney’s point to the bulge of the frontal escarpment.

Nor did Dempsey, as they say, knock him out finally with a right to the jaw, or with a left to the jaw, or with any single blow to any other place. Dempsey knocked him out by beating him steadily and fearfully, chiefly with short-arm jabs—to the jaw, to the nose, to the eyes, to the neck front and back, to the ears, to the arms, to the ribs, to the kishgish. His collapse was gradual. He died by inches. In the end he simply dropped in his tracks, and was unable to get up again—perhaps the most scientifically and thoroughly beaten a man that ever fought in a championship mill. It was, to my taste, almost the ideal fight. There was absolutely no chance to talk of an accidental blow, or of a foul. Carpentier fought bravely, and for the first minute or two, brilliantly. But after that he went steadily downhill, and there was never a moment when the result was in doubt. The spectators applauded the swinging blows and the agile footwork, but it was the relentless pummeling that won the fight.

Such are the facts. I apologize for the Babylonian indecency of printing them.

Haven’t looked at this yet, and I will, but this is all much ado about absolutely nothing. It’s just Mojo trying to prove that the source I gave is against Dempsey based upon anything he can fish out. He already failed twice before bringing this up.

There was a punch, some felt it did some damage, some I guess thought it didnt. Why has the discussion here deteriorated to the point that we are discussing a single punch? It’s ridiculous.

If everything you posted is about that punch, then it’s clear why the source may have mentioned it. Doesn’t mean it’s dumping on Dempsey.

Ok just read it...

Here’s a thought. Maybe some people felt it almost knocked him down. Who really cares? Lol. This is all rather silly. Now I’ve seen two full pages of writing on a single punch!!!

[Dempsey-Louis]

Don't know why I posted that twice sorry - couldn't find the delete button. LOL

[Dempsey-Louis]

Here’s a thought. Maybe some people felt it almost knocked him down. Who really cares? Lol. This is all rather silly. Now I’ve seen two full pages of writing on a single punch!!!

What it is really about is Mencken ragging on his colleagues, he did that often; this one just happens to be about sports writers.

[travestyny]

What it is really about is Mencken ragging on his colleagues, he did that often; this one just happens to be about sports writers.

LOl. I don’t think I ever want to read about that punch again!

I would compare it to the Pacquiao punch in the 4th round against Mayweather. Some thought May was in serious trouble, some thought it was nothing. The crowd went wild.

In the end I thought it was much ado about nothing. Depends on who you ask. I hope we don’t get theses about it, that’s for sure! Lol

[Mr.MojoRisin']

You moron. I posted the entire article for you to see. The lines that I pulled out was to give a synapsis of what they said. It commented on the fight up until round 8 and then the remaining rounds.

If you had a brain, you would have been able to figure that out for yourself.

How does that crow taste?

Still spouting the usual drivel I see? Looks like I really rattled you here!

[Mr.MojoRisin']

I just gave you quotations of people who were there saying the same exact thing as was in the article that you are busy railing against.

You're trying much too hard and you keep coming up short. Here's a news flash: You aren't an authority on Dempsey.


Learn to accept your mistakes and move on with your life. Oh...and since I proved that quotation was legit, tell us how you think Dempsey is a racist now. Thanks

Just answer this. Do you think that whatever the newspaper people say or what someone says in a book or in general about a fight automatically trumps what the film shows?

Because you're essentially saying "I don't care what the film shows I have people saying otherwise".

[Mr.MojoRisin']

This aside about Carpentier-Dempsey has unequivocally proven that this guy can pull sources out of thin air that will say whatever they want even if it's blatantly false. That calls everything else he's posted into question.

[travestyny]

Still spouting the usual drivel I see? Looks like I really rattled you here!

Once again, keep dreaming. What it should look like is that you've annoyed me by me having to prove you wrong over and over again. It's boring now.

[travestyny]

Just answer this. Do you think that whatever the newspaper people say or what someone says in a book or in general about a fight automatically trumps what the film shows?

Because you're essentially saying "I don't care what the film shows I have people saying otherwise".

You are completely missing the point.

You're railing on the author because he said precisely what many people have said, those at the fight and those who have watched the film. So do you have any point at all?

You claimed it was an outright lie that Brennan could have been up going into the last round because your ONE (yes, you kept posting the same one) newspaper article said he only won two rounds, and then we find the New York Times aligned with what the article said by saying Brennan was slightly ahead after 7 and then split the next 4 rounds.

You claimed Miske was not retired and then we find a source that says he did indeed retire.

You claimed it was a flat out lie that Carpentier came close to dropping Dempsey and then we find many other people at the fight saying the same thing.

You also claimed that a statement I found from Dempsey was a flat out forgery and then we find the source of it was the New York Times in 1926, with 2 replies to it in 1926 by Wills Manager, and then by Dempsey.

Haven't you had enough. Let it go.