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Around 1911, within the dark and sweaty confines of a copper mine in Bingham Canyon, Utah, sixteen-year old Jack Dempsey got angry and showed a select audience what the future held for him. The lean and muscled youngster was working quietly on his own when the bully of the crew started throwing dirt at him for a laugh. Dempsey gave his tormentor every chance to desist, but then the bully made his biggest mistake by starting to swing his fists.
Jack began to circle him in the chilling manner that he would circle and snare so many great heavyweights in the years to follow. Fellow miners who had picked up on the commotion began to lay bets as they waited for the first blow to be struck. They didn’t have to wait long. Only one punch was thrown as Dempsey crossed a right to the jaw and knocked his man out.
“Fighting soon followed me into the mining camp,” Jack would later recall. “My powerful fists were my prized assets – my only assets, come to think of it – and no one could take them away from me.”
This was the kind of tough life that Jack Dempsey led, before he even got around to he tough business of prize-fighting in earnest. In the gentler and more accommodating era in which we now live, it is essential that we do not forget the unforgiving, rough-and-tumble canvas on which the fighters of Dempsey’s era had to paint their masterpieces. In ranking the fighters of different eras, most of us are guilty of setting the usual parameters and using the familiar old yardsticks: number of fights, number of wins, championship reign, quality of opposition etc. What we seldom do, in the case of older boxers, is dig beneath the surface and assess the number of ‘life’ fights they had to win before they became actual fighters.
There is nothing misty-eyed or romantic about making such comparisons and highlighting the hardships of boxers from early times. For we are certainly not harking back to the ‘good old days’ when everything in the garden was rosy. Ordinary folk in Dempsey’s era had to work insufferably hard in the hope of breaking even, often travelling huge distances to obtain work. Jack and his family uprooted from the ‘feud country’ of West ******ia and hauled themselves all the way out to Manassa, Colorado, for a new life and a new chance. Many other poor families did likewise. [details]
Jack began to circle him in the chilling manner that he would circle and snare so many great heavyweights in the years to follow. Fellow miners who had picked up on the commotion began to lay bets as they waited for the first blow to be struck. They didn’t have to wait long. Only one punch was thrown as Dempsey crossed a right to the jaw and knocked his man out.
“Fighting soon followed me into the mining camp,” Jack would later recall. “My powerful fists were my prized assets – my only assets, come to think of it – and no one could take them away from me.”
This was the kind of tough life that Jack Dempsey led, before he even got around to he tough business of prize-fighting in earnest. In the gentler and more accommodating era in which we now live, it is essential that we do not forget the unforgiving, rough-and-tumble canvas on which the fighters of Dempsey’s era had to paint their masterpieces. In ranking the fighters of different eras, most of us are guilty of setting the usual parameters and using the familiar old yardsticks: number of fights, number of wins, championship reign, quality of opposition etc. What we seldom do, in the case of older boxers, is dig beneath the surface and assess the number of ‘life’ fights they had to win before they became actual fighters.
There is nothing misty-eyed or romantic about making such comparisons and highlighting the hardships of boxers from early times. For we are certainly not harking back to the ‘good old days’ when everything in the garden was rosy. Ordinary folk in Dempsey’s era had to work insufferably hard in the hope of breaking even, often travelling huge distances to obtain work. Jack and his family uprooted from the ‘feud country’ of West ******ia and hauled themselves all the way out to Manassa, Colorado, for a new life and a new chance. Many other poor families did likewise. [details]
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