You’ll often see the 1920s referred to as the “golden age of sports.” There are a couple reasons for this, but a big part of it is slate of huge stars that emerged in this decade.
Baseball had Babe Ruth. Football had “Red” Grange. Golf had Bobby Jones. And boxing? Well, obviously it had Jack Dempsey, “The Manassa Mauler,” whose heavyweight title run lifted the sport to new heights at the box office and beyond.
For a long time, the “million-dollar gate” — that is to say, a boxing match (or any live entertainment) that brought in $1 million or more in ticket sales — was considered to be boxing’s four-minute mile. No one had ever broken that barrier, or even really come all that close. Then Dempsey did it. Then he did it four more times after that. That’s how big a star Dempsey was during the roaring ‘20s.
But just because he was a star didn’t mean he was universally loved. As the writer Paul Gallico once put it, while Dempsey ended his career as “the most popular prizefighter that ever lived,” for years before that he was “one of the most unpopular and despised champions that ever climbed into a ring.”
What finally brought the public all the way around wasn’t his many victories. Instead it was two specific defeats, both of which came at the hands of Gene Tunney, “The Fighting Marine.” The second of their two fights drew a reported crowd of just over 104,000 to Chicago’s Soldier Field in 1927, resulting in boxing’s first $2 million gate ($2,658,660 to be exact, equivalent to about $48.5 million in today’s money).
It was the biggest boxing match the world had ever seen. It would end in one of the sport’s greatest controversies, enshrined forever in boxing lore as “the long count fight.” It was also the perfect controversy for the age of newsreels and stylish gangsters, mass media and decadent wealth, savagery and civilization.
If you sat down with a team of talented screenwriters and tried to come up with the perfect antagonist for a champion like Dempsey, you probably couldn’t do much better than James Joseph Tunney.
Dempsey was often described by sportswriters of the time as “swarthy” and scarred, a man whose small, mean eyes and dented nose made it easy to believe he’d come up as a mining camp brawler, riding the rails the rough-and-tumble American west and spilling blood all along the way.
Tunney, meanwhile, was handsome and well-spoken. He married a wealthy socialite and lectured on Shakespeare at Yale. While Dempsey made his reputation as a ferocious brawler, Tunney was the thinking man’s fighter, preferring to focus on avoiding knockouts rather than delivering them.
One of their most glaring differences was in their respective military records. Dempsey spent much of his career battling claims that he’d been a “slacker” during World War I, meaning he’d intentionally avoided military service. He always denied this, and the accusation seemed ungenerous at best, but it was enough justification for those who’d already resolved to hate him for one reason or another.
Tunney, meanwhile, had enlisted in the Marines and served in France. He became the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) boxing champion, a title he jokingly said he pursued primarily to “avoid guard duty.”
For the vast majority of his career, Tunney was an undercard fighter. A slick technician and defensive ace, he wasn’t known for delivering knockouts or even pursuing them all that eagerly. He never denied this, and when writing about his fights with Dempsey, he reflected on their differences in style and temperament with a coldly analytical approach.
“They said I lacked the killer instinct — which was also true,” Tunney wrote. “I found no joy in knocking people unconscious or battering their faces. The lust for battle and massacre was missing. I had a notion that the killer instinct was really founded in fear, that the killer of the ring raged with ruthless brutality because deep down he was afraid.”
Still, Tunney had his pride. He sometimes noted that, as much as people praised Dempsey’s wild aggression, he’d had to settle for a decision win over Tommy Gibbons, while Tunney had knocked him out. All told, he won 48 of his 85 pro fights via knockout. Officially, he lost just one fight — a decision to “The Smoke City Wildcat” Harry Greb — though Tunney was the rare fighter to willingly tell people that he’d also lost another bout not on his record, also via decision, during his time in military service.
It wasn’t until he had over 60 pro fights to his credit that Tunney began to gain traction as a serious heavyweight contender. He got his revenge (more than once) against Greb. He knocked out Georges Carpentier, who’d challenged Dempsey for the title in boxing’s first million-dollar gate fight.
Tunney climbed the ranks gradually, at times on the undercard of events headlined by Dempsey. He used this opportunity to study the champion, and while studying he became only more convinced that “a good boxer can always lick a good fighter.” All he needed was the chance to prove it.
He got his first chance in September 1926, though few people expected it to be a very good chance. Dempsey hadn’t fought in three years — not since his furious brawl with Luis Angel Firpo, in which Dempsey was famously knocked out of the ring in an iconic moment captured by painter George Bellows. Dempsey had charged back to win via yet another knockout, and now he entered his first fight with Tunney as a heavy betting favorite.
Those around Dempsey felt certain of the outcome. That certainty only grew when they read an Associated Press story about Tunney’s training camp, where it was said he occupied himself in between training sessions by reading the Samuel Butler novel “The Way Of All Flesh.”
“Hitherto, as just another prizefighter, my personal and training camp habits had been of little news interest, and nobody had bothered to find out whether I read books or not,” Tunney wrote later. “Now, as the challenger for the heavyweight title, I was in a glare of publicity, and the disclosure that I read books, literature, and Shakespeare, was a headline. The exquisite twist was when one of Dempsey’s principal camp followers saw the newspaper story. He hurried to Jack with a roar of mirth. ‘It’s in the bag, Champ. The so-and-so is up there reading a book!’”
This eventually became a kind of running joke, which made Tunney, by his own admission “angry and resentful.” He was mocked by fight fans, who dismissed him as a pretentious, pillow-fisted nerd.
“I was an earnest young man with a proper amount of professional pride,” he wrote. “The ridicule hurt. It might have injured my chances. To be consigned so unanimously to certain and abject defeat might have been intimidating, might have impaired confidence. What saved me from that was my stubborn belief in the correctness of my logic. The laugh, in fact, helped to defeat itself and bring about the very thing that it ridiculed. It could only tend to make the champion overconfident.”
Dempsey and Tunney met for the first time in a driving rain at Sesquicentennial Stadium in Philadelphia. Tunney worried that the wet conditions might work against his game plan for the fight, hindering his footwork and slowing him down enough for Dempsey to catch him. It didn’t. Tunney easily outboxed Dempsey to claim the heavyweight title via clear-cut decision.
Some attributed that first loss to Dempsey’s inactivity in the years prior. Others said that he’d fallen prey to the celebrity lifestyle that accompanied his gargantuan fame. He was rich by this point. He slept on silk sheets and ate room service for breakfast. The savage beast had been tamed by soft living, or so people said.
He’d handled the loss with grace, telling his wife that he simply “forgot to duck” — a line repeated in newspapers all over the nation, endearing Dempsey to fans. But according to the sportswriter Gallico, who observed Dempsey’s training for that first fight and saw even sparring partners get the better of him, the first loss was a sign that Dempsey’s legs were gone. He was shopworn and aging. They could all see it in the gym, even if they couldn’t admit it.
“I remember that we made apologies for him,” Gallico wrote in “Farewell To Sport,” his memoir about his time as a writer for the New York Daily News. “He was going easy on [sparring partner] Tommy [Loughran], because, after all, Tommy was of championship caliber in his own class and no ordinary sparring partner, and Dempsey didn’t want to hurt him. That was a laugh; Dempsey, who never went easy on anybody, who would have broken Loughran in two if he could have caught him. Here again was an example of the strange grip that this man had even on the minds of the hard-boiled and unbelieving sportswriters trained to look for and detect weaknesses in a fighter.”
Dempsey’s first loss to Tunney was a shock to the sports world. He hadn’t been beaten in nearly a decade. He’d been heavyweight champ ever since he pummeled the giant Jess Willard to claim the title in 1919. Now, suddenly, the baddest man on the planet was this book-reading choir boy. It was a jarring shift, and America was eager for a rematch.
That moment came almost exactly one year later. Dempsey had returned to form with a knockout win over Jack Sharkey, albeit after a shaky start in the first round. Tunney had bided his time, holding onto the belt and awaiting the return bout that would net him a record payout topping $900,000. When they met again at Chicago’s Soldier Field on September 22, 1927, Dempsey was again the betting favorite.
This time the bout was subject to unusually extensive officiating discussions. Later, there would be rumors that organized crime interests in Chicago…
