Word: dempseys
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...people are capable of making memories of events that occurred years before they were born, never letting a technicality that slight exclude them from an argument as rich as the "long count" fight of 1927. Failing to withdraw to a neutral corner, as a new rule required after knockdowns, Dempsey inadvertently allowed Tunney perhaps 14 seconds to defog his head in the seventh round and go on to outpoint Jack for a second time. "The best thing that ever happened to both of us was the long count," Dempsey said a few years ago. "Half the people thought...
...Dempsey never contested either loss to Tunney, a wonderful boxer but a colorless fighter whose unforgivable sins were that he read books and beat Dempsey. "Honey, I forgot to duck," Dempsey told his wife after the first fight, a line President Reagan found use for 55 years later. When Tunney died in 1978 at the age of 80, Dempsey said, "Now I feel alone...
...Blackie before he was Jack Dempsey, and he was William Harrison Dempsey before that. Also the Manassa Mauler, for the Colorado cow town where he was born on June 24, 1895. Toughening his face by marinating it in brine, hardening his jaw by chomping pine gum, Dempsey set out hoboing across the West and brawling in saloons. "You and your opponent would go at it," he exlpained, "and if the bar patrons liked it, they'd pass...
Names conjured more romance then. Jess Willard was the Pottawatomie Giant. Georges Carpentier was the Orchid Man. Luis Angel Firpo, the Argentine, was the Wild Bull of the Pampas. Those were Dempsey's great foes. Knocked clear through the ropes by Firpo in the second round, Dempsey came back to floor the Wild Bull an eighth, ninth and tenth time...
...Dempsey's lore of names there is also a town: Shelby, Mont. (1923 pop. 2,000). The way Johnstown had a flood, Shelby had a prizefight. Hankering to be a world capital for a day, Shelby constructed a 40,000-seat arena for a Dempsey-Tommy Gibbons fight, only to have trouble raising the $300,000 guarantee required by Dempsey's rascally manager Jack ("Doc") Kearns. ("Give Doc 1,000 Ibs. of steel wool," it was said, "and he'll knit you a stove.") Barely 7,000 people paid to see the fight: the rest crashed...