Email
Print
FeedOn the Wrong Foot
Fighter Jack Dempsey’s popularity took a hit when his shoes didn’t fit the scene.
(page 1 of 3)
Always dress appropriately.
Sweats are fine for the gym, but not so much for a wedding. A bikini (or less) is OK for a French beach, but not if the beach is in Iran.
Boxer Jack Dempsey learned this lesson the hard way. In 1918—the year before he became heavyweight champion of the world—he posed for publicity photographs at Sun Ship in Chester wearing overalls and patent-leather shoes.
Dempsey’s stated intention that day was to encourage workers to take jobs in defense plants. But the contrast between his overalls and his shoes made it obvious that he was no shipyard worker—which raised questions about why a guy who lived by combat wasn’t in the Army. That, combined with damning words from his estranged ex-wife, eventually led to his indictment and trial for draft evasion. It nearly destroyed Dempsey’s career.
“Dempsey, 6-feet-1 of strength in the glowing splendor of his youth, a man fashioned by nature as an athlete and a warrior, did not go to the war, while weak-armed, strong-hearted clerks reeled under pack and rifle,” sneered the New York Times. “Our greatest fighter sidestepped our greatest fight.”
Born in a log cabin in Manassa, Colo., William Harrison “Harry” Dempsey was the ninth of 11 children. His parents, Hyrum and Celia, had come in a covered wagon from West Virginia, where they were converted by a Mormon missionary who also told them of wonderful possibilities in the Mountain States—possibilities never realized for Hyrum, who spent his life as a day laborer.
Manassa was a scrappy sort of town surrounded by ranches and silver mines. Its rough-and-tumble workers enjoyed a good fight. Dempsey and his brothers picked up the ethos. And because of their Irish last name, they competed with each other for the nickname “Jack.”
An earlier and unrelated—but also Irish—Jack Dempsey had held the middleweight title from 1884 to 1891. Dubbed “The Nonpareil” for his excellence in the ring, he’d been memorialized with a somber poem, “The Nonpareil’s Grave,” lamenting his early death and unmarked resting place:
’Tis strange New York should thus forget
its bravest of the brave
and in the wilds of Oregon
unmarked, leave Dempsey’s grave.
“My brothers and I all knew that poem,” the later Dempsey recalled. “All of us wanted to be the new Jack Dempsey.” So when Harry Dempsey turned out to be the best fighter in Manassa, he also won the right to be “Jack.”
In 1911, after finishing the eighth grade, Dempsey quit school and left home. For five years, he lived on the road. He took any kind of job, from washing dishes and scrubbing floors to mining coal and picking fruit. And when he couldn’t get work, he begged for food and hopped railroad cars. A photograph of Dempsey from this period revealed a face on which were written his reasons for leaving home, observed one biographer.
“The nose, broken in several places, the expressionless mouth, and the cold haunting eyes suggest a childhood that had been less than kind,” wrote Randy Roberts, author of Jack Dempsey.
Dempsey also began to fight as a source of income. Calling himself “Kid Blackie,” he fought an estimated 100 fights in Colorado, Utah and Nevada by mid-1914. Sometimes he lost because, as Roberts wrote, “In the world of miners, cowboys, railroad workers and lumberjacks, there was frequently someone who could maul a 130-pound 16-year-old.”
But often he won. In Nevada, he once walked from Tonopah to Goldfield in the desert heat of July to fight a fellow known as “One Punch” Hancock for his ability to put opponents on the floor quickly. The fight was in the back room of a bar. Fifteen seconds into it, Dempsey knocked out Hancock with one punch. The purse was $5.
