Dempsey vs. Carpentier
From the New York World, July 3, 1921. During the 20s and 30s I often undertook newspaper commissions, and always enjoyed them vastly. I covered the Dempsey-Carpentier fight in Boyle’s Thirty Acres, Jersey City, N. J., July 2, 1921, for the World and the Baltimore Sun jointly. Carpentier was the favorite, not only of the populace but also of the sporting reporters, mainly because Dempsey was disliked for evading service in World War I. These sporting reporters were nearly all inclined to see what they wanted to see, to wit, the severe punishment of Dempsey by Carpentier. Accordingly, they reported that Dempsey had been almost knocked out in the second or third round. This rapidly developed into a sort of superstition, which was not laid until both Carpentier and Dempsey denounced it as untrue
IN the great combat staged there in that colossal sterilizer beneath the harsh Jersey sun there was little to entertain the fancier of gladiatorial delicacies. It was simply a brief and hopeless struggle between a man full of romantic courage and one overwhelmingly superior in every way. This superiority was certainly not only in weight nor even in weight and reach.
As a matter of fact, the difference in weight was a good deal less than many another championship battle has witnessed, and Carpentier’s blows seldom failed by falling short. What ailed them was that they were not hard enough to knock out Dempsey or even to do him any serious damage. Whenever they landed Dempsey simply shook them off. And in the intervals between them he landed dozens and scores of harder ones. It was a clean fight, if not a beautiful one. It was swift, clear-cut, brilliant and honest.
Before half of the first round was over it must have been plain to even the policemen and Follies girls at the ringside that poor Carpentier was done for. Dempsey heaved him into the ropes, indeed, at the end of the first minute and thereafter gave him such a beating that he was plainly gone by the time he got to his corner. Blow after blow landed upon his face, neck, ribs, belly and arms. Two-thirds of them were upper cuts at very short range—blows which shook him, winded him, confused him, hurt him, staggered him. A gigantic impact was behind them. His face began to look blobby; red marks appeared all over his front.
Where was his celebrated right? Obviously he was working hard for a chance to unlimber it. He walked in boldly, taking terrific punishment with great gallantry. Suddenly the opportunity came and he let it fly. It caught Dempsey somewhere along the frontiers of his singularly impassive face. The effect upon him was apparently no greater than that of a somewhat angry slap upon an ordinary ox. His great bulk hardly trembled. He blinked, snuffled amiably and went on. Five seconds later Carpentier was seeking cover behind the barricade of his own gloves, and Dempsey was delivering colossal wallops under it, over it and headlong through it.
He fought with both hands, and he fought all the time. Carpentier, after that, was in the fight only intermittently. His right swings reached Dempsey often enough, but as one followed another they hurt him less and less. Toward the end he scarcely dodged them. More and more they clearly missed him, shooting under the arms or sliding behind his ears.
In the second round, of course, there was a moment when Carpentier appeared to be returning to the fight. The crowd, eager to reward his heroic struggle, got to its legs and gave him a cheer. He waded into Jack, pushed him about a bit, and now and then gave him a taste of that graceful right. But there was no left to keep it company, and behind it there was not enough amperage to make it burn. Dempsey took it, shook it off, and went on.
Clout, clout, clout! In the space of half a minute Carpentier stopped twenty-five sickening blows—most of them short, and all of them cruelly hard. His nose began to melt. His jaw sagged. He heaved pathetically. Because he stood up to it gamely, and even forced the fighting, the crowd was for him, and called it his round. But this view was largely that of amateurs familiar only with rough fights between actors at the Lambs club. Observed more scientifically, the round was Jack’s. When it closed he was as good as new—and Carpentier was beginning to go pale.
It was not in the second, but in the third round that Carpentier did his actual best. Soon after the gong he reached Jack with a couple of uppers that seemed to have genuine steam in them, and Jack began to show a new wariness. But it was only for a moment. Presently Carpentier was punching holes through the air with wild rights that missed the champion by a foot, and the champion was battering him to pieces with shorts that covered almost every square inch of his upper works. They came in pairs, right and left, and then in quartets, and then in octets, and then almost continuously.
Carpentier decayed beneath them like an Autumn leaf in Vallombrosa. Gently and pathetically he fluttered down. His celebrated right by this time gave Jack no more concern. It would have taken ten of them to have knocked out even Fatty Arbuckle. They had the effect upon the iron champion of petting with a hot water bag. Carpentier went to his corner bloody and bowed. It was all over with the high hopes of that gallant France. He had fought a brave fight; he had kept the faith—but the stars were set for Ireland and the Mormons.
The last round was simply mopping up. Carpentier was on the floor in half a minute. I doubt that Dempsey hit him hard in this round. A few jabs, and all the starch was out of his neck. He got up at nine, and tried a rush. Jack shoved him over, and gave him two or three light ones for good measure as he went down again. He managed to move one of his legs, but above the waist he was dead. When the referee counted ten Dempsey lifted him to his feet and helped him to his stool.
With his arms outstretched along the ropes, he managed to sit up, but all the same he was a very badly beaten pug. His whole face was puffy and blood ran out of his nose and mouth. His facade was one great mass of hoof-prints. Between them his skin had the whiteness of a mackerel’s belly. Gone were all his hopes. And with them, the hard francs and centimes, at ruinous rates of exchange, of all the beauty and chivalry of France. Many Frenchmen were in the stand. They took it as Carpentier fought—bravely and stoically. It was a hard and a square battle, and there was no dishonor in it for the loser.
But as a spectacle, of course, it suffered by its shortness and its one-sidedness. There was never the slightest doubt in any cultured heart, from the moment the boys put up their dukes, that Dempsey would have a walk-over.
As I say, it was not only or even mainly a matter of weight. Between the two of them, as they shook hands, there was no very noticeable disparity in size and bulk. Dempsey was the larger, but he certainly did not tower over Carpentier. He was also a bit the thicker and solider, but Carpentier was thick and solid too. What separated them so widely was simply a difference in fighting technique. Carpentier was the lyrical fighter, prodigal with agile footwork and blows describing graceful curves. He fought nervously, eagerly and beautifully. I have seen far better boxers, but I have never seen a more brilliant fighter—that is, with one hand.
Dempsey showed none of that style and passion. He seldom moved his feet, and never hopped, skipped or jumped. His strategy consisted in the bare business: (a) of standing up to it as quietly and solidly as possible; and (b) of jolting, bumping, thumping, bouncing and shocking his antagonist to death with the utmost convenient despatch.
This method is obviously not one for gladiators born subject to ordinary human weaknesses and feelings; it presents advantages to an antagonist who is both quick and strong; it grounds itself, when all is said, rather more on mere toughness than on actual skill at fighting. But that toughness is certainly a handy thing to have when one hoofs the fatal rosin. It gets one around bad situations. It saves the day when the vultures begin to circle overhead.
To reinforce his left Dempsey has a wallop in his right hand like the bump of a ferryboat into its slip. The two work constantly and with lovely synchronization. The fighter who hopes to stand up to them must be even tougher than Jack is, which is like aspiring to be even taller than the late Cy Sulloway. Carpentier simply fell short. He could not hurt Dempsey, and he could not live through the Dempsey bombardment. So he perished t
here in that Homeric stewpan, a brave man but an unwise one.
The show was managed with great deftness, and all the antecedent rumors of a frame-up were laid in a manner that will bring in much kudos and mazuma to Mons. Tex Rickard, the manager, hereafter. I have never been in a great crowd that was more orderly, or that had less to complain of in the way of avoidable discomforts.
Getting out of the arena, true enough, involved some hot work with the elbows; the management, in fact, put in small fry after the main battle in order to hold some of the crowd back, and so diminish the shoving in the exits, which were too few and too narrow. If there had been a panic in the house, thousands would have been heeled to death. But getting in was easy enough, the seats though narrow were fairly comfortable, and there was a clear view of the ring from every place in the monster bowl. Those who bought bleacher tickets, in fact, saw just as clearly as those who paid $50 apiece for seats at the ringside.
The crowd in the more expensive sections was well-dressed, good-humored and almost distinguished. The common allegation of professional moralists that prize fights are attended by thugs was given a colossal and devastating answer. No such cleanly and decent looking gang was ever gathered at a Billy Sunday meeting, or at any other great moral outpouring that I have ever attended. All the leaders of fashionable and theatrical society were on hand, most of them in checkerboard suits and smoking excellent cigars, or, if female, in new hats and pretty frocks.
Within the range of my private vision, long trained to esthetic alertness, there was not a single homely gal. Four rows ahead of me there were no less than half a dozen who would have adorned the “Follies.” Behind me, clad in pink, was a creature so lovely that she caused me to miss most of the preliminaries. She rooted for Carpentier in the French language, and took the count with heroic fortitude.
How Legends are Made
From the Baltimore Evening Sun, July 5, 1921
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 got to Hell. I allude specifically to a legend already in full credit throughout the length and breadth of Christendom, to wit, the legend that Carpentier gave 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. Dempsey was never in any more danger of being knocked out than I was, sitting there in the stand 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 Dempsey. His true finish came, in fact, in the first round, when Dempsey, after one of 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 Carpentier, produced a general agglutination of his blood corpuscles, telescoped his vertebræ, 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 will probably believe 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?
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 a majority of the intelligentsia present were with M. Carpentier, 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 prize-fighting 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 confidently 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.
I could fish up other elements out of the hocus-pocus, but here are enough. Boiled down, the thing simply amounts to this: that Carpentier practised a style of fighting that was more spectacular and attractive than Dempsey’s, both to the laiety present and to the experts; that he was much more popular than 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 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 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, no doubt, 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.
Meanwhile, I take advant
age of my hours of grace to state the ribald and immoral truth in plain terms, that an occasional misanthrope may be rejoiced. Carpentier never for a single instant showed the slightest chance of knocking out 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 very 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 kishkas. 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 down hill, 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.
Mencken Chrestomathy (Vintage) Page 46