Knockdown

“Ican lick any son of a bitch in the house,” gloated John L. Sullivan, America’s last bare-knuckles champion. No other athlete can match the barroom boast of a heavyweight boxer. Success in football, hockey or shotput certainly demands pluck, luck and talent but, lacking Sullivan’s primitive proof of elemental mastery over another human being in one-on-one combat, a star in any sport other than boxing seems a mere technician. For Roger Kahn, the bard of baseball who elegized the Brooklyn Dodgers in “The Boys of Summer,” Jack Dempsey was the champion of champions, “the greatest fighter who ever lived,” a popular pugilist who, despite his fame and fortune, never lost contact with the working class from which he came. Dempsey was also, according to Kahn, the embodiment of a boisterous decade, the 1920s, which leaves all other eras lying on the canvas.

William Harrison Dempsey, named for the ninth president of the United States, came into the world in the manner of a mythological hero. On a wintry day in Manassa, Colo., Celia Dempsey, pregnant with her ninth child, opened her cabin door to a hungry, sleepy peddler. For her hospitality, the peddler offered Celia anything in his sack. She chose a book, a biography of John L. Sullivan. Celia told her son, long after he was born on June 24, 1895: “It was fated for you to become a boxer. I read and reread that book about John L. so many times while waiting for you to be born.”

The Dempseys had left a West Virginia farm in hopes of making their fortune in the Western mining boom. Lapsed Mormons, the Dempsey brood grew up in a succession of brawling frontier towns. The future Manassa Mauler was out working in the Colorado mines by age 7 and by 11 had set his sights on being heavyweight boxing champion. To toughen his fists, he soaked them in horse urine, and he pickled his face with brine to prevent easy bleeding. Calling himself Kid Blackie, he became a pugilist vagabond, traveling on foot and on rail. Staging fights in local saloons, he picked up supper money by daring to lick any son of a bitch in the house. On July 4, 1919, the scrappy kid from Colorado defeated Jess Willard, a Goliath who had wrested the heavyweight boxing title from Jack Johnson four years earlier. William Harrison Dempsey reigned in the ring as Jack Dempsey, in tribute to a 19th century champion of the same name who inspired a popular poem but died broke and alcoholic at 33.

Unlike that unfortunate figure, Dempsey died at 87 in 1983, a gentle, courtly figure to thousands who visited the restaurant he ran in New York from 1935 to 1974. “You began by talking with an icon and you finished talking with a friend,” contends Kahn, who, as sports editor of Newsweek in the 1950s, had many conversations with the former champ. Kahn claims that Dempsey enticed him to tell his story, but between request and publication fell a very long count. “A Flame of Pure Fire,” which takes its title from John Lardner’s description of Dempsey (“The public suddenly saw him in a new light, the two-handed fighter who stormed forward, a flame of pure fire in the ring, strong, native, affable, easy of speech, close to the people in word and deed and feeling”), does not attempt to cover the entire life. It focuses on Dempsey’s career as a professional heavyweight, which ended on Sept. 22, 1927, when a controversial delayed count gave Gene Tunney, who had wrested the championship from Dempsey in a 10-round decision on Sept. 23, 1926, in Philadelphia, time enough to get up off the canvas and defeat him again. After decking Tunney with a sequence of punches to the jaw, Dempsey failed to retire, as required, to the farthest neutral corner, and the referee, whom Kahn considers crooked, did not begin his tally until at least five seconds had passed. In the notorious delayed count, Tunney lingered on the canvas for at least 14 seconds, before recovering sufficiently to return to his feet and win the bout on points in 10 rounds. Kahn’s description of Dempsey glory coincides with the most storied of decades, the Roaring ‘20s. Kahn’s Dempsey is a lovable lion whose roar was the voice of the zeitgeist: “He was the wild and raucous champion of the wild and raucous 1920s when Al Capone ran free and jazz men trumpeted a new night music and women bobbed their hair and smoked; they smoked cigarettes in public, and hemlines rose and people talked about free love, and it was against the law to buy a drink.”

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Relatively unscathed after a world war that devastated enemies and allies, the United States reveled in its own prosperity. The world heavyweight crown found a proper setting in an American republic newly anointed as a global power. Babe Ruth, Red Grange, Bobby Jones and Man o’ War joined upstart Dempsey in an athletic royalty that belied the frontier nation’s egalitarian pretensions. In addition, it seemed a golden age of sportswriting, when, especially outside the Northeast, spectatorship was really lectorship; before television and even much radio, more fans read about professional matches than watched them. Kahn recalls the lively prose of Heywood Broun, Paul Gallico, Ring Lardner, Grantland Rice and Damon Runyon while noting that, often paid by the subjects they were covering, they were loath to look beyond the immediate drama they reported.

Though Kahn recycles Dempsey stories available elsewhere, including Randy Roberts’ 1979 study, “Jack Dempsey: The Manassa Mauler,” what ignites “A Flame of Pure Fire” is its author’s personal passion. In accounts of his sessions with the legend at the Dempsey restaurant and of his own father’s fisticuffs, Kahn injects himself into the plot. He writes with such enthusiasm about his fighting man and that manic age that his sentences all aspire to hyperbole. In the bout against Willard, “the strongest man ever to hold the heavyweight championship,” Kahn reports, without evidence or argumentation, that Dempsey “loosed the most devastating combination of punches in boxing history.” Without irony or validation, Kahn claims that Dempsey’s encounter with Georges Carpentier was “the fight of the century,” though its date, 1921, was still early in Dempsey’s career and the century. Though Dempsey brought unprecedented attention, and money, to prizefighting, Kahn’s claim that “[n]either before nor after has sport known a single individual attraction equal to the Mauler” is at least debatable. Babe Ruth, Pele, Muhammad Ali and Michael Jordan have not been chopped liver.

Stronger on anecdote than on analysis, Kahn makes his case for Dempsey as a symbol of the ‘20s merely by stringing together--and often repeating--extraneous information about the period. When Dempsey visits Europe in 1922, the first item adduced to prove that Paris was “a cultural carnival like no other” is Marcel Proust, though Kahn’s boxer had no contact with the reclusive novelist. Prohibition, isolationism and organized crime were relevant to the context in which Dempsey’s career unfolded, but salacious details about Warren Harding’s womanizing that are included in the book merely pander to prurient curiosity. Of course, everything that happened during the 1920s contributed to the zeitgeist, but why does Kahn mention the Indian parliament that convened in New Delhi in 1921 but not Otto von Porat, the Norwegian heavyweight who won the Olympic gold medal in 1924? Why Dorothy Parker but not Sinclair Lewis?

The weakness of Kahn’s analysis is further demonstrated in his treatment of complex issues of the time. Though he notes ratification of the 19th Amendment, Kahn fails to relate the feminist revolution to Dempsey’s career. Did mass popularity of “the manly art” have anything to do with anxieties over women’s power? It was the age of Margaret Sanger as well as Jack Dempsey, but though Kahn smiles at the boxer’s marital transgressions with Clara Bow, Barbara Stanwyck and others, he holds second wife Estelle Taylor to a higher standard of conjugal fidelity. He presents first wife Maxine Cates, who worked as a prostitute before, after and during their tumultuous marriage, as a Delilah who nearly unmanned the champ.

Under pressure from promoters who feared alienating the public and bankrupting the sport, Dempsey refused to fight Harry Wills or any other black contender. Protective of his hero, Kahn pulls punches about Dempsey’s collusion in the institutional racism of the period, and he ignores the contributions that African Americans, excluded from boxing as participants and segregated as spectators, were making to the culture. Kahn’s portrait of Dempsey as paragon of the Jazz Age ignores Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith, Langston Hughes and non-white fight fans. But it oozes with infectious affection for a flawed hero of his time. Even Al Capone, who tried unsuccessfully to recruit him to his service, admired Dempsey, whose punch was prosperous but whose touch remained common. So will readers of “A Flame of Pure Fire.”