The Long Count
Chapter Four
On Monday, September 27, 1926, summer was over, suddenly, for New
Yorkers; the temperature dropped thirty-five degrees from 86 to 51. The
Moderation League, Inc., which had offices on Madison Avenue, was in full
cry against the demon booze. Drunkenness, particularly among children and
motorists, had increased alarmingly, a League spokesman said, and something
drastic had to be done.
For a day or two, all was quiet on the boxing scene. Tunney's mother
said that Gene had "gone away" and Billy Gibson said he hadn't seen his
charge in more than twenty-four hours, although over the weekend they both
had been at the Westchester-Biltmore in Harrison. In Atlantic City,
reporters dropped in at Dempsey's suite, which was heavy with the smell of
wintergreen and roses, and Jack, still visibly bruised, said he had nothing
to say, no comment about his future, no statement about Tunney.
At the Garden, Rickard broke his big news; an elimination tournament
for contending heavyweights, the winner to meet Tunney for the title. Only
Harry Wills was barred. Rickard seemed more concerned, however, with a
complaint against the federal government. At the Sesquicentennial Stadium,
he said, the head Internal Revenue man had demanded a hundred tickets to
permit his men to enter and watch the ticket takers at work--after which
the agents had run into the arena to watch the bout. Tex said he was going
to write to Washington about it.
It was the custom for people to try and sue the new heavyweight
champion on whatever grounds could be scraped up--the man had ready money,
didn't he?--but the first suit that was an aftermath of the Philadelphia
fight was against Dempsey. A man said that Jack, in making his way to the
dressing room after the bout, hit his wife in the side with an elbow,
causing her to fall. It could have been the best shot Dempsey landed all
night.
By the middle of the week, the pot had begun to boil a little again.
In Veracruz, Mexico, a hurricane struck viciously with an undertermined
loss of life, and the French liner "Paris" steamed into the North River
carrying Suzanne Lenglen, the celebrated tennis player, who hiked her
skirts for cameramen and said she was in the United States this time to
make lots of money as a professional.
The World Series was about to start, too, between the New York Yankees
with their celebrated "murderers' row" of Ruth, Gehrig, Lazzeri, Meusel and
Combs, and the St. Louis Cardinals, but these things were almost apart form
the specialized world of fighting. Like horse players, the residents of
Cauliflower Row really lived in a world of their own, and that world was
prospering.
Billy Gibson had an office in East Forty-second Street. Now, sitting
there complacently, he sifted through all kinds of offers for Tunney. The
101 Ranch circus people wanted to put the new champion on display. A
theatrical firm offered $100,000 for eighteen weeks of four-a-day time
across the country. And so on.
Across the street from the Garden, Dempsey holed up at the Belmont--he
and Estelle had come up from Atlantic City for the Series--and played
pinochle with Floyd Fitzsimmons, a Midwestern boxing-promoter friend of
Jack's.
"I may fight again," he told reporters, "and I may not." He grinned
his small-boy grin. "I'm thinking of taking up the practice of law."
Kearn's assorted lawsuits still hung over his head. Fitzsimmons nodded and
started to tell the newsmen how hard it had been for Dempsey to keep his
mind on training before the Philadelphia fight.
"That's enough of that, Floyd," Dempsey cut in. "No alibis.
Everything's O.K."
Kearns, who had been tracking Dempsey down in several states legally,
now moved to the United States District Court in Manhattan, the gist of his
charges being that he had a contract as Dempsey's manager and that Jack
owed him hundreds of thousands of dollars in back pay. Dempsey, using the
New York lawyers O'Brien, Malevinsky and Driscoll, countersued and charged
that the alleged contract didn't exist.
Not quite all America, meanwhile, had taken Dempsey to its bosom as
the lovable Peck's Bad Boy. "Labor," the trade-union paper, said in an
editorial that of the 115,000,000 persons in the United States, 114,000,000
wanted Tunney to win--which, to put it kindly, was something of a
distortion of fact. "The American people," the paper said shrilly, "will
not forgive a slacker." And: "Nothing in his championship became him like
the manner of his leaving it."
There had been no excuses from Dempsey, but there was one from another
source. A Dr. Frank H. Russell, with headquarters at the Hotel Astor, said
that before the Tunney bout Jack had suffered an infection of the left arm,
amounting to an attack of boils. "I am inclined to believe," he said,
"that it played a considerable part in the fight. Dempsey was a man
intoxicated by poisonous matter in the blood when he entered the ring."
Dempsey, when told, just shook his head. "I lost to a better man," he
said again. "I have no alibis."
Tunney, meanwhile, came into town briefly from Connecticut, but
somehow missed connections with Gibson. It likely was not deliberate, but
there was no mistaking the simple fact Tunney and Gibson were not now the
closest of friends. "I'm unacquainted with his schedule," Gibson said
tersely when told Tunney had been and gone. Before returning to
Connecticut, Tunney invited reporters to accompany him to Philadelphia on
the weekend. There was to be, he announced, a reception for boys and girls
of the city, and Gene was going there to talk to the boys about how
splendid boxing was.
When the World Series started at Yankee Stadium on Sunday, October 3,
Dempsey and Estelle were there, taking their seats to tumultuous applause.
The scars still were visible on his face. Tunney, meanwhile, had returned
from selling boxing to Philadelphia's boys and had gone to West Hartford to
stay at the home of his friend Edward S. Dewing and get in a little golf at
the Wampanoag Club.
Rickard also turned up at the Stadium, reporting he would have some
important announcements to make, but another New York promoter, Humbert
Fugazy, stole a march on him. He said he had matched Wills to fight Jack
Sharkey on October 12, adding, "I don't see how Gene Tunney can avoid
meeting the winner of this fight." He knew very well, of course, how
Tunney could and would.
As October began, the country still was busy with its World Series,
and even to casual visitors New York seemed an exciting, if crazy, city.
In Paris, however, Jacques Deval wrote in "Le Journal" that New York was "a
mass of banality, a city of abstinence and desolation, boresome without
being noble, a city for which no one could possibly become homesick."
Rickard's important announcement, it appeared, was his plan to build
in Manhattan, within the next year, a great outdoor stadium patterned after
the Yale Bowl. The success of the Dempsey-Tunney match had been heady and
Tex felt that the existing ballparks in New York--the Polo Grounds, the
Stadium and Ebbets Field in Brooklyn--no longer were large enough to hold
big fight crowds. The new layout, he said, would hold 100,000 football
fans and 25,000 more for boxing bouts.
Dempsey returned to Atlantic City with Estelle and Gene Normile,
although he was due back in court for the Kearns suit. Tunney held a short
conference with Gibson, after which he announced to the press that he had
engaged Dudley Field Malone as his attorney and adviser "in all business
matters outside the ring." He and Malone, he added, would be going away
for two or three days to study contracts and other proposals that had been
made.
Meanwhile, Joseph Paul Zukauskas, the Lithuanian who fought under the
name Jack Sharkey, came to town with his manager, red-faced, fast-talking
Johnny Buckley. Their arrival at the Astor Hotel was, if not exactly a
breath of fresh air, at least something different. Sharkey, a onetime
sailor with slicked-back blond hair, was a good boxer and hitter, and he
was quick-tempered--and cocky. He went up to Stillman's Gymnasium on
Eighth Avenue and had a light workout, after which he gathered newsmen
around him and told them genially that after he had beaten George Godfrey,
the big Negro heavywight, Godfrey had said Sharkey could beat Wills and
Tunney.
That seemed a reasonable statement, Sharkey added.
Both Dempsey and Kearns showed up in court on Tuesday, October 5, but
smiled cheerfully at each other. It was, they both knew, merely business.
Kearns wanted to get some money out of Dempsey and Dempsey meant for him
not to. Jack, on the stand only three or four minutes, charged that Doc
had forged his, Dempsey's, name to a contract for one of his bouts and had
admitted as much to him at a training camp in Saratoga Springs, New York.
Kearns, meanwhile, introduced into testimony a letter he had written
to Dempsey in March, in which he said he had "waited as patiently as
possible for you to come to your senses and stop being ungrateful."
"As my vocation is management of boxers," Doc added in the letter, "I
have been forced by your actions to assume management of the next
heavyweight champion, Napoleon Dorval." Public sentiment, he said, would
force a meeting of the two "and he will take the title from you. Put a pin
in that and don't say I did not advise you." Dempsey grinned broadly.
Life filled with only Napoleon Dorvals for opponents would have been
charming.
"These people who are attacking Dempsey," stated Richard L. Mackey,
who was defending him, "are nothing but shakedown artists." Decision was
reserved for three weeks, for the filing of briefs.
The busy fall days were on. The legitimate theatre season was in full
swing on Broadway. At Madison Square Garden, Suzanne Lenglen made her
professional debut before 13,000 tennis fans and easily defeated Mary K.
Browne. The match was arranged by Charles C. Pyle, who two years before
had been an obscure Midwestern promoter. Tex Rickard smiled at the
promotion, but kept an eye on Pyle. In St. Louis, Babe Ruth hit three home
runs as the Yankees trounced the Cardinals, 19 to 5, and then on Sunday,
October 10, the Cards won the title when Grover Cleveland Alexander, tired
and hungover, came in from the bull pen with the bases filled and struck
out Tony Lazzeri to preserve a 3-to-2 victory. Ruth, it was announced, had
broken ten Series records.
But for a moment Chicago was front and center. Gang warfare, sporadic
but unending, had spattered the Illinois city ever since Prohibition had
been established. Now it seemed to grow more furious. Dion O'Banion, the
cut-throat florist, already was dead, and now his successor, Hymie Weiss,
was machine-gunned to death on the North Side.
Tunney was in and out of New York, experiencing some of the fringe
benefits, if those are the words, of being the heavyweight champion. The
New York department of the American Legion announced it was giving Gene a
testimonial dinner on October 28, with 1500 expected. On Saturday, October
9, Tunney went to City Hall, where, looking uncomfortable in a new blue
officer's uniform, he was commissioned a first lieutenant in the Marine
Reserve Corps, receiving a sword. Pains were taken to note that he wasn't
getting the rank because he was the champion. He had applied for a
commission several months before and it had been granted because of his
"distinguished service overseas" with the 11th Marine Regiment.
Five thousand persons filled City Hall Park to get a glimpse of Tunney
after the ceremony, which took place inside the Hall in a reception room.
They didn't know the officer who was accompanying Tunney. He was Major
Anthony J. D. Biddle of the 8th Regiment, Philadelphia. There seemed
almost no new social worlds for the champion to conquer.
New York once again turned its attention to fighting. Forty thousand
men, women and children packed Ebbets Field on Tuesday, October 12, to see
Sharkey fight Wills, "The Brown Panther." It wasn't much of a bout. The
Boston sailor handled the slow-moving Wills with ease, and in the 13th,
Wills, after having been warned ten times, was disqualified for backhanding
and hitting on the breaks from clinches.
Dempsey, who had returned to town from Atlantic City, moved out of the
Belmont and into an apartment on the upper West Side. There was some talk
that he might box during the winter at the Tijuana racetrack in Mexico,
since Normile, his current manager, was one of the right-hand men of Jm
Coffroth, who ran the racecourse. Jack, meanwhile, had nothing to say on
boxing, but, rather, turned his attention to horse racing. He had bought
four yearlings at the August sales in Saratoga and was anxious to see them
run.
There never really was such a thing as Rickard slowing up; he wasn't
built that way. But on October 11 he made a slight move in that
direction. He went to the Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs, West
Virginia, and took a side trip to Lewisburg, West Virginia, with a
twenty-four-year-old, pretty Broadway bit actress, Maxine Hodges, and
married her. Maxine, who was to give the free-wheeling promoter a
daughter, Maxine Texas, tried hard to get the fifty-five-year-old Tex to
ease up and she had some small success at it.
Rickard read of the Dempsey lawsuit with a smile on his face. Kearns
had planned that his attorneys would tie up Dempsey's huge paycheck the day
after the Philadelphia fight, but he reckoned without Rickard.
The day before the fight Tex went to a Western Union office with a
suitcase containing $711,868 in cash for Dempsey. He wired the money to
Jack's brother Joe, in California, and there it promptly was placed in a
bank vault.
"I'll get that hick son of a bitch yet," Doc moaned. "He has crossed
me up for the last time."
The rest of October was comparatively quiet along Cauliflower Row.
The New York State Athletic Commission, which never had been too fond of
Harry Wills, suspended the big Nergro for thirty days for his fouling in
the Sharkey fight. On October 22 the Garden was filled to capacity, more
than 20,000 persons, to see Jim Maloney knock out one Arthur de Kuh in the
second round.
It was just an ordinary fight on an ordinary fight night, but there
was an intriguing sidelight. Both Dempsey and Tunney were introduced from
the ring--and Jack was cheered in an uproar of several minutes, with
feet-stamping and paper being showered form the second balcony, while for
Gene there were mingled cheers and boos. It bothered Tunney, naturally,
but he had become almost used to it by now. He was not the rough-and-ready
type that the crowd could identify with, and there wasn't a way on God's
earth to make him so.
On October 22, the same night as the Maloney-de Kuh bout, Tunney was
saddened to learn of the death in an Atlantic City sanitarium of his old
arch-foe, Harry Greb. The great middleweight/light-heavyweight had been in
an auto accident several weeks before, and he went into the hospital to
have a nose fracture treated. Weak after coming out of the anesthesia,
Greb suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and died. The Pittsburgh Windmill was
stilled.
Rickard saw Dempsey a couple of times around this time, the idea being
to prod Jack into resuming his career, but he had no great luck. After a
luncheon with Dempsey on the twenty-sixth, he had to tell newsmen he was
doubtful that Jack ever would fight again. "All this talk of my having him
under contract to meet Tunney again next year is all bosh," he said. Late
in the month Dempsey returned to his home in Los Angeles. Rickard said
Jack would resume training there, but no one made any book on it.
Tunney was in Pittsburgh on the twenty-seventh to be a pallbearer at
Greb's funeral service. He had come in from Dayton, Ohio, where he already
was launched on his round of personal appearances and banquets, and he was
to stay in Pittsburgh for several more days to attend the football game
between the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Tech.
A heavyweight boxing champion at a college football game. There was a
feeling that John L. Sullivan was stirring restlessly in his grave.
November came, gray and chilly. In London, Sir Oliver Lodge opined
that it seemed "absurd to suppose this is the only habitable world," and in
Detroit the magician Harry Houdini died of peritonitis after two operations
in a week. In Bologna, Italy, a mob killed the boy assailant who fired a
shot at Mussolini--the bullet ripped through Il Duce's coat--and the next
day hundreds of thousands of Black Shirts paraded in all parts of the
country, crying, "Death to every enemy of Mussolini!" In North Dakota,
Queen Marie of Rumania, who had come into New York aboard the "Leviathan"
on a rainy morning a few days before, had her finger pricked by Chief Red
Tomahawk and was given a war bonnet and membership (she was called a "war
woman") in the Sioux Nation.
Al Smith was reelected Governor of New York, and the Democrats cut
into the Republicans' edge in Congress. "The Ladies' Home Journal," its
latest issue featuring an article on "Sex and Nicotine," offered a year's
subscription for a dollar. In Stockholm, Leopold, the heir to the Belgian
throne, married Princess Astrid of Sweden in a setting of almost medieval
splendor, studded with four kings, two queens and any number of princes and
princesses. There was word in London that Asian countries, most notably
China, Turkey and Soviet Russia, were forming an "Asiatic League of
Nations" as a "hostile counterpoise" to the League of Nations, but here in
America there was even more depressing news. Princeton severed athletic
relations with Harvard. A Harvard "Lampoon" issue that had needled
Princeton with "extreme animosity" had climaxed a long "atmosphere of
suspicion and ill will," the Princeton officials charged.
On his way back to California, Dempsey stopped first in Wilmington,
Delaware, to visit Estelle's relatives, and then in Chicago, where again he
got together with Rickard. Tex was there to confer with Major Frederick
McLaughlin, president of the Black Hawks hockey team, about building a
stadium like Madison Square Garden for Chicago, possibly the first of a
chain of such arenas.
Rickard continued to press Dempsey about the future but with no luck.
The big Coloradan continued to brood about losing to Tunney, the fancy
Dan. He thought he was through when something like that happened.
Tunney was still being seen in the right places. He went to Bermuda
for a holiday of eight days, and when he returned to New York on November
11, he said that he was glad Al Smith had been reelected, since he had
contributed to Smith's campaign fund, and that he was ready to begin an
eight-week vaudeville tour at $7500 a week.
Coming up the bay toward the North River pier, Tunney stood at
attention--it was Armistice Day--when the ship's bugler played taps. Gene
told newsmen that eight years before, when the Armistice had been signed,
he had received $60 back pay. "It looked like a milllion dollars to me
then," he added.
On Wednesday, November 17, Tunney went to the Hotel Breslin in
Manhattan and conferred with Humbert Fugazy.
Fugazy's promotion of the Wills-Sharkey fight had been a financial, if
not an artistic, success. He had tasted blood. Now he made his move at
muscling in on the big time.
After Humbert had talked with Tunney, Gene emerged and said candidly
that he wasn't bound to any one promoter and that Fugazy had as good a
chance as anyone for a title fight in 1927. "My services," Tunney noted,
"will go to the highest bidder." Fugazy added, "Tunney looked to me
straightforward and sincere," and said he felt fairly certain he would land
the bout.
Reporters rushed to Rickard. Looking blander than usual, he shrugged
and said he had no contract with Tunney. There was a twinkle in his eye,
however, as he said he was giving his strictest attention to developing the
next challenger for the heavyweight crown.
"And you can bet your last dollar," he said softly, "that when I bring
him out, I will have him so tied up he won't be able to move hand or
foot." He paused. "Right now, of course, there isn't a single man in the
world, with the exception of Dempsey, who could prove an attraction with
Tunney."
The split between Tunney and Gibson, meanwhile, seemed to be
widening. Billy was with Rickard at the time, and he said almost
petulantly that he had no knowledge of Tunney's conference with Fugazy.
Back home in Los Angeles, Dempsey relaxed, looked at his healing face,
and plunged into the lighthearted business of having a new home built on
Los Felis Boulevard in Los Angeles. Was he going back east? Probably.
But first he wanted to go into light training to see "what kind of
condition I can get in and what seems to be ahead of me." Did that mean he
might or might not fight again? "I won't go into the ring again," he said
slowly, "if my condition is in any way objectionable." He gave the
newspaper boys a drink and went back to looking at the plans for the new
house.
- end of Chapter Four -
