William Harrison Dempsey was born in 1895 in Manassa, Colorado, one of 13 children in a poor family, and was baptized a Mormon at eight. He left school early and at 16 took to riding the rods, lashed beneath freight cars between mining camps. Fighting as Kid Blackie, he walked into saloons and announced that he could not sing or dance but could lick anyone in the house. In 1914 he took the place of his brother Bernie, who had been boxing as Jack Dempsey, against George Copeland in Cripple Creek, at over 9,000 feet. Outweighed by 20 pounds, he dropped Copeland six times in the first round, won when the fight was stopped in the seventh, earned $100 and kept the name.
On July 4, 1919, he knocked down the 245-pound champion Jess Willard seven times in the first round; the episode disputes later loaded-glove rumors, citing Nat Fleischer’s view of the hand wraps and film of Dempsey pushing with open gloves. His 1921 fight with Georges Carpentier drew 91,000 fans, boxing’s first million-dollar gate and the first national radio broadcast of a fight. Against Luis Firpo in 1923 he was knocked out of the ring onto a reporter’s typewriter, shoved back by writers and won in the second round. After three idle years of films and celebrity he lost to Gene Tunney in 1926, telling his wife, Estelle Taylor, “Honey, I forgot to duck,” a line Ronald Reagan reused in 1981. He lost the 1927 rematch after failing to go to a neutral corner.
- He fought from a crouch with a bobbing, weaving motion later called the Dempsey roll.
- Critics branded him a slacker for working in a shipyard during World War I, though he had registered and held a dependent’s exemption.
- The story that his gloves were loaded came decades later from his estranged former manager Jack Kearns.
- The 1927 Tunney rematch in Chicago drew a $2 million gate, and the referee was changed at the last minute amid fixing rumors.
- In World War II he served in the Coast Guard, was at Okinawa and left as a commander in 1952.
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