16. Jack Dempsey outslugs Luis Firpo, September 14, 1923, Polo Grounds

Boxing is the “sweet science,” a complex sport with layers of nuance involving footwork, psychology, and strategy.

            Aw hell, let’s be honest, what fight fans really want is a damn slugfest. And for a feast of flying fists, no bout can top the fast and furious Jack Dempsey–Luis Firpo punch-a-thon at the Polo Grounds on September 14, 1923. It lasted less than two rounds and was marred by rule violations and poor refereeing, yet it’s commonly hailed as the most thrilling fight of all time.

            Jack Dempsey’s mother told him he was fated to be a boxer because during her pregnancy she read and reread a book about heavyweight champ John L. Sullivan. Dempsey was the ninth of eleven children in a poor family and had left home to work an array of jobs while living in “hobo jungles” out west. He began boxing in saloons and mining towns. Although his ducking and sidestepping techniques were influential, he was best known for the ferocity of his attacks. In 1919 he overcame unfair accusations about draft-dodging during World War I to become a popular champ, winning five straight first-round knockouts before capturing the heavyweight title by flattening champ Jess Willard in the third. In his third title defense, “the Manassa Mauler” firmly established himself as boxing’s biggest draw with the sport’s first million-dollar gate, for which he punched Georges Carpentier senseless in the fourth.

            The only other top-flight contender was Harry Willis, who was black, and promoter Tex Rickard wouldn’t let Dempsey fight him because Rickard was afraid of another potential black champion so soon after the flamboyant and turbulent reign of Jack Johnson. But questions remained about whether Dempsey was a true great, whether he’d respond if hit hard, and with worthy foes hard to come by, Dempsey barely fought in 1922 and for much of 1923. Rickard decided if he couldn’t have quality, he’d get somebody who would be a good draw. He settled on Argentinean Luis Angel Firpo, who had the exotic but decidedly inappropriate nickname “the Wild Bull of the Pampas.”

            The 6K3J, 216-pound Firpo was big, tough, and phenomenally strong, but, man, was he raw. Nat Fleischer, founder of The Ring magazine, wrote that Firpo had “only a vague idea of the finer points of pugilism.” He’d grown up poor and worked as a laborer, butcher, and drugstore clerk before he began boxing for exercise and soon for money. He was not a wild bull but a reticent miser—he wore cheap clothes and refused to pay for trainers, managers, or sparring partners, preferring to train simply by fighting more bouts. (After becoming wealthy thanks to this fight, he turned quite generous, and once gave Dempsey a gift of $20,000.)

            When Firpo made his deal with Rickard, he shrewdly insisted on foreign film rights to his bouts leading up to and including the Dempsey fight. While Dempsey trained near Saratoga Springs, Firpo went low-rent in Atlantic City and initially demanded payment from the press for interviews or photos. The night before the fight, wrote W.ºO. McGeehan in the New York Herald, Firpo sat in his hotel room “stark naked with a pencil in his hand,” calculating how much he’d owe in taxes for his take.

            That night fans, armed with food, binoculars, and extra clothes, camped out at the Polo Grounds to get bleacher seats. Fight night was crisp, in the mid-50s, as over 80,000 packed the ballpark and tens of thousands were turned away. (When a van arrived containing 3,800 tickets for last-minute sales, it was attacked by fans who were forcibly removed by cops wielding nightsticks.)

            The best seats were filled with society names like Astor, Belmont, Morgan, Gould, Vanderbilt, Rothschild, and Whitney, entertainment figures like Flo Ziegfeld and John Ringling, and former champs Jim Corbett and Jess Willard. The New York Yankees and visiting Chicago White Sox were all there, as well as Giants manager John McGraw; Babe Ruth attracted all the buzz as he walked to his eighth-row seat.

            What these people didn’t know was that the fight was nearly called off. At weigh-in, Dr. William Walker thought Firpo’s left elbow was dislocated and fractured and was set to cancel the fight when Firpo demonstrated his fitness by smashing his fist hard onto a table, gritting his teeth and forcing a smile through the agony. New York Medical Commission chairman William Muldoon deemed the limb dislocated but not broken and jerked it sharply back into place. Firpo sweated profusely but didn’t utter a sound. His swollen arm was bandaged until the fight.

            The fisticuffs began at 10:02. Firpo looked somber, while Dempsey, giving away 24 pounds, waved to the crowd. Then the ring exploded with a purposeful violence no one could have imagined. The action was so frenetic that every newspaper account differs about what actually happened.

            Dempsey rushed Firpo instantly, but for one brief moment Firpo showed surprising agility and technique, sidestepping the champ’s first blow and delivering a quick left that sent Dempsey to one knee and the fans to their feet. They would not sit down again. (In the eighth row the bench toppled over, taking down Ruth, who angrily came up swinging at the nearest target, who happened to be middleweight Mickey Walker.)

            Dempsey was more surprised than hurt and was up without a count. He roared in, but the two men got tangled and clinched. When the ref shouted, “Break,” and Firpo naively let his hands drop, Dempsey, uninterested in decorum, floored the challenger with a right to the body. Firpo too popped right back, but he didn’t stay upright for long.

            The two were doing a vicious tango in the clinches when a Dempsey left to the top of the head sent Firpo to the canvas. In a move that altered this fight and boxing history, Dempsey did not retreat to a neutral corner, and referee Johnny Gallagher failed to make him. Firpo rose quickly, but Dempsey attacked, and a left to the body slammed Firpo back down. Again, Gallagher was lax. Encouraged, Dempsey continually stalked Firpo like prey, knocking him down, then lurking nearby and pouncing as soon as Firpo pulled himself up. The fourth knockdown came with a left to the body. Firpo was up by nine, but Dempsey was right there, drilling him with a big right that immediately floored him again.

            Somehow Firpo hoisted himself up again and dropped Dempsey to all fours briefly with an overhead right. Then they traded blows, and Dempsey soon landed a right cross that scored his sixth knockdown. He hovered over Firpo, who tried getting up and covering up simultaneously, but Dempsey left no room and thrashed him once more. After this record seventh knockdown, Dempsey nonchalantly stepped over his fallen foe and lounged in the corner with his arms against the ropes, surveying the havoc he had wreaked. Amazingly, however, the bell still had not rung. Dempsey later admitted, “I just relaxed. I didn’t think the man would get up again.”

            Firpo not only hauled himself up once more but escaped the corner for the center of the ring and started firing away. Catching Dempsey off guard, he backed the champ into the ropes, then fired a remarkable volley of rights. Just before the biggest right of them all, he stung Dempsey with a left uppercut that raised Dempsey’s face right into the path of the crashing right overhead. Firpo’s heavy punch seemingly stayed connected to Dempsey’s head as he went down and out, through the ropes, completely out of the ring. (Some say the ropes weren’t strung tightly enough.)

            George Bellows’s classic painting, which now hangs in the Whitney Museum, commemorates this notorious moment. Dempsey was lucky to escape—if he’d stayed upright, another blow would have knocked him out. He tumbled into the press row, jamming his hip on a wooden board and banging his neck and head on the typewriters of New York Tribune writer Jack Lawrence, Hype Igoe of the New York World, and Western Union telegraph operator Perry Grogan.

            It was almost impossible for Dempsey to resurrect himself before a 10 count. But the referee reacted slowly, and the writers shoved Dempsey up and back into the ring. They claimed later that they were not unfairly abetting the American but merely removing an intruder, an obstacle to their writing, although they also claimed that Dempsey—despite being dazed and semiconscious—snarled in a rage, “Get me back in there. I’ll fix him.”

            Gallagher should have disqualified the champ but instead remained a passive bystander. Dempsey—who wouldn’t remember leaving or climbing back in the ring—was groggy, swaying with his chin unprotected, yet Firpo was so surprised to discover the fight was still on, and so weakened himself, that he was unable to land the final big blow. The brief letup allowed Dempsey to tie Firpo up until the round ended.

            After the bell, Dempsey prompted some boos when he threw a few extra weak punches, but he was unaware of the bell, unaware of the chaos around him, unaware of pretty much everything.

            This fight was so action-packed that even the scene in the corner was exciting. Dempsey’s manager Jack Kearns yelled at everyone, asking where the smelling salts were; he couldn’t hear trainer Jerry Ludvadis shouting back that the salts were in Kearns’s own pocket. Kearns instead tried rousing the fighter with a bucket of cold water over his head, and when Ludvadis reached for Kearns to pull the salts out, Kearns, not understanding the trainer’s actions, punched Ludvadis. Kearns finally found the salts, and they helped Dempsey snap to .º.º. kind of: thinking he’d been through a war, he innocently asked what round it was, only to find out he’d made it through only one.

            “I was seeing double,” Dempsey said later. “When the bell rang, I went out and hit every Firpo I saw.”

            Firpo seemed revived, at least enough to rear back for another right. But Dempsey had that move read and stepped in with a left. They seemed to wrestle a bit, but soon Firpo was back on the canvas. Again he got up, this time with blood gushing from his face.

            Firpo missed a wild right, then desperately tried clinching, but Dempsey was the very definition of relentless. He tore free and fired a left uppercut to Firpo’s jaw and a right to his face. The mighty Argentinean toppled. This time it was for good. Firpo rolled over onto his stomach but couldn’t pull himself up. At 58 seconds of Round 2, the count reached 10.

            The fight raised a hue and cry from preachers and editorials denouncing the primitive blood lust it incited, and Dempsey (who rushed over to help Firpo up afterwards) was ripped for unethical, even treacherous behavior. (Ironically, in the aftermath the rules would be strengthened to force boxers to return to the neutral corner during a knockdown; in 1927 Dempsey would lose the famous “Long Count” fight to Gene Tunney because he forgot to retreat after flooring Tunney and the ref refused to count until Dempsey moved, giving Tunney at least an extra four or five seconds. Though Dempsey lost that fight, he gained new stature for his dignity in defeat.)

            Yet many prominent writers, like Grantland Rice and Nat Fleischer, lambasted Dempsey’s tactics while gushing effusively about the fight itself: Rice called it the “most sensational” fight he had ever seen, while Fleischer wrote that neither “Shakespeare nor Shaw could have constructed a greater drama.”

            By bravely withstanding such an assault, Firpo became a hero, and his tour of Latin and South America with his film reaped a fortune for him when it created demand for Firpo’s Fedoras, Firpo’s Fantasy Perfume, and other products. Streets and soccer teams were named for him throughout Latin and South America. He retired soon after, a millionaire. Meanwhile, despite the criticism of Dempsey’s tactics and the fact that even he admitted that Firpo rightfully should have won when he flew out of the ring, his stature was enhanced by the bout too. Dempsey had responded to his greatest challenge with undeniable greatness, and he became nearly equal to Babe Ruth as an American hero of folktale proportions.

            From Dempsey through Muhammad Ali in the 1970s, boxing would flourish for five decades­—paralleling the heyday of its working-class fan base—and New York would be the venue for more memorable and important fights than any other city. Dempsey’s appeal had been growing since the Willard fight, but it was the Dempsey-Firpo fight that made the champ an icon and hauled boxing up near baseball at the top of the sports heap.