A New Book on Jack Dempsey is Worth a Look

But certain new arrivals sometimes are promptly moved to the front of the line, which was the case with The Million Dollar Man: Jack Dempsey

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Published

7 years ago

November 7, 2017

Bernard Fernandez

My personal library contains hundreds of books, dozens of which this voracious reader has yet to get around to. There is, after all, only so much time in any given day to spend large chunks of it curling up with a mystery novel or biography of a notable person. But certain new arrivals sometimes are promptly moved to the front of the line, which was the case with The Million Dollar Man: Jack Dempsey, authored by Thomas Brennan, which came in the mail recently with a written request from the publisher (Regent Press of Berkeley, CA) that I kindly review it for the edification of would-be purchasers.

Well, OK. The life and times of William Harrison Dempsey – the “Manassa Mauler’s” birth name – is of such import that it has been covered at length in previous literary ventures, including Round by Round, Dempsey’s autobiography written in conjunction with contributor Myron M. Stearns, and Dempsey, again written by the great man himself with input from Jack’s stepdaughter, Barbara Piatelli Dempsey. There aren’t wide swaths of untilled soil in The Million Dollar Man (a reference to Dempsey being the attraction in the first five fights to generate million-dollar live gates), and some of Brennan’s prose tends to be excessively flowery, as was frequently the case with such legendary early-20^th-century sports writers as Paul Gallico, Damon Runyan and Grantland Rice, inflatable garden slide whose ruminations on the most compelling sports superstar (along with New York Yankees slugger Babe Ruth) of the Roaring ’20s include descriptions of the punches Jack delivered as “lusty cracks” and “wallops.” But a bit of excess is perhaps allowable if the lead character is larger than life, and the nearly century-old past from which Dempsey emerged serves as prologue. Bits and pieces of the enthralling road traveled by Dempsey were played out, in one form or another, by such later heroes of the ring (or anti-heroes, depending on one’s point of view) as Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier and Mike Tyson.

I admittedly remain a moth drawn to Dempsey’s flame because of his connection, however tenuous, to my all-time favorite fighter, a quite unrenowned welterweight whose professional record was 4-1-1, with just one victory by knockout. But Jack Fernandez, like Jack Dempsey, came into this world with a different birth name. He departed this mortal coil at age 74 as Bernard J. Fernandez Sr. on March 4, 1994, my father’s nickname having been conferred upon him as an amateur by someone who compared his boxing style – crouching, bobbing and weaving, always coming forward – to that of the infinitely more celebrated former heavyweight champion. Some yellowed clippings of Dad’s fighting days variously describe him as a “left hook specialist” and a “wild-hooking slugger.” I wish I had video of him in action, but I do have a poster from 1944 in which his name appears right under that of main-eventer Archie Moore.

But I digress. Gallico once described Dempsey (and this particular passage is not in Brennan’s book) thusly: “His weaving, shuffling style of approach suggested the stalking of a jungle animal. He had a smoldering truculence on his face and hatred in his eyes.” Brennan supports the notion of Dempsey as predator, claiming that he “singlehandedly brought shock and awe to the sport of boxing like no one before or since … The Manassa Mauler backed down to no man in the ring. He stalked his opponents much the same way a tiger stalks his prey.”

Many of the better fighters from every era arise from abject poverty, and Dempsey was no exception. He was the ninth of Hyrum and Celia Dempsey’s 13 children, and perhaps the only one predestined to follow a particular career path. Before Jack was born, his mother had read and re-read a book given to her by an old peddler, Life of a 19^th Century Gladiator, supposedly authored by John L. Sullivan but no doubt assisted in no small part by a ghost writer. Celia told Jack years later that, before he was born, she wanted her next male child to be the next John L. Sullivan.

In truth, Harry – which is what the rest of the family, which relocated often in search of better financial opportunities, called him – was preceded as a boxer by older brother Bernie, who for reasons unstated billed himself as Jack Dempsey. But Bernie had a liability, a glass jaw that precluded him from ever making it big as a fighter. In the hope of avoiding the pugilistic fate that had befallen Bernie, Harry – then going by the nom de guerre of “Kid Blackie” in mostly unsanctioned (and unrecorded for historical purposes) bouts – chewed rosin gum to strengthen his jaw muscles and soaked his face in beef brine to toughen his skin and make it less susceptible to cuts.

“Who knows how many fights I had between 1911 and 1916?” the former Kid Blackie said years later, after he had officially switched his ring (and legal) name to Jack Dempsey in tribute to the retired Bernie. “The record books don’t contain them, and I couldn’t name the number or identify all the faces today if my life depended on it. I’d guess a hundred. But that’s still a guess. Whatever the number was, it wasn’t enough to support me. To fill the gaps and my belly, I was a dishwasher, a miner or anything else you could dig up in Nevada, Utah, Colorado and Idaho – I dug potatoes and beets, punched cattle, shined shoes and was a porter in the Hotel Utah in Salt Lake City.”

In search of more and better-paying fights, and to capture the attention of nationally influential sports writers, Dempsey relocated to New York City. He did have some spot success – Damon Runyon was the first columnist to refer to him as the “Manassa Mauler,” a reference to the Colorado mining town in which he was born, and a sobriquet which eventually took root with the public – but the constant struggle for recognition wore on him and he moved back to his comfort zone out west.

Except that Dempsey’s comfort zone wasn’t any more comforting than New York. He was still scuffling along, considering quitting the ring, when a fortuitous turn of events – a barroom brawl – essentially turned his life around. He was having a drink in a saloon in Oakland, Calif., when he noticed several men attacking another bar patron, who was by far getting the worst of it. Jack went to the aid of the customer being pummeled, driving off the assailants. The guy he saved from taking a more severe thrashing was Jack “Doc” Kearns, a boxing manager, who figured anyone that handy with his fists had to have boxing potential. He immediately offered to take his accidental savior under his wing.

Kearns might have been many things, not all of them good – Dempsey later claimed Kearns had shortchanged him on several purses, and the two had a bitter falling-out that led to Kearns filing a lawsuit against his onetime meal ticket – but their association soon began to pay major dividends, with Jack rising to the position of the top-ranked heavyweight contender to champion Jess Willard after he starched the previous No. 1, Fred Fulton, in a mere 18 seconds on July 27, 1918.

But Willard, nicknamed “The Pottawatomie Giant” (for his hometown of Pottawatomie, Kan.) at 6-6½ and 245 pounds, dismissed Dempsey as too small to pose much of a threat. Kearns and Dempsey were obliged to embark on a nationwide tour in which Dempsey registered five consecutive first-round knockouts in early 1919 while constantly chirping for Willard to come out of hiding and face him. Given the immense size difference – the 6-foot-1 Dempsey was scarcely 180 pounds then – there was some concern that Willard might lethally dispose of the mouthy challenger, as he had six years earlier when another opponent, John “Bull” Young, died of a brain hemorrhage a day after he was knocked unconscious. Willard even asked Kearns to provide written assurance that no attempt would be made to file charges if he did unto Dempsey what he had done to Young.

America was still not that far from its frontier days when the Willard-Dempsey fight finally took place on July 4, 1919, in Toledo, Ohio. Legendary Old West lawmen Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp, serving as human metal detectors, were charged with the responsibility of collecting guns and knives from armed fans before they could enter the outrageously hot stadium.

Willard was correct, in a sense; a slaughter did indeed take place. But it was not Dempsey’s health and well-being that were in jeopardy, it was Willard’s after the ferocious aspirant to the title – perhaps spurred on by the knowledge that Kearns had bet $10,000 of their money (at 10-to-1 odds) on him to win by first-round knockout – beat the champion bloody in the process of flooring him seven times in that opening stanza. Willard was counted out by referee Ollie Pecord after the last of those knockdowns, but the bell sounded just prior to the toll of 10, obliging the battered Willard to submit himself to more punishment while Kearns and Dempsey missed out by a couple of ticks on $100,000 additional income on the wager. Willard did not come out for the fourth round, having gone down twice more in round three.

Handsome in a rugged, outdoors kind of way with his chiseled physique, jet-black hair, bushy eyebrows, piercing eyes and mesmerizing air of malevolence, Dempsey, already on the way there, was instantly confirmed as the USA’s new king of the ring following his beatdown of the favored Willard. Damon Runyon, ever the wordsmith, wrote that Willard’s submission came “just as the bell was about to toss him into the fourth round of a mangling at the paws of Jack Dempsey, the young mountain lion in human form, from the Sangre de Cristo Hills of Colorado.”

But those placed upon a pedestal learn fast that the fall from grace can be swift and damaging. Dempsey was soon thereafter denounced as a “slacker” after reporters learned he had not served in the U.S. military during World War I, prompting Grantland Rice of the New York Tribune to temper his praise of the new titlist’s ferociousness inside the ropes with his presumed lack of patriotism outside of them.

“Let us have no illusions about our new heavyweight champion,” Rice wrote. “He is a marvel in the ring, the greatest hitting machine even the old-timers have ever seen. But he isn’t the world’s champion fighter. Not by a margin of 50,000 men who either stood or were even ready to stand the test of cold steel and exploding shell for anything from six cents to a dollar a day.”

By and by, Dempsey’s undeniable charisma and crowd-pleasing savagery in plying his trade won over that portion of a nation, and the world, that would have preferred him to have included a Sergeant York chapter in his thickening book of pugilistic accomplishments. During a trip to Europe he literally had to fight off female admirers, and his popularity soared to a point that an envious Babe Ruth reportedly considered taking up boxing before coming to his senses and sticking with baseball.

A four-round destruction of France’s Georges Carpentier was the first of five fights involving Dempsey to have generated million-dollar live gates, to be followed by those against Luis Angel Firpo, Jack Sharkey and the two losing matchups with Gene Tunney, his stylistic opposite.

Where Dempsey had always fought to win as quickly and emphatically as possible, a boiling pot of explosive energy always on the verge of eruption, Tunney, a former Marine, was a scholarly type who, despite a decent KO percentage, considered boxing to be something of a sweaty but nonetheless intellectual pursuit.

“I am here to train for a boxing contest, not a fight,” Tunney said before the rematch with Dempsey on Sept. 22, 1927, the notorious “Long Count” bout. “I don’t like fighting. Never did. But I’m free to admit that I like boxing.”

Such comments by Tunney did not set well with fans that preferred Dempsey’s familiar go-for-the-jugular aggression. Gallico claimed that Tunney’s image was that of a “priggish, snobbish, bookish fellow, too proud to associate with common prizefighters.”

By the time an aging Dempsey, by now accustomed to taking long breaks between fights, entered into his fire-and-ice meetings with Tunney, however, his internal blaze was already set to low flame. Even a jungle cat might be capable of fighting mad only so long. Even before his epic slugfest with the much larger Firpo, in which the Argentine went down nine times and Dempsey twice in two rounds, the champion spoke wistfully of the changes brought about when the desperation of poverty is replaced by the comfort of wealth and privilege.

“Maybe I can’t take as much now as I took then,” Dempsey said. “It’s much easier you know and more fun fighting your way to the top and defending it. Being champion isn’t as great as it seemed before I was champion. I have more money and softer living, but there are more worries and troubles and cares than I ever dreamed of before. The glory and even the money don’t mean as much as they did in the days when you belonged only to yourself – not the public.”

Now, regarding those parallels between Dempsey and those who would later fill his role and his shoes as elite heavyweight champions. That crouching, swarming, no-reverse-gear, left-hook-heavy attack? “Smokin” Joe Frazier fits the bill.

What about the controversy and loss of fan support that arose from Dempsey’s lack of military service during wartime? Sounds a lot like Muhammad Ali staying on the sidelines during Vietnam, doesn’t it?

Dempsey’s bitter split with his longtime manager, Kearns? How about the unpleasant professional separation of Mike Tyson from his disliked co-manager Bill Cayton after the two father figures in Iron Mike’s life, Cus D’Amato and Jimmy Jacobs, passed away?

Nor were Dempsey’s marital difficulties lastingly unique. His first wife, Maxine, was a prostitute 16 years his senior. His second wife, Estelle Taylor, was a stunningly beautiful model and actress who detested her husband’s boxing friends and considered them to be low-class and beneath her station. Tyson’s first wife, Robin Givens, apparently didn’t much care for anything about him except for the lavish lifestyle he was able to provide her.

Fortunately for Dempsey, his post-boxing life was as rich and fulfilling, in its own way, as had been his ring career. Not only did he enjoy a long and successful run as a New York restaurateur, but he served in the Coast Guard during World War II and was part of the American assault on Okinawa in 1945, when he was 49. Doing so mollified whatever holdovers were still resentful about his non-participation in the so-called war to end all wars.

If there is a lingering knock on Dempsey, it is the lack of black opponents on his otherwise sterling resume. He never did swap punches with such highly capable men of color as Sam Langford and Harry Wills, a taint that still clings in part to his legacy and is a shameful reminder of the bigotry prevalent in America in the early 20^th century. It should be noted, however, that Dempsey urged promoter Tex Rickard to arrange a fight with Wills, but Rickard either was unwilling or unable to do so because of the tense racial politics of that time. Too many managers and promoters remembered the race riots that erupted throughout the country after Jack Johnson, a black man with swagger, conquered James J. Jeffries in 1910.

Dempsey was 87 when he died on May 31, 1983, but he remains a pivotal figure in the first golden age of American sports in the 1920s, a heyday also marked by Ruth, football’s Red Grange, golf’s Bobby Jones and tennis’ Bill Tilden. If you think Tom Brady and LeBron James are big deals today, beamed into your living room or den in high-definition color with regularity by the miracle of satellite communications, imagine yourself and a dozen friends hunched around an upright radio, listening to an excited announcer describe the majesty of a Ruth home run or a Dempsey knockout.

The very inaccessibility of such athletes in the 1920s stamped them as wondrous, almost mystical individuals. Were they mortal men, hewn of flesh and bone? Or did some elixir of the gods course through their veins, enabling them to extend the boundaries of athletic capability to limits once thought unimaginable?

The Million Dollar Man might not be a long (262 pages) or classic read, but its subject matter will grab anyone who wants to know more about one of the fight game’s most enduring and cherished legends. It might make a nice Christmas present for any fight fan willing to open an important portal to boxing’s past.

Check out more boxing news on video at The Boxing Channel

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Avila Perspective, Chap. 316: Art of the Deal in Boxing and More

Published

7 hours ago

March 6, 2025

David A. Avila

Avila-Perspective-Chap-316-Art-of-the-Deal-in-Boxing-and-More

So, they want to save boxing?

A group of guys with recent ties to the sport of boxing and bags of money suddenly believe they can save a sport that is older than any other sport since the dawn of mankind.

Boxing is the oldest sport.

When cavemen roamed the planet, you can believe one tribe bet another tribe their guy could whip the other guy. Thus began the sport of boxing. There was no baseball, soccer or horse racing.

Even the invention of the wheel was still a few generations away when men were duking it out with other men for sport.

Throughout history mentions of one man fighting another man without arms are written in the Tales of Ulysses and other literary references.

Boxing will never die. Period.

Here is the reason why?

Boxing requires only two men in their underwear with no weapons and no requirement of classes in jujitsu, kickboxing, wrestling or advance training facilities. You can prepare in your backyard with one heavy bag and a pair of boxing gloves. It’s simple.

MMA, on the other hand, requires money.

Boxing is for the poor. Any kid can walk into a gym and begin training. When they become adults, then they start paying to use the gym.

Don’t let people fool you and tell you “boxing is dying.”

People have been saying those same words since John L. Sullivan in the late 1800s. You can look it up.

The phrase “boxing is dying,” is said by people who want you to pay them money to save it. Kind of sounds like the guy currently sitting in the White House who is going to save America by firing Americans from their jobs and allowing Russia to take over Ukraine.

Don’t believe these people.

Boxing does not need saving.

Why would Dana White, who has stated for decades that MMA is bigger than boxing, though no MMA fighter can equal the purses of a Saul “Canelo” Alvarez or Tyson Fury, why is he involved in boxing?

There is big money to be made in boxing, especially with internet gambling sites being allowed all over the world. And boxing is popular all over the world. MMA is not.

More people know who Canelo is than UFC’s Alex Pereira.

I respect the UFC fighters. They put in hard work and battle injuries throughout their careers. But MMA is simply not as big as boxing. The purses of MMA fighters at the top level don’t come close to boxing’s top money earners.

Why did Conor McGregor, Nate Diaz and others quickly switch to boxing when called?

The money in boxing is much bigger.

Follow the money.

NYC

A rumble is planned for Times Square in New York City.

Vatos from Southern California are fighting dudes from Nevada and Brooklyn. Sounds like a script from the Gangs of New York.

Where is Leonardo DiCaprio when you need him?

Ryan “KingRy” Garcia (24-1, 20 KOs) will meet Rollie Romero (16-2, 13 KOs) in a welterweight match set for May 2, on Times Square in mid-Manhattan. This is one of three marquee bouts planned to be streamed on DAZN.

Others matched will be Arnold Barboza (32-0, 11 KOs) versus super lightweight titlist Teofimo Lopez (21-1, 13 KOs), and Devin Haney (31-0, 15 KOs) against Jose Carlos Ramirez (29-2, 18 KOs) in a welterweight contest.

This is the proposed match by The Ring magazine backed by Turki Alalshikh who along with Golden Boy Promotions and Matchroom Boxing are sponsoring this fight card.

It was also announced that Alalshikh along with TKO Group Holdings and Sela are forming a promotion company.

TKO owns UFC and WWE.

SoCal Fights

Southern California will be busy with boxing cards this weekend.

This Thursday, March 6, is Golden Boy Promotions with a boxing card featuring Manny Flores (19-1, 15 KOs) versus Jorge Leyva (18-3, 13 KOs) in a super bantamweight match at Fantasy Springs Casino. DAZN will stream the boxing card from Indio, California.

On Saturday, March 8, the Fox Theater in Pomona, California hosts a boxing card featuring super middleweights Ruben Cazales (10-0) vs Adam Diu Abdulhamid (18-16). Also, super featherweights Michael Bracamontes (10-2-1) meets Eugene Lagos (16-9-3) at the historic venue promoted by House of Pain Boxing.

On Saturday March 8, Elite Boxing hosts a boxing card at Salesian High in East Los Angeles featuring East L.A. native Merari Vivar (8-0) against Sarah Click (2-8-1) and several other fights.

On Saturday, March 8, an event hosted by House of Champions features top contenders Joet Gonzalez (26-4) vs Arnold Khegai (22-1-1) in a featherweight main event at Thunder Studios in Long Beach, Calif.

A Big All-Female Card in London

On Friday, March 7, the historic Royal Albert Hall in the Kensington borough of London will host an all-female card with two world title fights including a unification fight in the welterweight division.

Natasha Jonas (16-2-1) and Lauren Price (8-0) meet 10 rounds for the IBF, WBC, and WBA belts.

Jonas, 40, the current WBC and IBF titlist, recently defeated Ivana Habazin and before that edged past Mikaela Mayer in a win that could have gone the other way very easily. She will be facing Price, an Olympic gold medalist and current WBA and IBO titlist.

Price, 30, hails from Wales and has an aggressive pressure style that saw her win a battle between punchers with a third-round knockout of Colombia’s Bexcy Mateus this past December in Liverpool. Before that she defeated the always tough Jessica McCaskill.

In the co-main event, lightweights Caroline Dubois (10-0-1) and Bo Mi Re Shin (18-2-3) meet for the WBC world title.

Me Re Shin, 30, fights out of South Korea and has knockout power. She was one of only two fighters to stop Venezuela’s Ana Maria Lozano who has 38 pro fights. That says something. She lost a split decision to Delfine Persoon in Belgium. That really says something.

Dubois had two competitive fights, first, against Jessica Camara that ended in a technical draw due to a clash of heads. Before that she defeated Maira Moneo. Dubois has very good talent and is still young at 24. Is she ready for Mi Re Shin?

Times Square photo credit: JP Yim

Fights to watch:

Thurs., March 6: DAZN, Manny Flores (19-1) vs. Jorge Leyva (18-3)

Fri., March 7: free on DAZN, Lucas Bahdi (18-0) vs. Ryan James Racaza (15-0)

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A Wide-Ranging Conversation on the Ills of Boxing with Author/Journalist Sean Nam

Published

1 day ago

March 5, 2025

Rick Assad

A-Wide-Ranging-Conversation-on-the-Ills-of-Boxing-with-Author/Journalist-Sean-Nam

During the last decade covering boxing, Sean Nam has tackled, without fear or favor, many interesting and thought-provoking subjects.

Nam’s feature on Ukrainian ringmaster Vasiliy Lomachenko, which ran in May 2024 in The Sunday Long Read, falls into this category. “I had been hearing whispers, mainly from Internet chatter, that Lomachenko had something of a contested reputation in his native Ukraine,” said Nam, who found it curious that Lomachenko draped the municipal flag of his hometown over his shoulders rather than the national flag of his country after defeating Richard Commey at Madison Square Garden. “[Those whispers] piqued my interest because that was not the narrative boxing consumers in the United States were given. ESPN, which has long showcased Lomachenko, ran a spot touting his bonafides as a beloved war hero.

“I figured someone from our media establishment, or whatever remains of that shambolic, penny-click bazaar, would write it up, but a year passed, and I didn’t come across anything close to attempting to dissect what was going on with Lomachenko and his country’s people.

“The response [to my story] was overwhelmingly positive. The general reaction was one of shock. I even had a lot of native Ukrainians thank me for shedding light on an admittedly angst-ridden situation; many of them saw their frustrations with Lomachenko reflected in the piece. I am eager to see how it all plays out for Lomachenko, who seems to be on the verge of retirement.”

At the urging of a fellow boxing writer, Nam, whose work has appeared in such periodicals as (British) Boxing News, USA Today, The Sweet Science, and Boxing Scene, found time to write a well-received first book, “Murder On Federal Street: Tyrone Everett, The Black Mafia, Fixed Fights And The Last Golden Age Of Philadelphia Boxing.”

“My close friend and mentor, the writer Carlos Acevedo, suggested it one day in an attempt to get me to write a book,” he said. “Carlos is also the reason I started writing about boxing in the first place.”

“Tyrone Everett is a more or less obscure name in boxing history, but the fact he was part of not just one, but two unsettling tragedies in the sport makes him a standout case – and this is a sport in which there is no shortage of sad stories,” he said. “Here was an opportunity, in other words, to present a story that had legitimate intrigue and, crucially, had not been over-chronicled.”

Philadelphia, which spawned such fighters as Joe Frazier, Bernard Hopkins, Bennie Briscoe, Matthew Saad Muhammad, Danny Garcia and Jaron “Boots” Ennis, has long been a hotbed of boxing talent.

“For a brief spell in the mid-1970s, Everett was a hot property on the sports scene of Philadelphia. His lone title shot, in 1976, against Alfredo Escalera, has long been considered one of the greatest ring injustices: Everett lost a decision despite seemingly out-boxing the Puerto Rican champion for the majority of the 15 rounds,” Nam said. “Noted ringside observers like Harold Lederman had Everett winning handily on their scorecards.”

Nam, who double-majored in English and philosophy at a liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, went on: “Then there was the matter of Everett’s tragic death, six months later, at the hands of his live-in girlfriend, Carolyn McKendrick, who shot him in the face with a pistol. Everett was only 24 years old. The ensuing trial was a tabloid circus. Everett’s sexuality came under heavy scrutiny, as the lone witness to the shooting was a gay, crossdressing drug pusher, whom McKendrick and Everett had allegedly been in bed with on the morning of the shooting.…But Everett’s outré sexual habits were far from the only issues that were being dangled daily to the public. He was also accused of beating McKendrick and dealing drugs himself. In my book, I try to rectify some of the misconceptions that have come down to us over the years from that trial, while also playing up some of the street talk (i.e. the infamous Black Mafia) that most media at the time had snubbed.”

The fight game is a curious suitor but one that can entangle even the best and smartest of us.

“I suppose on some elemental level I enjoy watching people getting punched in the face, to put it somewhat glibly. (I don’t feel any need to over-intellectualize this.) If a poor schlub is getting the tar beat out of him by the proverbial favorite in the name of “good matchmaking,” I don’t see much there to enjoy, but when you have two skilled, evenly matched fighters, sometimes what happens inside the ropes approaches the sublime.

“A corollary to this is upsets. Since so much of boxing is engineered to produce outcomes favorable to the house fighter, when upsets happen, they almost seem like a miracle – a momentary glitch in the machine. Like when Andy Ruiz dethroned Anthony Joshua in 2019. Or consider a far more humble proceeding, an eight-round contest that took place this past year between Kurt Scoby and Dakota Linger.”

Nam talked about the particulars of that super lightweight bout.

“Scoby, the clear-cut A-side, was a ballyhooed prospect touted by his veteran promoter Lou DiBella as a future world champion and Linger was a little-known ham-and-egger from West Virginia, as crude and unheralded as they come,” he stated. “But Linger ended up stopping Scoby, seemingly with nothing more than a decent chin, above-average power, and stubbornness. Guys like Linger cut through all the hype and bull.”

Long before Las Vegas was the boxing capital of the world, New York City held that title.

“At risk of sounding like a curmudgeon, boxing in New York City has not been elite for a long time. It’s a joke, really. You can see this decline in both the amateur and pro ranks. (Indeed, the problem is interconnected.) The Daily News ditched the Golden Gloves brand and promoters seldom stage fights here anymore. By my count there were only 16 fights in the entire state of New York in 2023.

“Anecdotally, I’ve had conversations with a few amateur coaches who tell me that there has been a demonstrative drop-off in the talent level of the average open-class amateur boxer compared to even just 10 or 20 years ago,” said Nam. “This goes back to what the historian Mike Silver argues persuasively in his book, ‘The Arc Of Boxing: The Rise And Decline Of The Sweet Science,’ that there needs to be a culture and industry in place for boxing to thrive, and we simply do not have that anymore. What drives this home are the ubiquitous, white-collar boutique boxing gyms that have popped up around the city. In the neoliberal hellscape of Manhattan today, there is no place for Jimmy Glenn’s Times Square Gym or Cus D’Amato’s Gramercy Gym.”

For the most part, boxing is doing well but there are always issues that prevent the sport from fully flourishing.

“For years promoters and their apparatchiks insisted that boxing was on the upswing. There was Premier Boxing Champions and its audacious play to bring boxing back to network television. There was Top Rank and their own rights deal with ESPN. And there was the UK-based Matchroom, which barged its way into the United States market with the backing of DAZN, the streaming platform that pledged a billion dollars to this crusade. All three outfits have essentially failed to see their initial prognostications pan out. PBC is running (underwhelming) shows exclusively on Amazon Prime, Top Rank seems to be winding down its deal with ESPN and has few if any fighters on its rosters that are legitimate stars, and DAZN (along with Matchroom), after bleeding more than two billion dollars, shifted its priorities to the UK. Golden Boy, which also has a deal with DAZN, seems to be one Ryan Garcia meltdown away from tottering into oblivion.

“Now we’re seeing similar pronouncements made about Saudi Arabian chieftain Turki Alalshikh, who has quickly established himself as the savior du jour.

Major fights have been made under Alalshikh’s dictates, but is boxing healthy?

I fail to see how a sport that is being artificially propped up by a totalitarian state, with numerous human rights abuses can be considered healthy,” said Nam. “Once the spigot is turned off – and I assure you, it most certainly will – the sport will be worse off than before.”

In year’s past, there was one champion for each weight class. Now there are multiple boxers holding titles in one weight class.

“Of course there are too many champions in a single division. It is also true that this problem, diagnosed and groused about by every forum poster, blogger, journalist, and talking head, is the biggest fig leaf in the sport. Of all the jeremiads one could come up with, the ones leveled at the alphabet soup organizations are the most fatuous and exist at this point none other than to flatter the fancies of would-be moralizers,” Nam said.

“Sanctioning bodies are a problem, sure, but they are simply a symptom of a larger predicament, the sport’s inherent fragmentation. I don’t mean to sound fatalistic, but boxing’s problems are not going to go away because the WBA decides to do away with their “interim” championship belts or that every major promotional outfit starts to adhere to the rankings of The Ring magazine.”

Nam continued: “A couple of years ago I broke a story that examined the conduct between the WBA and a promoter. Using legal transcripts and business documents, I showed how, by all appearances, a promoter was paying the sanctioning body to gain favorable rankings for his fighters in a brazen pay-to-play scheme,” he said. “What happened? In any other sport there may have been a reckoning of sorts. Maybe 30 years ago the federal government might have given this a looksee. I was informed that a remonstration of sorts was coming my way. But the WBA to my knowledge never ended up responding to the points made in the article. That turned out to be a canny move. Keeping quiet actually helped defang the story. The episode highlighted a few things, chiefly of which is that, in the absence of a legitimate judicial apparatus in boxing, there are simply no consequences in the sport.”

Perhaps someone to oversee boxing would help, but this isn’t likely to happen.

“Boxing needs more than a commissioner to cure it of its myriad chronic illnesses. Would it help? Maybe. But I have a hard time believing that any meaningful form of organization will materialize in the sport anytime soon, in part because all the key industry players, i.e. the promoters, managers, and network executives, are not interested in reforming it to begin with,” Nam said. “The appeal of the sport has to do with its fundamentally decentralized nature, the fact that there is no barrier to entry and that, in theory, anyone with cash to burn and some patience, can end up with a staggering windfall.

“Ironically, boxing, despite its increasingly marginalized status, still remains a capitalist juggernaut, capable of generating obscene sums of money in a single night, with very little regulatory oversight. It’s a breeding ground for lowlifes, not surprisingly. I don’t see any meaningful change happening in the sport on the structural level. Even though there are a ton of things the individual state commissions can do to shore up the sport, that really only goes for the strong ones, like New York or California. Promoters can simply bop over to a more lenient one, a regulatory backwater like Oklahoma or Florida. That’s exactly what Eddie Hearn did recently with Conor Benn.”

This is what boxing is and what boxing does, and despite its various and sundry problems, it still captures our imagination.

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Boxing Odds and Ends: Mikaela Mayer on Jonas vs. Price and More

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2 days ago

March 4, 2025

Arne K. Lang

Boxing-Odds-and-Ends-Mikaela-Mayer-on-Jonas-vs-Price-and-More

The marquee match on this week’s fight docket takes place on Friday at London’s historic Royal Albert Hall where Natasha Jonas (16-2-1, 9 KOs) meets Lauren Price (9-0, 2 KOs). At stake are three of the four meaningful pieces of the female world welterweight title.

Price, an Olympic gold medalist in Tokyo and arguably the best all-around female athlete ever from Wales, holds the WBC and IBF versions of the title. Liverpool’s Jonas, unbeaten in her last seven since losing a narrow decision to Katie Taylor, holds the WBA belt.

Southern California native Mikaela Mayer owns the other piece of the 147-pound puzzle. If Mayer can get over her next hump – a rematch with Sandy Ryan – she would be in line to fight the Price-Jonas winner for the undisputed title. She and Ryan will collide on the 29^th of this month on a Top Rank card at the Fontainebleau in Las Vegas.

We caught up with Mikaela yesterday (Monday, Feb. 3) after she had finished a strenuous workout at the DLX Gym in Las Vegas to get her thoughts on the Jonas-Price encounter. Mikaela has a history with Jonas. They fought in January of last year on Jonas’s turf in Liverpool and Mayer came out on the short end of a very close and somewhat controversial decision.

Price is favored in the 4/1 range. To the oddsmakers, it matters greatly that there is a 10-year gap in their ages. Natasha Jonas turned 40 last year. However, Mayer, who would tell you that female boxers as a rule peak later than men (they take less damage because they don’t hit as hard and they absorb fewer punches fighting two-minute rounds) believes that the odds are askew.

“In my mind, this is a 50/50 fight,” she says. “Price’s former opponents were right there to be hit. Jonas doesn’t have a lot of wear and tear and I believe she has better spatial awareness inside the ring. The key will be if she can handle Price’s movement. I can see Price winning but, in my mind, she is no shoo-in. I think it will be a close fight.”

Carson Jones

Bobby Dobbs, the former manager of Carson Jones, has set up a Go Fund Me page in the name of Jones’ mother to defray the boxer’s funeral expenses. The Oklahoma City journeyman, active as recently as 2023, passed away on Feb. 28 at age 38 following an operation for achalasia, a rare swallowing disorder.

We are reminded that among Jones’ 38 wins was a match that originally went into the books as a “no-decision.” Nowadays, it’s no big surprise when a victory is amended to a “no-decision” – the adjudication usually comes after the fact because of a failed drug test – but the opposite is very uncommon.

The bout in question happened on May 5, 2011 in a hotel ballroom in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Jones was defending his USBA welterweight title against Ohio campaigner Michael Clark.

In the second round, Jones landed a punch that hit Clark in the family jewels and Clark wasn’t able to continue. The Oklahoma commission overturned the “no-decision” upon learning that Clark had forgot to bring his groin protector.

Fighter of the Month

The TSS Fighter of the Month for February is Keyshawn Davis who unseated WBO lightweight champion Denys Berinchyk on Bob Arum’s Valentine’s Day card before a sold-out crowd at Madison Square Garden’s Hulu Theater. It was the first world title for Davis, the former Olympic silver medalist who had the noted trainer Brian “Bomac” McIntyre in his corner.

Davis was a solid favorite. At age 36, his Ukrainian opponent had a lot of mileage on his odometer (Berinchyk purportedly had in the vicinity of 400 amateur fights). However, Berinchyk was also undefeated (19-0) and wasn’t expected to be such an easy mark.

Davis decked Berinchyk with a left hook to the liver in the third round and ended the contest with the same punch, only harder, in the next frame.

A pre-fight story in Forbes called Keyshawn Davis a mega-star on the cusp. It remains to be seen if he has the personality to transcend the sport, but one thing that’s certain is that he has made great gains since his Oct. 14, 2023 bout in Rosenberg, Texas with Nahir Albright. That fight went the full “10” and although Davis won, it transmuted into a “no-decision” after he tested positive for marijuana, a substance banned by the hidebound Texas commission.

Ketchel

A note from matchmaker, booking agent, and boxing historian Bruce Kielty informs us that the Polish Historical Society of Grand Rapids, Michigan, is $1,025 short of the $2,000 required to produce a new concrete base at the tombstone of Stanley Ketchel at Grand Rapids Holy Cross Cemetery.

Ketchel, the fabled “Michigan Assassin,” was born Stanislaw Kiecel in Grand Rapids in 1886. A two-time world middleweight champion, he was the premier knockout artist of his era, scoring 46 of his 49 wins inside the distance.

Ketchel was murdered in 1910 while staying at the ranch of a wealthy friend near Springfield, Missouri. The great sportswriter John Lardner revisited the incident and Ketchel’s tumultuous career in a widely anthologized 1954 story for True magazine. Lardner’s opening sentence is considered by some aficionados to be the best lede ever in a sports story: “Stanley Ketchel was twenty-four years old when he was fatally shot in the back by the common-law husband of the lady who was cooking his breakfast.”

The collar of Ketchel’s tombstone is cracked, weather-damaged, and falling apart. Any donation, however small, is welcomed. Contributions made by check should include the note “Ketchel Monument.” The address is Polish Historical Society, P.O. Box 1844, Grand Rapids, MI 49501.

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