The ep04 Jack Dempsey The Man From Maumee Bay

It's time for yours truly, Jimmy Powers with another Grantland Rice story. Here, this is Jimmy Powers once again with another installment from the Grantland Rice story, the two mold in the shouting. And following the same pattern as I have in preceding programs, I will continue the story in first person.

One June day in 1919 in Toledo, Ohio, off the hot and steamy shores of Mommy Bay, I came upon the greatest star of the offense in the boxing game. His name was Jack Dempsey. When I first met Dempsey, he was hard as steel from weeks of conditioning under a hot sun.

He was burnt purple and trained down to 180 pounds for his fight with champion Jess Willard. Dempsey was then 24 years old, keen in life, and almost as fast as Ty Cobb. Looking at these two opposites in 1919, it was hard to give Dempsey a chance.

Slightly over six feet and 180, Dempsey was a pygmy compared to Willard who outweighed Jack by some 70 pounds and stood six feet six inches in his stocking feet. Well, next day when the first round opened, Dempsey circled Willard some 25 or 30 seconds. He was a tiger circling an ox. Finally, Willard couldn't

wait any longer. He jabbed at Dempsey with his left. Jack ducked, then threw a vicious right to the body and at the same time, nailed Willard on the right side of the head with a smashing left. The roof had fallen in. For three rounds, nine solid minutes, the most concentrated dose of pure punishment ever doled out to a champion with spoon-fed Willard,

in about as brutal a spectacle as the ring has produced. Whatever else was said or written about Willard's collapse, his game-ness can never be questioned. Dempsey's first left hook, upended Willard, but that was just the first of six trips that Willard took to the canvas.