The ep11 The Story of Jack Dempseys Early Ring Career

Hello there. This is Jimmy Powers coming your way with another story from The Tumult and the Shouting. Hi there. This is Jimmy Powers. As we continue to read Grantland Rice's autobiography, The Tumult and The Shouting, we notice that considerable time is spent with Jack Dempsey.

Granny throughout his long and wonderful life collected friendships of the greats, champions of the ring, the diamond, the fairway and the gridiron. Granny saw Dempsey the first time in 1919 when the Manassa Maller slaughtered Champion Jess Willard at Toledo.

Toledo. He was one of Granny's all-time favorites. Once again, we opened the tumult and shouting to the chapter on Dempsey, and in first person, dwell for a moment on some of the promotional fireworks that Dempsey was connected with during the fabulous Golden Twenties.

I've often heard champions like Rocky Marciano compared to Dempsey. In my opinion, Dempsey was a top boxer. He had to be to go 15 rounds with Tom Gibbons when Gibbons was hungry and The Dempsey Gibbons title match at Shelby, Montana, was in some ways Dempsey's most demanding fight. As a promoter's dream, both the Shelby fight and the Sharkey Stripling fight at Miami

Beach were Grade A nightmares. In 1923 Mike Collins, a fight manager of sorts out of St. Paul, had a string of fighters barnstorming through Montana. In the course of his meandering's, he ran into a man named Johnson, who among other things was Mayor of Shelby and President of the local bank. With the talk flaring around fights, somebody had the glorious idea of staging

a heavyweight championship fight right there in Shelby. It would cause a land-bloom. Collins called his pal Eddie Kane, Gibbons' manager back in St. Paul, and propositioned him. Listen, Mike, replied Kane. You get Dempsey out there, and Gibbons will fight him for nothing.