A Flame of Pure Fire: Jack Dempsey and the Roaring Twenties

 by Roger Kahn

Roger Kahn’s masterful biography of heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey effectively presents Dempsey as a great fighter.  Even more, Kahn places Dempsey firmly in his times.  From the gold and silver camps of frontier Colorado at the turn of the twentieth century through the golden age of sport in the 1920’s, Dempsey reigned with the greats of the Jazz age.  Kahn captures these times, providing a background for Dempsey’s triumph and the dark rumors of cowardice and

brutality that haunted his career. 

Dempsey, born in 1895, grew up moving from place to place with his wastrel father and devout Mormon mother.  Soon he proved himself to be not much of a school person, and at an early age found his skill lay as a fighter.  Beginning in his teens he boxed his way through life, learning the brutality and science of the ring.  His life took place in bar rooms and brothels, each of which served to forge the man he became.  As Dempsey rises in the heavyweight ranks, he defeats the best young professional fighters of his era and marries an older prostitute, Maxine Cates, who will give him difficulties in the future.  As successful as his boxing career became, his relationships with women proved a powerful antidote.

Dempsey is surrounded by a stirring cast of characters, the manager Doc Kearns, the promoter Tex Rickard, and the women, women of all shapes, sizes and callings.  As his 1919 heavyweight championship challenge against Jess Willard approaches, Dempsey is castigated as a slacker for not having served in the military during the world war.  He is viewed as a brutal killer in the ring.  Kahn describes him as a gentle, personable man who becomes the consummate boxer/fighter as soon as he enters the ring.  Dempsey prefers the quick knockout to protect himself and his opponent from serious injury or death.  He is pilloried by the great sports writers of his era, men like Grantland Rice and Ring Lardner, while cheered and booed in equal measure by the fans who flocked to see him.

According to Kahn, Dempsey, along with Babe Ruth, Bobby Jones, and the other great athletes of the Golden Age of Sport recast the role of professional sports in America.  Of all of them, Dempsey was the most successful and became the wealthiest.  A man of deep honor and honesty, Dempsey turned aside the approaches of Al Capone and his Chicago mob, perhaps resulting in their willingness to help Gene Tunney achieve the heavyweight championship at the end of Dempsey’s career.  Even into his late seventies, Dempsey maintained his reputation as the greatest heavyweight boxer ever.

In the latter part of his life, Jack Dempsey owned and ran a restaurant on Broadway in New York.  As a teenager I went there for dinner once and had my picture taken with the Champ.  The picture, now lost, shows a chubby teenager, dwarfed by the smiling sleekness of the great man.  Kahn, in this eminently readable biography, captures the warmth and thoughtfulness as well as the cold brutality of one of the great sporting figures on the twentieth century in an era where sporting figures began to dominate the headlines and the national consciousness in new and interesting ways.