Dempsey vs Willard - best footage i've ever seen

[Master]

one of my fav fights of all time for soo many reasons.... good find on the better footage.

is ribs where broke in the first round and i think he'd have stayed down if his corner hadn't forced him up to try and steal the fight.

The corner men were very brave and showed tremendous courage.

[bradlee180]

Willard's injury reports have been greatly exaggerated. In this scan from Reading Eagle newspaper in 1919:
"Aside from the swelling on the right side of his face, which was subsiding under cold applications, he was none the worse for his encounter with Dempsey."

"The defeated Champion said today that rumors that he was severely injured and that he was taken to a hospital were gross exaggerations. The only injury he suffered was a deep cut over the eye and badly cut mouth. He did not lose any teeth, nor was his jaw fractured, as reported."



Willard drove himself home a few days after the fight.

[bradlee180]

[bradlee180]

When Dempsey was training for the Gibbons fight just a few months before the legendary Firpo brawl, a 7'2" giant named Big Ben Wray showed up throwing challenges:





Max Schmeling and Dempsey. Max knocked the Great Joe Louis' brains out in the 1st fight. The rematch didn't go too good for Max though.




Dempsey lived to be 87 years old, passing on in 1983.
Big Jess Willard lived for 86 years, passing on in 1968.
Max Schmeling was born in 1905 and passed on in 2005, 8 months short of reaching 100 years old.

[brocktonblockbust]

dont care what anybody says, they dont make 'em like they used to.

[Master]

Dempsey and Max looked alike from that picture. Great black and white pictures.

[Spicoli]

Enjoyed the full footage, thanks for posting it bud. Love to hear the old timey calls afterwards.

[bradlee180]

Clearest footage of Dempsey/Willard I've seen is at the Getty Images site:

News Footage | Getty Images Canada | 2002-8

pdf of Championship Fighting:
http://cdn.preterhuman.net/texts/sur...20Fighting.pdf

[beenKOed]

to be honest, this looked so so amatuer . Look how Dempsey just punches Willard when he was barely up. I know boxing was like that back in the day, but still this has no technical appeal for boxing "junkies" . Still, Dempsey would def. be a top cruiser today

I love these old fights, no neutral corner, hitting from behind allowed, no limit on knock downs!
You never see the finesse we expect today, but man these guys are tough as nails.
Seeing Dempsey walking behind the referee so he can hit Willard from behind always makes laugh every time I see it.
Can you imagine any fighter being allowed to take that kind of punishment today?

[Mars_ax]

to be honest, this looked so so amatuer . Look how Dempsey just punches Willard when he was barely up. I know boxing was like that back in the day, but still this has no technical appeal for boxing "junkies" . Still, Dempsey would def. be a top cruiser today

I love these old fights, no neutral corner, hitting from behind allowed, no limit on knock downs!
You never see the finesse we expect today, but man these guys are tough as nails.
Seeing Dempsey walking behind the referee so he can hit Willard from behind always makes laugh every time I see it.
Can you imagine any fighter being allowed to take that kind of punishment today?

I never realized what a big dumb looking oaf Willard was until I saw the prefight footage. He looked like he was getting a stiff one when the guy who was measuring his chest would brush against his nipples, what a fucking fruitcake.

[greynotsoold]

What i find funny is people calling the style 'amateur', 'primitive', and lacking in 'finesse'. Then, in the next breath, wonder about how to throw a wide, lead left hook with the palm down.

[Mars_ax]

Dempsey learned to fight in barrooms/saloons, he honed his skills when he turned pro, but he was always more of a brawler then a boxer. This was never more clear than in his 2 championship fights against Gene Tunney who pretty much boxed circles around Jack.

[Master]

Dempsey learned to fight in barrooms/saloons, he honed his skills when he turned pro, but he was always more of a brawler then a boxer. This was never more clear than in his 2 championship fights against Gene Tunney who pretty much boxed circles around Jack.

Tunney had tremendous fitness from the first to the last bell he appeared to not tire. I also think style wise he was made to beat Dempsey. I read Tunney was adamant he would beat Dempsey when others thought he was mad.

[beenKOed]

When Dempsey was training for the Gibbons fight just a few months before the legendary Firpo brawl, a 7'2" giant named Big Ben Wray showed up throwing challenges:





Max Schmeling and Dempsey. Max knocked the Great Joe Louis' brains out in the 1st fight. The rematch didn't go too good for Max though.




Dempsey lived to be 87 years old, passing on in 1983.
Big Jess Willard lived for 86 years, passing on in 1968.
Max Schmeling was born in 1905 and passed on in 2005, 8 months short of reaching 100 years old.

Look enough alike to be father and son or related at least.

[bradlee180]

On Jan 1, 2000, an article was published by former Heavyweight Champ Max Schmeling.

Schmeling's the veteran that knocked a young Joe Louis' brains out in the 1st fight, handing Louis his 1st loss.
The rematch didn't go so well for ol' Max though.

The article was on Dispatch Online (dispatch.co.za), the link is dead now, but here's the article:
______________________________________

Saturday, January 1, 2000

Dempsey Was The Big Daddy
By Max Schmeling

HAMBURG -- This century has provided many dramatic boxing matches and yielded even more unique heroes. Trying to name them all would be asking a little too much.
But my short list of those boxers who will never be forgotten includes -- in alphabetical order -- Mohammed Ali, Henry Armstrong, Georges Carpentier, Julio Cesar Chavez, George Foreman, Harry Greb, Marvin Hagler, Thomas Hearns, Jack Johnson, Ray Leonard, Joe Louis, Rocky Marciano, Carlos Monzon, Archie Moore, Willie Pep, Ray Robinson, and Mike Tyson.

But now I want to add, all by itself, one more name: Jack Dempsey.

Despite all the class shown by the others, Dempsey was not only my own idol, he remains for me to this day the greatest of them all.

He embodied the complete perfection of a professional boxer.
Jack, the ninth of 11 children of an impoverished family of Mormon itinerant workers in Colorado, welded brilliant technique and strategy with a stupendous punch like no other boxer.
His punches came packed with the full power of his entire shoulder span.
He was a nightmare of an opponent.
He hated sharing the ring with anybody else.
He appeared to be a fist-fighter from another planet.
It was no coincidence that they called him the 'man killer'.

Writer Joyce Carol Oates in her famous essay 'On Boxing' was right on target when she said that Dempsey's style of fighting -- fast, direct, and merciless -- has forever put its stamp on the sport of boxing in America, and not only there.
She is also not wrong when she says that today's boxing matches, compared with those of Dempsey's, appear to be harmless minuets.

We never faced each other in a prize fight. Jack's seven-year era as heavyweight world champion ended almost four years before mine began.
Still, we did box twice against each other.
The first time was in 1925, when he was on his honeymoon trip in Europe and made a stop in Cologne where he gave a sampling of his boxing know-how to a few thousand spectators in the city's Luna Park.
I was one of three Cologne boxers who were chosen to go two rounds against him.
The second time was certainly different, coming in May 1933 in New York, when he visited me in training camp four weeks before my fight against Max Baer and wanted to spar with me.
In the first round I landed my right directly in the middle of his nose, which had been operated on, and he quit right there.

By no means do I mean to overglorify him or above all the first half of this century of boxing.
But the fact is that our fights back then were definitely much tougher, much more brutal.
I was still boxing with only four- and five-ounce gloves, and after two rounds they were mostly already torn apart, with only a few patches of tough leather covering my knuckles. The punches were extremely painful.
Back then, there were also only eight weight categories, in which there was, logically, only a single world champion.
It was extremely difficult to box your way to the top.

This is not meant in the slightest to dismiss later achievements, for example those by Mohammed Ali.
It was especially thanks to him that boxing battles gained a new seal of quality.
The heavyweight division will always exert a magical attraction, it is simply in the nature of things.

Still, I must honestly say that for years now I have no longer attended a match and only rarely do I watch a fight on television.
This is because usually everybody knows beforehand who is going to win.
There was in my time, when already the purses were going into the millions, certainly some amount of behind-the-scenes deal-making going on -- and it was not always fair, as I found out for myself on June 8, 1937.
I had already been weighed in, but title defender Jimmy Braddock, against whom I had wanted to become the first boxer to break through the 'they-never-come-back' law, did not appear.
He was then suspended by the New York boxing authority and slapped with a ludicrous fine of a mere $1000.
As it later became evident, this was all a fixed deal.
For Braddock, who was supposedly ill, had already long earlier signed another contract for a title bout against Joe Louis.
The fight took place a few weeks later.
The clincher was a secret clause in which Braddock was guaranteed 10 percent of all his opponent's earnings for the next 10 years.

For the benefit and for the credibility of boxing I would hope that the new century will see a harkening back to the past times -- when there was only one association and only one champion per weight category. It would additionally be nice if a German heavyweight would finally follow in my footsteps.

Let the fight begin!


MAX SCHMELING was born September 28, 1905 in Klein Luckow, Germany. He entered boxing history with his world championship victory in 1930 over Jack Sharkey and with his sensational knockout of Joe Louis in 1936. Schmeling ended his career in 1948 and remains an idol in Germany and a legend in the world of sports, a man who embodies the image of the 'honest guy'. Schmeling today lives in Hollenstedt, near Hamburg. -- Sapa-DP

Max Schmeling
September 28th, 1905 – February 2nd, 2005
56 Wins, 10 Losses, 4 Draws, 40 KO’s