New York City Tours by Urban Oyster

New York City has hosted some of the world's most famous boxing matches. Madison Square Garden has been dubbed “The World's Most Famous Arena,” but it did not earn that nickname thanks to basketball or hockey. It was boxing that made The Garden famous; in its various incarnations, the building has hosted title fights since 1882, including such legendary bouts as Ali-Frasier in 1971. Baseball may be the national pastime, but boxing has also drawn enormous crowds to Yankee Stadium and the Polo Grounds; there is even talk that boxing may return to the new Yankee Stadium next year.

The Manassa Mauler, Jack Dempsey, a figure who eclipsed even Babe Ruth as the most famous sporting star of the 1920's, fought in all three of these venues. One of his biggest fights, however, was fought just across the Hudson River in Jersey City, New Jersey. When in 1921 Dempsey, the reigning heavyweight champion, signed a contract to fight the European champ, Frenchman Georges Carpentier, it was originally planned to be held in New York, but temperance and anti-gambling activists drove the fight from the state. Few stadiums of the day could hold the throngs that clamored to see the heavyweight legend, so when promoter Tex Rickard settled on Jersey City, he decided to build his own stadium. Built on a plot of land known as Boyle's Thirty Acres, the arena took two months to construct and cost more than $250,000. The mammoth complex spread over 300,000 square feet and was meant to accommodate 91,000 spectators.

The fight was a gargantuan media event. The promoters issued more than 700 press passes, and reporters came from as far away as California and Europe, including seven from Carpentier's home country. Radios were still not in wide use, but the technology was available to broadcast accounts of the fight. The Committee on Devastated France and the Navy Club, two charitable organizations, both set up 70 halls equipped with special wireless feeds in cities across the northeast. Even airplanes would be employed to get the photographs of the fight to cities nationwide, as the New York Times reported:

“A Chicago paper, anxious to beat all its contemporaries in getting pictures of the happenings inside or near the ring, has made a big offer to an aviator to rush plates westward as soon as possible.”

The citizens of Benton Harbor, Michigan probably had the best access to news about the fight, with the exception of those actually in attendance, of course. Spectators gathered in a local arena to watch lightweight title holder Benny Leonard and his brother Charley re-enact the bout punch by punch just moments after each blow was delivered in Jersey City. A special telegraph line was set up to deliver every detail of the fight directly to Benton Harbor, and the fighters were told which punches to deliver.

The fight was condemned by temperance activists and other moral crusaders. New York Governor Nathan Miller outlawed prizefighting to prevent the bout from being held at Manhattan's Polo Grounds. Following the fight, the International Reform Bureau demanded Dempsey's arrest for engaging in boxing. Their spokesman, Dr. Wilbur Crafts, decried the moral degradation caused by movies, dances, automobiles, and boxing.

“You may ask what all this has to do with prizefighting, but there is a distinct connection. These Frenchy dances, sex movies and joy rides are a form of animalism that is akin to the animal instincts brought forth by pugilism. What we want is a return to American moral normalcy. Back from Spanish bullfights to American clean boxing. Back from German beer to – er – er – American habits of sobriety.”

The fight itself was a mismatch. Dempsey battered Carpentier throughout, finally knocking him out in the fourth round. But the gate receipts totaled $1.6 million, the first time a boxing match had ever passed the million-dollar mark, and the victory cemented Dempsey's position as the biggest box office draw of the day. You can watch video footage of the fight below:

This was not the first time, nor the last, that Dempsey's promoters would build an entire stadium just to showcase their punching star. When he captured the heavyweight title from Jess Willard in 1919, more than 80,000 people jammed into a temporary stadium in Toledo, Ohio – at the time, it was the world's largest arena.

Two years after the Carpentier fight, Dempsey was lured to Shelby, Montana, a small town in the state's remote Hi-Line region. In an attempt to attract investment, the town offered to pay Dempsey a $300,000 purse and to erect a 42,000-seat stadium at their own expense. Unfortunately, when the town was late with part of the payment, Dempsey's manager leaked to the press that the fight was off; by the time word got out that the fight was back on, there was no time to get enough people out to the remote town. Around 4,000 people, most of whom crashed the gate without paying, watched a fantastic fight with Tommy Gibbons, and the town was left broke.

The stadium on Boyle's Thirty Acres would survive nearly as long as Dempsey's boxing career. Rickard continued to promote fights there, and the following summer Benny Leonard would get to fight for real instead of just pantomiming the action a thousand miles away. In 1923, Jess Willard would fall to Luis Angel Firpo, setting up a title fight with Dempsey at the Polo Grounds later that same year. The last fight at Boyle's would be staged on August 27, 1926, a forgettable four-fight card. As most prizefights had moved to Yankee Stadium and the Polo Grounds, Rickard sold the arena for $6,000 to a wrecking company, which began dismantling it in June 1927. Dempsey's last fight, a loss to Gene Tunney in Chicago, came in September.

Today, boxing's popularity has waned, and big prizefights are mostly held in Las Vegas and broadcast on Pay-Per-View. But there was a time when New York's sporting temples were thronged with boxing fans, and even the giant stadiums couldn't hold the talents of fighters like Dempsey.

For a detailed description of the Dempsey-Carpentier fight, visit Jersey City: Past and Present. For Jack Dempsey's career statistics, as well as information on nearly every single professional boxing match ever fought, visit BoxRec.com. For more on media coverage of the fight, visit The Pop History Dig. You can visit the Jack Dempsey Museum and Park in Manassa, Colorado, but unfortunately, his restaurant on Broadway closed in 1974. As for the site of the famous Jersey City stadium, there isn't much left to see.

This blog post was written by Andrew Gustafson, a regular contributor to the Urban Oyster blog. You can find out more about him and his work for Urban Oyster here.