Sport: Marine

A god’s iron larynx spoke to the multitudes of his people assembled on a hill outside their city in darkness and rain.

“. . . AND GENE TUNNEY, OF THE YEWNITED STATES MARINES, ONE HUNNERD EIGHTY-FIVE POUNDS.”

From the ranked tribes there burst an answering roar. The metal snarl of that huge voice sent shivers into their hearts. Yet it was not any god, but only Joseph Griffo, the announcer, his voice trumpeted from the loud speaker whose horns overhung the ring. Tunney, who still had a bathrobe on, smiled slightly and bowed his head. Across from him sat a scowling, unshaven man with a towel over his shoulder. And around them rose the crowd.

There is no simile big enough to give an idea of that crowd. To conceive of the cup of the stadium as the cup that holds a man’s brain; to conceive of the ranked heads as the cells of the brain, each alone, yet united in a common consciousness, each fiercely kinetic, yet keeping its place in a segment, an area at once cut off from and united to other areas by dark intersecting lanes, and every cell, every segment, every area of the vast filled hollow burning inward and downward upon the mysterious core of its life—a little white ring with four posts. To conceive of this is not to exaggerate. But you must add that every cell of this huge mind was itself a mind. And that one mind, one cell, included the whole.

All evening the crowd had come trickling in. You showed your ticket at a brass gate in the stucco wall of the Sesqui-Centennial, a mile from the stadium. Between the Centennial Gate and the Stadium long narrow buses with red lights, electric motors and canvas roofs plied to and fro, silent as lizards. They were crowded. Diplomats, politicians, millionaires, sailors, Negroes, sportsmen went by. Vincent Richards, the tennis player, and his wife, and a raincoat. A huge black preacherman in a woman’s straw hat. Mortimer Schiff. Mayor Walker.

It was still early. In the pale violet sky an airplane somersaulted, strung with lights.

The iron voice began its snarling; quick little men, clumsy big men, fought and went away again. Beside the ring sat eight frightened fellows in sweaters. They were referees. When a preliminary fight was to begin, a man sitting behind would lean over and tap one of them on the shoulder. Now he tapped Tommy Reilly. The crowd cheered.

Tunney got into the ring first. Dempsey was coming. You could see a swirl far back in the crowd that drew nearer and nearer as Dempsey moved down the aisle with his handlers and a corps of policemen. He climbed through the ropes—unshaven, hard-muscled, surprisingly thin—and crossed to Tunney’s corner. “How are you, boy?” he said. The iron voice announced the weights: “Jack Dempsey, who has defended his title for the last six years. . . .” Loud booing. You bent over to light a cigaret and when you looked up they were fighting.

Tunney stood up straight, Dempsey came in weaving, bobbing, prowling. He bent his head a little and Tunney’s lefts whizzed over. Three of them missed in succession. Incomparably better looking in the ring than Tunney, who was merely handsome, Dempsey leaped forward; he was inside Tunney’s guard, a panther striking. Then an amazing thing happened. Tunney held his terrible arms. The referee parted their shoulders and Tunney, with a right and left to the head, backed Dempsey against the ropes, pounded his face, made him shelter himself with wrapping elbows. The gong rang for the end of the first round. A gentleman who sat between Peggy Hopkins Joyce and Tex Rickard in an aisle by the ring put down his flask and stretched himself. “Tunney’s got it, . . .” he said.

And Tunney had it. Two gentlemen on the other side of the ring agreed to that as well. All through the fight they took turns talking, apparently to themselves; an inconspicuous microphone in front of them carried their gabble verbatim to many million people. They told how the rain, just a sprinkle as the fighters got into the ring, grew harder; how Dempsey kept weaving in, pawing at Tunney with fierce, ineffective blows; how people spread newspapers over their knees and passed bottles from hand to hand; how Tunney outboxed Dempsey, poked him off with wary blows, closed his left eye, cut his cheek, made his nose bleed. In the last round, with a tremendous effort, Dempsey fired his weariness into a rally and swung a right for Tunney’s jaw. If that blow had connected the Dempsey-Tunney fight would have been remembered as the most sensational ten-round bout ever fought. Tunney ducked. Thirty seconds later, as the new heavyweight champion of the world, he was making a brief martial* address into the microphone, while cameras snapped. It was several minutes before the photographers remembered that there had been another man in the ring. They looked over their shoulders at a wet corner, but Dempsey had gone.

*”I have realized all my ambition, and I will try to defend the title that I have worked so hard for for six years, and I am going to try to defend it as becomes a marine.”