Carl Weingarten
None who saw last night’s battle can doubt that Dempsey would have annihilated Wills four years ago, three years ago, or a year ago.
Milwaukee Journal, September 12, 1924
It was a terrible injustice that Wills never got a title shot, but those big, slower guys were made to order for Dempsey. [He] would have cut Wills down in a few rounds.
Ray Arcel quoted in Roger Kahn, Jack Dempsey: A Flame of Pure Fire
Between 1920 and 1925, contender Harry Wills, an African American, and his advocates pressed for a match with champion Jack Dempsey, which would have been the first integrated heavyweight title fight since 1915. In that year, the first black heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson, lost to Jess Willard, whom Dempsey would beat for the crown in 1919.
Upon Dempsey’s title victory over Willard, the New York Times reported that the new champion would ignore all black challengers. The statement was a political gesture to the men who controlled boxing that this new and very young champion would uphold the status quo. Privately, Dempsey was not committed to this belief. Whatever his feelings about African Americans might have been, Dempsey was inclusive in his professional life. He had already fought black opponents and employed African Americans in his training camps, including contenders Big Bill Tate and George Godfrey. Within a year not only were his managers discussing the possibility of Harry Wills as an opponent, but also there was growing public support for the matchup as well. Jim Crow was still the rule of law, but some signs of racial tolerance, coinciding with the end of World War I, were beginning to emerge. The prospect of a Dempsey-Wills fight arose on the cusp of this new era. The possibility of a black man fighting for the heavyweight championship was still remote, but now no longer out of the question. Five years of efforts followed to make the bout, but when the climate was finally right, it was too late for both boxers.
Harry Wills’s not getting a title shot, in a sport rife with tragedy, remains on some observers’ short list of boxing’s greatest injustices. While the five-year saga intertwining Dempsey and Wills represents one of boxing’s most famous unfinished chapters, the clearly unjust circumstances of Wills’s denial have led to unwarranted assumptions about who would have won. Whether Wills was an uncrowned champion or just a noteworthy contender has been debated for decades, but estimates of his prowess have become inflated over time, especially since he was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 1992.
There’s no question that the failure to match Dempsey and Wills was an injustice, but it actually may have worked out, ironically, for the best. First, outrage over the obvious injustice done to Wills has blinded observers to the strong probability that Dempsey would have crushed him at any time during the period they might have fought. Second, had the bout lost money it might have led to an even longer exclusion of African American heavyweight contenders. Third, regardless of the victor, the fight might have led to widespread rioting. Fourth, the public sympathy and support Wills generated in the press may have helped open the door for Joe Louis ten years later.
As a boxing and fight film historian, I wanted to learn how good Harry Wills actually was, and the details of his quest to fight Jack Dempsey. Going back to the newspaper and biographical records, I researched firsthand accounts of these two men and studied films of both fighters in action, including footage only recently discovered. The story was of a challenger turned away not only because of race but also by a matrix of forces that left a baffling trail of claims, counterclaims, public debates, court battles, reluctant investors, lawyers, feuding business interests, and fearful politicians. It’s not that Dempsey wouldn’t fight Wills; it’s that people didn’t see it as a profitable enough venture to be worth the trouble that an interracial heavyweight title fight would carry. The failure to match Dempsey and Wills resulted not from a conspiracy, but instead from the gridlock and infighting between the parties that dragged out over six years. Boxing and American racial politics can both be cruel, but it’s a mistake to regard the two as always governed by a single set of rules.
Harry “The Black Panther” Wills (born 1889) began boxing professionally in 1912 and was the youngest of a generation of African American heavyweights known as “The Black Lights,” who had dominated the division even though they did not receive title shots from champions Jack Johnson and Jess Willard, who both drew the color line. This group included Sam Langford, Joe Jeannette, and Sam McVey. Wills’s size and age distinguished him from most of the era’s other great black heavyweights, who were usually smaller than Wills and who had aged considerably by the time Wills came into his own. Wills looks impressive in photographs—lean, imposing, chiseled—standing over six feet two and weighing 210 pounds. He seems like one of the few old-time fighters who could keep up in the gym with the behemoths of today. Wills’s most celebrated victories were over Langford, one of history’s greatest fighters, who, like Wills, never fought for the title. But Langford was near ancient when he fought Wills, and still their bouts were close. Wills also had at least a thirty-pound weight and seven-inch height advantage over Langford. This three-weight-class differential would have been considered a mismatch in most cases.
Jack Dempsey (born 1895) was one of the greatest superstars in boxing history as well as one of the most lethal punchers who ever fought. His kinetic style buried the previous generation of flat-footed heavyweights—Wills’s stylistic equivalents—and paved the way for the modern big man. With each defense of his title, Dempsey became more of a sensation. When the Dempsey–Georges Carpentier fight of 1921, promoted by Tex Rickard, grossed more than a million dollars at the gate, boxing exploded from a subculture into what would become the nation’s most popular sport.
Dempsey would have fought Wills, as evidenced by the many negotiations and multiple contracts the two signed over the years, the first in 1922, and the last in 1925. When interest for a Dempsey-Wills fight peaked in 1922, a national poll was taken over one week in March to determine the public’s choice for Jack Dempsey’s next opponent, according to the Evening Independent. Wills came in first with 131,073 votes, just edging out Tommy Gibbons, who received 125,000. Here was confirmation that the public appeared ready for an African American to fight for the heavyweight title. The color line was becoming blurred.
The 1922 Dempsey-Wills agreement was open-ended. No deadline for the bidding process, or fight date, was scheduled. When the bidding timeline ran beyond sixty days, Wills and his manager sued. From that point until 1926, the legal proceedings dragged on. A potential Dempsey-Wills fight hung in the air, often mentioned in the news as either under consideration, being planned, or “scheduled for next year,” but never a done deal.
Boxing has produced its share of heroes in every community, but boxing at its core is a venture that enables a few people to make a great deal of money in a short amount of time, with most of the cash going to those who already have plenty of it. Dempsey was the central figure in the nation’s leading sport, holding an esteemed title with huge earnings possibilities. At the same time, this made the potential for ruin also great. Dempsey, Wills, and their managers did not create the nation’s racial problems. They were caught up in the times like everyone else, while investors, politicians, and other powers of the day played political football with the prospect of a mixed-race championship fight.
Boxing had only recently emerged from the aftermath of the championship reign of Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion who held the title from 1908 to 1915. Johnson was a supremely talented fighter, and he defeated a short list of “white hope” challengers, including former champion Jim Jeffries in 1910. Law enforcement and politicians hounded Johnson, and he became mired in a scandal and court battle over his personal life. Johnson also fueled the fire. He dated and married white women when interracial relations were still taboo. He was openly unfaithful and self-aggrandizing. Johnson also drew the color line, refusing to defend against Langford, Jeannette, McVey, Wills, and other black heavyweights. Johnson argued that the issue was money, proclaiming the reason he fought only one African American challenger was that two black men fighting for the title wouldn’t sell. But this was an excuse, and his claim was never substantiated. A Johnson-Langford title fight, proposed in 1915, might have been as successful as any other title defense that Johnson had. It would have matched a very unpopular champion with an established and respected challenger. A rally behind Langford could have galvanized both whites and blacks, easing race relations surrounding the event and making history by doing so.
But Johnson would have none of the above. Historians have yet to hold Johnson fully accountable for this choice, especially considering that he was an outsider, with more control in his choice of opponents than Dempsey had. When Johnson fled the United States to avoid prison, the heavyweight championship franchise, perhaps the richest in all of sports, lost much of its monetary value as Johnson and his nomadic entourage toured overseas. The promoter Tex Rickard spoke for the boxing establishment when he said that the heavyweight title in the hands of a black man “ain’t worth a nickel.”
Rickard was the leading boxing promoter during the 1920s, and it was he, not Dempsey, who ultimately decided who the champion would or would not fight. Rickard has been singled out as the culprit for blocking the Dempsey-Wills fight, and there’s no question that he did not want it to take place. But Rickard was a businessman, who in fact had promoted several mixed-race contests, including the controversial Johnson-Jeffries match. But Dempsey-Wills, as a sporting event, just didn’t merit the risk. Big fights were complicated and massive undertakings with no room for failure. A century ago, large-capacity stadiums had yet to be built in the United States, and the venues that did exist were made for field sports, not for watching two men in a twenty-foot ring at night from a quarter of a mile away. Stadiums were sometimes built for just one event, which meant acquiring acres of land, as well as property rights, in a location close enough to a big city to be accessible by thousands of people. Local officials had to sign off, including state governors. If any of those parties balked, the event was in danger of being canceled. All this took an enormous amount of credit, planning, labor, and months of promotion.
Big as boxing had become, Rickard and his associates were still at the mercy of the political winds. Even if a Dempsey-Wills fight ended fair and square, race relations were such that no one could predict what the public reaction might be. Would the bout trigger racial violence? Johnson-Jeffries led to the most widespread day of rioting in American history until Martin Luther King was killed nearly sixty years later. There was a lot at stake, a great deal of money to lose, a social and political cost, and possibly jail for those backing the fight. In short, there was too much risk and not enough reward to make Dempsey-Wills worthwhile. Rickard wanted no part of it.
Around the time Dempsey and Wills signed their first contract, Argentine heavyweight champion Luis Angel Firpo arrived in the United States and began to upstage Wills as Dempsey’s most intriguing contender by knocking out a series of opponents, including Jess Willard. When Dempsey signed to fight Firpo, Wills sued yet again, insisting that he was the rightful challenger, but the bout was held anyway. Wills was not without means, money, or popularity, but suing into existence a championship fight that had no promoter is like suing a corporation for its stock price going down. That Wills was never given the chance to fight Jack Dempsey was grossly unfair in its day, but boxing history is filled with worthy fighters from all communities who never had their rightful title shot due to discrimination, circumstance, or bad luck. At least Wills got his case on the record.
Firpo and Dempsey met in September 1923 in one of boxing’s most furious battles, famously captured in the artwork of George Bellows. Dempsey sent Firpo to the canvas seven times, but the champion was also dropped twice, including a trip into press row, nearly losing his title. During this period, Wills and his manager Paddy Mullins made a key tactical error. Many fighters other than Wills wanted Dempsey’s title, and the contenders battled one another for position. But Wills and Mullins chose not to fight and perhaps eliminate the other leading rivals, a group that included Tommy Gibbons, Billy Miske, Georges Carpentier, Jim Maloney, Harry Greb, Young Stribling, and Jack Delaney—all of whom fought across racial barriers. As good a boxer as he was, perhaps Harry Wills’s reputation has been advanced in part because of who he didn’t fight rather than who he did.
In 1924, Wills could no longer stand on the sidelines and received the golden opportunity to fight Firpo. Jack Dempsey sat at ringside. Both Wills and Firpo were knockout artists of roughly the same height and weight. The Times Daily reported the odds as virtually even on the day of the fight. Staged in front of an audience of seventy-five thousand, it was the highest-profile bout of Wills’s career. The contest went the full twelve rounds to end in a no-decision. Newspapers, including the Quebec Daily Telegraph, hailed Wills as the winner who “took almost every round and in the second round floored his opponent.” Others were not as impressed. The Milwaukee Journal headlined, “Harry Wills No Match for Champion Dempsey.”
How close Dempsey and Wills actually were to a bout is unclear. In March 1925, the New York State Athletic Commission reversed its earlier position and sanctioned a Dempsey-Wills match. The Associated Press reported on July 17 that Dempsey appeared before the New York Licensing Commission and formally accepted Wills’s challenge. Two months later, acting without Rickard, Dempsey agreed to a second contract with Wills. Midwestern businessman and promoter Floyd Fitzsimmons, who had produced the Dempsey–Billy Miske title fight in 1920, proposed a Dempsey-Wills bout to be held in Michigan City, Indiana. Dempsey was guaranteed $1 million for the fight with $300,000 due upon signing. Dempsey accepted the offer. On September 28, Wills, Dempsey, the promoter, and investors met for the contract ceremony. Wills received a check for $50,000. Dempsey’s check was for only $25,000. Despite the $275,000 shortfall, Dempsey was still willing to proceed. The next morning, Dempsey accompanied Fitzsimmons to cash the check. The bank, wrote author Roger Kahn, reported that the Fitzsimmons account was in fact empty. The check bounced, and Dempsey walked away. Wills kept his $50,000.
In 1926, Wills received another opportunity. This time the offer was $250,000 to fight Gene Tunney in a title eliminator, with the winner to meet the champion. Wills turned it down, believing that he was already entitled to fight the champion. Others were also in contention now, including Jim Maloney, Jack Delaney, Jack Sharkey, Paulino Uzcudun, and Tom Heeney. Rickard may not have wanted to take chances with a Dempsey-Wills contest, but Mullins, too, didn’t want to take chances with his fighter’s career. By trying to tie up Dempsey in court instead of cleaning out the division, Wills may further have dimmed his own prospects.
Wills, already thirty years of age by the time Dempsey beat Willard for the title, had time working against him. But time ran out sooner for Dempsey. With the pathway for a Tunney-Dempsey match eventually cleared, Dempsey lost the fight and the crown to Tunney in what was the biggest-grossing bout of all time. One month later, Wills lost to future champion Jack Sharkey. Time reported, “Sharkey chopped and hacked at Wills, closed his eye, made his mouth bleed, all through the fight.” Wills reportedly backhanded, butted, and hit Sharkey during the break in an effort to discourage his opponent. After numerous warnings by the referee, Wills was disqualified in the thirteenth round. Wills soldiered on for several more fights, but retired from boxing in 1932.
So the question remains: What would a Dempsey-Wills fight have looked like? Who would likely have won in 1922 or 1925? No single piece of evidence is conclusive. Boxing matches are fleeting events. Those that are close and competitive are complex, and judging them is subjective at best. The wealth of archival materials including biographical information, newspaper accounts, interviews, photographs, and motion pictures of Dempsey show him to have been a force of nature in his prime with supreme punching power, ferocity, fighting savvy, and determination. The question, then, is Wills. Aside from photographs, most of the testimony regarding Wills comes from newspaper accounts. At the height of boxing, newspapers often reported fights in great detail. Reporters composed their eyewitness accounts as the action took place. It made for exciting journalism prone to exaggeration. With newspapers hitting the streets just hours after events and no time to review fight films, the initial press reports of major fights were usually hasty impressions slanted toward popular sentiment. In any case, the accounts of Wills’s fights were more than favorable. The condescending and blatantly racist narratives published in Jack Johnson’s era were no longer en vogue by the time Wills contended. The press liked Wills and championed his cause. The accounts of his battles describe him as an exciting, skilled, and powerful fighter. But one valuable cache of evidence has remained missing—film footage.
For almost a century, the only accessible Wills fight footage, issued by Official Films as part of a series called Monarchs of the Ring, showed him in 1927 at age thirty-eight being clubbed to the canvas by Paulino Uzcudun in a fourth-round-knockout loss. Several newsreels from British and American archives also survive, showing Wills posing and sparring for the cameras prior to the Firpo bout. These provided a glimpse of his size and stance, but little else, leaving people to wonder about Wills’s true abilities. The real breakthrough occurred in 2012, when boxing film archivist Steve Lott received a call from a woman living on Long Island who wanted him to identify some film she found stored in her attic labeled “Wills and others.” She agreed to send him the footage for inspection. When Lott received the package it contained two reels of thirty-five-millimeter theatrical film on nitrate stock. The materials, in marginal condition, were carefully transferred to digital video. The footage showed excerpts of two fights: the Mickey Walker–Mike McTigue middleweight title match and the Wills-Firpo fight.
Though the reel contained only the first two rounds of Wills-Firpo, the footage has been a revelation. Remarkably well photographed, the film captures the match with amazing clarity for the period. From it, we finally get a good, if brief, look at Wills’s skills and style, a true reading of what he could do inside the ring. Promoted as a clash of the titans, Firpo and Wills was anticipated to be an exciting display of punching power, but the match went the full distance. The fight has since been described as one of Wills’s best performances and one of his best credentials for holding his own with or even defeating Dempsey.
The film, however, tells an unflattering story. In keeping with Jack Johnson’s old-school stance, the one Dempsey would likely rip through, Wills holds his hands forward at waist level, with a pawing left jab and his feet spread wide for maximum balance and stability. But Wills was no Jack Johnson. Wills’s footwork was limited, and he didn’t have Johnson’s speed or savvy to control the action. Firpo did little in this fight to enhance his own reputation, predictably launching one overhand right after another while Wills slipped them, though some just barely. Other than dodging punches, however, Wills had no tactical response to Firpo. He could make Firpo miss those broadly telegraphed overhand rights, but he couldn’t make him pay for missing. The two spent most of the fight in clinches, dragging one another around the ring. The much-noted knockdown came in round two, when, the United Press reported, “Wills floored Firpo with a right to the jaw. When Firpo arose Wills swarmed him with a flock of rights.” This sequence makes for better reading than viewing. The film shows Wills hitting Firpo illegally on a break. Firpo drops, but rises more surprised than hurt. The action resumes, with Firpo crowding Wills, and Wills struggling for punching room. The footage suggests that Wills was either a very slow starter, or as Firpo himself put it, “more of a wrestler than a boxer.” Wills’s greatest asset may simply have been the height and reach advantage he had over the majority of his opponents.
In addition to the Wills-Firpo excerpt, further film evidence of Wills has come to light. Footage from a European archive shows Wills’s fight prior to Firpo, against Irish veteran Bartley Madden in 1924. Madden, who had also fought Harry Greb, Gene Tunney, Fred Fulton, and Tommy Gibbons, brought respectable ring experience to the fight. Wills-Madden went fifteen rounds, with Wills the easy winner. But even this victory exposed some of Wills’s weaknesses. In the film, Wills, again the much bigger man, stalks Madden aggressively, but Madden has little difficulty evading Wills or quickly closing the distance to score on the inside. This vulnerability would have been fatal against a puncher like Dempsey.
Dempsey and Wills were also much closer in size than has been suggested. Wills had twenty pounds and three inches at best on Dempsey, still only half as much as Willard and little more than Firpo—two men Dempsey dispatched in less than four rounds each. In addition to his superior speed, mobility, and success against larger opponents, Dempsey sparred and trained with Big Bill Tate. A heavyweight contender who stood six feet six and weighed 220 pounds, Tate had been hired by Doc Kearns in 1918 and remained in the Dempsey camp until Jack’s retirement in 1927. During those years, Tate continued fighting professionally. In fact, his resume lists five fights with Harry Wills, including a knockout loss, two close decision losses, a draw, and a win. Had a Dempsey-Wills fight actually gone forward, Tate’s tactical experience with Wills would have helped Dempsey substantially. It’s important to note that two of Tate’s best showings against Wills, a disqualification win and a draw, came in 1922, the same year Wills first proposed to challenge Dempsey for the title. One has to wonder—what does it say that one man’s difficult opponent is another man’s sparring partner?
Hall of Fame trainer Ray Arcel witnessed both Wills and Dempsey in action as early as 1916. Arcel, who lived long enough to train both Benny Leonard and Roberto Duran, had apprenticed with Wills’s trainer Dai Dollings. Arcel told author Phil Guarnieri that Harry Wills was surely deserving of a title shot but was also at best “a very good journeyman” who was too slow and did not hit hard enough to deal with Dempsey.
Although Harry Wills deserved a title shot in the 1920s, to include his experience in the pantheon of great boxing misfortunes is to ignore a number of key factors. First, Wills was no better than any of the other Black Lights, one of too many African American fighters to count who were denied a title shot because of the color line. Second, had he fought Dempsey, he would likely have lost badly. Third, the failure to hold a Dempsey-Wills match may have raised public consciousness and thus helped to open the doors to Joe Louis’s emergence and historic reign as heavyweight champion a decade later, which forever made the division open to African American contenders and champions. Fourth, Wills had a good life after boxing. He and his wife were successful business partners, and, with the help of the $50,000 advance he received for a fight with Dempsey that never happened, he prospered more than the majority of African Americans. Finally, nobody “avoided” Wills. Dempsey wanted to fight him, but the bout was more a risk for promoters than for the champion. “I never blamed Jack,” Wills was quoted as saying in a 1964 Sports Illustrated profile. “I’m sure if he had had his way, I’d have gotten the fight.”