The Battle of the Century: Dempsey, Carpentier, and the Birth of Modern Promotion

(Hardback)

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Description

This exciting account of the 1921 heavyweight boxing title fight between champion Jack Dempsey and Frenchman Georges Carpentier relates how it originated and how it became a template for modern sports promotion. Immortalized as the battle of the century by Ring Lardner, the Dempsey-Carpentier heavyweight title bout marked America's first experience with the intersection of show business, high society, politics, and the underworld at a single sporting event. The Battle of the Century: Dempsey, Carpentier, and the Birth of Modern Promotion offers the definitive history of this landmark event's genesis and impact. To explain why the fight had such a far-reaching influence on mass entertainment and modern culture, newspaperman Jim Waltzer invites readers to travel the path to the 1921 heavyweight championship. Along the way, they will meet a cast of outsize characters, including the savage defending champion (and alleged World War I slacker) Jack Dempsey, French pretty-boy war hero Georges Carpentier, promoter Tex Rickard, Dempsey's slippery manager Doc Kearns, and Jersey City boss Frank Hague. As the tale unfolds, so does an understanding of the forces that shaped the Roaring Twenties and established promotional hype as the MO of business.

Reviews

Although the author devotes most of the book to the background of Rickard and the fighters, he closely follows the evolution of the fight and shows how it fit into the culture of the 1920s. The story is not new, but it never seems to get old. Summing Up: Recommended. * Choice *

Author Bio

Jim Waltzer, a longtime newspaper sports editor and freelance magazine writer, is the author of Tales of South Jersey: Profiles and Personalities and the novel Sound of Mind.