Dempsey

                                     FROM THE BOOKS
   Carpentier donned a gray silk bathrobe over his boxing trunks and set out for the ring. He had been morose in the dressing room, but now, for the public, he wore a bright and carefree smile. Seeing him, the crowd stood to cheer, rising slowly at first, but then yielding itself to a great wordless roar such as a few especially favored gladiators might have heard in the Flavian Amphitheater-the Coliseum-eighteen hundred years earlier. Carpentier skipped and whirled about the ring, smiling and all but dancing to the cheers.
   Dempsey was not a silk-robe kind of fighter. He pulled on a simple crimson cardigan and made his way out of the dressing room. The crowd cheered the champion, too. Dempsey did not smile. Among the cheers he heard hoots. Some shouted, "Slacker." Dempsey walked into the ring and sat down on a stool in his corner, with his oddly shaved head, two-day growth of beard, heavy-knotted brows, and blank, pitiless gaze. Carpentier looked at Dempsey once, then looked away. He did not want to look at Dempsey anymore.
   The fight announcer, Joe Humphrey, intoned: "In this corner, weighing 188 pounds from Salt Lake City, Utah, the heavyweight champion of the world-Jack Dempsey." As Dempsey recalled it, there was a little applause and a low murmur. There wasn't anything much more American than Salt Lake City, Utah, he said, but here this huge, overwhelming American crowd declined to cheer the native champion. "Believe me," Dempsey said, "that hurt."
   "And in this corner, weighing 175 pounds, the challenger from Paris, France-Georges Carpentier." Ovation. "It was simply impossible to root for Dempsey," Heywood Broun wrote. Then, invoking A Tale of Two Cities, "It would have been like giving three long cheers for the guillotine as Sydney Carton went up to meet it where it waited. Romance is silly stuff, but that doesn't prevent it from getting you."

Roger Kahn-A Flame of Pure Fire