Anything Goes

In Jersey City, on July 2, 1921, U. S. sport fans witnessed a milestone in prizefight annals: the first million-dollar gate. Last week, on the 19th anniversary of that historic Dempsey-Carpentier battle, Jersey City was the scene of another heavyweight prize fight that will probably go down in history as the wretchedest of the post-Dempsey era.

Grappling for the role of challenger for the world's heavyweight championship were two washed-up fighters: Barkeep Tony Galento, a beer-bibbing ham-&-egger who had never heard of the Marquess of Queensberry, and Madcap Maxie Baer, who had been floundering around in the second division since losing his world's title to Jim Braddock in 1935. Both were over 30, had already been knocked out by Champion Joe Louis.

Some 22,000 fight fans went to see the show. The boys slugged, slapped, tugged, butted, pushed, did everything but reach for their water bottles. In the first round, Baer went after the fresh wound on Galento's chin which Tony's disgruntled brother had caused by slinging a beer glass at him two nights before. By the seventh round Galento was spouting blood, reeling drunkenly, his eyes closed, his head throbbing where he had landed with a running, broad butt at Baer's jaw. When the bell rang for the eighth round, Galento sat on his stool, called it quits.

Among the spectators who watched last week's burlesque with something more than amusement was Jack Dempsey. Only the night before, the onetime world's champion, who had earned some $5,000,000 in the ring, had started a pugilistic "comeback" at 45. In Atlanta, during two rounds of roughhouse scrapping that left him wobbly-kneed, he had knocked out of the ring one Cowboy Luttrell, a fat, 34-year-old wrestler who had taken a poke at him during a wrestling match which he refereed last spring.

Though sport fans mourned his doing so, the onetime Tiger Man went ahead with his "comeback" plans. Though far from broke (he had no direct interest in the Jack Dempsey Restaurant which recently folded in Manhattan), enough of his funds are tied up in the Jack Dempsey Broadway Bar, the Dempsey Distilling Co. and other projects so that he can use $3,000 to $5,000 cash, to be picked up--along with publicity-- from a small-time fight now & then. His next opponent: Bull Curry, a Hartford (Conn.) policeman who "has done a little wrestling."

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