In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

50 ARRAYS
Jack Dempsey we were accustomed to see ... Tunney hit him at least
six times with rights and lefts to the face, and Jack gets another on the
eye as the bell rings. The first round: Tunney's round by a mile.
Nine rounds later, when Tunney, tightly wrapped in white towels under
the pouring rain (Andre and Fleischer, 108), is officially declared the
winner on the basis of points, "there [is] a real burst of applause for the
new champion"-yet nothing more than applause. Dempsey appears as
"a sorry, pitiful subject ... His mouth and nose [are spouting] blood,
his left eye, bruised and battered, [is] closed tight and bleeding. There
[is] a cut under his left eye an inch long." Meanwhile, something almost
uncanny has happened. In the course of this humiliating defeat, Jack
Dempsey has become the crowd's hero. "The crowd was mostly silent,
and evidently pro-Dempsey, for there were few cheers and usually stony
silence for the progress of Tunney as he poked Dempsey around the ring,
and the only loud cheers were when Dempsey managed to land a few
solid blows. It was a strangely silent and unenthusiastic crowd" (New
York Times, September 24). [see Silence vs. Noise] Then "they started
yelling. They seemed to forget their own discomfort and they shouted
[Dempsey's] name" (Heimer, 23). Dempsey himself is no less astonished
by this reaction than the journalists. As he recalls in his autobiography,
"To my surprise, I was loudly cheered as I marched from the ring, more
than I had ever been cheered before. People were screaming, 'Champ,
Champ!' Could it be that the loss was really a victory?" (Dempsey and
Dempsey,201ff.).
Despite his civic virtues and his admirable boxing skills, Tunney is not
a popular champion. But why has the defeat of September 23 transformed
Dempsey into a popular hero? A possible answer to this question
lies in a scene from Hemingway's novel The Sun Also Rises. During the
fiesta in Pamplona, Brett, who is the central object of desire for all the
male protagonists in the novel, enters into a passionate erotic relationship
with a young bullfighter. Nobody is more jealous than Robert Cohn,
the former "middleweight champion of Princeton" (Hemingway, 4).
Although for him boxing has never been anything other, or anything
more, than a chance to overcome his inferiority complex and his resentment
as a Jew in a WASP-dominated social world, Cohn is a skillful
boxer-and therefore finds it easy to beat up his rival in Brett's hotel
room. Yet not only does this "victory" fail to help Cohn overcome his