How much is Dempsey's greatness down to Johnson??

Dempsey has always been top 10 but his record doesn't really suggest he should be higher than the likes Of Frazier and Holyfield......

However not only did he have a crowd pleasing style..was handsome...charismatic and had a film star Wife he basically succeeded the most unpopular champion who happened to be Black in a racist era.........

One can assume that by building Dempsey up into a beast and this great champion it could have been... (could have been) a way of overshadowing Johnson's accomplishments and restoring White pride to a certain extent..............

Not sure If there had been no Johnson...Dempsey's reputation which has remained high all these years... would be quite so big...........as there may not be a need to extoll his every virtue in quite the same way!!

Dempsey came at the right time for a hero.................

How much is his greatness down to Johnson........??

I agree regarding Dempsey the persona amounting to more than his record, think I have previously described him as the beckham of his day, which might be a bit harsh.

It may have been influenced by the backlash from Johnson, but suspect it was as much a case of the us just needing a post war hero in hard times... And having a media friendly champion in a time of growing media influence helped provide the ammunition for it.

You could be right...One thing is for sure his record and the legend don't add up in comparison to today's criteria............

He was undisputed though.

As a Dempsey fan is difficult to say because the more I think of his record as champion it isn’t all that. Gibbons and Miske were decent fighters in their own right but would have to be acknowledged their best days were at light heavy, Firpo was tough but beatable and Carpentier, whilst having some form against heavies, they were very much of a level such as Beckett and Wells and Carpentier did blow a bit hot and cold.

Think his appeal has something to do with the factors you have mentioned but should be acknowledged his style represented something of a step forward for the heavies, none before him fought with quite such intensity as Jack or looked to fight on the inside like Jack and as you know from your own boy Corbett Truss those that represent a stylistic step forward are frequently highly rated on the back of that.

Should also not be forgotten Dempsey and Rickard between them pretty much invented the mega fight, not sure such a factor should count in his ranking but rightly or wrongly these things do tend to be a factor.

I do think coming after Johnson probably helped kickstart him in the public affection, truss, so i can see where you're coming from... just suspect it would have happened anyway perhaps to a lesser extent

Not sure really, Truss. If anything, it was Willard who was held up in higher regard than he should have been for being the man to remove Johnson from the picture, hence why he was allowed to basically sit on the Heavyweight title for four years with only one defence to his name, and a pretty dreadful defence at that.

Ol' Jess was even being touted as being greater than Jeffries by some publications before Dempsey tore him to bits, largely on the basis of him dealing with Moran more impressively than Johnson had done in Paris near the end of his title reign and because he'd dealt with the lumbering ox Carl Morris, who was a giant like Willard and ranked for little reason other than that!

Anyway, it's easy to forget that Dempsey, like Ali, was actually an unpopular champion when he first reached the top, what with all and sundry accusing him of being a draft dodger and the stories (some true, but most overblown) about his first wife turning in tricks, his reportedly evil behaviour in the hobo camps he'd previously been living in and so on. It wasn't until he'd disspelled the draft dodging myth and trounced Carpentier that he became a universally loved figure across America (as shown by the fact that the Carpentier fight was the first ever million dollar gate but, within a space of just six years, he'd hit that figure a further four times).

Great article, but I don't think Johnson had much to do with how much Dempsey was and still is revered, personally.

I think there were a lot of factors which came together to make Dempsey the figure he was but I tend to think his actual record and even his ability is liable to be overrated. Although increasingly over decades I do think he has drifted down a bit the rankings. He had the look, the style and the appeal of what what a heavyweight champion should be to the average man. Boxing was a big sport maybe second only to baseball in the U.S. Importantly he came around the time the Walker Laws were passed in boxing which for the first time gave boxing a real legal and regulated platform and phased out the unpopular No Decision era which didn’t really work in practice. It gave boxing the framework to flourish and Dempsey had the right kind of style, personality and skin colour to take advantage.

Personified the era, really, which is what did it for Jack. Along with Babe Ruth, and to a lesser extent someone like Walter Hagen, Dempsey embodied the glamour of the Roaring Twenties.

This was a time, after all, when everyone was heaving a sigh of relief about the end of the war and was ready to let their hair down and party hard. Dempsey's reign was sandwiched by the grimness of the Great War and the greyness of Prohibition, and his persona and fights retain a comparatively colourful hue, even at this distance.

Johnson was a much better fighter than Dempsey, although his record as a champion, which consisted of fighting no-one who could be construed a serious threat, was probably even more full of holes than Jack's. I honestly don't think that Jack's lustre owes much to Johnson, reviled though the latter was. He was just the epitome of the good times, however brief they may have been. They made a great movie about that decade, remember. No-one looks back with much nostalgia to the 30s or the early years of Woodrow Wilson's presidency.

Excellent points............Maybe Johnson isn't a big contributing factor. .....