“THE WANDERING EYE” and “TY THROWS HANDS AGAINST HANDLESS FAN”
#850/#849
850. JACK DEMPSEY VS JACK SHARKEY
HEAVYWEIGHT NON-TITLE FIGHT
JULY 21, 1927
YANKEE STADIUM
QUALITY OF PLAY—6.13
DRAMA—6.28
STAR POWER—9.27
CONTEMPORARY IMPORT—7.35
HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE—7.03
LOCAL IMPACT—7.21
TOTAL: 43.25
“THE WANDERING EYE”
The year 1927 was the “Ballyhoo year,” nowhere more so than in New York. Uptown, Babe Ruth hit sixty homers. In midtown, Henry Ford rented out Madison Square Garden to show off the new Model A Ford, the latest in automobiling proficiency. Out on Long Island, Charles Lindbergh lifted off in his Spirit of St. Louis and descended into Paris 34 hours later, having crossed the Atlantic solo, a feat that engendered an enormous ticker-tape parade, with four million people lining Manhattan’s streets.
But arguably the most popular man in New York remained Jack Dempsey, even though he had just been savaged by Gene Tunney in Philly. The heavyweight king was urged not to retire by the City’s legions of fight fans, although Jack was well aware of what happened to pugilists who hung on for those last few paydays. Thus in the wake of Lucky Lindy’s May heroics, the public swooned in June when the Manassa Mauler announced he would return to the ring to take on “Sailor” Jack Sharkey, the Boston Gob, right there in the Babe’s House, the Yankee Stadium.
“I want to fight,” Dempsey insisted to reporters. “It’s my business. I’m not dead by a gobful.”
Unfortunately, his ne’er do well brother, Johnny Dempsey, was, having murdered his wife Edna and then turned the gun on himself in a macabre crime scene in Schenectady, the result of a longtime heroin addiction. Jack’s training was, needless to say, interrupted, but he went ahead with the bout, scheduled for Thursday night July 21, 1927.
Sharkey, born Joseph Paul Zukauskas in Binghamton, NY, had a formidable left and despite a mixed record was considered a tough scrapper. He looked sharpish in training, which took place mainly on the Madison Square Garden roof, in order to prepare for the outdoor conditions at the Stadium. Dempsey, distracted, appeared as though Tunney had drained his life force. “This is great drama,” wrote Jim Dawson in the Times. “A tough pro, Sharkey, against Dempsey, who only a little while ago was being described as ‘a hollow shell,’”
So hollow that Sharkey was being quoted as a 7-5 favorite by the City bookmakers. Tunney had carved up Dempsey—and his reputation—that badly. What hadn’t taken a blow was Jack’s popularity. Some 85,000, a record for a non-title fight, poured into the Stadium, including Tunney. Also there was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, newly confined to a wheelchair, and “fourteen kings of finance, six bootleggers and five ticket speculators, all owners of Rolls-Royce cars,” according to Damon Runyon. They paid five times the capped face value of $27.50 for tickets—some reports had ringside ducats going for a cool $1,000 a pop.
Those fortunate enough to sit up close saw Sharkey and his snapping left dominate the first five rounds. Dempsey was left to "flounder around the ring, flat-footed, bewildered, and staggering like a blind man finding his way,” according to Dawson. “I thought he was going to knock me out,” Dempsey admitted.
Ringside fans also noticed that Sharkey wore his trunks awfully high, to guard against body shots. After the torpid start, Dempsey followed his corner’s advice to “go for the body—he doesn’t like it in the gut.” He took the sixth with the new stratagem, and in the seventh bounced several blows off various portions of Sharkey’s lower anatomy. Were they too low? Hard to say with those trunks pulled up to his nipples.
One thing was certain—you never, ever turned away from the rampaging Dempsey, for any reason. Sharkey made this critical error, and paid the price. He turned to the referee to complain about a low blow, and never got to finish his sentence. The Mauler whacked him with his fabled left hook, the one that could stop a charging rhino, and Sharkey and his high-riding trunks were suddenly one with the canvas. Sharkey writhed around in agony, and was counted out as thousands of straw hats were thrown toward the ring—many of them even landing inside. The winner paraded around ringside, shaking hands with the throng who shoved their way forward to get close to the People’s Champ.
Dempsey was back, baby!
AFTERMATH:
Jack earned $350,000 for the win, which restored his faith in humanity. “Did you hear the way the New York people cheered me when I entered the ring?” he asked Tex Rickard, impresario of MSG. “That’s worth a million. This is my town.” True enough, but Rickard thought mainly about the $27.50 price cap on tickets in New York, and moved the rematch with Tunney to Chicago, where face value could get up to $50 per. That fight in August was the night of the fabled “Long Count,” where Dempsey floored Tunney in the seventh, only to waste several seconds refusing to go to a neutral corner. Tunney got up after roughly 15 seconds, and went on to win the fight, essentially ending Dempsey’s career. Jack went on to open his eponymous restaurant on Broadway and remain a popular fixture on the Avenue for many decades.
Sharkey went on to fight for another ten or so years himself, at last hanging up his gloves after losing again to a legend at Yankee Stadium, this time Joe Louis. After finishing with a 38-14-3 record, Sharkey, ironically enough, became a referee, always ensuring that fighters trunks weren’t worn too high and warning them not to chat with him during the fight.
WHAT THEY SAID:
Q: How could you hit Sharkey like that when he had his hands down and was talking to the referee?
A: What was I supposed to do? Write him a letter?
—Jack Dempsey, exchange with a reporter after the fight
FURTHER READING:
A Flame of Pure Fire by Roger Khan
VIDEO:
849. NEW YORK HIGHLANDERS VS DETROIT TIGERS
HILLTOP PARK
MAY 15, 1912
QUALITY OF PLAY—6.13
DRAMA—6.28
STAR POWER—9.57
CONTEMPORARY IMPORT—7.25
HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE—7.83
LOCAL IMPACT—6.21
TOTAL: 43.26
“TY THROWS HANDS AGAINST HANDLESS FAN”
Back in the days just after the Titanic went to the bottom, the spring of 1912, baseball was rough trade. The game on the field was nasty and violent, embodied by the high spiked whirlwind Ty Cobb. Cobb was a brilliant player, the best of his day, and he made the Detroit Tigers the most popular team in the league to go out and watch in person, even if many enjoyed booing him. He was also willing to do almost anything to win. As one fellow Tiger famously put it, to Cobb baseball was “something like a war.”
Or, as Ty himself said, baseball “was as gentlemanly as a kick in the crotch.”
That extended to the action in the stands. The general atmosphere in major league stadia in Cobb’s time was vice-ridden and ruffianly; gamblers abounded, the booze flowed freely, women were seldom seen, and the full-throated heckler was allowed far greater freedom than he would in later eras. Horrible language made for an R-rated crowd that reduced hardened ballplayers to tears, or violence. One of the worst of the breed was a New Yorker named Claude Lucker.
A regular at Hilltop Park up in Washington Heights, where the Highlanders (soon to become the Yankees) toiled, Lucker was the victim of a bad accident while working as a pressman for the New York Times—he lost all the fingers on one hand and two more on the other. The lack of useful hands didn’t prevent him from becoming a dapper dandy hooked up with the Tammany organization, and he was well known in baseball circles as the howler in the bleachers always wearing an alpaca coat—even in high summer.
Lucker was one of the 20,000 who came out to Hilltop to see Cobb when he and the Tigers came to town on Wednesday afternoon, May 15, 1912. Lucker had been savaging Cobb with his usual leather-lunged atrocities since the series began. Among the hurled swill included accusations that Cobb came from an African-American background, couched in the vile epithets you might expect. Cobb’s racism has been somewhat overblown down through the years, but he was nevertheless a southerner in 1912, and those sort of insults went over as well as you might expect. Lucker was a regular when it came to heaping abuse on Cobb, who “usually took the joshing good naturedly enough,” Lucker said. But the Georgia Peach was “peevish right away” on this day.
Cobb took the approbrium for a couple of innings, then asked if Highlanders co-owner Frank Farrell was in the park, so he could point out Lucker and have him removed. Alas, no one could find Farrell. By the fourth inning, Cobb had had enough. His teammate Davy Jones told Cobb he had to do something about the heckler, and be it peer pressure or pent up anger Cobb immediately raced down the third base line, hopped the railing, ran up some stairs and began beating the everloving tar out of Lucker.
Cobb had the size and athletic advantage, and of course, the hands advantage. Fans yelled to stop the fight, noting “he’s a cripple!” And “he has no hands!!” among other things. According to the lore, Cobb responded “I don’t care if he has no feet!” He continued to whale away on the hapless heckler. Lucker later said that the enraged Tiger “cut me with his spikes, tore a big hole behind my ear and cut my face in several places.”
After Cobb was pulled off the bloody heckler and escorted away, the crowd cheered—for Cobb, the enemy player. He was ejected, naturally, though the umpire allowed him to hang around the dugout for several innings. Ban Johnson, the A.L. president, happened to be at Hilltop Park that day to watch Cobb. The exec was aghast, not least because of the irony that Johnson had created the American League as a safer and more family-friendly alternative to the National League. Johnson dispatched a flunky over to Lucker to beg him not to have the ballplayer arrested. “I was told that Johnson planned to take immediate action,” Lucker said, “and let it go at that.” He left, and though he “looked like he should be taken to the dressmakers to be sewn up,” according to the Philadelphia Herald, Lucker still managed to “give a sketchy history of Cobb’s ancestry” on the way out of the park.
By the way, the Tigers won the game 8-4.
AFTERMATH:
The brawl created coast-to-coast controversy in the days before sports radio, social media and 24/7 cable. Johnson suspended Cobb indefinitely, and fined him an undetermined amount. Cobb was mostly defended by fans and press alike—top sportswriter Hugh Fullerton backed Ty in the Chicago Tribune: “Ty Cobb travels around the circuit year after year, singled out as the special mark by every violent fan, and he has learned to endure almost any kind of abuse possible. If the epithets and accusations made by the Highlander fan toward Cobb was half as bad as the Detroit players claim, it was a cause for violence.”
Detroit went down to Philadelphia and beat the A’s without Cobb on Friday. The next day the Tigers players went on strike to force his reinstatement. The game at Shibe Park that day became a legendary farce, as Detroit management scoured local sandlots and pubs for nine live bodies who could take the field. “Any ballplayer who could stop a grapefruit from rolling uphill or hit a bull in the pants with a bass fiddle was given a chance of going direct from the semipros to the Detroits with no questions asked,” wrote “Bugs” Baer, a future sportswriter who took the field that day. Cobb’s uniform was worn by a policeman named Bill Leinhauser, who went 0-4 and had a fly ball bounce off his head. The local gentry lost to the A’s 24-2, and it wasn’t that close.
After the Sunday off day, cooler heads prevailed. Cobb convinced his teammates to go back to work, and Johnson levied just a six-game suspension and $50 fine. The 1912 Tigers were poor, a sixth-place team in an eight-team league, but Cobb was brilliant as usual in ’12, winning the batting crown with a .409 average and topping the league with a .584 slugging percentage.
Controversy would trail Ty for the rest of his career, and his life.
WHAT THEY SAID:
“A ball player should not be expected to take everything, as we have some self-respect, and cannot endure more than human nature will stand for. When a ballplayer can’t take it hw can they expect women to do so, who attended the game by themselves or with their husbands?”
—Ty Cobb, to the Sporting News
FURTHER READING:
Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty by Charles Leerhsen
VIDEO: