Exactly six months later the bout took place, boxing's first million dollar gate.
Is Rickard serious here or is this just ballyhoo?
I do not know how much the tickets were for the bout at Jersey City but the gate receipts were 1.8 million dollars with an attendance of 80,000. On average, therefore, the average price paid per person attending was 22.5 dollars. At the time the average weekly wage for a worker in the manufacturing industry (and therefore probably quite typical of all manual workers) in the States was 26.3 dollars.
This means that those attending the bout were giving up most of their weekly pay to be there. In todays terms this probably equates to about £250 a ticket in British money.
No wonder Rickard had his doubts about the economic risk associated with the bout but, boy, did he pull it off when he did so. This was due, no doubt, to the hype he managed to build up about the risk that Carpentier posed to Dempsey as challenger.
Miles Templeton.
