Anyway, I stumbled across this post on another forum and found it very interesting.
http://board.deathvalleydriver.com/inde ... opic=37088
The link to the E-Bay seller is below...Boxing, moreso than any other sport I can think of, loves to wallow in mystery and conspiracy. It's not surprising given its illegal nature in most of the country up until the early 20th century, but it does leave us with many seemingly contradictory and nebulous factoids to sort through.
One whispered rumor that stretches back to the 1920s is this:
In 1921, immediately following his record-breaking million-dollar gate fight against Georges Carpentier, heavyweight champion of the world Jack Dempsey quietly drove up to Saskatoon, Canada and, in an illegal prizefight staged by high-roller gamblers, met and knocked out Jack Johnson, the former heavyweight champion who had been released from prison in July of that year.
A tall tale perhaps, and one that begs many questions - Dempsey made $300,000 to fight Carpentier, how much could a hundred-or-so high rollers offer the champ for a private bout? The biggest elephant in the ring, of course, is the lack of confirmatory evidence in the papers of the day. Or so I thought.
A seller on eBay claims to have an original copy of a 1921 newspaper, "The Brooklyn Eagle", which purportedly has a round-by-round description of the bout as relayed to them from a firsthand source in attendance.
Now this rumor of a Dempsey vs Johnson fight stretches all the way back to this period, but neither Dempsey nor Johnson ever confirmed it, or even debunked it to my knowledge. Boxing historian Monte Cox gives the following account of Dempsey's reaction to the rumor:
One of the truly intriguing aspects of Jack Dempsey was that as a mature adult world champion, he worked tirelessly to recreate his image as that of a gentleman, and did a good job of it too. He took diction lessons, read a newspaper from front to back every single day, and made every effort to distance himself from gamblers and other shady types (Al Capone was a big Dempsey fan and actually offered to promote Dempsey after Jack split from Doc Kearns - Dempsey quickly and quietly declined). But there is no doubt that during his hardscrabble years as a young hobo and itinerant worker, Dempsey couldn't help but associate with such men - heck, he worked in brothels and speakeasies all over Colorado and Utah! Dempsey was so ashamed of this aspect of his life that he outright denied all of it after his career was over; even the 1917 Fireman Jim Flynn fight in Utah, a dive so blatant that both fighters were chased out of town and boxing banned, is stated by Dempsey himself as being completely on the level - the journeyman Flynn KO'd Dempsey with one punch within 10 seconds (for his part Dempsey took his money, rumored to be $500, and was fighting in California 3 weeks later).Lew Eskin, former Boxing Illustrated Editor, wrote an article about it in Dec 1985 Fightbeat magazine. He asked Dempsey about it who was evasive. The only thing Jack would say is he boxed a series of exhibitions during that time. He asked Dempsey if he could publish the story in B.Ill. but Dempsey said, "Not Now" which Eskin took to mean not in his lifetime. The bout with Jack Johnson was allegedly an under the table affair for rich gamblers.
So Dempsey was not above doing the bidding of gamblers during his young and hungry years out west. Could he have repaid a favor to some by fighting Jack Johnson in some remote Canadian basement only 4 years after the Flynn debacle? I don't know, but I'd sure be curious to read that article!
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Rare-oddball-boxi ... dZViewItem
now lets have a pint