BoxRec

Some complaints (excuses) are so ingrained into the fight game that regardless of circumstances (reality) fighters will say them anyway. Considering the events surrounding the Dempsey-Firpo fight one wouldn't expect this complaint from Firpo.

That's a pretty good find.
I don't recall hearing about this. What newspaper is this from?
Hard to say watching the footage because the film is sped up. Firpo doesn't look like he had much left anyway. He probably has a better argument that the neutral corner rule was not enforced.

This film is edited. I have read some say Dempsey was out of the ring for over 20 seconds.

Why is such an action packed 2 round fight this edited? Best answer Doc Kearns and crew took out something they do not want you to see.

pound per pound wrote:This film is edited. I have read some say Dempsey was out of the ring for over 20 seconds.

Why is such an action packed 2 round fight this edited? Best answer Doc Kearns and crew took out something they do not want you to see.

Not likely the 'best answer,' but a more romantic one I will give you that.

Doc Kearns sure gets around - he supposedly cut the Willard film as well, so we couldn't see Dempsey drop the iron bar from his fist.

I think what we are seeing here is a choppy film that got kicked around because of the interstate prohibition. Rickard was not able to repeat his magic (bribing authorities to get around the Sims Law) and get the Firpo film into theaters the way he did the Carpentier fight. Most (most likely, all) of the surviving Firpo films are from someone's illegal bootleg; it never got a legal theater run; it never got big distribution the way the Carpentier fight did; there were never that many copies of the fight around to begin with, plus no one had any commercial motivation to preserve it.

Often people would replay the exciting parts of these films (Dempsey out of the ring) so often that they would burn out the film and the scene would be lost. A good example of this is the Corbett-Fitzsimmons fight. The famed solar plexus punch got replayed so often they burnt it off every film and it is lost to us today. (It has the same choppy look the 'Dempsey out of the ring' moment has.)

This Corbett-Fitzsimmons video is a good example of the problem I was complaining about (above). The video is reasonable until the KO (around 19:00) at that point you can see how the film has burnt marks and the image obscured because the film was played back and forth too often. At the 20:00 mark they show the KO in 'slowed' motion which clearly shows the damage to the film.

This happened with many fight films as early fans went looking to create their own instant reply. - In some cases the the KO or the KO round was deliberately removed from the film and the customer had to first buy the fight film (minus the exciting parts) and then for an added expense could buy the KO round. This of course created a plethora of circulating fight films missing the exciting moments.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbscS06dur4