Tens of thousands of boxing fans caught their first glimpse of the rugged young pugilist when he climbed through the ropes July 4, 1919, in Toledo, Ohio, to challenge Jess Willard for his world heavyweight championship. Heat waves shimmered across the ring on a day some said reached 110 degrees. Dempsey’s mop of jet-black hair crowned an otherwise shaved head, and his bronze, muscular frame stretched 6-foot-1 and 180 pounds.

Jack Dempsey – a contender from “out West” – was a virtual unknown on the national stage. That would soon change. Few, however, could have predicted it on that fateful day.

The champion stepped into the ring “like a moving mountain,” Dempsey later recalled in Dempsey: By the Man Himself. The behemoth Kansan who had taken the crown from Jack Johnson stood 6-foot-6 and 250 pounds, towering over the Colorado underdog.

Then the opening bell rang.

Fans soon witnessed a shocking display of savagery as Dempsey mauled Willard relentlessly over three rounds. A thunderous left hook midway through the first dropped the champion to the canvas for the first time in his career – the beginning of the end. Dempsey swarmed with relentless fury, knocking the bloodied giant down seven times in that opening round.

The beating continued through the next two rounds to the crowd’s stunned amazement. To Willard’s credit, he showed heart until finally his cornermen wouldn’t allow him to answer the bell for the fourth. Born into poverty in Colorado, Dempsey was suddenly the new heavyweight king of the world.

Reports from ringside claimed Willard suffered facial fractures, a broken jaw, missing teeth and broken ribs – all plausible given the punishment he took from Dempsey. Yet to those who knew his hardscrabble rise in Colorado, none of it came as a surprise. “The Jack we knew was peaceable,” said Susie Osborne of Uncompahgre, Colorado. “The Jack who got in that ring was downright vicious.”

The late Toby Smith, author of Kid Blackie: Jack Dempsey’s Colorado Days, summed it up best: “Colorado not only provided Jack Dempsey with a beginning, but it also gave him a destiny.”

So began the improbable rise of the Manassa Mauler.

 

The signs may have been there all along – or, at least, they should have been.

William Harrison Dempsey entered the world on June 24, 1895, in Manassa, Colorado, weighing a whopping 11 pounds. He was the ninth of 11 children born to Hiram and Celia Dempsey, but his mother sensed something special from the start. Years later she told her famous son – by then known as the Manassa Mauler – how that feeling began.

One day, before his birth, a stranger knocked at their cabin door peddling magazines. Celia offered him a glass of milk but explained they couldn’t afford anything he was selling. The man gratefully drank, then insisted on paying before he left.

“I wouldn’t hear of it,” said Celia, a tiny woman who never weighed more than 110 pounds. “So he gave me a useless, battered old book he was toting.” It told the life story of the famous John L. Sullivan, the last bare-knuckle world heavyweight champion. “I finished reading it before you were born,” she said. “When you came, so big and strong, I told everyone, ‘William will grow up to be the world’s champion fighter – just like John L. Sullivan.’ ”

And he did – though against all odds.

Poverty followed the Dempseys like a long shadow. Jack later called his childhood “rugged,” adding, “An old story, perhaps, but a painful one: too many mouths to feed,” and “a father with the wanderlust and almost no ability to make a decent living …”

Religion brought the Dempsey family to Colorado around 1880 from Logan County, West Virginia. A missionary from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints first planted the seeds of faith in the restless Hiram, who soon sold 300 acres of coal and timber land for a dollar an acre and loaded his family of four into a schooner headed west. Their trek ended in Manassa – a San Luis Valley frontier town founded a year earlier by Latter-day Saint pioneers.

Hiram and Celia joined the Church, though Hiram soon fell away. He even called himself a “Jack Mormon” – one who doesn’t entirely live by its teachings. He liked to drink and smoke and freely admitted to breaking most of the Church’s rules. “I know the Church is right,” he’d say with a grin. “I’m just too weak to live up to those rules.”

Celia often filled the breach left by her husband. One neighbor remembered her as the real fighter of the family. Petite yet formidable, she was both strict and tireless. None of her children dared cross her, and all loved her deeply. Still, love and hard work couldn’t always fill an empty stomach. In those desperate times, Manassa offered the Dempseys one enduring blessing: the quiet generosity of Church leaders and neighbors. When bishops sensed an empty cupboard, Jack recalled, it was “filled before nightfall – without comment.”

The scars of poverty hardened Jack’s resolve to climb higher in life. None cut deeper than when his mother fell ill in Leadville. Hiram decided she should travel the hundred miles to Denver to recover with their daughter Florence. Celia refused to go without her baby, Bruce; youngest daughter, Elsie; and Jack, then called Harry. She boarded the train with a single ticket, two ticketless children, a few coins and a baby in her arms.

The conductor wasn’t pleased. He demanded tickets for Elsie and Jack. “I’m very sick,” Celia said weakly, showing her small purse. “Okay, the girl can travel free,” he relented, then glared at Jack. “But that boy has to have a half-fare ticket, or he gets thrown off at the next station.”

The cruelty of those words gave Jack his first true taste of humiliation. Overwhelmed by fear of being left behind, he froze until a kind man across the aisle leaned over. “I don’t think that conductor will bother you, kid,” he said quietly. “But tell your mother not to worry. If he insists on his money, I’ll pay it for you.”

Jack vowed in that moment to never be “humiliated” or “frightened” again – and he would only look back on that day when he needed the pain to drive him forward.

 

Boxing quickly became Jack’s only hope. Bernie, his brother 15 years older, had been a prizefighter when not laboring in Colorado’s mines. Jack called him his “idol” – not just for his toughness, but because he embodied manhood. Bernie gave Jack what their father never could – a model to follow.

Bernie taught him how to survive with grit, tenacity and a fierce work ethic. He also taught him to fight: how to make a proper fist, how to throw it and how to move. He drilled him on the classics – the feint, the jab, the counterpunch. In training, Bernie would rush forward, broom handle in hand, shouting for Jack to strike the stick to build speed.

By age 11, Bernie had him chewing pine resin to toughen his jaw and soaking his face and hands in beef brine three times a day to harden his skin “as tough as leather.” Jack kept those habits throughout his career.

By age 12, Jack was already training to be a prizefighter. The one thing Bernie couldn’t teach him was power. That came naturally – and first appeared when Jack was about seven, fighting a classmate named Fred Daniels at Manassa’s White House School. A crowd gathered as the boys squared off. Fred’s father shouted, “Bite him, Fred!” When the boy turned, Jack landed a crashing blow to his chin that knocked him cold. Legend says a local veterinarian had to revive him.

From then on, Jack was hooked on fighting.

Records of his early bouts are hazy at best. Most took place in saloons across Colorado, Utah, Idaho and Nevada, where he worked odd jobs in mining towns. By his own account, he began fighting for money around 1911, at 16, and estimated he’d had “a hundred” such barroom brawls.

Like a young John L. Sullivan, the slender, 130-pound Dempsey would stand in the middle of a saloon and challenge any “son of a bitch in the house” to a fight. He would then add in his high-pitched voice, “For a buck.”

Dempsey discovered every Western saloon generally had at least one tough guy willing to accept his offer. Oftentimes they were hardened miners or rough-and-tumble cowboys, some outweighing him by more than 100 pounds. Dempsey admitted he probably looked like easy prey back then but bluntly added that he “murdered most of them.”

Dempsey’s first known professional fight took place Sept. 15, 1912, at the Moose Hall in Montrose. The Western Slope town held a special place in his heart because it was where he’d seen his first prizefight as a child. Now, at 17, Dempsey was ready to start his own career, and he didn’t wait for it to come to him.

He ran into an old childhood friend, Fred Wood, a fair country pugilist who went by “The Fighting Blacksmith.” Dempsey asked if he’d be interested in a bout, and Wood agreed. The two promoted the fight themselves, renting the venue, selling tickets and splitting the gate receipts.

Dempsey fought under the name “Kid Blackie.” Bernie suggested the nickname after noticing his brother’s black hair and dark complexion. The name stuck for a while. Only later would he adopt the name Jack Dempsey in honor of his favorite fighter, Jack “The Nonpareil” Dempsey, the world middleweight champion from 1884 to 1891.

The fight with Wood didn’t go past the fourth round. Dempsey dropped him in the second but failed to finish him off, hesitating long enough for Wood to recover – a lapse that stood out for a fighter who later became famous for his killer instinct. Dempsey nearly paid for it when Wood came back strong, doubling him over with a shot to the midsection. But a round later, Dempsey surged back, unleashing a flurry of wild punches that knocked the blacksmith cold.

He quickly grabbed a pail of water and doused his game friend back to consciousness. Each man earned $20 that night for his trouble.

Little did anyone suspect Dempsey would go on to become world heavyweight champion less than seven years later.

Hardship paved his road. For the next few years, Dempsey crisscrossed Colorado – often starving and desperate. He fought in towns like Telluride, Cripple Creek, Colorado Springs, Durango and Salida, logging at least 10 bouts outside the saloons. When he wasn’t boxing or hustling a fight, he took any work he could find. He labored in mines, baled hay, washed dishes, chopped wood, broke wild burros, scrubbed floors, cleaned windows – even begged for a meal when he had to.

“I never turned down a job anybody offered me,” Dempsey recalled decades later. “No matter what the pay. I’d rather go hungry than steal … I was a starving kid, wandering in search of food, sometimes almost like an animal, living as best I could and with the weapons of survival God gave me – my fists. And I guess my chin.”

His motivation in the ring came hard-earned. In those days, he traveled like a hobo, “riding the rods” – clinging to two narrow steel beams beneath a Pullman car. “There’s only a few inches between you and the tracks and roadbeds – and death,” he said. Falling asleep wasn’t an option.

Once, while catching a freight from Grand Junction to Delta, he climbed the ladder of a moving train. A railroad bull appeared above him, swinging a heavy club. He ordered Dempsey to jump, but the train was moving too fast. The man didn’t care. One blow split Dempsey’s head and sent him tumbling down a hillside. Groggy and bleeding, Dempsey picked himself up and walked 40 miles to Delta as the blood dried.

Manassa’s favorite son would rise with that same determination, time and again, in the ring. Dempsey once said, “A champion is someone who gets up when he can’t.”

Unquestionably, Colorado taught him that resolve – and he never forgot the lesson.


RETRACING JACK DEMPSEY’S COLORADO DAYS
THREE PLACES TO VISIT

The Jack Dempsey Museum – Located in Dempsey’s hometown of Manassa, the museum is dedicated to preserving the legacy of its most famous native son. Visitors will find a collection of original memorabilia from the Dempsey estate, as well as a life-size sculpture, artwork and newspaper clippings that chronicle his rise from obscurity in Colorado to World Heavyweight Champion. Most notably, the collection is housed in the cabin where Dempsey was born June 24, 1895. Open 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday through Friday. Admission is free. For more information, call (719) 843-5207.

Durango – In this scenic mountain town, visitors will find the famous Durango & Silverton Narrow-Gauge Railroad, whitewater rafting, an abundance of hiking trails and a mural that celebrates Dempsey’s Oct. 7, 1915, fight with Andy Malloy by artist Tom McMurray. The mural captures the moment Dempsey knocked down Malloy for the last time at the Gem Theatre. The mural remains prominently in sight today, located south of the old Gem Theatre and painted on the red brick wall of the El Rancho Tavern.

Montrose – The Dempsey family once lived in Montrose, where Jack’s mother opened a ramshackle restaurant. The eatery became a popular hangout for the workers building the Gunnison Tunnel for the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad. Jack helped his mother in the restaurant, but Montrose is especially noted as the site of two of Dempsey’s earliest fights in 1912. At the time, Dempsey fought under the name, “Kid Blackie.”


WHY IS THERE A FISH CALLED JACK DEMPSEY?

Turns out the boxer isn’t the only Jack Dempsey known for throwing his weight around.

Native to Central America, the Jack Dempsey fish (Rocio octofasciata) is a freshwater cichlid with a reputation for being bold, flashy – and downright aggressive when provoked. Aquarium keepers quickly took note of its bad temper and brawler instincts. In the early 20th century, as it entered the aquarium trade, it earned a fitting nickname: Jack Dempsey, after the heavyweight champ who ruled American boxing rings with raw power and unshakable grit.

Like its namesake, the fish is hard to ignore. Its deep, dark coloring shimmers with blues, greens and purples that seem to flare when it’s agitated – or just showing off. And while it won’t break your nose, it has no trouble intimidating other fish in the tank.

Tough. Flashy. Territorial. A fighter by nature.

The name just made sense.