Kings and Champs Fighting for Their Thrones
On Ego and Masculinity, from Jack Dempsey to Mike Tyson and Jake Paul
I’m a pretty casual sports fan, and even if I don’t watch a lot, I still try to keep abreast of matchups, standings, and scores, especially with some of the combat sports. And I’ve always had a particular draw towards boxing history.
I was thumbing around this book I have—A Flame of Pure Fire: Jack Dempsey and the Roaring 20s by Roger Kahn—which I first bought and read as a college student—for fun1—and I’ve been wanting to read it again. I only read it that one time, and I got a lot out of it, so 20+ years later, I’m curious to see how much more I’d absorb.
Jack Dempsey was one of the progenitors of our modern notion of the celebrity athlete as a boxer who ascended in the 1910s and fought throughout the 1920s. He was a powerful puncher whose prestige filled stadiums and probably helped escalate sports betting more than any other single individual. If memory serves, I had initially become interested in learning about Dempsey because I had heard about some of his training, which involved a lot of pullups, which, in his estimation, helped build up and unleash the power in his punches.
Kahn knew and spoke to Dempsey, who recounted how he, like many up-and-coming fighters of the time, fought because it was easy money, easy but necessary. They were literally hungry, and their next meal depended on them winning. Before gaining too much traction, Dempsey would walk miles between towns, even in the middle of a Nevada summer’s day, to get to a fight to earn some money just to feed himself and then later to also feed his family.
It’s a trajectory that’s maybe universal to the human experience—when we feel so depraved for so long, when we come into abundance, we tend to lean hard into it, and Dempsey was no exception. He married four times; once was to Estelle Taylor2, a movie star of the day, even purportedly got a bit of plastic surgery for her, and hobnobbed and rubbed elbows with other VIPs.
Examples/side stories: The book has a lot of crazy little nuggets about the notable figures Dempsey crossed paths with, directly or indirectly. Kahn, a young writer, and Dempsey, an old man and retired champ, had been talking and agreed to work together, but Dempsey said that he had already been talking to another writer who also wanted to tell Dempsey’s story. Out of respect, Dempsey just wanted to clear it with him first. That other writer was some guy by the name of Hemingway. Also, after losing a championship fight near the end of his career, Dempsey received a bouquet and a condolence card from a fan. It was unsigned but was delivered on behalf of one Alfonse Capone. Imagine.
There’s a photograph in the book that caused quite a stir when it was originally taken. Already a bit of a celebrity fighter, Dempsey posed in a mining camp, wearing the standard issue coveralls of the miners, a smudge or two of dirt on his face and one leg perched upon a small pile of coal. From underneath his coveralls, appeared a clean, well-polished, shining, black shoed foot.
Obviously, the photo was staged, and people weren’t having it. In his own words, Dempsey had been a hobo—not a bum, but a hobo, a wanderer, a vagrant—but his fame and fortunes catapulted him into a higher tier of the social hierarchy, yet he still wanted to appear as an everyday man.
This got me thinking about ego.
Let’s be honest. We all have it. We’re all vain, though, clearly, some have more than others.
There was something about Dempsey’s ego that appealed to the characterization of that photo. On the one hand, ego might drive a person in his situation to never look back, to forget about his prior life. He could have strutted like a peacock. On the other, his ego was such that he was trying to appeal to a large swath of people.
Look at me. I’m different. But I’m not.
In this light, ego can ironically appear as humility. Sometimes, then, are vanity, ego, and pride good things?
Or is it that maybe celebrity men fear an appearance of softness? Wealth, after all, affords certain creature comforts, luxuries, even extravagances that can sand down the roughness of the hardest men. Was Dempsey’s photo a reminder that, despite his suits and his slicked-back hair, he was roughneck and a fighter?
Either way, this is ego at work.
If you are driven to lose weight, gain some muscle, and improve certain health markers for aesthetics and bragging rights, because you want to look good, which are probably the primary drivers for most of us, that’s ultimately a good thing. Whatever gets us there, and you’re not alone.
More often, though, ego gets in our way. It can make us impatient. We don’t want to wait for the slow drops to accumulate in the bucket. We want to be instantly gratified and have it yesterday. Our egos can make us do things that are counter to our rational logic, which, sometimes, only kicks in after the fact.
Fast forward 100 years since Dempsey’s heyday: In July, Mike Tyson and Jake Paul will be stepping into the boxing ring for a professional boxing match, and I’ve been trying to figure out why. As everyone knows, Iron Mike is a former heavyweight boxing champ, and Paul, 30 years Tyson’s junior, is a legitimate boxer but maybe more known through and from his social media presence. Why these two disparate fighters with such a generation gulf separating them would want to step into the squared circle is, to put it plainly, odd.
Then again, socio-thematically (new word!?), maybe it’s not that outlandish. It’s the very premise of Rocky Balboa (2006), and the earlier Rocky V (1990) has similar notes—the old king coming back to put the young prince in his place. For better or worse, it’s the art of manliness. A study of masculinities; a study of manhood.
The elder men, the warriors of yesteryear, want to reclaim their glory, and what better way to do it than to dominate the young men who are on their own quest for prestige, and what better way for the young men to forge and solidify their position and status than to best their cultural champions.
Paul’s been gathering momentum as he’s been fighting some pretty well known and reputable fighters, even if some of them are retired and past their prime. As he’s not been doing a traditional ladder climb, it looks like he’s vying for something serious.
On the other side, there’s a pretty viral clip of Tyson from 2020 where he talks about feeling empty and sometimes like, in his words, a bitch. He acknowledges the ferocity of the young man he used to be but also admits that he doesn’t want to be that guy, that he hates that guy, but if that man shows up, hell’s coming with him.
It’s powerful.
I worry about Tyson and Paul for different reasons in their forthcoming bout. Tyson stands to lose much more than Paul, and Paul stands to gain much more than Tyson. It’s a gamble for each of them, and that’s probably part of the allure. No risk, no reward.
Iron Mike may be gambling with his legacy. The capstone to his story as a fighter could be a defeat in a match—now sanctioned as a professional bout and not merely exhibition—at the hands of a boxer with an unconventional rise. Paul has earned his stripes his own way, but the fact is that he likely would not be in a position to fight some of these once prestigious fighters, like Anderson Silva and Nate Diaz, without his social media rise.
There’s a famous story about a 76-year-old Dempsey. Upon leaving his New York restaurant one evening, two oblivious knuckleheads attempted to mug him, and Dempsey, without much ado, knocked each out with a single knuckle sandwich, a left for one and a right for the other. To call it a bada-bing, bada-boom would be uneconomical; it was simply bing-boom. Clockwork.
A 76-year-old Jack Dempsey was still Jack Dempsey—The toughest man in the world.
For Paul’s part, I worry about the physical harm he may be facing. A 57-year-old Mike Tyson is still Iron Mike Tyson, and the trauma the kid in him experienced still lives, and I’m sure with a flick of a switch, it can all come back. Bada-bing. Bada-boom.
But this is a two-way street. Paul’s got the speed and agility of youth and the virtue of not having the accumulated the volume of beatings of an older fighter’s body. He could land the right hit on Tyson and in the right way such that it takes him out. Despite being a 57-year-old Iron Mike, he’s still a 57-year-old retired boxer with a long catalogue of hits, bruises, and knockouts.
I did some martial arts and kickboxing and even played some rugby in my college days. When another human punches you with full force or you catch a boot to the head, you forever appreciate the gravity of the situation and understand how dangerous it really is. I had a biology teacher in college who basically told us all to avoid contact sports lest the brain damage it elicits. Even small, seemingly insignificant shots to the head and body can result in damage that may not manifest visibly until much later.
I enjoy sports and combat sports, but every time an athlete gets hit, every time a fighter absorbs a kick—which is like getting hit with a bat—every time I watch football players crash into each other, I feel the impacts reverberate through me.
Whether it’s Tyson or Paul, either one could land the blow that permanently derails the other.
Moreover, combat sports have a long history of retirees and former champs attempting some kind of comeback, and it almost never goes well. Tyson’s successor, James Buster Douglas, lost the championship in his very next fight to Evander Holyfield. Nate Diaz, who lost to Jake Paul in Diaz’s only professional boxing bout to date, defeated Conor McGregor when McGregor was untouchable.3
The broader issue is the cultural model that this matchup provides. The bout isn’t just sanctioning a professional boxing match. It’s also sanctioning an acceptance and a truth that older men want to feel something they’re lacking—maybe useful, maybe youth—by competing with the younger men, who are happy to oblige because they also want to feel useful and attain a perceived greatness, which they can do by permanently dethroning a king, almost like a form of Herostratic fame.4
It’s naïve to say that this matchup has nothing to do with ego. Contrarily, that’s what it boils down to. Tyson and Paul will each get a payday, but neither needs it. Each of these guys is hungry in his own way. It’s entertainment for us, but it’s life, limb, and legacy at stake for each of them.
For us, Tyson and Paul are metaphors for men in our society, men at different stages of life and career but who ultimately want the same things—to satiate their hunger, to fill an emptiness inside them.
They are us.
On July 20, one will defeat the other, and we’ll all give another push to this wheel of masculinity and keep it rolling.
LOL.
Among her filmography is Cecil B. Demille’s The Ten Commandments (1923). She played Moses’ sister. Any average cinephile can tell you what a big deal this is.
Despite my reproaches, respect to all these guys, which might seem ironic or hypocritical. It takes courage to step into any ring, especially with the whole world watching.
Herostratus: Ancient Greek who became famous for doing something terrible—burning down the Temple of Artemis, one of the wonders of the ancient world. It’s fame at any cost, and he was quickly executed.