Dempsey vs. Gibbons Brings Down Shelby

The anatomy of a financial disaster

William George, “The Boxers”

My friend Kelly Addy, who grew up in Shelby, reminded me a couple of days ago that it was the 100^th anniversary of one of the most bizarre stories to come out of Montana—the heavyweight championship fight featuring Jack Dempsey and Tommy Gibbons.

In the 1920s, the heavyweight champion was among the most famous people in the world. Boxing was king of the sports world, and any heavyweight championship fight was guaranteed to draw a huge crowd, not to mention massive publicity around the globe. And Jack Dempsey was one of the best, winning the title in 1919 against a man about five inches taller than he, Jess Willard. Dempsey was a powerful puncher, and an aggressive fighter, plus he had the looks of a movie idol, which made him a very popular champion.

Jack Dempsey

So when ‘Body’ Johnson, the son of the mayor of Shelby, Montana saw a newspaper article reporting that Montreal, Canada, was offering Dempsey $100,000 to stage his next fight there, he came up with the idea that he was hoping would bring their little burg of 500 people a brief moment of fame. There had been a recent oil strike nearby, and many were predicting that Shelby was destined to grow with the oncoming boom of oil money.

Johnson sent a wire to Dempsey’s manager, a snake oil salesman named Doc Kearns, telling him they would double that offer to bring the fight to Shelby. Johnson was so sure the offer wouldn’t be taken seriously that he didn’t even tell his father about the wire until he was shocked to get a response from Kearns saying he accepted their offer, demanding half of the money right away and the other half before the fight.

Jack ‘Doc’ Kearns, with Jack Dempsey and his wife, Maxine

Johnson suddenly found himself in a quandary of how he was going to come up with $100,000. When he informed Joseph Dixon, the governor of Montana at the time, about the deal, Dixon said “We don’t have $200,000 in the whole state of Montana.” This may have been an exaggeration, but not much of one.

But the American Legion in Shelby managed to scrape together the necessary $100,000, and Loy Molumby, the commander of the Legion, made the trip to Chicago to deliver the first installment to Kearns. Nobody knows exactly what happened on that trip to Chicago, but when Molumby returned to Shelby, he must have been pretty embarrassed to have to report that he had agreed to raise the price to $300,000.