Evander Holyfield may be the reigning heavyweight title-holder, but in this off-the-beaten-path southern Colorado town the
Manassa Mauler always will be the champ.Nestled among potato fields and cattle and sheep ranches, this quiet, pastoral town of 1,000 showcases the humble beginnings of one of America's most famous prizefighters at the Jack Dempsey Museum.
"That's all that keeps us on the map," Laverne King confesses to travelers who happen upon museum, situated in the tiny log cabin where Dempsey was born nearly a century ago.
For those who believe in fate, Dempsey was destined to become a great fighter. His family roots go back to the battling Hatfields and McCoys of West Virginia. Dempsey's Scottish-Irish immigrant parents traveled west in a covered wagon to help Mormon pioneers eke out a living in the arid San Luis Valley.
In his autobiography, "Dempsey," the boxer wrote that his mother paid a midwife a quarter for helping with his birth on June 24, 1895. He was the ninth of the Dempseys' 13 children.
Like most of the pioneers in the valley, the Dempseys were poor. Hyrum Dempsey worked on a farm for a while, but lost his job when Jack was about 8 and the family moved from town to town in Colorado and Utah.
In his teens, Dempsey began honing what became his trademark ferociousness by sauntering into mining town saloons and announcing, "I can't sing and I can't dance, but I'll lick anyone in the house."
That tough-guy, underdog attitude helped Dempsey the fighter charm America.
Under 6 feet tall and at times fighting at only 180 pounds, Dempsey was small for a heavyweight, but he compensated with aggressiveness and a big punch. His elusive, crouching moves helped inspire the phrase, "bobbing and weaving." Boxing's first $1 million gate came during a Dempsey title fight.
He won the heavyweight championship in 1919, knocking out Jesse Willard, and lost it to Gene Tunney in 1926.
Although it has been more than 60 years since Dempsey left the ring and eight years since his death, the memory of the famed prizefighter lives on.
About 200 people a month browse through the memorabilia inside the trim, red-and-white log cabin museum in a small park across from the Manassa town hall. No admission is charged.
Inside, a display case holds the shoes Dempsey wore in Chicago on Sept. 23, 1926, when he lost the heavyweight title to Tunney after Tunney survived a knockdown because of the controversial "long count."
Nearby are the gloves Dempsey wore in a New York fight in 1923 when he KO'd Argentinean Luis Firpo after a wild first round in which Dempsey was knocked completely out of the ring onto a sportswriter's typewriter. The sports scribes lifted Dempsey onto the ring apron and he beat the count.
The walls, set off by lace-curtained windows, are lined with black-and-white photographs - Dempsey in his familiar boxing stance, the champ rubbing shoulders with former presidents and the Hollywood crowd, and appearing at the museum's dedication.
Poster-size frames hold clippings chronicling his feats. There is a $50 ringside ticket to the Dempsey-Gibbons fight on July 4, 1923. A video on Dempsey's life is available for viewing.
In a pamphlet offered by the museum, Manassa oldtimers who since have passed on recalled Dempsey as an active child, who pestered merchants and spent his time in school seated between two girls "as this seemed the only method the teacher found would control his actions."
The pamphlet tells of Dempsey's trips to a favorite swimming hole near Dead Man's Gulch on the Conejos River where the water is "too cold for girls, has always been, and still is a most popular place with the boys."
Dempsey and his friends also passed the time in a spot called Devil's Kitchen on the Little River south of Manassa, picknicking on boiled eggs and baked potatoes.
In later years, when he returned to Manassa, Dempsey was heard to say that Mooney Daniels was "the only boy in town I couldn't lick.'
Although Dempsey only lived in Manassa a few years, he never forgot his roots, and the town has never forgotten him. He always welcomed Coloradans to his New York restaurant where "he never let people from back home pay for a meal," King said.
When King was a young girl, she would hear her parents talk of Dempsey's fighting prowess, and walk past the dilapidated cabin where Dempsey was born. "It was a shack," she recalled.
The town decided to honor its native son in the 1960s by renovating the shack into a museum.