“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please”:

On Luis Angel Firpo

 

 

I suppose every defeat is, in a way, inevitable, but some seem more inevitable than others Like lines of perspective converging at one single point on the horizon, they correspond more perfectly to some notion we hold of the foreordained and cause us to think: here is destiny at work.

 

Luis Angel Firpo’s 1923 defeat at the hands of Jack Dempsey, whom he was challenging for the world heavyweight title, has that feeling of solid inevitability.  Dempsey, the champion since 1919, would hold onto the title two more years.  Firpo, the South American heavyweight champion, was coming off a string of impressive victories.  Called “El Toro Salvaje de las Pampas,” it was said he could knock a bull out cold with a blow.  He would be the first, and only, Argentine to contend for the world heavyweight championship.    

 

The heavily-hyped match took place on September 14 at the Polo Grounds in New York, before 80,000 witnesses. In Buenos Aires, crowds gathered in front of the Palacio Barolo to watch as rows of colored lights marked the progress of the fight.

 

Dempsey – the ‘Manassa Mauler’ -- seemed headed for an easy victory.  The first round had hardly begun and he had already knocked Firpo down seven times.  But then El Toro rallied with a fusillade of nine hard punches culminating in a left hook that sent Dempsey flying over the ropes and out of the ring.  

 

In the photograph that captured his fall (the source for George Bellows’ painting ‘Dempsey and Firpo’, now at the Whitney), Dempsey hangs suspended like Brueghel’s Icarus, upside-down and with his legs sprawled in the air.  It seems almost as though Firpo is recoiling from force of his blow.  The squat back of the referee commands the center of the frame.  

 

How long was Dempsey out?  Here, time becomes muddy.  Spectators in the audience with stopwatches measured 14 seconds before he stood up.  Some say Dempsey was out cold as long as 17 seconds.  But only one person’s count mattered, that of Johnny Gallagher, the referee.  When Dempsey finally rose, bleeding from where he had gashed his head on a reporter’s ringside typewriter, Gallagher had only counted to nine – meaning the fight would continue.  (Gallagher would later be suspended by the Metropolitan Boxing Commission for 5 weeks for this excruciatingly slow count.)

 

And in the second round, Dempsey would knock Firpo out one final time and retain the world championship title.

 

Firpo continued to fight off and on for a few more years, with a respectable record, but he never again challenged for the world championship title.  He died in 1960, and is buried in Recoleta cemetery, in Buenos Aires.

 

“To judge by [Firpo’s] popularity today,” wrote Gene Tunney in the October 1958 issue of Esquire, “South Americans have either forgotten, or perhaps never believed, that he was defeated by Dempsey….  As Vice-President Nixon is supposed to have said, down there they still think Firpo won.”  Tunny, the man who did succeed in beating Dempsey, taking over as world heavyweight champ in 1926, praises Firpo’s thrift and success in business (he became a millionaire car dealer) more than he does his fighting skills, and seems gently bemused by this loser’s acclaim and reputation.  Joe Louis, he reminds us, died penniless.  

 

But in 1958, the upward trajectory of American imperium was steep.  Argentina, after more than two decades of political instability and military governments, had settled into its doomed path to third-world status – never to be a global power.  Was it ever even in the running?  

 

In 1923, when Firpo was defeated, Argentina was one of the ten wealthiest nations in the world.  In many ways, it was an analog of the United States.  It was a constitutional democracy, with a population composed largely of immigrants.  It had a prosperous, growing economy – agricultural and industrial.  Buenos Aires, like New York, was a melting-pot city and a cultural hub. There was even the vast frontier, complete with cowboys -- gauchos -- and massacred natives.  The future looked bright.  

 

Is it going too far to say that Firpo’s defeat is emblematic of Argentina’s record of disappointment, underachievement, failure?  It seems to me, at least, to be an omen.

 

In his story “Circe,” Julio Cortázar writes: “Then came the Firpo-Dempsey match, and in every house there was weeping and brutal indignation, followed by a humiliated melancholy that was almost colonial.”  

 

It hardly even matters that the count was fudged, that the fight should have gone to Firpo the moment Dempsey fell out of the ring.  That’s what destiny is: a rigged game.