Chansky's Notebook: Baseball, Boxing Once A Draw

Next week, we’ll be celebrating two important sports milestones.

The first Major League Baseball All-Star Game was played 84 years ago, when 17 players suited up at the old Comiskey Park in Chicago, nine for the National League and eight for the American League. Babe Ruth hit the first home run, the Great Bambino’s only all-star tater in his legendary career that was already winding down at the time.

The American League won 4-2 in 1933 and will try to even the all-time series that the National League leads, 43-42, in Tuesday night’s renewal at Nationals Park in Washington when there will be far more than 17 players on each team. Starting with the Home-Run Derby Monday night, you know what an extravaganza All-Star week has become.

The one thing the current All-Star Game lacks is the same excitement of that first one, which ended when Ruth made a catch against the rightfield wall that saved the game for the American League. Now, the best players who are voted on by the fans start and are long gone by the ninth inning.

The two biggest sports in America in the 1920s and ’30s were baseball and boxing, and 12 years before the first All-Star game the heavyweight championship fight between Jack Dempsey and Georges Carpentier in New Jersey drew 91,000 fans and produced the first $1 million gate in boxing history. Dempsey made $300,000 from that fight, more than four times Babe Ruth’s highest salary from baseball.

Dempsey was actually the Babe before the Babe. He was once charged with draft evasion and had to go to court to prove that he indeed did support his wife and was acquitted. After that, Dempsey was seen with celebrities like actor Rudy Valentino and although he only fought once or so a year he was voted more newsworthy than infamous gangster John Dillinger in the 1920s.

His exploits in the ring were just as famous. His first fight against Gene Tunney drew more 120,000 fans and $2 million in ticket sales, and after losing the heavyweight title to Tunney won it back on the famous long count when Tunney was allowed to stay down for more than ten seconds because Dempsey did not go to a neutral corner.

Yes, times have changed. The All-Star game will dominate the news next week, while the fight game is still fighting for its very survival.