Jack Dempsey

I am not a fight fan, though Jack Dempsey was my boyhood hero. I was never the same after Dempsey lost that second fight to Gene Tunney, the one that turned on the notorious "long count." That fight cost me my watch, my knife and every cent I had. I lost my stomach for fighting when I saw too many beautiful young fighters reduced to punch-drunk stumblebums with scarred faces and pig eyes, robbed and abandoned by their hangers-on and hopelessly in debt to the IRS.

One of boxing's rarest collectibles, or so Gloria Haley would have you believe, sits in the cluttered, darkened living room of her Beverly Hills home. A septuagenarian, she cares little for the sweet science. "I can't stand it," Haley says of boxing. "It's barbaric." She is the daughter of the late actor Jack Haley, who was the Tin Man in "The Wizard of Oz." Her brother was the late Jack Haley Jr.

Sixty years ago today, two men climbed into a 20-foot ring in Chicago and for 40 minutes made the world stand still. Dempsey-Tunney II. The Long Count fight. In 1927, they called it the fight of the century. It might well have been. Radio was in its infancy, yet NBC estimated that on the night of Sept. 22, 1927, about 50 million people around the world heard Gene Tunney successfully defend his championship against Jack Dempsey.

I'm sitting in a hotel room in Columbus, Ohio, waiting for a call from a man who doesn't trust me, hoping he'll have answers about a man I don't trust, which may clear the name of a man no one gives a damn about. To distract myself from this uneasy vigil--and from the phone that never rings, and from the icy rain that never stops pelting the window--I light a cigar and open a 40-year-old newspaper.

For more than half a century, it was a musty pugilistic monument--preserved in liniment and sweat--where generations of Los Angeles prizefighters learned the lessons of "the sweet science." The Main Street Gym, on the edge of skid row, was the rattiest workout venue in the city (some said the world), but it also was the most famous. "World Rated Boxers Train Here Daily" read a sign at the entrance.

A man who popped a friend's 6-inch tropical fish into his mouth as a joke died when it got stuck in his throat. Steven Hill Epperson, 36, was dead on arrival at a hospital Sunday. He put the Jack Dempsey fish in his mouth at his friend's house, and it became wedged in his airway.

This Sunday: Regina Marler on the life and work of Gore Vidal; Steven Kellman on Roger Kahn's biography of Jack Dempsey; Nicole Krauss on Joseph Brodsky's children's poem "Discovery"; and Jonathan Levi on Rikki Ducornet's novel about the Marquis de Sade.

Creel and catch-per-angler ratios for trout have increased on the Kern River, according to Jack Dempsey of Sierra Sporting Goods in Kernville, since the California Department of Fish and Game altered its stocking routine. Dempsey said the DFG now plants away from concentrations of the voracious squawfish, a non-game species that previously consumed up to 85% of the hatchery fish, leaving few for the fishermen.

Recent storms have muddied the waters and slowed fishing temporarily in many popular Southland lakes, but water levels have increased dramatically. Randy King reported from Lake Casitas near Ventura that the level is up 14 feet from Feb. 28 and still rising--but still down 40 from normal. "We got back everything (the water users) used last year," King said. "Now if the water gets warmer, we'll really take off." Jack Dempsey at Lake Isabella said, "These four weeks of storms have really helped.