Boxing was once on par with baseball as America’s No. 1 sport. At the turn of the 20th Century, it was commonplace for prizefighters to have well over 100 sanctioned bouts and many more that were off the books. Before Jack Dempsey, Joe Louis, Muhammad Ali and Mike Tyson ruled the heavyweight division, Jack Johnson was the king.
On April 5, 1915, the 6-foot-6 Jess Willard dethroned Johnson when he knocked him out in the 26th round at Oriental Park Racetrack in Havana, Cuba. It would go down as the only significant victory of the St. Clere, Kansas, native’s career. The “Pottawatomie Giant” went on to lose to Dempsey four years later and retired from boxing in 1923.
Willard finished with a career with a 26-6-1 record and 20 knockouts, but his unlikely victory over Johnson is the stuff of which legends are made. The fact that he did not start boxing professionally until the age of 29 makes his upset over Johnson all the more impressive. Willard, who died in 1968, was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 2003.
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