Tag: Book of Mormon

Of Fists and Fields: The Unlikely Sons of Manassa, Colorado

Posted on by Mark Harvey

by Mark Harvey

Jack Dempsey (right) fighting Jess Willard, Toledo, Ohio, 1919

On a hot Ohio day on July 4th, 1919, a young man named Jack Dempsey from the tiny town of Manassa, Colorado, stepped into the ring to fight Jess Willard, a boxer who was sixty pounds heavier and five inches taller. The two were fighting for the heavyweight championship of the world, and the odds favored Willard, the bigger man and defending champion.

The fight was the most anticipated event across the country. Radio broadcasting wasn’t a thing yet, so men and women gathered at newspaper offices in every state to hear the “megaphone men” announce the fight from telegraph dispatches.

In Toledo, thousands of men surrounded the ring, wearing straw boaters with grosgrain hatbands.

The fight didn’t last long: Dempsey knocked Willard down six times in the first round. That Willard got up six times and survived four rounds before throwing in the sponge is a testament to his toughness. But he paid a terrible price. Dempsey broke his jaw, his cheek, his ribs, and gave him permanent hearing loss.

A surviving film of the fight shows Dempsey moving around the ring like a cat dwarfed by a slow-moving Willard. In modern boxing, the fight probably would have been stopped in the first round.

After his win, Dempsey became arguably the most famous and celebrated man in America. When he met President Coolidge a few years later, the President said, “Well, Mr. Dempsey, you’re a creditable champion, and you’re a more popular man than I am.”

Dempsey’s went on to win many more boxing matches, became a millionaire, and was hosted and toasted by the cream of America and Europe. If you knew his beginnings, you never would have imagined him becoming one of the world’s most famous men. Read more »

Tuesday, May 20, 2025

An Interview With God

Posted on by Akim Reinhardt

by Akim Reinhardt

3QD: The old cliché about a guest needing no introduction never seemed more apt. So instead of me introducing you to our readers, maybe you could begin by telling us a little bit about yourself, perhaps something not so well known, a little more revealing.

God: I am, I am.

3QD: Indeed. But what about your early years? We don’t often hear much about your childhood. What was it like to emerge from nothingness? Or did you precede nothingness, first creating the void and then all of the somethings that filled it up? Or, as some speculate, were you and the great nothingness one and the same? Did you, personally, go from nothing to everything?

God:

3QD: Perhaps too difficult to talk about. We’ll let that be. Nonetheless, you quite literally burst onto the scene, creating everything in 6 days. I don’t think it’s worth getting into your sense of time versus human constructions of time, but whether it was six of our days, or six of yours which might be billions of our solar years, it was a phenomenal debut in the truest sense. Bigger than Elvis’ first single, the Beatles first album, or Justin Bieber’s first YouTube video. More gravitas than Shakespeare’s first play, Henry V, Part II. More charisma than Julie Andrews’ screen debut in Mary Poppins. Scarier, in many ways, than Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which she wrote when she was just 19. Better received by the public than Gary Coleman’s turn as Arnold “What’chu talkin’ about, Willis” Jackson on Dff’rent Strokes. More disorienting, in many ways, than Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. Some would even say more impressive than Orson Welles’ screen directing/acting debut, Citizen Kane, which he pulled off when he was almost inconceivably young, only 25 years old. But here you were, creating the entire universe and everything in it as your first known work of art. How did you handle that? Were you able to maintain a sense of normality, or, like so many young artists who receive so much fame and praise so quickly, did it damage your sense of self or impede how you related to others?

God: Read more »