On This Date: Dempsey, Miske, and the First Title Fight on the Radio (Sept. 6, 1920)

On this date in 1920 — Labor Day — Jack Dempsey defended his heavyweight title for the first time, knocking out Billy Miske in the third round at a wooden arena in Benton Harbor, Michigan. Two things make this fight worth remembering a century later. One is a technological first with an asterisk. The other is one of the kindest, saddest secrets in the history of the sport.

The Broadcast That Wasn't Quite a Broadcast

Radio was two weeks old in Detroit — the Detroit News' experimental station 8MK, ancestor of WWJ, had signed on Aug. 20 — and on Sept. 6 it did something no station had done: it carried a heavyweight championship fight. Sort of. There was no announcer at ringside. Telegraph wires brought round-by-round returns from Benton Harbor to the Detroit studio, where they were read out over the air, the knockout flashed to listeners within about 30 seconds of it happening. A bulletin service, not a blow-by-blow — but the first prizefight ever carried over radio, seven months before KDKA aired the first true live sports broadcast and ten months before the Dempsey-Carpentier fight reached 300,000 listeners and invented sports media as we know it. Every fight broadcast, every call, every "down goes Frazier" traces back to a man in Detroit reading telegrams into a microphone on this date.

The Fix That Was Actually a Gift

Now the real story. Billy Miske of St. Paul was one of the best heavyweights alive — he'd fought Dempsey twice in 1918, no-decision bouts widely scored as draws, and many at ringside thought Miske had the better of the first one. He was also dying. Diagnosed with Bright's disease — chronic kidney failure — around 1918 and given roughly five years, Miske told almost no one. Not the boxing commissions. For years, not even his wife, Marie.

By 1920 the illness and a failed automobile dealership had wiped him out, and Miske went to his old rival with the truth about his debts, if not his kidneys: he was broke, and he needed a payday. Dempsey — with every reason to pick a safer, healthier first defense — gave his friend the title shot. Miske's purse ran to roughly $25,000, real money in 1920. Dempsey ended it in 3 rounds; it was the only knockout loss of Miske's hundred-fight career, and as Dempsey later told it, he saw no reason to let a hurting man take punishment any longer than necessary.

The Last Fight

The coda belongs among the great sports stories, period. By late 1923, Miske was too sick to train — too sick, some days, to leave the house — and broke again, with three kids and Christmas coming. He begged his manager, Jack Reddy, for one more fight. Reddy refused; he was afraid Miske would die in the ring. Miske, reportedly: he'd rather that than waste away in a chair. On Nov. 7, 1923, with almost no training, Billy Miske knocked out Bill Brennan — a legitimate contender — in 4 rounds in Omaha. He took his roughly $2,400 home to St. Paul and spent it on Christmas: presents for the kids, and a piano for Marie.

Billy Miske died on New Year's Day, 1924. He was 29. The man boxing remembers as an answer to a radio trivia question spent his last healthy breath buying his family one perfect Christmas — and the champion who gave him that first big payday knew exactly what he was doing.

On this date in 1920: three rounds in Benton Harbor, a telegraph line to Detroit, and two tough men being better to each other than the fight game ever required.

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