Jack Dempsey

As Towson-area native Michael Phelps racked up gold medals for swimming at the Olympics in Beijing, I thought it worthwhile to look back at another Olympian, Johnny Weissmuller, who won five gold medals and a bronze at the 1924 and 1928 Olympics....

MOVIES WITH A PUNCH. Boxing films come out swinging all month on "MSG at the Movies." Tonight, it's "Kings of the Ring" (MSG at 8), sports documentarian Bud Greenspan's 1995 portrait of four men who defined the sport's place in pop culture: Jack Johnson,...

A Few Seconds of Panic A 5-Foot-8, 170-Pound, 43-Year-Old Sportswriter Plays in the NFL Stefan Fatsis Penguin: 340 pp., $25.95 George Plimpton, the longtime editor of the Paris Review, enjoyed a second literary career when he turned Walter Mitty-like...

Lasting a mere 124 seconds, the Joe Louis-Max Schmeling heavyweight rematch of June 22, 1938, nevertheless is among the most noted and long remembered events in Yankee Stadium history. His first-round knockout allowed Louis, then 24, to avenge Schmeling'...

Yankee Stadium's first glimpse of professional football came in 1926, three decades before the Giants took up residence there, when storied Chicago promoter C.C. Pyle (the initials were for "Cash & Carry," according to wags of the time) built an entire...

On June 24, 1314, the forces of Scotland's King Robert I defeated the English in the Battle of Bannockburn. In 1509 Henry VIII was crowned king of England. In 1895 boxing champion Jack Dempsey was born William Harrison Dempsey in Manassa, Colo. In 1948...

Frustrated as her house languished on the market for three straight summers, J.J. Rodgers is trying a new sales tactic: giving the two-story home away in an essay contest. Already, she has received more than 500 entries -- each essay requires a $100...

RUDOLPH VALENTINO'S SMOLDERING eyes and graceful moves made him Hollywood's FIRST SUPERSTAR SEX SYMBOL before his Aug. 24, 1926, death from peritonitis at age 31 sealed his immortality. But the Italian native's European, slightly androgynous appeal was...

It's dusk in Tijuana's red-light district, and two bouncers are slouching outside a strip joint called the Chicago Club. A car rolls up, a window rolls down, and the American guy on the passenger side starts asking questions in awkward Spanish. Looks like...

It was instantly dubbed "the long count." And it has been recounted in tales both true and tall since the heavyweight championship fight this night at Soldier Field. Amid a screaming crowd of 104,943 spectators, reporters at ringside said it took...

On the early morning of March 21, 1980, Eve Wilkowitz boarded a Long Island Rail Road train from Penn Station to Bay Shore and never made it home. Three days later, her lifeless body was found lying in a vacant lot on Centre Avenue in Bay Shore, about...

There I was, perched on a folding chair, eating raisin toast in the lobby of a Days Inn in upstate New York. Quietly sipping orange juice next to me sat Marlon "Magic Man" Starling, the world welterweight boxing champ in the late 1980s. On any other day,...