Rocky Marciano v Jack Dempsey

In 1967 a fictional all-time heavyweight championship tournament was aired on Radio. The brain child of Murray Woroner who had a history of creating historical eye witness accounts for radio. originally the intent was to create baseball and football events pitting the greatest teams through the years in those sports in a world series, but this proved to be to complicated. Instead boxing was chosen. 16 former champions were chosen to compete, from John L Sullivan to the then Cassius Clay. Results were based on factors such as punching power, durability and conditioning. Each fighter was portrayed in their hypothetical prime worked out by historian Hank Kaplan who plucked the fighters out from a specified period in their respective career. Rocky Marciano was aggrieved to hear that the time scale chosen for him did not include his victory over Rex Layne, a fight he would regard as near perfect. Most of the surviving champions became involved in the ballyhoo, except Gene Tunney, he felt the results, to be determined byba computer, were open to human influences and bias, he may have been right. The then Cassius Clay became incensed at losing to Jim Jeffries and threatened to sue, finally settling when Woroner came up with the idea for the Marciano-Ali project filmed in 1969. Rocky Marciano & Jack Dempsey attended a special event to listen to the final, Marciano would later admit to feeling a little embarrassed to be sitting next to Dempsey listening to himself winning. Jack his avatars defeat in his stride, he leaned in to Rocky and said: "I wish we had fought, it would have made a lot of money." A year later Woroner productions produced a Middleweight version of the tournament. for more details on the tournament pick up a copy of Ghosts in the Machine Marciano v Ali on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09CRNPZQZ For more on Rocky Marciano Redemption: The Life of Rocky Marciano Volume One 1923-1949 is also available on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09JJ7L7G2 Thanks for supporting the channel.