How boxing launched radio. A century ago the sports world got a new medium for conveying events with the first radio broadcast.
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One hundred years ago Friday, on July 2, 1921, Georges Carpentier left a makeshift boxing arena in Jersey City with a broken nose, a fractured thumb and a swollen eye thanks to Jack Dempsey, who knocked him out in the fourth round of their heavyweight championship bout. Carpentier recalled shortly after the conclusion of the carnage, “I went down and out when the hardest blow I ever felt caught me over the heart.”
Like most firsts in sports, there are asterisks involved. Strictly speaking, the Dempsey-Carpentier fight wasn’t the first sporting event broadcast. A few months earlier, KDKA, a Pittsburgh radio station—the nation’s only commercial station—had aired an account of a local fight. But the technological limitations meant that the audience for the fight was miniscule group of local radio enthusiasts. The Dempsey-Carpentier bout was heard over an area of 125,000 square miles—from Maine to Maryland and as far west as Ohio—showing the viability of radio as a medium for conveying live events. As The Wireless Age, a leading industry journal of the day, put it: “Transmission of the voice by wireless on a large scale is new to the world, and the event has no little historical significance.”
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https://www.si.com/boxing/2021/06/30...tm_source=digg