The challenger Luis Firpo, known as the “Wild Bull of the Pampas,” was Argentine.
Dempsey defeated him in a brutal fight that ended less than a minute into the second round at New York’s Polo Grounds on September 4, 1923.
The event is immortalized in the 1924 painting by George Bellows, The Dempsey-Firpo Fight, which shows Dempsey being punched out of the ring before coming back to beat his opponent.