Georges Carpentier

Georges Carpentier
Data
Birth Name	Georges Carpentier
Weight class	Light heavyweight
nationality	French
birthday	January 12, 1894
place of birth	Lens
Date of death	October 28, 1975
Place of death	Paris
style	Left delivery
size	1.82 m
Combat Statistics
Struggles	109
Victories	88
Knockout victories	57
Defeats	15th
draw	6th

Georges Carpentier (born January 12, 1894 in Liévin , † October 28, 1975 in Paris ) was a French boxer.

Professional career

"Orchid Man" Carpentier became a professional flyweight in 1908 at the age of 14. He was a powerful counter boxer and rose to heavyweight in the course of his career. He was European welterweight champion in 1911 and middleweight in 1912. In a fight for the world middleweight title in June 1912 against Frank Klaus, he lost by disqualification in the nineteenth round.

In February 1913 he became European light heavyweight champion. Only four months later he won the heavyweight title against the British "Bombardier" Billy Wells. Until then, he got all title wins prematurely through knockout .

In 1914 he won the white heavyweight championship against "Gunboat" Smith. The actual world champion at the time, however, was black Jack Johnson . He then took part in the First World War as a pilot for France and received two awards.

In 1919 he finally continued his career with two defenses of his European title. On October 12, 1920 he won in the United States against "Battling" Levinsky by knockout in the fourth round and was recognized world light heavyweight champion.

On July 2, 1921, promoter Tex Rickard hosted the heavyweight world championship match against Jack Dempsey . More than 80,000 spectators saw the fight live in the arena, and it was also the first boxing match broadcast on the radio. During the fight, Carpentier was able to land a few good punches at the beginning, but Dempsey's physical superiority finally prevailed and he won by knockout in the fourth round.

Back in the light heavyweight division, he defended his title in this weight class in 1922 with a first-round knockout. against Ted Lewis , but then lost to the Senegalese Battling Siki by knockout in the sixth round. Siki later testified that he was originally directed to lose that fight. The atmosphere in the stadium, which was filled with 40,000 spectators, and his conviction of his own strength would have caused a change of heart in the ring, so that he wanted to win the fight.

After losing the title Carpentier fought a few more times in the USA between 1924 and 1926 and was defeated by Gene Tunney , Tommy Gibbons and Tommy Loughran and then ended his career.

In addition to his boxing career, Carpentier also occasionally worked as a referee. Among other things, he directed a world championship fight by Jack Johnson and a fight by Paolino Uzcudun .

In 1991 Carpentier was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame .

Trivia

In his boxer novel, which has remained a fragment, the passionate boxing fan Bertolt Brecht describes the rise of the boxer George Carrare, who is modeled on Carpentier. He describes Carrare as a strategic "brain boxer" without a "sportsmanship" and sees in this an example of an ascent staged primarily on the basis of business interests, which is made possible primarily through the targeted selection of his opponents and bribery.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ See Bertolt Brecht : The chin hook and other boxing and sports stories (= Suhrkamp-Taschenbuch. 2395). Edited and with an afterword by Günter Berg. Suhrkamp-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1995, ISBN 3-518-38895-9 , p. 84.

Web links

Commons : Georges Carpentier  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Georges Carpentier in the catalog of the German National Library
• Georges Carpentier in the BoxRec database