“’There were a lot of Americans in Paris and I sparred with a couple, just to be obliging,’ Jack Dempsey said. ‘But there was one fellow I wouldn’t mix it with. That was Ernest Hemingway. He was about twenty-five or so and in good shape, and I was getting so I could read people, or anyway men, pretty well. I had this sense that Hemingway, who really thought he could box, would come out of the corner like a madman. To stop him, I would have to hurt him badly, I didn’t want to do that to Hemingway. That’s why I never sparred with him.’”

An excerpt from Roger Kahn’s biography of Dempsey, A Flame of Pure Fire. (Borrowed from Book Patrol)