George Bellows’ Dempsey and Firpo (1924) has always struck me as more than a sports painting. It is myth, theater, and allegory all at once. The canvas freezes Jack Dempsey—the great American champion—in the instant he is hurled through the ropes by Luis Ángel Firpo, “the Wild Bull of the Pampas.” History remembers that Dempsey climbed back in and won, but Bellows chose to immortalize the humiliation rather than the triumph. What we see is the paradox of boxing: calculation undone by chaos, mastery interrupted by collapse. This is the essence of what Pierce Egan once called the sweet science.
I grew up on HBO fights, when Saturday nights belonged to boxing. It was never mere brawling to me. Every bout was geometry in motion, each punch an equation, every slip a theorem solved in real time. The greats—Lennox Lewis, Roy Jones Jr., even the ferocity of Mike Tyson—were not only fighters but tacticians. Boxing was art disguised as destruction, precision masquerading as brutality.
Bellows understood that paradox. His painting doesn’t show Firpo flailing wildly. Instead, Firpo lands the one clean blow that momentarily undid the champion. The science of the fight is there, but so too is its cruelty: the hero suspended in air, half in the ring and half out, caught between order and chaos.
I thought about this today watching the Chiefs’ first game. Travis Kelce—trash-talker, scrapper, the tight end who thrives on edge and swagger—first collided with his own teammate on a crossing route. Friendly fire, as unforgiving as any opponent’s punch, left both players shaken. Later in the game, Kelce took an open-handed shot to the face, snapping his head back. The flag flew, but the image lingered. In those two moments—the accidental collision and the humiliating slap—I saw Bellows’ painting. Dempsey stumbled, then was struck. Kelce and the Chiefs looked the same: champions on the ropes.
And that is where the team finds itself today. After the embarrassment of the last Super Bowl, where the dream of a three-peat was shattered, the Chiefs are like Dempsey—stunned, disoriented, made suddenly mortal. Tonight’s performance made it clear: they are not yet ready to climb back through the ropes. But history suggests they will. The Chiefs were born in 1960 as the Dallas Texans before moving to Kansas City in 1963. They claimed their first Super Bowl in 1970, then endured a fifty-year drought before Patrick Mahomes led them to glory in 2020. Since then, they’ve added two more Super Bowl titles, building a dynasty. Champions fall, but dynasties endure because they rise again.
Boxing is the sweet science because it crystallizes this paradox: artistry through destruction, elegance through pain. Bellows’ Dempsey and Firpo preserves the moment of collapse, not the comeback—but the comeback is implied. Dempsey returned. The Chiefs will too.