A heavyweight champion.
His starry-eyed fans.
$300,000.
50,000 head of sheep.
And more ambition than sense.
Those are the ingredients for an uproariously funny new play in which small-town dreams run head-on into the reality of big-city sports promotion.
The champion is Jack Dempsey and the year is 1923. Bending to pressure from his cash-strapped, take-no-prisoners manager, Doc Kearns, Dempsey agrees to a boxing match in way-out-of-the-way Shelby, Montana, population 500 (not counting the sheep). For a mere $300,000 guaranteed, the town fathers plan to capitalize on the boxer's celebrity to lure oil investors to town, along with, of course, 40,000 paying fans.
But when ticket sales stall amid rumors that Kearns plans to scuttle the fight, a crusading, sometime lady sportswriter emerges as a voice of moral outrage to feed a growing frenzy----and the target of public wrath is the champion himself.
For one woman and six men.