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Tunney: Boxing's Brainiest Champ and His Upset of the Great Jack Dempsey, by Jack Cavanaugh
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About the Author
Jack Cavanaugh is a veteran sportswriter who has covered scores of major boxing bouts, along with the Olympics, the World Series, Super Bowl games, the Masters golf tournament, and both the U.S. golf and tennis opens. His work has appeared most notably on the sports pages of The New York Times, for which he has covered hundreds of varied sports assignments. In addition, he has been a frequent contributor to Sports Illustrated and written for Reader’s Digest, Tennis and Golf magazines, and other national publications. He is also a former reporter for both ABC and CBS News. Cavanaugh currently is an adjunct writing professor at Fairfield University. He and his wife, Marge, live in Wilton, Connecticut.From the Hardcover edition.
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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
ONEThe Longshoreman's SonJohn Tunney always liked a good fight-from afar. From the days of his boyhood in Ireland's County Mayo, where he grew up idolizing John L. Sullivan, the bare-knuckled and blustering heavyweight champion from Boston, to the years after he arrived in New York, where he came to worship another American-born Irish boxer, James J. Corbett, whose victory over Sullivan with padded gloves ushered in a new era in boxing, Tunney's favorite diversion was watching, reading about, or talking about boxing bouts. This was especially true if a bout involved Irish boxers, which in that era many, if indeed not most, did.After emigrating to the United States around 1880 (although he claimed to have made a stopover years before as a boy sailor aboard a windjammer), Tunney reveled in observing two men go at it in the ring at "smokers," which abounded in New York from the 1880s until shortly after World War I. Usually staged in smoke-filled Knights of Columbus halls capable of seating several hundred patrons and in large basements of other fraternal organizations, smokers were designed to circumvent New York state laws against professional boxing, which at the time was held in disrepute in the United States and most of the world, except for England. Generally held on Friday and Saturday nights, smokers tended to attract a rowdy crowd of men, a large percentage of them Irish and Italian immigrants, most of whom placed bets with one another. Often raucous, the spectators at times produced fights as good as if not better than the ones in the ring. The police virtually never interfered and, indeed, promoters often hired off-duty officers to try to prevent the frequent disorders that erupted during bouts and that usually stemmed from excessive drinking.As a stevedore on the Hudson River docks in the western part of Greenwich Village, known later as the West Village, Tunney also was accustomed to seeing but personally avoiding the fierce, bloody brawls between longshoremen competing for jobs at daily shape-ups, which determined who would load and unload freighters on a given day. Then there were the impromptu fights that broke out occasionally in the saloons that abounded in the neighborhood to which he and his family had moved in 1897. But even watching those fracases had little impact on Tunney, jaded at having seen so many of them, particularly on the docks, which were as mob-controlled around the turn of the twentieth century as they were a half a century later. The same was true of the bloodletting that ensued from street fights involving Greenwich Village toughs, including members of the Hudson Dusters or Gophers, two of the more prominent of the notorious gangs of New York, which had maintained an intimidating influence on businessmen and residents on the lower West Side of Manhattan since the middle of the nineteenth century.But Tunney abhorred violence when it involved any of his three sons, particularly James Joseph, the oldest, a spindly youngster who often returned home from school bloodied after having been accosted and beaten by one or more neighborhood bullies. In a poor neighborhood populated primarily by Irish immigrants of limited means, such as the one in which the Tunney family lived, flexing one's muscles, even in prepubescence, was, if not a way out, then possibily a way up.James Joseph Tunney was no match for older and heavier youths who set upon him, either individually or in groups, if for no other reason than that he had refrained from gang activities and had attracted attention because of his athleticism, primarily in basketball, distance running, and swimming. That young Tunney was slight of build and usually loaded down with school and library books made him an even more vulnerable target for neighborhood toughs, as did his disinclination to fight back.Aware of what was happening to his oldest son, whom he called "Skinny," John Tunney decided on James's tenth birthday to give him a pair of inexpensive boxing gloves he had spotted in a Greenwich Village department store. He did so not because he wanted James Joseph to follow in the footsteps of John Tunney's heroes of the past, but so that the boy could learn how to defend himself against neighborhood hoodlums. Much as he liked boxing, John Tunney, like his wife, Mary, wanted his eldest son to become a priest, a common desire on the part of immigrant Irish parents of the era.The sight of the gloves entranced the boy, who had already become fascinated with boxing through the cartoons and columns on boxing in the New York Evening World by Robert Edgren. Infatuated with the gift, young Tunney, aided by his father, put on the twelve-ounce gloves (far heavier than the eight- and six-ounce gloves used by both amateur and professional boxers) and began sparring playfully with his younger brothers, John, seven, and Tom, six. By that time, James Joseph had become known as "Gene" to family members and friends-a name bestowed on him by his youngest of four sisters, Agnes, who, in struggling to say James, kept saying something that sounded much more like Gene.John Tunney's own fascination with boxing was easy to understand. He had boxed, bare-fisted, as a teenager in Kiltimagh in County Mayo and, while weighing around 160 pounds, he had filled in occasionally and with no particular distinction as a substitute boxer at Knights of Columbus smokers in Manhattan. Also, Irish boxers, both those from the Old Country and those born in the United States, dominated the sport in the latter part of the nineteenth century and during the first two decades of the twentieth. With not much else to lift their spirits while toiling at what for the most part were menial, low- paying jobs, Irish immigrants like Tunney could take pride in Irish fighters like Sullivan-"The Boston Strong Boy," as he was called; Corbett, to a far lesser degree than Sullivan, from whom he had won the heavyweight title, to the chagrin of most Irish boxing fans; the freckle-faced, skinny-legged Bob Fitszimmons, who took away Corbett's title after having won the world middleweight title and later captured the light heavyweight championship; and the great middleweight champion Jack Dempsey from County Kildare. Reflecting the Irish dominance of boxing at the time, Irish-American boxers held five of the seven weight division championships in 1890.Intrigued now by a sport to which he had previously given scant notice, young Gene Tunney soon began boxing with friends and older boys in the gymnasium at the Villagers Athletic Club, a hotbed of sports activity in the West Village. Remarkably quick for a boy in his early teens, Tunney even impressed Willie Green, a veteran professional lightweight fighter from Greenwich Village who often worked out at both places and eventually taught young Tunney the rudiments of boxing and occasionally sparred with him, to young Tunney's delight. With a newly instilled confidence in his ability not only to defend himself but also to retaliate, Tunney began to respond to older street-gang attackers with his fists, though only when his defensive tactics proved insufficient. Before long, the attacks on the scrawny Tunney began to abate as his reputation as a skilled boxer spread among the neighborhood's thugs. Whenever either of his brothers was threatened or set upon by young toughs older and bigger, Tunney approached the neighborhood hoodlums and warned them to leave his siblings alone or face the consequences. For his newfound boxing skills and the concomitant confidence they had instilled in him, Tunney would forever be indebted to Willie Green.Though longshoremen historically have been better paid than other blue-collar workers, John Tunney brought home only fifteen dollars a week, the equivalent today of about three hundred dollars hardly enough for a family of nine, even in the early 1900s. But despite the impecunious circumstances of almost all of its residents-most of whom usually shared a water closet with several other families-the neighborhood in which the Tunneys lived was hardly a slum. After living in an apartment on West 52nd Street, where Gene Tunney was born on May 25, 1897, the family moved to Perry Street in Greenwich Village five months later. Several years after that the Tunneys relocated to another tenement, two blocks north on Bank Street close by the Hudson River docks where John Tunney worked and where the Tunneys' neighbors included John Dos Passos, who wrote much of his novel Manhattan Transfer there, and Willa Cather, whose novel One of Ours won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923.New York was a city of just under two million when Tunney was born. It practically doubled in population a year later, though, in 1898, when all five boroughs, along with a part of Westchester County, were consolidated into one city, with Brooklyn-up until 1898 the country's third largest city with a population of slightly more than a million- the major addition. If the city was growing geographically, it also was growing vertically. As the nineteenth century came to an end, the tallest structure was the thirty-story Park Row Building just to the east of City Hall in lower Manhattan, whose one thousand offices became available for occupancy when it opened in 1899.Like most Irish immigrant parents in the West Village, John and Mary Tunney were both religious and strict. In the cramped quarters of the Tunney household, grace was said before all meals, and each of the six children was required to kneel at their bedsides and recite the Lord's Prayer and the Hail Mary before going to sleep. Sundays, the family went to church together at St. Veronica's, which-like many Catholic churches of the era-had been built through the largesse of its relatively poor parishioners and street fairs between 1890, when the lower church was built, and 1903, when the upper church opened its doors to what by then had become an astonishingly large congregation of about six thousand, mostly all of them Irish. The parochial school associated with St. Veronica's, like other parochial schools at the time, was both free and very strict. "I would estimate that at least three mornings a week the good brothers [at St. Veronica's School] would rap me on the knuckles for being late to school after my work at the butcher shop," Gene Tunney was to say years later. Such corporal punishment was not unusual in Catholic parochial schools right into the 1960s, but far worse in the early part of the twentieth century when the behavior of some of the Christian Brothers and Sisters of Charity (who also taught at St. Veronica's) bordered on the sadistic."It was not uncommon for a Brother or a Sister to whack you across the hands or the back of your legs with a yardstick," Harold Blake, a graduate of St. Veronica's grammar school and a longtime parishioner and volunteer at the church school, recalled in 2004. "If you happened to tell your mother and father about getting whacked when you got home from school, they usually would say, 'You probably deserved it.' And sometimes the parents would then whack you, too, which discouraged a kid from telling them in the first place. You have to understand that the Irish parents years ago had a great deal of respect for the Brothers and Sisters who taught, and felt they could do no wrong, and so they never complained to school authorities. But that's how it was in the parochial schools."During that era, the docks along the Hudson in the West Village thrived and stevedores tended to live as close to the docks as they could, mainly because their primary mode of transportation at the turn of the century was their legs, since the opening of the New York subway system was still four years away. In all three tenement buildings in which the Tunneys lived, John Tunney was never more than two blocks from the waterfront.For a city boy growing up so close to the Hudson, there was much to do. From the nearby piers, Gene Tunney and his friends could look out on a seemingly endless parade of ocean liners, freighters, and tankers, along with trans-river ferries, side-wheel excursion steamers, lighters, railroad car floats in tow, barges, and occasionally a United States Navy squadron or even an entire fleet.In the summer, though, the Hudson had a more adventurous allure for Tunney and his more daring friends. On hot nights, they would dive off the docks at the foot of West Tenth Street into the Hudson to swim. And when an ocean liner was berthed at a nearby pier, they were inclined to get even more daring. Aware of which steamship lines tended to be lax about security, the boys, almost all of them the sons of Irish immigrants, managed to get aboard some passenger ships and then find their way to the bridge. From there, about one hundred feet above the Hudson, one teenager after another would leap into the murky water below, often blessing themselves first, and then swim or dog-paddle back to the pier. Once, Tunney recalled some years later, he did what was known as a "soldier's dive," wherein one puts his hands at his sides and then dives into the water, headfirst. The dive could have killed or paralyzed young Tunney, he realized after, and he never tried the daredevil stunt again.By the time he was eleven, Tunney, despite his frail-looking stature, had established himself as one of the best athletes at St. Veronica's School, excelling at basketball, baseball, swimming, and running, and good enough at the quintessentially New York City game of handball to hold his own with the Christian Brothers who taught at the school. Young Tunney's evident penchant for learning and the inordinate time he spent in the school library, much of it poring over books on Greek and Roman history, cast him as something of a prig to many of his classmates, who, like Tunney, were from poor families, and who, unlike Tunney, found school boring. "There was an inclination to poke fun at Gene's scholarly demeanor," Dr. Fred Van Vliet, a neighborhood physician, once recalled. "He was an inveterate reader as far back as I knew him, and my library had a sort of fascination for him as a boy, and I guess he must have browsed through every book in my possession."Even some of young Tunney's closest friends tried to take advantage of his passive nature. "Some of us kids were pretty active and keen for boxing," Gene Boyle, a classmate at St. Veronica's School, later said, "and Gene was such a simple-looking chap at the time that we proceeded to go to work on him. But it wasn't long before we realized our mistake."Indeed, Tunney's sports teammates, along with some of the budding toughs among the student body, found it hard to reconcile his passion for reading and his thespian activities at the school with his athleticism. Always eager to take part in theatrical productions, by the age of thirteen young Tunney was able to recite the soliloquies of such Shakespearean characters as Antonio, Portia, and Shylock and had played Antonio in The Merchant of Venice as an eighth-grader. This did not particularly impress most of his neighborhood friends, but it helped elevate his own self-esteem and delighted his teachers and his parents, whose education in County Mayo had been sparse, to say the least.From the Hardcover edition.
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Product details
Paperback: 496 pages
Publisher: Ballantine Books (October 30, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0812967836
ISBN-13: 978-0812967838
Product Dimensions:
5.2 x 1.1 x 7.9 inches
Shipping Weight: 9.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.4 out of 5 stars
32 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#464,040 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
I'll just come right out swinging: for a book about a heavyweight, it's fairly lightweight. The section on Gene's childhood and initiation into boxing was the best part, but as other reviewers have noted, much is left unsaid overall. There's almost nothing on Polly (except waxing on about her exalted social position and family background. It's accepted unquestioningly as fact in the book that her objection to prizefighting is why he gave up boxing - what about the coexisting myth that he decided to give it up after he read Jack London's 1904 novelette The Game? probably false but is so well known I expected it would be addressed at least). There's a short paragraph about their honeymoon, which doesn't mention Polly's serious medical emergency that marred the trip. And, while Cavanaugh (briefly) discusses briefly Tunney's relationships with other women before his marriage, he doesn't mention Mrs. Katherine Fogarty, who slapped Tunney with a $500.000 breech of promise suit in 1929. The story came out publicly in May during the Tunney's honeymoon; Fogarty claimed Tunney had said he wanted to marry her. At first Gene asserted he knew nothing about her, but the papers (clearly thrilled to have some dirt on Tunney at last) revealed that, shortly before sailing, he had paid $27k or so for the return of some letters Gene had written to her. Whether Fogarty's story was 100% true or not, it made national headlines, so curious that it isn't even referred to in the book - particularly as it does devote some ink (pg. 280) to socialite Peggy Joyce Hopkins' claim that Dempsey had been her "lover," and the champ's denial of that story. The author also discusses Tommy (Light Heavyweight World Champ) Loughran's pummeling of Dempsey during a sparring session while Dempsey was training for the first Tunney fight, but doesn't mention Jimmy Slattery's pummeling of Tunney during Tunney's training for the same fight. There are also little opinionated asides here and there, like between Tunney and Dempsey, "Tunney was the more handsome of the two." (sez you). Not sure why the author's clear all-around preference for Tunney has to come at Dempsey's (and other opponents') expense. That and the lack of detail into the man himself weaken the book, but it's not terrible and I appreciate that people are at least continuing to write books about the 20s heavyweights, so 3 stars.
It takes a ton of commitment and hard work to write any book so I'm careful in expressing my thoughts. It's not that the author wrote a bad book on Tunney because it contains a few golden nuggets even hard core boxing fans will enjoy. My problem with the book is how blinded with Tunney lust Cavanaugh is and how it impacted any objectivity on his subject. Reading this book one would believe Tunney a saint and Dempsey an over rated bum. I find it amusing that the author had to spend close to half the book on Dempsey to make a book on Tunney even readable. The author was ridiculously one sided in his descriptions of Dempsey's inactivity and how it impacted him as a fighter by the time he fought Tunney .... I found it disturbing that the author goes out of his way too describe Tunney as handsome over a dozen times in the book ... Bizarre and over the top ... I also do not like how he ducked the fact that Tunney later went on to be a terrible drunk .... I would have given him far more credit if he humanized his man crush ... That aside, I did enjoy it even though I felt it two dimensional ...
This is a fascinating book and I loved every minute of it. But it meanders all over the place. It adequately covers Gene Tunney's youth in Greenwich Village, NY and how he got so good at defending himself from bullies that he ended up fighting for money. You learn about his stint in the Marines, and his burgeoning love for books and reading. You are at ringside for many of his early fights, including the wars with his early trainer and later with Harry Greb and Jack Dempsey.But the book spends just as muchtime covering Dempsey's life. It also meanders into how Jewish people and Irish people got into boxing. It was fascinating because Cavanaugh is such an engaging writer. But I kept wondering "When will we get back to talking about Tunney? And why does Cavanaugh only devote 30 pages to the last 50 years of Tunney's (and Dempsey's) life? And why does he forget to mention their "dance" in the ring commemorating the 30th anniversary of their celebrated rematch?These criticisms are more than enough to knock the book down a star or two. But Cavanaugh's gift for storytelling makes the book such a compulsive read that I had to give it 5 stars. Recommended for all boxing fans.
Cavanaugh gives the reader a complete tour of life in the first half of the 20th century with a great boxing story thrown in! Engrossingly, compelling and a real page- turner
This was a very good book about the great boxer, Gene Tunney. It was interesting to hear about his early life and how most successful boxers are "hungry" (poor, underpriviledged) and thus are driven to excel in order to survive. Tunney is unusual in that he was very book-wise which is rare for an excellent athlete. Because he was so bookish, he was not the most popular boxer as the people preferred traditional boxers like Jack Dempsey.
Great read. Some much historical context. Way more than just Tunney here, but a myriad of fighters included in the historical telling.
Marvelous chronicle of the boxing world in the 1910 and 1920s. Even-handed and detailed with the politics and business. Gene Tunney created himself as a gentleman in a cruel environment. He had good business judgment, but also an ethical sense of himself as an Irish-American patriot and the first-born son of a large Catholic working-class immigrant family.
This book's focus was on Tunney but had so much more. The information on Greb, Dempsey, Loughran, Levinski, and many others was priceless. This is how a boxing bio. should be done. The records of Tunney and Dempsey were included. Very well done Mr. Cavanaugh.
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