The American Spectator

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The Man Who Wasn't There

By Paul Beston on 2.22.07 @ 12:06AM

(Page 2 of 2)

Yet while Cavanaugh was denied access to what must be a treasure trove of information, he could have done more with what is available to explore Tunney's character. Sooner or later, a biographer needs to quit playing defense himself and venture a point of view. Who was Tunney, really, and what was the source of his amazing willfulness? What does it tell us that in two full-length autobiographies Tunney can barely bring himself to mention his father, a longshoreman on the Hudson River docks who bought him his first pair of boxing gloves? Were Tunney and Dempsey really "close friends" in later life, as commonly described, or did Tunney resent Dempsey's popularity?

And what about the terrible drinking problem that Tunney developed after he left the ring?

Here was the most resolute champion of self-control that ever graced American sports, given to writing articles on the dangers of smoking and asserting that a man's goal at 40 should be to attain greater fitness than he enjoyed at 20. According to the scraps of information out there, Tunney's drinking went back at least as far as his stint in the U.S. Navy in World War II, and his problem seems to have been more severe than garden variety alcoholism. The image is hard to reconcile with the youthful paragon of discipline, yet Cavanaugh never raises the issue, even in passing. And Tunney slips away from us again, maybe for good.

The mystery of Gene Tunney -- what drove him, and what eventually broke him -- remains. Without an interrogation of its subject, Cavanaugh's biography is too much like Tunney himself: impressive on every surface, but silent at its center.

Letter to the Editor

topics:
Sports, NATO