This review appears in the February 2007 issue of
The American Spectator. To subscribe to the monthly print
edition, click here.
Tunney: Boxing’s Brainiest Champ and His Upset of
the Great Jack Dempsey
by Jack Cavanaugh
(Random House, 496 pages, $27.95)
I’VE OFTEN THOUGHT that the heavyweight champions form a sporting
analogue to the presidents of the United States: great soloists
pursuing the ultimate prize of authority and power over other men,
yet often finding the throne lonely and more complicated than they
bargained for, haunted by their predecessors in unpredictable ways,
and, although trained to think ahead and anticipate the unexpected,
rarely getting out of action in the circumstances they would have
wished. Unlike former presidents, who now get libraries and even
Nobel Prizes, the former champs are fortunate if they just hold
onto their marbles and their money.
Gene Tunney, who was briefly heavyweight champion of the world
in the 1920s and is remembered today, when he is remembered at all,
for defeating Jack Dempsey, seemed to understand that the fate of a
boxer was often unhappy. Unlike most beloved champions, he was not
married to the boxing game — and as a result, he was not beloved.
Complicated and aloof, he never captured the imagination of the
sporting public then or since, except as a poseur who had the gall
to discuss his reading habits. His detractors in the sporting
press, forgiving of so many other vices among athletes, could never
forgive the clumsy hubris with which this poor man’s son flaunted
his hard-won refinement. For the last 75 years or so, the only
Tunney biographies were the two he wrote himself. Both are minor
classics of nondisclosure. (In the spirit of full disclosure, I
should mention that I conducted a fair amount of research on Tunney
and Jack Dempsey for a book of my own, which I have for the time
being abandoned.)
In his new biography, Jack Cavanaugh proves that Tunney was a
defensive specialist in the boxing ring and out. Cavanaugh’s book,
readable and well researched, puts us in the ring with Tunney but
never allows us to get within a whisker of him. It’s a frustrating
book, especially given the promise with which it arrived: to tell
the story of the forgotten man Cavanaugh rightly describes as “the
most unique heavyweight champion of all time.” That’s an
understatement. There aren’t many athletes in any sport, before or
since, comparable to Tunney.
If you were told that an Irish immigrant’s son growing up in
turn of the century New York would serve in the Marines in World
War I, go on to win the world heavyweight title while becoming a
self-educated man of culture, live another half century in which he
married a Carnegie heiress, befriended men like George Bernard Shaw
and Thornton Wilder, lectured on Shakespeare at Yale, served in the
Navy in World War II, attained directorship of numerous
corporations, and fathered a U.S. senator, you would probably say
that has the makings of a pretty good story. Gene Tunney was even
remarkable in death: his gravestone makes no mention of his boxing
career, citing instead his service to America in two great wars.
It’s a touch of majesty almost unimaginable among today’s
athletes.
The facts of Tunney’s life are the stuff of great American
biographies. There is only one problem: the man himself seems not
quite real, his character seemingly immune to what the historian
Shelby Foote once described as the “picklocks of biographers.”
TUNNEY’S RECORD AS A BOXER is real enough, though. He was one of
the ring’s immortals, a master of defense and counterpunching, an
early pioneer of strategy (he studied his opponents like a
prosecuting attorney), and a fanatic about physical conditioning.
In over 70 fights, he was beaten only once, in a bloodbath to the
legendary Harry Greb. Tunney lost perhaps two quarts of his own
blood from a broken nose but fought on until the bout went to a
decision. Soon afterwards, he posted bond for a rematch to stunned
observers, and he went on to defeat Greb several times. He was
difficult to discourage and impossible to deny.
At a young age, Tunney seemed to have envisioned the entire
outline of his life, and then he set about sketching it in. He
wanted to defeat Jack Dempsey for the heavyweight championship,
make a million dollars, and then retire and pursue a different
life. He achieved all of these things and vanished, more or less,
from popular scrutiny until his death in 1978. You almost get the
feeling that the only thing he didn’t plan was dying.
All of this Cavanaugh chronicles in a manner heavy on fact but
light on reflection. He relates much boxing history from eras
before and after Tunney, and he devotes whole chapters to Dempsey’s
exploits in which Tunney does not make even a walk-on appearance.
Cavanaugh’s treatment nearly relegates Tunney to a supporting role
in his long-awaited feature and lends credence to the age-old
verdict that Tunney is only interesting insofar as he was connected
to Dempsey. The book’s subtitle reinforces this impression.
Tunney’s and Dempsey’s names were hyphenated in history after
their two famous fights, especially the second one, held in
Chicago’s Soldier Field in 1927 and known ever since as the Battle
of the Long Count. The slugging Dempsey, who was champion
throughout the 1920s and had a stature on par with Babe Ruth, had
lost his title to Tunney the previous year in a huge upset. Now
their second fight was unfolding in much the same way, until the
seventh round, when Dempsey suddenly found the mark and put Tunney
down with a barrage of punches, the only knockdown Tunney suffered
in his career.
But Dempsey forgot the rule, agreed on beforehand, that a
fighter scoring a knockdown had to retreat to a “neutral” corner
before the count could be started. The rule was created with
Dempsey in mind; he had become notorious for standing over fallen
opponents and blasting them back to the canvas. Now, with so much
at stake, he reverted to his old ways and stood over Tunney. Only
after Dempsey retreated did the referee begin his count. At the
referee’s “nine,” Tunney rose, evaded Dempsey’s rushes, and went on
to win the fight by decision. Debates raged about how long Tunney
was on the canvas, whether he could have gotten up if not given
extra time, and whether the referee’s action was fair. One of those
sporting controversies that takes on a life of its own — like
Ruth’s called shot or Bobby Thomson’s home run off Ralph Branca —
the Long Count defined the two men in the public imagination
forever.
With one important note: it was always Dempsey’s name that came
first. The crowd cheered him after he lost both Tunney fights, and
they gravitated to his popular Broadway restaurant for 40 years.
Dempsey had an impromptu way of saying memorable things, the best
example of which was, “Honey, I forgot to duck” (employed half a
century later by another natural genius, Ronald Reagan). Pitiless
inside the ring but generous and good-humored outside of it,
Dempsey was loved for good reasons.
By contrast, Tunney was like the William Howard Taft to
Dempsey’s Theodore Roosevelt, the gifted but bloodless successor to
a man shrouded in myth. Unlike Dempsey, whose vivid character
emerges from even the dustiest boxing histories, Tunney is a name
attached to a series of deeds. His inscrutable public face is the
only one we see.
CAVANAUGH’S DIFFICULTIES in getting beyond that public face were
compounded by the Tunney family’s interest in an authorized
biography, an arrangement the author rejected. Like its late
patriarch, the family seems determined to control the terms on
which they engage the American public. After all these years, their
protectiveness is remarkable, even inspiring, for those who still
admire such things.
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.
