T he golden age of sports mined a rich vein of glittering heroes.
There was Babe Ruth, the Sultan of Swat; Red Grange, the Galloping Ghost; Bill Tilden in tennis; and Bobby Jones on the links.
And there was Jack Dempsey, the Manassa Mauler, who was beaten in two famous fights by a forgotten hero, Gene Tunney, the Fighting Marine.
In “Tunney: Boxing’s Brainiest Champ and His Upset of the Great Jack Dempsey,” veteran sports writer Jack Cavanaugh digs deep into boxing’s colorful and often contemptible past to rescue perhaps the most skilled (and learned) practitioner of the sweet science, a champ who not only preferred obscurity but actually sought it after retiring as undefeated heavyweight champion.
Cavanaugh reminds us that all too often in the golden age of sports, gold was the goal. This was the age of million-dollar gates, of sports writers on the take, and gangsters at ringside with politicians and priests; the age of fixed fights and even a fixed World Series.
They also termed it the Roaring ’20s, an era of loud suits, silent movies and speakeasies.
The cast of characters includes Jimmy Walker, New York’s playboy mayor; bootleg baron Scarface Al Capone; promoter Tex Rickard, who began as a faro dealer in the Alaskan gold rush; and fight manager Doc Kearns, who pocketed half of Dempsey’s ring earnings and dubiously claimed to have doused the boxer’s hands with plaster of Paris to knock out Jess Willard for the heavyweight title.
Socialites, songwriters and chorus girls join the mix.
“Guys and Dolls” comes to mind here because Damon Runyon, the short-story writer responsible for its fanciful characters, is depicted in the book as one of the more flagrant sports writers on the payroll of fight managers and promoters.
Clean-living, Shakespeare-loving Tunney managed to rise above all this but somehow lost favor with the public and prominent sports writers by rising from the canvas to retain the heavyweight title after a hovering, glowering Dempsey had decked him with a savage left hook in the famous, still-argued “long count” second fight. Dempsey’s reluctance to obey the neutral corner rule may or may not have cost him the fight, but it did cost Capone $50,000 on a losing bet.
Cavanaugh brings up the interesting forgotten facts that Tunney had Dempsey on the canvas in the next round and handily won all but one round in their million-dollar gate battles in Philadelphia and Chicago. It was a battered Dempsey, fearful of going blind, who wanted no part of a third fight, no matter how big the gate. How the two became good friends ever after is among the delights of this book.
After defending his title only one more time, with a one-sided TKO of New Zealander Tom Heeney, Tunney made good his promise to his fiance, the Carnegie heiress Polly Lauder, to hang up his gloves. He retired to a life of business investments, world travel and his first love since attending St. Veronica’s parochial school in New York’s Greenwich Village: reading good books.
Although Cavanaugh diligently stalks the reclusive Tunney from a tenement in Greenwich Village to the family estate in Greenwich, Conn., through eight decades and 23 anecdote-crowded chapters, he understandably fails to nail him with a knockout biography.
James Joseph Tunney, to give the unsung hero the real name on his modest tombstone, is still shadow boxing in the shadows of sports history, bobbing and weaving and ducking the definitive biography that would never have been important enough anyhow to fit on his bookshelf crowded with Shakespeare, Shaw, Victor Hugo and Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.”
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