Among the legendary athletes of the 1920s, the unquestioned halcyon days
of sports, stands Gene Tunney, the boxer who upset Jack Dempsey in
spectacular fashion, notched a 77--1 record as a prizefighter, and later
avenged his sole setback (to a fearless and highly unorthodox fighter
named Harry Greb). Yet within a few years of retiring from the ring,
Tunney willingly receded into the background, renouncing the image of
jock celebrity that became the stock in trade of so many of his
contemporaries. To this day, Gene Tunney's name is most often recognized
only in conjunction with his epic "long count" second bout with Dempsey.
In Tunney, the veteran journalist and author Jack Cavanaugh gives an
account of the incomparable sporting milieu of the Roaring Twenties,
centered around Gene Tunney and Jack Dempsey, the gladiators whose two
titanic clashes transfixed a nation. Cavanaugh traces Tunney's life and
career, taking us from the mean streets of Tunney's native Greenwich
Village to the Greenwich, Connecticut, home of his only love, the
heiress Polly Lauder; from Parris Island to Yale University; from Tunney
learning fisticuffs as a skinny kid at the knee of his longshoreman
father to his reign atop boxing's glamorous heavyweight division.
Gene Tunney defied easy categorization, as a fighter and as a person. He
was a sex symbol, a master of defensive boxing strategy, and the
possessor of a powerful, and occasionally showy, intellect-qualities
that prompted the great sportswriters of the golden age of sports to
portray Tunney as "aloof." This intelligence would later serve him well
in the corporate world, as CEO of several major companies and as a
patron of the arts. And while the public craved reports of bad blood
between Tunney and Dempsey, the pair were, in reality, respectful ring
adversaries who in retirement grew to share a sincere lifelong
friendship-with Dempsey even stumping for Tunney's son, John, during the
younger Tunney's successful run for Congress.
Tunney offers a unique perspective on sports, celebrity, and popular
culture in the 1920s. But more than an exciting and insightful real-life
tale, replete with heads of state, irrepressible showmen, mobsters,
Hollywood luminaries, and the cream of New York society, Tunney is an
irresistible story of an American underdog who forever changed the way
fans look at their heroes.
