During the Roaring 20s no athlete roared louder than Jack Dempsey. While Babe Ruth earned US$50,000 a year, Dempsey was able to bankrupt four Montana banks by forcing the mayor of Shelby to honor a US$250,000 guarantee that had been made to lure the champ to fight there. In 1924 Dempsey went into semiretirement by taking US$1 million from Universal to star in 10 silent movies. But two years later, playing a heavyweight on film wasn't cutting it.
Needing to taste his own blood again, the 31-year-old Dempsey approached the promoter Tex Rickard, who was attempting a comeback of his own. Rickard had just starred in a tabloid trial in which he was accused, and ultimately acquitted, of luring under-age girls to a pied a terre he kept above Madison Square Garden. Rickard's matchmaking skills were famous. But he didn't need much imagination to figure out whom Dempsey should fight next. The only boxer who came close in star power was Gene Tunney, the subject of Jack Cavanaugh's sprawling new biography.
Cavanaugh starts by recalling a chance meeting he had with Tunney on a commuter train in the mid-1960s. By then Tunney was a gray pillar of the financial world with seats on several corporate boards, and was content to go unnoticed. Cavanaugh, however, couldn't ignore him and still can't. Tunney "had the temerity, while still fighting, to become an intellectual and scholar," he writes. His "aloofness from the sport, following his retirement, coupled with his literacy, scholarly bent and wealth, damn near made him a pariah."
In Tunney, Cavanaugh aims to correct this injustice. But he's in no hurry to do it. The first half of his 471-page book, including acknowledgments, charts, bibliography, notes and index, is filled with so many detours (a master's class in Jewish boxing; the life story of mob-run wrestler-turned-boxer Primo Carnera) that one begins to wonder where the main character went. What we learn is that Tunney was raised poor, but not impoverished, in an Irish household on the West Side of Manhattan, where he developed an early love for literature. (To relax between matches, he often turned to his favorite play by Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida.)
He used a pair of gloves that his father gave him to start sparring at a Knights of Columbus Hall and by age 18 was known as one of New York City's best boxers. He didn't see action when he served in World War I; he wound up guarding an airplane hangar south of Paris. But upon returning home in 1919, he was nicknamed the Fighting Marine.
While Tunney once remarked that he found "no joy in knocking people unconscious," he had a run of KOs by the mid-1920s that drew huge crowds and the eye of Dempsey, in whom he had a perfectly matched opposite. Tunney stood up straight and counterpunched while Dempsey attacked from the crouch, often landing low, dirty blows. There were other contrasts for Rickard to sell when he matched them on Sept. 23, 1926. Tunney as the erudite Easterner, Dempsey as the hard-luck ex-hobo who once mined copper for five bucks a day. But the fight already had all the glamour it needed as Dempsey's long-awaited return to the ring.
Cavanaugh, who was a frequent contributor to the New York Times, has a firm knowledge of the fight game, and his description of Tunney's 10-round upset in Philadelphia crackles. (The fight can be seen on YouTube, but this read is more fun.) The decision was so shocking, Ring Lardner wrote to F. Scott Fitzgerald that he was sure the fight was a "fake, a very well done fake."
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