Of course Rickard couldn't let it end there, not with the public giving the distant Tunney such a chilly hello and the press demanding a rematch. So 364 days later they met again.
Tunney-Dempsey II is known for "the long count": that moment at Soldier Field in Chicago when Dempsey knocked Tunney down in the seventh round, only to forget a new rule requiring him to move to a neutral corner before the knockdown count could start. Tunney later insisted that he was ready to get up two seconds after he hit the canvas. But the five seconds that Dempsey wasted before he was reminded of the new rule gave Tunney a 14-second break. Once he rose, he meted out three more rounds of punishment that led an exhausted Dempsey to his second straight defeat.
Dempsey was gracious afterward, and in his later years, he sat by the window of his Manhattan restaurant, greeting patrons who offered him an endless reserve of good will. Tunney, meanwhile, fell in love with an heiress to the Andrew Carnegie fortune and retired to a life of privilege.
Though in his prologue Cavanaugh notes that Tunney's marriage to Polly Lauder "became the most publicized and widely read love story of the 1920s," he never shows us how. And that's not an isolated problem. On the book's second page he says that Tunney was "an intellectual and scholar" who spent his life discussing writing with the likes of George Bernard Shaw and Somerset Maugham. But the friendship with Shaw is raced past sketchily, and Maugham — whom I spent the book waiting to see — is unforgivably dealt with in a scant footnote.
As a result Tunney doesn't accomplish its goal of making us regret the way history has regarded its subject. But the boxing scenes are spun gold, and the author is at his best when he shows us what Tunney meant to the sweet science.
Shaun Assael, a senior writer for ESPN Magazine, is at work on a history of steroids in America, to be published next fall. He also writes about boxing.
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