Sun, Dec 07, 2008 page18

• FEATURE: The intellectual who floored Jack Dempsey

  • AP
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  Heavyweight boxing champion Gene Tunney was famous for twice defeating rival Jack Dempsey.

  What isn’t well known is that he loved Shakespeare and counted such literary giants as Ernest Hemingway and George Bernard Shaw among his friends.

  Tunney’s unusual life of boxing and books will be on display on Thursday in an auction of his memorabilia by Sotheby’s in New York.

  Items on the block include the gloves Tunney wore and the stool he sat on when he defeated Dempsey in the 1920s, a collection of Shakespeare’s plays from the 17th century and books inscribed by Hemingway.

  “It wasn’t a persona or an act that he did to get attention,” said Selby Kiffer, a senior vice president at Sotheby’s. “This was really who he was. He was just as comfortable, if not more comfortable, in a library than in the boxing ring.”

  Tunney, who grew up in a poor Irish immigrant family in New York City, died in 1978 at age 81. His widow, Polly Lauder Tunney, a Carnegie Steel Co heiress, died in April at age 100 in Stamford.

  Tunney is most famous for his fight with Dempsey on Sept. 22, 1927. The bout, in front of 104,000 at Soldier Field in Chicago, was a rematch of a fight Tunney won as a challenger a year earlier.

  Dempsey knocked Tunney to the canvas in the seventh round, but the referee delayed the count because Dempsey did not immediately heed a new rule that it could not start until the fighter was in a neutral corner. Tunney rose at the count of nine and went on to win.

  Many fans and reporters believed Tunney would have been counted out had it not been for the delayed count.

  The 10-ounce gloves Tunney wore during that fight are expected to sell for US$35,000 to US$50,000.

  Tunney shocked the boxing world not only with his defeat of Dempsey, but also when he told reporter Brian Bell during an interview before the bout that he loved literary classics.

  The story prompted one of Dempsey’s bodyguards to say dismissively of Tunney’s chances against the champ: “Tunney, he reads books.”

  As boxing champ, Tunney lectured once at Yale University about Shakespeare for nearly an hour without notes. He related characters in Shakespeare’s plays to those in his own life, comparing the blustery soldier Ajax in Troilus and Cressida to a loud contemporary boxer, said his son, Jay Tunney, who was writing a book about his father.

  “He brought Shakespeare into his own life and showed people in the audience how Shakespeare influenced him,” Jay Tunney said. “That’s what made his lecture stand out.”

  Tunney owned the first complete collection of Shakespeare’s plays, published in 1685. It is expected to sell for US$80,000 to US$120,000.

  Hemingway gave Tunney three books, including A Farewell to Arms. Tunney turns up in a later Hemingway book, Island in the Stream, when the characters drink to him at a Havana bar.

  Tunney also sparred with Hemingway, typically after the men had a few drinks, Jay Tunney said. One time after a debate about whether a street fighter could take a professional boxer, Hemingway accidentally gave Tunney a bloody nose, prompting Tunney to respond with a few fast punches that stopped just short of Hemingway’s face.

  “Hemingway was absolutely flustered,” Jay Tunney said. “He turned a little shade of white.”

  Tunney was also close friends with Shaw, who admired boxing and had also risen from poverty.

  “He loved the fact that this particular boxer had been a man who knew Shakespeare,” Tunney said.

  But boxing was not secondary to Tunney’s literary interest, his son said. Tunney recognized that boxing enabled him to rise out of poverty and gave him the confidence, courage and discipline to become a successful businessman and family man.

  “Dad was always an interesting combination of brains and brawn,” Tunney said. “More and more he leaned on brains.”
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