Jack Cavanaugh - Tunney: Boxings Brainiest Champ and His Upset of the Great Jack Dempsey

earing a pinstripe gray suit, a white shirt, and a striped tie, the man sitting beside me on the New Haven Railroad train blended in perfectly with the other homeward-bound commuters on an early spring evening in the mid-1960s. Like most passengers in the car, he was immersed in one of New York's three afternoon newspapers of the time, the nightly ritual for daily riders to the Connecticut suburbs from Manhattan. On a rush-hour train like this, there is an unspoken rule not to bother a fellow rider. But suddenly breaking that commuters' rule, to my eternal gratification, my seatmate began to comment on the wretched condition of our car. Isn't it ridiculous, he said, gesturing down the aisle. Look at all the broken seats. You'd think they'd do something about it.

Turning toward him, I agreed, then realized who he was. And why not? After all, I had seen photos of him since I was a young boy, all the more so since I had grown up in Stamford, Connecticut, where he had lived ever since leaving the boxing ring and getting married in 1928. At first, I was reluctant to ask if he was indeed Gene Tunney, the enigmatic former heavyweight champion of the world, who had wrested the title from Jack Dempsey in 1926 before about 135,000 spectators in Philadelphiathen the largest crowd ever to witness a boxing bout. The same Gene Tunney who then met Dempsey a second time a year later in an even more famous fight at Soldier Field in Chicago before an even larger gathering of an estimated 145,000. Finally, I could resist no longer. Pardon me for asking, but you are Gene Tunney, aren't you?

Yes, I am, answered Tunney, then in his late sixties and still handsome, with a ruddy complexion and tinges of gray in his brown hair. He then shook my hand warmly as I introduced myself.

Having met so many athletes as a sportswriter, and having been one myself, I have never been in awe of sports figures, with the exception of an elite handful including the enigmatic Joe DiMaggio; my boyhood idol, Stan Musial, the great St. Louis Cardinal slugger; the legendary sprinter Jesse Owens; the Negro Leagues baseball star Cool Papa Bell; and, yes, Jack Dempsey. I had met all of them, too, but never had I sat alongside any of them on a train, engaged in a memorable hour-long conversation, as I did with Gene Tunney. After growing up poor in Greenwich Village, Tunney had won the world heavyweight boxing championship but had largely been disparaged and even mocked because he had beaten the iconic Dempsey. Further, he had had the temerity, while still fighting, to become an intellectual and scholar, having lectured on Shakespeare at Yale and having discussed writing with friends and acquaintances like George Bernard Shaw, Ernest Hemingway, H. G. Wells, Thornton Wilder, John Marquand, and Somerset Maugham.

Tunney, he reads books, was the dismissive and disparaging assessment of Tunney by one of Dempsey's bodyguards before the first Dempsey-Tunney fight, which Tunney was given virtually no chance of winning. That simplistic portrayal of Tunney was shared, as it were, by not only other boxing managers and trainers but also most sportswriters and fans, few of whom gave Tunney his due until well after he had retired. Not to say that Tunney himself did not offend sportswriters, including such journalistic paragons of the era as Grantland Rice, Damon Runyon, Ring Lardner, Paul Gallico, and Westbrook Pegler, with what they perceived to be intellectual pretensions and an aloof demeanor.