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Jack Cavanaugh - Tunney

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Tunney: summary, description and annotation

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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 Tunneys 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 Tunneys life and career, taking us from the mean streets of Tunneys native Greenwich...

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Praise for TUNNEY Entertaining Crammed with vivid fistic descriptions The - photo 1
Praise for
TUNNEY

Entertaining Crammed with vivid fistic descriptions.

The New York Times Book Review

This richly researched book follows a smooth trajectory and is strung with compelling vignettes. Cavanaugh describes Tunney's improbable ascent to the heavyweight heights and his two battles with Dempsey so well that I felt as though I were sitting ringside, unsure of the outcome.

Los Angeles Times

A fine book. A wonderfully interesting sports story. It's a great read, and could make a great fight movie.

New York Daily News

[A] splendid biography Here is a book about which all the principals can feel proud.

New York Post

The type of read that could make boxing fans forget about the shady personalities that dominate the sport today.

Rocky Mountain News

Cavanaugh mines countless nuggetsto paint a compelling portrait of Gene Tunney, the widely misunderstood first heavyweight champ from New York.

Newsday

Vividly recounted. Cavanaugh brings alive an era when boxers fought more in a year than they do now over entire careers.

Publishers Weekly

Gene Tunney was truly a thinking man's champ, and that's part of what makes this biography so fascinating. This immensely well-researched biography finally gives Tunney his full due. But better still, Cavanaugh vividly describes life and sport in the Dempsey-Tunney era, doing for the 1920s what David Margolick's Beyond Glory did for the 1930s.

Booklist

Cavanaugh digs deep into boxing's colorful past to rescue perhaps the most skilled (and learned) practitioner of the sweet science.

Associated Press

The golden age of boxing is brought back to life in Tunney. [It] shows how the boxer went against the grain of his sport with a lifelong interest in literature and the arts.

Connecticut Post

[The] buildup to the Tunney-Dempsey fights reads like a suspense novel. The prose is crisp and crackles with tension as he describes the fight; one does not have to watch the grainy newsreels to appreciate the drama. Cavanaugh brings it to life in vivid detail.

The Tampa Tribune

[Tunney] will go far in reminding new generations that Gene Tunney wasn't simply a great fighter, he was one of the greatest any generation will ever see.

San Antonio Express-News

Thoughtfully researched Cavanaugh's book on Tunney is unique in that he gives us the perspective on Tunney and his life in and out of the ring that many did not have. Cavanaugh's book certainly gives justice to both Tunney's name and his record in the ring.

Las Cruces Sun-News

Cavanaugh leaves few cobwebs undisturbed. The research reveals as much about the fight game of the first half of the twentieth century as it does about the social milieu in which it is set.

Norwalk Hour

To Marge John and Tara They never called him champ He was unloved - photo 2

To Marge, John, and Tara

Picture 3

They never called him champ. He was unloved, underrated, shunned by his own people, rejected by history. Still, he was the best advertisement his sport has ever had.

JIM MURRAY,
former sports columnist for
the Los Angeles Times.

Picture 4

CONTENTS

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

INTRODUCTION

Tunney - image 5 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.

When I met Tunney, he was the chief executive officer of the McCandless Corporation, a conglomerate of rubber products companies based in New York, and a board member of a half-dozen or so corporations. Like the other commuters, he was headed home, in his case to his gentleman's farm in Stamford, where he had been living for more than thirty years with his wife, Polly Lauder Tunney, an heiress to the Andrew Carnegie fortune.

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