James Joseph "Gene" Tunney was an American professional boxer who competed from 1915 to 1928.
Background
James Joseph "Gene" Tunney was born on May 25, 1897 in a flat above a grocery store to Irish Catholic parents who lived at 414 West Fifty-second Street in New York City.
When Gene was three months old his father, John Joseph Tunney, a longshoreman, moved the family to Perry Street in Greenwich Village.
Gene's mother, Mary Lydon, born at Castle Bar in County Mayo, was a devout woman and hoped that one of her three sons would become a priest.
Gene's father was a fight fan who idolized Jim Corbett, Bob Fitzsimmons, and John L. Sullivan. John Tunney frequented Owney Geaghan's boxing club on the Bowery, where the great John L. Sullivan had fought, and there was defeated in a boxing match against the house pro.
Education
Gene attended St. Veronica's Parochial School, demonstrating an early interest in the arts. Classmates considered him a bit of a prig because of his interest in Greek and Roman history and his fastidiousness with language and deportment. At thirteen, he appeared on the school stage as the prince in Romeo and Juliet, and he liked reciting speeches by Portia, Antonio, and Shylock.
His father gave his son boxing gloves for his tenth birthday, hoping the skinny lad would learn to protect himself from neighborhood toughs. Gene boxed all day with his brothers and companions, going home with a swollen nose, bloody lips, and "a terrific headache. "
He based his boxing style on the columns of New York Evening World sportswriter Bob Edgren, repeatedly practicing a straight left and a right swing, once on an inflated turkey crop that he tied to a transom after the family's Thanksgiving meal.
None of the Tunney boys entered the priesthood, but a sister did become a nun. Initially, Tunney fought as a means of physical conditioning. He sparred with volunteers at the local firehouse and played center in local basketball, and handball with parish priests. He ran marathon at La Salle Academy, from which he graduated in 1915, and organized sprints around Central Park with neighborhood friends. On warm summer nights Tunney could be seen jogging up Fifth Avenue behind big green double-decker buses. He liked to swim off the pier at West Tenth Street and frequently dove from barges and transatlantic steamers into the Hudson River. He suffered a concussion after diving with arms to his sides from the top deck of the SS Majestic. Boxing was as much a part of Tunney's teen years as breathing, he later recalled.
Scuffling with rivals in the Gophers and Hudson Dusters, two youth gangs who fought for West Side bragging rights, taught Tunney a valuable lesson "in the manly art of self-protection. " A healthy respect for "the other fellow's fists" cautioned him to size up his opponents before challenging them.
Tunney's defensive instincts characterized his boxing and business careers. He emulated "Handsome" Jack Goodman, a light heavyweight who also lived on Perry Street. Tunney followed him through the streets of the city's West Side, imitating his short, snappy stride.
At school and at smokers held by Catholic clubs, the Christian Brothers encouraged Tunney's interest in boxing, hoping to channel his surplus energy. But a bout with Leonard Ross failed to impress onlookers.
The promoter of a competing smoker thought Tunney "too awkward and wild" to have a future in prizefighting. In his middle teens, Tunney fought nightly in West Side smokers for ginger ale and a stale ham sandwich.
By day he worked at the Ocean Steamship Company, earning five dollars weekly as a fifteen-year-old office boy and eleven dollars weekly later as a mail clerk. Promotion to freight classifier when he was seventeen brought seventeen dollars per week and correspondence courses in business, mathematics, and English in the hope he would one day rise to the rank of dock superintendent. But the work proved monotonous; Tunney was "itching for excitement. " During breaks, he would spar with junior clerks, pushing desks and file cabinets out of the way to provide ring space. Fight club evenings were "rough and tumble" and proved a good training ground "where nearly anything went. "
Career
Tunney's first encounter with a professional boxer came when he was sixteen. He sparred three rounds with twenty-six-year-old Willie Green, a veteran of 168 fights, and was beaten up so badly he decided the next morning he would never go up against a professional again. Three weeks later, however, he battled Green a second time and held his own, following that with two savvy showings against the veteran, which made the 133-pound challenger the talk of the West Side. Tunney's first fight as a professional came when he was a 140-pound eighteen-year-old. He received eighteen dollars from the Sharkey Athletic Club for his seventh-round knockout of Bobby Dawson.
Four fights quickly followed, a draw and three wins, two by knockout. Tunney became a 150-pound fighter of "careful" habits. He had learned to counterpunch, feint, and sidestep, and to time his attacks.
In early 1917, Tunney clung to his daytime job at the steamship company, poised between two careers and unsure if there was a future for him in fighting.
American entrance into World War I complicated matters further. Tunney failed a physical with the United States Marine Corps in May of that year because of an elbow injury. He took a summer job as a lifeguard in Keansburg, N. J. , hoping the sun and exercise would expedite the healing process, and in June 1918 he was aboard a troop ship bound for France. He boxed as a member of the American Expeditionary Force to avoid guard duty.
Despite breaking a knuckle in a preliminary bout in Tours, he went on to defeat southpaw K. O. Sullivan and American amateur light heavyweight champion Ted Jamison to win the AEF's light heavyweight championship in Paris in 1918.
He returned to the United States the following year. Late in 1919, while on a boxing exhibition in the Rhineland, Tunney confessed to a newspaper man his ambition of one day defeating Jack Dempsey, the "Manassa Mauler, " who earlier that year had become world heavyweight champion. The boast seemed absurd.
Even after Tunney won the United States light heavyweight title in 1922 with a twelve-round decision over Battling Levinsky, critics charged the six-foot, one-and-a-half-inch, 175-pound Tunney was a "synthetic fighter" with small, brittle hands and little punching power. That critique seemed substantiated when Tunney lost his title later that year to Harry Greb. Tunney, blind and out on his feet at the end of the fight, collapsed at his dressing room door. It would be the only loss of Tunney's career.
He fought the "Pittsburgh Windmill" four more times in four years and, following the final fight in St. Paul, Greb predicted that Tunney would beat Dempsey.
Despite victories over the leading contenders of his era, including GeorgesCarpentier, Tommy Gibbons, and Bartley Madden, Tunney was a nine-to-five underdog when he fought Jack Dempsey at Philadelphia's Sesquicentennial Stadium on Sept. 23, 1926. Dempsey, slowed by three years of inactivity, was no match for the now 187-pound "fighting marine. "
Tunney dominated the ten-round title fight, fought in a driving rain before 144, 468 spectators, the largest crowd yet to see a sporting event in North America. Tunney's superior speed and careful study of Dempsey's ring style led to a first-round right that landed flush on the champion's jaw. Dempsey, badly battered, never recovered.
A rematch fought September 22, 1927, at Soldier Field in Chicago created the most famous moment in the history of boxing. The first six rounds were a replay of the first Tunney-Dempsey fight, with Tunney's counterpunching keeping him in command. Then, fifty seconds into the seventh round, Dempsey caught Tunney against the ropes with a left-hand lead and floored the sagging Tunney with six more blows, only two of which Tunney later remembered. For the first time in his career Tunney was on the canvas. Dempsey, however, refused to go immediately to the furthest neutral corner, and this led to a six-second delay in referee Dave Barry's count, the so-called long count. Tunney rose on nine, fifteen seconds after his knockdown, escaped Dempsey's charge, and won the final three rounds of the fight, retaining his championship.
Tunney defended his title only one additional time, knocking out a longshot, New Zealander Tom Heeney, in the eleventh round on July 26, 1928, in New York.
Tunney retired from the ring following his marriage in 1928.
Gene Tunney had become a millionaire through boxing and made a second fortune as a corporate executive. He served as chairman of the board of American Distilling Company and of the McCandless Corporation and served on boards for Schick, Technicolor, Inc. , the Industrial Bank of Commerce, and many other companies. He became national chairman for the National Foundation for American Youth and directed athletics and physical fitness programs for the United States Navy in World War II.
He traveled extensively, made friends with George Bernard Shaw, Thornton Wilder, and other members of the literary community, and even lectured on Shakespeare at Yale.
He died in Greenwich, Connecticut Tunney's place in boxing history seems secure.
Quotations:
"A boxer must exercise and develop every part of his body. "
"A boxer's diet should be low in fat and high in proteins and sugar. Therefore you should eat plenty of lean meat, milk, leafy vegetables, and fresh fruit and ice cream for sugar. "
"A concave chest means that your diaphragm is sagging. "
"As a West Side kid fooling around with boxing gloves, I had been, for some reason of temperament, more interested in dodging a blow than in striking one. "
"Ever since boyhood I've made a religion of keeping in shape by regular, conscientious exercise. "
"Exercise should be regarded as tribute to the heart. "
"Fat is one of the chief enemies of the heart because it has to be plentifully supplied with blood and thus needlessly increases the pumping load that the heart must sustain. "
"Handball, swimming, running, jumping, basketball, and boxing were as much a part of me as breathing. "
"I did six years of planning to win the championship from Jack Dempsey. "
"If all human lives depended upon their usefulness - as might be judged by certain standards - there would be a sudden and terrific mortality in the world. "
"In youth, we get plenty of exercise through games and running around, but as middle life approaches, we settle down, literally and figuratively. "
"My own ambition in the ring had always been skillful boxing, speed and defense - on the order of Mike Gibbons. "
"Never eat less than four hours before boxing. Then eat only lightly. "
"Normally, I could hit hard enough, as anyone who studied my fights might have known. But the impression was that I was essentially defensive, the very reverse of a killer, the prize fighter who read books, even Shakespeare. "
"One half-conscious thought was burned in my mind: stay on your feet. "
"The man who has allowed his body to deteriorate cuts a pitiful figure - chest collapsed, stomach protruding. "
"The way to know about championship quality is to learn from champions, and that I did; studying them with professional purpose during my time in the ring and from habitual interest afterward. "
"Though I was not a belligerent kid, I do not think I ever passed up a good opportunity to fight. "
"To enjoy the glow of good health, you must exercise. "
"Upon awakening in the morning, I wondered if the proceedings of the night before had been a dream. It was hard to believe that I was the world's heavyweight champion. "
Connections
Tunney retired from the ring following his marriage to Mary Josephine ("Polly") Lauder, heir to the Carnegie estate, on October 3, 1928. They had four children, one of whom, John Varick Tunney, became a United States senator from California.