of state and hypnotize and psycho-analyze the helpless public by their pens,” he wrote. “I hope they will be examined just as strictly in pugilism as in political economy when that time comes.” At one point he was so fed up with what he felt was inept coverage of boxing that he suggested, somewhat in jest, that a bill be introduced “making it a punishable offence for a newspaper to order or publish any description of a prizefight until they had sent for a professional boxer and made the writer spar a bye with him, and obtain from a couple of competent judges a certificate that he at least knows his right hand from his left.”
Bell found Tunney’s training camp alongside a placid, pine-rimmed lake called, appropriately enough, Lake Pleasant, just off a two-lane highway that wove through the mountain resort village of Speculator, New York. The Osborne Inn, a sprawling, three-story white-shingled hotel with a wide verandah facing the lake, was run by one of Tunney’s Marine buddies and served as headquarters for the press, with rooms, gossip, a well-stocked bar, a telephone and a menu boasting the “best apple pie north of Manhattan.”
Outside, only a few steps from the inn, an elevated platform resembling a large open porch served as the training ring. It was roofed to protect it from sun and rain, and open on the sides so that spectators could sit in the grass, on the newly erected pine bleachers or on the tops of cars to see workouts and match wits with the experts on whether the challenger could beat the champ. Not many thought Tunney had a chance. Dempsey had been heavyweight champion for seven years, and reporters writing daily stories from the opposing training camps had almost unanimously picked Dempsey as invincible.
As Bell later recounted, it seemed a little like going to a farm auction and looking over the stock. He arrived too late in the day to schedule an interview, so with ring workouts completed, he jammed a notebook in his pocket and went off to where he was told he might find the target of his story. He tromped along the shoreline and into the trees until he spotted what he called a “secret cabin.”
On receiving no answer to his knock, he opened the door and slipped inside. What he saw surprised him for its almost monastic orderliness. There was a neatly made-up single cot, a camp desk with a portable typewriter, a wood chair, a dresser and shelves neatly lined with row upon row of books. Good grief, he thought. One might think that the occupant was a college student or an author. It was hardly the kind of space one would expect for a boxer, not that Bell knew any boxers, but he could tell from the training paraphernalia that it was undoubtedly Tunney’s living quarters. Bell sat down in the chair and picked up a book.
As one of nine living in a cramped New York apartment, Gene had found seclusion on the Hudson River docks. Those early memories and a driving need for personal space had made him insist, against the advice of his manager and trainers, that he have a private sanctuary at Speculator. His rough-hewed clapboard cabin, known as “the shack” to reporters, was off-limits to visitors. Jogging back late in the day from an hour’s run, Gene was troubled to see the silhouette of someone inside. He opened the door, ready to unleash his anger at the intruder.
Bell was only a few years older than Tunney, a big, burly, Scotch-Irish American with the ability, said friends, to charm anyone’s socks off. The reporter instinctively saw that his presence was unappreciated. Without trying to make excuses, Bell simply apologized, saying that he had hoped to get acquainted and would like an interview. Then, looking toward the stack of books on the night table, Bell smiled and asked, “What are you reading?”
Gene’s concern about a visitor vanished. He was enormously pleased that someone was asking about authors instead of his punches, knockdowns, right cross and brittle knuckles. It was a relief to be invited to talk to a reporter about books and ideas, subjects that were infinitely more interesting to him than talking about the upcoming fight. Gene sat down on the bed and gestured for Bell to use the chair.
“Reading now? The Way of All Flesh,” replied Gene, “an autobiographical novel by Samuel Butler.” He went on to say that the book had an excellent preface by George Bernard Shaw who praised it as a neglected masterpiece. In fact, Tunney said he had bought it at a used book store for 50 cents during a trip to Los Angeles, specifically because he noticed the preface was written by Shaw, the world-famous playwright who had won the Nobel Prize for literature and was an author he admired for his wit and wisdom.
As if to cap off the conversation, Tunney said he found the book’s lessons on an English cleric’s self-righteous use of religion to manipulate his son to be absorbing and the discussions of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species thought-provoking. In questioning the pretentious social class values of Victorian society, he said, Butler, like Shaw, offered hope for the freedom of the individual against hypocritical conventions.
Bell was nonplussed. He took out a new notebook, resettled himself in the chair and prepared to interview this “man of multiple surprises,” a man with wide-ranging interests and a command of language who was so filled with energy that he seemed to gesticulate constantly. Often getting up to pull out a book, he spoke faster than Bell could take notes. Tunney had a quick wit and enjoyed repartee, and Bell found him a willing audience for his own humorous tales about the newspaper business and his southern family.
There had been snickering about Tunney’s habit of reading during training and of using multi-syllable words. “Most prizefighters talk in words of one syllable and sharpen their jackknives on the backs of their necks,” said a Newspaper Enterprise Association syndicated story about Gene written the year before. When Gene said he liked poetry, the surprised interviewer said he “clung to his chair and took a shot from his pocket flask of aromatic spirits of ammonia to steady himself.” The article was published in the Chicago Post, with the headline “The Boxing Savant.” At the time, Tunney was not yet signed to fight Dempsey and the tale of the heavyweight who read poetry was dismissed as laughable.
In general, the sportswriters didn’t really care about Tunney’s inner life, about what he read, why he read or what he thought. They didn’t care that he walked to church, read the editorial pages of newspapers, including The New York Times, that he was a member of the Shakespearean Society or that he had memorized Hamlet. If anything, they were irritated that his reading habit made him less accessible because it consumed his time away from the ring. Reading skills weren’t why Tunney was in the limelight. Tunney hadn’t graduated from high school, and his ability, or inability, to decipher a sentence and expand his vocabulary appeared to have no bearing whatsoever on whether he could withstand the crushing onslaughts of “The Manassa Mauler.”
Books on the shelves of Tunney’s cabin included a leather-bound set of the complete plays of William Shakespeare, novels by H.G. Wells, Thomas Hardy, Jack London, Victor Hugo, Thornton Wilder’s The Cabala, the poetry of Percy Shelley and W.B. Yeats, a Bible, Jeffrey Farnol’s The Amateur Gentleman and The Broad Highway, and Bernard Shaw’s Cashel Byron’s Profession, and plays including Back to Methuselah, Saint Joan, and Pygmalion. Gene said he had read them all at least once, sometimes several times. “I am always deliberate and methodical, my normal gait for most things,” said Gene. “I could never just skim a book and I always appreciate the mes-sage more in the rereading.”
Bell knew at once that he was onto a bigger and better story than the usual feature about a heavyweight contender hitting speed bags. The contradiction of a boxer reading literature would capture headlines and grab attention. As an experienced newsman who appreciated literature, Bell was also well-equipped to play the role that every newspaper writer hopes to have: that of being the first to develop and elaborate on a major story — a scoop. The Associated Press was the largest general news agency in the world, which made it uniquely suited to sending stories to a far-flung audience.
Several days later, Bell’s story on the fighter who loved to read was distributed to virtually every newspaper in the country and to papers overseas. Bell’s boss, Alan Gould, said that other sportswriters, suspecting a clever publicity gimmick drummed up to get coverage, initially ignored the report. When they learned it was true, the
