Almost overnight, the story ballooned and the massive maw of the sports press took over, making the tale of Gene’s reading a bigger yarn than Rip Van Winkle.
Initially, Gene was elated with the attention the news created. He was pleased and proud to finally be seen as someone distinct from Dempsey, someone smart and a man with more to offer than a boxer’s biceps. It made him feel good to be recognized as a reader of fine literature. As if to emphasize his new status, he stashed books in his gear and started carrying volumes around the training camp. Visitors said that at meals, he often dropped a book or two on the table. Gene, still unknown to those who didn’t follow sports and impressed simply to see his name spelled correctly, was unaccustomed to being in the headlines. He lacked any understanding of how to cope with the intense publicity brought to bear on public figures during the prosperous post-war era of the Roaring Twenties. He was totally unprepared for celebrity. In the language of the idiom, he was wet behind the ears.
Indeed, one of Gene’s greatest strengths — his ability to focus and block out all surroundings — became his biggest weakness outside the ring. The concentration and willpower that enabled him to drive himself almost beyond endurance to utilize his mental and physical powers in pursuit of the championship also made it easier for him to disregard what seemed irrelevant remarks that reporters and the boxing crowd might be saying about him.
“It never occurred to me,” he said, “that a habit of reading could be seen as a stunt or a joke. Wasn’t reading something we wanted to champion?” He had no inkling of how absurd the notion of a literate prizefighter might seem to the sportswriters. Nor did he appreciate the day-to-day need for competing columnists to write controversial, provocative, even negative, copy to sell newspapers.
Until Bell’s story, sportswriters had considered the man challenging Dempsey for the championship to be a boring, colorless figure who kept to himself. Most sports celebrities were easy to write about because they tended toward extravagances with women, gambling, alcohol, temper tantrums, problems with their managers, with money, or tangles with the law.
“The average pug, when he lets down, gets roaring drunk or takes to sitting up all night pounding night-club tables with little wooden mallets, reaching hungrily for the powdered nakedness of the girls who march by,” wrote sportswriter Paul Gallico.
Tunney didn’t hang around with writers or other visitors playing card games or drinking beer, common pursuits in a training camp that also allowed reporters to know the sports figure better. Instead he spent the five hours between his morning and afternoon workouts reading, and the evenings listening to classical music.
In contrast, “the old Dempsey camps were magnificent social cross-sections of vulgarity and brutality,” wrote Gallico. “Phonographs brayed, spar mates brawled, the champ played pinochle or roughhoused, frowsy blondes got themselves into the pictures at nighttime.”
Tunney had been a difficult and enigmatic personality to capture on paper and was, in effect, a nonentity. Bell’s scoop and all the incredulous stories that followed were dreams come true for reporters, most of whom considered a heavyweight boxer reading books a spoof, as hilarious as a presidential candidate singing arias. It was a story that eventually moved from sports pages to front pages, catching the attention of the general public and incidentally making boxers more interesting to people, including women, who didn’t normally follow the sport.
Columnists and comedians picked up the drumbeat that Tunney, the challenger to the heavyweight boxing title, was training to beat the “man-killer” Dempsey on a diet of classical authors. Sportswriters and broadcasters spouted witty remarks about the “Bard of Biff” and “Genteel Gene,” sure that no serious contender would read novels and plays, much less poetry, while training for the most important fight of his career.
“In Gene Tunney, pugilism has found a Galahad far more taxing to credulity than novelist, playwright or scenarist would dare to conceive,” wrote Ed Van Every of the New York Evening World.
Once he realized he was being made a laughingstock, Gene agonized over it, worrying that he was too sensitive yet unable to put it behind him. In telling the truth, in trying to be himself, he had been held up to ridicule. In trying to fix it, he made it worse, and the perception of Gene as impersonal and arrogant took root. From childhood, he had never backed down from confrontation, and his experience at verbal encounters had been finely honed at the family dinner table. He tried to talk his way out of it, but his explanations often engendered disbelief.
“Some think I am high-hatting the boys when I talk about literature. I am not,” Gene said defensively. “It is a hobby with me, just as Jem Mace, a bare-knuckle champion of the 1860s, played the violin, and Jem Ward, another prize-ring title holder, painted pictures.” Jem Mace? Playing the violin? Few had ever heard of him.
It also didn’t help that he had what some called “an oddly British quality” to his speech, especially in public, making him sound pretentious. Gene did not explain that his father had a bit of a British accent, that Aunt Margaret routinely quoted Shakespeare, and that his brother Tom, now a policeman, couldn’t get through a dinner without reciting Edgar Allan Poe and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
“The kid from Greenwich talked like a gentleman from Mayfair,” said columnist Ed Fitzgerald. He had “a most unpugilistic interest in things like art, science, music and literature, and he never used a short word if he could think of a big one instead.”
One author wrote that “Tunney’s affected convoluted speech patterns were as foreign to most Americans as an untranslated poem by Baudelaire.”
“Actually,” said Gene, shifting the blame, “some visitors, seeing me reading in my spare moments, had a little fun in their conversations with me by using big words.” There was perhaps nothing more likely to raise Gene’s ire than the feeling that others were making a fool of him. Instead of bluntly telling someone off, however, Gene was always more likely to bury his feelings, keep a straight face and resort to wordplay to diminish his adversary. This paradoxical Irish propensity for purposely using big words in conversations was misunderstood by reporters and many readers.
“Taking up the joke, I answered back in polysyllables. I’m afraid,” he said, in a supreme understatement, “some of the innocent bystanders took me seriously and thought I was parading my knowledge.”
He blamed himself, thinking he should have been less cocky, shown more patience, seen a backlash coming and understood that his popularity with the fans might ultimately be affected. “Along came this new guy, Tunney, who makes it clear he’s an intellectual, or pretends to be, and the writers took whacks at him — they hated him, so we hated him,” recalled author Studs Terkel, who was a boy at the time. “Dempsey was never much interested in reading, writing and learning, but he was a scrapper, a mauler! No one on our block liked Tunney, except my older brother, an academic. Everyone wanted Tunney to lose.”
For Gene, books became ever more an escape, an Alice in Wonderland tumble into world after world after world, providing lyrical language and peaceful landscapes far removed from the fight game. Words and stories were a form of meditation, allowing him to relieve tension and stress. Reading became central to his ability to concentrate and focus, making books invaluable tools of training.
He had always felt that the art of repose was one of a boxer’s major challenges. In quiet desperation in the weeks before an important bout, many prizefighters filled spare time with hangers-on, sycophants, idle talk and the rowdy, barlike atmosphere in training camps to try to calm their jangled nerves. A boxer tended to be nervous and jumpy and could easily wear himself down through anticipation and lack of rest. Even in the ring, fighting itself came in flurries. For a large part of the time a boxer was sparring, not hitting, and the less nervous energy he burned and the more relaxed he kept his body,
