to go and gave him the discipline to distance himself from his work. In the ring, a rested mind allowed him to strategize. “The truth is, I became addicted to reading not in spite of pugilism, but largely because of it,” he recalled. “For me, fisticuffs and literature were allied arts, through the medium of training.” The explanation was largely dismissed by the unsympathetic fight crowd. But not by Greb.
Harry Greb, one of Dempsey’s toughest sparring partners, the only man who ever beat Tunney in the ring, and a boxer who exemplified the physical and brutal life of a prizefighter, took the story of reading seriously.
“Gene reads books? Did you know that?” Greb asked sportswriter James R. Fair.
“Do you think he gets anything out of them?” asked Fair.
“Why, Jim,” Greb asked in amazement, “Do you think he don’t? When he reads a book, I’ll bet my last dollar he knows as much about it as the man who wrote it does. And I’ll tell you why. I gave him a lesson in our first fight and he learned it so well that I was never able to hurt him or cut him up again. I don’t know why he reads them, but by God he knows what he’s reading.” Greb was one of the few in boxing circles who predicted Tunney would beat Dempsey, but his opinion was ignored.
Tunney was fighting for a life beyond the ring. He was fighting to be “the respectable gentleman” that his mother idolized. He wanted to put the tedious, repetitious work of the dock clerk behind him, along with the sameness of daily living and a paycheck too big to leave him poor but too small to allow him his dreams. In the doctor’s waiting room, he had read about poor boys that had triumphed. As a teenager, he had bought standing-room-only tickets for the Metropolitan Opera to hear the most famous singer of the era, Enrico Caruso. Watching alone from the back of the house, he had been as entranced by the social elite passing down the aisles as he had been by the extraordinary power of Caruso’s voice. Outside, he remembered huddling in the cold from across a snowy street as men in top hats and white ties and women in long gowns stepped from carriages and chauffer-driven luxury sedans.
Nor had he forgotten that as a schoolboy he had practiced for marathons by racing buses up Fifth Avenue, past grand mansions, apartment houses with doormen in livery, and stores with opulent window displays of clothing, furs and jewelry.
In time, through wealthy friends and backers, Tunney had been introduced to a society where words commanded respect, households had cooks and butlers, homes were big enough to have libraries and gaming rooms, and manicured lawns and formal dinners were commonplace. “I had a 33-room house, a staff, an elevator to the third floor, a butler, and all the things that go with it. He liked that house,” said his close friend Samuel F. Pryor, the son of a wealthy gun manufacturer, whom he had met on a troopship returning home from Europe. “He liked to come and stay.”
Tunney had been invited to spar at the private and prestigious New York Athletic Club and the City Athletic Club with millionaires and businessmen who lived not in one house but two or three and who vacationed in Florida and Europe. Gene liked that style of living, and he was not going to give up his pursuit of a better life because the press had a different idea of how a boxer should live. In his striving, he did not realize that in rejecting the expectations of the fight crowd, he was also turning his back on their attitudes and values. Many of them were not educated, could not read, never wanted any other life but to be on the fringes of the sport and interpreted Gene’s desire for something more as a personal affront. He was separating himself from those whose support he needed to be popular.
Seize opportunities, Gene always said, quoting Shakespeare: “I have wasted time, and now doth time waste me.”
“Seizing opportunities reveals the kind of stuff we are made of. Men do not lack opportunities,” he said, “they miss them.” Learning and reading, he said, were the stepping-stones to opportunity.
In interviews, Gene irritated sportswriters by talking about boxing dispassionately as a science, as a job, discussing musculature and bone structure. He analyzed fighters as if he were an engineer not as a battle-tested pug.
“You know, I always fight my battles out beforehand,” he said. “I mean by that, I plan and live through them by myself, figuring out my opponents and my own attack and defense.”
He studied fight films for hours as he studied books, watching them over and over again. He hired boxers who had fought his opponents as sparring partners. He drew detailed diagrams of the body’s vital points, and as a spectator at bouts sat in a seat near the ring drawing diagrams with a pencil and feverishly taking notes on the action. He relied on Wilburn Pardon Bower’s Applied Anatomy and Kinesiology and probably read more medical books than any boxer in history.
“I think of pugilism as a fencing bout of gloved fists, rather than an act of assault and battery,” he said. “You’ve got to cultivate the art of thinking as expressed in action.”
It reached the point that whatever Gene said seemed alien to the traditional boxing crowd, and in print, the words tasted hypocritical. “Call me a boxer, a pugilist,” he said repeatedly, “not a fighter.” Not a fighter? A heavyweight contender training for a championship fight? Who was he kidding? they asked.
“As defined in the dictionary,” he said, “the word ‘fight’ connotes a hostile encounter, and there’s no room in a boxing contest for hostility.” (He always maintained this distinction; he was pleased to say he had been a professional prizefighter who engaged in boxing, but that he never “fought.”)
A year later, he arrived in Chicago and noted there was talk “about some fight to be held.” He said he knew nothing about it. “I am here to train for a boxing contest, not a fight. I don’t like fighting. Never did. But I’m free to admit that I like boxing.”
As for the hangers-on who infested the boxing world of the 1920s, Gene had no time for them either. Having grown up in a neighborhood with gangs, he saw no reason why he should tolerate riffraff, bootleggers, two-timing politicians, second-rate managers, roughnecks and criminals. He saw boxing as a profession, much like being a dentist, except that the career was shorter. The rewards were great if one was good enough. Gene was convinced he had trained himself to be not only good but the best, and he confidently told anyone willing to listen that he was ready for Dempsey.
“I shall be champion,” he told the British poet Robert Nichols during an interview. “Yes, it’s written in the stars that I shall be champion. When I have won — and I shall win,” Gene told Nichols, “I want to become a cultivated person.” Nichols was one of many non-sportswriters assigned to interview Tunney, to try to determine if he was a fake and whether he actually knew and could correctly quote literature as he claimed.
“Tunney speaks better English than most Englishmen,” noted Nichols. “His sentences do not trail off into sheer vagueness.” Nichols said the articulate Tunney told him that by cultivated, he meant “a man who has some acquaintance with what man has seen and felt, and uses this acquaintance to understand the present world around him.”
When Maine author and writer Roger Batchelder met Tunney, he wrote that he “inquired rather furtively about the pugilist’s familiarity with the works of the Bard.” As they sat together at luncheon, “My host recited the advice of Polonius to Laertes in a soft rhythm that seemed strange from one of such massive frame.” Tunney’s big fingers drummed on the table as though to continue the cadence of Shakespeare’s rhythm as he quoted these words:
Neither a borrower nor a lender be,
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulleth the edge of husbandry.
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