reading newspaper coverage of his son’s ring battles, and he never saw Gene in a professional fight. He died without either of them resolving their lifelong animosity. Gene felt a sadness of lost opportunity that he would never be able to put into words. For the rest of his life, he would rarely speak of his father or his beloved brother John again.
Lying on his bunk in his small wood cabin in the Adirondacks, Gene had time to think. He wished for a trusted mentor in whom he could confide, whom he could talk to about his fears and concerns, his dreams for the future. On the brink of preparing for the biggest fight of his life, surrounded by dozens of supporters and ever more a public figure, he felt increasingly isolated and was sometimes desperately lonely.
Bell’s article and those that followed exposed his most private yearnings to public ridicule, and despite the assurance of friends, he struggled to understand why he should be shamed for trying to better himself. Books had made him an outsider in his profession at the very moment he was reaching for the crown jewel of sport, the heavyweight championship. He saw winning as the only way out, the only way to prove himself. He thought that once he had won, the public’s failure to understand him would pass, and he would be accepted by the boxing crowd for the man he was. He felt he had to slay the dragon to get ahead, and the dragon was Dempsey. “Think it, practice it, do it” became his mantra.
He also turned to prayer, believing that his faith would give him strength. He had grown up so devout that at age 21, he felt sinful that he hid his rosary in his bunk instead of kneeling beside his bed in front of other Marines to pray. He bent his knees at more altar rails than his friends would have known about, but he harbored questions about original sin for which he was ashamed and thought there were no answers.
“He was troubled, but he was truly a very good person,” said his friend Sam Pryor.
On days off in Speculator, and sometimes late into the night, he visited Father John Murnane, a Franciscan priest, to discuss God and man and Gene’s favorite saint, Saint Francis of Assisi. Saint Francis was a troubadour who captured for Christianity the joy in nature, the love for the sun and the moon, the trees, the clouds, the flowers and the birds, a saint who felt happiness did not come from comfort or material possessions but from serving others. When Gene sat outside alone under the night sky or walked along pine-covered mountain paths, he felt nature was God’s cathedral and that he could speak to God directly. Catholic priests were friends and frequent visitors to his camp, and in talking with them, he struggled inwardly with bridging the gap between rigid church doctrine and his own independent thinking. These were not thoughts that he dared talk about with the clergy or his fervently religious family.
Bernard Shaw had shown him a way out.
Gene had seen Shaw’s play Saint Joan, which had its world premiere in New York in 1923, and he had been profoundly moved by the story of the warrior saint, an ignorant peasant girl of unparalleled vision and courage who led the French army to victory in battles against the English and then was accused of heresy and burned at the stake by the dominant Roman Catholic Church. Joan’s alleged blasphemy was listening to what she felt were God’s wishes spoken to her through the voices of her angels rather than through obeying the Church’s interpretation of God’s will. Gene was touched by Joan’s plain-spoken individual conscience.
Shaw had written that Joan’s lesson was, “Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him; but I will maintain my own ways before Him.” The playwright, whose philosophy of religion did not mesh with traditional Christian teachings, felt the church should accept the freethinker as well as the faithful if it were to maintain authority with a modern congregation. Shaw felt that men of reason and science must be embraced by the church and that the true Christian Church was both Roman Catholic and Protestant in one. He wrote in his preface to the play that Joan’s burning at the stake in 1431 made her the first Protestant martyr.
Gene found the play deeply provocative. After reading it, he changed from a doctrinaire Catholic to one who adhered to faith in God as the Creator of all things but who maintained his own conscience and responsibility for moral decisions, without needing his priest as he had as a child. He found comfort in memorizing much of Saint Joan, repeating the words during hours of jogging through the Adirondacks:
To shut me from the light of the sky and the sight of the fields and flowers; to chain my feet so that I can never again ride with the soldiers nor climb the hills; to make me breathe foul damp darkness, and keep from me everything that brings me back to the love of God when your wickedness and foolishness tempt me to hate Him...if only I could still hear the wind in the trees, the larks in the sunshine, the young lambs crying through the healthy frost, and the blessed blessed church bells that send my angel voices floating to me on the wind. But without these things, I cannot live.
Gene told friends that Shaw’s preface to the play was one of the finest pieces of writing he’d ever read and that it “ought to have him canonized in a century or two.” Shaw felt that Catholicism was not yet catholic enough and Gene agreed. In later years he would name his only daughter, Joan.
In London, Shaw was following daily news reports of the buildup for the fight between Tunney and Dempsey. For the first time since 1924, when he had seen in the newsreels the battle in which Tunney had defeated the French champion, Georges Carpentier, Shaw was excited about a championship bout. Everything he remembered and read about Tunney interested him, in no small part because the boxer seemed to bear a resemblance to his fictional hero Cashel Byron, and Tunney was fighting against a man who was the personification of Cashel’s fictional opponent, the mauler Billy Paradise. Shaw told Lawrence Langner, his exclusive agent in New York, that the invincible Dempsey could be beaten by a scientific fighter.
Wait and see, he told Langner.
Late in the day on September 23, 1926, with his manager, trainers, and friends hovering near, Tunney closed himself in his room, and with only hours to go before doing battle for the championship, finished rereading for the fourth time the book that Shaw held up as a masterpiece, Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh. The day of the fight, nearly every sportswriter in the country predicted he would lose, and they continued to question whether reading was a suitable preoccupation for someone in his profession. The Chicago Daily Tribune was almost kindly:
Mr. Tunney, the refined prizefighter who will endeavor to smear Mr. Dempsey’s paraffin nose all over his (Mr. Dempsey’s) features, is reading Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh. Mr. Dempsey confines his reading to the comic strips, his trainer reading the two-syllable words aloud to him. We applaud Mr. Tunney’s love of great literature as greatly as we deplore Mr. Dempsey’s indifference to the words of the master minds. However, and after all, the two gentlemen are to meet in a fistic combat and not in a competitive examination on English literature.
The air was thick with moisture, and the rain, which would soon turn into a torrential downpour, had not yet started when Gene pushed aside the top rope, pulled the blue robe with the U.S. Marine emblem tightly around him, and climbed into the ring at Philadelphia’s new Sesquicentennial Stadium. There were tens of thousands of spectators, enough to fill a mid-sized American city, and more than 400 reporters. The cheapest seats were so far away that fans sitting in them had brought binoculars to see the ring.
Bob Edgren, whose drawings and columns had been Gene’s introduction to reading and boxing, was at ringside with colleagues from the New York Evening World. In the first row, on a pine bench so close to the ring he could touch it, wearing a fedora to shield his eyes from the glare of the powerful arc lights, was the reporter who had first written the story on Gene’s reading habits, the affable Brian Bell. He had asked Gene to be godfather to his son, born only the day before. Bell told his colleagues that he predicted Tunney would win. “Ha!” said ap’s Charlie Dunkley, also sitting at ringside. “Why, the so-and-so can barely punch holes in a lace curtain!”
Gene caught Bell’s eye, and smiled.
