Tunney’s cabin in the Adirondacks, where he secluded himself to read and write during training (Tunney Collection).
Gene, absorbed in a book (Tunney Collection).
Gene Tunney and Jack Dempsey in the offices of the New York State Boxing Commission, August 1926 (Bettmann Archive/Corbis).
Workmen erect the boxing ring in Philadelphia’s Sesquicentennial Stadium for the Tunney-Dempsey fight (Tunney Collection).
Chapter 4
Adelphi Kid
“The prizefighter is no more what the spectators imagine him to be than the lady with the wand and the star in the pantomime is really a fairy queen.”
G. BERNARD SHAW
Gene stood in the puddle, rain dripping down his face, a towel over his shoulders, his shoes and trunks sopping, and allowed his right glove to be raised in the air. The first few seconds in the ring had been the longest of his life, but it was over. A tumultuous ovation like a tsunami’s howl cascaded in waves down the canyons of screaming spectators even before the judge’s final decision was announced. More than 145,000 fight fans, the largest crowd ever to attend an outdoor spectacle, had seen him upset Jack Dempsey for the heavyweight boxing championship of the world, the climax of seven years of unrelenting work and focus.
He had willed himself to succeed, had demanded of himself that there was no other option, and he had won decisively. It was one of the first heavyweight championships of the modern era to be decided on points for skill, speed and strategy. The beaten Dempsey stumbled laboriously across the ring, blood dripping from a gash under his right eye, his left eye closed completely, his mouth bleeding. Gene moved toward him as the crowd parted. They reached out to embrace, and the torrents of rain didn’t stop.
At London’s Rialto Theatre, the playwright Shaw would see moving pictures of the fight several times over. “Punches that travel with the velocity of a streak of lightning and footwork that the most flickering shadow would envy cannot be followed intelligently,” reported The Times of London after its correspondent watched the movie. But it was interesting, the correspondent noted, to have “pictorial proof of Tunney’s British style of boxing.” Except for the referee, who Shaw thought resembled a churchwarden and ought to get out of the way, Shaw was elated with the outcome of the fight. In fact, so many Britons were enthused that an English boxing promoter made the first offer for a return bout, proposing Wembley Stadium in London, which seated 150,000.
Gene had triumphed in the most important night of his life and had done it his way, discounting naysayers, creating his own training regime and ignoring the sniping and salvos from the press. On the day of the fight, in a joyous jab at being his own man, he had stunned newsmen by climbing into the passenger seat of a blood-red Curtiss Oriole, piloted by stuntman Casey Jones, and lifted off toward a fog bank to fly from his training camp to Philadelphia, 85 miles and an hour and a half away. It was a year before Lindbergh’s historic flight across the Atlantic, and air travel was still seen as highly risky. “That son of a bitch!” yelled promoter Tex Rickard, furious that millions of dollars in revenue could be lost.
A reporter asked Gene if he’d been worried.
“If I’d crashed, it wouldn’t have mattered,” he replied philosophically. “It’s Rickard’s show, but it’s my life, remember.” Then, adding a sentiment often heard from his mother, he added, “The longest life is very short.”
Fifteen million people, the largest radio audience ever, had heard the broadcast from ringside. News accounts of his victory appeared on front pages, not only in the United States but around the world. In a year when the average annual wage in the United States was $1527, he had won $200,000 for a 30-minute fight. In half an hour, the poor boy from the docks had made more money than most Americans would earn in a lifetime.
The bells of Saint Veronica’s Church, his childhood parish, pealed in celebration, and candles were lit throughout the sanctuary for parishioners to give thanks. Gene couldn’t walk on the sidewalk without being stopped or visit a shop without a crowd gathering outside to peer in the windows and wave. People surrounded his car if it slowed in traffic and streamed by his table if he went to a public restaurant. He planned to take advantage of the moment and of his celebrity.
“Winning a championship and being a champion provide perhaps the most elating experience the modern world regularly affords, a mighty feeling of triumph,” he said. Three weeks later, after thousands of hometown fans had greeted his return by train to New York City’s Pennsylvania Station, and after Mayor Jimmy Walker had spoken kind words on the crowded City Hall steps, Gene prepared himself for another, more businesslike mission. At this point in his career, almost anyone would willingly grant him an interview.
“Don’t you think I am beginning to talk like a businessman?” Gene had jokingly written his friend, Sam Pryor. “The trouble with my business is that I must make hay while the sun shines. Tomorrow,” he told Sam, “everyone will have forgotten.”
Earlier in the year, Gene had gone to Hollywood as the lead in a silent movie serial called The Fighting Marine. He’d played a former Marine who becomes a newspaper reporter (an ironic choice of casting that did not go unnoticed by him). The reporter comes to the aid of a titled young lady forced to reside in a rough mining town or forfeit her inheritance.
Gene had yet to see the film, but he believed studio executives who told him that in playing the starring role of Dick Farrington, he had been an unqualified success and that with his glamorous looks he could be a star. They called it “the greatest serial ever produced” and said it hadn’t mattered that he refused to kiss the leading lady, an obstacle rarely encountered in Hollywood, or that he hated the fake blood and rouge. Gene had liked sunny, casual California and felt that if the praise was a reflection of his talent, he might be as successful in acting as he was in the ring.
“I find this new experience surprisingly interesting,” he wrote to his friend Sam. “I thought before leaving New York this was going to be the most irksome and boring kind of work imaginable. Much to my astonishment, it has proven itself, so far, to be quite to the contrary. As a matter of fact, I find this somewhat pleasant.”
Gene knew that John L. Sullivan had tried acting, touring the country with a tear-jerker called Honest Hearts and Willing Hands. Jack Johnson was paid $25 to clank onstage in chains leading prisoners in the triumphal scene in the opera Aida. And boxing commissioner William Muldoon was remembered for a scene in Shakespeare’s As You Like It when, as Charles the wrestler, he was hurled to the floor so realistically he landed with a thud. “Jesus Christ!” roared Muldoon, in an ad lib that became part of boxing lore. Even Dempsey had earned money acting.
“Gene is one of the best actors I’ve ever worked with,” said Spencer Gordon Bennet, the producer later known as the “serial king” for his achievements with Zorro and Superman. “He is much better right now than some men who have been in the game for eight or ten years. I think Gene would go a long way in the movies.”
“Opportunity knocks once, maybe twice,” Gene always said. “If you don’t answer
