weekend in May 1907, and Gene was doing what he always did in his spare time, sitting at the kitchen table reading with his head down, dark unruly curls falling over his ears, his arms flung over the sports section of the paper and legs dangling off the side of an old wood chair. Today, a Saturday, was his tenth birthday, and there was, praise God, no school and no Mass. A Saturday meant he had time to pore over Bob Edgren’s column in the New York Evening World and the big, bold, black-and-white drawings of fighters punching and whacking, each one labeled with details to memorize.
Gene read slowly, mouthing each word quietly to himself, following the type to the end with his fingers, then methodically going back again and again to make sure he understood it perfectly, each word, each phrase. It took him a long time, but he knew he was good at it. Once he understood a passage, he remembered it, and when he wanted to feel the sound of the words in his mouth, he could beckon them back into his mind. The priests said he was their best altar boy because he memorized the liturgy, and the nuns told his mother he liked to use words that other boys hadn’t learned. His chest swelled with pride. Once Gene read something, he tried hard never to forget it.
Sisters and brothers dashed in and out of the small kitchen as Nana tried to feed the youngest, baby Agnes. Papa had been up late drinking and had yet to leave for work. Papa was a longshoreman who did a little boxing at Owney Geaghan’s club in the Bowery. Old man Tunney, they said, could “fight like the dickens!” On evenings when he indulged in his home-brewed gin, Papa liked to debate loudly and vigorously the merits of one fighter versus another. There was nothing young Gene wanted more than to please his tough, opinionated Irish father, and there was no one who seemed harder to satisfy. Papa didn’t ruffle Gene’s hair as a show of affection as the priests did, and he seemed moody or distracted. Gene was often frightened of him.
For Irish lads from the poor, working-class Lower West Side of Man-hattan in the early 1900s, there were two constants in life: the church, for its unchangeable rhythms and innate order and promise of hope, and boxing, for its signature of manhood. Pugnacity took precedence over romance, and the Irish had long used boxing as a way to elevate themselves from lives of grinding poverty. When the men crowded around the long brass railing at O’Connor’s Columbia Hotel Garden on Christopher Street for whiskey and beers and they weren’t talking about the “stinkin’ bloody limeys” or raising funds for “Holy Irish” revolutionary causes, they were bragging about exploits with their fists. Generations of Irish found fights at village smokers or saloons where amateurs could do battle for a ham sandwich, a ginger ale or a couple of bucks. Sometimes, if they got enough wins and attracted enough notice, they could enter boxing contests, maybe even get good enough for a fight at Sharkey’s Athletic Club, a firetrap of a loft uptown. The boast of the two-fisted drinker John L. Sullivan that he could whip any man in the house was what every Irishman hoped to emulate.
“James,” he heard her say. “Come. Papa is leaving!” Nana, as he referred to his mother, was the only one who called him by his Christian name. Since he had started school, he had been “Gene,” a nickname picked up from his younger brother John, who pronounced his name as “Geeme.” In an Irish Catholic neighborhood where the name James was commonplace, the Gene stuck.
He walked into the parlor to find Nana at the piano wearing her apron, smiling and leading a chorus of “Happy Birthday,” and on the settee, there was a parcel with twine wrapped around it. The last thing Gene could have expected was a birthday present. With nine mouths to feed, and after giving something to the priests and the church at Christmas, there was never mon-ey left over. He didn’t expect a gift. In fact, Gene could not remember ever having received one.
He approached the brown paper package with his usual wariness, thinking perhaps it was a practical joke, like those he played on others. He picked up the bundle. The package gave in to his squeeze, and he saw what looked like shoestrings attached to leather mitts. With his wide-eyed brothers and sisters watching, Gene ripped off the paper and his heart seemed to stop. Slowly, carefully, he reached into the wrapping to pick out a pair of second-hand leather boxing gloves, holding them so tightly that the laces cut into the soft flesh of his fingers. The priests promised that if you told the truth, worked hard, attended confession and said Hail Marys, you would be rewarded. For a skinny ten-year-old boy, the worn brown mitts were a talisman, a treasure transform-ing him instantly into a muscular contender in the ring. In a flash of child-hood fantasy, he felt that his life had forever changed. He had studied Edgren’s column. He knew a right cross from a left hook and a haymaker from a rabbit punch. Elated, he thundered down the stairs to show the neighborhood his prize.
The birthday boy spent the rest of the day exchanging playful blows with his brothers, sometimes sharing the gloves with other boys on the block. “I was in complete, utter ecstasy,” he later remembered. “I was filled with confidence and a young boy’s dreams.” Papa said he had given Gene gloves to teach him to be a man, a mensch, to learn some respect, to take punches as well as give them. Gene went to bed determined to show his father how good he could be, and he took the bruises, swollen lip, black eye, and severe headache as a sign of manhood. “Even that early in my career, the conditioning process of becoming a prizefighter had begun.”
He punched boxes, pillows, piles of trash, shoes hanging by shoestrings and even a turkey crop from dinner, which he tied from the transom between two rooms and used as a makeshift punching bag. The birthday gloves were almost worn out by summer’s end, but Gene was just beginning.
Around the same time, in London, England, one of the greatest wordsmiths of the era was annoyed to discover that upstarts in the American theatre were showing fresh interest in a boxing novel he had written years earlier. He was George Bernard Shaw, one of England’s most combative and audacious playwrights, a middle-aged man who was still easily recognizable for his long, springy strides and a face with a red beard that one acquaintance described as an “unskillfully poached egg.” To Shaw’s irritation, former heavyweight boxing champion Jim Corbett had twice in five years staged a New York play based on Shaw’s novel, Cashel Byron’s Profession, forcing the playwright to do his own stage adaptation of the book to protect his English dramatic rights.
The boxer-actor Corbett, who had defeated the great Sullivan, was young Tunney’s hero. Gene identified with the well-spoken former bank clerk, a stylistic prizefighter the fans called “Gentleman Jim.” Gene followed every detail he could find about the former champion in the newspaper, including Corbett’s interest in Shaw’s fictional boxer.
Shaw could not have known then that the story of Cashel Byron would inspire a boy who would later become a world boxing champion. The boy and the playwright would not meet for almost 20 more years.
“Where ye from?” the Tunneys were asked.
“From County Mayo.”
“From County Mayo — oh, oh, God help us!”
John Tunney, Gene’s father, was the youngest of 13 children. He had been born in 1859 on the heels of the potato famine, on a hardscrabble piece of sheep land in western Ireland — the poorest, roughest ground in a poor, rough country. His family said his fair complexion and ginger-colored hair marked him as a descendant of the Vikings. Some said the Tunneys had been stone carvers in the 16th century, expert at effigies of knights and apostles. And indeed, an O’Tunney had signed a 1526 tomb at the Cistercian Abbey at Kilcooley and another at Kilkenny Cathedral. Some said the Tunneys were weavers who had escaped from the hills of County Tyrone in Northern Ireland, a reckless lot of Catholics who had lost to the better-armed Protestants in the famous Battle of the Diamond in 1795.
Flight was the motif of their lives, and for more than a century, the tradition of resisting authority had been deeply ingrained. When John Tunney was still too young to walk, his parents, poor tenant farmers, were evicted over a few farthings and forced with thousands of their starving countrymen to beg for passage across the Irish Sea. They sailed by cattle boat to Liverpool, where the uprooted Irish were booed and hissed
