rolled up his sleeves and laced on his gloves. With the twinkling lights of New Jersey in the distance, he fought imaginary opponents, sparring with the shadows and envisioning himself a champion in a great arena. He liked the seclusion and the quiet, broken only by the occasional piercing whistles and sound of foghorns or buoys in the river. Sometimes other junior clerks stayed with him to practice.
“You can do it,” urged his younger brother John, his best friend, supporter and sparring partner. “You will be the greatest champion the Village has ever seen.”
At other times, he sat alone behind a shanty on the dock, reading aloud the rousing stories of the early Greeks, words that exercised his lungs and raised his spirits, making him feel that in battling opponents, he was carrying on a noble tradition. He avoided small pleasures, such as ice cream and other desserts, becoming almost monastic, knowing it made him more self-proficient and independent of Papa.
“I felt I could make myself do anything,” he said. “I could will anything to come true. Anything, everything, was possible. I had fantasies of willpower. I felt nothing, absolutely nothing, could ever stop me.”
As the oldest son, he could do no wrong in his mother’s eyes, and he desperately wanted to please her. He carried his rosary in his pocket, attended Mass regularly and began to take account of his deficiencies: slender arms of ordinary length and average reach, hands that were abnormally small and soft-boned. “But I kept on trying,” he said. “I didn’t think of the gloves as a career, a profession. It was merely that I loved to box and always tried hard at anything I was doing. I put everything I had into it.”
Continuing a practice he had started as a schoolboy, Gene kept a notebook in which he wrote the definitions and correct pronunciations of every new word he read. Words like “expatiate” (to write or speak at length), “prolixity” (needless profusion of words) and “thrasonical” (boastful). He carried a dictionary in his pocket, and he made it a practice to read and re-read books until he understood every sentence. He read that mothers in ancient Sparta toughened their infants by having them look into the sun and that Demosthenes put pebbles in his mouth to develop his skill as an orator.
To strengthen his resolve to withstand the tedious repetition he felt would give him focus and self-discipline, Gene would sit in the kitchen in the middle of the night and lay out hundreds of kitchen matches in a row, each match tip facing the opposite direction. Once finished, he reversed the matches. When he returned home at night exhausted, he placed the key in the front door lock, then withdrew it and walked around the block. In his bedroom, he stood on a chair in the dark and counted to 500 or 1000, as his two brothers slept.
“Say, Gene, want to put on the gloves with Willy?”
“Does he want me to?”
“Well, he needs somebody for a workout!”
Gene was flattered. Willy Green, a wisecracking professional who wore Broadway’s loudest shirts, fancy vests and a heavy gold watch chain, was a veteran lightweight who had fought 168 professional bouts, an impressive number by any standard. He snorted rhythmically while boxing and blew his nose on a glove between flurries of punching, an intimidating practice that carried an air of professional arrogance. After a bout, he would fling off the gloves and turn a row of back flips, the last word in bravado. At age 26, Willy wanted to make a comeback in the ring. He needed sparring partners. It was an honor, thought Gene. He had never taken on a professional fighter. Besides, how bad could it be?
In a corner of a low-ceilinged room called the gymnasium at Public School 41 in the Village, with the neighborhood watching, they had their first bout. Willy hit Gene with a left hook, smashed a right into his mouth and slammed his head against a wall. “I was a human punching bag,” Gene remembered. But he didn’t give up. He kept fighting Willy. “I look back in wonder that I should have gone on with that sort of thing day after day, week after week. But I did.” He felt it was a distinction to be the sparring partner of a neighborhood idol. Once he even boxed Willy in the kitchen of a friend’s apartment. “Let’s go and see Willy Green make a punching bag of Gene Tunney,” became a neighborhood refrain. Gene didn’t care. “I wanted to win. I always wanted to win.” Through tenacity, in combination with his own galloping physical growth, Gene began to get the best of Willy.
Willy, his first professional, was his crucible. The lessons learned at Willy’s hands — how to avoid punches, how to ignore his opponent’s braggadocio and focus on tactics — became the blueprint for his ring career.
At 18, he turned professional, and his first fight was a ten-round bout against the experienced pro Bobby Dawson at the Sharkey Athletic Club. He lay awake the night before in near panic, anticipating injuries. But he beat Dawson and won $18, almost as much as his father made in a week. He fought 12 more professional bouts before he was 21, and won them all.
About that same time, his father brought home a distant cousin; he was a bookmaker who made his living waging bets on professional boxers, and he had come “to look me over as if he was a horse trader inspecting a colt.” Gene was sitting at the kitchen table reading. The exchange between him and the cousin was brief, but it bothered Gene enough that he remembered vividly being sized up for his small hands, his slender frame and his height as the bookie mentally calculated how much punishment he could withstand before his stamina failed and he collapsed in the ring.
The visitor frowned. “You reading that book?” he demanded.
“Yes,” replied Gene. “I like to read.”
The big guy shook his head, sighed, pursed his lips and shrugged. “Just the same, kid,” he said, “I like your looks.” But he glared at the book as he left.
Aunt Margaret Lydon, a teacher who lived with the family between jobs, was everyone’s favorite confidante. Margaret was small in stature, merry in nature and devoted to her handsome nephew. “Don’t worry about your cousin, dear,” she told him. “Remember what Shakespeare said,” she said brightly: ‘“Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt.’”
Besides, she said, “Everyone reads books, even prizefighters.” Aunt Margaret, for all her knowledge, knew nothing about the ring.
Gene’s announcement over dinner that he had enlisted in the Marines for the Great War turned out to be the last straw in the ongoing battle of wills between him and his father. Papa was enraged, claiming that his son’s obligations were at home.
“You can’t tell me what to do,” Gene shouted at his father.
As Gene’s son John recalled, “Grandfather Tunney and my dad found themselves in a boxing match down in the basement of the apartment house, and grandfather tried to knock him out. Because Dad was so skilled by that time, having become a boxing professional with 12 or 13 fights on record, he was able to stay away from all his father’s punches and deliver some punches, not with the idea of hurting him, but just to prove that he was superior.”
Gene won a decisive victory over his father, though it would cost them both dearly. The fight caused a break in an emotional fabric already worn down by years of tension and unresolved anger. Without saying good-bye, Gene left the apartment house at dawn the next day wearing a new cream-colored suit and carrying his rosary, his missal and a suitcase. He was determined to create a better life for himself, one better than his parents had had. It was his first trip away from the city, away from family and friends, and for the first time in his life, he would experience moments of excruciating loneliness.
Gene thought that going off to fight in the war would help him prove to Papa that he could be a man; maybe then, Papa would approve of him. But when Gene returned from the
