championship, nothing had changed in their relationship.
Nothing, that is, except that the altar boy had grown up.
For much of his growing up, Tunney lived in a cold-water flat above this grocery store in Greenwich Village. “We didn’t think of ourselves as poor,” he said, “we were like everyone else” (Tunney Collection).
Lithographs by George Wesley Bellows (1882-1925): a stag at Sharkey’s, 1917 (Bridgeman Art Library/Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio), and preliminaries, 1916 (Bridgeman Art Library/San Diego Museum of Art).
Gene striking a boxing pose at age 17 (Mary Agnes Mcintyre Anderson Collection).
Gene in uniform as a U.S. marine, August 1918 (Tunney Collection).
Chapter 2
Ring Rookie
“When he talked about boxing, it seemed like he would jump up and knock you out himself. G.B.S. loved to talk a big game — his eyes lit up, and that wit — sort of jabbing here and there.”
POLLY LAUDER TUNNEY
The gym had a heavy, pungent smell. The damp stench of sweaty clothes, body odor, liniment, rubbing lotions and lingering tobacco would leak out from the floorboards and cling to the rafters. In dusty corners, there might be benches for hangers-on with shifty eyes and breath reeking of onion, but the presence of men on the outskirts of the racket was common, even in the best gymnasiums. The syncopated rat-a-tat-tat of gloves against leather speed bags, jarring at first, would in time become only background noise. Later, even the smell wouldn’t seem to matter so much.
They were an unlikely pair — the short stocky man who jabbered incessantly and the tall, skinny fellow with a red beard and protruding ears. (Ears were a family specialty, according to Shaw, who wrote that when he was a child, “my nurse had to hold me by my waistband to prevent my being blown away when the wind caught them.”) Bernard Shaw hadn’t wanted to come to the gym, to any gym. It hadn’t been his idea in the first place. He had resisted for so long that his best friend, the persistent and excitable Paquito Beatty, had started boxing lessons without him. Beatty was loquacious, even more so than Shaw, and while swinging his fists, he couldn’t stop making quips, often in a Cockney dialect that had his tall friend throwing back his head and howling with laughter.
If their snickering and guffawing hadn’t already disrupted the men training in the gym, Beatty would make sure it did by lapsing into one of the singsong rhymes that punctuated his speech, usually at his best friend’s expense:
Of all contradictory fellows
In the course of my life whom I saw
None can compare I solemnly swear
For a minute with George Bernard Shaw
Shaw liked to say that the prize ring had a natural attraction for romantic and hysterical people, especially poets like Beatty, who was “crazy” about boxing. There just seemed no way to shut him up. For 2000 years, poets had been the most valued members of Irish society; in the old days, they were the only citizens allowed to move freely around the country. It seemed to have gone to Beatty’s head. He was incorrigible, and he continued his chirpy banter while leaping about taking potshots at his tall opponent as if they were entertainers at an Irish country fête:
He’ll argue on questions of medicine
And argue on questions of law
He’ll argue on boxing and banking
This versatile George Bernard Shaw
Beatty nicknamed his sparring partner “Gully Belcher,” combining the names of two famous ring gladiators of the era, Jem Belcher and John Gully. “Gully Belcher Shaw!” Gully, Shaw said later, may have been the first fighter in history who appreciated the value of money. Gully was discovered in a debtor’s prison when Hen “The Game Chicken” Pearce visited for a boxing exhibition, fought Gully, and lost. Members of The Fancy, as boxing was called in the 1800s, heard of Gully through this exploit, bailed him out, and he became champion of England. He retired, distanced himself from pugilism, invested in business, became a member of Parliament and died a rich man — a perfect example, said Shaw, of reinventing oneself. Jem Belcher, also a onetime champion, died penniless and friendless at age 30, but not before he discovered a strapping 6 foot 1 inch fighter named Shaw, known as “the Lifeguardsman.” The prizefighter Shaw might have made a name in the ring but was killed at Waterloo.
In the beginning, a slender, cautious, intellectual young man like Bernard Shaw would seem among the least likely of men to contemplate getting close to a boxing ring, much less climbing into it. Shaw was a shade over 6 feet, gangly and thin to angularity, with delicate hands, reddish hair and a long, bony face bearing a soft, almost ladylike, transparent complexion. His abrupt and jerky mannerisms in moving his arms and body bore no resemblance whatsoever to the conditioned grace of an athlete, much less a boxer. He hated his first name, George. It was one of the things he tried to unload, along with painful memories of his repressed and socially awkward childhood.
With acquaintances, he could be glib, opinionated, impertinent, argumentative, literate and clever, and not everyone, even close associates or family, liked him. When at age 18, he had made his first appearance in print with a public profession of atheism in an arrogant, satirical letter to Dublin’s Public Opinion, his churchgoing relatives were scandalized.
Shaw had been a lonely child in an impersonal family with an alcoholic father and a musical mother, neither with time for nor interest in him or his two sisters. Deeply frustrated with life in Ireland, he had arrived in London in 1876, desperate to create a new self and develop the genius that he felt was within him. At age 20, virtually penniless, he became an unwelcome occupant in a cramped London flat that he shared with his mother and elder sister. He brought with him an enormous contempt for snobbery and a comedic wit that masked shyness so deeply embedded that he often covered it with impudence and aggressiveness. He was friendless and anxious to be independent.
For Shaw, meeting the gregarious, intrepid Beatty, a rambunctious, charming Irish renegade who was lavish with his hospitality, had been salve for his soul. Here was a friend who shared his creative imagination and understood his Irish humor, who appreciated wit as an art form and celebrated satire as its most penetrating mode of attack.
Pakenham Thomas Beatty was the unorthodox offspring of a wealthy Irish diplomat; born in Maranhao, Brazil, his nickname fit his crusading spirit and round, boyish face perfectly. Beatty was an impractical idealist who moved through a series of clubs and antimonarchist societies buttressed by a large but fast-dwindling inheritance. He had a flair for the classics and languages, and by the time he and Shaw became friendly in 1878, Beatty was writing poetry in the style of Swinburne.
In the words of Beatty’s grandnephew, Claudius Beatty, they were “just two lads together enjoying life, two free spirits longing to be famous for their writing and wanting to be accepted and admired for their ideas.” Shaw was 22, and Beatty was 23.
The
