Shaw at Hammersmith Terrace, London, 1891, photograph by Emery Walker (Dan H. Laurence Collection, University of Guelph Library Archives).
Chapter 3
Big Sissy Reads
“There is little to suggest the gladiator in this mild, quiet-spoken, blue-eyed individual as he talks of tennis, golf, books — Wells, Tennyson and Omar Khayam are among his favorite authors.”
BRIAN BELL, REPORTER
Brian Bell didn’t know he was going to change someone’s life when he drove up to the Adirondacks, the most northerly place he’d ever been in New York or any other state. He was just glad to get out of New York City and away from the desk on a sweltering summer day. Bell had covered news stories since he was in knee pants, when, at age ten, he mailed clips to The State, the largest newspaper in his native South Carolina. Later, he had covered the Scopes “Monkey” Trial — in fact, had broken so many scoops on that trial that he had become something of a legend in the news business. Today was a new assignment, however, and his first sports assignment for the Associated Press.
On this summer day in 1926, Bell was en route to visit Gene Tunney, “The Fighting Marine” from Greenwich Village who was training to battle Jack Dempsey for the world heavyweight championship, the biggest prize in sports. No one knew much about Tunney, a city boy from a poor Irish family whose background reflected the changing demographics of a country moving toward urbanization. At 29, Tunney had fought 74 professional fights and lost only once, to Harry Greb, “the Pittsburgh Windmill.” It was a fight so murderous that viewers at ringside were splattered in red, Greb’s gloves were soggy, and the canvas was soaked in Tunney’s blood. The fighter-Marine defeated Greb three times in return bouts and fought him once to a draw.
“Just go up to Tunney’s training camp and look around for the usual stuff and give it a feature touch, for the most part,” said his boss and good friend, Alan Gould, the wire service’s sports editor. “Get a little something of the personality.” It didn’t matter, said Gould, that Bell had never been to a training camp and had never met the boxer; Bell was one of the best feature writers in the business, and he’d know what to do when he got there.
In the summer of 1926, there was no better job for a reporter than covering sports. The appetite of the nation’s newspapers for sports news had quadrupled since the Great War. The readers’ thirst for the minutest details of every aspect of a celebrity’s life was insatiable, and sports fans knew more about their heroes than they knew about members of their own families. Personal magnetism, charisma, youthful vitality and the will to win, also the hallmarks of a growing business culture, became imperative in sports. Millions of spectators were crowding into stadiums and onto golf courses, and sports champions became heroes overnight: Bobby Jones in golf, Bill Tilden in tennis, Babe Ruth in baseball, Red Grange in football, Earle Sande in horse racing. In the era called the Golden Age of Sports, boxing was king, drawing the most in money and spectators. Jack Dempsey made more money in one fight than Babe Ruth earned in a year, and he had twice defended his title as heavyweight champion in million-dollar gates. An estimated 12 million Americans watched boxing matches or fought in neighborhood gyms and athletic contests. Reporters vied for scoops, and major newspapers featured columnists with colorful prose meant to sway and titillate the public, as well as sell newspapers.
In London, even the playwright Bernard Shaw occasionally wrote columns on sports, sometimes taking aim at sportswriters themselves. “The time is evidently very near when journalists will have to obtain certificates of competence, like navigating officers, before they are allowed to navigate the ship of state and hypnotize and psycho-analyze the helpless public by their pens,” he wrote. “I hope they will be examined just as strictly in pugilism as in political economy when that time comes.” At one point he was so fed up with what he felt was inept coverage of boxing that he suggested, somewhat in jest, that a bill be introduced “making it a punishable offence for a newspaper to order or publish any description of a prizefight until they had sent for a professional boxer and made the writer spar a bye with him, and obtain from a couple of competent judges a certificate that he at least knows his right hand from his left.”
Bell found Tunney’s training camp alongside a placid, pine-rimmed lake called, appropriately enough, Lake Pleasant, just off a two-lane highway that wove through the mountain resort village of Speculator, New York. The Osborne Inn, a sprawling, three-story white-shingled hotel with a wide verandah facing the lake, was run by one of Tunney’s Marine buddies and served as headquarters for the press, with rooms, gossip, a well-stocked bar, a telephone and a menu boasting the “best apple pie north of Manhattan.”
Outside, only a few steps from the inn, an elevated platform resembling a large open porch served as the training ring. It was roofed to protect it from sun and rain, and open on the sides so that spectators could sit in the grass, on the newly erected pine bleachers or on the tops of cars to see workouts and match wits with the experts on whether the challenger could beat the champ. Not many thought Tunney had a chance. Dempsey had been heavyweight champion for seven years, and reporters writing daily stories from the opposing training camps had almost unanimously picked Dempsey as invincible.
As Bell later recounted, it seemed a little like going to a farm auction and looking over the stock. He arrived too late in the day to schedule an interview, so with ring workouts completed, he jammed a notebook in his pocket and went off to where he was told he might find the target of his story. He tromped along the shoreline and into the trees until he spotted what he called a “secret cabin.”
On receiving no answer to his knock, he opened the door and slipped inside. What he saw surprised him for its almost monastic orderliness. There was a neatly made-up single cot, a camp desk with a portable typewriter, a wood chair, a dresser and shelves neatly lined with row upon row of books. Good grief, he thought. One might think that the occupant was a college student or an author. It was hardly the kind of space one would expect for a boxer, not that Bell knew any boxers, but he could tell from the training paraphernalia that it was undoubtedly Tunney’s living quarters. Bell sat down in the chair and picked up a book.
As one of nine living in a cramped New York apartment, Gene had found seclusion on the Hudson River docks. Those early memories and a driving need for personal space had made him insist, against the advice of his manager and trainers, that he have a private sanctuary at Speculator. His rough-hewed clapboard cabin, known as “the shack” to reporters, was off-limits to visitors. Jogging back late in the day from an hour’s run, Gene was troubled to see the silhouette of someone inside. He opened the door, ready to unleash his anger at the intruder.
Bell was only a few years older than Tunney, a big, burly, Scotch-Irish American with the ability, said friends, to charm anyone’s socks off. The reporter instinctively saw that his presence was unappreciated. Without trying to make excuses, Bell simply apologized, saying that he had hoped to get acquainted and would like an interview. Then, looking toward the stack of books on the night table, Bell smiled and asked, “What are you reading?”
Gene’s concern about a visitor vanished. He was enormously pleased that someone was asking about authors instead of his punches, knockdowns, right cross and brittle knuckles. It was a relief to be invited to talk to a reporter about books and ideas, subjects that were infinitely more interesting to him than talking about the upcoming fight. Gene sat down on the bed and gestured for Bell to use the chair.
“Reading now? The Way of All Flesh,” replied Gene, “an autobiographical novel by Samuel Butler.” He went on to say that the book had an excellent preface by George Bernard Shaw who praised it as a neglected masterpiece. In fact, Tunney said he had bought it at a used book store for 50 cents during a trip to Los Angeles, specifically because he noticed the preface was written by Shaw, the world-famous playwright who had won the Nobel Prize for literature and was an author he admired for his wit and wisdom.
As if to cap off the conversation, Tunney said he found the book’s lessons