Bell was nonplussed. He took out a new notebook, resettled himself in the chair and prepared to interview this “man of multiple surprises,” a man with wide-ranging interests and a command of language who was so filled with energy that he seemed to gesticulate constantly. Often getting up to pull out a book, he spoke faster than Bell could take notes. Tunney had a quick wit and enjoyed repartee, and Bell found him a willing audience for his own humorous tales about the newspaper business and his southern family.
There had been snickering about Tunney’s habit of reading during training and of using multi-syllable words. “Most prizefighters talk in words of one syllable and sharpen their jackknives on the backs of their necks,” said a Newspaper Enterprise Association syndicated story about Gene written the year before. When Gene said he liked poetry, the surprised interviewer said he “clung to his chair and took a shot from his pocket flask of aromatic spirits of ammonia to steady himself.” The article was published in the Chicago Post, with the headline “The Boxing Savant.” At the time, Tunney was not yet signed to fight Dempsey and the tale of the heavyweight who read poetry was dismissed as laughable.
In general, the sportswriters didn’t really care about Tunney’s inner life, about what he read, why he read or what he thought. They didn’t care that he walked to church, read the editorial pages of newspapers, including The New York Times, that he was a member of the Shakespearean Society or that he had memorized Hamlet. If anything, they were irritated that his reading habit made him less accessible because it consumed his time away from the ring. Reading skills weren’t why Tunney was in the limelight. Tunney hadn’t graduated from high school, and his ability, or inability, to decipher a sentence and expand his vocabulary appeared to have no bearing whatsoever on whether he could withstand the crushing onslaughts of “The Manassa Mauler.”
Books on the shelves of Tunney’s cabin included a leather-bound set of the complete plays of William Shakespeare, novels by H.G. Wells, Thomas Hardy, Jack London, Victor Hugo, Thornton Wilder’s The Cabala, the poetry of Percy Shelley and W.B. Yeats, a Bible, Jeffrey Farnol’s The Amateur Gentleman and The Broad Highway, and Bernard Shaw’s Cashel Byron’s Profession, and plays including Back to Methuselah, Saint Joan, and Pygmalion. Gene said he had read them all at least once, sometimes several times. “I am always deliberate and methodical, my normal gait for most things,” said Gene. “I could never just skim a book and I always appreciate the mes-sage more in the rereading.”
Bell knew at once that he was onto a bigger and better story than the usual feature about a heavyweight contender hitting speed bags. The contradiction of a boxer reading literature would capture headlines and grab attention. As an experienced newsman who appreciated literature, Bell was also well-equipped to play the role that every newspaper writer hopes to have: that of being the first to develop and elaborate on a major story — a scoop. The Associated Press was the largest general news agency in the world, which made it uniquely suited to sending stories to a far-flung audience.
Several days later, Bell’s story on the fighter who loved to read was distributed to virtually every newspaper in the country and to papers overseas. Bell’s boss, Alan Gould, said that other sportswriters, suspecting a clever publicity gimmick drummed up to get coverage, initially ignored the report. When they learned it was true, the regulars were irritated to be scooped by a reporter who wasn’t even a regular on the beat. Editors clamored for follow-up details. Almost overnight, the story ballooned and the massive maw of the sports press took over, making the tale of Gene’s reading a bigger yarn than Rip Van Winkle.
Initially, Gene was elated with the attention the news created. He was pleased and proud to finally be seen as someone distinct from Dempsey, someone smart and a man with more to offer than a boxer’s biceps. It made him feel good to be recognized as a reader of fine literature. As if to emphasize his new status, he stashed books in his gear and started carrying volumes around the training camp. Visitors said that at meals, he often dropped a book or two on the table. Gene, still unknown to those who didn’t follow sports and impressed simply to see his name spelled correctly, was unaccustomed to being in the headlines. He lacked any understanding of how to cope with the intense publicity brought to bear on public figures during the prosperous post-war era of the Roaring Twenties. He was totally unprepared for celebrity. In the language of the idiom, he was wet behind the ears.
Indeed, one of Gene’s greatest strengths — his ability to focus and block out all surroundings — became his biggest weakness outside the ring. The concentration and willpower that enabled him to drive himself almost beyond endurance to utilize his mental and physical powers in pursuit of the championship also made it easier for him to disregard what seemed irrelevant remarks that reporters and the boxing crowd might be saying about him.
“It never occurred to me,” he said, “that a habit of reading could be seen as a stunt or a joke. Wasn’t reading something we wanted to champion?” He had no inkling of how absurd the notion of a literate prizefighter might seem to the sportswriters. Nor did he appreciate the day-to-day need for competing columnists to write controversial, provocative, even negative, copy to sell newspapers.
Until Bell’s story, sportswriters had considered the man challenging Dempsey for the championship to be a boring, colorless figure who kept to himself. Most sports celebrities were easy to write about because they tended toward extravagances with women, gambling, alcohol, temper tantrums, problems with their managers, with money, or tangles with the law.
“The average pug, when he lets down, gets roaring drunk or takes to sitting up all night pounding night-club tables with little wooden mallets, reaching hungrily for the powdered nakedness of the girls who march by,” wrote sportswriter Paul Gallico.
Tunney didn’t hang around with writers or other visitors playing card games or drinking beer, common pursuits in a training camp that also allowed reporters to know the sports figure better. Instead he spent the five hours between his morning and afternoon workouts reading, and the evenings listening to classical music.
In contrast, “the old Dempsey camps were magnificent social cross-sections of vulgarity and brutality,” wrote Gallico. “Phonographs brayed, spar mates brawled, the champ played pinochle or roughhoused, frowsy blondes got themselves into the pictures at nighttime.”
Tunney had been a difficult and enigmatic personality to capture on paper and was, in effect, a nonentity. Bell’s scoop and all the incredulous stories that followed were dreams come true for reporters, most of whom considered a heavyweight boxer reading books a spoof, as hilarious as a presidential candidate singing arias. It was a story that eventually moved from sports pages to front pages, catching the attention of the general public and incidentally making boxers more interesting to people, including women, who didn’t normally follow the sport.
Columnists and comedians picked up the drumbeat that Tunney, the challenger to the heavyweight boxing title, was training to beat the “man-killer” Dempsey on a diet of classical authors. Sportswriters and broadcasters spouted witty remarks about the “Bard of Biff” and “Genteel Gene,” sure that no serious contender would read novels and plays, much less poetry, while training for the most important fight of his career.
“In Gene Tunney, pugilism has found a Galahad far more taxing to credulity than novelist, playwright or scenarist would dare to conceive,” wrote Ed Van Every of the New York Evening World.
Once he realized he was being made a laughingstock, Gene agonized over it, worrying that he was too sensitive yet unable to put it behind him. In telling the truth, in trying to be himself, he had been held up to ridicule. In trying to fix it, he made it worse, and the perception of Gene as impersonal and arrogant took root. From childhood, he had never backed down from confrontation, and his experience at verbal encounters had been finely honed at the family dinner table. He tried to talk his way out of it, but his explanations often engendered disbelief.
“Some think I am high-hatting the boys when I talk about literature. I am not,” Gene said defensively. “It is a hobby with me, just as Jem