It also didn’t help that he had what some called “an oddly British quality” to his speech, especially in public, making him sound pretentious. Gene did not explain that his father had a bit of a British accent, that Aunt Margaret routinely quoted Shakespeare, and that his brother Tom, now a policeman, couldn’t get through a dinner without reciting Edgar Allan Poe and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
“The kid from Greenwich talked like a gentleman from Mayfair,” said columnist Ed Fitzgerald. He had “a most unpugilistic interest in things like art, science, music and literature, and he never used a short word if he could think of a big one instead.”
One author wrote that “Tunney’s affected convoluted speech patterns were as foreign to most Americans as an untranslated poem by Baudelaire.”
“Actually,” said Gene, shifting the blame, “some visitors, seeing me reading in my spare moments, had a little fun in their conversations with me by using big words.” There was perhaps nothing more likely to raise Gene’s ire than the feeling that others were making a fool of him. Instead of bluntly telling someone off, however, Gene was always more likely to bury his feelings, keep a straight face and resort to wordplay to diminish his adversary. This paradoxical Irish propensity for purposely using big words in conversations was misunderstood by reporters and many readers.
“Taking up the joke, I answered back in polysyllables. I’m afraid,” he said, in a supreme understatement, “some of the innocent bystanders took me seriously and thought I was parading my knowledge.”
He blamed himself, thinking he should have been less cocky, shown more patience, seen a backlash coming and understood that his popularity with the fans might ultimately be affected. “Along came this new guy, Tunney, who makes it clear he’s an intellectual, or pretends to be, and the writers took whacks at him — they hated him, so we hated him,” recalled author Studs Terkel, who was a boy at the time. “Dempsey was never much interested in reading, writing and learning, but he was a scrapper, a mauler! No one on our block liked Tunney, except my older brother, an academic. Everyone wanted Tunney to lose.”
For Gene, books became ever more an escape, an Alice in Wonderland tumble into world after world after world, providing lyrical language and peaceful landscapes far removed from the fight game. Words and stories were a form of meditation, allowing him to relieve tension and stress. Reading became central to his ability to concentrate and focus, making books invaluable tools of training.
He had always felt that the art of repose was one of a boxer’s major challenges. In quiet desperation in the weeks before an important bout, many prizefighters filled spare time with hangers-on, sycophants, idle talk and the rowdy, barlike atmosphere in training camps to try to calm their jangled nerves. A boxer tended to be nervous and jumpy and could easily wear himself down through anticipation and lack of rest. Even in the ring, fighting itself came in flurries. For a large part of the time a boxer was sparring, not hitting, and the less nervous energy he burned and the more relaxed he kept his body, the better he fought.
Gene said that books helped him understand who he was and where he wanted to go and gave him the discipline to distance himself from his work. In the ring, a rested mind allowed him to strategize. “The truth is, I became addicted to reading not in spite of pugilism, but largely because of it,” he recalled. “For me, fisticuffs and literature were allied arts, through the medium of training.” The explanation was largely dismissed by the unsympathetic fight crowd. But not by Greb.
Harry Greb, one of Dempsey’s toughest sparring partners, the only man who ever beat Tunney in the ring, and a boxer who exemplified the physical and brutal life of a prizefighter, took the story of reading seriously.
“Gene reads books? Did you know that?” Greb asked sportswriter James R. Fair.
“Do you think he gets anything out of them?” asked Fair.
“Why, Jim,” Greb asked in amazement, “Do you think he don’t? When he reads a book, I’ll bet my last dollar he knows as much about it as the man who wrote it does. And I’ll tell you why. I gave him a lesson in our first fight and he learned it so well that I was never able to hurt him or cut him up again. I don’t know why he reads them, but by God he knows what he’s reading.” Greb was one of the few in boxing circles who predicted Tunney would beat Dempsey, but his opinion was ignored.
Tunney was fighting for a life beyond the ring. He was fighting to be “the respectable gentleman” that his mother idolized. He wanted to put the tedious, repetitious work of the dock clerk behind him, along with the sameness of daily living and a paycheck too big to leave him poor but too small to allow him his dreams. In the doctor’s waiting room, he had read about poor boys that had triumphed. As a teenager, he had bought standing-room-only tickets for the Metropolitan Opera to hear the most famous singer of the era, Enrico Caruso. Watching alone from the back of the house, he had been as entranced by the social elite passing down the aisles as he had been by the extraordinary power of Caruso’s voice. Outside, he remembered huddling in the cold from across a snowy street as men in top hats and white ties and women in long gowns stepped from carriages and chauffer-driven luxury sedans.
Nor had he forgotten that as a schoolboy he had practiced for marathons by racing buses up Fifth Avenue, past grand mansions, apartment houses with doormen in livery, and stores with opulent window displays of clothing, furs and jewelry.
In time, through wealthy friends and backers, Tunney had been introduced to a society where words commanded respect, households had cooks and butlers, homes were big enough to have libraries and gaming rooms, and manicured lawns and formal dinners were commonplace. “I had a 33-room house, a staff, an elevator to the third floor, a butler, and all the things that go with it. He liked that house,” said his close friend Samuel F. Pryor, the son of a wealthy gun manufacturer, whom he had met on a troopship returning home from Europe. “He liked to come and stay.”
Tunney had been invited to spar at the private and prestigious New York Athletic Club and the City Athletic Club with millionaires and businessmen who lived not in one house but two or three and who vacationed in Florida and Europe. Gene liked that style of living, and he was not going to give up his pursuit of a better life because the press had a different idea of how a boxer should live. In his striving, he did not realize that in rejecting the expectations of the fight crowd, he was also turning his back on their attitudes and values. Many of them were not educated, could not read, never wanted any other life but to be on the fringes of the sport and interpreted Gene’s desire for something more as a personal affront. He was separating himself from those whose support he needed to be popular.
Seize opportunities, Gene always said, quoting Shakespeare: “I have wasted time, and now doth time waste me.”
“Seizing opportunities reveals the kind of stuff we are made of. Men do not lack opportunities,” he said, “they miss them.” Learning and reading, he said, were the stepping-stones to opportunity.
In interviews, Gene irritated sportswriters by talking about boxing dispassionately as a science, as a job, discussing musculature and bone structure. He analyzed fighters as if he were an engineer not as a battle-tested pug.
“You know, I always fight my battles out beforehand,” he said. “I mean by that, I plan and live through them by myself, figuring out my opponents and my own attack and defense.”
He studied fight films for hours as he studied books, watching them over and over again. He hired boxers who had fought his opponents as sparring partners. He drew detailed diagrams of the body’s vital points, and as a spectator at bouts sat in a seat near the ring drawing diagrams with a pencil and feverishly taking notes on the action. He relied on Wilburn Pardon Bower’s Applied Anatomy and Kinesiology and probably read more medical books than any boxer in history.
“I think of pugilism as a fencing bout of gloved fists, rather than an act of assault and battery,” he said. “You’ve got to cultivate the art of thinking as expressed in action.”
It reached the point that whatever Gene said seemed alien to the traditional boxing crowd, and in print, the words tasted