“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 war, with the distinction of having won an American Expeditionary Forces boxing 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,