The Prizefighter and the Playwright. Jay R. Tunney

      “As defined in the dictionary,” he said, “the word ‘fight’ connotes a hostile encounter, and there’s no room in a boxing contest for hostility.” (He always maintained this distinction; he was pleased to say he had been a professional prizefighter who engaged in boxing, but that he never “fought.”)

      A year later, he arrived in Chicago and noted there was talk “about some fight to be held.” He said he knew nothing about it. “I am here to train for a boxing contest, not a fight. I don’t like fighting. Never did. But I’m free to admit that I like boxing.”

      As for the hangers-on who infested the boxing world of the 1920s, Gene had no time for them either. Having grown up in a neighborhood with gangs, he saw no reason why he should tolerate riffraff, bootleggers, two-timing politicians, second-rate managers, roughnecks and criminals. He saw boxing as a profession, much like being a dentist, except that the career was shorter. The rewards were great if one was good enough. Gene was convinced he had trained himself to be not only good but the best, and he confidently told anyone willing to listen that he was ready for Dempsey.

      “I shall be champion,” he told the British poet Robert Nichols during an interview. “Yes, it’s written in the stars that I shall be champion. When I have won — and I shall win,” Gene told Nichols, “I want to become a cultivated person.” Nichols was one of many non-sportswriters assigned to interview Tunney, to try to determine if he was a fake and whether he actually knew and could correctly quote literature as he claimed.

      “Tunney speaks better English than most Englishmen,” noted Nichols. “His sentences do not trail off into sheer vagueness.” Nichols said the articulate Tunney told him that by cultivated, he meant “a man who has some acquaintance with what man has seen and felt, and uses this acquaintance to understand the present world around him.”

      When Maine author and writer Roger Batchelder met Tunney, he wrote that he “inquired rather furtively about the pugilist’s familiarity with the works of the Bard.” As they sat together at luncheon, “My host recited the advice of Polonius to Laertes in a soft rhythm that seemed strange from one of such massive frame.” Tunney’s big fingers drummed on the table as though to continue the cadence of Shakespeare’s rhythm as he quoted these words:

      Neither a borrower nor a lender be,

      For loan oft loses both itself and friend,

      And borrowing dulleth the edge of husbandry.

      This above all, to thine own self be true,

      And it must follow as the night the day,

      Thou canst not then be false to any man.

      Before the luncheon was over, Tunney had discussed Dempsey, boxing, his school days, politics, “some sort of ‘ology’ which gave him complete knowledge of the muscles of the body, their means of functioning, and the results of an onslaught on the defensive muscles.” And he had quoted much more Shakespeare, including the soliloquy of Henry IV on sleep, many passages from The Merchant of Venice and others, “all effective, well done.”

      “He speaks easily in fluent English, unlike many of his comrades in the ring,” wrote Batchelder. “His poise is absolute, where Dempsey in previous interviews with the writer has often fidgeted, and grasped for words which might enable him best to express himself.”

      Tunney told him he did not start the ballyhoo in the press, “for I should hate to have any of my followers think that I’m a pseudo-highbrow. Shakespeare,” he said, “offers me infinite relaxation, and since that is essential in my business, I turn to him for assistance, as well as for my own enjoyment.”

      The interview undoubtedly raised the spirits of English teachers everywhere, but did little to help Tunney with his core constituency.

      A Chicago policeman named Mike Trant, a self-appointed bodyguard for Dempsey, investigated the peculiar literary goings-on at the Speculator training camp and eagerly took his findings back to the champion.

      “The fight’s in the bag, Jack,” he gloated. “The so-and-so is up there reading a book. A big sissy!” Dempsey believed it. Dempsey’s supporters repeated stories that Tunney had no punch, that he was a synthetic fighter, not a natural one, and that he didn’t have the killer instinct that fans considered mandatory to win in the ring. Most importantly, he didn’t look or act like a fighter. Now, there were books to go along with the looks.

      President Calvin Coolidge would say that Tunney “looked more like a movie actor than a prizefighter.” Cornelius J. Vanderbilt, Jr. called him a “perfect Adonis.” One columnist said he could be a “young ascetic priest.” No one said he looked or acted like a fighter.

      “Dempsey fights with the killer spirit,” said The Baltimore Sun, characterizing the champion as did Bernard Shaw. “He is entirely reckless. He doesn’t care what happens to anybody, himself or the other fellow. It is easy to imagine Dempsey in an earlier age fighting the desperate combats of the caveman.” Tunney, on the other hand, had the head of a student. “Tunney might be a scientist, a physician, a lawyer, an engineer, if he had been given a chance to study instead of going to work when he was still a boy.”

      When Grantland Rice, the kindly dean of the boxing writers, arrived at Gene’s training camp in the Adirondacks with syndicated columnist Ring Lardner, an ardent Dempsey backer, they ran into the boxer carrying a fat book under one arm. “He could have passed for a young college athlete studying for his master’s in English,” said Rice.

      “What’s the title?” asked Lardner, who looked at Tunney in contempt.

      “The Rubaiyat,” replied a smiling Tunney, holding up a translation by Edward Fitzgerald. Then gesturing toward the mountains, the boxer added that the setting was so beautiful he had hardly been able to take his eyes off the scenery.

      Lardner fixed Tunney with steely eyes. “Then why the book?”

      Paul Gallico of the New York Daily News, an influential skeptic, mirrored, as well as stimulated, the sentiment of the majority:

      I think Tunney has hurt his own game with his cultural nonsense. It is a fine thing that he has educated himself to the point where he no longer says dese and dem and dose, and where he can alone tell one bookfrom another, but also indicate some familiarity with their contents, but his publicity has built him up as a scholar more than a fighter, and the man who steps into the ring with Dempsey with nothing but his hands as weapons needs to be a fighter and nothing else but. He will have to have a natural viciousness and nastiness well up in him that will transcend rules and reason, that will make him want to fight foul if he thinks he can get away with it, that will make him want to commit murder with his two hands. And I don’t think that Master Tunney, who likes first editions and rare paintings and works of art, has it in him.

      At night, alone in his cabin, Gene paced and began to imagine his fate might match that of Shakespeare’s protagonist in The Tragedy of Coriolanus. Coriolanus was the fifth-century Roman military hero who thought that bravery was in one’s heart and actions and that a man should be recognized on his own merits. While campaigning for the Roman Senate, he ignored the public, who wanted him to trumpet his military accomplishments and actively seek their support. Coriolanus had too much pride and felt demeaned by the political process, just as Gene was prideful and felt demeaned by the press. Coriolanus was assassinated.

      “It was no spiritual gratification to know that I was an unpopular champion,” he said. “It made me resentful of the very idea of popularity. I developed a sense of perverse amusement in the game of living precisely as I wanted to and damn anyone else’s opinion.” He stopped reading the sports news and focused only on training, taking long jogs alone and sometimes issuing statements instead of holding press conferences. He was confident that once he became champion, people would admire him.

      In dark hours, he grieved over his younger brother and best friend, John, a thoughtful man destined for the priesthood who had always taken his side in household disputes with their difficult and demanding father.

      He remembered as if it were yesterday arriving