Tunney
Boxing's Brainiest Champ and His Upset of the Great Jack Dempsey
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4.7 • 3개의 평가
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- US$6.99
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- US$6.99
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Among the legendary athletes of the 1920s, the unquestioned halcyon days of sports, stands Gene Tunney, the boxer who upset Jack Dempsey in spectacular fashion, notched a 77—1 record as a prizefighter, and later avenged his sole setback (to a fearless and highly unorthodox fighter named Harry Greb). Yet within a few years of retiring from the ring, Tunney willingly receded into the background, renouncing the image of jock celebrity that became the stock in trade of so many of his contemporaries. To this day, Gene Tunney’s name is most often recognized only in conjunction with his epic “long count” second bout with Dempsey.
In Tunney, the veteran journalist and author Jack Cavanaugh gives an account of the incomparable sporting milieu of the Roaring Twenties, centered around Gene Tunney and Jack Dempsey, the gladiators whose two titanic clashes transfixed a nation. Cavanaugh traces Tunney’s life and career, taking us from the mean streets of Tunney’s native Greenwich Village to the Greenwich, Connecticut, home of his only love, the heiress Polly Lauder; from Parris Island to Yale University; from Tunney learning fisticuffs as a skinny kid at the knee of his longshoreman father to his reign atop boxing’s glamorous heavyweight division.
Gene Tunney defied easy categorization, as a fighter and as a person. He was a sex symbol, a master of defensive boxing strategy, and the possessor of a powerful, and occasionally showy, intellect–qualities that prompted the great sportswriters of the golden age of sports to portray Tunney as “aloof.” This intelligence would later serve him well in the corporate world, as CEO of several major companies and as a patron of the arts. And while the public craved reports of bad blood between Tunney and Dempsey, the pair were, in reality, respectful ring adversaries who in retirement grew to share a sincere lifelong friendship–with Dempsey even stumping for Tunney’s son, John, during the younger Tunney’s successful run for Congress.
Tunney offers a unique perspective on sports, celebrity, and popular culture in the 1920s. But more than an exciting and insightful real-life tale, replete with heads of state, irrepressible showmen, mobsters, Hollywood luminaries, and the cream of New York society, Tunney is an irresistible story of an American underdog who forever changed the way fans look at their heroes.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
On September 23, 1926, in Philadelphia, Gene Tunney easily defeated Jack Dempsey for the title of heavyweight champion of the world, and in this exhaustively researched work, sportswriter Cavanaugh makes an excellent case for Tunney's undervalued prowess as a fighter. Dempsey was the Mike Tyson of his era, and his beating at the hands of the defense-minded, Shakespeare-quoting Tunney shocked the boxing cognoscenti. Exactly 364 days later, Tunney beat Dempsey again in the famous "Long-Count" match, one of the most controversial in the history of the sport. The two fights, vividly recounted by Cavanaugh, marked a pinnacle of popular success for boxing (which in the preceding decades had been illegal in much of the country), drew the largest crowds of any sporting event at that time and made the principals the most highly paid athletes in the world. Ironically, the losses only increased the popularity of Dempsey, who until then faced accusations of being a greedy draft dodger. In victory, however, Tunney proved to be an unpopular champion both with sportswriters and the American public, who like their heroes more common-minded. After successfully defending his title once more, Tunney took his millions, married an heiress and settled down in Greenwich, Conn. Cavanaugh brings alive an era when boxers fought more in a year than they do now over entire careers.
