The Prizefighter and the Playwright: Gene Tunney and George Bernard Shaw [Hardcover]

As a boxing historian , I have spent the past thirty years eagerly devouring every new boxing book I could get my hands. Over the past decade the emergence of the web has made access to information much easier. At the same time my own palate has become far more sophisticated. Standard biographies rarely interest me. Autobiographies or sociological portraits of men in their time and the impact on society have become far more interesting to me ... Mr. Tunney's book succeeds on both parts.

Gene Tunney was a complex and unique figure in the history of sport. He remains one of the most underrated and misunderstood of all champions. Jay Tunney manages to bring Gene to life as never before. After thirty years of reading about this man I feel I am finally learning who he was. His relationship with the brilliant Shaw opens us up to a whole world within an era ....

The work is a gem and highly recommended.

Jay R. Tunney, a son of the famous prizefighter Gene Tunney (and also vice-president of the International Shaw Society), recreates the story of the twenty-year friendship between his father and George Bernard Shaw with such love, admiration, and sensitivity to the intensely personal relationship between these two men that the reader cannot help but be swept up by this story of two men who, ignoring a forty-year age difference, found enduring satisfaction in each other's company: John James (Gene) Tunney was thirty-two; Shaw was seventy-three when they met in 1929, after Tunney's retirement as heavyweight champion of the world, and after Shaw had won the Nobel Prize (1925).

Both men were Irish, both saw boxing as a noble sport representing Greek ideals, and both were passionately interested in serious literature. Shaw had participated in boxing matches as a young man himself, and had written a novel about a prizefighter, Cashel Byron's Profession. Tunney found in Shaw a mentor who treated him as an equal, listened to his ideas, and argued happily about the most erudite aspects of Shakespeare. Tunney had often escaped into books, even as a child. He read whatever he could find during his stint as a Marine in World War I, read whenever he had a free moment during his training as a boxer, and read up to an hour before he had a championship fight.

When Tunney and his new bride, Polly Lauder Tunney, were on their extended honeymoon in Europe, Tunney persuaded Shaw and his wife to join them on Brioni, an island in the Adriatic. Every day for a month, Tunney and Shaw would walk and talk for hours. Shaw has said that Tunney helped him "to plant my feet on solid ground." And Tunney has said, "I think of Shaw as the most considerate person I have ever known. He was helpful, directing me aright on questions of literature, music, art, thought...No period of my life was more valuable than this. It was like a matriculation in a cosmic school."

Always a friend of Thornton Wilder, with whom he traveled in Europe, he also became friends with many other authors and artists there and on his return to the US: Somerset Maugham (until Maugham wrote Cakes and Ale, which Tunney felt was mean-spirited); John P. Marquand; F. Scott Fitzgerald; Horace Walpole; H. G. Wells; Charlie Chaplin; Max Beerbohm; and Ernest Hemingway, who once gave him a deliberate and unexpected elbow to the chin, split his lip, and almost knocked out his front teeth. He was never to do it again. His friendship with William Lyons Phelps at Yale eventually led to Tunney giving a series of highly regarded lectures on Shakespeare at Yale, which Tunney, an autodidact, could quote at length while lecturing without notes. He periodically returned to Europe to see Bernard Shaw, last visiting him when Shaw was in his nineties.

When Gene Tunney died in 1978, at the age of 81, the Boston Herald said, "Gentleman Gene left a legacy of physical and intellectual stamina that should inspire us all. The Washington Star added, "Mr. Tunney was given to quoting Shakespeare. He looked like an actor; he sailed to Europe to talk with George Bernard Shaw; he did not act like a pug. The fans would not forgive him...[but] he died a hero. But there was never any real understanding of this man, who was too gifted, too fast and driven, to stay where the people wanted him." His son Jay has corrected that. His story of Gene Tunney will be considered the final, incisive word. Mary Whipple

The fascinating link between these professions (helped along by rhyme like an "old one-two")extends from Homer to Hazlitt, Hemingway to Mailer, not to mention Oates, Remnick, and others. But books on the link itself--especially where the admiration is mutual!-- are far less common, and this is an uncommonly good book, vividly written, genuinely informative, and touching. Splendidly produced on semigloss paper with photos I have never before seen (after 50 years of reading boxing publications), the book also reaffirms Gene Tunney's place in American history. Jack Dempsey is the Roaring 20s fighter we all learned to love, with his snarl, beard stubble, threatening good looks, and wild, knockdown-filled bouts. But Tunney was probably just as great a fighter. Even though he caught Jack at the end of his career, Dempsey would have to have been at his very best, and a little lucky, to defeat the skilled and courageous Tunney at any point. Tunney appears to have been relatively prudish for a pro fighter, unlike Dempsey, as well as a genuine lover of poetry, drama, and ideas, but that only makes him all the more amazing, with his little scholar's cabin retreat tucked away in the woods near his training camp. (a lovely photo shows his rustic, Prospero-study, an echo of Shaw's famed writing hut in England).
The book is actually about at least three fascinating connections: Tunney and Shaw; Tunney and his society wife Polly; and Tunney and his son, who wrote the book. (This is Jay Tunney, the brother of California's former Senator John Tunney.) What is it like to be the son of a heavyweight champion--especially this kind of champion? For me, a son's research into his father's intense friendship is as interesting as the friendship itself, but that is just another layer of the book that makes it great reading.