Remembering Gene Tunney - A Man Apart

Maybe it would have been different if he had just remained plain old James Joseph. Heavyweight boxing, even then, had an illustrious history of past champions with double first names or middle initials. John L. Sullivan, James J. Corbett, James J. Jeffries; all heroic figures. Surely James Joseph Tunney should have no problem continuing that legacy? But he was destined to be different, a man apart. As a boy, when a younger sibling tried to call him Jim, it came out sounding like Gene, and the modification stuck. Gene Tunney, ‘The Fighting Marine’, was born in 1897; one of the great heavyweight champions, but to this day, still a man apart.

Despite notable victories over men such as Tommy Gibbons, Georges Carpentier and Tommy Loughran among others, Gene Tunney’s legacy will forever be inextricably linked with two legends of the sport: Jack Dempsey and Harry Greb. It is in large part because of the controversial nature of the clashes with these two beloved characters that Tunney’s greatness is often overlooked.

Tunney and Greb fought five times between May 1922 and March 1925. There seems to be a growing army of Greb supporters who claim that the “Pittsburgh Windmill” was the greatest fighter who ever lived. One of the arguments for this is his performances against naturally bigger men, with Tunney being the prime example.

Greb inflicted the first defeat of Gene’s professional career in their initial meeting. Tunney was defending his American light-heavyweight title that he had won only four months previously from Battling Levinsky. If some of the fights between Tunney and Greb were controversial, there was no doubting the winner in their first contest, fought at Madison Square Garden. Greb battered Tunney for the full 15 rounds. Tunney was already considered a stylish boxer, but in his first defeat he proved he had the necessary character to dig deep in the heat of battle. Greb, despite being blind in one eye and being outweighed by 13lbs, was ferocious, and his famous swarming attack was too much for Tunney. Gene’s face was a bloody mess by the final bell. He later recalled, “I had never bled so much before, nor have I since”.

Two days after the defeat, Tunney visited the boxing commission offices trying to secure a rematch.

They were back in the Garden on February 23 1923 and again went the 15-round distance. Tunney was awarded a unanimous decision from the officials, but the decision was controversial with the majority of ringside reporters scoring the fight for Greb.

Their third meeting took place in December of the same year, once again at Madison Square Garden. For the first time, in the eyes of both the officials and the majority of ringsiders, Gene was able to establish his dominance and took the decision over 15 sessions.

Harry Greb was never the sort to go away quietly and when the pair met again for the fourth time in September 1924, the referee could not split them in what is deemed to be a draw but was officially a ‘No Decision’ over 10 rounds.

Their fifth and final meeting, on March 27 1925, in St. Paul, Minnesota, was a conclusive points win for Tunney. The Associated Press reported that, “Tunney gave Greb as thorough a beating as he has ever received.”

At the conclusion of the contest, Greb claimed he was done with Tunney: “That’s the last time I’ll fight this guy. He’s getting too big and too strong for me to handle. I could lick him at one point but not anymore. Tunney is really getting good”.

There is no doubting that Harry Greb was a phenomenal fighter and the physical disadvantages he took into the ring against Tunney make his performances all the more remarkable. They were also meeting at different stages of their careers; their final fight was the 270th on Greb’s record.

This should not, however, detract from the achievement of Gene Tunney over their five bouts. As Gavin Evans puts it in his book, Kings of the Ring: The History of Heavyweight Boxing, Harry Greb was “the man who turned Tunney from a good boxer into a great one.”

But let’s roll back a few years further, and to a venue etched into the memories of boxing fan: Boyles Thirty Acres, Jersey City. It was here in July 1921 that famously, Jack Dempsey defended his world heavyweight title against Frenchman, Georges Carpentier in a battle billed as “The Fight Of The Century” (although these seem to come along more than once every hundred years). The fight is also remembered as the first to top a million dollars in gate receipts. The twenties were starting to roar.

Among the 90,000 sets of eyes fixed on the ring that day, one pair was more keenly riveted than any other, studying the champion. Gene Tunney, who had stopped Soldier Jones in one of the preliminary bouts, was crouching at ringside. He didn’t know how long it was going to take him to get his shot at “The Manassa Mauler”, but he wasn’t going to miss this chance to study him up close. Dempsey was already in Tunney’s sights.

It was September 1926 by the time they met in the ring. Dempsey had only had two bouts in the five years since the Carpentier bout and had been inactive for three years. Gene, meanwhile, had become a highly skilled technician, although the people around Jack regarded the challenger as nothing more than a good light-heavyweight. Despite being considered a significant underdog (in one poll of fifty experts, not one picked Tunney to win), a record crowd of over 120,000 piled into the Sesquicentennial Stadium in Philadelphia to see the fight.

Boxing in the rain, Gene got off to a dream start. Years later, Ed Fitzgerald wrote in Ring magazine that it was, “generally agreed by expert witnesses that the heavyweight championship of the world changed hands in that tumultuous first round.” Gene showed early that he was not intimidated by Dempsey, landing hard and often. He continued to control the fight, to the astonishment of the crowd and ringside reporters, consistently beating Jack to the punch. At the end of the 10 rounds, there was no argument that Tunney was the new champion.

Jack accepted defeat in sporting fashion, saying that, “I lost to a good man… I have no alibis.”

Nearly one hundred years of hindsight puts Tunney’s win over Dempsey in perspective, but at the end of the 1920s it was Ring’s Upset of the Decade.

Jack Dempsey was an icon and still is. It was hard for people to believe and accept he had lost. He was what a fighter was supposed to be; a barely tamed animal. Whereas Tunney seemed aloof, a technical boxer, a bookworm, even a “pompous ass”, as described by the New York Daily News. This was to be an image that stuck with Gene, who in reality was just an Irish kid from Greenwich Village who valued his privacy and aspired to a better life.

If Gene needed a reminder of how things were, he got it at Madison Square Garden on the night of October 22, just a few weeks after winning the title. He and Dempsey were in attendance at a fight card and presented to the crowd. Dempsey was met with cheers and an ovation, while Gene received boos and hisses.

Paul Gallico offered his explanation as to why Gene would forever be in the shadow of Dempsey, “Tunney will never be the drawing card Dempsey was because he has as much sudden death in his make up as a woolly lamb”.

Tunney just said, “I’m not unpopular except with the professional fight crowd. They don’t understand me and never will.”

The return bout was set for almost exactly a year after the first contest, September 22 1927. Jack had taken one bout in the intervening year, stopping Jack Sharkey in seven rounds, while Tunney remained inactive. Soldiers Field, Chicago was the venue this time around for another blockbuster crowd, setting a paid gate record of $2,658,660.

The fight itself will be forever known as The Battle of the Long Count and must have more words written about it than any other fight. Tunney was again largely controlling the action, Ed Fitzgerald describing Gene’s left hand, “like a bayonet that night, and he stuck it into Dempsey’s face time and time again.”

Then came the fateful seventh round. There was less than a minute gone in the session when a left hook from Dempsey put Tunney on the floor by the ropes. This was what Dempsey’s fans had been waiting for and what they expected from the man who was already becoming a legend. Tunney was on the canvas for 14 seconds as referee Dave Barry delayed the count while Jack retreated to a neutral corner after initially standing over his fallen prey.

For a man who had never been knocked down before, and in a fight of such enormous magnitude, Tunney displayed remarkable composure, making the most of the referee’s count and rising at ‘nine’. Why not get up sooner? Tunney’s response, “Only badly dazed boxers who have momentarily lost consciousness, and show offs, fail to take those nine seconds that are theirs.”

Tunney survived the round and then re-established his dominance for the remainder of the fight, even briefly flooring Dempsey in the eighth. Again, there was no argument about the scorecards at the end of the fight, with Gene a clear winner. That’s not to say there were no arguments after the fight and for many years to come regarding the seventh round. How much did Tunney benefit from the extended time he was given? Could he have got to his feet and survived a Dempsey onslaught before a count of ten? All that is now irrelevant, and as the dust settled even Jack agreed that the long count was inconsequential.

It may not have made a difference to the outcome of the fight, but that’s not to say that the long count was not impactful. Jack forgetting, or ignoring, the neutral corner rule and the resulting 14 seconds, turned what may have been a routine points win for Tunney, into a fight that is written about and debated nearly a hundred years later.

For fans of Jack Dempsey, those fourteen seconds only added to his legend and allowed them to always grumble the famous fistic line, “We wuz robbed!”

Gene Tunney had only one more fight; an 11^th-round stoppage of Tom Heeney at Yankee Stadium in July the following year. Days later he retired, having achieved everything he had set out to do in the sport. For those last three fights, Gene had earned approximately $1,715,000 and boxed in front of around 271,000 people. He retired with just the one solitary loss at the hands of Greb, and walked away from the sport as the reigning world heavyweight champion.

Having already served in the Marines earlier in his life, he later went on to become a Commander in the Navy during World War Two. He married heiress Polly Lauder and had a highly successful career in business.

But Gene Tunney would always call himself a boxer first and foremost and that is how we remember him, almost a century after his retirement. He is likely destined to not be remembered as fondly as either Harry Greb or Jack Dempsey. Larry Holmes will tell you how hard it is to get love and respect; struggling for recognition in the long dark shadow of a beloved all-time great.

James Joseph Tunney, later to be known as Gene, “The Fighting Marine”, fought his way out of humble beginnings in Greenwich Village to the heavyweight championship of the world. He may not always have been what the fans or the fight writers wanted, but he established himself among the immortals of the sport.