Sweet scientist and Shakespeare fan

GENE TUNNEY won the heavyweight title from Jack Dempsey in 1926. At the time, Dempsey was the most popular athlete on the planet and widely considered unbeatable. Tunney triumphed in their rematch, which took place in Chicago in front of 144,000 spectators a year later. He defended the title once more in 1928 against Tom Heeney, then hung up his gloves with an astonishing record of 58 wins and one defeat.

Tunney’s only loss occurred against the windmill fists of the legendary Harry Greb in 1922. He avenged that defeat three times. Nevertheless, the judges of boxing immortality seldom mention Tunney in the same breath with Dempsey and Greb. Tunney was an unpopular champion and an even less popular ex-champ.

As author Jack Cavanaugh explains in “Tunney,” it was a public relations problem stemming from the fact that Tunney, the son of Irish immigrants, married an heiress and acted like a blue blood in an era of intense class consciousness. Tunney, who once lectured on Shakespeare at Yale University and was pals with playwright George Bernard Shaw, never endeared himself to the brotherhood of bruisers. As a boxer, he was a sweet scientist -- an Ali-like dance master in a period that relished brawlers. For someone who was not a connoisseur of the ring, Tunney could be boring to watch. He carried opponents whom he could have put to sleep because he had no taste for dishing out pain and injuries.

Born James Joseph Tunney in 1897, he was raised in Greenwich Village, but it was not exactly the place that would embrace Bob Dylan in the early 1960s. There were gangs and constant turf battles. Though a versatile athlete, the boy who would one day be heavyweight king was slight of build (at 14 he was 5 feet 3 and 115 pounds) and bait for neighborhood thugs. Cavanaugh tells us that Tunney’s father bought young Gene a pair of boxing gloves and provided a little instruction in the art of self-defense. The old man never intended for his son to become an amateur pugilist, much less a professional. But Gene was a quick study, and soon he was racking up wins in local youth tournaments.

Though a passionate student who read voraciously and enjoyed participating in the drama club, Tunney dropped out of high school at age 15 to help support his family. Three years later, partly on a lark, he entered the prize ring. Like the parents of many fighters of his day, Tunney’s devoutly Catholic folks were highly averse to the idea of their son becoming a professional boxer. They had hoped he would enter the priesthood. But the bookish shipping clerk with striking good looks quickly developed a local following and began earning sums that were great enough to assuage some of his parent’s concerns.

Then came World War I. Tunney immediately enlisted in the Marine Corps. Cavanaugh captures a scene that could have come from a 1950s film: A few months into his military service, Tunney, the sensitive but tough guy from New York, reluctantly dusts the much larger company bully. From then on, and much to Tunney’s chagrin, he did all his wartime fighting in the ring, representing the corps and giving boxing instruction. After the war, the “Fighting Marine” went back to his clerical post and to boxing the ears off just about everyone.

This richly researched book follows a smooth trajectory and is strung with compelling vignettes. Take, for instance, the day Tunney spies Dempsey on a ferryboat. Tunney shyly introduces himself to the Manassa Mauler. Always amiable outside the ring, Dempsey chats with him. At the time, Tunney’s career is in jeopardy because of frequent hand injuries. He shares his problems with Dempsey, who teaches the upstart boxer how to wrap his hands properly and avoid fracturing his knuckles. A few years later, the hands Dempsey helped save were wresting away his heavyweight crown.

It takes a muse to lend an element of mystery and expectation to celebrated past events. A longtime sports writer, Cavanaugh describes Tunney’s improbable ascent to the heavyweight heights and his two battles with Dempsey so well that I felt as though I were sitting ringside, unsure of the outcome.

Today, boxing has all but slipped off the sports pages. However, a spate of superb life stories of boxers have been published in recent years, including Roger Kahn’s “A Flame of Pure Fire: Jack Dempsey and the Roaring ‘20s” (1999) and Geoffrey Ward’s “Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson” (2004). Although Cavanaugh’s book is a little light on Tunney’s life after he stopped boxing, this portrait carries the same punch as these other heavyweight biographies.

Gordon Marino is a professor in the College of Health and Human Performance at the University of Florida.