Boxing’s Brainiest Champ and His Upset of the Great Jack Dempsey

Tunney: Boxing’s Brainiest Champ and His Upset of the Great Jack Dempsey
by Jack Cavanaugh
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Ringside: A Treasury of Boxing Reportage
by Budd Schulberg, with an introduction by Hugh McIlvanney
Ivan R. Dee

Nearly eighty years later, my father can still recall the scene outside the Windsor Hotel in Montreal: the dashing and immaculately dressed young man in a felt hat standing by a sleek car—a Packard, probably, or maybe a Cadillac—supervising the bellhops as they loaded his luggage. The man in question was Gene Tunney. He had retired from boxing at the age of thirty-one and was on his honeymoon, having just married a Carnegie heiress from Greenwich. Even though he was watching from a distance down Piel Street, my father can also remember the aura that Tunney emitted: “very supercilious,â€￾ he says.

For more on this subject go to this link:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2007/may/31/the-reader-in-the-ring/

 

Tunneys parents came from County Mayo, Ireland, not too far from where Cooney's parents came from.

 

Cooney has roots in Newfoundland. :bears: I work with his first cousin.

 

I think it was Cooneys Grandfather who came from Mayo.

 

Tunney, ranked #1 all-time amongst the great Light-Heavy champs by myself, was such an outstanding boxer, with very few flaws in his game. He may well have beaten even the more spritely, explosive Dempsey of his youth (I have often debated the odds for that fight, with myself & others), though we'll never know.

Tunney was not far off having the lot --- advanced ring intelligence, a first-class jab & all-purpose right hand (with decent, & nowadays under-rated power), snappy, educated footwork, & top-notch defense, complimented by coil-spring reflexes, particularly in the lower-body...a great champion...one of the very greatest.

On his best night, could not only have beaten every LHW champ who ever lived, but quite a few of the great & near-great Heavies, too.

 

Yes Ramonza and Fred Flinstone beats Anderson Silva.

 

Tunney was a very modern styleof boxer. I could agree with you if we were talking about Corbett or Johnson, for various reasons. Not so with Tunney.

 

You're on crack. I can think of at least 10 LHWs who would beat the piss out of Tunney.

 

Ramone!!!!

 

You just believe you can.

 

He & Dempsey both were modern-styled fighters who would shine in any age.

 

::

 

Of course, people forget Tunney fought in black & white.

 

Absolutely. Both modern-styled for their time.

Both were so important, so influential. Both revolutionized boxing in their own way... and plenty of their tricks have been passed along from generation to generation.

But it wasn't the finished article. These guys were pioneers, but there was still work to be done.

 

Tunney is both over and underrated. He obviously had a decent jaw, you can't take salvos from Jack Dempsey unless you have a jaw, and he had a decent left hand too. But he had a pretty weak resume. I'm not sure about all these 175lbrs who "beat the piss" out of him. If you can deal with Jack Dempsey, there is a good chance you can deal with a lot of 175lbrs.

 

He could fight, no doubt. Honestly though, how often was Dempsey fighting when Tunney fought him? Guy was busy being famous.

 

He wasn't fighting at all. Dempsey is a classic example of the difference between a star and a champion. Dempsey was a star but Tunney was a champion. Thing is though that once Dempsey unloaded, there was still a lot of power in those shots. He was trapped on the ropes taking flush shots from Dempsey. As is ever the case, especially at the higher weights, and especially where you have the size advantage {vs Light-Heavies} robustness counts for a lot.

I think Tunney probably only runs into problems with guys like Michael Spinks or Bob Foster, even then, he's competitive at least. No 175lbr really "beats the piss" out of him, never mind 10 of them.

People put a lot of stock in the Greb fight, its not like he improve from that fight. Greb was a dirty piece of work in any case and never beat Tunney again in several attempts. According to the newspaper reports, it seems a green Tunney faded down the stretch as Greb set a fast pace. No mystery there. He got older and bigger and mastered Greb henceforth.

People might talk about Greb being a smaller man, but he was bigger than Montell Griffin- he of the {spurious} win over Roy Jones Junior no less.

 

What do you see missing in Tunney, present in current fighters, when you watch him?

 

That washes for the first fight. When a serious Dempsey got back into serious fighting condition, disposed of a young, hungry Jack Sharkey, & shook off the cobwebs to arrive at his most serious for a fight in years...he was, bar one dramatic moment in the seventh, dominated every bit as soundly as the first encounter.

Yes, it was not the Dempsey of his youth, but he was still pretty clearly a serious threat to any fighter in the world. There was no one out there sans Tunney who could've done that to him.

Tunney was a master strategist with all the trimmings. He may have even beaten the young, fresh Dempsey (highly debatable fight, that), & I wouldn't put a dime on another 175lber in history to pull that off, Ezzard Charles included.

 

Also, Greb was just an absolute freak of a fighting machine. He quite arguably has the greatest resume in al of history (people should stop & think for a minute about the magnitude of that statement)...he was a complete anomaly in terms of greatness...I'd bet dollars to doughnuts if you moved up a Hagler, a Monzon, a Robinson...these guys aren't beating Tunney.

 

I have often criticized the love people have for these old-timers but I have a theory about some of them, its an odd theory, just a personal thing......but guys like Greb had odd backgrounds- his mother was Irish, his father was German, he seems to have been some sort of a whirling-dervish, no set modus operandi, dubious background, no education as such, I heard he had a very low natural heartbeat rate, he seems to have had a remarkable physique- a trait of a lot of these top guys. Sure, a lot of the contenders they went through looked like famine victims, but all the best champs were in ripped condition. They also had a particular ignorance of brain-damage and associated malaises, and as they say, ignorance is bliss. It all added up to give a unique form of "suicide" fighting. The vast majority of these guys were bums, drifters, guys fighting to get a room or something to eat, but the very very best of them were, in a word, dangerous people.

Its their competition that makes their status as champions circumspect, not their innate talents, per se. They ultimately belong to their own era- I think its folly to try and bring them forward to our era- but it would be likely unfair on a modern 160lb fighter to be dragged back to the 1920's and, removed from the comforts of a dominant promotional outfit or a sympathetic referee, be thrown in with the likes of Greb, who knew nothing of brain damage and cared less.

The sight of a Amir Khan pushing off Lamont Peterson makes me fear for him in Box-Car America of the Depression Era. If he was put in a time machine right now and dragged back to then, there would be guys willing to go 25 rounds with him for their fare to California.

 

One of the great tragedies of Boxing, IMO, that Greb was never filmed in the ring. That CV is positively mouth-watering.

To read Tunney's own, personal accounts of fighting the man (not just the first bout, either) is indeed frightening stuff. He tells a tale of punches coming from angles, & in volume, he never saw before or since, in our out of the ring. Of, as you describe Irish, a whirling dervish, a suicidal ball of energy flowing forward as inexorable as the tide. I roughly remember Tunney explaining he tried everything & anything to halt Greb's onslaught in that first bout.

He grew as a fighter for having faced Greb, I have zero doubt.

 

Great post, very insightful.

 

It makes me wonder how the toughest of the tough, (comparatively) modern age (your Fraziers, your Haglers and your Holyfields) would do back then.

Its a hugely complex question, ultimately unanswerable.

 

His punching technique mainly generates power by leaping & bringing his balance as well as his weight behind him. Up close he cant punch effectively except with uppercuts because he doesn't know how to rotate or drop his weight properly. He basically doesn't have a left hook in any modern sense, beyond the occasional roundhouse

The above would obviously leave him pretty open to decent counter puncher had one existed in 1926. Joe Louis would have decapitated him, IMHO. He frequently over commits with shots because he needs to to get meat behind them, which in turn doesn't allow him to throw fluid combos and limits his output. Similarly, his defense is really dependent on reflexes alone since his chin isn't very well tucked (compare and contrast with my avatar, for instance), his right hand is kept low (possibly reflecting the fact most his opponents dont know how to hook properly either).

His feet are nimble for his time and he has great, natural fleetness and dexterity there but he crosses them allot when maneuvering which is another technical failing and one which better fighters would exploit to catch him off balance frequently.

Thats what I see, though I'm open to being convinced that im wrong

 

I'll get to your full post when time permits, but for right now, a low left is a hallmark of more primitive times?

Kindly explain Roy Jones, then...or better yet, that technical master youve often espoused, Floyd Mayweather.

 

Floyd, Roy, Vitali, Ali are all exponents of the low left, as was Ali. Mike Grant also had a low left. Spot the odd one out. A low left is like a long dick, it doesn't really mean anything. You could be a sexual deviant, or devoutly celibate. Or neither.

Hands can be fired faster from the waist than from the shoulder, that's basic physiology. For Vitali, he has the range, he has the height, he wants to create the impression of being easy to hit so you lead off, walk right into his counter hook, up from the waist. For Jones, he had the athleticism and the reflexes, for Ali, a bit of both, lean-back, counter, slide the left up from his waist, hands only held high when he was against the ropes.

For Grant, it was just sloppy, a trait borne of a truncated amateur career and a rushed pro apprenticeship.

A low left is a sign of a low left, basically. What you do with it, or how you came to have it, will tell you more about matters primitive or otherwise.

 

Ramone, please don't tell me you think he would beat Lennox Lewis.

 

No, I dont.

 

Low right. Hold the left almost anywhere you like if your chin is tucked & you've got your angles right.