PAUL BESTON:The Man Who Wasn't There
Cavanaugh, Jack
B O O K S I N R E V I E W son station of the Democratic Republic of the Planet Mars, among others. A more straightforward title (with apologies to Reader’s Digest) might have been My Most...
...Yet while Cavanaugh was denied access to what must be a treasure trove of information, he could have done more with what is available to explore Tunney’s character...
...Here Berendt carefully details the malfeasance, negligence, and unlucky coincidence —a canal beside the opera house had been drained for dredging, depriving fireboats of access and firemen of its water—that allowed it to burn to the ground...
...But Dempsey forgot the rule, agreed on beforehand, that a fighter scoring a knockdown had to retreat to a “neutral” corner before the count could be started...
...Complicated and aloof, he never captured the imagination of the sporting public then or since, except as a poseur who had the gall to discuss his reading habits...
...But when a writer is brave or foolhardy enough to take on Venice, he’s asking for it...
...Throughout, the tone is bland and detached, a voice reminiscent of rambling articles in the old New Yorker under the laissez-faire editorship of Mr...
...When a friend packing for a stay in Venice asked me whether “that book you’re reviewing” was something he should take along, I had to say no...
...And Tunney slips away from us again, maybe for good...
...Reviewed by Paul Beston Dempsey for a book of my own, which I have for the time being abandoned...
...It’s a frustrating book, especially given the promise with which it arrived: to tell the story of the forgotten man Cavanaugh rightly describes as “the most unique heavyweight champion of all time...
...Without an interrogation of its subject, Cavanaugh’s biography is too much like Tunney himself: impressive on every surface, but silent at its center...
...ly sinking into the lagoon...
...One of those sporting controversies that takes on a life of its own—like Ruth’s called shot or Bobby Thomson’s home run off Ralph Branca—the Long Count defined the two men in the public imagination forever...
...Berendt has told interviewers he thought he had his subject when he learned of two escapees from a leper colony...
...Something, for example, resembling this passage from Jan Morris’s sonorous vintage classic, Venice: “It is a gnarled but gorgeous city… the whole scene seems to shimmer—with pinkness, with age, with self-satisfaction, with sadness, with delight...
...Unlike most beloved champions, he was not married to the boxing game— and as a result, he was not beloved...
...Debates raged about how long Tunney was on the canvas, whether he could have gotten up if not given extra time, and whether the referee’s action was fair...
...His detractors in the sporting press, forgiving of so many other vices among athletes, could never forgive the clumsy hubris with which this poor man’s son flaunted his hard-won refinement...
...Similarly, the book is sorely deficient in anything useful or interesting 68 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 7 The Man Who Wasn’t There Tunney: Boxing’s Brainiest Champ and His Upset of the Great Jack Dempsey by Jack Cavanaugh (RANDOM HOUSE, 496 PAGES, $27.95) B O O K S I N R E V I E W Gene Tunney, who was briefly heavyweight champion of the world in the 1920s and is remembered today, when he is remembered at all, for defeating Jack Dempsey, seemed to understand that the fate of a boxer was often unhappy...
...At the referee’s “nine,” Tunney rose, evaded Dempsey’s rushes, and went on to win the fight by decision...
...According to the scraps of information out there, Tunney’s drinking went back at least as far as his stint in the U.S...
...Cavanaugh’s treatment nearly relegates Tunney to a supporting role in his long-awaited feature and lends credence to the age-old verdict that Tunney is only interesting insofar as he was connected to Dempsey...
...Soon afterwards, he posted bond for a rematch to stunned observers, and he went on to defeat Greb several times...
...Much of this is presented in the form of interminable reconstituted dialogue of the New Journalism school that quickly becomes both unconvincing and tedious...
...Then go o tle colored P O GO OUT AND BUY out among your friends who s st-its in among the important THIS BOOK...
...Tunney lost perhaps two quarts of his own blood from a broken nose but fought on until the bout went to a decision...
...Here was the most resolute champion of self-control that ever graced American sports, given to writing articles on the dangers of smoking and asserting that a man’s goal at 40 should be to attain greater fitness than he enjoyed at 20...
...Read it and stick littill have “Kerry for President” stickers on their Volvos World magazines...
...All of this Cavanaugh chronicles in a manner heavy on fact but light on reflection...
...In over 70 fights, he was beaten only once, in a bloodbath to the legendary Harry Greb...
...Mixed in are passages of purple, like the description of officials discussing the Fenice, who speak beneath a painted ceiling where “legions of tormented souls languished in Palma Giovane’s Cycles of Purgatory, in silent mockery of their every word...
...Without being a guidebook, sans addresses, recommendations or telephone numbers, a graceful, literate portrait could have whetted the appetite for the city, rather than painting it as a decadent grotesquerie full of corruption, feuds, scandal, and eccentrics...
...Dempsey had an impromptu way of saying memorable things, the best example of which was, “Honey, I forgot to duck” (employed half a century later by another natural genius, Ronald Reagan...
...He was one of the ring’s immortals, a master of defense and counterpunching, an early pioneer of strategy (he studied his opponents like a prosecuting attorney), and a fanatic about physical conditioning...
...But, dammit, one of them died before he could do an interview...
...He achieved all of these things and vanished, more or less, from popular scrutiny until his death in 1978...
...The image is hard to reconcile with the youthful paragon of discipline, yet Cavanaugh never raises the issue, even in passing...
...F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 7 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 69 B O O K S I N R E V I E W The slugging Dempsey, who was champion throughout the 1920s and had a stature on par with Babe Ruth, had lost his title to Tunney the previous year in a huge upset...
...t true at all...
...Who was Tunney, really, and what was the source of his amazing willfulness...
...Now, with so much at stake, he reverted to his old ways and stood over Tunney...
...After all these years, their protectiveTerms of Enrichment Spages...
...With one important note: it was always Dempsey’s name that came first...
...He was difficult to discourage and impossible to deny...
...He relates much boxing history from eras before and after Tunney, and he devotes whole chapters to Dempsey’s exploits in which Tunney does not make even a walk-on appearance...
...What does it tell us that in two full-length autobiographies Tunney can barely bring himself to mention his father, a longshoreman on the Hudson River docks who bought him his first pair of boxing gloves...
...You almost get the feeling that the only thing he didn’t plan was dying...
...In his new biography, Jack Cavanaugh proves that Tunney was a defensive specialist in the boxing ring and out...
...By contrast, Tunney was like the William Howard Taft to Dempsey’s Theodore Roosevelt, the gifted but bloodless successor to a man shrouded in myth...
...Unlike Dempsey, whose vivid character emerges from even the dustiest boxing histories, Tunney is a name attached to a series of deeds...
...The mystery of Gene Tunney—what drove him, and what eventually broke him—remains...
...he had become notorious for standing over fallen opponents and blasting them back to the canvas...
...Navy in World War II, and his problem seems to have been more severe than garden variety alcoholism...
...Like its late patriarch, the family seems determined to James Srodes, an author and broadcaster, is a former control the terms on which they engage the Am- Washington bureau chief for Forbes and Financial erican public...
...The problem is this part of the book doesn’t get the prominence it deserves until page 233...
...That’s an understatement...
...He also follows the subsequent investigation and trial of those accused of either carelessness or, in the case of two of the accused, criminal arson...
...Finally, one misses a sense of wonder at this most wonderful of cities: a personal, literate sense of place that Berendt, obviously a talented writer, could have given us if he hadn’t gone for calculated formula instead...
...Well, actually , that public face were compounded by the And when the rant s AVANAUGH’S DIFFICULTIES in getting beyond well armed for the two years of s rich, the poor too poor tarts ” you can cough quie , “The rich have become too , that’s no truggle that lie ahead...
...Now their second fight was unfolding in much the same way, until the seventh round, when Dempsey suddenly found the mark and put Tunney down with a barrage of punches, the only knockdown Tunney suffered in his career...
...There is only one problem: the man himself seems not quite real, his character seemingly immune to what the historian Shelby Foote once described as the “picklocks of biographers...
...B O O K S I N R E V I E W son station of the Democratic Republic of the Planet Mars, among others...
...For the last 75 years or so, the only Tunney biographies were the two he wrote himself...
...A more straightforward title (with apologies to Reader’s Digest) might have been My Most Unforgettable Venetian Characters...
...It’s a touch of majesty almost unimaginable among today’s athletes...
...The crowd cheered him after he lost both Tunney fights, and they gravitated to his popular Broadway restaurant for 40 years...
...In these chapters he shows himself to be a good reporter who does his legwork...
...senator, you would probably say that has the makings of a pretty good story...
...The rule was created with Dempsey in mind...
...Were Tunney and Dempsey really “close friends” in later life, as commonly described, or did Tunney resent Dempsey’s popularity...
...The facts of Tunney’s life are the stuff of great American biographies...
...The book’s subtitle reinforces this impression...
...To be sure, along the way we do get an exhaustive, well-researched account of the tragic fire that destroyed the beautiful, historic Fenice, where several Verdi operas premiered...
...Ions form a sporting analogue to the presidents of the United States: great solois ’VE OFTEN THOUGHT that the heavyweight champits pursuing the ultimate prize of authority and power over other men, yet often finding the throne lonely and more complicated than they bargained for, haunted by their predecessors in unpredictable ways, and, although trained to think ahead and anticipate the unexpected, rarely getting out of action in the circumstances they would have wished...
...Sooner or later, a biographer needs to quit playing defense himself and venture a point of view...
...face is the only one we see...
...I know, comparisons are odorous...
...His inscrutable public ness is remarkable, even inspiring, for those who still admire such things...
...These are the things I found real Venetians, the ones who never go within a gondolier’s oar of Harry’s Bar, talking about the last time I was there...
...Little things like slowfor travelers...
...Until then we get a tangled, disconnected tale of people and gossip, like the 42 eyeglazing pages devoted to the squabbling among the members of Save Venice, a well-meaning American fund-raising organization that finances preservation and restoration of the city’s art and architecture...
...UNNEY’S RECORD AS A BOXER is real enough, though...
...He wanted to defeat Jack Dempsey for the heavyweight championship, make a million dollars, and then retire and pursue a different life...
...Unlike former presidents, who now get libraries and even Nobel Prizes, the former champs are fortunate if they just hold onto their marbles and their money...
...There aren’t many athletes in any sport, before or since, comparable to Tunney...
...If you were told that an Irish immigrant’s son growing up in turn of the century New York would serve in the Marines in World War I, go on to win the world heavyweight title while becoming a self-educated man of culture, live another half century in which he married a Carnegie heiress, befriended men like George Bernard Shaw and Thornton Wilder, lectured on Shakespeare at Yale, served in the Navy in World War II, attained directorship of numerous corporations, and fathered a U.S...
...tly and ” biography, an arrangement the author rejected...
...Pitiless inside the ring but generous and good-humored outside of it, Dempsey was loved for good reasons...
...Both are minor classics of nondisclosure...
...Elsewhere, the city’s “sinister moods” are attributed to “the unfathomable mind of the East...
...Cavanaugh’s book, readable and well researched, puts us in the ring with Tunney but never allows us to get within a whisker of him...
...Or the frequent acqua alta flooding and the novel, $3 billion project of tidal barriers to control it, or the pervasive problem of the destructive moto ondoso wave motion churned up by powerboats, undermining the foundations of canalside buildings...
...Gene Tunney was even remarkable in death: his gravestone makes no mention of his boxing career, citing instead his service to America in Paul Beston is a writer in New York...
...Oh, please...
...Shawn...
...And while there are enough references to Harry’s Bar, a vastly overrated eatery with prices to match, to ensure a lifetime of free lunching on its mediocre food, there is scant mention of the real problems facing Venice and its ordinary citizens...
...In the spirit of full disclosure, I should mention that I conducted a fair amount of research on Tunney and Jack two great wars...
...Only after Dempsey retreated did the referee begin his count...
...70 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 7...
...And what about the terrible drinking problem that Tunney developed after he left the ring...
...At a young age, Tunney seemed to have envisioned the entire outline of his life, and then he set about sketching it in...
...CTunney family’s interest in an authorized commence...
...Tunney’s and Dempsey’s names were hyphenated in history after their two famous fights, especially the second one, held in Chicago’s Soldier Field in 1927 and known ever since as the Battle of the Long Count...
Vol. 40 • February 2007 • No. 1
