Tunney: Boxing's Brainiest Champ and His Upset of the ...

Jack Cavanaugh is a veteran sportswriter who has covered scores of major boxing bouts, along with the Olympics, the World Series, Super Bowl games, the Masters golf tournament, and both the U.S. golf and tennis opens. His work has appeared most notably on the sports pages ofiThe New York Times/i, for which he has covered hundreds of varied sports assignments. In addition, he has been a frequent contributor toiSports Illustrated/iand written for Rieader's Digest, Tennis/iandiGolf/imagazines, and other national publications. He is also a former reporter for both ABC and CBS News. Cavanaugh currently is an adjunct writing professor at Fairfield University. He and his wife, Marge, live in Wilton, Connecticut.brbrbriFrom the Hardcover edition./iONEbrbrThe Longshoreman's SonbrbrJohn Tunney always liked a good fight-from afar. From the days of his boyhood in Ireland's County Mayo, where he grew up idolizing John L. Sullivan, the bare-knuckled and blustering heavyweight champion from Boston, to the years after he arrived in New York, where he came to worship another American-born Irish boxer, James J. Corbett, whose victory over Sullivan with padded gloves ushered in a new era in boxing, Tunney's favorite diversion was watching, reading about, or talking about boxing bouts. This was especially true if a bout involved Irish boxers, which in that era many, if indeed not most, did.brbrAfter emigrating to the United States around 1880 (although he claimed to have made a stopover years before as a boy sailor aboard a windjammer), Tunney reveled in observing two men go at it in the ring at "smokers," which abounded in New York from the 1880s until shortly after World War I. Usually staged in smoke-filled Knights of Columbus halls capable of seating several hundred patrons and in large basements of other fraternal organizations, smokers were designed to circumvent New York state laws against professional boxing, which at the ti