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Gene Tunney: Intellectual and fighter
JOHN WIGHT tells the story of the famed US heavyweight who carried boxing gloves in his gym bag, along with the works of Shakespeare, F Scott Fitzgerald and other literary giants
Gene Tunney preparing for his fight with Jack Dempsey
INTELLECTUAL and fighter are not two words you normally see in the same sentence.
While fighters are of course keenly intelligent in their own way — combining as they do highly developed survival instincts and the spatial awareness necessary to avoid incoming punches and exploit opportunities to throw and land their own within split seconds — they are the last people the vast majority would ever associate with an appreciation of the arts or literature.
Famed US heavyweight Gene Tunney was unique, therefore, in that here was fighter who not only possessed in abundance the ring intelligence outlined above, he was also a man of letters who was known to carry in his gym bag along with his gloves and wraps the works of Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, F Scott Fitzgerald and other literary giants.
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