Gene Tunney's Prayer: The Complex Somatics of Catholic Manhood

The first time Harry "The Pittsburgh Windmill" Greb and Gene "The Fighting Marine" Tunney met in a boxing ring, in 1922, Tunney got the beating of a lifetime. Greb's first rally of punches unleashed a vicious left hook that smashed Tunney's nose into his skull, giving Tunney an instant double fracture that splattered both fighters with Tunney's blood. Harry Greb was known for his unorthodox style of mixing punches in such erratic combinations that his opponents were unable to predict the direction from which the next punch would come. Greb also was a notoriously dirty boxer, fond of elbowing and headbutting, or raking the laces of his gloves across the eyes of his opponents. Stepping into the ring with Greb was an unnerving experience for seasoned fighters; for a mid-career boxer like Tunney, it was nothing short of terrifying. After the 1922 fight Tunney commented that boxing Greb was "like fighting an octopus."¹⁹

Aficionados of the sport often count Tunney vs. Greb among the most brutal matches in boxing history. Through fifteen rounds, the pair of Catholic boxers pounded each other with furious determination. Greb focused on Tunney's face, punching his lips, gouging his eyes, and butting his forehead so hard that it severed a facial artery. In return, Tunney used the openings that were the weakness of Greb's erratic style to focus punishing blows and deep uppercuts on Greb's torso. In the middle of the sixth round, grappled in a clinch, the pair nearly fell out of the ring. The adrenaline Tunney's cut man gave him to staunch his nasal bleeding caused blood to flow down his throat into his stomach. Multiple lacerations on Tunney's face went clear through to the bone. Boxing historians estimate that Tunny lost two quarts of blood in the bout.²⁰ "Harry Greb cut Tunney up so bad, he swallowed more blood than Dracula," one colorful report observed. "He looked as if he just lost a razor fight not a fist fight. They almost needed a sewing machine to put his face back together."²¹

Boxing was an enormously popular sport among Catholics in the twentieth century, and the clean-cut champion Gene Tunney was a combination heart throb, hero, and spiritual role model in Catholic popular culture. Writing in the popular devotional magazine Guideposts, reflecting on the terror he experienced in the ring, Tunney wrote, "In every fighter comes occasionally the supreme horror of not being able to fend off the blows showered on him, of being helpless to raise his hands to ward them off."²² For a strategist like Tunney, boxing was as much an intellectual battle as it was a physical one. Throughout his career he struggled to overcome dread that would paralyze him immediately before a major bout. This was not a paranoid fantasy, as his brutal fifteen rounds with Greb illustrates. In those moments of terror, Tunney often prayed, and believed that those prayers protected his body and his mind in equal measure. "When I prayed that I might not be permanently injured, I gained confidence that I wouldn't be," he later reflected. "If it hadn't been for this confidence I gained from prayer, I imagine that I'd have gone into the ring inwardly shaking and quaking, thoroughly beaten in advance."²³

In my provocation for this forum on Catholic masculinities, I want to highlight the unsurprising insight I have gained from studying athletes: even as we recognize the cultural factors that shape Catholic manhood, we need to develop a much more robust, nuanced, promiscuous, and theoretically informed understanding of masculinity as an embodied experience. We must augment cultural semantics with bodily somatics; that is, we need to understand the ideas that circulated in Catholic culture about manhood, but we must add to this an additional layer of analysis that understands what happened to those messages about gender—how they were translated, interpreted, and complicated—in the process of being embedded in the bodies and consciousness of Catholic men. Somatics switches the interpretive lens of gender away from viewing...