New play at Theater Wit focuses on unlikely friendship between boxer Gene Tunney and George Bernard Shaw

Family photos of former World Boxing Champion Gene Tunney, kept by his son, Jay Tunney.

He will be in the audience with his wife Kelly, their daughter Teressa and, as he says with a chuckle, “the 196 cousins who will be flying in to see the show.”Jay Tunney, you see, is the son of Gene Tunney. Post has based his theatrical work solidly on Jay’s 2010 book “The Prizefighter and the Playwright: Gene Tunney and Bernard Shaw.”and the play.

“Well,” Jay says now, “it didn’t quite work out that way. We were about to take off and then a director departed and then the pandemic came. Everything just stopped. I thought we were done but Doug came through, found a producer and here we are. I am very pleased. Shaw, like many writers over the centuries, was drawn to boxing. In 1882, before fame came calling, he wrote a novel about the sport. “Cashel Byron’s Profession” was about an Irish heavyweight who becomes the champion of the world and develops an unlikely relationship with an aristocratic heiress.Shaw had boxed in his youth and in 1919 covered for The Nation magazine the heavyweight title bout between France’s Georges Carpentier and Britain’s Joe Beckett in London.

He was often derided by sports writers more accustomed to fighters whose reading habits began and ended with comic books. The usually incisive Paul Gallico once wrote, “I think Tunney has hurt his own game with his cultural nonsense.” The next year Tunney retired undefeated, becoming the first and only heavyweight champ to ever do so, until Rocky Marciano joined this exclusive club in 1956.He was movie star handsome and when he fell in love, he fell hard for Polly Lauder, a beautiful heiress. They were married in Rome and their pre- and post-wedding travels were peppered with meeting such celebrated people as Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Thornton Wilder.

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