"The life they didn't lead"

Jay Tunney at home under a painting of his father, boxer Gene Tunney.

     Chicagoans endlessly parse their city’s best-known features: pizza and hot dogs, crime and weather, the blues and the Cubs. While other significant aspects of Chicago are too often simply ignored.
     Boxing, for instance. Chicago was a big boxing town. The top three heavyweight champions of the 20th century — Jack Johnson, Joe Louis and Muhammad Ali — all lived in Chicago.
     Johnson was locked in Cook County Jail for violating the Mann Act — the law passed by Congress attempting to stop him from having relations with white women. Louis won his first championship at Comiskey Park. Ali fought in the Golden Gloves in Chicago, would have fought here for a title, too, but local officials cancelled the bout to punish him for being a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War.
     And the boxing match that contained what many considered the greatest moment in professional boxing — if not in all athletics — the famous “Long Count” between Gene Tunney and Jack Dempsey took place at Soldier Field in 1927.
     Almost a century ago. Yet Tunney’s son, Jay, still lives downtown. He is a sharp and energetic 87, and the driving force behind a new play about the improbable friendship between his father and the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, “Shaw vs. Tunney,” by Doug Post, making its world premiere at Theater Wit later this month.

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