KEY POINTS:
There are rare occasions when it is almost as though discoveries are meant to happen. That's how uncovering the forgotten story of the first New Zealand-born boxer to fight for the world heavyweight championship seemed to documentary-maker and author Lydia Monin.
Tom Heeney was a first-generation New Zealander of Irish stock. His father, Hugh, taught his sons to box in a rumpty tin shed they used as a gym in Gisborne in the early years of last century.
One of those sons was blessed with the build and forbearance of a brick privy. These features along with good fortune saw him come within a punch of being crowned world heavyweight champion at Yankee Stadium, New York _ the city that was the home of boxing, during its jazz, glam and gangster-infused golden era.
Wellington-born, Palmerston North-raised Monin knew nothing of Heeney until she kept coming across his name while in New York, trawling newspaper archives while researching a documentary about an Irish boxer who also fought in the Big Apple in the 1920s.
"Especially towards the end of 1927 and in 1928 this name, Tom Heeney, was splashed all over the newspapers, and often it would say he was a New Zealander," says Monin.
"It was intriguing, a boxer who was that famous in New York at that time who happened to come from my home country. I had to look into it, and I realised there was that snapshot in time when he was one of the most famous people on the planet. That's when I realised, here was a great story."
The championship heavyweight fight between Heeney and defending champ Gene Tunney (see below) would have been the biggest sporting event of 1928, says Monin. "It's hard now to understand the enormity of Tom's achievement. You have to understand how different boxing was in the 1920s. It's not like today. It's fair to say it was the world's most popular sport and the heavyweight champion was the greatest athlete in the world, the most revered, embodying manliness and courage and strength ... Tom was conceivably one punch away from being that person."
Heeney's title fight was the last of a mad glad age for boxing. Tunney retired after defending his title against Heeney and boxing lost its main promoter with the death the following year of Tex Rickard. The Great Depression followed.
The money washing around boxing was mind-boggling. Tunney earned US$990,000 for his second fight against people's favourite, the dashing Jack Dempsey. (Tunney promptly wrote the promoter a cheque for US$10,000 so he in turn could receive one made out for a million dollars.)
The money washed Heeney's way too. "Someone like Tom would never have dreamt he'd earn US$100,000 [his challenger's cheque, the equivalent in buying power of US$1.2 million today] in one night," says Monin.
Heeney had been a plumber before becoming a professional boxer and had struggled to make a living fighting mediocre heavyweights in England.
His ambition on arriving in New York in 1927 was to make enough money from his fists to earn his fare back to New Zealand. Within 18 months he reached the pinnacle of his success and became an overnight celebrity.
It didn't take Monin long to realise there was plenty of information for a book. Monin lives with her husband and documentary-making partner, Welshman Andrew Gallimore in Dublin, and with family living on Waiheke Island, she found herself well-placed to follow the trail of Heeney's story, scattered across the globe in old newspapers, memoirs, letters, photo albums and people's memories.
Monin collected about 200 photographs and discovered a surprisingly large amount of archive film.
Though primarily a documentary maker (Monin and Gallimore have made series on the history of landmines, war crimes and genocide) this is her third book _ the others were about landmines and famous writers to have visited New Zealand. She and Gallimore are now well down the track on a feature-length documentary about Heeney's life.
That there is so much material about Heeney reflects not only the interest there was in him but an enduring public interest in boxing, back to when it was illegal and bouts were fought in seedy back rooms of taverns. Its appeal, suggests Monin, is that it is primal: "Two guys, pretty much naked facing each other."
"I think that vulnerability is one reason why writers have been so fascinated by it ... it's a metaphor for so many other battles in life."
Heeney's cause was helped by the attention of renowned writers. Damon Runyon (the musical Guys And Dolls was based on two Runyon stories) dubbed the New Zealander "The Hard Rock From Down Under". "Honest Tom" was another sobriquet.
"Some of the best sportswriters who ever lived were based in Manhattan at the time that Tom made his transition from little-known boxer to global celebrity, the likes of Runyon, Paul Gallico, Bill McGeehan and Grantland Rice," says Monin.
"They were socialising with Tom, watching him train, watching him fight and of course writing about everything he did."
Everyone wanted to know him. "At the time Tom was fighting in New York, most of the fans would have been Irish. A lot of the boxers changed their names to Irish names because the most popular boxers were Irish and it was all about the money taken at the gate."
Tom's genuine Irish heritage was hyped by his manager but he was also described as a New Zealander, an Australian, and British.
Monin says Heeney was a dogged, persevering, uncomplaining slogger who was known to be able to take a lot of punishment. He was also known for his honesty and friendliness.
Writers such as Gallico (author of The Snow Goose and The Poseidon Adventure) didn't seek to make more of him than he was. "A strong willing fellow with a short, stocky body and very short arms," wrote Gallico. "He has a fairly strong chin and when slammed on the button acts the way nine-tenths of our heavyweights do. He falls to the floor and squirms, but arises whenever possible."
"A squat, corrugated-ribbed granite-jawed, super-courageous slugger, who could not hit a barn door if it happened to be swinging," was the summation of another writer.
Heeney himself never sought to complicate the business of boxing. He once said he never went into the ring with a plan. "You never know what the other fellow is going to do, so why worry about it in advance?"
His lack of pretension (he hated public speaking) was popular with fight fans, especially in contrast with the educated and sophisticated Tunney, who was seen as aloof.
Heeney was most remembered for the courage he showed against Tunney and returned to a hero's welcome in Gisborne. Heeney continued to box for another five years, losing often, and ended with a record of 37 wins, 22 losses and 8 draws.
After his boxing career, Heeney joined the minority of former boxers to succeed in business, opening a bar in Miami with his American wife, Marion. He was a friend of the writer Ernest Hemingway, and the two went fishing together.
Heeney was inducted into the New Zealand Sports Hall of Fame in 1996, 12 years after he died aged 86 in a Miami resthome.
BOB FITZSIMMONS
*Tom Heeney fared better in retirement than Timaru boxer Bob Fitzsimmons, who won three world titles including the heavyweight division.
*Fitzsimmons died, aged 54, in Chicago of pneumonia in 1917. Says a notation in Wikipedia: having four wives, a gambling habit and a susceptibility to confidence tricksters, Fitzsimmons did not hold on to the money he made.
- From Poverty Bay to Broadway: The Story Of Tom Heeney by Lydia Monin, was published this week.
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EPIC COURAGE: GENE TUNNEY V TOM HEENEY, YANKEE STADIUM, NEW YORK CITY, 26 JULY 1928
The position of challenger was keenly contested in a series of elimination bouts, though the press was less-than-enthused. "Plodding Thomas Heeney is about the best of a very bad lot of contenders," Bill McGeehan wrote in the New York Herald Tribune under the heading `Mortification Has Set In'.
Grantland Rice at least acknowledged Heeney's grit. "Through his march into the challenger's corner the Anzac was the triumph of mediocrity, hooked to deep earnestness, rare courage and iron-shod durability," he wrote.
Heeney himself didn't exactly talk up his prospects. "Nothing would please me better than to represent the Old Country in a world's title fight, and, fit and well, I guarantee I'd not disgrace myself," he said while holidaying in England.
Much was made of the differences between the literature-loving Tunney and Heeney, who professed to have read six books in his life _ his favourite being a biography of Ned Kelly.
Heeney had the chance to become the only New Zealand-born world heavyweight champion. As the fighters were introduced, Heeney stood in the ring draped in a Maori cloak given to him by the widow of politician Sir James Carroll.
Heeney's brothers, Jack, Artie and Pat, had made the voyage from Gisborne and sat ringside, 26 rows back.
His parents, Hugh and Eliza, sat beside the radio in a friend's house in Gisborne where 3000 citizens gathered downtown in front of 2ZM, which relayed the fight over two loudspeakers.
Round 1A sweeping left hook almost had Tunney off his feet. The champion responded with a right to Heeney's head, one of the hardest blows of the fight, but it was his lefts that most bothered Heeney who later said Tunney had the "most perfect straight left I ever saw. Every time it landed it jarred you to the back of your teeth."
Round 2 Heeney staggered Tunney with a right to the jaw ("At that moment I had visions of the championship coming to me"), but Heeney took a lot of punches to the head. The bell sounded to end the round and people stood and cheered.
Tunney took several telling blows in the early rounds but by the fourth the result seemed inevitable. Bleeding from his nose and an eye, a punch thudded against Heeney's ribs "with such a resounding smack it sounded like the booming of a Maori drum", wrote McGeehan.
Heeney, blinded in an eye, took a terrible battering but won fans for his courage. "Heeney's fighting style of always coming on in the face of punishment," said Tunney later, "made the ideal situation for my left jab to the face."
Round 10Late in the round Heeney seemed done. "Heeney came out of that exchange ready for the work of a killer," wrote Gallico, "and Tunney ... let him have that right, and he cocked his body the way a golfer does to lend power." Heeney's head cracked against the floor.
His cornermen worked frantically with water, ice and iodine. "It wouldn't have done any great good if they had thrown the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans on the broken challenger, now approaching a shambling wreck," wrote Rice.
Gallico, seated directly beneath Heeney's corner, despised those efforts to keep Heeney in the fight. "The carcass was beaten, they knew, and so, with all the slobbering greed of jackals, they strove to awaken that which is stronger than flesh."
Heeney, unconscious minutes earlier, bounded at Tunney when the bell sounded for the 11th of the 15 scheduled rounds. Gallico: "How he came to know what was wanted of him not even he will know. It was an epic of courage."
The fight was stopped 2m 52sec into the 11th round. The margin of victory was as wide, wrote Rice, "as the gap between New York City and Gisborne, New Zealand."
But Heeney's fame and fortune were sealed.
