TUNNEY INVITED TO SPEAK AT YALE ON SHAKESPEARE

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 305, 16 March 1928, Page 11

TUNNEY INVITED TO SPEAK AT YALE ON SHAKESPEARE

The exemplary and quite extraordinary erudition of James Joseph (Gene) Tunney is soon to brighten up the halls of learning (says an American journal). According to a recent announcement by Prof. William Lyon Phelps, noted ho'lder of the chair in English at Yale University, the world’s heavyweight champion is to lecture before Prof. Phelps’s Shakespeare class some time in April. Prof. Phelps and Tunney met a few weeks ago in Florida, where the champion was undergoing preliminary training for his next fight. Tunney, it is said, so impressed the college luminary with his knowledge of English literature that Prof. Phelps invited him to address his students on Shakespeare, and Gene readily consented. Though only a comparatively few years have intervened between them, it is surely a far cry, intellectually speaking, from John L. Sullivan, heavyweight champion, to Gene Tunney, heavyweight champion. Tunney, of course, is to be highly commended for his love of and pursuit of knowledge. Although he thus earns the respect of enlightened men and women, it is also true that the rougher element of fistiana views his penchant for the classics as a pose and regards Gene as “high hat.” These fellows like their fistic champions to say “dese, dose and dem,” and speak out of the corners of their mouths. You can’t please everybody.