Just finished the new bio of Jim Tully last night — review and miscellaneous thoughts to follow.
And even as I was punching my way toward the final bell, Brian Leno — resident Up and Down These Mean Streets expert on the world of old time boxing — popped in some scans from the September 1947 issue of The Ring with the obit for Tully.
None of the Ring obit makes it into the Tully bio —- you can’t fit each and every piece of info in, without making a book practically unreadable, and the Tully biographers shoot for and hit the readable target.
But I figure it’s worth seeing.
Written by Ring editor Nat Fleischer, it leans toward Tully’s own history as a boxer and writer about boxing, as you’d expect. Only detail that I see Fleischer gets wrong is Tully’s age upon his demise — he had just turned 61 in June 1947.
I especially like that “sorrel-thatched” bit for good old Red Tully.
If you’re interested in exploring the world of this almost forgotten writer, now riding the rediscovery rails, his novel of boxing The Bruiser is one of the titles Kent State University Press has reprinted in a very nice new trade paperback format. A few years back, kind of hard to get, now — for awhile, at least — easy to put a glove on.
