James Joseph Tunney was born on May 25, 1897, in New York City to Irish immigrant parents, John Tunney of Kiltimagh, County Mayo, and Mary Lydon, who had left Ireland following the Great Famine; the couple raised seven children, according to his Wikipedia biography. Inspired in part by President Theodore Roosevelt’s emphasis on physical fitness, young Tunney took up boxing in his teenage years while working an office job in New York, a background far removed from the corporate boardrooms he would later join.

Tunney turned professional in 1915, earning $18 for a seven round knockout win over a fighter named Bobby Dawson, a payday that reportedly exceeded his weekly office salary, according to Encyclopedia.com’s profile of his career. He enlisted in the US Marine Corps during World War I and served with the 11th Marine Regiment in France and during the postwar occupation of the Rhineland, seeing no combat but excelling on the Marine boxing team; he won the S.O.S. light heavyweight title in March 1919 and the American Expeditionary Forces light heavyweight championship the following month, according to his Wikipedia biography.

Back in the United States, Tunney built a light heavyweight rivalry with Harry Greb that would define his early career, losing a decision to Greb at Madison Square Garden in May 1922, the only defeat of his professional career, before avenging it to reclaim the American light heavyweight title in February 1923; Tunney finished 3-1-1 across their five meetings, according to his Wikipedia biography. A 15th round knockout of French contender Georges Carpentier at the Polo Grounds in July 1924 established him as a legitimate heavyweight, setting up a title shot against the sport’s dominant champion, Jack Dempsey.

Tunney won the world heavyweight championship from Jack Dempsey by unanimous decision on September 23, 1926, in front of more than 120,000 fans at Philadelphia’s Sesquicentennial Stadium, a gate worth roughly $2 million, according to Encyclopedia.com. He defended the title against Dempsey in their September 1927 rematch at Chicago’s Soldier Field, remembered as the “Long Count Fight,” a bout that drew a $2,658,660 gate and paid Tunney a $990,445 purse against $447,500 for Dempsey, boxing’s first seven figure payday once rounded up, according to Wikipedia’s account of the fight. He retired undefeated as champion after stopping Tom Heeney in the 11th round at Yankee Stadium in July 1928, finishing 82-1-3 with 2 no contests, and was named the inaugural Ring magazine Fighter of the Year, according to the New World Encyclopedia.

Despite beating the far more popular Dempsey twice, Tunney never matched his rival’s standing with fight fans, who mocked him for reading literature in training camp and delivering a lecture on Shakespeare at Yale in 1927; when newspapers reported he was reading “The Way of All Flesh,” one member of Dempsey’s camp reportedly laughed that “the so-and-so is up there reading a book,” according to Yahoo Sports’ account of the rivalry. Sportswriter A.J. Liebling later argued that Tunney “is belittled to this day” simply for having beaten a more beloved champion, a verdict that shaped his public reputation even as he collected the sport’s top individual honor and later entered the World Boxing Hall of Fame in 1980 and International Boxing Hall of Fame in 1990, according to the New World Encyclopedia.

No consumer product endorsement contract in the modern sense was found in the sourcing for this profile. Tunney’s outside-the-ring income in this category came instead from authorship, lecture appearances and a starring role in the 1926 film “The Fighting Marine,” income streams typical of a champion of his era rather than a branded sponsorship deal, according to his Wikipedia biography, which documents his film and writing work. None of the specific fees he earned for personal appearances or lectures, including his widely covered 1927 Shakespeare lecture at Yale, were disclosed publicly, and no dedicated sponsorship deal comparable to a modern athlete endorsement was documented anywhere in the sourcing for this profile.

After retiring from the ring at 31, Tunney built what several profiles describe as a genuinely lucrative second career in business, sitting on 12 corporate boards of directors and serving as CEO of two companies, reportedly quadrupling his income by personally managing his own investment portfolio and reading balance sheets rather than delegating to mutual funds or outside advisors, according to Baseball in the Attic’s profile of his post-boxing career. He was elevated to chairman of the board of the American Distilling Company in 1938 and served as a corporate director for several other companies and banks, according to EBSCO’s research profile of his life. He also earned ongoing income as an author, publishing “Boxing and Training” in 1928, “A Man Must Fight” in 1932 and “Arms for Living” in 1941, and later contributing the boxing entry to Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1945, according to Encyclopedia.com.

Tunney’s best documented asset outside boxing was real estate. In 1946 he purchased the former Havemeyer estate in Stamford, Connecticut, for $178,000, then partnered with builder Arthur M. Starck to form the Stamford Building Company and develop the land into Cape Cod style housing for returning World War II veterans, priced so that a $1,000 bank loan could secure a $10,000 home; the development, eventually 360 homes on streets named for wartime commanders such as MacArthur and Nimitz, became known as Havemeyer Park, according to Christopher Fountain’s history of the development. He and his wife otherwise settled permanently in Stamford, Connecticut, where he lived for the rest of his life.