From Poverty Bay to Broadway

On 26 July 1928 Tom Heeney entered the ring at New York's Yankee Stadium, in front of 46,000 spectators, wearing a Maori cloak. Guaranteed $100 000, he was about to fight world heavyweight champion Gene Tunney. In his hometown of Gisborne crowds cheered him on in what was described as 'the most ambitious radio station hook-up in history'. This was the golden, Mafia-controlled, era of American boxing. This extensively researched book follows the life of one of New Zealand's most colourful sports personalities from a labourer's cottage in Gisborne to the nightclubs of Broadway, to fishing in Florida with Ernest Hemingway. It reveals both the infamous (he killed a man with one punch, left another for dead on the canvas, and ran with gunmen, gangsters and racketeers) and the famous (he was New Zealand's first global sporting hero who became a member of the 'smart set' as the Jazz Age roared through Manhattan) Tom Heeney.