John R. Tunis

John Roberts Tunis (December 7, 1889 – February 4, 1975), "the 'inventor' of the modern sports story", was an American writer and broadcaster. Known for his juvenile sports novels, Tunis also wrote short stories and non-fiction, including a weekly sports column for the ''New Yorker'' magazine. As a commentator Tunis was part of the first trans-Atlantic sports cast and the first broadcast of the Wimbledon Tennis Tournament to the United States.

After graduating from Harvard and serving in the Army during World War I, Tunis began his writing career freelancing for American sports magazines while playing tennis in the Riviera. For the next two decades he wrote short stories and articles about sports and education for magazines including ''Reader's Digest'', ''The Saturday Evening Post'' and ''Esquire''. Tunis' work often protested the increasing professionalization of sports in America. He believed that amateur participation in sports taught values important for good citizenship like perseverance, fair play and equality, and that the emphasis on professional sports was turning America into a country of spectators. His sports books also tackled current social issues such as antisemitism and racial equality.

Though Tunis never considered himself a children's writer, all but one of his twenty-four books were published for juveniles; their success helped create the juvenile fiction book market in the 1940s. Books like ''Iron Duke'' (1938), ''All American'' (1942) and ''Keystone Kids'' (1943) were well received by readers and critics. ''Iron Duke'' received the New York Herald Tribune Spring Book Festival Award for best juvenile novel and was named a The Horn Book Magazine Best Book. The Child Study Association of America gave its Golden Scroll Award to ''Keystone Kids''.

Tunis' eight-book baseball series about the Brooklyn Dodgers began with ''The Kid from Tomkinsville'', a book often cited by sports writers and commentators as inspiring childhood reading. Phillip Roth used ''The Kid from Tomkinsville'' and its main character Roy Tucker in his book '' American Pastoral''. It is also considered an influence for Bernard Malamud's ''The Natural'' and Mark Harris' ''Bang the Drum Slowly''.

Early years

John Roberts Tunis was born December 7, 1889 to John Arthur and Caroline Greene Roberts Tunis, a teacher, in Boston, Massachusetts. John Arthur came from a well-to-do family, which he upset by leaving the Episcopalian church to become a Unitarian minister. His family disowned him when he married Caroline, the daughter of a waiter. When Tunis was seven and his brother Robert five their father died of Bright's disease; no one from the Tunis side of the family attended the funeral. After his death their mother taught at Brearley School for girls in Manhattan, later moving the family to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she ran a boarding house.

Tunis' maternal grandfather encouraged the brothers to take an interest in baseball. Two of young Tunis' heroes were Boston Nationals' baseball players Billy Hamilton and Fred Tenney. At age fourteen Tunis and his brother, too poor to pay the admission price, managed to watch a Davis Cup tennis match by climbing on top of a brewery wagon outside the courts. Tunis played tennis at Cambridge Latin School, then followed in his father's footsteps to Harvard where he competed in tennis and ran track. He graduated from Harvard with a B. A. in 1911, then got a job in a Newburyport, Massachusetts, cotton mill. Tunis became an officer in the U.S. Army, serving in France during World War I. On February 19, 1918, Tunis married Lucy Rogers in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They did not have any children.

Early career

Freelance writing and sportscasting

In 1921 the couple went to Europe where Tunis freelanced as a sports writer for American publications and played in some tennis tournaments on the Riviera, including a match against King Gustaf V of Sweden, who was 70 at the time. Tunis also played a doubles match against the French women's champion Suzanne Lenglen. Returning to the U.S. at the end of the summer, he dropped in on former Harvard classmate Lawrence Winship, the Sunday editor of ''The Boston Globe''. When Winship learned that Tunis actually knew the flamboyant Lenglen, he insisted he write an article about her for the ''Globe'' before leaving the building. The pressure of that deadline caused him such anxiety that after half an hour of struggle he went to the building's fire escape, "leaned over the railing, and threw up. I'll never forget it. I wiped my face with copy paper. But I did the story." Between 1920 and 1940 Tunis freelanced for a number of major magazines, including ''Reader's Digest'', '' Harper's'', ''Atlantic Monthly'', ''Collier's'', ''The Saturday Evening Post'' and ''Esquire'', writing primarily on two topics: sports and education. He also covered sports for the ''New York Evening Post'' from 1925 to 1932 and had a weekly column in ''The New Yorker''. According to Norman Cousins in ''Writing for Love or Money'', Tunis was known for producing "fact-packed articles based upon research". Working six days a week and taking the seventh to play tennis, Tunis published over 2,000 articles and short stories, becoming one ofAmerica's premier sportswriters.

At the same time, Tunis worked as a sport announcer, including commentating for tennis events for NBC. By 1927 ''The Harvard Crimson'' felt comfortable calling him "a world's authority on tennis". He was part of the first trans-Atlantic sports broadcast, a Davis Cup match from France in 1932. In 1934 Tunis announced the first broadcast of the Wimbledon Tennis Tournament to a U.S. audience. According to Anita Silvey in ''Children's Books and Their Creators'', between broadcasting and journalism Tunis became a "household name".

Novels and sports criticism

Tunis' first novel, ''American Girl'', appeared in 1930. An unflattering and thinly veiled fictionalization of tennis star Helen Wills Moody, it became the basis for the 1951 movie ''Hard, Fast and Beautiful.''This according to Tunis. Some sources say the short story "The Mother of a Champion" was the source. It turned out to be the only one of Tunis' novels to be published for adults.

In 1936, on the 25th anniversary of his graduation from Harvard, Tunis wrote ''Was College Worthwhile?'', a condemnation of the Ivy League school and of his classmates that became a best seller. Jerome Holtzman, in ''No Cheering in the Press Box'', calls it "a searing assault on Harvard traditions". Throughout his career he continued to write about education, including the chapter "New Leaven on the Campus" for ''Democracy's Challenge to Education'', and "Education and Ethics" for the ''Journal of Higher Education''.

The 1920-1930s have been called the Golden Age of Sports, and Tunis was right in the middle of much of it as a commentator, writer, and athlete, but he often criticized what he saw. He disliked the way the media was covering sports and its players. In the 1920s some sports promoters bribed newspapers for favorable coverage, and he felt the media was glorifying the business and ignoring its problems. Tunis also believed that high salaries would destroy the pleasure and benefits sports brought the everyday player. His essay "The Great God Football" appeared in ''Harper's Magazine'' in 1928, attacking what he saw as the increasing commercialization of college football. The article became the center of a continuing controversy. A 2010 ''The Texas Observer