It was a real delight to be able to return to Gisborne recently for the launch of From Poverty Bay to Broadway. It was only fitting. Tom Heeney may have become world famous while he was living in New York, but he spent his formative years in Gisborne. That’s where he was born, went to school, entered the workforce, enlisted for the Great War and began his professional boxing career. His unexpected success in boxing came relatively late; he was well into his twenties when he left Gisborne.

Tom travelled the world, leaving a trail of information about his life that stretches from New Zealand to Europe and the United States, and I was lucky enough to be able to follow much of that trail. I too, began the journey in Gisborne, a place I’d only visited occasionally when I was younger. But after touring around Tom’s childhood haunts – Kaiti, St Mary’s school, Gladstone Road, Waikanae Beach – a picture of his daily routine emerged.   

It’s always valuable to see and experience places that are significant to someone’s story. It helps to imagine what life was like for him or her; a bit like the ‘In the footsteps of …’ tours that have become very popular with sightseers – Jane Austen tours are part of Britain’s multi-million pound ‘Austen industry’ for example – except that I’m both the guide and the only participant, and the route unfolds bit by bit as the research progresses. Sometimes a key building still exists, like the New York apartment Tom and his new bride took refuge in as the city’s reporters tried to get the scoop on their elopement. But the New York gyms Tom trained in have disappeared, as has Madison Square Garden III, the scene of some of his most important fights where he earned today’s equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars in one night. Either way it doesn’t really matter. The important thing is to get a feel for a place, to imagine Tom running around Central Park, taking the train from Manhasset (where he lived during the Depression) to Penn Station, or dining at a tavern in the roaring forties after a fight at the Garden. Old New York seems ever present on the streets of Manhattan (‘To him, no matter what the season was, this was still a town that existed in black and white and pulsated to the great tunes of George Gershwin,’ says the narrator in Woody Allen’s film Manhattan) and I couldn’t help but feel the spirit of the roaring twenties even more keenly while researching Tom’s life there.

A real bonus of these journeys is either seeing a place for the first time or correcting pre-conceived notions. I had an image of New Jersey as a bleak, industrial sprawl. Yet during one trip there I ended up in an area that was all perfectly manicured lawns, chocolate box villas, fireflies and great local wine. Another New Jersey visit took in the lush and green Fair Haven, where Tom laboured in a heatwave for weeks as he trained for his world title fight with Gene Tunney. In July 2007 it was sweltering, just as it had been in July 1928.

Following someone else’s footsteps can lead to a greater understanding of already familiar places. Researching the story of Tom’s brief visit to Dublin in 1926, I walked up O’Connell Street, looking for the ticket office at number 8 that had done a great trade in seats for Tom’s fight against Bartley Madden. Interested to see what the layout of the street was in 1926, I later consulted a local directory for that year. Number 8 was home to several businesses including the ticket office and a dental surgery. Next the directory listed ‘9 to 17 ruins’. 17a was occupied by a merchant tailor and then came ‘18-18a ruins’. 19 and 19a were occupied but 20 to 22 were ‘ruins’. Street directories are usually pretty dry sources. But this one offered a vivid picture of O’Connell Street, post-Civil War, people going about their business amongst the rubble and the rebuilding.

I find it hard to pass the Auckland Town Hall now without thinking of a tragic bout that took place there in 1923 between Tom and a young Southlander, Cyril Whitaker. It’s not a pleasant association, but the sad events of that night are important. They will always be part of Tom’s story, the Town Hall’s story, Auckland history, New Zealand boxing history and most importantly of course, Whitaker family history.

Researching and writing history is largely a solitary job, but occasionally other people join one of my ‘In the footsteps of …’ tours. When two of my uncles visited Dublin recently they ended up in an apartment a couple of blocks from Barry’s Hotel, where Tom stayed. Barry’s has a bar, so I took them there for a drink, amid the spirits of Tom, his trainer and the Dublin newspaper reporter who tracked the New Zealander down for an interview in the hotel before the Madden fight.

From New York to New Jersey, Auckland to Gisborne to Dublin. I’d clocked up thousands of miles but it felt like a journey back in time as well. And like any good journey it enhanced my understanding of the world and left me with some enduring memories. But it’s always nice to return home and begin planning the next adventure.

I have a confession to make. While researching Tom Heeney’s life at the peak of his boxing career when he was one of the most famous people in the world I couldn’t have asked for better source material. I was spoiled. How many of today’s top athletes talk to sports journalists who also write poetry, novels and short stories and are considered such gifted writers they are celebrities in their own right even before they’ve created the works they will ultimately be most famous for?

When Tom Heeney arrived in New York at the beginning of 1927 the golden age of sports was at its height; but it wouldn’t have been the golden age of sports if hadn’t also been the golden age of sports writers. Scurrying back and forth from their newspaper offices in downtown Manhattan to boxing arenas, baseball parks, racing tracks, golf courses and tennis courts were some of the best sports writers who ever lived: Bill McGeehan, Paul Gallico (best known for The Snow Goose and The Poisedon Adventure), Grantland Rice and Damon Runyon (of Guys and Dolls fame) to name a few. Not only were they as famous as many of the people they wrote about, they helped to make their subjects even more famous. Their pieces were sophistocated, insightful, funny and evocative. What’s really impressive is that they were hammered out day after day, often after an evening spent at ringside in order to make the following afternoon’s paper, yet each one was finely crafted.

Paul Gallico could start a column by writing about the previous night’s boxing match or a brief conversation he’d had with a colleague in the office, and expand the theme of it into something quite profound: the ethics of boxing; the poignancy of the fighter who cannot accept he should quit; the ‘jungle rules’ of the game that mean from the very second a new champion is crowned he is under threat from the youngster, somewhere, already preparing to dethrone him; or a descriptive piece about the faded glamour of Madison Square Garden during the Depression years.

Bill McGeehan’s speciality was to tease out a particularly good joke over weeks or even months, reprising it whenever the opportunity arose. One of his favourites involved the so-called British ‘horizontal heavyweights’ like Joe Beckett, who was renowned for ending up sprawled on the canvas early in his fights. When Tom came on the New York boxing scene McGeehan described him as a British fighter with the rare ability to remain vertical because he did everything standing up, even sleeping.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of non-fiction writers becoming emotionally involved with their subjects, it’s intriguing how Gallico, especially, really seemed to like Tom. Despite the New Zealander’s ‘man of few words’ reputation, his strange accent and the inevitable cultural differences, Gallico wrote sympathically about Tom. There was the sweltering training camp in New Jersey that seemed to serve everyone’s interests but Tom, and the injustice of an official knockout by Max Baer when the New Zealander was much more the victim of a timekeeping fiasco than he was of Baer’s fists. Gallico was also a lone dissenting voice among his peers when he accused Tom’s New York manager, whose honesty and gentlemanly demeanour was legendary, of heartlessness in the final, brutal stages of the Tunney fight.

After he’d retired, Tom became firm friends with the most famous writer of the twentieth century. Ernest Hemingway saw numerous similarities between boxing and writing. The boxer has the support of a trainer and manager until the bell rings, when he faces his opponent alone in the middle of the canvas. He is naked figuratively and barring a pair of shorts⎯ literally. A writer has the support of an editor and publisher but like the boxer, stands alone to be judged once the work is released. The primal nature of boxing has fascinated great writers for centuries. But to have so many clustered around Tom, witnessing his rapid transition from little-known boxer to world famous celebrity I was lucky indeed.