Hemingway said he admired people who had guts, says Lydia.
“Visually, the letter is different from reading a transcript of a conversation. You can see where he's made some typos with the typewriter and writing angrily.”
Combined collections of Heeney memorabilia contribute to Off the Canvas. Lydia, author, documentary-maker and former TVNZ reporter and producer, had a collection of some of Heeney's possessions that the boxer's good friend in Miami, Mario Castricone, had sent her.
“After Tom died Mario wanted to repatriate some of those things. He sent me quite a bit, so I had my own collection and the museum had their own collection. Bringing it all together as an exhibition is like closing the circle. It's nice to think it's back in Tom's home-town.”
Included are previously unseen archival content from both Lydia's own research files and from Heeney's personal collection, a “listening post” where visitors can listen to radio interviews with the boxer (“He talks about meeting Tunney during the war”) and the korowai given to him by Heni Materoa, the widow of Sir James Carroll. Heeney wore the cloak into the boxing ring before fighting Gene Tunney for the world heavyweight championship title — all are part of Off the Canvas.
Lydia first heard of the Gisborne boxer while she was in New York researching Irish boxers. During her search through microfilm the name Tom Heeney kept popping up.
“He was everywhere. I thought I had better find out more about him.”
Born in Gisborne and of Irish stock, Heeney became a professional boxer when he fought Bill Bartlett in Gisborne in 1920. That same year Heeney became New Zealand heavyweight champion. Two years later he won the Australian heavyweight champion title then fought for “bread and butter stakes” against mediocre heavyweights in England “and not too brilliantly either”, said Tom Kieran in the New York Times.
Heeney went on to fight in South Africa in 1924. In the US in 1926 he was coined the Hard Rock from Down Under and came to rank among the world's heavyweight boxers.
Heeney was not a scientific pugilist but he did have a fantastic capacity to take blows and fought his way to the world heavyweight championships during the jazz age in New York.
“This was the golden age of boxing in the US, when fighters earned hundreds of thousands of dollars and the fight business was controlled by gunmen, gangsters and racketeers,” says Lydia in the blurb to From Poverty Bay to Broadway.
Heeney, though, was “dogged, lucky and, unusually for the time, incorruptible”,
Although unsuccessful in his New York match with Gene Tunney for the world championship title, the public warmed to the man one American reporter described as “hooked to a deep earnestness . . . and iron-shod durability”.
“[He] stood up to the champion for eleven rounds and won universal admiration for his courage and tenacity as a real fighter,” enthused a reporter in a 1957 Gisborne Photo News story.
Heeney remained, of course, Gisborne's, if not the country's, local hero. Hundreds of the town's citizens had crowded outside the town's radio station to listen to a relayed broadcast of the fight that signified the end of prizefighting's golden age.
Clive Drummond, a skilled telegraphist, had to transcribe the commentary from Morse code.
“The people in New Zealand were very interested as Heeney was a New Zealander and they made special arrangements to have the 2YA broadcast reproduced in the various theatres so people could follow the course of the fight,” says Drummond in a recording played on Radio New Zealand.
“It's hard to imagine now,” says Lydia.
“Tom returned to New Zealand shortly after the fight.
“When he came to Gisborne everyone came out to see him. We think of boxing as niche these days but in those days it was the sport.
“This was in the jazz age, the golden age of boxing, the golden age of writing.”
