Ringside Seat

The first stories about boxing that I remember came in a book with a red cover and nice big print. It was called “The Leather Pushers” and the author was H.C. Witwer. The size of the print was important because I had only recently learned to read. The book came with stills from the silent movie serial that was made from the stories; in the background you could see Clark Gable among the extras, although at the time I had no idea who he was. But knowing this had been a movie was what made the book really important. Later there was another boxing serial called “Fighting Blood,” also from stories by Witwer. This starred Reginald Denny who was English, but that didn’t matter because it was still silent and you could make up any accent you wanted. By that time, I was hooked on boxing with some help from my uncles. They would take me on Friday nights to the amateur card sponsored by the American Legion, of which they were faithful members. I remember the vast armory hall that muffled the sounds of the crowd and the hot white lights over the ring and a knockout artist named Eddie Benson whose fights ended so quickly that he rarely broke a sweat.

The first professional fighter who meant anything to me was named Soldier Bartfield. He was a favorite with my uncles because he was a fellow veteran from World War I. He was also Jewish, a source of pride when he won, unmentioned otherwise. But there were better Jewish fighters coming up at that time, usually lightweights or welterweights (Jews didn’t grow bigger until later)--Sid Terris, Ruby Goldstein, Al Singer, Barney Ross and, of course, the matchless Benny Leonard. Fighters, then and now, came from the poor and disenfranchised; Mexicans in California, Poles and Swedes in Chicago, poor whites in the South, Jews, Irish and Italians in New York, blacks everywhere. You rooted by race and religion. Unfortunately, many of these classy Jewish fighters at one time or another met up with a tough Irish puncher named Jimmy McLarnen, who feasted on the discovery that many of them had glass chins. I hated McLarnen.

There has never been much good fiction about boxing. Most writers don’t know enough about it; others never see the fact for the metaphor. Few of them give you the feeling of what it’s like to hit and be hit, that it’s a skill and an art, a profession and a business. That, like all professional sport, it is primarily about money. Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, Ring Lardner, Irwin Shaw, Thom Jones have managed the trick with short stories. Joseph Moncure March wrote an overwrought narrative poem, “The Setup,” that was later made into a movie. A few good novels come to mind: the bleak “Never Come Morning” by Nelson Algren, Budd Schulberg’s “The Harder They Fall,” Leonard Gardner’s “Fat City,” the neat “The Professional” by the sportswriter W.C. Heinz. There has been a lot of nonfiction, from William Hazlitt to A.J. Liebling to Joyce Carol Oates, all trying, some of them very hard, to find significance in two men determined to inflict damage on one another in a small, square ring.

Into this has stepped a welcome addition, F.X. Toole. Now 70 years old, he has produced “Rope Burns,” a book of chillingly authentic short stories about fighters and fighting written from as far inside as you can get. Toole came to boxing, as to writing, late in life. In the middle of his 40s, turning his back on whatever other life he led, he walked into the dark wood of the fight world. He decided to learn how to be a fighter. As he describes himself in the introduction to his book, he had been a fan since childhood. “My father had been a fight fan and I loved him for making me a part of something he loved.” What he found was “Magic, real magic, the real McCoy . . . the magic of going to wars I believe in . . . the magic of winning and losing in a man’s game . . . the magic because it’s a war you’ll go back to every chance you get.” Too old to become a professional fighter, Toole became a cut man, and there was “the magic of stopping blood that maybe another cut man couldn’t.” Everything about the fight game is magical to Toole; good and bad, honest or crooked, it is all magic to him. But when he says magic, what he really means is love.

Toole loves his fighters. He loves their hopes and dreams, their capacity to give and take punishment, and he especially loves their heart. In one way or another, all his stories are about that love, and it gives them an unexpected sweetness. The narrator is a cut man or trainer or gym attendant, a projection of Toole himself: skillful, proud of his ability, honest in a business populated with thieves, getting along in years but still able to handle himself. Everyone respects him even though he may be the only white man in the gym (in two of the stories, he seems black). He is religious, usually Catholic, and conscious of sin. He lives alone, has no close friends or significant others who do not wear eight-ounce gloves to work, and he admires beauty, whether in a landscape when running at dawn with his fighter, in a museum he visits on the day of a big fight or in the pretty moves of a good boxer. “Pretty” is a word he uses regularly to describe that kind of fighter. The essence of this man’s character is that he cares.

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The stories are written sparely and derive much of their power from their authenticity. They take place today or the day before yesterday and radiate from the steamy, sweaty gyms of Los Angeles. To read Toole is to be told all you might want to know about the sweet science. Did you know that “[e]verything in boxing is backwards to life”? “You want to move to the left, you don’t step left, you push on the right toe. To move right, you use the left toe.” It is not about strength, it is about delivering force; Toole will tell you how that is done. Do you wish to slow down your opponent? Hit him on the butt, on the sciatic nerve, and keep hitting him there. It will seriously slow him down after a while. Just be sure you do it while you are between him and the referee. These nuggets of pugilistic wisdom ground the stories in hard truth, but what you remember are the characters.

In “The Monkey Look,” there is Hoolie Garza, a good fighter who cuts easily. However, Hoolie is also a bad person who tries to cheat his cut man out of his share of the purse. How the cut man gets even makes the story not only satisfying but instructive in case you feel the need to keep a fighter bleeding while pretending to staunch his cuts. In the sad “Frozen Water,” it is Dangerous Dillard Fightin Flippo Bam-Bam Barch, the name that a backward young man who cannot fight at all gives himself while imagining he is preparing to fight Thomas “The Hit Man” Hearns. “Fightin in Philly” is about the white cut man Con Flutey and his partner Odell Blue, the black trainer, and their fighter Mookie Bodeen, whom they bring to Philadelphia to fight a big Ugandan, and what happens when they realize during the fight that the referee and probably the judges have been fixed. The detail is impressive: how Mookie is made ready for the fight, the pre-fight rituals, the description of the fight itself. But it is Con’s caring that is memorable. He prays in church before the fight that he will be able to help his fighter prevail and hopes, quoting Hemingway, that he will conduct himself in the corner with grace under pressure.

Then there is Margaret Mary Fitzgerald in “Million $$$ Baby.” This is the most affecting story in the collection and the most touching relationship, that between trailer trash Maggie from Tennessee and the older trainer, Frankie Dunn, who has never had a woman fighter and has no wish to start now. It is as much Frankie’s story as Maggie’s as he reluctantly trains her, helps her rise to the top, comes to love her courage and her spirit and, when tragedy strikes, is forced by that love to make a terrible decision.

Only the most ambitious story, the novella that gives the book its title, fails to satisfy. Once again, it is a relationship between an older trainer and a young promising fighter. This time the fighter is black, the trainer white and the story, without any character development, founders on melodrama. But even here, the solid foundation of fact, the simplicity and clarity of the writing and the empathy with his characters make Toole a writer to welcome and enjoy. Like his good fighters, he is delivering force.