Jerry Boyd, 72; Boxing Trainer Wrote Gritty, Lauded Fiction

Jerry Boyd, a veteran Los Angeles boxing trainer and ringside “cut man” who battled rejection slips for 40 years before becoming a literary sensation at age 70 with a collection of boxing short stories written under the pen name F.X. Toole, has died. He was 72.

Boyd, a Redondo Beach resident, died Sept 2 of complications after heart surgery in a Torrance hospital.

Boyd surprised the regulars at the L.A. Boxing Club near the Olympic Auditorium two years ago when “Rope Burns: Stories From the Corner” was published by Ecco Press, an imprint of HarperCollins.

They had no idea that the tall, lean trainer with the white, brush-cut hair, trim white beard and round, dark-rimmed eyeglasses was a writer.

But Boyd, a rough-and-ready guy who once had a chunk of his right ear chewed off during a street fight with a man he found ransacking his British sports car, preferred to keep his writing separate from his day job.

A latecomer to boxing, Boyd didn’t begin his career as a trainer and cut man, whose job it is to stop the bleeding of battered fighters between rounds, until his early 50s.

By then, he had held a succession of jobs, including bartender, cement truck driver and vat cleaner at a Good Humor Creamery. He even had a stint as a bullfighter in Mexico in the 1950s, during which he was gored three times.

Over the decades, with no formal training other than being an avid reader, Boyd wrote--everything from short stories and novels to plays and screenplays.

But unlike boxers who experience at least the occasional triumph, Boyd knew only disappointment.

Rejection slips, he’d say after they had ceased being a concern, are worse than getting knocked out in boxing.

“For years I’d say ... I don’t have any talent. I’m not going to do it anymore,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle after his book was published.

But then, like a bloodied fighter who manages to raise himself up after being driven to the mat, he would start writing again.

Boyd’s change of literary fortune began in 1999 when he made his first sale--a short story about a cut man who seeks revenge on a scheming boxer--to Zyzzyva, a San Francisco literary journal.

Boyd had sent the story in cold, plucking the literary magazine’s name out of Writer’s Market.

He celebrated the $50 sale by eating three dark chocolates and drinking a glass of single-malt scotch.

To keep his boxing and writing lives separate, Boyd chose the pseudonym F.X. Toole, an amalgamation of Francis Xavier, the 16th century teacher, philosopher and Jesuit saint, and British actor Peter O’Toole.

New York literary agent Nat Sobel, whose clients include James Ellroy, read a copy of the short story “The Monkey Look” in the literary journal and offered to represent Boyd.

Ecco Press reportedly paid a “high five-figure” advance for the collection of five short stories and a novella that became “Rope Burns,” plus a future boxing novel.

“I read a page and I knew I was going to buy the book,” recalled Daniel Halpern, Ecco’s editorial director. “The style was so unpretentious, so clean, so muscular, and the stories were so clear in their intent.

“They have, which so much fiction does not have, subject matter that feels very lived in. And the characters just exploded off the page.”

Ecco Press gave “Rope Burns” a 50,000-copy first printing--large for a collection of short stories by an unknown author--and, Halpern said, it sold well.

“People loved the book,” he said, “because it was the real thing.”

Critics agreed.

A review of “Rope Burns” in The Times called it “a book of chillingly authentic short stories about fighters and fighting written from as far inside as you can get.”

Ellroy, author of “L.A. Confidential,” called the collection “the best boxing short fiction ever written.” And Joyce Carol Oates told the New York Times that F.X. Toole is “a born storyteller who uses the language of the ring.”

Boyd’s son, Gannon, said his father “was very humble” about the critical response to his book and the widespread media attention it brought him.

“He was excited that people had finally started reading his work and appreciating it,” he said.

The son of an Irish immigrant father and a mother raised in Ventura County, Boyd was born in Long Beach and grew up in Gardena, where he worked in gambling clubs as a shoeshine boy during World War II.

Boyd, who began acting in Gardena High School, studied drama at Los Angeles City College and while stationed in Brooklyn in the Navy Reserves in the early 1950s, he studied briefly with acting teacher Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse in Manhattan.

But Boyd quickly discovered that acting wasn’t for him. Inspired by reading Ernest Hemingway’s bullfighting book “Death in the Afternoon,” he took off for Mexico City, where he studied at the university and trained to be a bullfighter.

Boyd was working as an L.A. bartender in the late 1970s when he began frequenting boxing gyms to get in shape.

“Boxing opened up to me, and I was good at it,” he told Newsday two years ago. “All of a sudden I was in the middle of something that I adored being in the middle of.”

Dub Huntley, a professional boxing trainer, began training Boyd and, a few years later, Boyd started helping Huntley train fighters and became Huntley’s cut man.

The two men traveled to fights as far away as Paris and South Africa. But through all their years together, Huntley recalled Wednesday, Boyd never mentioned that he was a writer.

Boyd dedicated “Rope Burns” to his longtime friend.

“Jerry is a guy, I don’t care what would happen--he could have made a million dollars with that book--and he’d still be the same Jerry,” Huntley said. At the time of his death, Boyd was preparing to turn in the manuscript of his boxing novel, set on the Texas-Mexico border. Halpern said he hopes to publish it.

In addition to his son, the thrice-married and divorced Boyd is survived by two other children, Ethan of Tustin and Erin of Rancho Palos Verdes, and three grandchildren.