Cruelly cut short by the final bell

SIX years ago, one of the country’s premier literary publishers -- Ecco -- almost single-handedly reinvigorated boxing stories as a writerly genre with an astonishing collection of short fiction by a previously unpublished writer.

The book was called “Rope Burn” and its author was F.X. Toole. Today, both are recalled mainly because one of the collection’s novella-length stories, “Million Dollar Baby,” was adapted into Clint Eastwood’s multiple Academy Award-winning film of the same name.

F.X. Toole was the pseudonym of a onetime fighter named Gerry Boyd, who was born in Long Beach, lived in Los Angeles and had a 22-year career as a trainer and cut man, mostly on the local boxing circuit. Along the way, he also studied theater and worked as a longshoreman, bartender and various other things. (In the interest of full disclosure, Boyd and this reviewer -- who spent several happy years as a boxing writer -- were friendly acquaintances. For a time, we frequented the same Irish bar, where we often smoked cigars and discussed our mutual interest in the fights and Ireland’s language and literature.)

Toole was 70 when his first book came out. Two years later, while working on a novel, he died after emergency heart surgery. His last words were, “Doc, get me just a little more time. I gotta finish my book.”

“Pound for Pound” is a fascinating, frequently engrossing version of what that book might have been. As James Ellroy points out in his introduction, the manuscript Toole left behind ran to some 900 pages. Toole’s agent, Nat Sobel, and freelance editor James Wade shaped this version -- and did a discreet and respectful job of it. Still, more than 500 pages is a heck of a cut, and the difference between a writer’s manuscript -- however elaborate -- and the novel ultimately published frequently is more than substantial.

What Toole finally would have made of this material is anybody’s guess. As a novel, “Pound for Pound” is a lot like one of the four-round amateur fighters Toole describes with such authority: There’s enough talent to keep you interested, but not quite enough science to go the distance with the pros.

The characters here will be familiar to anybody who read or watched “Million Dollar Baby.” Dan Cooley is an ex-fighter, now a trainer and cut man and proprietor of a Hollywood auto body shop and gym, which he operates with one of his ex-fighters, Earl Daw, an African American. As the story picks up, Dan -- the son of Irish immigrants -- has buried his wife and all four of his children, and is raising his grammar-school-age grandson, Tim Pat. When the boy is bullied on his way to parochial school, Dan and Earl take him into the gym and teach him to box.

The boy has heart and talent, faces down his tormenter and then begins working his way through youth competitions. After winning one of those, he’s standing at an ice cream truck outside the gym when he’s struck by a car and killed. It’s a pure accident -- nobody’s fault -- but Dan is unhinged by his grief, descends into heavy drinking, stalks the Chicana schoolgirl who was driving the car and comes within a hairsbreadth of killing her. Unable to do that, he plots suicide, but is drawn back from the abyss by the necessity of caring for a dog he rescues from the side of the road. The animal, it turns out, has been used as a sparring partner for pit bulls and has had its vocal cords cut.

Meanwhile, in San Antonio, a parallel narrative unfolds involving a dedicated and talented young fighter named Chicky Garza, who happens to be the grandson of the boxer whose dirty tactics ended Dan’s own career in the ring and denied him his shot at a title. How Dan ends up training Chicky and comes to terms with the grandfather and the girl who accidentally killed Tim Pat forms the book’s breakneck conclusion.

“Pound for Pound” contains some of the most lucidly crystalline descriptions of boxing and the day-to-day training of fighters ever written. There also are wonderfully laconic dialogue sequences of the sort that made “Million Dollar Baby” memorable. Here’s the opening exchange between Dan and Sally Gonzalez, the vet who saves his dog:

“ ‘Is that your dog?’

“Dan said, ‘No, I’m just the dummy who stopped to help.’ He explained the situation.

“ ‘Never save nothing that eats.’

“ ‘Huh?’

“ ‘It tells the world you’re easy.’ ”

There are finely detailed descriptive passages about Los Angeles, particularly the working end of Hollywood, hard up against Melrose between Highland and Vine, where Dan’s house, body shop and gym are located. Toole gets the look and feel of Christ the King Catholic Church on Rossmore just right, and Tim Pat’s route to the parish school is pitch perfect. Here’s the atmosphere, as the disconsolate Cooley grieves over his dead grandson:

“The change of seasons in Los Angeles can slip right by you. July and August usually are hot, but it can stay hot into October. January first can get hotter for the Rose Bowl game than the Fourth of July. But Dan was as oblivious to the weather as he was to everything else.

“At the gym in Hollywood, Dan would stare at himself in a wall mirror and wonder if he’d gone brain dead.

“ ‘Might as well have.’

“He struggled with whisky every day. He’d be drunk for a stretch, then not.”

Most writers enter fiction through the autobiographical door and gradually pass on to more richly peopled places. Age and time deprived Toole of the opportunity to make that journey and, thus, his book has both the strengths and weaknesses of a first novel centered on the self and animated by its experiences. The strength, of course, is authenticity -- and when the life at issue is as compelling as Toole’s, that’s a fine thing indeed. (It’s a given that few of us ever sees ourselves precisely as we really are, but as Irish playwright Brian Friel once said, “An autobiographical fact may be a lie and no less true for all of that.”) The deficiency is that when a writer like Toole moves further from the character based on himself, the geography of the imagination -- and all who inhabit it -- flattens considerably.

In a writerly sense, it’s less a failure of empathy than of the footwork that only comes when you’ve put in the time.

Similarly, just as sentimentality is what a certain kind of Irish American has instead of real feelings, so coincidence is the thing on which an inexperienced novelist relies when narrative cohesion flags. Toole only occasionally flirts with the former, but the latter plays a larger part in pushing “Pound for Pound” forward than the author might have wished -- if he’d had the opportunity to work through the entire story.

One of the most tantalizing things about “Pound for Pound” is the impression it leaves that Toole had in mind a meditation on forgiveness. There are hints throughout -- and not only in the rather breathless and less-than-convincing conclusion -- that he intended to bind Dan Cooley’s picaresque odyssey with an exposition on the healing necessity of forgiving the self and others. In some ways, boxing is the perfect metaphor for that process -- conflict occurs, indeed is the purpose, but proceeds according to rules and, when it is over, the antagonists, winner and loser, shake hands and part in respect, if not friendship. If Toole/Boyd had had the opportunity to strip away some of the cinematic melodrama from this novel and to polish this theme the results could have been memorable.

F.X. Toole was an extraordinary talent and the short stories in “Rope Burn” are among the best American boxing fiction ever written. As a novel, though, “Pound for Pound” is like a promising career cut short by misfortune. Read it for its touching conviction, for the bits that work almost as stories on their own -- and muse as you might on the record of some classy fighter who had the heart but not the luck and never quite got his shot.