Hands-on work of the Rope Burns

`I'm not the one who decides when to stop the fight, and I don't stitch up cuts once the fight's over. And it's not my job to hospitalise a boy for brain damage. My job is to stop blood so the fighter can see enough to keep on fighting. I do that, maybe I save a boy's title. I do that one little thing, and I'm worth every cent they pay me. I stop the blood and save the fight, the boy loves me more than he loves his daddy.' - From Rope Burns, by FX Toole

There is something about boxing that the best of them have always found intoxicatingly alluring. In the first half of the 20th Century Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, and Paul Gallico took their turns probing the mindset of the fighter; and everyone from Budd Schulberg and Norman Mailer to George Plimpton, Hunter S Thompson, and Joyce Carol Oates has, at one time or another, felt obliged to have a go at the Sweet Science.

Over the past several weeks the world of the literati appears to have gone gaga over Rope Burns, which represents FX Toole's maiden voyage into the world of fiction, turning its 70-year-old author into a most unlikely celebrity.

I won't pretend to have "discovered" Rope Burns, but I did stumble upon it in a roundabout fashion before most of my boxing acquaintances did. Several months ago a friend had written, asking my opinion of Toole's work.

This question was phrased in the offhand manner of "what do you think of Lewis' jab?" or "how about De La Hoya's corner?" although I must confess that, at the time, I'd never heard of FX Toole. Reluctant to display my ignorance, I determined that it might be prudent to investigate this Toole fellow before replying.

I managed to track down a short story called The Cut Man, which had been published last year in a London-based literary magazine called The Richmond Review.

The story was a knockout. Not only could the man write, his command of the language was exceeded only by the uncommon accuracy of his knowledge of the inner workings of the fight game. This wasn't some dilettante poet's stab at romanticising the fight game, but a guy who knew his stuff.

And, I must confess, I found this oddly troubling. Like a lot of other boxing people I was smelling a rat. The contributor's note, after all, claimed that "FX Toole has spent his entire career in the world of professional boxing. He has been both a trainer and a cut man, and still is."

Impossible. I'd never heard of him. And neither had anyone else I asked. "And I thought I knew everybody in the business out here," said Freddie Roach, Steve Collins' former trainer who works with boxers in the same ratty California gyms in which this Toole fellow would supposedly be a familiar face.

The answer to this bewildering mystery has unfolded with the publication of Rope Burns, and the concomitant acclaim which has been heaped upon its author. Finding himself splashed across the pages of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, as well as on television programs here and there didn't do much for Toole's attempt at anonymity.

Turns out, its author is indeed a bona fide gym rat and vagabond California cornerman, only his name isn't FX Toole, it's Jerry Boyd, and he hasn't spent his whole life immersed in boxing, just the last 20 years of it.

Which is a lot longer than he's been writing, or at least publishing, his work. While he was working the mostly minor-league California circuit so memorably described in Leonard Gardner's Fat City a quarter-century ago, Boyd/Toole quietly moonlighted as a closet writer, accumulating an impressive collection of rejection slips along the way.

Three years ago, a San Francisco literary magazine called Zyzzyva published one of his short stories called The Monkey Look. (The same story which turned up in England, retitled The Cut Man, it comprises the lead piece in Rope Burns, a collection of five stories and a novella.) Nat Sobel, the New York literary agent, read The Monkey Look, tracked down its author, and asked him if he had any more like it.

Jerry Boyd, of course, had several desk drawers full of them. Sobel proceeded to get a reported $100,000 advance for the book. HBO paid at least as much to option the movie rights. Boyd, whose biggest career payday in the corner was $1,260 was, suddenly, for the first time in his life, solvent.

Rope Burns has been universally praised, and the most frequent comparisons have been to early Hemingway. In truth, Toole's prose and milieu owe more to Gardner than Hemingway, but that the latter was a profound influence on how Jerry Boyd has lived his life is undeniable: Married three times, he has been at various times a bootblack, cab driver, bartender, and even a bullfighter.

Always fascinated by the fight game, he didn't take it up until he was 50, and no, he didn't jump straight into the corner with a spit bucket. Rather, he showed up at the gym, learned the ropes, and finally summoned the courage to engage a trainer, who did his best to discourage Boyd by regularly bloodying his nose. Instead, he only whetted his appetite for - and his understanding of - the Sweet Science.

Jerry Boyd has spent the past two decades as a white man in a milieu dominated by blacks and Hispanics, and FX Toole manages to recreate the dialogue of ethnicity as accurately as he does the smell of the gym itself.

Although the narrators of his stories are sometimes black and sometimes white, the stories have one thread in common: Somewhere in them, a major character, whether he's a trainer or a cutman or a gym owner, is a wise old Irish (or Irish-American) fellow, and you can take it to the bank that whether he is named Frankie Dunn or Mac McGee or Pats Moran or Con Flutey, he is every bit as much Jerry Boyd as is his other alter ego, FX Toole.

"Boxing is an unnatural act," whispered the voice. "Understand me on this, kid. Everything in boxing is backwards to life. You want to move to the left, you don't step left, you push off the right toe, like this. To move right, you use the left toe, see?" The old white man didn't look into your eyes, he looked clear through your eyes, and straight to the inside of the back of your head.