Pound for Pound
By F.X. Toole

Ecco. 384 pp. $25.95

Reviewed by Michael Harrington

F.X. Toole was the pen name of Jerry Boyd, a vagabond adventurer turned middle-aged boxer and then a "cut man" in other fighters' corners. He wrote for 40 years until he finally published his first story in 1999 - at around age 70. That story caught the eye of the estimable literary agent Nat Sobel, who bundled it with some other stories and got the collection published as Rope Burns - though in the paperback edition it was called Million Dollar Baby, after the Oscar-winning film based on two of the stories.

Toole had died of heart disease by the time the movie came out, but he left behind the 900-page manuscript for a novel, Pound for Pound. The book tells parallel stories: one about a Los Angeles trainer, Dan Cooley, struggling against a tide of death, despair and drink that leads to a general loss of faith, both in God and boxing. The second is about an idealistic San Antonio fighter, Chicky Garza, whose dreams of the big-time are complicated by his shady trainers and the drug addiction of his grandfather, who is also his manager. As the novel slowly unfolds, Cooley and Garza are brought together in a way that heals what has been broken in each along the way.

After Toole's death, Sobel and editor James Wade tried to shape this story into a narrative. They failed, but that doesn't mean the novel is a failure. Toole's strength was not narrative, even in his stories. A writer with a keen sense of the tragic, he stuffs his stories with enough accident, heartbreak and coincidence to fuel 20 telenovelas. Though the novel's title refers to ranking boxers without regard to weight classification, the unrelenting tragedy that stalks every single character makes it seem more likely a reference to Shakespeare's "pound of flesh," extracted painfully in exchange for the privilege of enduring life's travail.

The true appeal in Toole's writing is in detail and in his ability as a pure storyteller. He knows things, not just about boxing (that fighters drink glasses of grapefruit juice for potassium; that thrombin, a surgical clotting agent, can stop a cut in the ring), but also about modern life (that gabacho is the Chicano term for gringo, with only gringos using the latter). Even aficionados can learn from Toole about such things as gloves and wrapping, how they differ between pros and amateurs and what a difference they can make. "Wrapped and taped properly, the pro's fist is a lethal weapon. Hands wrapped by a coyote corner man can lengthen a fighter's reach on each hand by as much as three-fourths of an inch inside the glove. Fires ignite and blackouts occur when those fists land."

Toole knows how a gym looks and feels and he tells us in language that glides: "Places on the hardwood floor showed smooth, bare wood around the body bags and beneath the speed bags. There were sixteen-inch spit funnels crusted with years of dry mucous. Hoses ran from the funnels to five-gallon white plastic spit buckets on the floor. Neither ring had padding beneath its slick canvas. These were boxers' rings, no padding meant fast. A workout timer against one wall would mark off three-minute rounds and one-minute rest periods. Once fighters had been in the game for a while, they knew instinctively when the warning buzzer should sound, when the bell would ring. There were no stools to rest on. Fighters don't sit between rounds when sparring."

Since Toole was a natural storyteller, the novel as a whole is less than the sum of its parts, but its parts are amazing. Individual scenes will stay with the reader, such as the reaction of Cooley's 6-year-old grandson to being left orphaned by a plane crash: "He hardly spoke once he knew the bodies had arrived, and had said nothing at the rosary or at the funeral mass, but now he shivered like a cold pup and wanted answers." Or Cooley's delighted discovery of his grandson's boxing skills after the boy is bullied and asks for help, and his rise in the ranks, crushed brutally and suddenly as if by an unseen left hook. Or Chicky Garza's growing desperation when greedy machinations prevent his fighting in an Olympic qualifier.

Toole knows that boxing has a clarity to it. "The fight game was black and white. You could or you couldn't. You did or you didn't." He knows that a fighter's dreams and plans are made more poignant by the physical costs required, both in training and in the ring. But he also knows that, often, the fix is in, someone's on the take, and the winner isn't always the best one in the ring.

"The boxing life is a treacherous one," a fighter says. His trainer agrees, but notes that "it's the only life where you can become the champion of the world."

It's moments like these that will keep readers committing time to this work and that will, in the end, bring the realization that it was all time well-spent. Sure, the novel has a herky-jerky feel and a slow pace that suddenly wraps up in the last 30 or so pages, but that befits a work that was no doubt left as a crate of pages to be pieced together. Sure, it may have been better for the editors to have just rewritten it as a series of interrelated short stories, but who knows what obstacles they faced? As it is, Pound for Pound is gripping in parts and, so, worthwhile as a whole.

And the movie should be great.