Friday, August 4, 2006 - 12:00 AM
Permission to reprint or copy this article or photo, other than personal use, must be obtained from The Seattle Times. Call 206-464-3113 or e-mail resale@seattletimes.com with your request.
Book Review
By Richard Wakefield
Special to The Seattle Times
"Pound for Pound"
by F.X. Toole
Ecco, 366 pp.,
$25.95
A cherished myth is the one about the tough guy who turns out to be tender. In "Pound for Pound," F.X. Toole creates a gallery of very, very tough guys, yet even the toughest of them rarely goes more than a chapter without crying. For all the devastating jabs and hooks these fighters throw, they shed more tears than blood. But Toole convinces us that for these men weeping is far more painful than bleeding.
Dan Cooley, a former boxer, is now a washed-up trainer who has lost everything, including his health. He sets out to kill himself, but a chance encounter with an abandoned dog brings a change of plan. He takes the suffering animal to a vet who tells him, "Never save nothing what eats. It tells the world you're easy."
Before long Dan has another needy creature in his charge. This one is Chicky Garza, a young would-be boxer who is the grandson of one of Dan's former rivals — of the very man, in fact, who cost Dan his shot at real success in the ring. Yet in a twist, the relationship will change Dan's future and, stunningly, his past as well.
Toole was a trainer of boxers for over 20 years, as well as, at various times, a truck driver, a bartender, a longshoreman and a matador. He didn't publish fiction until he was 70 years old, but his first volume, "Rope Burns," included the story that was later made into the film "Million Dollar Baby." Toole, however, died before the movie was completed.
Nor did he live to complete "Pound for Pound." That was left for two editors, and the result is an engaging, sometimes riveting book that also includes long swaths of prose that sound almost like notes for a novel. In the first few dozen pages, for example, we get a family history that slows the plot like a pot gut on a welterweight.
When Toole hits his stride, though, the story — or the two converging stories of Dan and Chicky — moves as gracefully yet forcefully as a well-trained fighter.