The Last Word

POUND FOR POUND
by F.X. Toole
Ecco, 366 pages; $25.95

Even the luckiest boxer risks getting his brains scrambled, while his unlucky brethren can make Job seem like a preliminary boy. And yet this savage enterprise, gnawed to the bone by flesh peddlers, has always been a haven for dreamers, for fighters and corner men who endure the ugliness to give us courage, grace, humanity. F.X. Toole was a member of that noble tribe, closing cuts for the wounded for the last 20 years of his life. But he was a writer too--oh, was he a writer--and he opened his arms widest to boxing's dreamers.

Two of them are the lifeblood of his posthumously published novel, Pound for Pound, and if it seems that Toole stacked the obstacles before them impossibly high, it may be because he cared for them at such a gut level. Dan Cooley is a timeworn Los Angeles trainer with a bad eye, a worse heart and a family decimated by disease and tragedy. The only kin he can reach out and touch is an 11-year-old grandson with a gift for fighting. Then an accident snatches the boy's life away too, sending Dan into a tailspin that veers from homicidal to suicidal.

His salvation is someone he'll be a long time in meeting, a teenage welterweight named Chicky Garza, who is taking his own lumps as he tries to fight his way out of San Antonio. His grandfather, an ex-boxer deep in the clutches of morphine, entrusts Chicky to a pair of rat-bastard brothers who scam Chicky out of his shot at the U.S. Olympic trials. So the young fighter heads for L.A. , where his first professional manager is an even lower form of vermin who steers him into three quick mismatch losses. Small wonder that Chicky becomes a savior who needs saving himself.

There's a Dickensian touch to all this, but there's also a sense of the immense pressure Toole labored under. He wrote Pound for Pound not knowing if he could finish it before he died. Of course, the fight guy who was born Jerry Boyd had pulled off the impossible before, publishing his first short story under the pen name Toole when he was 69. A year later his story collection, Rope Burns, arrived to take its place among the greatest boxing fiction ever. But in 2002, Toole went to his grave at 72, too soon to see Clint Eastwood turn two of his stories into the Oscar-winning movie Million Dollar Baby. And Pound for Pound remained a 900-page manuscript that begged for more work.

Toole's literary agent and a freelance editor stepped in and "shaped" it, to borrow a verb from crime novelist James Ellroy's introduction. The drastically shortened result, alas, doesn't belong on the same shelf with Leonard Gardner's Fat City and W.C. Heinz 's The Professional, the gold standard of boxing novels. There is none of the precision or surprise that made Toole's short stories a revelation. Instead, Pound for Pound is burdened with a predictable plot and some shaky logic. And when Dan and Chicky finally do meet, only 84 pages remain, space enough to do no more than tie things up with an inelegant bow.

Such haste can be blamed on the forces that snatched Toole away too soon. Those same forces, however, couldn't prevent him from creating characters worthy of remembering long after their story is forgotten. They inhabit a world no writer ever understood better, and speak a language as real as a boxer's bruises. As an old-timer who saw Dan fight says, "He did it so pretty you wished you had the same daddy." Both Dan and Chicky are riding life's roller coaster, Chicky worrying that failure is his destiny, Dan trying to outlast an uncertain heart. They are prime candidates for surrender, just as the man who created them was. But there is no quit in them, nor was there in Toole. To the end, he wrote with a fighter's heart.

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