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Los Angeles, California Legendary New York sports scribe Jimmy Cannon once observed, "writers who claim to have been short order cooks or lumberjacks, write as if they were still members of those professions." Cannon, staunchly religious, and Irish Catholic by upbringing and inclination, took the Jesuit attitude that all things in the universe had their places. F.X. Toole never cooked short order or chopped a tree but was, in various episodes of his life, a cab driver, a shoe shine guy, an actor, a bullfighter – he did claim that – and engaged in the thoroughly Irish exercise of bartending. And while his all too brief body of work may have edges that would smash against the graceful flow of Turgenyev – who also chronicled the lives and intentions of the gut level people he so loved – had Cannon lived to be privy to Toole's work, he'd have had to re-evaluate his theory on the source of creation. But F.X. Toole took the ten count two years ago on the cusp of recognition, He was an Irish writer like Swift, Yeats and Joyce and wrote about the true path, the pledged word, the connection of all things. After all, he was born Jerry Boyd. Irish Jerry Boyd, a 20-year cutman, gathered all the life experience that fueled his literary Doctor Jekyll: F X Toole. A late comer to writing as he was to boxing, he feared such soulful prose wasn’t good enough. He's Irish. So he took a pseudonym, a phantom name. F X for Francis Xavier. Jerry Boyd's favorite saint. But only Toole. He thought the 'O' too much.  Clint Eastwood brought to life F.X. Toole's characters in Million Dollar Baby. Leonard Gardner's Fat City pushes readers through the small intestines of boxing's hellish, hopeless lower echelons. The Professional, W.C. Heinz's fictional account of a fighter's preparation for a title bout, based on the career of late '40's, early'50's middleweight Billy Graham – whose approach to work Heinz admired – has generally been considered the classic insider's look at a fighter's discipline. With Rope Bums Toole goes deep into the mine shafts of a working man's existence in the euphemistically monikered sweet science. The paycheck fights that might bring that title shot or just enough dough to survive. Car fare to the next bout. Life in the middle once a man is driven to make his living in this madness. And driven one must be. It can't just be the money. The pain level is too high. You a fan? Big fan? Ever glove up? And, if you have, ever been in with a good pro? Nowhere to hide. The shots come from angles geometry never considered, landing stiff and jolting, shaking your whole frame. Even if he's just cuffing you around. That's how Rope Bums surrounds you, jabbing and hooking away, bit by bit, battering away any notion that it's all hotels on The Strip or The Boardwalk or, holy of holies – The Garden. It's the over-crowded sweaty, basement dressing rooms, odors of sweat, alcohol, wintergreen, and piss from the head wafting off the page, in the bowels of Chicago's Avalon Ballroom or Philly's Blue Horizon. Airless, surreal, yet brutally real pits shared by half a dozen contestants with the other half dozen across the hall and just as cramped. The gritty LA boxing gyms each its own jungle. The universe, according to Toole. Toole comes at you with words chosen for the ear as well as the eye, in crisp sentences and penetrating metaphor. After Frankie Dunn – portrayed with craggy, rough hewn compassion by Clint Eastwood in his Oscar grabbing Opus Million Dollar Baby – performs a trainer's consummate act of mercy for his crippled fighter Maggie, he leaves her carrying his shoes "but without his soul, his eyes dry as burning leaves." And the reader, feeling the emotional devastation of a shot to the solar plexus, wants to chase him down and hand him back that soul deeper and truer than ever – and offer your heart for his fortitude. The loyalty, the fidelity, the forgiveness, the compassion, the preparation, the stolen decisions. The bittersweet satisfaction of knowing that LA middleweight Mookie Bodeen, screwed out of the decision though he was, brought his soul to the ring and fought accordingly, comes at you in Fightin' In Philly. The words, like six inch hooks, come third person but from the point of view of old and Irish corner man Con Flutey and black trainer Odell Blue, Mookie's "black uncle and white grampa."
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