'F.X. Toole' hits literary paydirt

Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES - Up until a few weeks ago, if you ducked into the L.A. Boxing Club asking after a certain "F.X. Toole," you might be rebuffed with a blank stare. A lifted eyebrow. A beat of silence.

In the warren of sky-lit rooms overtaken by blue-canvas boxing rings, men and women who hit the bags and dance the canvas here don't know jack about an F.X. Toole.

They've seen neither hide nor hair of this so-called legendary, 69-year-old Irishman claiming kinship in "the fancy." This storied, picaresque cut man, who with his magic bag of tricks stops the flow of a boxer's blood. This man who has written a much-lauded new collection of documentary-harsh yet poetic boxing fiction, "Rope Burns: Stories From the Corner" (Ecco/Harper Collins) set in a quartet of L.A.'s spirit-proving boxing gyms.

F.X. Toole? Doesn't ring a bell. But they can tell you an earful about another Irish cut man, trainer and gym rat, Jerry Boyd.

Everyone knows Jerry Boyd: Tall and lean with silver hair cut brush short and neatly trimmed whiskers and round tortoise-shell spectacles. Looking more professorial than pugilistic, today he's touring the busy rooms in a polo shirt, khakis and running shoes; the only clues giving away his fighter's life are a badly banged nose and a missing piece of right ear.

"Hey! Jerry! I didn't know you wrote a book!" says a boxer known as "Samson." He ambles over with a photocopied semi-bound manuscript curling at the edges. "I'm working on a book too. Trying to get these kids offa the street. And out of gangs. Inta the gym."

"Good for you!" booms Boyd -Toole - over the blare of warring boomboxes.

The real-life cut man, born and baptized as Geraldum Boyd, speaks of this unveiling as "opening the curtain."

"I really wanted to keep all this separate," says Boyd, leaning back in his folding chair. He looks like a man at home with the world _ wherever it may take him. "There's my training partner over there. There's Dub Huntley." He points out a trim, muscular man studying the action. "He's my daddy in boxing. He's my man."

Though they're all close, though they're family, he kept all this tightly under wraps. So he understands the shock. And figures that he can handle some of the head-scratching that's bound to go for a while in each opposing corner. This writer who has appeared to come out of nowhere; this expert cut man who is an elegant writer.

But the truth of the matter: The writer has been at it 30 years, and this born fighter has been sparring in one world or another for more than twice as long. He's not so much a late-starter as a late-bloomer.

The nom de plume, Francis Xavier Toole, is a nod to the 16th century teacher, philosopher and Jesuit saint, and the rapscallion actor Peter O'Toole. Under this cloak, he's scribbled short fiction and plays and novels - adventure tales, meditations on faith and luck, belief and unbelief - always examining both sides of the coin. He likes conundrums. The either/ors and what ifs?

And with not a word published, nor a play staged, these worlds, he felt, could be separate - but that was when he didn't expect to write about boxing. His book's large first printing (50,000 copies) and enthusiastic advance praise have suddenly sent reporters sniffing into his past and present, upsetting his carefully compartmentalized world.