TOOLE SNAGS BWAA’s LIEBLING AWARD
F.X. Toole, a cut man who became a literary sensation at the age of 70 with the short stories that inspired the Oscar-winning movie MILLION DOLLAR BABY, has been named the winner of the Boxing Writers Association of America’s 2010 A.J. Liebling Award. The late cornerman-turned-author will be honored at the BWAA’s annual awards dinner on June 11 in New York, at a venue to be announced.
The acclaim for Toole’s gritty, evocative short story collection ROPE BURNS served as the final reward for a knockaround guy who spent so much of his life as an unpublished — and frustrated — writer. When the book was published in 2000, however, his real name was nowhere to be found. He was born Jerry Boyd, and he adopted his pen name because he was afraid the denizens of the Los Angeles gym he worked at would feel he had somehow betrayed them.
It was only a year before that Toole saw one of his stories in print for the first time. The San Francisco literary journal Zyzzva paid him $35 for “The Monkey Look,” and he thanked the journal’s editor by baking him a gooseberry pie.
In the kind of life that no one would have appreciated more than the character-embracing Liebling himself, Toole kicked around the United States and Mexico as an actor, cab driver, bartender, street fighter, bullfighter and gambling den bootblack. He turned to boxing in his late 40s, intending to do nothing more than get in shape. He wound up as a student of the fight game and a cornerman whose specialty is defined by the first sentence of “The Monkey Look”:
“I stop blood.”
Toole, who had churned out novels, short stories, poetry, plays and screenplays all his adult life, wrote tirelessly about boxing until his death, at 72, in 2002. He lived long enough to read glowing reviews for ROPE BURNS in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and New York Review of Books. But he had been dead for two years by the time MILLION DOLLAR BABY made it to the screen, with Clint Eastwood directing and Hillary Swank as the female boxer whose tragic story it tells.
That is not to say, however, that the last has been heard from F.X. Toole. His novel POUND FOR POUND was published in 2006, and CUTMAN, a cable TV series based on his short stories, is currently in development.
And yet to Dub Huntley, the California trainer who schooled him in the ways of boxing, Toole remains a stranger. It is Jerry Boyd who counts for something in his old friend’s world because he captured it perfectly. As Huntley once said, “Jerry had wrote down everything.”
Named in honor of the stylish New Yorker scribe and author of THE SWEET SCIENCE and A NEUTRAL CORNER, the A.J. Liebling Award has been bestowed since 1995, and is determined by a BWAA committee of veteran journalists appointed by President Jack Hirsch — George Kimball (Chairman), Pulitzer Prize winner Dave Anderson, recently-named Boxing Hall of Famer Ed Schuyler Jr., John Schulian, and Bernard Fernandez.