Million Dollar Baby
Page 31
It wasn’t until when I got to the gym on Tuesday that I found out about Kenny Coyle. Hunters found him dead in the dirt. He was beside his torched BMW in the mesquite on the outside of town. They found him Sunday noon, and word was he’d been dead some twelve hours, which meant he’d been killed near midnight Saturday night. Someone at the gym said the cops had been by to see me. Hell, me’n Billy was in Mexico, and Dee-Cee was in Houston.
The inside skinny was that Coyle’d been hog-tied with them plastic cable-tie deals that cops’ll sometimes use instead of handcuffs. One leg’d been knee-capped with his own Ruger someplace else, and later his head was busted in by blunt force with a unknown object. His brains was said to hang free, and looked like a bunch of grapes. His balls was in his mouth, and his mouth had been slit to the ear so’s both balls’d fit. The story I got was that the cops who found him got to laughing, said it was funny seeing a man eating his own mountain oysters. See, police right away knew it was business.
When the cops stopped by the gym Tuesday morning, I was still having coffee and looking out the storefront window. I didn’t have nothing to hide, so I stayed sipping my joe right where I was. I told them the same story I been telling you, starting off with stopping by to see old Royal in Dilley. See, the head cop was old Junior, and old Junior was daddy to that plain-Jane gal.
I told him me and Billy had been down Nuevo Laredo when the tragedy occurred. Told him about the Cadillac Bar, and about drinking tequila and teasing the girls in Boys Town. ’Course, I left out a few thousand details I didn’t think was any of his business. Old Junior’s eyes got paler still, and his jaw was clenched up to where his lips didn’t hardly move when he talked. He didn’t ask but two or three questions, and looked satisfied with what I answered.
Fixing to leave, Junior said, “Seems like some’s got to learn good sense the hard way.”
Once Junior’d gone, talk started up in the gym again and ropes got jumped. Fight gyms from northern Mexico all up through Texas knew what happened to Coyle. Far as I know, the cops never knocked on Billy Clancy’s door, but I can tell you that none of Billy’s fighters never had trouble working up a sweat no more, or getting up for a fight neither.
I was into my third cup of coffee when I saw old Dee-Cee get off the bus. He was same as always, except this time he had him a knobby new walking stick. It was made of mesquite like the last one. But as he come closer, I could see that the wood on this new one was still green from the tree.
I said, “You hear about Coyle?”
“I jus’ got back,” said Dee-Cee, “what about him?”
One of the colored boys working out started to snicker. Dee-Cee gave that boy a look with those greeny-blue eyes. And that was the end of that.
A Biography of F. X. Toole
F. X. Toole was the pseudonym of Jerry Boyd (1930–2002), a boxing trainer and author whose work inspired the award-winning film Million Dollar Baby. Though an unpublished author until the age of seventy, Boyd spent decades honing his craft, writing stories, novels, plays, and screenplays in an effort to realize his lifelong literary dream.
Boyd’s love of boxing started in childhood, when he and his father would listen to fights on the radio. Despite this, he did not get involved with the sport until his forties, when he stopped writing to focus on learning the science and art of the boxing. In 1988, a heart attack and triple bypass surgery forced him to leave the ring and turn his attention to training younger fighters. Over the next decade, he found his calling as a trainer and cutman, responsible for closing cuts on a fighter’s face to allow the boxer to stay in the ring. Gradually, Boyd also started to write again.
He turned his pen to boxing, using the pseudonym Francis Xavier Toole to keep his work secret from his colleagues in the boxing world. In 1999, one of his stories was plucked from the slush pile and published in the San Francisco literary magazine Zyzzvya. An agent saw the story and brought Boyd’s work to HarperCollins Publishers. Boyd’s first short story collection, Rope Burns, was released in 2000.
Boyd next sold the film rights for his story “Million $$$ Baby.” But he didn’t live to see Clint Eastwood’s adaptation of the story, Million Dollar Baby, which won four Academy Awards, including the Oscar for Best Picture. Boyd died in 2002; his novel Pound for Pound was published posthumously, in 2006.
In his introduction to Rope Burns, Boyd wrote that he was drawn to boxing by a curiosity about what makes men willing to take hits and keep on fighting. For most of his life, he made no money as a writer and very little as a boxing trainer, but he persisted with both, doing what he loved no matter how often he took one on the chin.
F. X. Toole in 1950, around age twenty. Although not yet a boxer himself, Toole had been a fan of the sport since childhood. Soon after this photo was taken, Toole served in the navy during the Korean War.
Toole bullfighting in Mexico in 1955. He was inspired to become a matador after reading Ernest Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon. “I figured if I was going to become an espontáneo—that's what they call them—I was going to be the best there ever was. There was no point being in there running around and trying to be careful,” Toole told NPR in 2000.
Taken in 1955, Toole is pictured in traditional matador clothing. He inscribed this image with a heartfelt message to a dear friend: “I have known many men; few have been my friend, yet I consider you one of the best friends I have ever had.”
The cover of one of Toole’s 1956 bullfighting programs. During his bullfighting career, he would be gored two times.
Inside the bullfighting program, Toole is listed under his given name, Jerry Boyd, “The Novice Bullfighter from North America.”
Toole’s modeling headshot from the early 1960s, while he was living in Los Angeles.
Toole photographed training at the gym in 2000. Toole became a boxer at the age of forty-nine, and went on to serve as cutman and trainer, among other pugilistic positions. (Photography by Ethan Boyd.)
Toole in 2000 at age seventy, the year his first book was published. Before Rope Burns (now known as Million Dollar Baby), he had written six novels, as well as several plays and stories. He selected F. X. Toole as his pen name, combining elements from the names of St. Francis Xavier and the actor Peter O’Toole to indicate his Irish Catholicism. (Photograph by Ethan Boyd.)
Toole with his five-month-old grandson, Jack Boyd. The photo was taken on March 10, 2002, five months before Toole passed away from complications following heart surgery.
Images courtesy of Gannon Boyd.
Between Rounds: An Acknowledgment
SPECIAL ACKNOWLEDGMENT AND GRATITUDE go to my Wizard, Mr. Nat Sobel, of Sobel Weber Associates, who made a silk purse from a sow’s ear.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
“The Monkey Look” originally appeared in ZYZZYVA
copyright © 2000 by F. X. Toole
“Training a Heavyweight” originally appeared in Playboy magazine
“Holyman” originally appeared in Playboy magazine
“Midnight Emissions” originally appeared in the book Murder on the Ropes edited by Otto Penzler
cover design by Andrea C. Uva
978-1-4532-5400-4
This edition published in 2012 by Open Road Integrated Media
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New York, NY 10014
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