Read Million Dollar Baby Online
Authors: F. X. Toole
Million Dollar Baby (39 page)
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.
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 Though an unpublished author until the age of seventy, Boyd spent decades honing his craft, writing stories, novels, plays, and screenplays in an effort to realize his lifelong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.
S
PECIAL 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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