Bruiser

Jim Tully

Description

A picture of life in the boxing ring "Few novelists captured the contradictions of his country so simply or so honestly in the metaphor of the pure, fatalistic, and merciless community of bruising."-from the ForewordWhen The Bruiser was first published in 1936, almost every reviewer praised Jim Tully's gritty boxing novel for its authenticity-a hard-earned attribute. Twenty-eight years before the appearance of The Bruiser, Tully began a career in the ring, fighting regularly on the Ohio circuit. He knew what it felt like to step inside the ropes, hoping to beat another man senseless for the amusement of the crowd. Having won acclaim in the 1920s for such hard-boiled autobiographical novels as Beggars of Life and Circus Parade, Tully thus became both fighter and writer. "It's a pip of a story because it is written by a man who knows what he is writing about," said sportswriter and Guys and Dolls author Damon Runyon. "He has some descriptions of ring fighting in it that literally smell of whizzing leather. He has put bone and sinew into it, and atmosphere and feeling."The Bruiser is the story of Shane Rory, a drifter who turns to boxing and works his way up the heavyweight ranks. Like Tully, Shane starts out as a road kid who takes up prizefighting. While The Bruiser is not an autobiographical work, it does draw heavily on Tully's experiences of the road and ring. Rory is part Tully, but the boxers populating these briskly paced chapters are drawn from the many ring legends the writer counted among his friends: Jack Dempsey, Joe Gans, Stanley Ketchel, Gene Tunney, Frank Moran, and Johnny Kilbane, to name a few. The book is dedicated to Dempsey, the Roaring Twenties heavyweight champion, who said, "If I still had the punch in the ring that Jim Tully packs in The Bruiser, I'd still be the heavyweight champion of the world today."More than just a riveting picture of life in the ring, The Bruiser is a portrait of an America that Jim Tully knew from the bottom up.

Sujets

• Adventure (Guyana)
• Adventure fiction
• Adventure

Informations

• Publié par: The Kent State University Press
• Date de parution: 05 janvier 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781631010088
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE BRUISER
Jim Tully, 1886–1947
THE BRUISER
 
by
JIM TULLY
Edited by Paul J. Bauer and Mark Dawidziak
Foreword by Gerald Early

Black Squirrel Books
KENT, OHIO
 
© 2010 by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2010008636
ISBN 978-1-60635-056-0
Manufactured in the United States of America
First published by Greenberg, New York, 1936.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tully, Jim.
The bruiser / by Jim Tully;foreword by Gerald Early.
p. cm.
“Edited by Paul J. Bauer and Mark Dawidziak.”
ISBN 978-1-60635-056-0 (pbk.: alk. paper) ∞
I. Early, Gerald Lyn.
II. Title.
PS 3539. U 44 B 78 2010
813′.52—dc22
2010008636
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication data are available.
14  13  12  11  10         5  4  3  2  1
TO
MY FELLOW
ROAD-KID
JACK DEMPSEY
CONTENTS
Foreword
Introduction
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
XXI
XXII
XXIII
XXIV
XXV
XXVI
XXVII
XXVIII
XXIX
XXX
XXXI
XXXII
FOREWORD
by Gerald Early
It’s a rough world, Shane—as warm as the very devil when the referee’s raisin’ your hand, and cold as a hang-man’s heart when he ain’t.
—Silent Tim speaking to his fighter,
Shane Rory, in Jim Tully’s The Bruiser
Baseball may have captured America’s heart, but boxing is America’s body and its soul.
American authors have written a number of noted, even outstanding, baseball novels including Mark Harris’s quartet, The Southpaw, Bang the Drum Slowly, A Ticket for Seamstitch , and It Looked like For Ever , Robert Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop , Bernard Malamud’s The Natural , W. P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe , Ring Lardner’s You Know Me, Al , and Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel . Comparatively speaking, there have been far fewer great American boxing novels: Budd Schulberg’s The Harder They Fall , W. C. Heinz’s The Professional , Leonard Gardner’s Fat City , and F. X. Toole’s Rope Burns , which is actually a collection of stories, come immediately to mind. On this short list should be placed the book you hold in your hands, Jim Tully’s neglected novel, The Bruiser , published in 1936. I shall say more about Tully’s work momentarily.
The fact that more impressive baseball novels than boxing novels have been written cannot be accounted for by the fact that baseball is the more popular sport, so it would be expected to have produced a greater number of novels. That is certainly true today that baseball is more popular, but throughout most of the twentieth century, in the United States, prizefighting, as professional boxing was often called, had a huge and passionate following, million-dollar gates, and huge television contracts. (Indeed, boxing was the first sport to hit television, when the device became available for mass use in the late 1940s, and was televised much more than baseball.) Many heavyweight champions were among not only the most famous athletes of their era but among the most famous celebrities or public figures anywhere. John L. Sullivan, Jack Johnson, Jack Dempsey, Joe Louis, Rocky Marciano, Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier, and Mike Tyson were among the most famous people on the planet during their heyday, the princes of popular culture. And some fighters in lighter weight divisions were also world-famous: Sugar Ray Robinson, Willie Pep, Henry Armstrong, Emile Griffith, Benny Leonard, Rocky Graziano, Marvelous Marvin Hagler, Sugar Ray Leonard, Alexis Arguello, Roberto Duran, Tommy Hearns, Carlos Monzon, Nino Benvenuti, and Oscar De La Hoya to name only a few. Nearly all of these men made fabulous amounts of money during their careers—whether they were capable of keeping what they earned is another story and some, most famously Louis, Duran, Tyson, and Armstrong wound up broke—and their fights generated enormous publicity, front page in the sports section, sometimes front page news stories.
Highly gifted boxers, regardless of whether they are especially articulate men, are charismatic by virtue of the unsettling but striking combination of naked brutality and muscular yet lissome grace that characterizes their sport. Boxing is the only sport where the object is to break your opponent’s will by physically beating him into submission: either to knock him unconscious or to make him quit or make the referee or your opponent’s corner make him quit by stopping the fight. The risk the prizefighter takes seems by turns heroic, curious, thrilling, decadent, primitive, or simply absurd. So what if you win? But the same can be said for any sport. Perhaps that is the point of sports, the irrationality of its imbalance: so much is harnessed and expended to prove so little. Its aim is pointless, which is why, perhaps, it is so fascinating, especially to the bourgeoisie who often seem obsessed completely by the need for safety and comfort, the avoidance of risk or any sort of danger. Sometimes absurd risk can be honorable. For no matter how much money a successful boxer makes, no fighter fights only for money. And most fighters do not make much money, in the end, because most never become champion or anything close to it. There is a certain code that drives these men (and now the women who box as well). This point may seem counterintuitive for a sport that is often accused of being faked, fixed, and corrupted by organized crime. Yet boxing has been able to transcend its shoddy origins and debased tendencies, and some boxers have become authentic national heroes. Prizefighting is both the height of inhumanity—to beat another human being senseless if you can—and the essence of what it means to be an exemplary human being—to stand up alone to a fearsome adversary and not be afraid.
American novelist, journalist, socialist reformer, and boxing fan Jack London published what is, by all accounts, the first fictional American boxing story, The Abysmal Brute , in book form in 1913 (it had been serialized in 1911); its similarities to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes (serialized in 1912), published in book form in 1914, is startling. Both are essentially pulp novels about physically imposing white heroes—Young Pat Glendon and Lord Greystoke, who seem uncivilized—one reared in the woods and mountains and the other reared by apes in the jungle—but in fact are cultured but also more than a match for any man or beast. The love interests in the book, the rich heiress and enterprising journalist Maud Sangster and the intrepid Jane Porter—innocent, young, beautiful but assertive white women (the New Woman of the twentieth century that pundits and arbiters talked about)—are basically the same woman, seeking an extraordinary man to whom they can submit sexually. What both fantasies reflect are the racial phobias about masculinity that troubled the imagination of white America during the reign of the first black heavyweight champion Jack Johnson (1908–1915). The books were serialized during the height of Johnson-mania, right after his much-publicized fight with Jim Jeffries in July 1910, which Johnson won by knockout and which produced racial violence throughout the country, and during his closely followed trial for violation of the White Slavery Act.
The heavyweight champion, at this time, was not only the most famous, toughest man in the United States, usually, but he was the most famous, most mythical male . The fact that a man from a so-called inferior race beat white men in the ring and became the champion (until the rise of Johnson, white heavyweight champions drew the color line and refused to fight black challengers) was a cause of considerable cultural and social unrest in the United States. Johnson made headlines not only because of his fights against white champions but also because of his affairs and marriages to white women at a time when miscegenation, at least between a black man and a white woman, was outlawed in virtually the entire south, and was a rigidly observed taboo nearly everywhere. Johnson was prosecuted and convicted under the new federal antiprostitution legislation called the Mann Act and sentenced to prison for one year. He fled the country in 1912 to avoid imprisonment and did not serve the sentence until his return to the United States after World War I, at which time he was no longer the heavyweight champion.
But the novels by London and Burroughs also reflect the concern that white men were becoming too civilized, too softened by civilization. The books depicted their white heroes as idealized children of nature, Adamic, Wordsworthian, and rigidly Victorian in their morals; they are, in most respects, prelapsarian man, a form of cultural innocence. The heroes are also strikingly well read, extraordinarily literate. (Amazingly, London’s hero prefigures Gene Tunney, who was to defeat Jack Dempsey twice, in 1926 and 1927, marry an heiress, and lecture about Shakespeare in an English class at Yale. Life does on occasion imitate fiction.) Both novels display distrust of civilization; London’s novel, for instance, condemns the business of boxing but not the actual performance of the sport, which, ideally, is pure and manly. Cities are seductive, deceptive fleshpots; journalism is a racket.
I mention both Burroughs and particularly London at length because Tully’s The Bruiser makes use of many of the elements to be found in the earlier novels but tends to turn them on their head or to recast them in a more nuanced, complex way. The rising young fighter of 1936, the year The Bruiser was published, was Joe Louis of Detroit, the first black heavyweight to contest seriously for the title since Jack Johnson’s defeat at the hands of Jess Willard in Havana in 1915. Louis was not to win the title until 1937 when he defeated Jim Braddock, the Cinderella Man, in eight rounds. But in 1936 Louis lost for the first time in his career when he w