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F.X. TOOLE (JERRY BOYD)
F.X. Toole/Jerry Boyd (30 July 1930- 2 September 2002) was the son of Irish immigrants. He worked odd jobs, including shoeshine boy, bartender, cement truck driver and vat cleaner. Inspired by Ernest Hemingway's book
Death in the Afternoon, he moved to Mexico City and studied bullfighting. After his brief matador career, Boyd returned to Los Angeles and began frequenting boxing gyms to get in shape. Eventually, he became a boxing trainer and ringside "cut man," whose sole job is to stop a fighter's bleeding.
Over the decades, with no formal writing training, he also began writing. At the age of 69 and after 40 years of rejection slips, he published a short story called
The Monkey Look in Zyzzyva, a San Francisco literary journal. To keep his boxing and writing lives separate, Boyd took the pseudonym F.X. Toole, an amalgamation of Francis Xavier, the 16th century teacher, philosopher and Jesuit saint, and Irish actor Peter O'Toole.
After the story appeared, a New York literary agent offered to represent him. A collection of stories about the professional boxing community called
Rope Burns: Stories From the Corner was published by Ecco Press (HarperCollins) when Boyd was 70. The book drew critical praise, and
Rope Burns became the film Million Dollar Baby, which won the Best Picture Oscar in 2005.
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