books:

	• The Professional W. C. Heinz Da Capo Press, 2001 - 352 pages average customer review:based on 5 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

There are a lot of reasons to read this book, including the fact that almost all sports writers (and a lot of others besides) consider W.C. Heinz to be one of the best ever, but mainly it should be read because it is great writing.


It's How You Play the Game

Eddie Brown, known as "The Pro" for his mature, professional approach to boxing, is a contender for the Middleweight Championship. Sportswriter Frank Hughes, the narrator of the novel, spends a month at a boxing camp in the Catskills with Eddie and his cantankerous old-school manager, Doc Carroll, to observe their training and pre-bout preparation for use in a magazine article. Because this will be the peaking Eddie's best shot at the title, as well as the aging Doc's final opportunity to see one of his charges crowned as world champion, the tension surrounding the bout is intense and addictive.

A simple story, to be sure, but it is not the story line per se that interests Mr. Heinz. Rather, he uses the world of boxing as a medium to distinguish the few, heroic champions from the multitude of pretenders. This echoes Papa Hemingway's view of the world, where people must be separated into those who have grace under pressure and those who are phony imitators. Boxing, like Hemingway's bullfighting, succeeds wonderfully as a backdrop for development of this theme, particularly given the prevalence of corruption in the sport, the number of unskilled athletes and managers, and the increased focus on profiteering by the media with the advent of the television age.

My sport is running, not boxing. Yet I thoroughly enjoyed this novel. The author's dissection of what it really means to be a champion, how the code by which an athlete lives and competes is every bit as important as the result of the competition. Despite a few holier-than-thou passages, in which the author may have gone a bit overboard in drawing his distinction between the heroes and the anti-heroes, this is an impressive work harkening back to a time when there was a greater appreciation for a straight-forward story told in the journalistic style perfected by Hemingway.

Kevin Joseph, author of "The Champion Maker"

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Doc Carroll - Unique Character

The manager Doc Carroll is a fictonalized version of Heinz's hero Jack Hurley, about whom he wrote a memorable essay. Doc and his fighter Eddie Brown are consummate professionals. They are endearing characters, although the writing is without sentimentality. They are honest and straightforward and give their best, as a matter of course. I intend to re-read this book.

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Boxing's SUN ALSO RISES

If you're going to read THE PROFESSIONAL written by the great sports writer W.C. Heinz (who also wrote MASH), skip the foreward by Elmore Leonard until you've read the book. The ditz gives away the ending.
Other than that, the book is pretty much what one might expect after reading the blurb by Hemingway: "THE PROFESSIONAL is the only good novel about a fighter I've read and an excellent novel in its own right." It reminded me a whole lot of THE SUN ALSO RISES. Rather than the minutia of fishing and bullfighting we get boxing: how to wrap a fighter's hands, how the fighter eats during training (Lots of tea and boiled eggs), how to fake a missed right hand, followed by a left hook. All of this is narrated by a somewhat cynical sports writer named Frank Hughes, who follows middle weight fighter Eddie Brown around as he prepares for a championship bout. Eddie is the professional in the title. He's fought ninety times, losing only three, one of which his manager, Doc Carroll, set him up to lose because he was becoming too cocky. W.C. Heinz has a pretty good reason for entitling the book, THE PROFESSIONAL. Carroll resents the champion because he's pretty much all glitz and show. At one point Heinz has his narrator say, "The amateurs have always crowded the highways to everywhere, so it's never been easy for the pros to get through."
I've never been a big Hemingway fan, but this book is chock full of interesting minor characters. There's Eddie's "cold fish" of a wife. There's Johnny Jay, the trainer, a non-stop talker who never makes a whole lot of sense, but is tolerated because he was Doc Carroll's first fighter. There's Al Penna, who steals a ring off a dead man's finger. But my favorite is Jean Girot the recovering alcoholic who owns the hotel at the training camp. He's sad because he misses his favorite drink, the dry martini, which he took nips from out of a milk bottle.
If you're looking for an action packed novel, this one's not for you. There's really only one fight scene and that's at the end when Eddie fights for the title; but if you're tired of the "same old same old" THE PROFESSIONAL fits the bill.

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