The Brave Blonde

LADY BULLFIGHTER (209 pp.)--Patricia McCormick--Henry Holt ($3.95).

Every time the vicious young bull charged, the tall, blonde girl from Texas spun him past her high-waisted Andalusian pants with a flick of the crimson muleta. When finally she leaned over the bull's lowered horns and killed him, the crowd at the Ciudad Juarez ring went crazy over Pat McCormick, the U.S.'s first professional woman bullfighter. As she paraded around the arena with the bull's two ears that the admiring judge had awarded her, a fan called: "If you could only cook."

It is an accepted fact of 20th century life that an American girl can do anything she wants to, and this story records how Pat McCormick, the pretty art student from El Paso's Western College, wanted to make a career of bullfighting, and did. Though far from Hemingway's or Barnaby Conrad's bullfight Baedekers, this ingratiatingly modest account of a girl's apprenticeship in one of man's most mysterious worlds will tell most North Americans more than they ever knew about the art of the corrida.

After her sensational Ciudad Juarez debut in 1952, Pat joined the bullfighters' union as a matador de novillos (apprentice fighter of bulls five years old or less), and became the union's first woman member since the memorable Peruvian Conchita Cintron, who quit the bull ring for matrimony in 1950. In the next two years, she killed 80 bulls in Mexico's smaller rings. As soon as her technique matched her courage, said her trainer, she could move on to fight in the big ring of Mexico City. But those goals seem further away now than when Pat wrote about them. Last month, fighting a thousand-pounder at Villa Acuna, Torero, McCormick suffered her third and most serious goring. Recuperating at her parents' home in Big Spring, Texas, Pat vows she will fight again as soon as the doctors let her--probably next year.

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