Writer With Boxing Gloves

THE PROFESSIONAL (338 pp.)--W. C. Heinz--Harper ($3.95).

One of the remarkable facts about U.S. daily journalism is that its most talented practitioners write about games for boys --or, at any rate, about games for men with boyish hearts. Still, the situation is bearable when the sportswriters stick to sports. The trouble begins when, like aging college athletes shadow-boxing before the bathroom mirror, they tangle with that elusive opponent, literature.

On the jacket of this novel by Freelance Sportswriter W. C. Heinz, the reader is warned of its contents by Quentin Reynolds, himself an ex-athlete (Brown's football team of 1923) and a sportswriter so eminent that he no longer writes sports. Reynolds' warning: Heinz never loses "the hard jab of actuality." The New York Herald Tribune's Sports Columnist Red Smith, no athlete, puts in a few jabs of his own: "Here are the people; this is what they are like, how they think, how they talk." Actually Heinz's characters turn out not to be "the people" at all, but a fight mob and the literary gents who write about them.

The You-Man Sentence. Two warning signs mark the literary he-man pusher: the use of the historical present and a tendency to address the reader as "you." Nearly 20 years ago, British Critic Cyril Connolly said that the "youman sentence" finally "would seem to have had its day" (Connolly alleged James Joyce started the whole thing). But sportswriters, who might believe a man named Connolly, would never listen to a character called Cyril.

W. C. (for Wilfred Charles) Heinz makes the point in what he has to say about the view from the New York elevated: "You can see the flower pots, too, on the fire escapes. Most of them have geraniums in them... and always, a long time after they shouldn't be there any longer, you'll see the long, yellow leaves of Easter lilies, and the pink foil still around the pots."

The Professional, though, is not roses, lilies and geraniums all the way. It's about the fight game, see. It is told in the first person by this sportswriter who signs his stuff Frank Hughes. The story begins with Hughes's recollections as one of a bunch of sportswriters returning from an Army-Fordham game (it was bloody as all get out). "After that first half, Fordham couldn't have won except by a knockout," says Tom Meany. Jimmy Cannon says: "How about that?" Cannon and Meany, of course, are both real-life sportswriters who would, at one time or another, have recognized each other at Toots Shor's. This sort of thing solves a problem confronting all novelists--how to create real characters. Well, in a youman sentence, you just put in real men.

The Dumb Oxen. As for the plot, it is about a fighter called Eddie and his manager, Doc, and about how Eddie may or may not have made the middleweight crown. But another thing this book offers, apart from a reasonably, effective story, is wonderful examples of tough prose. One minor character is wondering about what happened to another character named Angelo. "Twenty to life," replies another character named Frankie. "He killed some poor slob run a candy store. They shoulda juiced him, but they give him twenty to life. Just a hood." The Professional, in short, is a classic example of the Heming-wayward conviction that small words must be used to denote big things.

The missing element in the book is, of course, the quality of thought. Hemingway's "dumb oxen" did not remain dumb, because Hemingway, after all, was capable of thought. Not so the sports-jacketed, impressively cicatriced authors who still follow Hemingway out of the Land of Letters into the Land of Ham. At one point Author Heinz has his Neanderthal narrator muse: "I can never figure out how the mind works." Somewhere there must be a literary line coach getting the squad together with the injunction: "Please, fellers, just once more, try for dear old Harper's, try figure how that mind works. Hit that mind with all you got."

The trouble is that you cannot write novels about boxers with boxing gloves.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.