Newhouse: How many punches can a guy take?
By Dave Newhouse; Oakland Tribune columnist Posted: 04/18/2010 12:01:00 AM PDT
http://www.mercurynews.com/columns/ci_14902212
Rejection is similar to castor oil — difficult to swallow. Only rejection is harder to
keep down because it can't be digested.
We've all experienced rejection over the course of a lifetime, although I'm certain
you're feeling that it wasn't deserved in your case.
If you're wondering where this is going, I'm feeling badly rejected myself.
It's about books, and the writing thereof, a process that has become increasingly
painful for me of late.
Being turned down once on a manuscript is deflating, but when rejection climbs into
double figures, you see yourself as an absolute failure.
Then the smelling salts take hold, you pick yourself off the ground, and you try
again with a new agent or publisher or both. However, I'm contemplating just
staying down for good and taking the 10 count.
Writing a column and writing a book are contrasting experiences. A columnist
thinks succinctly. An author must stret-t-t-tch.
A column can be written in a matter of hours. A book takes three, four, five years or
longer to do the research, writing, editing, and rewriting.
I spent four years on a novel in the 1990s that hasn't sold. It's about a fatherless
white kid from the wrong side of the tracks who aspires to become "the world's
fastest human." His 100-meter rival is an Oxford-educated African-American whose
parents are a United States senator and a renowned civil rights attorney. My intent
was role reversal, for whatever that's worth.
I titled it "White Lightning," after extensive research into whether white men can
jump (or run). They can worldwide, but not so much in the United States.
Well, "White Lightning" sits in a box in my basement, rejected into submission.
Now I must decide the fate of "Before Boxing Lost Its Punch."
As a child, I sat by the radio and listened to a boxing trilogy that boxing experts —
the ones who've been around long enough to know such things — believe is the most
savage ring rivalry ever.
This brutal, bloody 1940s pairing involved middleweights Tony Zale and Rocky
Graziano. Their three scheduled 15-round fights lasted a total of 15 rounds.
Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, you say? Three games of croquet in contrast.
As proof, I heard legendary boxing announcer Don Dunphy say, "He can't lift his
arms," referring to a defenseless Zale when Graziano took away his title in their
second fight. Zale took it back in the third fight. But Dunphy called their first
meeting the greatest fight of his 40-year broadcasting career.
I traveled the country to interview famous trainers, fight writers, a boxing novelist
and artist, and boxing broadcasters, plus the families of Zale and Graziano, and
premier fight promoters Don King and Bob Arum.
I spoke with Jake "Raging Bull" La Motta and Joey Giardello by phone. I ate
dinner at Carmen Basilio's house in upstate New York. I saw Gene Fullmer at his
West Jordan, Utah, gym, where he was teaching boxing seven years ago.
These middleweights represented an era in which fighters actually fought, and not
the occasional once-a-year prima donna pugilists you see today. All those I
interviewed addressed boxing's serious decline.
My manuscript contains romance, specifically the doomed affair between the
greatest French fighter, Marcel Cerdan, and the greatest French singer, Edith Piaf,
which ended with Cerdan's death in a plane crash while flying to America to regain
his title from LaMotta.
I visited Europe twice — to interview a housemate of Piaf's in Paris and Cerdan's
widow and two of their three sons on the Spanish coast above Barcelona.
I believe this is the most comprehensive boxing manuscript ever written. One agent
said I was a "gifted" writer. One publisher called me "cliche-ridden." But the
general response I've gotten is "boxing books don't sell."
Rejection, rejection, rejection.
Eight, nine "... can I beat the count?
Dave Newhouse's columns appear Mondays, Thursdays and Sundays, usually on the
Metro page. Know any Good Neighbors?
Phone 510-208-6466 or e-mail [email protected].