#58: ‘The Harder They Fall’ by Budd Schulberg

‘The Harder They Fall’ is Budd Schulberg’s novel about fictional boxer and man-mountain ‘El Toro’ Molina.

The narrator of the book is boxing journalist Eddie Lewis, who, like a lot of writers I know, is procrastinating and putting off finishing the play he believes is his life’s work, while scratching a living filing copy for New York newspapers. His circle of friends and acquaintances includes boxing promoters, fighters active and retired, drinkers, prostitutes and mobsters.

Eddie gets embroiled with one of these mobsters, Nick Latka, in a scheme to pass off a ‘freakishly’ large (though not by today’s standard) Argentinian fighter presented to him by his hapless manager. Through a series of fixed fights, from San Francisco, across the U.S., and finally Madison Square Garden, Latka builds Molina into a crowd-pulling phenom, with the book culminating in Molina’s first ‘on the level’ fight. Eddie’s role throughout is as the fighter’s press agent, inventing storylines and quotes in order to drum up interest in the fights.

The book is clearly based on the Italian heavyweight Primo Carnera, a boxer whose main draw was his huge size and the fascination that crowds had with fighters who, not many years before, would have been fighting in circus and carnival tents.

The underlying theme of the story is a man, who in this case happens to be a writer, questioning the ethics of what he is doing in order to earn a living, and how turning a blind eye to someone being taken advantage of can be a very slippery slope, with events running away from your control. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like the issues described in this story have been erased from professional boxing, with too many boxers being pushed to fight way past their prime.

Schulberg is a brilliantly descriptive writer, though sometimes he lays it on so thick he has the air of a man trying extremely hard to convince you his alibi is true. I’m looking forward to reading his other novels, including ‘On the Waterfront’

Something I’ll take from this book is the numerous slang terms used for taking a dive in a fight, my favourite of which is doing an el foldo! Brilliant!