In a previous essay,

In a previous essay, "Discovering Our Past Through Literature and Images," I wrote about the nexus of literature and boxing using two separate authors, Ernest Hemingway and Louis L'Amour. The authors have similar yet diverging background. Both were products of the prairie and accomplished outdoorsmen in their youths and throughout their lives. Both served in World Wars, Hemingway in his youth before establishing his fame while L'Amour approached middle age before fighting in war and mastering his craft. Both had the need to "go yondering" as L'Amour describes the phenomena of wanderlust that seems to affect young men. (I am not immune to this urge, although most of my yondering involves exploring the undersea world to the limits allowed by scuba gear, backcountry trails, or airways.) These experiences are reflected in their writing, after all, all fiction is essentially autobiography. The transfer of experience to story is well illustrated in Louis L'Amour's memories "Education of a Wandering Man."

Hemingway enjoys critical acclaim and continues as required reading in literature classes in high schools and college campuses. L'Amour achieved commercial success but thestatus of serious writer-as-artist eluded him, more from bigotry of the intellectual elite who confer such titles than from lack of merit. While I have widely read both, I admit that I enjoyed L'Amour's stories more than Hemingway's stories. This in part is because of my love of the western United States which are reflected in L'Amour's writing. One characterisitc about L'Amour's writing is his deep knowledge of his subject, part from personal experience and part from reading. The following selection from his memoirs address a portion of his boxing education, one that was to serve him well in his life and as inspiration for his writing. Throughout this website, I have eluded to my own education in boxing and other matters. Now I would like to share those of one of my favorite literary masters.

About that time my education took another direction. My father and two older brothers had boxed, and I grew up knowing the rudiments. In the YMCA gym I worked out a few times with Labe Safro, who had been a crack welterweight and middleweight fighter during the days of Mike Gibbons, Mike O'Dowd, and Kid Graves. Labe was umpiring baseball in Jamestown and worked out every day. He was a phenomenal bag puncher and had punched bags in vaudeville, keeping ten bags going at once.

Pete Petrolle was a lightweight fighter out of Schenectady, New York. His manager at the time was a former boxer who owned and operated a cafe in Jamestown. His name was Lee Shrankel; he was also, temporarily, manager of Pete's younger brother, Billy.

Pete was a good, tough, knowing fighter who had already become as good as he was ever to get. Billy, on the other hand, was just beginning a career that would take him to the top, where he would defeat several champions in over-weight matches (so the title was not at stake) but was never to win a championship himself. From featherweight to welterweight he fought all the good ones, and many of them were very, very good.

At the time there were at least twenty good fighters for every one there is now, and it was about the only way a young man could come off the streets and become somebody. Now, with basketball and football paying enormous sums, there are many other ways to reach the top, and even common labor pays more in a day than one received in a week in the 1920's.

Competition in the ring was very tough and a boy had to be good to get anywhere at all. Usually that meant a year or two fighting four- or six-round bouts before a fighter got a shot at anything longer. During those years he was learning, discovering to cope with the different styles of fighting, and refining his own. Probably the last fighter who went through that mill was Sugar Ray Robinson, who was also one of the greatest.

How I met Pete Petrolle I do not recall, but evidently I heard he was looking for somebody to spar with. I was fourteen, but tall, with a good reach, and I knew enough about boxing to take care of myself, in the next few weeks I learned a lot more. I would guess I worked at least fifty rounds with Pete on various days before I met Billy, and then I worked with them both. They took it easy with me, but I enjoyed the workouts and was learning rapidly.

At the time a boxing magazine was published in St. Paul, Minnesota (one of the great fight towns in its day). It was printed on pink paper like the more famous Police Gazette and was called the Boxing Blade. Aside from articles on boxers and boxing, old and new, it also published the decisions in fights all over the world. These decisions usually covered two or three pages in relatively fine print, and I was an avid reader of this weekly, with a good memory for who had fought whom and the result. I also learned how certain fighters reacted to southpaws, fancy-dan boxers, and the like.

Our library was a gift to the town by Alfred Dickey and was named for him. He was known to both my parents but had passed on, I believe, before my time of awareness. Certainly no gift ever presented to a community was more appreciated, and especially so by me. The foundation of my education was laid there, and I learned not only how to use a library but what unexpected riches may lie hidden away on dusty shelves. That library was the first of many in my life, and I spent hours there, dipping into book after book, completing many.

All boxers will have stories to tell about their matches. We might entitle a story based on this image as "winning with eyes closed."

It is often said that one has but one life to live, but that is nonsense. For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography, and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time.

So it was with me. I saved myself much hardship by learning from the experiences of others, learning what to expect and what to avoid. I have no doubt that my vicarious experience saved me from mistakes I might otherwise have made--not to say I did not make many along the way.

When in my stories I write of hunger, thirst, and cold, these things I have experienced. Here and there I've taken some brutal beatings, the worst of them in fights I won. I lost fights, too, in the amateur rings. Outside the ring I never lost a fight but my first one.