Andrew O'Toole. Sweet William: The Life of Billy Conn

Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature, Spring-Summer, 2008 by Jillian LeRue

Andrew O'Toole. Sweet William: The Life of Billy Conn. University of Illinois Press, 2007:376 pp. $32.95.

Boxing is in a most perplexing--and decidedly rare--position among contemporary sports--it has had enough of mythology, it needs history. Most sports crave the larger-than-life dimensions inevitable when writers, drunk on religious imagery and transcendent metaphors, elevate the stuff of the games we play into the myths that we crave. Asked to name a boxer in the last twenty years, apart from that sorry trainwreck Mike Tyson, most people will say Rocky Balboa. Even as Rocky through its six installments has become a mythic fixture, boxing itself is a shoddy enterprise, its most heroic figures reduced by infirmity (Ali) of seduced by marketing (Foreman). What boxing needs is to reconsider its past and shape from the authentic the stuff of the heroic, excavate its history, isolate real names, real boxers who have managed to mist into obscurity. The success of The Cinderella Man is exactly what the sport needs to reclaim its grandeur--and add to that renaissance of interest in boxing's roots this glorious and engaging biography of one of the authentic working-class boxers whose understated charisma and ring savvy made him a generational icon in the Depression era leading up to the era of Joe Louis.

Billy Conn's early life amid the rough and tumble blue collar environs of 1930s Pittsburgh is wonderfully captured. O'Toole (himself with roots in Pittsburgh) gives the early years a leisurely and careful feel, to understand Billy Conn, he says, is to understand those roots amid the teeming streets of immigrant Irish, impoverished and dreaming only of tomorrow's meal. Conn's work in the ring, his years of stellar performance in which he claimed the light heavyweight title, is given careful review-O'Toole captures the gritty smoky feel of that era's idea of a boxing competition so far removed from the plastic and tinsel Vegas pay-per-veiw spectacles today. He makes all the cliches of sportswriting pale as his prose effortlessly recreates the immediacy of those early matches as Conn compiled an impressive record and earned a shot at Louis. That much-heralded fight, which Conn won the hearts of the fans if not the title with his stand-and-deliver performance, his refusal to concede to the champ, his determination to test his endurance in a match that is still regarded among the finest played in the sport's history.

It is Conn's post-career that intrigues--O'Toole covers Conn's flirtation with film, his flamboyant romantic life, his struggle to accept that fame (despite being inducted into the Boxing Hall of Fame in the mid-1960s) was going to elude him, that his legacy was going to be largely in the hearts and minds of the white immigrant working class who saw in Conn's relentless determination, his classy appearance, and his reckless ring fury appropriate metaphors for their own struggle to find a place in America. O'Toole has given us a splendid introduction to how a boxer can shape a culture's attitude--but his writing, his obvious love of Pittsburgh, his obvious feel for the ring, his clear sense of the history of the sport ensure that this never becomes a tedious exercise in overreading an athlete. This is exactly what boxing needs--a mesmerizing account of one of its real heroes who succeeded in the ring and managed a career around that success in which he distinguished himself with dignity and grace and humor. This is a fascinating book.

Jillian LeRue

Pittsburgh Evening Star