Besides loading up my facebook profile with junk, today I started reading Million Dollar Baby: Stories From The Corner (aka Rope Burns) by F.X. Toole, which contains the story Million Dollar Baby was based off of. F.X Toole was seventy when it was published, after forty years of battling rejections, and died two years later. Two quotes from the preface that hit me like Maggie's beautiful roundhouse.
About the only thing I haven't done in boxing is make money. It's the same for most fight guys. But that hasn't stopped me any more than not making money in writing has. Both are something you just do, and you feel grateful for being able to do them, even if both keep you broke, drive you crazy, and make you sick. Rational people don't think like that. But they don't have in their lives what I have in mine. Magic.
Ring magic is different from the magic of the theater, because the curtain never comes down-because teh blood in the ring is real blood, and the broken noses and the broken hearts are real, and sometimes they are broken forever. Boxing is the magic of men in combat, the magics of will, and skill, and pain, and the risking of everything so you can respect yourself the rest of your life. Almost sounds like writing.
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