Cockfighter (1962)

"As far back as 320 B.C. an old poet named Chanakya wrote that a man can learn four things from a cock: To fight, to get up early, to eat with his family, and to protect his spouse when she gets into trouble. I had learned how to fight and how to get up early, but I had never gotten along too well with my family and I didn't have any spouse to protect. Fighting was all very well, but getting up early was not the most desirable habit to have when living in a big city like Jacksonville [FL]." pg. 416

"Unlike most American sportsmen, the cockfighting fan has an overwhelming tendency to become an active participant. There is no such thing as a passive interest in cockfighting. Beginning as a casual onlooker, a man soon finds the action of two game cocks battling to the death a fascinating spectacle. He either likes it or he doesn't. If he doesn't like it, he doesn't return to watch another fight. If he does like it, he accepts, sooner or later, everything about the sport - the good with the bad.
"As the fan gradually learns to tell one game strain from another, he admires the vain beauty of a game rooster. Admiration leads to the desire to possess one of these beautiful creatures for his very own, and pride of ownership leads to the pitting of his pet against another game cock. Whether he wins or loses, once the fan has got as far as pitting, he is as hooked as a ghetto mainliner." pg.493

"Members of the cockfighting fraternity are from all walks of life. There are men like myself, from good Southern families, sharecroppers, businessmen, loafers on the county relief rolls, Jews, and Holy Rollers. If there is one single thing in the world, more than all the others, preserving the tradition of the sport of cocking for thousands of years, it's the spirit of democracy. In a letter to General Lafayette, George Washington wrote, 'It will be worth coming back to the United States, if only to be present at an election and a cocking main at which is displayed a spirit of anarchy and confusion, which no countryman of yours can understand.' I carried a clipping of this letter, which had been reprinted in a game fowl magazine, in my wallet. I had told Mary Elizabeth [my fiance] once that George Washington and Alexander Hamilton had both been cockfighters during the colonial period, but she had been unimpressed. Nonetheless, cockfighters are still the most democratic group of men in the United States." pg.497

After figuring out that Monte Hellman's Cockfighter was based on this book I checked it out from the library but was disappointed by the unconvincing "moral heroics" of the main character. "He's a low life cockfighter, but wait a sec, this rugged individual is also a man of solid principle with a strong moral compass! Goodness! " I suppose Willeford wanted to surprise and impress the reader with the essential goodeness and high principles of a seemingly seedy "sportsman" from the lower echelons of the social ladder but it just came off as being unnecessary and annoying. Sure, the main character does a couple questionable things but overall he's a redeemable character. Which was saccharine and boring. But the detailed descriptions of the culture and practice of cockfighting was totally engaging, like getting a glimpse into an different world. In this sense it's similar to Willeford's excellent memoir, Something About a Soldier, which details his early experience in the army during the great depression. ( )

Certainly one of the finest cockfighting novels I have ever read. OK - so it's the only cockfighting novel I have ever read, and I'm not likely to read another, but it still grabs you. This has more of a conventional plot than a lot of Willeford's other novels. In this case, the protagonist (there are no heroes in Willeford, even Hoke Moseley doesn't fit that mold) forsakes everything else in his life (e.g., the woman he has been engaged to for 10 years) to try one more time for the coveted Cocker of the Year Award. He starts out with almost nothing - he has lost his car, his trailer, and his 16-year old live-in sleeping partner in a cockfight and has to start from scratch. This involves a few expediencies, such as throwing his brother and wife out of the family home (love the ironic twist later in the novel about what happens to the brother) and teaming up with an ex-Madison Avenue adman who gave up a lucrative career to be a cockfighter. Willeford describes, in great detail, the process of preparing the gamecocks for the fights (and its associated coldblooded cruelty) and the fights themselves, with lots of the first-person narrator's asides about the nobility and purity of the sport (he says a cockfight can't be fixed) and so on. Either Willeford was a great researcher or he had a lot of firsthand experience with cockfighting. In any case, the sheer momentum of the book and urge to see what finally happens make it hard to put down. Definitely one of the more engrossing experiences of any "sports" book I have ever read. ( )

terse, anti-drama ( )