Half-a-Buck, Nobody and Me

John Marston was a federal civil servant in Ottawa.

Vince Bagnato, the author of Half-a-Buck, Nobody and Me, is a member of the Toronto Bagnato family, where boxing was, and is, the name of the game. He has been a fighter, trainer, manager, and promoter, and has spent all of his life in and around the boxing fraternity, not only on the “action” side but in boxing’s administrative corridors of power.

The book is well illustrated with photographs and rather child-like cartoons of the fight genre, and it has certain touches of the Damon Runyon style. There are some amusing incidents of life in the precarious world of “fight” which illustrate the glamour and heartbreak of it all.

This reviewer was not at all amused, however, by the heavy concentration of profanity which forms a large part of Bagnato’s story. There are limits — and one feels these limits have been strained beyond reason, probably in an attempt to show what a rough life a fighter and the fight fraternity in general endures. This is certainly not a book for your Aunt Fanny or one of your children. It does tell the story of the fight game, and there is sadness and happiness in some of the stories Bagnato tells, but the overwhelming deficit in this book is the needless use of profanity, which is simply not justified.