[Let me state for the record, I am not, nor have ever been, a member of the Southern Cockfighting Alliance. What follows is a defence of the book and film, not
the sport.]
To a cocker, this medal means as much as the Nobel prize does to a scientist.
As Paul Newman says in The Hustler, “Anything can be great. I don't care, bricklaying can be great, if a guy knows. If he knows what he's doing and why and if he can make it come off.”
Cockfighter’s Frank Mansfield is a meticulous and down-on-his-luck trainer and fighter of game hens. He knows what he’s doing in cockfighting circles.
After messing up a chance at victory by talking too much, Mansfield takes a vow of silence until he wins the Cockfighter of the Year medal at the Southern Conference. The medal is handed out by a reclusive senator. It isn’t awarded every year, and it’s not awarded simply for being the best. The award is more like a knighthood, for being both great and chivalrous. At least to Frank.
Like many of Willeford’s books, Cockfighter is both funny and serious, and funny because it’s serious, and also tragic. Down to his last fighter, Mansfield ruins him by damaging the beak in a bid to shave the odds. Left with nothing, he’s forced to play guitar in dive bars, seduce a lonely widow, and sue his brother so he can sell the family home.
Mansfield writes to the widow and his fiancee, begging them both to attend the Southern Conference. Cockfighting, he believes, is a noble pastime. This is his world and he’s the best in it, and he believes that will trump their objections to the sport.
Without spoiling the book, his fiancee has a different reaction, which calls into question everything we know about Frank. Is he the best because of his know-how, or his near-sociopathic ruthlessness? Is cockfighting a sport or a barbaric dick-waving contest?
The writing about the sport itself rings true—the breeds of bird, the training regimen, the ways to cajole or inspire an injured chicken, and the dirty tricks the trainers employ to chisel each other out of victories. Willeford knows this world.
In the film version, directed by Monte Hellman and starring Warren Oates as Mansfield—who else could have directed and starred?—strips out the picaresque adventures and focuses solely on the training. It’s less rich but more straightforward, and Willeford himself plays the referee.
Cockfighter brings two of art’s strongest moral prejudices together. We hate representations of cruelty to animals, but we love representations of greatness, of someone being the best. John Wick can spend three hours butchering people, and no one will question the morality of the film.
Nobody dies in Cockfighter, but the book and film wade into moral repugnance. Willeford suggests, both ironically and seriously, that cockfighting is western civilization itself. Fighting animals are found in nature, sure, but they’re also intrinsic to the culture of the Greeks and Romans, of the Bible, of the United States. Our inheritence is cruelty. Enjoy.