CROSS YOUR ENTHUSIASM (6)
By:
October 20, 2026
One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating our favorite… creators switching art forms and/or careers! Series edited by Adam McGovern.
CURTIS COKES, FIGHTING ACTOR
Actors can’t fight, but some fighters can act. Fat City (1972), directed by the former amateur lightweight John Huston, features several boxers, among them Ruben Navarro and Art Aragon, as well as the veteran trainer Al Silvani. Most of them are retired and play noncombatants, but just having them around fills the movie with bodies that radiate the right kind of physical competence. The actors playing fighters, Stacy Keach and the young Jeff Bridges, fake that competence as well as they can—which isn’t very well, but, coached by Silvani, at least they don’t try to do too much.
Two boxers, in particular, turn in beautifully understated performances. Sixto Rodriguez, a California light-heavyweight, plays Lucero, an opponent who comes to Stockton by bus from Mexico to lose a fight to Tully, a local favorite. Lucero’s cock-of-the-walk demeanor and dapper attire are essential features of this justly famous sequence, a kind of tone poem about a capable human doing what he can to preserve his dignity in a situation designed to rob him of it.
The other great performance is by Curtis Cokes, a former welterweight champion who was just coming to the end of a distinguished career the year the movie was released.
He has his moment in a scene in which Tully tries to see Oma, a barfly he has taken up with while her boyfriend, Earl, is in jail. But Earl, played by Cokes, has returned, and he explains that Tully’s no longer welcome at their place. There’s no melodrama, none of the manly posturing that Hollywood so often mistakes for character. Earl is decent but firm, and Tully accepts being turned away without rancor. Earl opens the conversation with “What you want?” and ends it with “You see how it is? You got your stuff,” but in between he’s reasonable, even taking off the undershirt he’s wearing and returning it to Tully, having borrowed it because his own undershirts were dirty. Earl is a regular guy, not a fighter. Shirtless, he doesn’t look anywhere near as ripped as your average soap-opera actor, and he makes no effort to seem intimidating, but Cokes conveys an unforced potency that actors can’t counterfeit.
Playing Earl seems to have been a one-off for Cokes, who has no other film credits. He wasn’t an actor, and in this scene he’s not acting in the way that Keach, who plays Tully, or Susan Tyrrell, who plays Oma, are acting. Those two are not hams, but Cokes’ presence makes you realize that he’s doing something else that looks more like life. When I watch this scene I forget, for once, about the camera and the script and I believe that there’s a gentle, patient guy named Earl who loves the disastrous juicehead Oma and has something banked deep within him that gives him the confidence to tell a professional fighter to get lost. I usually find it difficult to manage such a suspension of disbelief when I watch a movie, especially one with recognizable stars in it, but a moonlighting welterweight in decline made it happen.
CROSS YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Adam McGovern | James Scott Maloy on DAVID LEE ROTH, EMT | Lynn Peril on HEDY LAMARR AND GEORGE ANTHEIL, INVENTORS | Crockett Doob on LARS ULRICH, TENNIS ACE | Mimi Lipson on DANIEL DAY-LEWIS, COBBLER | Mariane Cara on BRIAN MAY, ASTROPHYSICIST | Carlo Rotella on CURTIS COKES, FIGHTING ACTOR | Josh Glenn on GEORGE HARRISON, FILM PRODUCER | Crystal Durant on SKUNK BAXTER, DEFENSE CONSULTANT | Adrienne Crew on HENRY ROLLINS, PUNK POLYMATH | Deborah Wassertzug on JOHN LURIE, DISRUPTOR | Heather Quinlan on HARRY NILSSON, COMPUTER GENIUS | Adam McGovern on JOSEPHINE BAKER, SPY | Douglas Wolk on RICHARD McGUIRE, GRAPHIC-LIT INNOVATOR | Jake Zucker on SYDNEY POLLACK, CHARACTER ACTOR | Rani Som on RACHEL POLLACK, SEEKER | Jeff Lewonczyk on ANDY WARHOL, FORMER ANDY WARHOL | Nikhil Singh on ADOLF HITLER, FORMER PAINTER | Holly Interlandi on ADAM JONES, DIRECTOR | Jonathan Pinchera on PETER CAINE, CONSPIRACY STAR | Miranda Mellis on EVE KOSOVSKY SEDGWICK, ACADEMIC WEAVER | Kelly Jean Fitzsimmons on BRENT SPINER, SINGING NOVELIST | Christopher-Rashee Stevenson on QUENTIN TARANTINO, CRITIC | Sangamithra Iyer on MADHUR ANAND, LITERARY ECOLOGIST | Marlon Stern Lopez on GREG GRAFFIN, HARDCORE ZOOLOGIST | Pichchenda Bao on WENDELL BERRY, FARMING POET.
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