In the book's original cover, Gene comes from a planet of purple people.

First book missteps. Oh where do I begin with this one? The phone woke me up on 7am on a Saturday morning. It was Fiaz Rafiq. He was calling from Bolton, England. He wanted me to ghostwrite The Toughest Man Alive, the autobiography of martial arts and Hollywood stunt legend “Judo” Gene LeBell. I didn’t really know Gene all that well, having only talked to him on the phone a couple of times. I didn’t know Fiaz Rafiq of Bolton, England either but here he was telling me that he was going to fax me a contract right away and he wanted me to sign it and send it back to him as soon as possible. “Don’t you want to see my clips?” I asked. No he didn’t. He didn’t have time for that.

 My first book's puslisher. Would you sign a contract from this man?

I didn’t have a fax machine so I had him fax the contract to my work where it was fortunately waiting for me on Monday morning. The contract consisted of a tangle of blurry text crammed onto a single sheet of paper with a few typos. There wasn’t going to be any advance but I was promised 50 cents for every copy sold. At that point in time, as a writer, I had only sold a few stories to mags and websites like Salon.com, SFGate.com, Bass Player and Inside Kung-Fu. I didn’t know a thing about the book business or what a book contract was supposed to look like. I did know that a publisher who can’t even proofread his own contracts, probably won’t give your book a good edit either. But as stupid as it sounds, I went ahead and signed it and faxed it back anyway. Miraculously, nobody in the front office at my day job ever asked why I needed to fax a two-page document to England.

“Judo” Gene LeBell was/is an ass kicking Renaissance man. He taught Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris how to break arms and if that wasn’t cool enough already, he was also a stunt man and a pro wrestler. You know that part of The Jerk where Steve Martin is wearing all of those medallions and tossing thugs wearing tacky sports coats into the pool? Gene LeBell is one of those thugs. He’s also a ring announcer in Raging Bull and, rumor has it, he choked out Steven Segal on the set of an 80s action flick. Gene has done it all and even though Fiaz Rafiq seemed more than a little iffy, this book project was my chance to work with something pretty close to an American folk legend. Gene had gone through a few writers already so I saw this as a challenge. Gene LeBell may be the toughest man alive, but I was going to prove that I was the toughest ghostwriter alive by finishing this book.

I conducted interviews over the phone with Gene at all hours of the night and taped them with an old Radio Shack cassette recorder. I also drove down to LA (I lived in San Francisco) to talk to the man in person. He always tried to show me excruciatingly painful finger breaking techniques but I reminded the old master that I needed those to type his book with. He decided to show me crippling knee locks instead.

One time when I went down to LA, our publisher, Fiaz Rafiq flew into town to pay Gene and me a visit. I met Fiaz at a rundown motel in Santa Monica. He had me come into his room. He reeked of cologne. He led me to believe that he had published this UK bestseller called The Guv’nor about some cockney tough guy that had sold over 100,000 copies in the UK. He said that the the LeBell book would do the same kind of business and I stood to make at least 50 thousand bucks from it. He also kept talking about how we were going to be on the Jay Leno show to hype this martial arts book from a smalltime publisher and he thought that maybe Michael Moore would be interested in it. Why, I don’t really know. He kept asking me if I wanted to go to McDonald’s. I declined. There was something sad in that hotel room. I was crestfallen as I left my first big meeting with my publisher. I drove around the corner and called my then-girlfriend. “I’m never gonna’ see a dime from this,” I said.

That still wasn’t the worst of it. Later on that week, I had to wrestle my publisher at Gene LeBell’s judo school. He smelled like a family of hobos and been living in his kimono. I asked Gene what he thought of our publisher and he chuckled. Still, we forged on. We brought the book in on time but relations between Gene and Fiaz frayed rapidly between the time that we delivered the manuscript and the book's publication date. Fiaz designed a hideous dust jacket where he used a cropped and fuzzy scan of the cover of one of Gene's instructional books as its central image. Fiaz also didn't attempt to color correct his quick and dirty scan either making Gene look like a shirtless purple dude from another planet. Adding insult to insult, Fiaz also penned photo captions that were written in that first-person/third-person style usually attributed to Tarzan or the Hulk, making LeBell sound like a Neanderthal.

Gene was livid over this since his contract stated he had final approval of "the book." LeBell's one-page contract never defined what "the book" was, leaving this open to bitter interpretation. To Gene, this included its cover. To Fiaz, the cover was something detached from the book altogether. Sensing that my first major writing enterprise was going down the crapper, I convinced a designer friend of mine to create a cover that was to Gene's liking. She designed three marvelous covers and Gene approved what he felt was the best one. Rafiq agreed to use this cover in emails to everyone involved.

The cover designed by Brandi Valenza and chosen by "Judo" Gene LeBell.

An ugly volume with yet another badly scanned cover photo of Gene arrived a few months later. Gene was livid and refused to promote the book. No Jay Leno for us. As initially predicted, Gene and I never saw a dime from it but people seemed to really like it. The book has sold over three thousand copies as far as I can tell from calling Ingram's sales statistics line (Ingram is the largest North American book distributor).  But all wasn't lost; I learned more about putting a narrative together from writing The Toughest Man Alive than I could have from any grad school creative writing program. For my own wrestling memoir, Beer, Blood and Cornmeal: Seven Years of Incredibly Strange Wrestling I researched the book publishing business. I learned about query letters, contracts and submission guidelines. The next time around, I did everything right and now I’m pretty happy with my new book’s publisher, ECW Press. Beer, Blood and Cornmeal became San Francisco Chronicle Bay Area bestseller and good reviews are still coming in for it.

As for The Toughest Man Alive, Gene got tired of waiting for checks that would never come so he republished the book himself under the title of The Godfather of Grappling. It’s a much better looking product and you should really buy this version of the book instead of Toughest Man Alive, no matter how greatly discounted the original edition may be. If you don't "Judo" Gene wil choke you out and he can do it too. Just ask Steven Segal.