Danny Hogan
The owner of the New Jersey health farm where Jack Brennan trains in 'Fifty Grand'.
To keep the farm's name good. He is worried that Brennan will go into the ring looking untrained, and that people will say the place gave him a black eye.
The book
At a glance
- Owner of the health farm where Jack Brennan trains
- Up in the hills in New Jersey, with a gym in the barn
- Paying health-farm customers, and Bruce, who does the rubbing
- The horses, by telephone
- Everything, including the liquor and the rubdowns
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeDanny Hogan runs the health farm in 'Fifty Grand', one of the fourteen stories in Men Without Women, the 1927 collection by the American writer Ernest Hemingway. The farm is up in the hills in New Jersey, with a gym in the barn, and Hogan takes both fighters in training and paying customers who want to be looked after.
Jack Brennan spends the last weeks before his title fight there and does not much like it. Hogan likes him, more or less, and watches him carefully, and most of what the reader learns about the state the champion is in comes from Hogan saying it out loud on the porch.
How the book draws them
- The farmNice country in the hills, a porch, an office, and a gym in the barn where two of his health-farm customers put the gloves on and decline to hit each other in case they get hit back. His way of ending the session is to tell them they can stop the slaughter and go and take a shower.
- His verdict on the champion“He's a pretty cold one,” Hogan says of Brennan, after the fighter sends his sparring partner back to town. Pressed on it, he agrees that Brennan has always been fine to him too, and then says it again anyway: he has no complaint, but the man is a cold one.
- He follows the horses by telephoneThe narrator brings him yesterday's racing news from the paper and Hogan has already had it on the telephone the night before. He says he keeps in touch with them.
- What he says about the conditionWatching Brennan skip rope the day before the fight without raising a sweat, Hogan says he is stale as poorhouse cake and has nothing. He wonders aloud whether the man has tuberculosis. When the narrator complains about what the sportswriters have printed, Hogan's answer is that they are not such fools, and that this time they are right.
- The bottle, and the billAsked for liquor on the last night, Hogan brings up a quart and two glasses, offers ginger ale, and is told the point is not to get sick. In the morning Brennan tells him to put it on the bill. Hogan puts everything on the bill, including the rubdowns, which is how the man who gives them ends up disappointed with his tip.
- He recognises the visitorsWhen the manager arrives with two friends, Hogan names them straight off as Happy Steinfelt and Lew Morgan, who own a pool-room, calls Steinfelt a big operator and a smooth boy, and sums the pair up as a couple of sharpshooters. Told they will see him in half an hour, he says to hell with them and goes back to the office.