Cockfighter Book 
by Charles Willeford 
an Avon Paperback 1974 
Cockpits 
Sport 
Violence
The sport is cockfighting, and Frank Mansfield is the Cockfighter--a silent and fiercely contrary man whose obsession with winning will cost him almost everything.  In this haunting, ribald, and percussively violent work, the author of the Hoke Mosely detective novels yields a floodlit vision of the cockpits and criminal underbelly of the rural South.