On Monday night I was lucky enough to attend a preview screening of David Russell's new Oscar-nominated film, The Fighter, which stars Mark Wahlberg as 'Irish' Micky Ward.
Ward is an unlikely subject for a boxing biopic but then this isn't really a film about his career. If it was it would never end before the fights which made him famous - an epic trilogy against Arturo Gatti (pictured above). It's really a film about his family and in particular his brother Dick Ecklund, an ex-boxer and crack addict, brilliantly portrayed in the film by Christian Bale. It's a crazy, helter-skelter performance that has to be seen to be believed and Bale is as short as 1/9 to take home the Oscar at the end of the month. Ecklund is a compelling character, a local legend around Lowell on account of his 1978 fight with Sugar Ray Leonard (he had Leonard on the canvas, but lost on points). The HBO documentary which chronicled his sad decent into drug addiction - and which features in the film - is now available to view online.
But back to those Gatti fights. If you've just come back from the cinema and you want to know what happened next, then I urge you to go on YouTube and look up Gatti-Ward.
The pair fought a total of three times, two victories for Gatti and one for Ward - but that doesn't tell the half of it. Two of their three contests were subsequently voted 'Fight of the Year' by Ring magazine and they still take the breath away, even on second, third, and fourth viewing.
Their first encounter was one of those rare occasions, in boxing and in life, when two men with an abundance of what fight people call 'heart' met in a head-on collision the like of which we may never see again. Like two cars driving towards each at full speed, they never let up the tempo, each daring the other to be the first to pull out. All three of their fights were over 10 rounds and it is interesting to speculate how they would have turned out over the 12-round championship distance. Both men gave literally everything they had, and walked away with the satisfaction of knowing they had left their blood, sweat, their very souls on the canvas.
Despite the ferocity of their fights, both became close friends after their boxing careers were over, sharing a bond few people will ever understand. Ward was devastated when Gatti was found dead in a Brazilian hotel room in 2009. His death has never been satisfactorily explained, but the fight world lost one of its most charismatic figures.
When I first watched those Gatti-Ward fights I always sided with Gatti, I'm not sure why. But knowing something of Ward's own extraordinary back story means I'll watch them again with new eyes.
The Fighter is a helluva film and deserves every one of its seven Oscar nominations. Amy Adams is also a revelation as Ward's feisty girlfriend Charlene who gives as good as she gets against Ward's mother and seven sisters. In real life there's no love lost between them to this day. The movie ends with Ward's 2000 victory over Shea Neary, a promising fighter who had previously been unbeaten but retired just two fights later. Both men played strongly on their Irish roots: Micky Ward was known simply as 'Irish' while Neary went by the nickname, the 'Shamrock Express'. In the movie though, most of the crowd in the London-based fight are wearing Union Jack t-shirts. A minor point, because the movie as a whole is superb.
