With Christmas and New Years falling on the weekend this time around, there wasn’t much in the way of action in the boxing world. This time of year is about awards and reflections on the prior 12 months in the sport of the Sweet Science. So I decided on Monday night to do what many had told me to, and take in a certain movie… And “Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader” it was. I’m kidding, it was, of course, “The Fighter”, The true story based on retired Boxer, “Irish” Micky Ward and his brother/trainer and former Boxer – Dick Eklund.
Just like in the movie “Rudy” there were a lot of things exaggerated from an in-the-ring standpoint. I don’t want to ruin the flick for anyone that hasn’t seen it, but let’s just say, the sequence of events after Ward’s win over Alfonoso Sanchez wasn’t accurately portrayed. Not to mention that the “beating” that he was given by Mike Mungin isn’t really a fair representation of the final score total from the fight.
But that’s Hollywood and that’s what you do with a lot of movies that are based on true stories; you have to dramatize them. No matter how nit-picky you want to get, there is no doubt that Christian Bale’s performance as Eklund was fantastic and I won’t be surprised if he receives an Oscar nomination for the role. The movie overall is good. The dialogue is thick with Boston slang, and funny. I would recommend it to anybody that hasn’t seen it.
Now, I’m not disappointed in any way that I saw it, but I’m a little disappointed that the only mention of Ward’s trilogy with Arturo Gatti was in the credits at the end. Make no mistake, if you talk to majority of boxing writers or hardcore boxing fans, they’ll tell you that the highlight of Ward’s career was his three wars with Gatti. I’ve made mention of the fights in columns before, in particular the 9th round of their first battle, which is the greatest round that I’ve ever seen. I did find it odd in that some of the audio they used from the HBO announcers for his final fight in the movie was in fact pulled from that first Gatti fight, and not the fight shown in the movie.
I’ve always told anyone that would listen, that they need to watch that round, watch that fight, and watch that trilogy. Ward won that first fight and it would have been a fitting way to end the movie with him winning a battle that not even a director or Hollywood scriptwriter could come up with. It is that real, that dramatic, and that good.
Watch Gatti vs. Ward I Round 9
Admittedly I am not a movie critic. I have a brief background in acting and that is the extent of my in depth Hollywood knowledge. But I know what I feel and I know what inspires me. In one of the toughest times for me personally, I watched a replay of that first fight against Gatti and had chills and admiration for what I saw.
To sit here and rip a movie that people worked tirelessly on would be somewhat disrespectful to those parties involved. If you look at it from a consumer standpoint, you could say that I paid $11 to watch it, so I have the freedom to critique it. I also pay $10 a month for a DVR service and use that same freedom to playback, pause, record, watch, and delete various programs on my TV. There are three programs on my current DVR list that will never be deleted – Ward vs. Gatti I, II, and III.
HBO announcer Jim Lampley said it best during that epic first fight between Ward and Gatti. In the final minute of that 9th round, with the crowd roar deafening, and Ward slugging it out and beating Gatti, Lampley yelled, “Just imagine if you bought a ticket!”
For those that did, there is no need to imagine. What they saw was real. And although the ticket I bought Monday didn’t get me the ending I desired, in that fight, Micky Ward got his.
