Small-town boxer Micky Ward was on a losing streak until clinching a world title. Now his troubled tale comes to life in a new hit film
We've seen it a dozen times before: the blue-collar contender who dreams of being a boxing champ. He fights personal battles, struggles in a dead-end job, and jogs along derelict streets punching the air in the training montage, all leading up to the Big Fight. As the title suggests, The Fighter, starring Mark Wahlberg as the put-upon contender, does very little to challenge the movie cliches of Rocky and its ilk, but the key difference is that this story actually happened ? to "Irish" Micky Ward. From the impoverished town of Lowell, Massachusetts, Ward really did turn around his losing streak, gave it one last shot and triumphed, winning the WBU light welterweight title in 2000.
"I guess that's the way things happened but I never thought in a million years it would be turned into something like this, y'know?" says Ward, now 45 and retired from boxing since 2003. Did his life feel like a boxing movie when he was living it? "To be honest, no, not at all. It's not really a boxing movie anyway. The boxing's the backdrop, but it's more about family dynamics, it's about the struggles of two brothers, ups and downs, all that."
If Ward's family were fictional, nobody would believe it. His mother, Alice, portrayed in the film by Melissa Leo, is a flinty, chain-smoking matriarch with voluminous bleach-blonde hair and a firm idea of what's good for her son's career ? which appears to be letting him get pounded into defeat time after time. She's backed up by Ward's seven sisters ? a united front of aggressively hairsprayed hardness with nicknames such as "Red Dog", "Beaver" and "Pork". And then there's his half-brother and trainer, Dicky Eklund, played by Christian Bale, a former boxer whose career was blighted by crack addiction. Pitted against them is Ward's partner Charlene (Amy Adams), whose suggestion that the biggest obstacle to his success is his family provokes as much violence as the boxing.
If anything, The Fighter tones his family life down, says Ward. "It's like the OK Corral when we get together!" he laughs. "Especially if there's booze involved. When they start drinking, forget it. There'll be police coming round and everything, you can bet on it. We don't really get together much like that any more." After a pause, perhaps to consider his ambassadorial duty to the movie, Ward adds: "But honestly we all got along and we all loved each other."
Before their lives became a movie, Ward and his family were no strangers to the camera. They had already been material for hours of TV sports programming. Eklund, four years Ward's senior, was once known as "the pride of Lowell". His career high point was knocking down Sugar Ray Leonard in 1978. Less honourable was his later appearance in a grim HBO documentary with the self-explanatory title, High on Crack Street: Lost Lives in Lowell. In it, Eklund oscillates between getting high with his toothless buddies and training Ward down at the gym, often in the same afternoon. He is ultimately handed a 10-year prison sentence for armed robbery and kidnapping, among other offences.
The Fighter started out as another documentary, following Eklund's release from jail and the brothers' preparations for the 2000 title fight, Ward explains, but then it got into the hands of the Paramount studio that loved the idea of making it as a movie. Wahlberg, who came on as a producer as well as the star, had also dreamed of making a movie about Ward. The two had much in common. Both came from large, working-class families in the Boston area, both had successful older brothers (in Wahlberg's case, Donnie, of New Kids On The Block fame), and Wahlberg's father even knew Ward's father in prison. "Micky Ward was the local guy who did the impossible," Wahlberg told US national radio. "He always inspired all of us to be able to set really big goals for ourselves and to accomplish them."
What all of this meant for Ward was first a succession of writers, then Wahlberg and Bale coming to hang out with him and his family to study them. "I went over and stayed with Mark [in California] for a few weeks at a time," says Ward matter-of-factly. "And three or four times he came to hang out here. He wanted to train like I did, come running with me, or he'd want to just talk and get to know me." Didn't it feel weird having your every move scrutinised? "No. Yeah, well, a little bit. You couldn't really tell, but I guess that's what being a good actor is. I guess he was studying me as we talked and whatever, watching my mannerisms without me even knowing it. "
Wahlberg started preparing for the role a good four years before The Fighter started shooting. Even while working on other movies, he would get up early and put in a workout before going on set. As a result, the boxing in The Fighter is basically for real. Ward and Wahlberg even got in the ring together a couple of times. "He could be a decent fighter," judges Ward. Could Ward have taken him? "I hope I could, but he's a lot bigger than me!" Besides, he adds, no punches to the face were allowed: giving the lead star a black eye would not have gone down well.
Ward's biggest disappointment is that while Bale, Leo and Adams all earned Oscar nominations for their performances, Wahlberg did not. Roger Ebert, film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times, described him as having "less personality than the hero of any other boxing movie I can remember". "See, that's the thing that kind of sucks," says Ward, "because I wasn't flashy and loud, his character doesn't get nominated for an academy award, y'know. If my character was crazy and jumping out of windows [like Bale's], maybe he would have, but it is what it is."
It's no great spoiler to reveal that The Fighter obeys movie rules and closes at a narrative and emotional high point. Ward wins the big fight, family wounds are healed. Roll credits. Everybody lived happily ever after, right? "No, it wasn't like that," Ward laughs. "Not at all."
When he and Eklund first saw The Fighter at a private screening, Eklund hated it, says Ward, complaining that, "it made me look like a million bucks and him look like a two-dollar bill. He didn't like it seeing all the drugs stuff, it brought him back to that time. But then he saw it again at the premiere, and he saw people clapping and crying and laughing and he felt proud. All his mistakes weren't for nothing."
Mother and sisters have been less consolable, apparently, and the movie's family truce was only temporary. "There's no love lost between my sisters and my wife. Some of them don't talk to her at all. Some of them I talk to, and a couple of them I don't. I was loyal to my family, but obviously I got a wife and a daughter I got to take care of now."
Ward's career continued beyond the frame of the movie. In his next fight, five months later, he lost his title and never regained it. He did, however, go on to box in some legendary fights, including a famous trilogy with Canadian Arturo Gatti. These 10-round slug-outs are what really sealed Ward's boxing reputation: evenly matched, both boxers refused to give in, and took injuries so punishing they ended up in hospital. Ring magazine nominated Ward's matches "Fight of the Year" three years running. Had The Fighter been a "proper" boxing movie it would have focused on this era.
Ward doesn't mind, though. As far as he's concerned, The Fighter hasn't changed his life at all. He was already a local hero, eulogised in songs, books and video games. He still runs a gym and trains young boxers in Lowell, as does his brother Dicky, who's now clean. He also runs an outdoor hockey rink and works as a truck driver for local movie productions such as Ben Affleck's The Town and Ricky Gervais's The Invention of Lying (a Gervais cameo in The Fighter would have been truly surreal but Ward never met him).
As for boxing movies, despite his own fabled resilience in the ring, Ward finds Rocky a little far-fetched. "There's no person in the world who could take that much without the referee stopping it." He's more sympathetic towards Somebody Up There Likes Me (Paul Newman's biopic of Rocky Graziano) and The Hurricane (Denzel Washington as wrongly imprisoned boxer Rubin Carter). But his favourite boxing movie turns out to be The Champ ? Jon Voight's sentimental father-son weepie. "I saw that as a kid, it really got to me."
You could say The Fighter weaves together similar strands of family and pugilistic conflict, but perhaps its success is equally down to timing. The Lowell of Ward's youth was already in terminal, post-industrial decline, like much of the present-day US. The Fighter's themes of poverty, family, determination and redemption are clearly what American audiences want to see right now, which makes Ward as close as you can get to a real-life working-class hero ? even if that real life needed a little tweaking to fit the formula.
Three of the best boxing films
Raging Bull (1980)
A Scorsese masterpiece with Robert De Niro devastating as champion Jake LaMotta; the brutal fights are shot in a grainy black and white harking back to boxing's heyday.
When We Were Kings (1996)
From the press hoopla to the brutal majesty of the fight: it's all there in Leon Gast's exemplary documentary about Muhammad Ali v George Foreman in Zaire in 1974, the rumble in the jungle.
Fat City (1972)
Veteran pug Stacy Keach and young bruiser Jeff Bridges form a friendship that counterpoints bloody experience and optimism in John Huston's sweatily authentic portrait of the fight game.
Paul Howlett
