![]() 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. "And three or four times he came to hang out here. ![]() "I went over and stayed with Mark for a few weeks at a time," says Ward matter-of-factly. 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. "He always inspired all of us to be able to set really big goals for ourselves and to accomplish them." "Micky Ward was the local guy who did the impossible," Wahlberg told US national radio. 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. Wahlberg, who came on as a producer as well as the star, had also dreamed of making a movie about Ward. 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. ![]() He is ultimately handed a 10-year prison sentence for armed robbery and kidnapping, among other offences. In it, Eklund oscillates between getting high with his toothless buddies and training Ward down at the gym, often in the same afternoon. Less honourable was his later appearance in a grim HBO documentary with the self-explanatory title, High on Crack Street: Lost Lives in Lowell. His career high point was knocking down Sugar Ray Leonard in 1978. Eklund, four years Ward's senior, was once known as "the pride of Lowell". They had already been material for hours of TV sports programming. 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."īefore their lives became a movie, Ward and his family were no strangers to the camera. There'll be police coming round and everything, you can bet on it. "It's like the OK Corral when we get together!" he laughs. If anything, The Fighter tones his family life down, says Ward. 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. 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. 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". 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. If Ward's family were fictional, nobody would believe it. 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." Did his life feel like a boxing movie when he was living it? "To be honest, no, not at all. "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. 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. 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. 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. W e've seen it a dozen times before: the blue-collar contender who dreams of being a boxing champ.
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