I have never gone, and never want to go, to an actual boxing match. To see two men -- and now women -- battering each other until one is knocked senseless seems altogether too primal.
Despite that, it’s a sport I’ve long followed. For years I watched matches on TV and read about fighters in Sports Illustrated. When Normal Mailer or Joyce Carol Oates wrote books about boxers, I bought ‘em.
I don’t track boxing as closely these days, but still I find myself, on more weekends than I care to count, sitting mesmerized in front of the ESPN Classics channel as Gene Tunney beats Jack Dempsey with the long count or Muhammad Ali floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee.
What would drive a man to slug others and risk his own life by allowing himself to be slugged? The easy answer is money. Most professional fighters come from deprived backgrounds; boxing is a way out.
The best of boxing movies get this, but they also get that financial concerns are rarely the sole reason propelling a man into the ring. The are as much about a fighter’s psychology as his physique. It’s what broadens their appeal beyond just fans of the sweet science.
In Martin Scorsese’s “Raging Bull,” arguably the greatest boxing movie ever, real life pugilist Jake LaMotta (Robert De Niro) is a seething, red-hot ball of self-loathing, as brutal on himself and those close to him as he is to opponents.
In Clint Eastwood’s “Million Dollar Baby,” the real fight for female boxer Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank) comes after a beating in the ring leaves her a quadriplegic. For her, it’s now a fight to the finish -- she must enlist her trainer (Eastwood) to help her die -- in the most permanent sense.
Even the first “Rocky” (forget the chest-beating, hyperbolic sequels) exhibited a fascination with why a mediocre fighter, who knew he couldn’t win, would still climb into the ring where he would be battered yet refuse to end his own misery by going down.
David O. Russell’s newest, “The Fighter,” gets to double-down on the interior struggles of boxers, because it’s about two of them: real-life half-brothers “Irish” Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg) and Dicky Eklund (Christian Bale), from working class Lowell, Massachussetts.
Dicky, the elder brother, is a once promising fighter -- he managed to knock down Sugar Ray Leonard before losing a match to him -- who is now a crack addict. He also serves as trainer for the younger Micky, who grew up idolizing Dicky.
But the family dynamics are more complicated than that. Dicky and now Micky are managed and promoted by their mother (Melissa Leo) who, in addition to her sons, also has seven daughters, each with hair dyed blonder and teased higher than the next. Mom is so eager for money that she willingly books Mickey into fights he can’t hope to win.
