Irish Micky Ward: "The Fighter" speaks out

The real-life boxer behind the Oscar-nominated movie

Gatti prevailed in their second encounter and also the third. “Micky is a great guy,” he said when the fighting was done. “I can’t say anything bad about him. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t find anything bad to say.”

Ward responded in kind, offering, “It’s not about who’s tougher. We’re both tough guys. It’s about respect. In the ring, we tried to kill each other. But I have a lot of respect for Arturo. I like him; he’s a nice person. I’d never say anything bad about him and I think that he feels the same way about me. I wanted to beat him more than anything in the world. But outside the ring, he’s a beautiful guy.”

Gatti died in Brazil in 2009. Initially, the authorities ruled that he’d passed out or been knocked unconscious after a night of hard drinking and been strangled to death. His wife (an exotic dancer named Amanda Rodrigues) was charged with first-degree murder. Then investigators did a suspicious about-face, claiming that Arturo had committed suicide by hanging himself with the strap from his wife’s purse.

“Arturo’s death really shook me up,” Micky says. “It was a terrible tragedy. I wasn’t there, so I can’t tell you what happened. But it’s hard for me to believe that he killed himself.”

That brings us to ‘The Fighter’, the Hollywood version of Ward’s life. Purists don’t like the movie. Its factual distortions and other departures from reality bother them.

George Kimball, longtime boxing writer for the Boston Herald, covered Ward from his days as an amateur through Micky’s final professional fight.

“I have problems with the movie,” Kimball says. “It depicts Micky’s family in a way that’s bound to humiliate them. I can live with that because some of them were pretty bad. But the boxing career that’s shown in the film isn’t Micky’s and that bothers me. Chronologically, the storyline is way off. There are fights in the film that bear no relationship to what actually happened. And the make-believe world championship fight at the end is ridiculous. Micky never won a world title. When he beat Shea Neary in London (the climactic scene in 'The Fighter'), it was for a belt given out by a silly alphabet-soup organization called the World Boxing Union. That belt meant so little to Micky that he gave it up rather than defend it. The great thing about Micky Ward is that he’s appreciated and respected by people who know boxing even though he never won a world title. Why construct a nonsense storyline and pretend that fiction is history?”

The best way to enjoy 'The Fighter' is to forget about the details of Micky’s life, treat it like fiction, and enjoy the show.
That might be hard for some members of Ward’s family to do. As Kimball notes, “Micky’s mother is presented as such a selfish venal matriarch, she could be Fagin in drag. Alice presides over a flock of daughters; big-haired, gum-chewing, chain-smoking, foul-mouthed, small-town bimbos. This gaggle of slovenly crones serves the approximate function of the witches in Macbeth.”

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