Rooting for the Home Team: Sport, Community, and Identity

14. The Cult of Micky Ward in Massachusette

14. The Cult of Micky Ward in Massachusetts Carlo rotella The retired boxer Micky Ward and the movie star Mark Wahlberg, escorted by publicists from Paramount Pictures, were sitting at a round table in a conference room in the Four Seasons hotel in Boston. It was early December 2010; The Fighter, the movie about Ward starring and produced by Wahlberg , was about to open. The early reviews were good, and Oscar buzz was mounting, especially around Christian Bale, who played the part of Dickie Eklund, Ward’s half-brother. Dickie, a far more sophisticated boxer than Micky, had taught Micky most of what he knew about boxing, but Dickie had squandered his own promise in traditional ways—crack, armed robbery , jail—before embarking on an equally traditional arc of recovery. The canonization in global popular culture that comes with being the subject of a big-time Hollywood movie would square all accounts for Micky, and maybe even for Dickie. “It makes all those days and nights, the b.s., worth it,” said Ward. “The hospital visits, the headaches, everything.” Ward is from Lowell, Massachusetts, a former textile-manufacturing capital thirty miles northwest of Boston. When I asked him how he expected the movie to go over there, especially its depiction of his mother as blindly favoring Dickie and of his sisters as a crew of baleful harpies, he said, “Some of them were taken aback when they saw what we were doing, but it is what it is.” Wahlberg, who grew up in a large working-class family in Dorchester, stressed the importance of his own local knowledge in assuring Ward and his family that the film would get Lowell right. “I know he took comfort in the fact that I was the driving force behind the movie,” Wahlberg said. 206 Carlo rotella Ward, who was forty-five, was not much heavier than his prime fighting weight of 140 pounds. Straight-backed but relaxed, giving brief answers and smiling occasionally, he had the former fighter’s aura of residual force. Consequential blows, given and taken, had worn smooth all his sharp edges. Wahlberg, thirty-nine, the bulkier of the two men, talked in longer, more energetic riffs, leaning forward as he described his long effort to bring the movie to fruition. Wahlberg spent five years developing The Fighter, but his desire to play a boxer goes back to his early days in show business, as a viewing of his Marky Mark videos from the early 1990s will confirm. Wahlberg did his best to defer to Ward, but Ward refused to take over, and, anyway, a movie star’s idea of deferring does not preclude dominating theconversation.Wahlberg,knowninthebusinessasaformerknucklehead who matured into a decent guy who gets things done (for instance, he proMicky Ward (right) and Mark Wahlberg. Courtesy of Stuart Cahill/Boston Herald. The Cult of Micky Ward in Massachusetts 207 duced the HBO series Entourage), clearly wanted to be taken seriously, not only as the prime mover behind The Fighter but also as a tough customer. He brought up his youthful brushes with the law, and he told me that the boxers who worked on The Fighter had not been in shape for long shooting days, but he had been, having trained for them. He interrupted himself at one point to ask why I hadn’t written down something he’d said that apparently struck him as quotable. Ward, for his part, said he had nothing left to prove to anybody. He was getting more requests for appearances and endorsements as a result of the movie, but they were no more than icing on the cake. “I’m pretty smart”—smaaht—“on how things go,” he said. “I don’t need a lot lot”—luot luot—“to be happy. My wife and my daughter are all set. Comfortable. I’m satisfied with that.” Wahlberg had at least one further ambition for Ward, however. “Next stop is the Boxing Hall of Fame, baby,” he said. Ward looked apologetic. If he is elected, it will be as a sentimental favorite or because the movie puts him over the top as a celebrity, not because he was one of the best of his time, let alone all time. He has become a folk hero—in the subcultural niches of eastern Massachusetts and the fight world, and now, thanks to the movie, in the mainstream of global popular culture—not because...