Irish Thunder: The Hard Life and Times of Micky Ward

Welcome to Lowell, where anything can happen.

Rocky Marciano fought at the Auditorium in 1947. Mike Tyson fought there in his Golden Glove days. Sugar Ray Leonard won there, so did Marvin Hagler. Each of them prepared for his battle downstairs in the boiler room, just like thousands of other kids whose greatest feeling in life would forever remain the night they landed a few good shots on the chin of some other twelve-, thirteen-, or fourteen-year-old.

Fighters got dressed next to other fighters in the brightly lit makeup rooms for the theater productions. They had their hands taped and their gloves tied under the glow of several domed lights that outlined the large mirrors. Warm-ups, shadowboxing, meditation, and stretching were all done wherever a fighter could find the space. But there wasn’t any space. Each of the dozens of fighters brought a manager, a trainer, a family member, or all three. The bathrooms, makeup areas, and hallways filled up rather quickly.

In their amateur days, their matches on any given night were made when organizers put numbered pills into a bottle and picked out two pills at a time. If a fighter was number seven, he learned at six o’clock that he was fighting number five at seven o’clock. “Good luck, kid. You’re on in an hour.”

“Irish” Micky Ward grew up in the 1970s and 80s as a tough kid from Lowell, Massachusetts—a town where boxers were once bred as a means of survival. A hard worker who overcame bad luck, bad management, and chronic pain in his hands, he avoided the pitfall of poverty and dead-end work that plagued Lowell to become a Golden Gloves junior welterweight.

Ward participated in street fights from an early age and was forever known by his opponents and spectators as the underdog. But with his incredible ability to suddenly drop an opponent late in a fight with his trademark left hook, he kept proving everyone wrong.