By Vitali Shaposhnikov: In and out of the ring, fighter’s lives are different yet are directly intertwined. A boxer’s career is directly dependant on their boxing coach, friends and family.
To put it simply, anyone who gets to see the fighter out of the ring often is capable of changing everything in that person’s career. Sometimes, trouble pushes people to do better and get further, and other times, it does the complete opposite, plunging them into a never-ending downspiral into defeat.
Some of you have been able to go to the movies and see the latest boxing film “The Fighter” starring Mark Wahlberg, Christian Bale and Amy Adams. The film ended up being highly rated by the public, which I thought was accurate. The movie, if you did not know, mostly focuses on parts of Micky Ward’s and Dicky Eklund’s lives.
During that specific period of time, as seen in the film, Dicky was a part of a documentary about crack addiction, called “High on Crack Street: Lost Lives in Lowell.” Lowell is a little city 30 miles northwest of Boston, Massachusetts. In The Fighter, the cast and director try to play out Dicky’s addiction to crack amongst other things and show how he directly affected Micky Ward’s career.
Since seeing The Fighter a few days ago, I found a real 1995 HBO version of “High on Crack Street: Lost Lives in Lowell.” It is a very powerful film, and it shows what Dick Eklund had to really go through while training Micky Ward for a part of his career. If anyone is interested, I thought posting the link to the documentary here might be interesting, and I highly recommend it.
Dick Eklund. Born 05/09/1957. Welterweight from Lowell, Massachusetts. Record 19-10-0, 4 KO.
Eklund’s biggest fight in his career was a UD loss to Sugar Ray Leonard in July 1978, where Eklund was able to knock Sugar Ray down in their bout.
http://www.snagfilms.com/films/title/high_on_crack_street_lost_lives_in_lowell/