‘Million Dollar Baby’ Throws Sucker Punch

Three or four years ago, I bought a small book to take on a long airplane ride. “Rope Burns: Stories from the Corner,” by F.X. Toole. Writer Pete Hamill was quoted in a cover blurb: “In this remarkable collection ... the spirit of Hemingway lives on.”

I once loved writing about boxing, and I still do it, though there’s not so much fun in it anymore. I picked up Toole’s book because, thumbing through it, I’d read a paragraph that rang with truth as I had come to know it with Muhammad Ali.

“Respect (Toole wrote) is part of the magic of boxing. Most outside the fight game expect the victors to denigrate the vanquished. That would destroy the magic. Ali was yappy before, during and after a fight, but we always knew he was playing the fool, was a pup so full of life that he had to yip and yap, prance and dance. There are imitators, to be sure, but there’s no fun to what they do.”

Toole’s storytelling skills gave the short pieces the feel of the real boxing world -- until, somewhere over Nebraska, I came to page 63. There, in a story called “Million $$$ Baby,” an old trainer turns to a woman who has tapped him on the shoulder. He says, “What, I owe you money?”

“No, sir,” she says, “but we got us a problem bigger’n a tranny in a Peterbilt.”

Real people don’t talk like that.

It’s how aspiring boxer Maggie Fitzgerald introduces herself to veteran trainer Frankie Dunn. He immediately sees a “pair of agate eyes” that remind him of his daughter, a daughter whose name we are not told and who is mentioned only twice in the story. I caught the drift. The woman has sought him out because she is 33 and wants to amount to something. (Think Rocky Balboa, only cuter.) The trainer resists because, for one thing, he knows boxing is no game, and, for sure, it’s no game for women.

“I saw two little hunred-ten-pounders,” Frankie tells Maggie, “and all they did was stand toe to toe and wing punches like they were out behind a liquor store fightin’ on broken glass. Got their eyes all tore up. One got a broken jaw, and the winner went to the hospital with a ruptured spleen. What the hell is that? And then, what if a gal up and dies on you? Nah, get one of the other guys.”

So when the movie “Million Dollar Baby” made some noise, I thought the plot sounded familiar. In time I saw that it was a faithful adaptation of the Toole story. So faithful, in fact, that the movie is just as disappointing as the story and in just as many ways. The movie’s four Academy Awards, including the one for best picture, are more testament to director/star Clint Eastwood’s technical mastery of the medium and its community politics than to any artful representation of boxing and life.

Here, a pause for a Spoiler Alert: For those of you who plan to see the movie, be advised that we’re going to talk about the ending.

Eastwood has insisted that Baby is not about boxing. His insistence had the aroma of commercial expedience. Boxing movies rarely are the family fare that bring in big box office receipts. The “Rocky” franchise of fairy tales was the exception and “Raging Bull” the rule with its fulsome brutality. So Eastwood told reporters, “It’s not a boxing story. It’s all about hopes and dreams. It’s a love story, and the boxing is just there.”

Oh.

Please.

Without the boxing, there’s no movie. And women’s boxing is awful. Its poster girl is Tonya Harding, the Pillsbury Doughboy in drag. Still, there’s no way a real world Maggie Fitzgerald, however powerful her hopes and dreams, can walk into a gym and be made into a one-punch destroyer. There’s the story’s foundational lie.

The bottom line truth of boxing is disturbing. It’s the only sport in which the goal is to injure the opponent’s brain. And yet “Baby” gets to its inevitable tragedy in such a preposterous way that even boxing’s critics consider the story less a commentary on boxing than it is sentimental tripe disguised by shadowy lighting. (What, did Eastwood’s budget allow only for 40-watt bulbs?)

Maggie becomes a quadriplegic by falling against the corner stool when sucker-punched at the bell by a hulking East German brawler who used to be a prostitute. Could happen.

About to have a leg amputated, Maggie tries to bite off her tongue in an attempted suicide. Could happen.

The old trainer grants the woman he loves as his daughter her last wish with a shot of adrenaline that kills her. Could happen.

Just don’t tell me it’s a love story.