Irish Micky Ward and  Mark Wahlberg

Boston Herald sports and boxing writer Ron Borges has a timely interview with  Lowell’s Irish Micky Ward in today’s edition. In a few days Paramount Pictures will release the long-awaited, shot-in-Lowell movie about Ward and his fighting career culminating (in the movie) with his victory over Shea Neary in London for the  the World Boxing Union light welterweight championship. Borges  knows more than most about Ward,  his career, his  personal ups and downs and the fight business. As he notes in the article:

Next week the world will see the cinematic version of not only that night, but of Ward’s sometimes dysfunctional family life and how, in the end, he triumphed over all of it with his troubled older half-brother, Dickie Ecklund, in his corner. Dickie had seen his own career and much of his life dissipated by drug abuse.

It is not always a happy story, but it’s a feel-good ending, one that has left the 45-year-old Ward wealthy beyond his dreams, yet still happy to work as a driver on movie sets for the Teamsters and occasionally run the road grader he used to operate when he needed that road crew job to supplement his boxing income.

For a fighter like him, with no one behind him when he made his pro debut at Roll-On America Skating Rink in Lawrence in 1985, it wasn’t supposed to end with a movie and several million dollars’ worth of income late in his career. That’s not what boxing is very often.

There’s a story to tell both in the article and on the screen. “The Fighter” opens in Boston and environs on December 10th with a sold-out preview for charity in Lowell on December 9th. Some feel the acting is Oscar-worthy… for some it’s the story that’s worthy.

Read the full article and interview here in today’s Boston Herald on-line.