There's only one Ali - but why are there six Rockys?

BOXING IN THE MOVIES: JOE QUEENANhas enjoyed the many great boxing movies out there – but can't help remarking on how few of them are about black boxers , who, of course, have always dominated the fight game, both in numbers and in actual world titles won

THE RATIO of good films about boxers to bad films about boxers is extraordinarily high. That may be because there is something inherently thrilling about the manly art, but it may also be because Hollywood doesn't make a movie about boxers every week, whereas it does make a movie about young men who treat women badly 52 times a year. It may also be because the great movies about boxers become lodged in the public's memory, while the bad ones ( The Main Event, a woeful 1979 outing starring Barbra Streisand and Ryan O'Neal immediately comes to mind) simply vaporise.

It may also be because so many movies about boxers have been directed by talented directors (Martin Scorsese, John Huston, Michael Mann, Martin Ritt, Jim Sheridan, David O Russell, Clint Eastwood), whereas movies about young men who mistreat women get directed by clowns.

Boxing films have been much in the air recently because of Russell’s stirring new release, The Fighter. With Christian Bale giving the performance of a lifetime as a washed-up welterweight contender whose younger half-brother (Mark Wahlberg) has also entered the family business, The Fighter’s narrative threads have a great deal to say about family, class, drugs, romance and holding on to one’s dreams.

Bale's performance is so stunning it seems like a new, emotionally re-engineered Christian Bale has replaced the limp, overmatched actor who got upstaged by his co-stars in 3.10 to Yuma(Russell Crowe), Public Enemies(Johnny Depp) and The Dark Knight(Heath Ledger). The same is true of Amy Adams, who played a lovable nitwit in Junebug, a lovable nitwit in Doubtand a perky nitwit in Julie and Julia, but who here takes a sharp turn from her apparent career path as the second coming of Meg Ryan by playing a tough, savvy, determined townie who would dearly love to get out of town.

Even before The Fighterstarted making waves – it also features a juicy performance by Melissa Leo as the boys' acid-tongued mother – there was a good deal of chatter about the boxing film genre in general. In December, the character Rocky Balboa from the six Rocky films was inducted into the Boxing Hall of Fame, the first time a fictional entity had been accorded this high honour.

Shortly after that, the industry celebrated the 30th anniversary of the release of Scorsese's brilliant Raging Bull, conveniently forgetting the film did not do all that well at the box office when it first saw the light of day. Given it has only been seven years since Eastwood's offbeat Million Dollar Babywon the Oscar for best picture, and just six years since Ron Howard's rousing, if somewhat less successful Cinderella Man premiered, it is safe to say the past decade has been very good for the boxing movie genre indeed.

These films all have two things in common: they are basically rags-to-riches stories about underdogs who came out of nowhere to achieve greatness, and they are all about white people. A white person myself, I have nothing against films revolving around white people – I loved Bringing Up Baby, Psychoand Jaws– nor do I think that there is anything sinister about the preponderance of motion pictures dealing with white boxers. Fat Citywas great, The Boxerwas superb, and classics like Requiem for a Heavyweight, Kid Galahadand The Champare all burned into my psyche.

But white people are pretty rare inside the ring, certainly at the highest levels (the recent ascendance of all those giant brawlers from the post-Soviet states to the various versions of the world heavyweight title notwithstanding).

There's certainly no rule that motion pictures have to be faithful to reality; everything from King of Kingsto King Kongto The Last King of Scotlandto The King's Speechtakes liberties with the facts. Still, if virtually every picture about jazz, basketball or the civil rights movement focused on the exploits of intrepid, charismatic white people, to the exclusion of the black people who actually dominate these milieus in real life, somebody might start to notice.

The last high-profile motion picture to deal with a black boxer was Mann's Ali(2001), co-written by Stephen Rivele, a college classmate of mine who introduced me to my future wife and then never spoke to me again. It was a good, though certainly not a great film, hampered by the fact Will Smith lacked the vivaciousness and charm of Muhammad Ali.

The genius of Ali was better captured in When We Were Kings, a 1996 film about Ali's epic 1974 "Rumble in the Jungle" with champion George Foreman in Zaire. But When We Were Kingsis a documentary, and the public rarely sees documentaries. Moreover, documentaries rarely enter the world of mythology the way dramatic films like Rockyand Raging Bulldo. That's just the way it is.

In 1999, Denzel Washington played Rubin "Hurricane" Carter in The Hurricane, about a middleweight contender who spent 20 years in a New Jersey prison for allegedly participating in a triple murder. The subject of a Bob Dylan song, Carter's case became a cause celebre among liberals in the US, who claimed the boxer had been railroaded by the police and the government. Carter was eventually released from prison, though detractors never stopped insisting he was guilty.

One thing cannot be contested: The Hurricane, a flawed, self-congratulatory film that is less about boxing than about racism, does not fall into the heartwarming, inspirational mode of Cinderella Manand Rockyand The Fighter. Like so many of his films, it was lifted above mediocrity almost entirely by Washington's talents. But in the end, it was lifted only slightly above mediocrity.

Since Ali, with the exception of a few negligible, low-budget releases, there have been no films of any consequence featuring black boxers. Hmm. I once suggested in print the Rockyfilms might have a mildly racist subtext – inadvertent, to be sure! – in that the white public, rankled that they could never have a white champion in the real world, simply retreated into the realm of fantasy, where they could. It was thereupon pointed out to me that Rockyis a fairytale, and that fairytales are absurd, and the most absurd fairytale of all is the idea that a short white man could become heavyweight champion of the world.

By this reasoning, everyone who watches Rockyalready knows that it is a fairytale, and thus racial issues have nothing to do with it. I would suggest that proponents of this view do not know much about white people, and even less about Philadelphia.

Moreover, once Rockyscored big, its fairytale aura faded away. In the original Rocky, the converted South Philly goon gives Apollo Creed, Sylvester Stallone's crude Ali stand-in, more than he can handle, but does not actually win the fight. In Rocky II, he does. This is where the fairytale becomes preposterous; when Rocky IIwas made, in 1979, it had been 19 years since a white man – the Swede Ingemar Johansson – had been world heavyweight champion. In the 20 subsequent years, until Vitali Klitschko began the eastern invasion of the division, there were two white heavyweight title holders across the four different boxing federations, against 28 black ones. And one of those two, Francesco Damiani, barely counts because no one was interested in the belt he won while Mike Tyson held the other three.

I thoroughly enjoyed The Fighter, I thought Million Dollar Babywas kind of sweet, and I admired Russell Crowe's performance in Cinderella Man, even though the film itself was oddly inanimate. Still, I wouldn't mind occasionally seeing a good movie about a fantastic black boxer.

It’s not like there haven’t been plenty to choose from: Mike Tyson, Joe Louis, Sugar Ray Leonard, Sugar Ray Robinson, Floyd Patterson, Sonny Liston, and Tommy Hearns, just to name a few. Louis, for example, knocked out Hitler’s favourite son, Max Schmeling, in a famous 1938 bout at Yankee Stadium after losing to him two years earlier; it was probably the most important fight in the history of the world. That would make an interesting film. So why no takers? How come these things only get made for television?

I don’t think I’m asking for the moon here. It’s not as if I’m suggesting that Hollywood start making films with names like Eskimo TKO, to make up for decades of callously overlooking the vast pugilistic prowess of Inuit flyweights. It’s not as if I’m asking Hollywood to start making movies about hermaphrodite boxers or blind Macedonian boxers or boxers who slug it out from wheelchairs or boxers who can cite Arthur Rimbaud in the original French. I’m only asking Hollywood to occasionally make a film that more closely reflects the reality of the boxing world as we know it.

If you can have six Rockys, why do we only have one Ali? If we have movies about a so-so white middleweight and a scrappy white welterweight and a couple of pint-sized heavyweights, why can't we have a movie about Mike Tyson, whose rise and fall is as tragic a story as the boxing world has ever known? So yes, my request is modest.

Every once in a while, perhaps every seven years or so, somebody should make a motion picture that lionises a black man, a film that depicts an overmatched wretch from the wrong side of the tracks who comes out of nowhere, ignores the seemingly insuperable odds, and becomes heavyweight champion of the world. This, in fact, is the Mike Tyson story. And the Leon Spinks story. And the Jersey Joe Walcott story. And . . . but I digress.

One final plea to Hollywood: When you’re done with the African-American project, you might try making a movie about Hispanics. I seem to remember reading somewhere that there were a couple of good Latino boxers out there.