You show me a boxer, I’ll show you a person whose life story would make a great movie.
You show me someone who came from nothing, who suffered abuse and neglect, who had little hope for a productive life until they found the one thing they were good at, who became rich and famous and beloved but had to absorb countless punches to the head to do so, and I’ll show you a screenwriter’s dream.
Not every boxer checks all of those boxes. But most of ‘em check most of ‘em.
And that’s why Hollywood just keeps pumping out boxing movies, year after year, even as the sport keeps drifting further and further from the mainstream.
They aren’t all hits, of course. But they keep coming, spanning all eras – and genders.
In the closing months of 2024, there was “The Fire Inside,” about the rise of Claressa Shields, and there was “The Featherweight,” about the attempted comeback of Willie Pep, both movies earning acclaim at fall film festivals before struggling to gain theatrical traction. (“The Featherweight” just arrived last week for rental or purchase on Apple TV.)
Now all boxing biopic attention turns to the still-untitled Christy Martin movie, which filmed last year, is penciled in for a November release and has major buzz surrounding Sydney Sweeney – the grand marshal of the upcoming International Boxing Hall of Fame induction parade – in the lead role.
We all know the most famous biographical boxing movies: “Raging Bull” (Jake La Motta), “Cinderella Man” (James Braddock), “The Fighter” (Micky Ward), “The Hurricane” (Rubin Carter), “Somebody Up There Likes Me” (Rocky Graziano). There have been less-mainstream movies about Roberto Duran, Vinny Paz, Chuck Wepner and George Foreman, made-for-TV movies about Rocky Marciano and Mike Tyson, and a 13-episode Netflix series about Carlos Monzon.
And despite this glut of boxing biopics in the present and the past, there’s endless opportunity for more in the future. There are just that many fighters with cinematic stories.
Honestly, it would be quicker to list all the boxers who don’t have movie-worthy stories than to list those who do.
That said, from a field of thousands of biopic-worthy boxers, here, after consulting with several of my colleagues in the boxing media, are the 10 whom I think are most in need of the Hollywood treatment.
It was no easy task whittling it down to just 10. A partial list of names that were suggested to me and didn’t make the cut – but certainly could have – includes Floyd Mayweather Jnr, Saul “Canelo” Alvarez, Corrie Sanders, Deontay Wilder, Joe Calzaghe, Tony Galento, Aaron Pryor, Ricky Hatton, Sonny Liston, Gerry Cooney, Roy Jones Jnr, Emanuel Augustus and the Spinks brothers.
The right screenwriter and director could make an Oscar-worthy movie about any of those guys.
Maybe I’ll save them for the sequel to this column. For now, let’s focus on the featured attractions.
So make yourself a movie-theater salad (M&Ms poured into a bucket of popcorn), grab a cup of Coke the size of Primo Carnera’s fist and enjoy this (alphabetical) list of 10 boxers whose stories undoubtedly belong on the silver screen:
Bobby Chacon
The fact that Chacon was a Hall of Fame fighter who made spectacular wars and was in the Fight of the Year twice is almost incidental.
The tragic-then-triumphant twist in his tale – in which his wife committed suicide because he wouldn’t retire from boxing, and Chacon proceeded to fight and win the very next day, then later that year captured a world title – is far beyond what any fiction writer could conjure.
I may write these words often during this column, but … how have they not already made this guy’s story into a movie?
Oscar De La Hoya
There are two versions of this movie. There’s the straightforward, tear-jerking, probably-directed-by-Ron-Howard version based on the story Oscar told for most of his life – about winning the Olympic gold medal for his beloved mother, who died tragically young of cancer.
And then there’s the one, maybe directed by Darren Aronofsky, that tells what De La Hoya now says is the real story, of him overcoming the abuse of his mother – and lying to the world about it – as he became the biggest star in boxing and simultaneously spiraled out of control.
I’d watch either one.
Buster Douglas
Speaking of mothers and tragedy, Buster’s story just about writes itself. A chronically out-of-shape underachiever with an unforgiving ex-fighter for a dad has to endure his mom dying during the training camp for his chance-of-a-lifetime fight … and uses it as motivation to win the heavyweight championship of the world in the biggest upset in sports history.
I say save the squandered title, diabetic coma and subsequent comeback for the sequel. You won’t get a better climactic movie scene than Douglas knocking out Mike Tyson and finally letting the tears flow in the ring afterward.
Tyson Fury
The movie about Fury is a change of pace, to a degree, channeling some of the comic energy of Micky Ward’s sisters in “The Fighter” into every exchange involving Fury, his dad and the rest of the family and entourage of “The Gypsy King.” Supplement those over-the-top personalities with drug abuse, mental health crises and our protagonist ballooning up to 400 pounds, and it’s a can’t-miss.
Oh, and this one demands an in media res opening scene, where we start with Deontay Wilder knocking Fury down in Round 12 of their first fight. Voice-over, as Fury’s eyes pop open while he’s lying flat on his back: “You may wonder how I got here. Well, I’ll tell ya, you little sausage.”
Arturo Gatti
You start with a baseline of fight scenes that resemble those from the “Rocky” movies, but that’s not where the action ends, because in Gatti, you have a guy doing as much hard living as hard fighting. Partying, crashing cars, getting knifed in the back … when he isn’t knocking out Wilson Rodriguez while half-blind.
Of course, there’s the tragic ending, too, and the unsolved mystery of it all. People won’t walk out of the theater skipping gleefully, but hey, “Million Dollar Baby” won Best Picture, so maybe the Gatti story works as awards bait.
You may recall that a dozen years ago Jerry Ferrara was tapped to play Gatti, but the movie never quite made it into production – and all my “Arturtle Gatti” jokes went to waste. Well, it’s not too late to re-cast it with someone from the next generation and try again. (Are you ready to move more into grown-up roles, former Disney Channel star ?)
Bernard Hopkins
The story Jim Lampley loves to tell makes for the perfect opening scene: a prison warden tells young Bernard as he goes free that he’ll be back soon, and B-Hop dedicates his life to proving that warden wrong.
The movie hits some of the familiar Hollywood beats – from the streets, to jail, to the gym, to the championship – but Hopkins’ fiery personality and ability to deliver a monologue set this script apart.
The dramatic conclusion – Hopkins upsets Felix Trinidad in the first major post-9/11 sporting event in Manhattan – is a hell of a way to send audiences home. But the scene they’ll really be buzzing about is the penultimate one, in which Bernard throws the Puerto Rican flag to the ground in San Juan and then has to run for his life like Indiana Jones from the Hovitos.
Matthew Saad Muhammad
When your life story is so compelling that both and decide to tell it at the same time, it just may be worth a movie. (As I’m friends with both and have worked with both, you will not see me making any public suggestions about whose book the movie should be based on. Privately, of course, I will gladly tell one the truth and lie to the other.)
As with Chacon and Gatti, the insane thrills of Saad’s fights alone would be enough to make for a fun sports flick, but it’s the heartbreaking personal story that sets it apart. He and his brother go to live with an aunt after their mother dies when Matthew is an infant, and when he’s five years old, that aunt can’t afford to raise both of them and instructs the older brother to abandon Matthew – which he reluctantly does.
Even on the “every boxer has a story” scale, the immensity of the tragedy with which Saad’s began (and ended) was almost unimaginable.
James Scott
Remember “Undisputed,” the 2002 movie with Wesley Snipes and Ving Rhames, about the heavyweight champ going to prison? OK, picture that – but not as a work of fiction, and not as the most unfathomably stupid movie you’ve ever seen.
A movie about James Scott is a no-brainer. The man worked his way up the light heavyweight rankings while incarcerated. He defeated Eddie Mustafa Muhammad live on HBO from inside the walls of Rahway State Prison.
Again: How has this movie not been made already?
Johnny Tapia
This one is titled “Mi Vida Loca,” end of discussion.
And you could argue that Tapia’s childhood makes Saad Muhammad’s look like a scene out of “Leave it to Beaver.” Tapia was told that his father was murdered before Johnny was born. His mother was kidnapped, raped and murdered when Johnny was eight.
Then came boxing, drugs, jail, more drugs, world championships, more drugs and suicide attempts. Tapia was declared dead four separate times and somehow came back each time. Along the way, he thought he had found his father, alive after all – and Johnny died, for a fifth and final time, before the world learned that the man was not in fact his biological father.
If you thought “The Iron Claw” was a tough hang, well, Johnny Tapia’s story was the equivalent of all the Von Erich brothers rolled into one.
Rudell Stitch
I’m going out of alphabetical order here, because this is the perfect one to end on. And full disclosure: I didn’t know the name Rudell Stitch until this week. Now that I know it, I’ll never forget it.
Stitch, a welterweight contender working full-time at a meat-packing plant to support the wife and five kids he had by his mid 20s, nearly died as he rescued a man drowning in the Ohio River in 1958. But he survived, as did the man he saved, and Stitch was recognized as a hero and got back to fighting the best welterweights in the world.
Until, in 1960, at just 27 years old, he again tried to save someone drowning in the Ohio River, and this time neither man made it out alive.
When the line, “Stitch used to spar with a Louisville amateur named Cassius Clay” is just a throwaway buried halfway through your Wikipedia page, that’s a good sign that your life is worth a movie.
Eric Raskin is a veteran boxing journalist with nearly 30 years of experience covering the sport for such outlets as BoxingScene, ESPN, Grantland, Playboy, and The Ring (where he served as managing editor for seven years). He also co-hosted The HBO Boxing Podcast, Showtime Boxing with Raskin & Mulvaney, The Interim Champion Boxing Podcast with Raskin & Mulvaney, and Ring Theory. He has won three first-place writing awards from the BWAA, for his work with The Ring, Grantland, and HBO. Outside boxing, he is the senior editor of and the author of 2014’s . He can be reached on , , or , or via email at [email protected].