The Fighter and W&L
If you saw the Academy Award-nominated movie “The Fighter,” you might have missed his name in the fine print, but a Washington and Lee alumnus appears in the credits as a technical consultant.
Bob Halloran, of the Class of 1985, is the author of a book about the boxer whose story is told in the movie, “Irish’’ Micky Ward. When Halloran’s book, Irish Thunder: The Hard Life and Times of Micky Ward, was published in November 2007, the movie project was already underway. But the careful research that Bob did for his account of the Lowell, Mass., fighter was so thorough that one of the film’s screenwriters called after the book was published to ask Bob to consult.
Just prior to the Academy Award ceremony last month (where “The Fighter” won in the supporting-actor and supporting-actress categories), the Boston Globe talked with Bob about the book. He told the Globe in that interview that he hopes Ward comes across in the book “as someone who survived in the eye of a hurricane. Micky stayed focused, clean, and sober, when there were so many role models to lead him in the wrong direction.’’
In another interview about the movie, this one in the edition of the Globe published for his hometown of Milton, Mass., Bob admitted that he snapped a photo of his name in the credits when they rolled on the big screen at the premiere in Lowell, Mass.
Irish Thunder is not Bob’s first book. He wrote the 2004 Destiny Derailed, his account of the 2003 Boston Red Sox, expected to be a “team of destiny” but ultimately second to the archrival New York Yankees. And last year he published Breakdown: A Season of Gang Warfare, High School Football, and the Coach Who Policed the Streets, about a football coach — also a cop on the gang beat — who pulls kids off the streets and puts them on the field with a combination of kindness and intimidation.
Bob is currently the weekend sports anchor for Boston’s WCVB Channel 5, where he has been since 2003. Before that, he workedat ESPNews for three years, as an anchor and writer for ESPN.com.
Bob also has logged time at Boston’s WFXT-TV Channel 25 as a weekend sports anchor, at WPRI-TV (Providence, R.I.) as sports director and WCVX-TV (Hyannis, Mass.) as sports director and news director.
