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September 2007
Resurrecting The Champ |
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By Kam Williams
|
Reporter Befriends Hobo in Unconvincing Bio-Pic Hollywood has never been known to let the facts get in the way of an uplifting, overcoming-the-odds bio-pic, and Resurrecting the Champ is no exception. Based on the Los Angeles Times article of the same name written by J.R. Moehringer in 1997, the film revolves around an aspiring journalist who stakes his teetering career on a feature about a homeless ex-boxer while simultaneously learning a valuable lesson about father-son relationships in the process. The picture stars Josh Hartnett as Erik Kernan, a sports columnist for the Denver Post who has a hard time avoiding invidious comparisons with his late father, a fondly-remembered radio personality from the Mile High City. Not only is he getting grief from his boss (Alan Alda) who complains that his submissions’ “lack personality,” but his wife, Joyce (Kathryn Morris), the paper’s star reporter, has just asked him for a divorce. For, only after Erik publishes his piece does he learn that he had been hoodwinked because the real Bob Satterfield had died in 1977. Nonetheless, the picture has been packaged as a feelgood flick, as the audience is expected to be tweaked emotionally by the notion that Champ has still somehow provided a noble service by inspiring Kernan to focus on mending fences with his estranged son. However, the preposterous hoax is portrayed in an utterly unconvincing fashion, and leaves one wondering how a big city paper could fail to fact check whether the subject of a cover story was dead or alive? For this reason, it is not surprising to learn that the movie script bears little resemblance to what actually transpired. In real life, author J.R. Moehringer was not duped and disgraced by any impostor, but quite the opposite. His Resurrecting the Champ article was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Furthermore, he had no famous father’s shadow to worry about, since his dad had abandoned the family when he was just seven months-old. Plus, instead of ever being a struggling writer, Moehringer was a very-promising boy-most-likely who, after graduating from Yale, enjoyed a meteoric rise and won a Pulitzer early in his career. Even the touching father-son plot point was purely a dreamed-up fabrication, as the unmarried author apparently has no offspring. Pardon me for being offended when a flick revolving around the question of journalistic ethics takes so many liberties with the truth simply to spin a tall tale designed to tug on unsuspecting heartstrings. If this were a championship bout, the ref would have stopped it in the first round. |
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