Just Watched Legendary Nights: The Tale of Gatti-Ward... Made Me Cry

If you're a Brit and Churchill hasn't, in someway, led to your emotions getting the best of you, you're not human.

What a man.

"Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few."
....So much irony in that quote.

 

Saw this when it was aired, and I was a little disappointed. Good enough that I wouldn't just dismiss it altogether, but saccharine as all get-out. Overstated and too on the nose at moments where understatement could have had greater (more enduring, less cheaply earned) emotional impact. The 'let's drown this thing in treacle' method is an insult to the audience's taste and intelligence — that it's made for TV is no real excuse.

For that matter, the contrast between Eddie Alcazar's Tapia and the HBO reworking is a graphic illustration of the ways in which the network sacrifices nuance and percipience for corn and mawkishness in its approach to documentary filmmaking, and also an insight into how this kind of thing can be done better (with greater artistry, and yet greater honesty).

 

Gatti/Ward, wars that can only be dreamed about!

 

The film is as cheesy as old hell, but what a series of fights. That first fight had more drama than Lord of the Rings. If anyone hasn't seen it take a look. Two of them almost out on their feet at the end, and famously both carted off to the trauma unit afterwards. Incredible courage and resilience.

 

I cry when Maximus the Merciful dies, and when Pavarotti sings Nessun Dorma. I laugh when someone steals one my old avatars.

 

"I haven't cried that hard since GrandPac separated from Roach" -Jim Lampley

 

What’s just as sad as the Legendary Nights series is the fact that HBO has fallen so far. At the time the of LN series HBO was the dominant cable channel for boxing and nobody else was even close. Now, they’re the boxing cable equivalent of Gatti, Bowe and meldrick Taylor