On Resurrecting the Champ

There's the old line that, to someone with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. As sports journalists we look at the world, and we bang it into stories. Stories, 20 or 30 or 40 inches of gray text on the page, are our way of packaging life, in a format constrained by the medium, trying to make it burst back into color for readers. Stories are the containers we fill up after we walk around and make calls gathering up the things we learn. But always there's a risk of confusing journalism's most prized form -- the perfect story -- with its real purpose, which is getting at the truth.

Resurrecting the Champ, which opens on Friday starring Samuel L. Jackson and Josh Hartnett (trailer above), is a boxing movie and a newspaper movie, and it draws a melodramatic connection between the two professions: "A writer, like a boxer, must stand alone. The truth is revealed, and there's nowhere to hide."

In the film, a newspaper writer (Hartnett) desperate to impress his editors finally finds the story that will give him his big break. He encounters a homeless man (Jackson) who claims to have been a former championship contender. He writes his guts out. In the movie, the story is published and hailed as brilliant, and then, well, the truth comes out. The movie is based on a 1997 Los Angeles Times Magazine article by J.R. Moehringer, whose article about his own experiences told the whole story.

I haven't seen the film yet. It looks like a terrific newsroom movie, the second of the year after Zodiac. More to come.

some links:
Official movie site
Interview with Alan Alda, who plays the editor
Interview with Hartnett