Fighter, The

Micky Ward - who has donated his brain and spinal chord for head-injury researchers to analyze after he dies - was only twenty-six when he decided to give up boxing.  Although he'd had a promising start as a club fighter, the junior welterweight - who was born in 1964 - had lost four straight bouts and wasn't keen to lose more. 

It wasn't just that Ward was losing confidence in his abilities - he could still take punishment in monstrous doses - but his right hand was brittle.  He needed surgery to repair the damage caused, unnecessarily, by ... the police. 

Those injuries could have forever ended his professional boxing career.  They resulted from the intentional infliction of harm when Micky joined a tussle outside Lowell's Cosmopolitan Cafe.

We learn what happened from the police report and from Bob Halloran's book, Irish Thunder:  Mickey himself tells the story:

I was out with a friend at some bars in Lowell, and we ended up at the Cosmo.  I saw my brother, Dickie, in there, and some other guys.  It's a wicked bad bar, very violent, real bad.  I was with my friend Mike Lapointe.

Lapointe thought he had a reason to "have it out" with another bar patron:

...when my friend saw him in the bar, they started arguing.  They took it outside and started fighting ... And Dickie comes over and tries to help the guy out, saying, "He's a friend, I know him."  As Dickie's picking the guy up off the ground, the cops show up and think Dickie's beating him up.  They tackle Dickie and now he's arrested.  Nothing you can do, and they're walking him back to the wagon.  That's fine.  Then they take him and pull him down, throw him on the ground.  That's when I went over and yelled, "What the h... are you doing?"  Boom!  They must have thought I was gonna do something to them."

Unfortunately for Ward, he was now the one in trouble:

They dragged me, and got me on the ground.  One cop was yelling, 'Break his ... hands!  Break his ... hands!  I don't know who it was who said it.  I was cuffed at the time.  They split my head wide open.  I got seven stitches in my head, and I got my hands busted up. 

How were his hands injured?

My hands were behind my back, and they were hitting them, a bunch of times ... I just feel as though I was gonna do something with my life, and they said, "...this little punk."  You know?  I had just come back from fighting in Vegas.  They probably didn't like me, because I was having some success.  (Bob Halloran, in the above passages, quoting Micky Ward in Irish Thunder:  The Hard Life and Times of Micky Ward, pages 6-8.)

Perhaps it was Ward's brother whom the police officers "didn't like." 

Whatever caused the keepers-of-the-peace to profoundly injure Micky's hands, he had to delay his dreams of becoming a world-class professional boxer.  It mattered little that he could "take" punishment if could no longer "give" it.