FanShot

Hollywood Ending: Tony Bellew Finishes Up

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No contemporary fighter’s manner of self-presentation more obviously repeats the depiction of boxing in popular cinema than the British cruiserweight Tony Bellew. Every account that Bellew gives of his life as a boxer is sodden with cliché: the Liverpool-based fighter started a recent BBC column by saying that he "had one foot out of the door in this game but someone has drawn me in one last time"—mingling banality with solecism. It is only right that Bellew should have been featured in the most recent episode of the Rocky franchise, as the barely believable oddball "Pretty" Ricky Conlan. One of the far-reaching consequences of the cinematization of boxing has been to create a new kind of boxer, in the English-speaking world, that had never existed before, whose authenticity is wagered in script rather than action. Every time Bellew describes his hatred for an opponent or his loneliness in training or his relish for punching he sounds as falsely authentic as the fiction of his character is.