Million Dollar Baby

Million Dollar Baby is the best collection of short stories on boxing that I’ve found, and one of the best short-story collections period. F.X. Toole takes boxing, a theme that thrives of clichés, and reworks it to create original characters and explorations of race, poverty, and violence. Even more impressive, he does so without resorting to cynicism or condescension.

The movie is a compilation of episodes and characters from several of the stories. The stories are all strong on their own, but the title story is actually one of the weakest. My favorite is the original title story, “Rope Burns”.