Mickey Rourke

Name: Mickey Rourke

Alias: El Marielito

Birth Name: Philip Andre Rourke, Jr.

Born: 1952-09-16

Hometown: Schenectady, New York, USA

Birthplace: Schenectady, New York, USA

Stance: Orthodox

Height: 180cm

Pro Boxer: Record



Mickey Rourke Gallery



Total record of opposition at time of meeting, 40-79- 8





Mickey Rourke, best known as an award-winning actor, was born Phillip Andre Rourke, Jr., in Schenectady, New York, on September 16, 1952, the son of Annette and Phillip Andre Rourke. Rourke was the oldest of three children. He had a brother and sister.

Rourke's father left the family when he was six, and Rourke’s mother moved to Miami, where she married a Miami Beach cop named Eugene Addis. Addis had four boys and a daughter of his own and would later have another daughter with Rourke’s mother.

Rourke attended Horace Mann Junior High School and Miami Beach Senior High School, where he played baseball (he was a second-string first baseman) and acted in a school play, "The Serpent."

Rourke's biography on IMDb.com states that he had his first amateur bout when he was 12 years old, defeating a boy named Javier Villanueva in a bantamweight bout. Rourke, who went by the name Andre Rourke for some of his bouts, trained at the famed 5th Street Gym in Miami Beach and joined the Police Athletic League boxing program.

He suffered a concussion during a sparring session with former World Welterweight Champion Luis Rodriguez in 1969 and another concussion at the Florida Golden Gloves in 1971. After that, doctors told him to take a year off and rest. In 1972, Rourke knocked out Ron Robinson in 18 seconds and John Carver in 39 seconds. On August 20, 1973, Rourke knocked out Sherman "Big Train"' Bergman in 31 seconds. Rourke then decided to retire from amateur boxing.

From 1964 to 1973, Rourke compiled an amateur boxing record of 27 wins (17 by knockout) and 3 defeats. At one point, he reportedly scored 12 consecutive first-round knockouts.

Rourke's boxing claims have been disputed. In 2008, his stepfather, Eugene Addis, told Pat Jordan of the New York Times: "I took him to the 5th Street Gym. I bought him boxing gloves and paid for a trainer. The trainer worked with him for six months, and he kept telling me, ‘I can’t get Mickey into the ring to fight.’ Finally, Mickey had his first fight, and he walked out of the ring. Golden Gloves! Mickey was never in the Golden Gloves. He has these fantasies."

Boxing trainer Angelo Dundee told Jordan, "I don’t think Mickey ever had an amateur fight," and Brian Adams, the director of The New York Daily News Golden Gloves, told Jordan that no one involved with the organization believes Rourke ever had a Golden Gloves fight.

Addis also disputed his stepson's claim that he grew up in Liberty City, a black section of Miami. "We never lived in Liberty City," Addis said. "That was an all-black neighborhood. We lived in a white section near Miami Shores in a brand-new home I got for being a Navy vet in World War II." Addis said Rourke "never spoke the truth in his life."

In the early 1990s, after sparring with Roberto Duran at the 5th Street Gym, Rourke met former pro boxer and matchmaker Tommy Torino. He approached Torino about turning professional, and asked if Torino would be his manager. Rourke said he wanted to see "if I still can do it for real, and not make believe."

Rourke, trained by Hall of Fame trainer Freddie Roach, fought eight times between May 1991 and September 1994. He went undefeated, 6-0-2 with 4 knockouts, but the legitimacy of the bouts were called into question. In a 2009 Miami Herald article, Rourke's stepfather expressed his disdain for Rourke's professional boxing career: "They paid him (Mickey Rourke) millions (of dollars) to fight in Japan. The fight lasted not even 30 seconds. (Mickey) threw one punch and missed the guy by six inches. The (other) guy took the biggest dive I ever saw."

Rourke appeared on the June 1994 issue of World Boxing magazine with the caption "Mickey Rourke: Acting Like A Boxer ... Or Boxing Like An Actor?"

When former World Middleweight Champion Carlos Monzon died in 1995, the British newspaper The Independent reported: "Recently the film star Mickey Rourke, while on location in Argentina, met Monzon and took a crew with him to film the occasion for posterity. ... He felt moved to swap boxing stories with the former champion - and eventually persuaded him to take part in a sparring session in the prison gym. ... It was a brief, extremely nasty, and embarrassing experience for the actor. A single blow left him unconscious on his back."

Rourke also sparred with Thomas Hearns. Former WBO Middleweight Champion Doug DeWitt told Men's Health magazine: "[W]hen Mickey Rourke was sparring with Tommy Hearns, he got cute. Hearns threw a good punch. Rourke was unconscious for 5 minutes."

Rourke's face was badly damaged from boxing. He said the sport made a "mess of my face," and he required plastic surgery. "I had my nose broken twice. I had five operations on my nose and one on a smashed cheekbone," he said. "I had to have cartilage taken from my ear to rebuild my nose and a couple of operations to scrape out the cartilage because the scar tissue wasn't healing properly."

On November 28, 2014, 62-year-old Rourke went to Moscow, Russia, and boxed an exhibition with Elliot Seymour on the undercard of Ruslan Provodnikov vs. Jose Luis Castillo. Rourke stopped him in the second round. Seymour later said he was paid $15,000 by Rourke's representatives to take a dive. "I was told specifically to go down in the second," he said. Asked whether Rourke was aware of the deal, Seymour said: "No, as far as I know, Mickey had no knowledge of this, he was in the dark. I think he's a stand up guy, I think he's a nice man, a great actor, he didn't have anything to do with the 'fix' being in, it was all his people."

Notes

Rourke has appeared in over forty movies, including Body Heat , Diner , The Pope of Greenwich Village , Sin City , The Wrestler , Iron Man 2 , and The Expendables .

, , , , , , and . For his performance in the 2008 movie The Wrestler , Rourke won a Golden Globe (Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Drama) and was nominated for an Oscar (Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role).

, Rourke won a Golden Globe (Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Drama) and was nominated for an Oscar (Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role). Rourke portrayed a boxer in the 1988 movie Homeboy .

. Among the boxers Rourke has sparred with are James Toney, Tommy Morrison, John David Jackson, and John Montes.

Sources