By Eoin Cannon

Mickey Finn, "the Fighting Marine," never wanted to be an Opponent. An Opponent isn't the Fighter, he's the other guy. He gets paid to lose prizefights convincingly, to boost the confidence and the record of the one being groomed by whatever unholy alliance of promoters, managers, and fixers are running the show.

But an Opponent is what the gods of professional boxing decreed that Finn, now 60 and still living in the St. Mark's Parish where he grew up, should be. After a stellar amateur career fighting for the U.S. Marines boxing team in the late 1950s and early '60s, in his first professional fight he was ordered to lose to a guy he knew he could whip. It's with some relief, now, that he thinks of the eye injury that settled his decision not to pursue a professional career.

"You're in there to make sure the other guy looks good," he explains. "You don't let yourself get hurt, and you don't hurt him. You do enough to make a good fight, but he wins. Boxing needs that, to bring guys up, but it's not what I wanted out of the sport."

Finn has memorialized the result of that bout on the license plate of his luxury SUV, which reads, "TKO4." That score marked the end of what for some would be the Glory Days, but which Finn sees more as the training phase of his life.

Since then, in one capacity or another, he has been the Fighter that he worked so hard to become. Fighting his way out of alcohol abuse. Fighting to sustain the life and the reputation of a sport that has fallen in prestige. Helping other former boxers climb out of poverty and helplessness. Supporting a mother with Alzheimer's.

He has worked as a deputy state boxing commissioner, a ringside timekeeper, a judge, a referee, a trainer. He's been president of both the South Shore and North Shore chapters of the Veteran Boxers Association. He's a member of the New England Boxing Hall of Fame. He has been active on the Boxers Fund Board since its inception. That work is dedicated to helping out former fighters who have become Opponents in life, preordained by society's great fight fixers to suffer defeat at the hands of joblessness, educational deficits, and disability.

"We help guys out with medical bills, money to pay the rent, even headstones after they die, for the family," he explains. "We try not to say no to people who deserve it. It's tough when guys are active alcoholics or drug addicts and you can't give them the money. You don't want to be responsible for the drink that kills them."

Finn knows a bit about that, from the years after his boxing career was cut short in the '60s. He says the greatest blessing of his life was that his mother got to see him sober for 25 years, and his greatest disappointment is that his father didn't.

"Boxing with me, like a lot of guys, goes back to watching the Friday Night Fights with my father," he said. "I only wished he'd lived to see what I ended up doing in the sport, afterwards, with all this. He died in 1966."

The great battles of adulthood - for health (he beat alcohol and ran in marathons), for work (a career as an electrician), and for meaning (working with friends for the betterment of boxing) - may have been won, but the fight continues. In the last few years, Finn has begun confronting the battles of middle age and retirement.

In 1998, his mother died after a difficult decline into Alzheimer's, during which he was her caretaker. He had to check her into a facility, and face the day when she no longer recognized him. Not long after she died, Finn, a runner since before it was fashionable (when he started they called it roadwork), took a header on Gallivan Boulevard that bloodied him worse than any shot he ever took in the ring. That spill led to a hip replacement last year that has put a hitch into the lifelong bounce in his step. He was forced into early retirement after the operation, when after 20 years the hospital he worked for gave his job to someone else while he was recuperating.

Tough blows, to be sure, but Finn wasn't down for the count. His hair has been white for a few years now, but he still sports a flowing ponytail, and with his tattoos and spry, upright bearing he is an image of a former era's sailor or marine. His youthful features, which he cursed as a young man, now sit well, balancing out the effects of age, glove leather, and booze.

"Aging? To hell with it," he said last week, on his sixtieth birthday.

He had intended to spend his birthday relaxing and talking about good times with old friends. Boxing, as ever, though, wouldn't let him go. When he and Jerry Forte, a lifelong friend and fellow boxer, went down to Brockton to see their old pal Goody Petronelli, Petronelli's young fighters bombarded the Fighting Marine with questions.

Ian Gardner, a young Canadian middleweight with championship-caliber handspeed and conditioning, and 14 professional wins to his name, wanted Finn's take on a sparring round in which he had taken apart another top prospect. Finn gave him a short lecture on the importance for both punching and defense of keeping his hands up, not relying on their preternatural quickness to find their mark at the right time.

Petronelli, a retired naval officer, used to work Mickey's corner sometimes when both were in the service. "I go way back with Mickey and I have a lot of respect for him," Petronelli said. "He's been around the ring for a long time and I trust his judgments about fighters. Mickey's a smart guy. He says something and you believe it."

Giving advice, Finn says, "makes me feel good after all these years. ... It's a compliment, but I want to put it behind me. You need your rest!"

He's not done yet, though. He recently took on a promising young fighter from St. Mark's, called Pat Browning. "It's so hard to take someone on to train them at my age, because you put so much into it and you don't know if they'll ever make it," he said. "But this kid's got the qualities you look for. We'll see how it goes."

Finn traveled widely as a Marine, though most of his fights took place in front of captive military audiences, in places like Parris Island and Camp Lejeune. But he is essentially a local guy. His best friends are his lifelong friends.

Finn and Forte met as young boxers growing up in the city, Finn from Dorchester and attending Christopher Columbus High School and Forte from Roxbury and Don Bosco. Finn became the welterweight champion of the U.S. Marines, while Forte was the bantamweight Golden Gloves champ of New England.

They entered the New England Boxing Hall of Fame together in 1995.

Jerry says Mickey had the best left hook he ever saw around here outside of Tony De Marco, the North End's welterweight champion of the world.

Mickey still models the hook, pivoting sharply with a bent elbow and sticking his fist like a knife into an imaginary opponent. Even after more than three decades outside the ring, there's something eerily calm about a boxer's ungloved fist. It isn't clenched, but it isn't limp. It's just

still, squared around the absent wrapping, like sculpture.

"You don't throw a left hook, you turn your whole body into it," he says.

"And you can't throw it whenever you want. You have to wait until you get the guy on the ropes, where he's got nowhere to go. You throw it wide in the middle of the ring and you'll get caught by a straight right hand before you finish the punch."

Like a lot of tough old guys, Mickey and Jerry aren't afraid of a little sentiment. They both choked up for a brief moment upon reflecting about their lifelong friendship, realizing how long it had been since a day passed without them sharing a word.

When they were inducted into the Hall of Fame, Mickey bought Jerry a big ring to commemorate the occasion. Jerry thinks it was because Mickey never forgot the time 30 years ago, when, while moving out of his Roxbury home, all Jerry's medals and awards were stolen. Mickey has a simpler explanation for the gesture.

"You want to do something for your friends, and he's been a close friend to me. We always stuck by each other. I wanted something for him to remember me by, in case I die."

"Telling this story always gives me a chance to talk about what a big heart Mickey has," Jerry said. "He's always for the underdog."

Finn does have a baseline of such values, but he's not a simple man. This is evident in his speech, as he switches gears often, from the elder-statesmanlike, to the street-corner wise, to the locker-room blue.

In each case his voice recalls a time when the vernacular and the tough could be lyrical, not vain and loud.

Finn and his friends' voices are full of wry wit, conveying a head-shaking disbelief at the world's capacity to be absurd, corrupt, and, every now and then, rewarding. They know the difference between appearance and reality. Finn was picked to be an Opponent because he could be counted on to navigate in that space: He was so technically skilled, and experienced as an amateur, that he could choreograph a believable fight, even with a clumsy dance-partner.

Mickey and his friends come from a time and place when they had to learn, sometimes the hard way, that things were rarely on the level. The fix was in, and the real players were hashing things out behind closed doors.

Like the time Finn won the "best fighter of the tournament" award after winning his weight class at the armed services boxing tournament; he found out later it wasn't because of his performance, but because of his height. Not short enough to make the Marines look bad, not tall enough to make the commandant look short in the ceremony.

Finn and friends know what has changed and what hasn't. They know that, today, little is on the level, the fix is still in, and the real players are still hashing things out behind closed doors. Only those players are less likely to come from your own time zone or to ever have been to a boxing show. The world has changed, and it can be depressing.

"You look back at all the years you had in boxing, all you put into it, and what do you have left?" Finn asks. "A shoebox. That's your memories. That's it."

And it's harder when boxing, the thing you built your life around, has suffered such loss of prestige. Then your friends start to die, taking their memories with them. "It makes you wonder when your time will come."

Finn and his friends may sometimes trade in sentiments, spin yarns, and crack jokes, but they do so with the gleam of self-awareness in their eyes. They have no time for fakers, especially self-styled boxing expertswho trump up their fight experience. They don't pretend the past was better than the present, and they don't want to get too set in their ways.

Finn and Forte agree with Petronelli's theory about training and about life: "It's like my mother used to say," Petronelli explains, holding up his hand, the fingers spread out. "People are like the fingers of your hand - they're all the same thing, but each one is different. One guy maybe needs to be yelled at, called a miserable son of a whatever to get him going. Another guy you do that to, he goes inside himself, feels hurt. Every boxer is different and you have to treat each one differently."

"And you always have to be open to new techniques, always willing to learn new things. The day you think you know everything is the day it's all over for you."

It's not over yet for Mickey Finn. After a tumultuous few years, he is growing accustomed to the onset of a new phase in life. "I'm a lot happier now - I'm beginning to get peace of mind," he says.

But he hasn't lost his edge. He holds a grudge against he hospital that gave away his job five years before his pension kicks in. "I wish to hell Jerry and me were 20 years younger, because we'd go over there and show them how to box," he says. "There wouldn't be enough of them left to bury."

Finn and Forte smile. In that fight, Finn knows, the fix was in. Boxing has taught him when to dance away, as well as when to stand and trade.

"I enjoyed it," he said of the sport. "It's been good to me later in life, allowed me to help some people out. But getting yourself straightened out is the important thing. ... I got to take care of my mother when she was sick. When you get a chance to return that favor, for all the things she did for you, that's something."