The Further Adventures of Frankie Dunn

In honor of the DVD release of Million Dollar Baby, I thought I'd make a first stab at an outline of the sequel, "The Further Adventures of Frankie Dunn" or "One and a Half Million Dollar Baby."

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Well, after the Maggie Fitzgerald incident, it took me a while to find another fighter to manage. Lady boxers have all these questions up front, like "What's my share of the cut," "How do I know you won't poison me and look grimly down at my crippled corpse," and so on.

But eventually I found a good prospect, Anna O'Rourke. She was a tough gal from a family of welfare-abusing meth addicts, and she knew that boxing was the only way she'd save up enough money to go to law school.

In her first fight, a Bratistlavan woman knocked her out and broke her legs. Anna said to me: "I don't want to live without legs like those useless people whose parking spaces I steal. Put me and my legs out of their misery."

I was conflicted. I said to my priest: "What should I do, father?" He said: "You do know she'll be able to use her legs again in a few weeks, right?" Some help he was.

Finally I knew what I had to do. I put arsenic in her Count Chocula and set her free. Yes, she was free. But me, I knew I'd never be free. Never.

So then I found a new fighter, Meghan O'Shaunessey. She was the thirteenth daughter in a family of cocaine-dealing shoplifters. She told me she'd turned to boxing so she could make enough to shop at Wal-Mart instead of just slitting the clerk's throat and stealing his pants.

But I guess she didn't listen hard enough to the stuff I tried to teach her, because she'd only been in two fights when a seven-foot Bulgarian knocked all her teeth out. The next day, after the fight, she said to me: "Mmmph. Mmmmph. Mmmmph." I knew what that meant. It meant she didn't want to live without teeth and leech off the system like those parasites on intravenous.

What should I do? It tore me up inside. And all my priest had to say was: "Did you ever consider that maybe you're not doing a very good job as a trainer if your fighters all get horribly maimed?" Catholicism is so useless when you're in a jam.

But after a lot of thinking and brooding and drinking, I made my decision. I went back to Meghan and strangled her with her own hair. I might be damned forever, but she'd never need to regret her lack of teeth again.

New boxers were tough to come by for a while after that, especially once they started screaming and running away when they heard my name. But I finally got a hold of my best prospect ever, Mary O'Hara O'Reilly, the only non-hunchbacked member of a family of dyslexic incontinent sadomasochists who ran over babies with cars. She told me: "I'm never gonna get my own car and run over a baby of my own unless I fight for it."

First fight, she was up against a giant robot created by rogue scientists in the former Czechoslovakia. And she won by a K.O. When it was over, she came to me and said: "I won! I won! I knocked her out and all I got was a black eye." Yes, she had a black eye. Black as the night, black as the pits of hell. She wouldn't look pretty for at least another week.

What could I do? I consulted my priest, just as a token, and he said: "You're crazy. I'm calling the police." I could tell he was really crippled too, inside, so I bashed his skull in with a table lamp.

Then I went to Mary's place and put her, her boyfriend, and the Pizza-Pizza guy out of their miseries with some rat poison and a chainsaw.

After that, the thrill was gone out of managing fighters. I couldn't stand having to wait through all the fighting and crippling to put them out of their miseries. So now I mostly just go from gym to gym with a rifle, giving fighters eternal peace in advance and putting my soul at risk every day. Damn, I'm tormented.