The Hiltons? “A name that still means something,” says veteran sports commentator Robert Frosi. This family of first-rate boxers will make the news for years, well beyond their undeniable sporting successes.
In this three-episode series presented by the Crave channel, the Hiltons immediately find themselves at the heart of the boxer’s mythology. Here is someone who started from nothing. He rises in society with the sole strength of his fists. This myth of individual success, a sporting allegory of self-made man American, is here projected onto an entire family. How can you not be fascinated?
From heaven they sink to hell. Here they are making headlines for an armed robbery at a donut vendor or even at the local convenience store. The incest of one has caused a lot of ink to flow. They are involved in a lot of fights. For years, stories of assault filled the news columns. Just recently, Dave Hilton Jr. was convicted of making death threats. In both cases, erratic behavior is partly explained by after-effects linked to childhood, then propelled by addictions, particularly to alcohol.
The whole Hilton family boxes. That’s already enough to attract attention. Of the Hilton clan, Dave was perhaps the best. His footwork. His style. Her elegance in the ring. Matthew, his brother, was quite the heavy hitter. A boxer who went on the offensive, with raw attacking power. Alex Hilton, for his part, combines the faults and the qualities of these two, leaving a little predominance to a rather boorish side. This one has a big heart, repeats this series which lingers a lot on him. “We are close in the family,” he said. “We argue, like all families. But we stick together. We stay united, even in difficult times. »
It was Dave Hilton Sr., a boxer himself, several times Canadian champion, who pushed his five sons into the ring. Very early burned by alcohol, willingly violent, he satisfied, through his boys, his quest for disappointed success. Milk soup, alcoholic, he explodes for a yes or a no.
Father Hilton drags his children everywhere, almost making them into circus animals. He trains them. At not even 10 years old, the Hilton brothers were fighting in bars, in a sort of traveling show.
Two of the sons of the clan will be world champions. But at what cost? The Hilton children do not attend school. They are barely in school. “They have no education. They have nothing,” raises a family friend.
Boxing, to tell the truth, they don’t know how to do anything else. Is this enough to move forward, to exist?
The mafia will never be far from them. The father, as we know, frequented the Cotroni clan and, by association, everything that comes more or less with it: gambling, violence, alcohol, intimidation, the lowlands, prostitution.
When the key figure of the bikers, Mom Boucher, leaves prison, not insignificant, he spends his first evening of newfound freedom in a boxing match between Dave Hilton and Stéphane Ouellet.
The Hiltons attract bad boys, playing the loud gangster card themselves. We are not, alongside them, in the country of political and social commitment like Mohamed Ali. The conscience of the world is none of their business. They hit. They fight. They sweat. They cry.
The money flowed into them. And it always burned their fingers. Nothing remained of the fortune that passed under their noses. “We’ve all trusted the wrong people,” says Alex Hilton by way of explanation. Everything appears to be taking them adrift.
Some of the Hiltons abused it without counting. But they too were abused. “Outside the ring, the Hiltons didn’t see the punches coming,” Robert Frosi rightly indicates.
Here they are given to a promoter who promises them careers abroad. A contract bamboozles them. Their lawyer, supposed to defend them, is murdered…
“It’s the dark side of boxing that we love,” says Marie-Claude Savard, around whom this entire series is structured. It is a certain muscular conception of life that is served to us here, while taking stock of the Hiltons’ lives.