The tough kid from the streets who makes good is a staple of American immigrant and realistic fiction, and even the incest theme, especially between a young, single mother with a history of relationships with nogood men, and a son, appeared rather often in the realistic fiction of the seventies, as in Earl Thompson's Garden of Sand (1971).

Norman Mailer and Joyce Carol Oates, as well as Hamill wrote about fighters in the media and in fiction. Simon and Garfunkel released an elegiac, moody song called "The Boxer" that captures the same mood of loneliness and defeat ennobled by a determination to endure. In another vein, the story of the Brooklyn boy who escapes to Manhattan is also a staple, present in Bobby's joy at being in Manhattan, "You hated the Galway Bay bullshit you heard in the Brooklyn saloons," and dramatized in John Travolta's Saturday Night...