Word: hard-luck
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Like most other martial-arts stars, Jaa has been preparing since childhood. Born to elephant trainers in the hard-luck northeast province of Surin, the boy watched kung-fu movies on outdoor screens during temple festivals. Soon he was aping his heroes and studying gymnastics as well as Muay Thai, an ancient Siamese boxing discipline that is a kind of combination of karate and kickboxing. He worked as a stunt man, doubling Robin Shou in Mortal Kombat, before director Prachya Pinkaew saw a reel of Jaa's best stunts and built Ong-Bak around...
...Angeles. After struggling as a young stand-up comic under the name Jack Roy, he quit show business and sold aluminum siding for 12 years. But in 1967, he returned with a new stage name and earned his first big break on The Ed Sullivan Show. Dangerfield's hard-luck shtick made him a TV staple in the '70s and '80s, and he starred in the slapstick screen comedies Caddyshack and Back to School?hits that brought him much respect...
He’s also a senior who seems to have taken a lot of the hard-luck losses to heart this winter...
...year, the joke could be on everyone else. Princeton has all the earmarks of a team that could surprise. Its top eight scorers are back. It has a competitive, six-man freshman class. And, most importantly, it is coming off a season in which it was too often a hard-luck loser. The Tigers were tied 14 times after two periods last year, and went 0-13-1 in those games. Throw on a few more logs—nine one-goal losses, and a disappointing three wins overall—and consider the Princeton fire stoked. Expect a better...
...hero of Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude (Doubleday; 511 pages) is smart, scrawny, sensitive Dylan Ebdus. He's 5 when his parents move to a hard-luck black and Puerto Rican neighborhood in Brooklyn. His mom is a hippie, his dad a painter who spends his days on an incomprehensible, unfinishable masterpiece. Soon Mingus Rude moves in down the block. His father Barrett is a once famous soul singer--he fronted the fictional Subtle Distinctions--now in drastic, drug-addicted decline (Barrett owes more than a little to Marvin Gaye). The boys become friends--Mingus the leader, Dylan...