Wow, so good! My Lovely Boxer comes in way more serious than I expected, but after our premiere week we have strong characters, entangled and complicated motivations, and so much drama to come. I care about these characters way too much already.
EPISODES 1-2
Our first episode takes an interesting approach of first giving us the “legend,” as it were, of the young boxing prodigy LEE KWON-SOOK (Kim So-hye). She KOs a famous boxer at what’s essentially a boxing fan meet after a tentative, “Can I really hit you?” when she enters the ring. And hit him she does.
Kwon-sook is immediately likable, probably because she’s so quiet and lacks any sort of hubris. She turns blank-faced at the throng of reporters after she leaves the ring and the boxer in the dust, and after that we get a narrative montage of her swift rise to boxing victory. The drama handles all this Kwon-sook setup well, giving us everything we need to know very neatly. Interestingly, we only see Kwon-sook through the eyes of the overarching narrative, and then she disappears from the story — and the ring, and even Korea, it seems — in favor our hero.
Our hero is the hardcore sports agent KIM TAE-YOUNG (Lee Sang-yub), and we spend the majority of the first episode with him — it feels like a lot of setup at the beginning, but as the plot quickly advances, we see it’s time well spent. We need to know what Tae-young’s like and need a firm sense of his complicated scenario for his later interactions with Kwon-sook to have the impact that they do.
First we see Tae-young as the no-BS agent who gets his athletes earning money no matter what it takes. Empathize, he does not. Tae-young gets one of his players out of a violent assault situation while he ekes more money out of another athlete — a soccer player with a dying career — before he tells him to go and retire. In fact, if Tae-young wasn’t so adept and self-assured it would be easy to dislike him and his callous attitude. The story keeps us a few inches from dislike, and then we’re rewarded when we see a whole other side of him.
A baseball player hyung Tae-young manages starts to get into trouble, and the story spends a lot of time showing us their bond when they were younger, the ways that Tae-young has let him down as his agent, and the desperate measures the player has now taken (to get money for his precious little son’s surgery, natch). Tae-young’s true colors come out when he rages to protect his athlete/hyung, and all that nonchalance is quickly wiped away with a boatload of pain, regret, and guilt.
In the end, Tae-young winds up taking the fall for his athlete, and gets himself in the crosshairs of “the chairman” of an association that rigs sporting matching in its favor. One second Tae-young is having a professional conversation with the gambling ring’s point man. The next second he wakes up alone half-strangling in his own bathtub having “signed” an agreement to repay 2.5 million in three months. So things just got a heck of a lot more complicated for Tae-young.
And wow, Lee Sang-yub knocked it out of the park here. I always liked him, but there was so much in just the first episode for him to go from the self-assured and cocky agent, to utterly shaken and terrified, and then to carefully bury all of that turmoil under his veneer again — worth it just for the character layers alone. When Tae-young’s mother is threatened, he sits in the car watching her and gives his desperate animal-like shriek. If I wasn’t already committed to watching this drama, this was the moment that sealed the deal for me.
Finally, our two characters collide. Tae-young joins the rest of Korea’s sports world in the search to bring Kwon-sook from three-year obscurity back into the ring, and because he’s Tae-young, he is able to locate her pretty quickly. After she gets made by a fan, Tae-young happens to be sitting in the restaurant and swoops in to save her (ngl, I swooned; I’m already a goner for this character).
Afterwards, he gives her his card, and announces his intention to bring her back to the ring. He knows too much about her and her alias for her to deny it for long, and soon he’s following Kwon-sook on her morning runs, turning up every day to pressure her.
Kwon-sook, of course, wants the opposite. After moving six times and changing her name, she’s finally feeling secure working at a kindergarten, with a budding crush on the director’s seemingly vapid son HAN JAE-MIN (WINNER’s Kim Jin-woo). We see that for all Kwon-sook has tried to discard her previous identity, there are some things she can’t shake — the dawn wakeups, the grueling daily runs — it’s all been hardcoded into her. And not in a determined athlete way. More like in a my-father-brutally-trained-me-into-this way. A few quick flashbacks reveal how violent he was towards her and her mother, but really, all we needed to understand Kwon-sook was what she says about her crush on Jae-min: “He’s the first man that didn’t punch me.”
I can’t help but interject at this point how much I am loving this script. The conflicts are so strong and rooted in the characters already, and as we spend much of Episode 2 with Tae-young wooing/pressuring/harassing Kwon-sook to return, both sides of this battle are so well fleshed out.
For Tae-young, we see his desperation coming through as he plays Kwon-sook in every way he can think of — bribing her with money, using her deceased mother as emotional leverage, etc. — and for Kwon-sook, we see the fears she thought she escaped coming right to the fore.
Tae-young will use any trick necessary, so he eventually breaks the story of finding Kwon-sook to the reporter he’s working with, and the gig is essentially up. The school where Kwon-sook works is mobbed, her home is inundated with reporters, and her identity is exposed. But if Tae-young thinks this level of desperation will get her to bend, what he gets instead is a nasty punch to the jaw (she knows he’s responsible for the news article and he doesn’t deny it). But despite how snake-like we see Tae-young being, there are these moments of honesty, too — like when Kwon-sook offers to pay him off and when he names his price, it’s the 2.5 million he owes to the scary match-fixing ring.
Speaking of said ring, Tae-young meets with his contact KIM OH-BOK (Park Ji-hwan) repeatedly and pitches his plan: get Kwon-sook back in the ring, have her win her first match, get all the hype going again, and then have her lose the second and final match. It’s hard to trust these corrupt individuals — especially when Lee Kyung-young is serving you soup in his neighborhood restaurant — but Tae-young has no choice when his neck is on the line.
In the end, Tae-young gets what he wants — nay, needs. And he does it by finally learning what it is that Kwon-sook wants and aligning those two things. She’s pushed to brink and runs herself to the point of collapse when Tae-young turns up. He makes her an offer he hasn’t made before, and this one sticks: I’ll help you leave boxing forever. And his plan actually makes sense. Fight two matches, lose the second, and you can retire without anyone caring. “No one remembers losers,” he says. He then covers her with his umbrella — a nice bit of symbolism — and we’ve just completed our premiere week episodes.
Did I mention that I love this script? Everything feels so organic, and yet in the space of two episodes we’ve met both of our characters, learned what is at stake for them, and then got both of them on the same(ish) side — or at least, sharing a goal. None of it felt forced or rushed. The pacing is great, the complexities are rich, and the characters are believable. I haven’t been this excited for a drama in a while, and no, that’s not just because Lee Sang-yub was so charming here.
This is my first time seeing Kim So-hye, and I quite like her here so far. She feels like a real girl, and the bottled up pressure she’s under lands equally well. Also, her chemistry with Lee Sang-yub is also there, and since this drama is distinctly about their interactions from here on out, I am looking forward to what the script brings. As for romance, I have to assume it’s in the cards, because I recently went through all of Mental Coach Jegal thinking it was impossible due to the age gap, only to be proven wrong. In Jegal, the sudden age-gap romance was unnecessary and uncomfortable. But in contrast, I can see a future romance working between Tae-young and Kwon-sook, in looking at how the characters have been established so far — but the jury is still out on that one.