As a boy, Ray Mancini would pore over his father’s scrapbook, a collection of brittle-brown newspaper clippings and sepia-toned glossies, inevitably pausing to study the photograph of his father as a young fighter, his features bloodied and swollen, the right eye clenched shut like the seam of a mussel shell.


“I didn’t win ’em all,” Lenny Mancini would tell his son. “But I never took a step back.”


The elder Mancini had been a No. 1 contender in the abundantly talented lightweight division. But his dream of a title shot ended Nov. 10, 1944, near the French town of Metz, when he was hit with shrapnel from a German mortar shell.


Four decades later, his son entered the national consciousness. Ray called himself Boom Boom, too, just like the old man. But coming out of Youngstown, Ohio, at the cusp of the 1980s, Ray also represented those felled when the steel belt turned to rust. As refracted through the lens of television, he became The Last White Ethnic, a redemptive fable produced by CBS Sports.


Mancini won the lightweight title with a first-round knockout live from Vegas, the broadcast sponsored by Michelin (“the company that pioneered the radial”), Michelob (“smooth and mellow”) and the Norelco Rototract rechargeable. That was 1982. He was only 21, but already a modern allegory, as bankable as he was adored.


Then he fought Duk-koo Kim.


Kim had hit the Korean exacta at birth: dirt-poor and dark-skinned. But the prospect of a title shot seemed to ennoble him. He became fierce for the sake of his family. At the time of the Mancini fight, his fiancée was pregnant with their son.


If only Kim had taken a step back, he might have lived to see that boy.


These days, Ray is likely to be found at a trattoria in a Santa Monica strip mall. He’ll likely be joined by one of the regulars — the playwright David Mamet; the actor Ed O’Neill, an old friend from Youngstown; or maybe Ray-Ray, now 15, the youngest of Mancini’s three children.


Occasionally, patrons pull the waiter aside and point at Ray.


“What was he in?” they ask.


“That’s Ray ‘Boom Boom’ Mancini,” the waiter says. “Lightweight champion of the world.”


“He’s the guy who killed the guy, right? The Korean?”


DUK-KOO KIM was born July 29, 1955. At age 2, he survived the virus that killed his biological father. When he was not yet 5, his mother — Sun-nyo Yang, whom he’d remember as “a woman of great misfortune” — left his stepfather, a bean curd peddler whose oldest son had become violently abusive.


On the morning Sun-nyo fled with Duk-koo, she carried all their possessions on her head. Finally, at sundown, they stopped in a town 18 kilometers from the demilitarized zone that separated North and South Korea. Banam was a poor fishing village. But to Sun-nyo and her children, the townsfolk must have seemed well off. “I was not embarrassed when I saw my mother begging for food because I was so hungry,” Duk-koo wrote.


It was in Banam that Sun-nyo met her last husband. His name was Kim, the most common of Korean surnames. He was a farmer and a fisherman, with a small patch for rice and an old boat he would take out into the East Sea for mackerel, cuttlefish and octopus. Home was a block from the shore — a ramshackle house with a thatched roof and walls fashioned of mud and plywood. A partitioned cinderblock structure in the yard served as both an outhouse and a shelter for the family’s most valued possession, a cow.


Duk-koo became the youngest son in the new family. In the summer, he would swim out under a blazing red sun to catch fish and scallops. In the autumn, he’d fry locusts to eat as a snack. In the winter, with snow covering the mountain that rose behind Road No. 7, he and his brothers would corral rabbits and bludgeon them with sticks.