Rising up at the mean streets of Sunnyside, Queens, within the Fifties, Caan made a name for himself — two names, in reality — along with his bodily prowess. He earned one nickname, Shoulders, due to his vast body. “I had those little thin legs…[with] this giant sq. best,” Caan informed Cigar Aficionado in a 2006 interview. The 2nd nickname, Killer Caan, got here from his talents as a teenage boxer. “, we boxed in a hoop…now and again it wasn’t in a hoop.”
At age 16 he moved midway around the nation to attend Michigan State College, the place he studied Economics and performed soccer. Years later, Caan would downplay his contributions to the staff, joking that his activity used to be “most commonly preserving baggage and being the tackling dummy,” however that have of being a soccer participant and an athlete normally would mark a number of his most famed roles, from real-life Chicago Endure Brian Piccolo within the 1971 docudrama “Brian’s Track” to the celebrity participant of a dystopian bloodsport in Norman Jewison’s “Rollerball.” Even if enjoying a bedridden romance novelist in “Distress,” Rob Reiner’s 1990 Stephen King adaptation, Caan’s physicality performs a very powerful section. As screenwriter William Goldman wrote in his 2000 memoir, “That pent-up power you noticed on display used to be very genuine. And it used to be one of the crucial primary causes, a minimum of for me, the movie labored.”