Jack Murdock (character)

He has been portrayed by Scott L. Schwartz in Spider-Man (2002) and David Keith in Daredevil (2003). Jack Murdock was also portrayed by John Patrick Hayden in the first and third seasons of the Marvel Television production streaming television series Daredevil, set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU).

Fictional character biography[edit]

Born Jonathan Murdock, he went by Jack for short, and lived an average life in New York. He eventually met and fell in love with a woman named Maggie Grace, which led to the birth of a son, Matt. Although their life was good together, Maggie eventually divorced him and went on to join a convent, becoming a nun.


Jack didn't want Matt growing up hating his mother for leaving them and decided to tell him she died when he was little. From then on, Jack raised Matt as a single parent by becoming a boxer fighting other boxers like Happy Hogan and others while doing the best that he could to support Matt. ^[3][4][5][6]


As time went by, Jack found it hard to support his son on boxing alone and ended up going to a local mobster named Roscoe Sweeney, known as the "Fixer" because he fixed boxing matches to make money off of them. Jack made an agreement with him: Jack would be one of his enforcers, and in return, Sweeney would fix his fights so that Jack would win and make more money.^{[7][8][9][10][11][12][13]}


When Matt saw his father in the pupil of his eye roughing up someone for money to give to the Fixer, he fled from the scene in shock and got into a car accident, when he saved an old blind man from getting hit by a truck carrying radioactive chemicals. Blinded by the chemicals, Matt developed superhuman senses. Heartbroken by what he put his son through, Jack vowed to never work for the Fixer again and helped Matt adjust to his blindness, unaware of his powers.


Matt soon entered college and law school, studying to become a lawyer, while Jack continued to be a boxer. Unfortunately, Jack soon became involved with Roscoe Sweeney again when he returned to town; Sweeney revealed that Jack actually still worked for him, by showing him that all the fights he won over the years were the result of Sweeney fixing his matches so that Jack would win and he could make more money off him in return.^{[14][15][16][17][18][19]}


But this time, Sweeney paid Jack to lose the match. Jack reluctantly accepted the deal. But as the fight started he saw Matt in the crowd cheering him on. Knowing he couldn't disappoint his son, Jack rebelled against the Fixer's orders and won the fight with all his might in Matt's honor.^[20][21] In retaliation, Sweeney had Slade and the rest of his men ambush and kill Jack as he left the gym.


Thereafter, Matt Murdock put his powers and training to use as the crime-fighter Daredevil and brought his father's killers to justice.^[22][23][24]


Since then, Jack Murdock has appeared in flashbacks throughout Matt's life as Daredevil, and later the childhood of the magically created Mike Murdock after he uses a Norn stone to insert himself into history. At one point an amnesiac Matt began calling himself "Jack Murdock" when he couldn't remember his own name, although he eventually recalled his own true identity.