Theodore 'Ted' Grant was born in Gotham, long before there was a Batman keeping the streets safe. Back then a man had to know how to take care of himself, so to that end Henry Grant taught his son how to box. Young Ted took to the sport like a duck takes to water. In fact all his boxing training had the adverse effect of what his father had hoped for, that instead of keeping him out of trouble it was getting him into it. Ted had it in his mind that he had to prove he was the toughest kid on the block, eagerly jumping into any scrap he could find, regardless of the cause.

He eventually fell in with a gang of street toughs who called themselves the Wildcats. The group of late teen, young adult men dealt in petty crimes usually, while occasionally committing the odd stick-up job, all while having regular brawls with other youth gangs, hoping that they could catch the eyes of some of the cities Made Men, and make their way up to the big leagues of organised crime. While Ted didn't really care for becoming a full-time criminal, he did enjoy the respect he received for becoming one of Gotham's most effective bruisers.

Henry, worried about the direction his sons life was taking, figured he needed a more respectable outlet for his more violent urges, and so signed him up for an amateur boxing tournament. Ted demolished the competition, and in the doing he discovered what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. He wanted to be a boxer. However he wasn't keen to just abandon his old friends in the Wildcats, so while he wasn't in the ring he'd usually accompany them on whatever jobs they had lined up.

Things change though, and as the boxing demanded more and more of Ted's time he found he had less to give his gang. After all, this was a time when heavyweight boxing was dominated by some of the best names to ever grace the sport, men like Joe Fraiser, George Foreman, and of course Muhammed Ali after his forced exile. Ted couldn't afford to divide his attention. Things came to a head when he found out he had earned a chance at a title shot. He told the Wildcats he wanted out. The Wildcats, unsurprisingly perhaps, weren't best pleased. Ted was their muscle, their ace in the hole against the other gangs, and they didn't want to lose him. So they concocted a plan, one were they sent a crew round to Henry Grant's house, to beat Ted's father mercilessly and make it look like the work of one of the rival gangs. However Ted came home early that night, caught the men in the act, and reacted unsurprisingly, beating the crew in kind, even accidentally killing one man, John Travis.

Ted was defended under the Castle Doctrine, though he received a five year ban from boxing. Small punishment to his mind, for taking a man's life. He quit the Wildcats then, and became obsessed with making amends. At first he tried to pay back Travis' family, but they refused to speak to him at all, or accept any of his help, so he turned his efforts to charity. He tried his hand at anything he could find, church work, volunteering in soup kitchens, trying and failing to find something that might help him feel absolved of some of the guilt that was trying to crush him.

His salvation came one afternoon when he was loading boxes at the docks and a bunch of hood-rats arrived with the intention of squeezing some protection money from the dock-master. Ted was just thinking about intervening when none other than Green Lantern, member of the Justice Society, came floating down. The hero made short work of the villains, and left Ted with the knowledge of what he had to do.

He was to become a vigilante.

He would use his fighting skills to protect the little guys, to give back to society a little of what he had taken. With a makeshift costume costume and an Indian Scout motorcycle he took on the guise of the vigilante Wildcat. With his old ties to the underworld he knew just where to hit the criminals to make it hurt, and it wasn't long until he'd made some big waves. If boxing had been his career, then vigilantism had become Ted's passion.

It wasn't long before Ted caught the eye's of the other heroes of the day, and was offered a preliminary place on the Justice Society. While at first he was overjoyed to be thought worthy enough to stand among the likes of Green Lantern, the Flash, and Starman, he quickly discovered his roughshod approach to vigilantism didn't quite mesh with the groups clean-cut aesthetic.

It was with the Society that Ted received his first bite of 'super-crime', facing the likes of the Fourth Reich, Blackbriar Thorn, the Psycho Pirate, Solomon Grundy, and Johnny Sorrow. Although he was just a man with a talent for punching, and by all rights should have been unbelievably outmatched in all those encounters, Ted kept his head cool and triumphed, proving you didn't need a magic ring, super speed, or fantastic gadgets to be a hero. After that the other members of the Society grew to accept him as one of their own.

It couldn't last though, and by the late seventies it seemed that America was tiring of the Justice Society. When Senator Arthur Reeves claimed they were nothing but narcissistic vigilantes who needed to be ‘registered’ with the government Ted insisted that the team march on Washington and tell the government where they could stick their 'registration', but he was the minority voice. The group decided to vote on their future, and whether or not they should disband. Wildcat voted against it, arguing that America still needed them, even if the country refused to believe it. He couldn't sway the others though, and in 1979 the Justice Society was no more.

Lost and angry, Wildcat returned to solo vigilantism for a time, though was forced to quit in 1982 when he realized that his heart just wasn't in it anymore. The disbandment of the Society had taken from him his drive to protect others, and without it he was afraid that he was just using the Wildcat guise to take his anger out on others, a path that he knew led nowhere good.

After his suspension was over he returned to boxing, it being the only other life he had ever known. Ted was a revelation to boxing audiences, a stoic, enigmatic, brilliant gladiator who dispensed with the pre-match theatrics and opponent baiting practiced by his contempories to instead allow his actions to speak for him. Described as a 'flickering flame in the ring, delighting in the dance and destined to burn all foolish enough to challenge him', boxing fans were eager to accept him as a potential ambassador of the sport to the rest of the world, a spot left vacant since Muhammed Ali's departure in 1981. It seemed he could do no wrong in the ring.

His personal life, however, was going to hell in a hand-basket. Drinking, drugs, loose women and hard nights, this new age without the Justice Society was hurting Ted deep. This suited the media, who we're treating the boxer as their latest golden goose. Hardly a week went by where he wasn't in some tabloid or other.

Ted cemented his place in the Boxing hall of fame when he united the heavyweight championship in 1989, after a grueling match with Mike Tyson, who was at the time considered Grant's greatest threat. He was also declared Lineal Champion, considered by many (Ted among them) a much greater accolade than the actual official titles.

Things changed when in 1990 Buster Douglas, a 42 to 1 underdog, upsets Grant by going the 12 round distance Tokyo, even managing to knock Ted to the canvas twice. The media was quick to report that it should have been an easy win for Grant, that his hard living had obviously interfered with his training, though that maybe it was time for the old warhorse to throw in the towel. Despite their heckling Grant kept boxing, and though he did manage several successful title defenses in the following years, he never did regain the dizzy heights of his hey-day. He retired in 1997 with a professional record of 47 fights, 47 wins.

Ted opened his own gym in Gotham, deciding that it was time for him to pass on his skills and knowledge to the next generation. To his surprise he found he had a knack for teaching, and would later wonder why he never quit the boxing and take up coaching earlier. Many aspiring young fighters come through his doors, and at one point he even had the pleasure of teaching Bruce Wayne, Gotham's favored son.

Then in December 2003 everything changed for him again when he found out he had a son.

It's fair to say when social services contacted Ted to tell him about the son, Thomas Bronson, he never knew he had that he was knocked for a loop. He could barely even remember the boys recently deceased mother, a one night stand who had insisted she was related to African royalty. She had never tried to contact him to tell him about their son to his knowledge.

Grant dropped everything and traveled to New York to take custody of the boy, though if he had hoped for an emotional reunion then he was sorely disappointed. The two were complete strangers, and while there was no resentment from Tommy for his years of missing out on a father, neither was he particularly thrilled to meet Ted.

Ted re-opened his gym in New York while trying to connect with his son, to little success, while fully expecting to live out his golden years in peace.

How wrong he was.