Remembering Arturo Gatti

Remembering Arturo Gatti
Mark E. Ortega
Freelance
July 16, 2009

Arturo Gatti was more of a role model to me than any fighter out there. There may never be another fighter who will inspire me to “suck it up” when things get hard in my own life. Arturo taught me not to look for defeat, but to look for a way to overcome it, and that when we are down, that is when life is most precious.

It still has not fully hit me yet that Arturo Gatti is no longer with us. Sure, he had been out of the ring for almost exactly two years since suffering a shock knockout loss to Alfonso Gomez in July of 2007. But when you consider all that Arturo Gatti persevered through as a fighter, all the punishment he took in and out of the ring during a tumultuous sixteen year professional career that included world titles in two different weight classes as well as four Ring Magazine Fight of the Year awards and a Comeback of the Year Award, you figured if he was able to survive all of those things that he was going to be around for awhile after he hung up the gloves. Sadly for us, Arturo Gatti was taken way too soon and the circumstances surrounding his demise are as tragic as they can get.



This article is not going to delve too deeply into what caused Gatti to be found dead in his villa in Brazil, presumably from strangulation while he was intoxicated in his sleep. Gatti is one of those fighters that always had personal problems, whether it be from partying too much, chasing women, or just not taking good care of himself in general.

When Gatti retired, it was reported he was back to his old partying ways. His friends always wanted to go out, and Gatti obliged them and would tag along. Arturo Gatti was a man who was always the life of the party. How could you not be with the kinds of stories that not even Sylvester Stallone’s “Rocky Balboa” could contend with? Eventually, Gatti was able to taper off his partying and started settling into his life post-retirement. He had a one-year old son who many said was the light of Arturo’s life. The saddest thing of all of this may just be that Gatti’s young son will now grow up without either parent, but the fact that he has the same blood running through him as his father makes me think he will be able to handle whatever life intends on throwing at him.

What Gatti meant to people on a personal level is what makes this so hard for everyone. I was unlucky to have not been around the sport as a journalist long enough to cover an Arturo Gatti fight. I never had the chance to meet him, to shake his hand, and say thank you for the never-ending amount of memories that he supplied us with over the course of his career. The list of memorable moments that Arturo was a key part of might take the whole rest of this article to articulate.

First, there was his memorable and underrated title victory over Tracy Harris Patterson. Gatti came out of the gates quickly, but let Patterson back into the fight late, gutting out a close unanimous decision to win the IBF super featherweight title and become a world champion for the first time.

In his very next fight, Arturo Gatti would emerge as a star. In a fight against Wilson Rodriguez, he faced a rugged veteran who had been around awhile but was not expected to be too much of a challenge in what many considered a showcase bout for Gatti. From the opening round, you knew it was not going to be that easy of a fight. Gatti was getting hit, very often in fact at a rate that fighters at the top level of the sport should not be taking. Part of what made Gatti a fighter who was able to even compete at that level was the fact that he could take that kind of punishment and keep coming forward.

The Rodriguez fight was the headlining bout of HBO’s second ever episode of Boxing After Dark. The opening episode was a bout between Marco Antonio Barrera and Kennedy McKinney that many considered the best fight of the year and a tough act to follow for the hard-hitting Gatti. From the opening bell you knew that this fight could be just as good as that one.

Rodriguez came out in the first very quickly, peppering Gatti with an assortment of power shots that had Gatti heading back to his corner in a daze. The same onslaught continued in the next round, as Gatti took tons of punishment before being knocked down. But Gatti made it to his feet, and this would mark the beginning of the legacy of a fighter who was not world-class in skill but world-class in heart. The next three rounds saw Gatti continue to get hit but at the same time mount a comeback and tire his opponent out. At this point, Gatti’s eyes were nearly closed and he could not see right hands coming.

Heading to his corner before the sixth, he was given a “How many fingers?” test and somehow passed it and was given one more round to finish the job. Gatti went to the body immediately in the seventh, getting away with a few blows below the belt in between landing brutal body shots that would slow down his opponent. The body shots would setup a perfect left hook up top that would send the challenger spiraling to the canvas. Ringside Jim Lampley and Larry Merchant would go nuts, with Merchant proclaiming this fight one that nobody who saw it could ever forget.

He would follow that big victory with wins over Patterson in a rematch and Calvin Grove in an exciting underrated fight. Next he would face the tough former super featherweight champion Gabriel Ruelas in a fight that would win the 1997 Fight of the Year courtesy of Ring Magazine. Gatti would again fall behind early, get hurt and cut under his left eye, but he would not lose his resolve. It was never that Arturo Gatti had an iron chin or a thick skull where the punches had no effect on him, he constantly showed that he was getting hurt by the shots his opponents would land. It was that Gatti was mentally strong enough to take those shots and keep coming as he had the confidence that he would get his man out of there eventually.

With Ruelas, Gatti would land a ridiculous left hook that would drop Ruelas and end the fight in the fifth. Once again, Lampley, Merchant, and Roy Jones, Jr. went nuts following the victory.

“Can you believe Arturo Gatti?” exclaimed Larry Merchant as Jones, Jr. laughed like a young school girl giddy with excitement. “He just seems to have a bottomless well of will-power that just can’t stop him.”

Being an Arturo Gatti fan was a difficult thing to deal with. On one hand, you knew the guy was always going to bring you a good fight, but on the other hand you had to think to yourself, at what cost? If you were an Arturo Gatti fan, you may have been calling for him to retire after losing three straight bouts in 1998 to Angel Manfredy and Ivan Robinson twice in an attempted move to 135 pounds.

Manfredy was able to brutally cut Arturo early in the fight and drop him in the third round. This was an instance where Gatti was debilitated enough to not even be able to score a dramatic last-second victory, but even in the loss he gained more respect as he endured seven plus rounds against a contender without being able to see anything before the referee stopped the fight. Most other fighters would have packed it in as soon as the blood starting pouring into their eye but Gatti was not most other fighters.

In the first Robinson fight, Gatti would win Fight of the Year honors for the second time in this action-packed war that saw both guys hurt multiple times. With Gatti trailing on the scorecards heading into the final round, he knew he needed a knockout to get the win and came as close as you possibly can to making that a reality. In the tenth and final, Gatti would use every last bit of energy he had trying to knock Robinson out. A lot of fighters at that point in a brutal fight would just be trying to make it to the final bell, but Arturo Gatti never fought just to make it to the end. He was unsuccessful in his quest to stop Robinson, but made more fans in the process of losing.

Gatti would lose again to Robinson, and many considered him done as a top fighter. In 1999 and 2000, he would fight four times against lower level opposition, and even in one of those fights he faced a ton of drama.

In a fight against Joe Hutchinson in his hometown of Montreal on ESPN, Gatti would again get cut very badly early on in the fight. In most cases, a cut like this would have been a cause for stoppage, but the fact that this was Gatti’s first fight in his hometown probably helped keep the fight going. Gatti gutted out another decision victory and would earn a big payday against Oscar De La Hoya that many considered Gatti’s “cashout” fight. In other words, this was Gatti’s big payday so he could get out of the sport with some money and finally hang them up.

Gatti would suffer yet another bad cut under his right eye but it would not deter Arturo from coming forward and trying. In the fifth, Gatti’s trainer Hector Rocha would throw in the towel after seeing De La Hoya land at a 60% rate against his fighter.

If Arturo Gatti had retired after the De La Hoya fight, he would likely still be remembered as one of the sport’s most strong-willed fighters of the past few decades. But Gatti would continue fighting in 2002, and it wasn’t until then that he made his biggest mark on the sport.

After beating former title holder Terron Millett in the early portion of the year, Gatti would sign on to fight “Irish” Micky Ward, a similarly tough fighter who wasn’t the most skilled fighter but he was definitely in competition with Arturo for the title of biggest heart. Ward had a few of his own dramatic comeback victories and he also had a penchant for getting cut in fights. This fight deserves its own article to tell you the truth.

This would be Gatti’s second fight with former champion Buddy McGirt working his corner. HBO’s team would be Lampley, Merchant, and trainer Emmanuel Steward. This is a fight that has given me goosebumps upon each viewing, because the action in the ring turned the guys at ringside into fans for the duration of the bout. It is hard to act in a professional matter when you are engulfed in one of the sport’s most brutal wars, and neither Lampley, Merchant, or Steward were able to hold in their excitement.

It would take forever to talk about all the great moments in this fight, so here are my favorites.

In the fifth round, Gatti would get blasted by a five-punch combination that turned his head around like he was a robot. “Oh…look at that! Look at that combination!” Steward would exclaim following the barrage. A few more big shots from Ward would elicit loud noises of appreciation from Steward as the crowd starts to get into the fight more and more.

The ninth round is perhaps the best round of the century so far. Twenty seconds in, Gatti gets blasted by a left hook to the body, Ward’s signature punch, and go down. Steward noted that he doesn’t think Arturo will recover from this one because body shots are much different than head punches. I am guessing that Steward had not seen the Rodriguez fight, or the Ruelas fight, or either Robinson fight, or the Hutchinson fight.

Gatti does make it to his feet but is badly hurt. He gets blasted for the next minute and a half by Ward. “In the past, this is where Gatti has been dangerous,” notes Merchant.

“Gatti blinking away the blood in his right eye…can’t see out of the right eye! Vicious body shots by Gatti, Ward nods as if to say ‘Come on! Come on! Come on, let’s fight!” exclaims Lampley in a moment that will forever give me goosebumps.

“You know, you dream about fights like this and sometimes they don’t meet your expectations. This is more than you can dream of!” shouts Steward.

As Gatti takes more than a dozen unanswered power shots from Ward, one of which nearly bounces his head off of the turnbuckle, Lampley shouts, “Stop it Frank! You can stop it any time! Arturo Gatti is out on his feet! Frank Cappucino is going to let him keep going! Less than ten seconds in the round! Gatti is going to survive the round!”

Round nine is unequivocally Arturo Gatti in a nutshell. He didn’t take those shots easily and keep marching forward. He was hurt badly and somehow found it in himself to continue. And it is that quality that Arturo possessed that made him such a polarizing fighter.

In the tenth and final round, Merchant would note, “I am humbled by watching these two guys take the punishment they are taking.” As the round wore down, with both guys winging shots, Merchant says “This is the way it has to end.”

Gatti would go on to lose a majority decision to Ward but would gain even more notoriety than he had already obtained. He would help Micky Ward earn a few more paydays in two subsequent rematches that Gatti would win, one of which he had to do with a broken hand.

Gatti would follow the memorable Ward trilogy with a victory over Gianluco Branco for a vacant junior welterweight title. Gatti would then earn another payday against Floyd Mayweather, Jr. and again gamely take a savage beating from one of the sport’s best fighters. Gatti would then try and obtain a third world title in a different weight class, but finally ran into someone who could take his punches with little effect. The Gomez loss was the nail in the coffin for Gatti’s career but he is a fighter that would forever remain in the memory of anyone who ever had the privilege of seeing him wage war.

Gatti was a fighter who proved that losing didn’t have to be the end of things. Gatti lost nine fights over the course of his career, sometimes brutally. But he still made good money because he went out there and gave the fans what they wanted to see everytime out there. And I don’t believe Gatti ever fought on in those difficult fights because of the money, but because there was something inside of him that made him push on, made him continue going when all signs were pointing that he maybe should give up.

Arturo Gatti was more of a role model to me than any fighter out there. There may never be another fighter who will inspire me to “suck it up” when things get hard in my own life. Arturo taught me not to look for defeat, but to look for a way to overcome it, and that when we are down, that is when life is most precious.

The way I will always remember Arturo Gatti is with his hands raised, face swollen and bloody, totally exhausted following a well-deserved victory. For Arturo Gatti, nothing ever came easily just as most things in life aren’t.

Gatti will forever be immortalized in the minds of those who had the luxury of watching him ply his trade. Everybody who saw him fight will have a story or twelve to share for the rest of their lifetimes, and I am lucky to count myself as one of those people.