Imagine: You’re on a transatlantic flight from Boston to London, cruising along at 35,000 feet, when you hear cackling from across the aisle. The cackling won’t stop, so you shoot a glance to see where it’s coming from. And you discover that the culprit is “Irish” Micky Ward, laughing hysterically with his headphones on.

This was precisely the scene that unfolded a couple of weeks ago. The retired boxing icon was flying with his nephew, Sean Eklund. And Eklund — like everyone else within earshot on the plane, all turning their heads to look at this lunatic going full De Niro at the movies in “Cape Fear” — was dying to know what was so damned funny.

It turns out Micky was listening to “Pat Lynch Boxing,” the relatively new podcast in which, fight by fight, Arturo Gatti’s longtime manager tells all the behind-the-scenes stories of Gatti’s career.

Quite a few of them are tales that Ward, despite being one of Gatti’s closest friends and undoubtedly his fiercest rival, had never heard before. And they slayed him all the way to London, as he caught up on the entire podcast series before the flight’s end.

Some 23 years ago, Micky’s left hook to the liver had Arturo doubled over during one of the greatest rounds in boxing history.

Now Pat and Arturo are returning the favor.

“The response has been phenomenal,” said Lynch, now 67, semi-retired, and a couple of years removed from any professional involvement in boxing. “I can’t believe it. I didn’t know if anyone would even listen. But everywhere I go, like my local gym, people tell me, ‘Oh my god, I love your podcast.’ And my kids, they’re grown up now, and their friends are listening, and they’re passing it on. It’s taken off better than I would have imagined.”

One of Lynch’s three grown-up kids is directly responsible for the podcast existing. His eldest daughter Alexandra, 31, is his co-host, producer, and the person who spent about three years twisting his arm until they finally launched the pod last November.

“She kept pushing me,” Pat explained. “You know, every now and then, we’d be sitting around, we’d be talking about Arturo, and I’d tell a funny story here or there, and she said, ‘Dad, you really need to do a podcast.’ I said, ‘For what?’ She says, ‘You don’t understand. There’s so many of his fans and so many fans of Micky’s out there that are all gonna want to hear these stories, stories that have never been told.’ But I kept pushing it off, pushing it off.”

As it turns out, Alexandra Lynch has a little of Gatti’s fighting spirit in her.

“She was relentless,” Lynch said. “Finally, I said, ‘OK, I’ll do it.’”

There were a few ground rules. No fancy studios. No Zoom calls. And the episodes weren’t going to be massive undertakings that dragged on for hours.

No, these are quick-hit podcasts, mostly between 10 and 15 minutes long, just Alexandra and Pat having a conversation into a recording device in a quiet room, her asking the questions someone would ask if they kind of know the stories and kind of remember some of the fights, and him recalling all the details — the negotiations, the training camps, the trouble Gatti would get into when he had time on his hands, and of course, the drama that unfolded between the bells.

“I didn’t think I’d have that much to say, to be honest with you, and I wasn’t sure how I was gonna feel, but after we recorded the first one, I realized, it was exciting for me to talk about it,” Pat said. “It brought back some really great, pleasant memories. And, you know, when it’s happening, and you’re part of it, you can’t appreciate it as much as I can now, sitting back and looking at what he did over the course of his career.”

The podcast is mostly weekly, usually dropping on Thursdays, although there have been some weeks off. To the extent that they’re staying on schedule, Alexandra gets the credit. “She’s become my boss,” Pat said with a laugh.

Lynch’s prep work isn’t overly strenuous. He knows what fight or fights they’re going to be talking about on a given week, double checks the facts on BoxRec, maybe jots down the key details. Then he just trusts that once the red light is on, the stories will come to him.

Alexandra has some memories and stories of her own. She was born when Gatti was a junior lightweight contender working his way toward his first title shot and was too young to remember the first half of his career, but she was right there in Atlantic City for some of his biggest fights in the 2000s — and she and her younger brother and sister’s most fond recollections of Arturo come from the Friday nights of those fight weekends.

“Before all the fights in Atlantic City,” Pat said, “Arturo and I would have suites across the hall from one another, and I’d go out with my wife or whatever, and Arturo would always knock on the kids’ door, go in, and they’d rent movies together and they’d watch movies the night before the fight.”

Yep, the man known as “Thunder” spent the night before the fight in quite a different mode than how he tended to spend the night after the fight.

This may be a spoiler for a podcast episode to come, but Lynch recalled a story involving his kids from what turned out to be Gatti’s final fight, in the summer of 2007 against Alfonso Gomez.

“We decided to let my son Kyle and my nephew Johnny walk him into the ring with us. And we’re getting ready, and we’re about to start walking, and Arturo looks, and he turns to his left, he sees my nephew; turns to the right, he sees my son. He’s like, ‘Come on, I remember holding this kid in my arms.’ He goes, ‘Oh my god, I’m getting old. We gotta stop this.’”

A very serious question — one to which Lynch doesn’t have the answer yet — is when and where the podcast will stop.

As of last week, they were up to the second Ward fight. That means the day this article posts, they should be dropping an episode about the third Ward fight. There are still four years and seven fights to cover after that. The pod will at least go through the sad end to Gatti’s career against Gomez.

But given Gatti’s mysterious death in Brazil almost two years to the day later at just 37 years of age, Lynch has a complicated decision to make about whether to keep going.

“I honestly haven’t decided yet,” Lynch said. “I really haven’t. I don’t know if we’re going there. We may. I’m not really sure, to tell you the truth.”

Alexandra and Pat don’t have it all mapped out. So far they’ve just been going from episode to episode, figuring it out along the way.

But they do have one upcoming idea nailed down. After Sean Eklund called Lynch to let him know how much his uncle Micky was enjoying the podcast, they made a plan for the series finale, whenever that comes.

“After we do the last one, Micky wants to come on, with his nephew Sean who was in the corner with Micky the whole time, Micky wants to come on and talk about the three fights and his stories with Arturo. So we plan on having one with him, Sean, me, and my daughter, we’ll just sit around and talk about everything. That’s the perfect way to end the podcast.”

Eric Raskin is a veteran boxing journalist with more than 25 years of experience covering the sport for such outlets as BoxingScene, ESPN, Grantland, Playboy, and The Ring (where he served as managing editor for seven years). He also co-hosted The HBO Boxing Podcast, Showtime Boxing with Raskin & Mulvaney, The Interim Champion Boxing Podcast with Raskin & Mulvaney, and Ring Theory. He has won three first-place writing awards from the BWAA, for his work with The Ring, Grantland, and HBO. Outside boxing, he is the senior editor of CasinoReports and the author of 2014’s The Moneymaker Effect. He can be reached on X, BlueSky, or LinkedIn, or via email at RaskinBoxing@yahoo.com.