By Thomas Gerbasi

Shhhh. Don’t say anything, but despite all the talk about writers being impartial and objective, we all have our favorites, and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. We also have our non-favorites, the guys we wouldn’t yell “look out” to if they were about to get hit by a speeding truck.

But that’s a topic for another column.

For the time being, and with the only action of note this weekend being a heavyweight championship mismatch between Wladimir Klitschko and Jean-Marc Mormeck, I’m going to make you feel even worse by listing a half-dozen of “my guys,” the fighters you would never dread seeing on a Saturday afternoon. In fact, you would probably rearrange your plans to make sure you didn’t miss them.

Alexis Arguello

“El Flaco Explosivo” was just that in the ring, a skinny force of destruction that delivered classic after classic during his prime, many of which found their way to free TV on Saturday afternoons. In the process, Arguello became an instant star in the 80’s, but while it was his action-packed style and knockout power that appealed to fight fans, his classic Hollywood looks and class outside the ring hit the mark with everyone else. The Nicaraguan great gave boxing a different image, one where you could be a savage competitor when the bell rings, but a gentleman before and after. So when I met his son at a Shane Mosley fight in New York, the fanboy in me came out and I asked if dad would be interested in an interview. Just days later, I was on the phone with Arguello, and if I’m in this business for a hundred more years, it will still be a highlight. Recently I came across the tapes of the interview, and listening to them not only brought back personal memories, but amazing stories of his 24-year career. I can’t pick a single favorite, but one of them was when I asked him for his thoughts on Alfredo Escalera, with whom he fought two brutal wars in 1978 and 1979.

“Oh man,” said Arguello, “the second fight was the fight of the decade. That was a war. The man was talking to me during the rounds when we would get into a clinch. He was telling me "You skinny mother f----r, kill me you son of a bitch." That was the toughest guy I fought. I was so young. After the fight, when we were taking the test for drugs, the guy came to me and said "Hey Alexis, why don't we sign the third one? We're gonna make a lot of money." I said, "Get out of here. Find someone to fight. I don't want to go through another one." He was a tough son of a bitch. And then my doctor performed an operation, because I had an eighteen stitch cut on my right eye, right on the train. My flight was leaving at eight in the morning and the fight ended about 11:30, so we went back to the hotel, packed everything, and got on the train from Rimini to Milan. We took a six hour ride on the train. And I got plastic surgery right there on the train, with no painkillers.”

R.I.P. Alexis.

Tony Ayala Jr.

Talk about a change in direction from the gentleman of all gentlemen to Ayala, who is, in the interest of being kind, a lot less than that. Yet for a time, “El Torito” had the potential to be one of the best fighters in the world, a fearsome puncher who was simply mean in the ring. Rumored to have handled then welterweight champion Pipino Cuevas in sparring as a teenager, Ayala was well promoted and on his way to a world title shot against Davey Moore when he raped a New Jersey woman and was convicted and sentenced to 35 years in prison. He was 19 years old. Released early in 1999, Ayala staged a comeback, going 9-2 before violating probation and getting another ten year prison sentence in 2004. Needless to say, Ayala was a bad guy. The peculiar thing about him though, was that he had the ability to make you believe he was a changed man between jail terms. When I spoke to him before his 2000 loss to Yory Boy Campas, I was convinced that he had turned the corner and was about to live a law-abiding productive life. I even poked at him with questions that could have sent him on an angry tangent, like one asking how he felt about the media’s portrayal of him, and he passed the test with flying colors.

“I've got no problem with the way they've (the media) treated me,” said Ayala.  “For the most part they've always been fair.  Like in any profession, for the most part it's very cool and people are respectful.  But you'll always get somebody who wants to go beyond reporting, and who wants to get into your personal life and dig at whatever dirt they can, for whatever reason.  The negative press that I got was a result of me having committed a crime.  And it should have been negative.  It should have been critical.  I committed a crime against this nation, I committed a crime against a woman.  I violated her life, and as a result of that I went to prison.  I did my time, got out.  When I came out I think a lot of people were wondering whether or not I had changed; whether or not I was the same person; whether or not I was dangerous.  Some rushed to judgment and assumed that I was the same person and thought I was saying the right things to get back into the good graces of people.  I think that over the course of the year and a half I've been out it's been clear that they weren't just words.  I really did change, and I've turned my life around.  I'm certainly no angel, but I'm certainly not a criminal anymore.”

At the end of the interview, I liked Ayala not only as a fighter, but also as a person.  He committed a heinous crime, did his time, but seemed to be a changed man and a straight shooting sort that you could probably throw a few beers back with.  Once the tape stopped running, I even told him my preconceptions of him coming into the interview.  He accepted and even understood it. I was wrong. He fooled me, just like he fooled so many others, including the parole board.

Tony Ayala Jr., as exciting a fighter that he was, belongs in a cage.

Diego Corrales

What’s the first thing that pops into my mind at the mention of Diego Corrales? Not the greatest fight I’ve ever seen between him and Jose Luis Castillo, or any number of action-packed scraps that made him “must see TV” for fight fans. No, the first memory I have of “Chico” was from back in the House of Boxing.com days, when we conducted online chats with both Corrales and Floyd Mayweather (separately) before their 2001 bout. It was my first time talking to the feared junior lightweight, and his personality took me completely off guard, with his quoting of Woody Allen movies really sealing the deal. I was a fan from that moment, and while he had his struggles like anyone else, he wasn’t one to brush them off or blame them on someone else. He was a fighter, in the ring and in life, but unfortunately, he lived as hard as he fought, and you always got the impression that he and Castillo wouldn’t be tossing beers back on the porch, reminiscing about the old days. In 2007, he was tragically killed in a motorcycle accident, leaving a wife and kids behind. I asked him once about his children, and what he hoped they would say about him one day.

“When all is said and done, I’ll let my kids form their own opinion about their father, but hopefully they’ll say that I was someone very, very special, and that I showed them how to be strong,” said Corrales. “And that’s the only thing you can really hope for your kids is that they grow up to be strong – strong character, strong morals – and I hope that I’ve given my kids that.”

Frank Fletcher

If you were a boxing fan in the 80’s, it seemed like Frank “The Animal” Fletcher was on television every Saturday afternoon, putting on blood-soaked wars that could turn pacifists into boxing fans. There was no finesse about the Philly middleweight, but he could punch and he could brawl, and to add to the spectacle he brought to the ring, his mother Lucille was almost as much a part of the NBC broadcasts as her son was, as she screamed encouragement from ringside. The southpaw ran off a nice five fight winning streak in 1981-82, beating Norberto Sabater, Ernie Singletary, Tony Braxton, Clint Jackson, and James “Hard Rock” Green, but a 12 round loss to Wilford Scypion started a decline that saw him lose four of his last six bouts. In a way, it was probably a good thing, considering that a fight between Fletcher and then-middleweight king Marvin Hagler wouldn’t have ended well for “The Animal,” whose life went off the rails after his career was over as well, as he is currently incarcerated.

Arturo Gatti

These days, much of the talk about Arturo Gatti centers on his tragic and mysterious 2009 death in Brazil, but I’ll choose to remember the good times of “Thunder” and all the jaw-dropping fights he gave us over the years. A true action hero who will get my vote for the Hall of Fame as soon as he’s eligible just because of the impact he had on the business in his heyday, Gatti was a talented two-division world champion, but does anyone really remember him for that? No, they remember him for the fights with Wilson Rodriguez, Gabriel Ruelas, Ivan Robinson, and of course the classic trilogy with Micky Ward. Arturo Gatti was the fighter we were if we ever fantasized about being a fighter. He was a living Rocky movie, and even referring to him in the past tense hits a nerve. On the day of his death, I was in Las Vegas, covering the UFC 100 event. When the news hit, a pall fell over the press room, and one of the people I spoke to was renowned trainer Don House, who said of the Montreal native, “Gatti was my hero and one of those guys who always came to fight. We didn’t care if he won or lost the fight or who he was gonna fight, we knew Gatti was gonna give us all that he had, one hundred percent. Right now, we don’t have another Arturo Gatti. This guy gave us everything.”

Larry Holmes

The big man from Easton, Pennsylvania (now probably best described as the man who OWNS Easton, Pennsylvania) was MY heavyweight champ. You know how the first sports team you remember is usually the one you stick with for your entire life? That’s the way I am with boxing, and when I seriously got into the sport (seriously meaning buying every magazine I could, and even getting Super 8 films of the classics for only $3.99 each), Larry Holmes was the man who ruled the division. No, he didn’t have the charisma of Muhammad Ali, and even then, Sugar Ray Leonard was the man when it came to mainstream crossover, but Holmes was as dominant a fighter as the division ever saw, defending the crown 20 times, which is second only to Joe Louis’ 25. Yeah, he wasn’t media savvy, he spoke his mind, sometimes to his detriment, and he’s more remembered for beating up his former employer, Ali, than for his accomplishments, but who could forget his 15 round war with Ken Norton, the mega fight with Gerry Cooney, or his ability to rise from the canvas to beat Earnie Shavers and Renaldo Snipes? And what about that jab, perhaps the best in boxing history? In a 2003 interview with heavyweight Derek Bryant, one of Holmes’ sparring partners for his fight against Mike Tyson, I asked if the jab of “The Easton Assassin” was everything it was cracked up to be.

“I never seen the jab coming out,” said Bryant.  “I only saw it going back.  I couldn’t believe it.”

And mind you, that was a 38-year old Holmes that Bryant was sparring with.