The Arturo Gatti pictures Thread

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no ****, but u gotta say arturo was a good looking mofo..he just looked pure badasss

Well as big a party animal as he was there was a saying he ****ed half of New Jersey.

His unusual heritage also gave him a weird voice pattern.

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Arturo Gatti joins long list of fighters who died violently
by Mark Di Ionno/Star-Ledger Columnist Monday July 13, 2009, 9:33 PM

Al Bello/Getty
A 2006 file photo of boxer Arturo Gatti at the World Boxing and Fitness Center in Jersey City.
Arturo Gatti was a good kid who grew into a mostly good guy. But his sport has a dark side, and with it comes an almost self-fulfilling prophecy of self-destruction. Now Gatti has joined a hall of fame list of fighters who died violently.

Rocky Marciano, avoidable small plane crash. Sonny Liston, su****ious drug overdose. Trevor Berbick, hacked to death with machetes. Salvador Sanchez, crazy-speed sports car crash. Same for Carlos Monzon. Diego Corrales, motorcycle crash, just last year. Alexis Arguello, suicide, just last week. Now Gatti. There are many more, and many more to come.

The list of those who end up ill or feeble or impaired, or prematurely dead for health reasons is longer. Start with Muhammad Ali. Even longer is the list of those who end up in jail, or addicted to drugs, or broke and back on the streets where they first found the sport of temporary salvation. Mike Tyson, to name one.


Al Bello/Getty
In this Jan. 28, 2006, file photo, Arturo Gatti hits Thomas Damgaard during their IBA Welterweight Championship fight at Caesars Atlantic City.Horse racing is the Sport of Kings, baseball is America's Pastime, soccer is the Beautiful Game. Boxing is called the Sweet Science, but it is not. It is the sport of Greek Tragedy. What makes a fighter great, ultimately does him in. The anger. The violence. The macho veneer of indestructibility. The deep-seeded self-loathing it takes to stand there and get one's head pounded fuzzy, the superhuman will it takes to withstand that punishment and come back to win.

The sport can give a man an outlet for all that, and at the top end, even provide a decent living. But it is temporary.

Where does all that misanthropic energy go, when the cheering stops and the paydays dry up? The anger, and fast-lane turmoil, stays. Money gets burned, machines crashed. Lives go in the tank. Domestic violence and boxers is an old story, and eventually this will play out in the Gatti case. It will become a defense, whether it's true or not.

Arturo Gatti was a good kid, the son of Canadian immigrants from Italy. His father was an electrician who sent his kids to Catholic schools. The middle-class work ethic fed all Gatti's success and much of his popularity. He won because he was the hardest worker. The fans loved him because he gave blood in the ring, and flesh outside it. There wasn't a hand he didn't shake, a hug he didn't give, an autograph he didn't sign.

But you wonder how being loved for taking a beating changes a man. You wonder what kind of hardness comes with being loved more for beating someone worse.

Yes, boxing attracts a certain type. But it molds others into certain types. Some of the fighters mentioned above were not born hard-cases. Sanchez, perhaps the greatest featherweight ever, was the son of successful Mexican doctor. He was doing triple digits in his Porsche in the hours before dawn when he ran into the back of a fruit truck.

Some found second careers. Longtime middleweight champ Monzon, the national hero of Argentina, became an action-film movie star. But he was a wife-beater. His second wife, an actress, ended up at the bottom of a balcony after a fight, and Monzon went to jail. He crashed at high-speed during a weekend furlough. Some say on purpose.

Arguello, one of boxing's gentlemen, admitted to being a ******* addict, but was later elected mayor of Managua, Nicaragua's largest city. He shot himself in his home.


Andrew Mills/The Star-Ledger
Gatti jumps rope at the World Boxing & Fitness Center in Jersey City while preparing to defend his WBC Super Lightweight Championship belt against Floyd Mayweather Jr. in Atlantic City in 2005.You wonder what boxing does to a man's soul. It is glorious, but inhumane. The rises are meteoric, the falls catastrophic.

None of this is to say Arturo Gatti was a bad guy. He was a good guy. But there was heavy drinking, by his own admission, and some bad choices, by his own admission.

All of that -- until Saturday at least -- was easy to overlook because Arturo Gatti also had a sincerity about him -- maybe even a sensitivity -- that emerged from behind the mask of scar tissue and misshapen features earned in all those boxing wars.

After he lost to Mayweather in what was the biggest fight of his life, Gatti was asked to help launch a fledgling anti-gun-violence public service campaign. The idea was to get a bunch of tough guys from all walks of sports to convince kids that "Guns are for Punks." The idea died at the doorstep of teams and leagues, never getting so much as a second look. But Donald Trembley, the former PR man of Main Events, Gatti's promoter, signed up the former champ. Gladly.

"He really wants to do it," Trembley said.

And so Gatti came to the gym, still bruised from the Mayweather fight, looked into a video camera with his fists up, and said, "This is Arturo Gatti and I got a question for you: If you're so tough, why do you need a gun?"

He had a loving family, but his marriage went violently bad. He leaves a 1-year-old boy, the son he always wanted. The son, perhaps, he married for.

All those good intentions, gone in the chaos and contradictions of a boxing life.

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Locals fondly recall Arturo Gatti in Jersey City neighborhood where he honed his boxing skills
JERSEY CITY, N.J. (AP) — Boxing trainer Mike Skowronski honed his skills beside Arturo Gatti at Jersey City's Ringside Gym and said the former champ's longtime friends never liked Gatti's wife — who is suspected of strangling him.

Skowronski, Gatti's one-time stablemate, sparring mate and cornerman, said Amanda Rodrigues met the boxing legend while working as a stripper in northern New Jersey and quickly became his business adviser and then his wife. Friends in the working-class area of Jersey City where Gatti paid his dues in the ring were su****ious of her motives but didn't want to offend him by pushing the matter.

"She tried to take over — she pushed him away from everybody," Skowronski said Tuesday. "I chose not to be around it, if you can imagine that, after being friends for 20 years. A lot of his friends did the same."

Rodrigues, a native of Brazil, is accused of strangling Gatti with her purse strap as he drunkenly slept. Rodrigues told investigators she awoke Saturday to find her husband's body in the apartment they rented in Brazil. But police said she was the only suspect.

"Arturo had a big heart and she took advantage of that," said Joe Gatti, 42. "There was nobody around down there that he could trust."

Ringside Gym is located along the rough-and-tumble Route 1 & 9 truck route that snakes across northern New Jersey from the Holland and Lincoln tunnels out of New York City. Gatti was a wiry 17-year-old when he joined his older brother Joe there in 1989.

Joe Gatti, who still lives in northern New Jersey, said the family is struggling to come to terms with his death and to handle the funeral and memorial arrangements. Gatti's body is scheduled to be released Tuesday in Brazil.

The family had hoped to hold a service in New Jersey, but Gatti never obtained his U.S. citizenship, so they're leaning toward an event in Montreal this weekend.

"He's my baby brother," Joe Gatti said by phone from his home in Wyckoff. "I got him here, I raised him and he became a champion."

The Gattis lived on one side of Route 1 & 9 in boxing guru Mario Costa's single-family home and ate breakfast each morning in his White Mana diner. They trained on the other side of the truck route in his second-floor boxing gym, eating dinner in the Ringside Lounge below. The blue-collar area, which is known for its truck repair yards, sometimes attracts **********s at night.

Regulars recalled Gatti on Tuesday as a great kid who never forgot the neighborhood.

"Everybody was his friend here," said Nunzi D'elia, 73. "He basically grew up here. We're taking it real hard."

Bartender Manuel Montiro said, "He wasn't fancy. It hurts, especially the way he died."

Gatti considered the area home and returned often even after becoming a world champion. The bar is festooned with his fight posters and trophies.

Costa cherished the champ's final amateur boxing trophy Tuesday, laughing about the time he found a bruised and battered Gatti eating cheeseburgers and Philly cheesesteak sandwiches at White Mana the morning after a big fight in Atlantic City. Gatti had starved himself to make weight for the bout and said he'd been dreaming of the diner for days.

"What hurts is that he was by himself when he died, with nobody to protect him, because he was loved by so many people around here," Costa said Tuesday.

Everyone has a Gatti story at Ringside. Costa likes to remember the starry-eyed teen who followed him around when he visited Montreal, begging for a chance.

Ricky Roman, 32, remembers sneaking away to neighborhood basketball courts with Gatti so the tough Canadian could break out the boxing gloves and give the local kids a shot. Gatti was small, but powerful. He also had "heavy hands," boxing lingo for knockout power.

Skowronski, 38, of Passaic, remembered Gatti as a prankster with a penchant for pulling down the shorts of other boxers. He also recalled how hurt the teenage Gatti was by his father's death in 1987. It was a source of strength for a boxer renowned for his courage, who was always trying to measure up to his old man's exacting standards.

Skowronski said he would play soccer with Gatti when they were teenagers, even though he hated the sport, which is a big deal in the champ's native Italy and childhood home of Quebec.

"I loved him," Skowronski said. "I'd stand in the net and play goalie."

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