Out of all the recent deaths lately, this one actually got me in my gut. I tried to never, ever miss an Arturo Gatti fight. He wasn't the best, but he was the fuckin' BEST, if that makes sense. I'm pretty sure if you liked fighting or were raised in Northern Jersey, you were required to be obsessed with Arturo Gatti. Being that I fit both categories, he fit me like a glove.
Anyway, this article from the Star Ledger by Jerry Izenberg says it best:
To understand the impact the tragic death of Arturo Gatti in Brazil on Saturday has had on so many people in this state, you have to know that going in, New Jersey was, is and always will be the state of long-shot dreams, of hard knocks, high hopes and getting off the deck for one more shot. In every facet of what makes this state what it is, this is the state of a Puncher's Chance.
It has always been this way. In urban enclaves, no matter how they change, no matter the ethnicity or the skin color or the economic status. Nobody has to remind us.
''The Puncher's Chance.''
It is the mantra of this state's psyche as it struggles to overcome the ''Rust Belt'' Burden. In other slices of geography they succumb to the awful dirge of the Rust Belt Blues. Here we respond with the code of The Puncher's Chance. And the fire in that determination explains who we are and why we do not store our dreams away in the closet.
It explains how the son of an Italian immigrant, who, himself, became an immigrant from Montreal, touched the emotions and the heartbeat of those North Jersey cities that still have neighborhoods. Gatti wasn't fancy and he wasn't quick. What you saw was what you got.
He was, pure and simple, a living example of ''The Puncher's Chance.''
Listen to coach Bob Hurley, who was born and raised in one of those enclaves. The sound of his voice could pass for the music of North Jersey's cities. He can explain the legend of Arturo Gatti:
''People have dreams. So do neighborhoods. They were his people. You look back when you grow up and you remember the toughest kid on the block and years later you think, 'Well, he made it. Why not me?' So you keep on trying. In so many ways, he is what we are sometimes, back on his heels, bleeding, hurt and then coming back again because he would not yield his Puncher's Chance.''
Try Carl Moretti, the matchmaker for so many of his fights:
''He was my friend. It was like if you really needed something no matter where or what time, he'd be there for you. He's the guy I would have wanted in my foxhole whether the other guys were coming with guns or dynamite or tanks.
''He was North Jersey. He came from another country but he was one of us and they knew it. When he got hit, they got hit. When he bled, they bled. And when he won, they won. He was their kind of guy. Before the Mayweather fight we had to do a studio shot with HBO so Pat (Lynch, the manager), and Buddy (McGirt, the trainer) and Ted Cruz (the conditioner) and I are standing in front of his apartment house and this limo about the size of a battleship pulls up and he says, 'What's that?' Pat says, 'It's for us,' and Arturo says, 'Not any more.' Arturo walks over to the driver and hands him 200 bucks and tells him, 'This isn't us. Take the day off.'
''Then he gets in his car and we get in and he drives, no retinue, nobody to hold the door and patronize him, just friends like always. We get to the tunnel and the (Port Authority) cops and toll-takers all recognize us and they are shouting, 'Hey, Arturo, you gonna beat that guy?' To them he wasn't a star. He was more than that. He was Arturo from the block.''
As a case in point, after the third Micky Ward fight, he was still bleeding when he walked over to the press conference. Lynch held the door open and Gatti grinned and slammed his hand against it, screamed and pointed to the blood near his eye. Lynch looked at mob of Gatti aficionados and blurted ''Jeez, Arturo, you want to get me killed?''
That was Arturo Gatti.
But what was Gatti's hold on urban New Jersey? How did it happen?
For Arturo Gatti, it began like this. On June 10, 1991, his manager, Pat Lynch, turned him pro at the Meadowlands Convention Center against an older guy named Jose Gonzales.
"I looked across the ring and I saw him and I was like, 'Oh, man.' I was scared to death," Gatti once said. "Here was a guy fresh out of the can with a ponytail and tattoos all over his body. I was a teenager. I never saw anything like him before in my life."
But in the third round he caught Gonzales with the kind of left hook for which all the tough-guy ritual trappings in the world have no answer.
And so it began.
Actually, he insists it began long before that. When he was 8, his immigrant father, Giovanni, would take him over to Gentile Cafe in Montreal's Little Italy, stand him on a chair and say, "Here he is, look. Look at him closely. One day he will be a champion."
This is the same kid who got very good grades at Louis Joseph Pepino High School and told his teacher he wanted to drop out and fight for the Canadian amateur team. She thought of all the immigrant kids who needed education so badly and what they were up against and wanted to help, so she sent him to the principal.
When the principal heard that, he told Ida Gatti to tell her husband to put his foot down and stop their son from watching all those "Rocky" movies.
"I wasn't a wise guy," Gatti once told me. "I even tried night school later on, but it wasn't for me. My father made me go to work for him as an electrician. I wasn't very good. Hey, I was terrible. If it weren't for boxing, I could have been responsible for burning down half of Montreal."
So this is the way it was when Gatti left Canada and came to Jersey City and morphed into the neighborhood kid who swallowed Atlantic City's Boardwalk Hall. You could walk down the boardwalk on Gatti fight night and, if you came from Newark or Jersey City or Paterson or Bayonne, every 50 feet, you saw somebody you knew. They were not only headed for a fight; they were headed for a reunion.
Boardwalk Hall belonged to them. They were his home team ... from the rafters to the floor seats ... from ringside's $750 seats to the $50 section in nosebleed heaven ... the joint was packed with Jersey guys and Jersey gals who had come to see a Jersey fighter in his element.
He was transplanted from the St. Leonard Italian ethnic section of Montreal to Jersey City in what seems like another incarnation, but he owned this state from the Delaware Water Gap to Cape May ... from the tank farms along the Jersey Turnpike to the rolling hills of Sussex County. He was the athlete who carved out a blue-collar autograph with his sweat and his blood.
This was a neighborhood guy who flipped burgers for pay days after he left Canada for Jersey City. He gave every blue collar in this state Jersey boxing the way it used to be ... Jersey boxing as it once was in Newark's old, rickety Laurel Garden and Meadowbrook Bowl and down the road in the Elizabeth Armory and in places like North Bergen's Embassy Hall along the way.
Even when Arturo Gatti was the main-eventer, he still fought with the passion of a club fighter ... the honest workman who never checked his hunger at the door just because life was easy and he had a world title. He fought a puncher named Micky Ward three times in matches so brutal and so passionate that they could have fought inside a pay telephone booth.
If you were there you will remember, and thousands, who were not, will say they were there as well.
The details of his murder are horrific. But in time they will not be how he is remembered. He will be remembered as Arturo from the block, laughing, caring and most of all, as the man who always kept his and their ''Puncher's Chance'' alive.
