Fans Have Come to Love Gatti’s Lumps and Lacerations

“They Have Kept Him in Stitches,” read the Sports Illustrated headline that accompanied a tight closeup of the sweaty, oft-sutured face of Chuck Wepner, which graced the cover the week of the journeyman heavyweight’s March 24, 1975, challenge of champion Muhammad Ali.

The article on Wepner included a chart with the number of stitches sewn into his fighter’s face, and their location — a road map, if you will, of the blood he had spilled in pursuit of his livelihood and to provide entertainment to audiences that had congregated for just such a purpose.

Sports Illustrated doesn’t do many cover stories on boxing anymore, perhaps because Ali is retired and the magazine’s editors are awaiting another pugilistic prophet who can bring the same grace and elegance that “The Greatest” did to an endeavor whose essence is the dispensing and incurring of pain. Former SI senior writer Frank Deford very publicly called for the banning of boxing, which he deemed “barbaric” and at odds with his personal belief of what constitutes athletic competition.

Too bad, because there is as much beauty in Wepner’s scarred visage as there was in Ali’s balletic movements. Boxing is an improbable union of naked power and subtle artistry, of stark fear and unbridled courage, those contrasts splashing the entire tableau of human emotions upon a canvas of a different sort than the ones used by Monet and Picasso. And the color most prevalent is blood-red.

Arturo Gatti (40-7, 31 KOs), who challenges WBC welterweight champion Carlos Baldomir (42-9-6, 12 KOs) of Argentina July 22 in Atlantic City Boardwalk Hall, never has appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated despite his being one of boxing’s more reliable draws. His popularity largely owes to the fact that he is a composite of Wepner and Ali, more gifted but as pugnacious as the former, less skilled but more inclined to the crowd-pleasing frontal assault than the latter.

Gatti, who grew up in Montreal and now lives in Jersey City, N.J., once was a handsome man, and he still has what might be described as rugged good looks, once the swelling goes down and the cuts have healed. But he is beloved in Atlantic City, where he effectively is the boxing franchise, in no small part because he has spent more time in real emergency rooms than George Clooney ever did on the set of that hit TV show. Oh, trainer Buddy McGirt has probably added years to the 34-year-old Gatti’s career by transforming him from a pure brawler into something akin to a boxer-puncher, but just beneath the surface of Gatti’s frequently lumped, contused and sutured skin is an irrestible itch to rumble.

Asked about his penchant for always selling out Boardwalk Hall, Gatti said there’s no secret to filling the house. If you promise action and regularly deliver it, they will come.
“I’m getting fans from New York, from Philly, from throughout Jersey,” Gatti said. “They know I’m going to give everything I have. That’s what they love about me. They know they’re going to see a fight.”

Since Boardwalk Hall was refurbished in 2002, Gatti has fought there seven times; seven times he’s sold the place out. His bout with Baldomir will extend the streak to eight.
So much of a star is Gatti down the shore that Val McGonigal, director of marketing for the Atlantic City Convention Center, maintains a permanent dressing room for Gatti, with his name embossed in gold letters on the door.

“We do lots of fights here, but when it’s Gatti, he generates a lot of buzz,” McGonigal said. “His tickets sell faster than for any other fighter. He calls Boardwalk Hall his home. How much value is there (for us) in a statement like that?”

Pat Lynch, Gatti’s longtime manager, says that while there are fighters as or more popular – Oscar De La Hoya is the first name that comes to mind – no one is as guaranteed box office in a particular venue as his guy is in Boardwalk Hall. Other fighters, like Floyd Mayweather Jr. and now Baldomir, don’t seem to mind ceding home-ring advantage to Gatti in exchange for bigger paydays.

“Arturo has a tremendous fan base in Atlantic City,” Lynch said. “They’ve been loyal for many years. A lot of his fans started out watching him at the Blue Horizon (in Philadelphia) and have never left him.

“When we take that walk to the ring in Boardwalk Hall … the hair stands up on the back of your neck. It’s such an unbelievable, electric feeling. You can feel the excitement building with each step.”

There have been many steps toward many rings as Gatti has evolved into an HBO favorite because, win or lose, he is an automatic ratings magnet. It is standard procedure for HBO to structure contracts with fighters which allow the pay-cable giant to exercise escape clauses should they lose. Gatti can lose, and has, yet remains an HBO staple because he not only serves up heaping doses of excitement, but obliges opponents to dig deep to do the same.

“I make no bones about my love for Arturo Gatti,” said former HBO Sports vice president Lou DiBella, who advised Gatti opponents Micky Ward and Leonard Dorin after he left the network. “I think he’s an icon in our sport. I think he’s the best of the best. In my 20-plus years of televised boxing, he’s the best TV fighter I’ve ever seen.”
So identified with head-banging is Gatti that a San Francisco heavy metal band calls itself “Arturo Gatti.”

“My fans deserve the best and I give them the best,” Gatti has said. “I was told lots of times in the amateurs that I had more heart and determination than other fighters. I think I have talent. But to be a fighter, the intangibles are something you need more than anything to be successful.

“I wish all my fights were easy, but I know that if it comes to that, I’ve got the heart, guts and determination to win the tough ones. Any time I need to bring that stuff out, it comes.”
The legend of Arturo Gatti began in club shows at the Blue Horizon, where the unheralded undercard (and later main-event) fighter launched himself at opponents as if he were a heat-seeking missile.

A string of emphatic knockouts later, Gatti was paired against IBF junior lightweight champion Tracy Harris Patterson in 1995. As had come to be expected, the two men engaged in furious two-way action before Gatti won a unanimous decision.

With his new title, it almost seemed as if Gatti told the world, “So you enjoyed my rock-’em, sock-’em fight with Patterson? Hey I can top that.” And he proceeded to do so, often in a sheen of his own blood.

Wilson Rodriguez … Gabriel Ruelas … Angel Manfredy … Ivan Robinson (twice) … Micky Ward (three times). The human highlight reel didn’t win every battle, but Gatti’s willingness to get down into the trenches and slug it out made him a hero to blue-collar types who understood that true grit is every bit as important as talent in the ring.
Frequently compared to former WBC light heavyweight champion Matthew Saad Muhammad, another pure action fighter whose prime was beaten out of him prematurely by having engaged in too many give-and-take affairs, Gatti turned himself over to McGirt nine bouts ago in an effort to refine some of his rougher edges and, subsequently, extend his career.

Gatti now can box when he has to, but his greatest allure remains the element of danger he brings to his work. He was dismissed as a “club fighter” and “C-plus fighter” by Mayweather, who dominated him en route to winning by sixth-round TKO on June 25, 2005, but “Pretty Boy Floyd” is the best pound-for-pound fighter in the world, and one of the finest ever. It is no disgrace for Gatti or anyone else to lose to him.

Not that HBO would exercise an escape clause in its deal with Gatti, even if one were written into the contract. Gatti provides more thrills than there are expletives uttered in HBO’s profanity-riddled Western series, “Deadwood,” and he’ll never be canceled until he and Lynch decide it’s time to begin the countdown to induction into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in Canastota, N.Y.

“I think I’ve earned it,” Gatti said of his prospects for boxing immortality. “What I’ve done in my career, I think, merits a spot in the Hall of Fame. But I’m not done yet. I think I still have some good fights in me.”

There’s a good chance one of those good fights will be provided by Baldomir, who went into Madison Square Garden on Jan. 7 and shocked the boxing establishment by outhustling hometown favorite Zab Judah, of Brooklyn, to claim the WBC title and the next spot on Gatti’s dance card.

“I believe Baldomir is 20-0 in his last 20 fights (actually, he’s 16-0-2 in his last 18),” Lynch said. “He may have nine losses, but they came early. Look at his resume. He’s knocked off three undefeated guys during this hot streak.

“It’s a shame Baldomir didn’t get the credit he deserves for beating the guy considered the No. 1 welterweight in the world at the time. All you heard afterward was, `Judah didn’t do this, Judah didn’t do that.’ He must have been doing something in the gym. I mean, he made weight, didn’t he?”

Gatti already is bracing for the putdowns from skeptics should he win. Like Baldomir, it seems that he’s never given credit for being what he is instead of what others would have him be.

“I can see it coming,” he said. “But you know what? I don’t give a bleep anymore.”
That, of course, is a lie, just as it is a lie when Gatti says after a bout that his lumps and lacerations don’t really hurt. Real fighters wear their wounds like badges of honor, and no one wears his more proudly than the King of the Boardwalk.