Arturo Gatti is boxing’s cat with nine lives. With a stunningly efficient dispatch of veteran Jesse James Leija by fifth-round knockout last Saturday night, Gatti is on the prowl again.
Rising from the depths of a string of embarrassing defeats, he is a junior welterweight champion. And he is calling out Floyd Mayweather Jr., the unbeaten former lightweight champion who just moved up to junior welterweight and is widely considered boxing’s best pound-for-pound fighter.
Gatti’s career has been dead and reborn. His style has been demolished and rebuilt. Those kinds of extreme makeovers are rare in the fight game, where one bad performance often marks the start of a downward spiral toward mediocrity or worse. See Mike Tyson, Shane Mosley, Michael Grant or Meldrick Taylor.
If you saw Gatti get mauled by Angel Manfredy in 1998, leaving his face a bloody mess, and then suffer two upset losses to Ivan Robinson, Gatti seemed to be drifting down that same path to Palookaville.
He then moved up from 135 pounds to 147 to test the waters as a welterweight and things became worse. He suffered his most one-sided defeat, dominated and knocked out by Oscar De La Hoya in five rounds in 2001.
Back to the drawing board. Under new trainer Buddy McGirt, the once easily hit and easily cut Gatti has literally saved face. By improving his defense and his jab as a 140-pound junior welterweight, he emerges from fights without the facial cuts and bleeding that were once his trademark, even in victory.
But he has retained two qualities that endear him to fans:
He has a huge punch, as in the right to the chin that dropped Leija and softened him up for a left-hand knockout shot.
And Gatti has a passion for fighting, a throwback no-quit style that keeps him a star attraction on the East Coast. Witness the sellout crowd of 12,599 in Atlantic City’s Boardwalk Hall venue last Saturday.
By outclassing Leija, 38, a shrewd veteran, Gatti, 32, earned his fifth consecutive victory since losing in May 2002 to Micky Ward in the first of their three crowd-pleasing brawls.
Gatti won the last two, and had Ward in his entourage entering the ring Saturday.
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If Gatti gets a June 11 date against Mayweather, win or lose, he would bring the kind of popularity that boxing needs.
Rise and fall
As they await the opening bell Saturday night, both welterweight champion Cory Spinks and challenger Zab Judah bring a psychological lift from the way their first title fight ended last April.
Each knocked the other down late in the bout. Judah scored his in the final round, too late to overcome Spinks’ earlier advantage.
Spinks said he would avoid the distractions of fighting in the Savvis Center in his hometown of St. Louis (8 p.m. Saturday, Showtime).
“I have been doing this all my life,” the champion said. “I know what it takes.”
For his part, Judah said he relished the chance to beat the champion on his home turf.
“I like Cory a lot as a person, but my whole thing is I am here to take,” the former champion said.
On the undercard, Monte Barrett faces Owen Beck in a clash of upper-tier heavyweight contenders.
Beck, unbeaten in two dozen fights, carries one of pugilism’s better nicknames, “What the Heck.” Barrett’s is “Two Gunz.”
Just jabs
Chicagoan Leatitia Robinson will step into the same ring as fellow unbeaten light heavyweight Laila Ali Feb. 11 in Atlanta’s Phillips Arena, but not at the same time. Robinson (12-0) will face Monica Nunez (9-2), while Ali (19-0) fights Cassandra Geigger (6-4). A cursory glance at those records suggests Ali vs. Robinson would be a better matchup. . . . In a column about the Academy Award-nominated film “Million Dollar Baby” author F.X. Toole, pen name of the late trainer and cut man Jerry Boyd, I misidentified an award Boyd’s children and screenwriter Paul Haggis will receive Feb. 20. It is the University of Southern California’s Scripter Award.