Pat Lynch was Arturo Gatti’s long-time manager.
Lynch, who now enjoys more time on the golf course than he does ringside, was with Gatti every step of the way, through the highs and lows.
He introduced me to Gatti and set up several interviews with Arturo for me over the years.
I met Gatti ahead of the second fight with Micky Ward but, of course, knew Micky Ward better. But Team Ward and Team Gatti was essentially one group such was their bond through three great fights.
I interviewed Pat about 18 months after Gatti died – and it’s republished below – and I mention that Lynch is a ticket-broker, and he has helped me get tickets for NBA games when I’ve taken my kids to the US.
He is one of the game’s good guys. And my heart still goes out to him for losing his treasured Arturo.
“It’s funny,” says Pat Lynch with a rueful smile. But there is a sad mist in his eyes that tells me it is not really humorous. Eighteen months on, the pain of the suspicious death of his fighter and friend Arturo Gatti still hurts. It is a raw wound that will take far longer than a year-and-a-half to heal. “Arturo used to make me crazy at times and we’d have these conversations and I’d be mad and yelling at him and he’d say, ‘Look, you’ve got to think of it this way, Pat. You’ve got to think of it as you’ve got four kids and one of them’s bad. I’m the bad kid, the one out of the four.’ We used to laugh about that. ‘You can’t have four kids and they’re all good, you know.’
“My children adored him, they really did. They called him Uncle Arturo.” Gatti was an usher at Lynch’s wedding two decades ago and godfather to one of his two daughters, Cameron. They would holiday together, spending Thanksgiving and Christmas with each other. Pat and his family were having a break in Italy in July 2009 when he took a call from the USA. It was the unwelcome news that Gatti, who it was later claimed committed suicide, had been murdered while on holiday in Brazil with his young Brazilian bride. Lynch pauses to think, removes his glasses and squeezes the bridge of his nose between his thumb and first finger. These are not happy memories. “It’s really hard, man,” he says, hesitating.
“I remember falling back onto the bed and my older daughter, Alexandra, just sobbed and sobbed and sobbed - uncontrollably. My son, Kyle, seemed to be in a state of shock. Maybe it was better that we were in Europe. I don’t know…” Gatti’s widow, Amanda Rodriguez, was arrested and jailed for his murder but Arturo’s death was later ruled suicide by Brazilian authorities and they released Rodriguez after a brief spell in custody.
Lynch remains convinced that Gatti would never have killed himself. He knew Arturo as well as anyone and refuses to accept that the man who never quit in a number of modern boxing’s most savage and classic battles had given up on life. Pat’s carried out an in depth, hugely detailed investigation into Gatti’s death, resulting in a revealing 317-page dossier about his fighter’s physical and mental health, his future, his outlook and the way in which he lost his life. “He just wasn’t that type of person,” Lynch protests, as he tries to insert the words Gatti and suicide into the same sentence. “He had too much to live for, you know. He had the second child [Arturo Jnr – with Amanda [author’s note – Arturo Jnr died in similar circumstances last year], he talked about promoting fights and he was ready to start another real estate project – the first one was very successful. It was just the way he talked. That would be the last thing he would ever do or think of. It just was not him.
“And everything sounded fishy from the beginning. That’s why I hired Dr Michael Baden to do the second autopsy. When he completed that in Canada he came down and we had lunch with my brother, John, who is an attorney and who represented Arturo, and Dr Baden said to me, ‘There’s a lot of missing stuff there that the Brazilians didn’t give us to come to a final conclusion, stuff you really need that we don’t have. But, I will tell you this, you cannot rule out murder. And what they’re saying, that he hanged himself with that [handbag] strap, that doesn’t match’.” Lynch paid for an exhaustive study to get to the bottom of what happened. “I could have never afforded the whole case to be very honest with you,” admits Lynch. “It was a good amount of money but realistically it should have cost 10 times more than it did.
But they got attached to it, too. After they started to see everything they [the investigators] said, ‘There’s no way this kid committed suicide.’
It took their hearts so they really dug in deep and went ahead with it.”
Now the fighting is left to Lynch, who does not think Rodriguez should be awarded the fighter’s $6m fortune. Pat recalls hearing that Gatti had considered changing his Will near the end and, when Rodriguez was initially arrested for murder, Lynch remembered turning to his wife, Lisette, and saying, ‘Thank God he didn’t change it.’ But when Pat returned to the US from Italy he discovered Gatti had made the amendments, leaving everything to Amanda. Three weeks later he was dead.
Pat now wants Gatti’s mother to be given the fighter’s estate and she insists all she wants to do is put it in trust funds for her son’s two children. There was speculation that Arturo, who had been retired two years, might be lured back into the ring. He found it hard to give up the sport that made him a superstar and one of its highest earners.
There was talk of a three-bout deal with the UFC but if Arturo fought again, in any way, shape or form, it would have tested his relationship with Lynch to its limits. The manager remained nervous that his fighter would try again, and even turned down offers of more than $1m for him to fight in Canada.
Then Gatti was on a Canadian radio show one evening and afterwards phoned Pat to say something he mentioned could have been misconstrued. “I was about to call him when he called me. And he goes, ‘Listen, I know you must have gotten a call. I was just on a radio show and they took what I said out of context. What I said was I would never fight again in a ring without you being by my side.’ “I said, ‘Woah, woah, woah. You’re never fighting again. If you want to manage a fighter, if you want me to promote with you or if you want to train fighters, that’s great. But Arturo, we made a deal. You wanted that one last fight with
[Alfonso] Gomez, which I was against. You begged me to have that last fight. You’re never going to put the gloves on again. That was the last one.’” Lynch prayed that the rollercoaster they had been on for 16 years had finally stopped at a calm, less chaotic destination. Pat had been a fixture in the passenger seat while the rest of us looked on, riveted, watching Gatti’s sensational journey and the phenomenal all-action fights that earned him the reputation as the most fan-friendly slugger of his generation. And to think, the thrills he gave the fans by boxing from behind closed eyes, rising from knockdowns and shipping heavy punishment only to return fire and win fights; he gave poor Lynch, his dear friend, heart attacks. When they signed together, in 1991, Pat had no idea what he was letting himself in for. He just knew he liked the 19-year-old.
“Yes, he was a good kid,” Pat smiles, again a little water settling on his eyes. “He was a lot of fun. He appreciated what you did for him. There are some guys I have met over the years, fighters who just take things for granted and don’t appreciate what you do. He was a big-hearted guy, always appreciated what people did for him and he was very respectful, with my family and everything. I very much took to him early on.” And it was not long before Gatti showed Lynch what he was made of as a person and as a fighter. He had a good amateur background in Canada but during a tournament in New Jersey he displayed the assets that would make his name: power and balls.
Pat enthusiastically retells the story. “He was going to work the corner for another young kid named ‘Machine Gun,’” Lynch begins. “So when they went down there ‘Machine Gun’ was just this little guy and one of the boxers said ‘I’m going to fight him’ – you know how they match up size at amateur tournaments. And Arturo said, ‘You’re not fighting him, you’re my size. I’ll fight you.’
He said, ‘Okay.’ “The kid was [former Olympic gold medallist] Howard Davis’ fighter, and Arturo said ‘You want a fight? Fight me. Let’s go.’
