I apologize in advance to any who find what I am about to say distasteful as it honestly is meant with affection for one of the gutsiest fighters I ever had the pleasure of watching.

Doesn’t the quoted exerpt kind of sum up Gatti? Any other fighter in the world would have crumbled under the sort of punishment he regularly took, yet he just didn’t know when to say ‘enough’. It would seem that even in the process of being murdered, Gatti simply didn’t understand how to give in, or roll over, or concede defeat in any way whatsoever. I don’t know many people that you could follow up a sentence involving them being stabbed in the head with one that reads “when that didn’t kill him”….

It is almost (I say ‘almost’, as I do find this unbelievably tragic) a fitting tribute to Arturo Gatti that even when succumbing to a violent death he showed more heart than most human beings can begin to contemplate, and in a somewhat poignant way his passing can be seen as something of a microcosm of the latter part of his boxing career.

I rarely suffer from death-induced-nostalgia, and point blank refuse to over-embellish the good points of a person due to the fact they have passed away, but I can say hand-on-heart that Arturo Gatti will be remembered for a very long time with fondness by both myself and a lot of my friends, and I would suggest most true boxing fans. I have never known yet a ‘real’ boxing fan who was not a fan of Arturo Gatti, and I genuinely believe the sport is the worse for his passing, in spite of the fact that he had all but disappeared from the big stage himself in terms of his own respective career.

Thanks for the memories, Arturo. A true great and an inspiration in so many ways.