ALMOST HUGGING /// With what eyes he had left, Micky Ward put up his last fight against Arturo Gatti. Then, friendship.
With the release of Mark Wahlberg's The Fighter, a little redheaded boxer from Lowell, Massachusetts, named Micky Ward has returned from the backs of our minds, has surfaced out of our memory banks.
Back in 2004, I played exactly three holes of golf with Ward and Arturo Gatti, the two lionhearts having become great friends and golfing buddies after their trilogy of epic, brutal fights, culminating with a punishing ten-rounder that retired Ward on June 7, 2003.
The night before our golf date, we'd gone out for dinner at an Italian restaurant in Vero Beach, Florida, where Gatti had set up his latest fight camp. Ward had flown in for a visit. They were great company, funny and profane and monstrous. They shoveled back pasta and laughed while they catalogued the scars they had given each other.
"I call it my Micky Ward lump," Gatti said, lifting his shirt to reveal the knot of tissue just under his rib cage that was a souvenir from his first fight with Ward. There aren't many men who can punch another man hard enough to make a cyst.
After their second fight, Gatti had needed his surgically repaired right hand examined; the titanium plate that held it together had come loose. Gatti broke that same hand again during their third fight, after he punched Ward in the hip.
Ward had been battered, too. During their second fight, Gatti had hit him in the side of his head hard enough to break his eardrum. It had been blown clean out.
And during their third fight, Ward had taken enough abuse to suffer irreparable damage to his eyes. Gatti had given Ward a permanent case of tunnel vision, had somehow turned his retinas into pinhole cameras.
Yet here they were, laughing a long night away.
They were professionals, and that explained their friendship, at least partly. They could divide what they did for a living — the terrible things they had done to each other — from their lives outside the ring. Mentally, each man could use the ropes the way businessmen see boardrooms: There are standards and practices that govern this place that probably don't apply anywhere else. That's our deal.
But they were also united by all that damage they had done to each other. They had struck up their first real conversation in the hospital waiting room after their second fight, when Ward couldn't hear out of his left ear and Gatti couldn't feel his right hand. In each other, they had found that rare man who could withstand ridiculous levels of punishment, who could see hope even through rivers of his own blood. The lumps and burns and titanium plates only reminded each man of the other's love. One day, they decided, they would do things like golf together.
The next afternoon, we approached the opening tee. There were, improbably, nine of us gathered there: Gatti, Ward, me, and a collection of gym rats, small-time mobsters, and remedials worthy of a Guy Ritchie flick. It was somehow agreed that we would all play together. It would take us six days to play.
Gatti's opening drive went wide left. Ward popped his drive straight up, which, because of the loss of his peripheral vision, he couldn't see. "Where'd my fuckin' ball go?" he laughed, waving his arms around like he was trying to find the light switch in the night.
I was the last to hit. I'm not a good golfer, but for some reason, even with that gangster audience, I stroked a four-iron as well as I have ever hit one, long and straight down the middle. Overcome with relief, I made one of the great mistakes of my life. I looked at the army of legbreakers and world champions around me and, for reasons that I've never been able to explain, lifted my arms into the air and said: "Take that, bitches."
It was pretty quiet after that. Gatti wasn't playing well, and he began to pout. Ward lost six balls on each hole. Finally, with the sun going down and only three holes behind us, Gatti wanted to pack it in.
"Really?" Ward said. "Come on. We're just getting started."
But that was it. They shook hands with everybody and took a cart together back to the clubhouse. Ward said something as they drove away, and Gatti broke into a smile. Those were the roles they had assumed at that stage in their friendship. One of them was the emotion, and the other the reason.
Within five years, Arturo Gatti would be dead. He would meet his mysterious end in Brazil, strangled by his wife's purse strap — his death first ruled a homicide, then a suicide.
And not long after, Micky Ward would become the hero in a Mark Wahlberg movie.
Their lives had come together, and then they had diverged.
Just then, though, watching them drive off that golf course in Vero Beach, there was no way of separating the damage that heals from the damage that won't.
PLUS: Christian Bale Gets Testy About Everything but The Fighter
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