LONG before Richie Giachetti trained wrestlers, he had a lot of bad luck in Cleveland bars. Once, according to his testimony, a guy walks into a bar and demands to know “who’s the toughest man here?” Some idiot pointed out Giachetti.
The guy walks up, grabs a glass and breaks it in Giachetti’s face. There is blood everywhere, Giachetti remembers fondly and laughing. Then the guy pulls out a knife.
Giachetti manages to get the knife away from the guy and then the guy ends up with three stab wounds. What happened to the boy? “I heard he died in the hospital,” Giachetti says.
Richie has no real idea, because for eight hours straight he was in surgery and surgeons tried to save his face and his vision. There was some nerve damage, but he retained his left eye. They gave him 78 stitches and he wore those scars like a badge of glory. He still maintained that he had never met the guy who attacked him.
In the same bar, Giachetti insisted, another stranger tried to kill him when he stabbed him in the ribs with an ice pick. The ice pick missed his heart and touched his lung, but he never pierced it. It was, according to Giachetti, another unknown person.
“Do you know what he taught me? I have to drink in a different bar!
In Mexico City, at the bullfights, a little more than 20 years later, Giachetti told me the stories. Giachetti survived both unprovoked attacks and began training fighters at his Cleveland gym. He grew up in the same town as Don King, he knew Don King’s reputation, but never met him until the 1970s when King began to take over boxing.
The bullfights were a spectacle on a long afternoon in the late winter sun, but in the cheaper seats, the sun was blinding. “No wonder these seats are so cheap, you get sunstroke and you can’t see anything,” said Angelo Dundee, who was also there that Sunday afternoon. The late Mike Marley was part of the beano, the fixer part. The night before, Julio César Chávez had gone to 85 and zero when 132,247 souls filled the Azteca to see his fight with Greg Haugen.
Dundee and Giachetti studied the bulls like two boxing experts studying the form of two children in a backup fight. Dundee was not impressed with the bull’s odds of winning. Giachetti looked for movement, he looked for the matador to have something special. “He’s not Larry,” Giachetti said of one of the killers. Larry Holmes and Richie Giachetti had a relationship that defied the odds; They often looked, sounded and felt like they were in the ring together.
Giachetti was once on the shortlist to take over coaching Lennox Lewis. In the end, Manny Steward got the job. It was after the loss to Oliver McCall. “I know who I would want in the trenches with me,” Kellie Maloney said at the time. “It would be Richie.” That was the kind of devotion Giachetti inspired in his boxers. Sure, he was an expert on Don King’s boxing, but he still fought for his men.
Giachetti also had an FBI file where he was known as the Torch. “The idea was simple: go to Richie Giachetti and you get to Don King. He knew it. “It never worked.” The Torch nickname was due to coincidental arson attacks in areas where Giachetti had been seen. The FBI tried to bring King and Giachetti closer to the fires. He must have had bad luck: fires. Ice pick under the heart, a glass in the eye and several gunshots: he was innocent and clean at all times.
There was also the time a well-known hitman came to see Richie and told him there was a problem. The problem was that the man was paid to kill Giachetti. There was a lot of talk about the FBI at the time and Giachetti was estranged from King. However, Richie and the guy were old friends and after a few drinks, the hitman agreed to kill the person who had hired him. The man was destined to be king. “I told him, I mind my own business.” It’s a charming story. Can you imagine hearing that under the winter sun at a bullfight in Mexico City?
“Don King is a liar and the greediest man I have ever met,” Giachetti said. “If I were a fighter and I needed a promoter, who would I choose? Don King. The man complies.”
He was a large man with a head the size of a battered pumpkin. His days as a car mechanic and his mishaps in bars and street corners had shaped that body. He was a beast of a man. He worked with Mike Tyson for the second fight with Evander Holyfield. Together in the ring, Richie and Mike might have been the scariest duo in boxing. The strange thing is that Tyson and Giachetti bonded over the love of old fighters and not over their respective damaged histories, egos and uncertain futures. They talked about fantasy fights: Who would win, Carlos Monzón or Sugar Ray Robinson? That kind of crazy stuff. (By the way, both said Monzón)
He once told Holmes his attitude and theory behind taking care of a good fighter. “Larry, I am your reminder. “I can’t fight for you, but I can tell you what you’re doing wrong and remind you what you should do.”
My three bullfighters are already dead. They are on a list, growing longer each year, to which I toast every time the bells ring to start January. It’s just a reminder of the friends we’ve lost. There are a lot of toasts, believe me.
