LONG before Richie Giachetti trained fighters, he had a lot of bad luck in Cleveland bars. One time, according to his testimony, a guy walks in a bar and demands to know, “who is the toughest man in here?” Some idiot pointed at Giachetti.
The guy walks over, grabs a glass and smashes it in Giachetti’s face. There is blood everywhere, Giachetti remembers fondly and with a chuckle. Then the guy pulls out a knife.
Giachetti manages to take the knife off the guy and then the guy ends up with three stab wounds. What happened to the guy? “I heard he died in hospital,” Giachetti says.
Richie has no real idea, because for eight hours straight he was in surgery and the surgeons were trying to save his face and vision. There was some nerve damage, but he kept his left eye. He had 78 stitches and 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 plunged an ice pick through his ribs. The ice pick missed his heart and touched his lung, but never punctured it. It was, according to Giachetti, another stranger.
“You know what it taught me? I gotta drink in a different bar!”
In Mexico City, at the bull fights, just over 20 years later, Giachetti told me the stories. Giachetti survived both unprovoked assaults and started to train fighters at his gym in Cleveland. He grew up in the same city as Don King, knew about his reputation, but never met him until the Seventies when King started his boxing takeover.
The bullfights were a spectacle on a long afternoon in the late winter sun, but down in the cheapest seats, the sun was blinding. “No wonder these seats are so cheap, you get sunstroke, and you can’t see a thing,” 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 Cesar Chavez had moved to 85 and zero when 132,247 souls had packed the Azteca to watch his fight with Greg Haugen.
Dundee and Giachetti studied the bulls like two boxing experts studying the form of two kids in an undercard fight. Dundee was not impressed with the odds of the bull winning. Giachetti looked for movement, looked for the matador to have something special. “He’s no Larry,” Giachetti said about one of the matadors. Larry Holmes and Richie Giachetti had a relationship that defied the odds; it often looked, sounded and felt like they were in the ring together.
Giachetti was once on a shortlist to take over the training of Lennox Lewis. In the end, Manny Steward got the gig. It was after the loss to Oliver McCall. “I know who I would want in the trenches with me,” said Kellie Maloney at the time. “It would be Richie.” That was the type of devotion that Giachetti inspired in his boxers. Sure, he was Don King’s boxing insider, but he still fought for his men.
Giachetti also had an FBI file where he was known as the Torch. “The thinking was simple: Get to Richie Giachetti and you get to Don King. I knew that. It never worked.” The torch nickname was because of coincidental arson attacks in areas where Giachetti had been seen. The FBI tried to put King and Giachetti near the fires. He sure had some bad luck: Fires. Ice picks under the heart, a glass in the eye and being shot at several times – he was innocent and in the clear every time.
There was also the time that a well-known hitman came to see Richie and told him that there was a problem. The problem was that the man was being paid to kill Giachetti. There was a lot of FBI talk 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 meant to be King. “I told him, I take care of my own business.” It’s a lovely story. Can you imagine hearing that in the winter sunshine at a bull fight in Mexico City.
“Don King is a liar and the greediest man I’ve ever known,” Giachetti said. “If I was a fighter and I needed a promoter, who would I take? Don King. The man delivers.”
He was a big man with a head the size of a battered pumpkin. His days as a car mechanic and his mishaps in bars and on 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. In the ring together, Richie and Mike might just have been the most fearsome duo in boxing. The odd thing is that Tyson and Giachetti bonded over a love of old fighters and not their respective damaged histories, egos and uncertain futures. They talked about fantasy fights: Who would win, Carlos Monzon or Sugar Ray Robinson? That sort of crazy stuff. (Incidentally, they both said Monzon)
He once famously told Holmes his attitude and theory behind looking after 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 be doing.”
My three bullfighting hombres are all dead now. They are on a list, which gets longer each year, that I toast each time the bell tolls to start January. It’s just a reminder of the friends we have lost. There are a lot of toasts, trust me.
