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Farrago movie5/25/2023 ![]() Then again, hypocrisy is one of the most common tropes in boxing. ![]() The problem is not that there aren’t enough people who care about helping downtrodden ex-fighters it’s that few who do follow through on their words. “I had enough experience in the ring to feel for the fighters.” “I knew this was my calling in life,” Farrago said in a recent phone conversation. He would refashion himself, in due time, as a custodian for ex-fighters. But the seeds of a new role within the sport had been planted in earnest. Soon, Farrago’s career as a boxer would come screeching to a cruel, humiliating end. Farrago was touched by the sincerity of their efforts, which, frankly, were not always successful. One of the first meetings Farrago remembers attending focused on ways to help an indigent Kid Gavilan, the former welterweight great of the 1940s and 1950s. These were a cadre of former fighters and industry lifers hoping to impart some small measure of good will to an unforgiving trade. The sport was filled with villain types, but that wasn’t the case here. “First time I went there, I said, ‘this is fucking great,’” Farrago said. It was a decision Farrago would never come to regret. He knew, if only casually, that boxing had a problem with looking after its own kind, that so many of its retirees led broken, forgotten lives. Since they held meetings at a union hall for bartenders only a few blocks away from his gym-Jimmy Glenn’s Times Square Gym-Farrago decided to check it out. “We want you to come to our next meeting.” His colleagues next to him were Tino Raino, also a former middleweight, and his boxing enthusiast brother, Lou. We help ex-fighters and we need more young people like you,” said the gentleman who would identify himself as Johnny Colan, a middleweight from the 1940s. “OK, who are you guys?” Farrago recalled asking. “We want you to come over to our organization.” “Listen, kid, we want to talk to ya,” one of them growled. Trundling toward him from the darkness were three “flat-nosed pugs with old-time faces.” Yet on this hot night at the Felt Forum in July of 1987, as Farrago stood next to his mother and awaited the main event, his thoughts gravitating toward the gleaming future ahead of him, he would receive a visit that would effectively chart the direction of his post-boxing life. Whatever aspirations Farrago had for himself in the sport-and he assures you that they were big-died in that instant. A year later, he would suffer his first loss in a virtual set-up arranged by his manager, who, as if acting out an especially jaded plot to a film noir, vanished without a trace after the fight, along with his paycheck. ![]() Club fights against part-time Tri-state journeymen and palookas bused in from the Rust Belt. Already, Farrago was imagining how his choirboy face would appear on ABC’s Wide World of Sports, illuminating harvest gold living rooms across the country.īut this was as far as Farrago would get. The young fighter, twenty-six-year-old Matt Farrago, was also a local product, hailing from Commack, New York, on Long Island. In a moment, the main event would commence, a heavyweight clash featuring Renaldo Snipes, a local fighter from Yonkers best known for nearly derailing the title reign of Larry Holmes in 1981. His mother fixated anxiously on his marred brow, still stupefied perhaps by the fact that her family of multi-generational medical professionals had produced, of all things, a boxer, someone whose sole purpose was to break apart, not mend, the human body. A small, tolerable price, he figured, to becoming a world champion. A collision of heads had opened a gash above his left eye, now stitched and covered by a heap of gauze and tape that made the wound appear more severe than it was. Yet he did not leave the ring completely unscathed. The Duke: The Life and Lies of Tommy MorrisonĮarlier in the night, the fighter, a junior-middleweight, extended his undefeated record to twenty-one wins (nine by way of knockout) with a third-round stoppage of a man named Harlen Holden.
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