AMERICA AT LARGE: THIS CURSED month can't end soon enough. "They say these bad things come in threes," said Buddy McGirt. "Hopefully we're done."
July had begun with Alexis Arguello putting a bullet through his head in Managua. Ten days later Arturo Gatti was found murdered at a holiday villa on the Brazilian coast. Then, last Sunday, we were having coffee at an outdoor cafe in Temple Bar when Irish promoter Brian Peters pulled up the news on his BlackBerry that just a few hours earlier Vernon Forrest had been shot to death in Atlanta.
The third member of our party, middleweight Matthew Macklin, and I had the same immediate response: “Why would anyone kill Vernon Forrest?”
With all respect to the other descendants, between Arguello’s inner demons and Gatti’s fast-lane lifestyle, there was always the sense neither of them was likely to die of natural causes at a ripe old age in a nursing home. But to the best of our knowledge, Forrest hadn’t an enemy in the world.
Yet the three former world champions now seem destined to be forever linked. They certainly will be by McGirt, who succeeded Arguello as light-welterweight champion by a few years, and who trained Gatti and Forrest.
Forrest, who won three world titles at two weights, was known almost as much for his philanthropy as he was for his ring exploits. Even before he won his first championship he had founded “Destiny’s Child”, an Atlanta-based charity created to provide housing and transitional resources for mentally and developmentally handicapped children and adults, and had continued to fund the project, largely out of his pocket, for almost a dozen years.
He was a comparatively late bloomer on the world stage. He was 29 when he won his first championship, routing Raul Frank in a bout for the vacant IBF 140lb title, and the following year, 2002, he shocked the boxing world when he added the WBC version with back-to-back victories over Shane Mosley. At the time, Mosley was 38-0, he had already beaten Oscar De La Hoya and was widely regarded as the best pound-for-pound boxer in the world until he met Forrest.
But Vernon had reason not to be intimidated, for he and Mosley were hardly strangers. Ten years earlier they had met in the lightweight semi-final of the US Olympic Trials, where Forrest posted a 6-4 victory.
In Barcelona, Forrest contracted food poisoning and lost in the first round. When he returned, the big-time promoters were so busy throwing money at De La Hoya that he was all but ignored. Beset by shoulder injuries and fighting primarily for lower-echelon promoters, he went 33-0 over 10 years while flying under boxing’s radar, on undercards in backwater venues.
I’d seen him fight several times, which was probably more than most ringsiders had by the time he was matched against Mosley at Madison Square Garden in 2002. In his third pro fight, he’d stopped a guy named Augustine Renteria on the 1993 Tommy Morrison -George Foreman undercard. Two years after that he was in Boston long enough to score a first-round knockout of Genaro Andujar, and I was there in Las Vegas in 1997 when he solidly outpointed another respectable New England opponent, Ray Oliveira.
He was quiet and reflective, as businesslike in the ring as he was out of it. He disdained the braggadocio and showmanship and self-absorption of so many of his contemporaries, and utterly refused to engage in trash-talking, even when promoters encouraged it. More than once I heard him reflect that perhaps he’d been born at the wrong time. He’d have been much more comfortable in an era when boxers let their fists do their talking.
Forrest was a 7 to 1 underdog when he met Mosley in New York, and Mosley was also favoured in the rematch in Las Vegas later that year. Vernon was honoured as Fighter of the Year following those wins, and in 2003 he was an honoured guest at the Boxing Writers Association dinner for the second straight year, this time to accept the Marvin Kohn “Good Guy” award for his work on behalf of Destiny’s Child.
Had it not been scheduled for the night before Super Bowl XXVII in San Diego, I probably wouldn’t have even travelled to an Indian reservation in southern California for Forrest’s 2003 unification fight against Nicaragua’s Ricardo Mayorga. Awkward and undisciplined, Mayorga was the antithesis of Forrest’s almost elegant precision in the ring, but styles make fights, and just as Forrest had been able to extend his domination over Mosley in their fights, Mayorga put the whammy on Forrest and beat him twice in a row.
Following shoulder surgery, he fought just twice between then and 2007, when he took the WBC light middleweight title from the Argentine Carlos Baldomir. Last summer at the Mohegan Sun he lost a majority decision to Sergio Mora, but regained the title in a September rematch. Unable to defend because of a training camp rib injury, he was involuntarily relieved of his title in May. (Within a day of his death, WBC president Jose Suliaman, who two months earlier had stripped Forrest of his belt, declared “a day of world mourning”.)
As best as the constabulary has been able to piece events together, Forrest was returning from a late training session Saturday night when his 11-year-old godson was visited by the call of nature. He pulled his Jaguar into a filling station, and, after sending the boy inside with instructions to buy himself a chocolate bar, pulled around to fill the air in his tyres. There he was accosted by a vagrant who asked him for money and then, after being rebuffed, produced a pistol and relieved Forrest of his wallet.
Forrest, as it turned out, had a gun in his car, and grabbed it as he gave chase to the robber. Shots were exchanged, but Forrest had apparently given up the chase and begun to walk back to his car when he was hit from behind by a spray of bullets from an automatic weapon, probably by an accomplice of the original assailant. He was hit seven times, including once in the head. The cops are still looking for the killer, or killers.
This spate of violent deaths might appear to be a modern phenomenon, but men who practice this most dangerous of games have always lived close to the edge. In 1910, middleweight champion Stanley Ketchel was, in the words of the great John Lardner, “24-years-old when he was fatally shot in the back by the common-law husband of the lady who was cooking his breakfast”.
In 1925, less than two years after losing his light-heavyweight title to Mike McTigue in Dublin, Battling Siki was gunned down, at 28, on the streets of Hells Kitchen in New York. In 1945, Al (Bummy) Davis was 25 when he was killed after taking on four armed men who were trying to rob a Brownsville saloon.
In other words, an attempt to label this killing a sign of the times is probably misplaced.
Forrest, who will be buried Monday in Georgia, was 36, and left a 13-year-old son. His has been described since as a senseless killing, which it was, and a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, which it also was, but one would be remiss in failing to point out, as painfully few have, that, great humanitarian though he may have been, if Vernon Forrest had never owned a gun he’d probably be alive today.
