AMERICA AT LARGE:Arturo Gatti's legacy will be his blood-and-guts trilogy with Micky Ward, writes GEORGE KIMBALL

OURS IS an age in which boxing nicknames not only seem to be de riguer, but often defy rational analysis, but whoever hung the handle “The Human Highlight Film” on Arturo Gatti got it right.

A classic counter-puncher who was not only willing to take two or three good shots to get in one of his own, but actually seemed to enjoy the process, Gatti’s legacy will be not the two world titles he won during a 16-year ring career, but the epic, blood-and-guts trilogy in which he collaborated with Micky Ward over the space of 13 months earlier in this decade.

Each of those three fights was a shared near-death experience, and taken together they will define resilience and bravery for as long as men wear gloves.

Gatti was the victor in 40 of the 49 fights in which he engaged, and whether he won or lost he took so many hard punches to the head that eventual brain damage seemed an almost inevitable consequence.

If you wondered whether Gatti would be able to tie his shoelaces a decade or two down the line, somewhere in the back of your mind there was also the feeling that the chances of his actually reaching middle age seemed at best remote. If his boxing career was one long flirtation with danger, the Human Highlight Film’s fast-track life outside the ring did not inspire confidence that he would some day collect a social security check.

Gatti was born in Italy, carried a Canadian passport, lived in New Jersey and partied in Miami Beach.

He was 37 when he was found, strangled to death, at a seaside resort in Brazil while on his honeymoon last Saturday, and the case took an even more bizarre twist two days later when Amanda Rodrigues Gatti, a former Brazilian stripper who was the mother of his year-old son and recently became the latest Mrs Gatti, was arrested and charged with the murder.

Gatti had had his brushes with the law in the past. Just this past April in Montreal he did a few days in the pokey after missing a court date to answer charges that he had assaulted Rodrigues. He was released on the condition that he remain free of drugs and alcohol and stay away from Ms Rodrigues. How things got from there in April to a honeymoon three months later remains unlearned.

A dozen or so years ago, between fights, Gatti and a previous girlfriend went out on the town one night in Miami. By the time they got back to their hotel after a fun-filled evening their party had acquired a third member, a middle-aged lounge lizard into whose company they had fallen along the way. At some point in the wee hours of the morning, this new friend apparently suggested a menage a trois, a proposal which so offended Arturo’s sensibilities that he gave the fellow a worse beating than he had Gabriel Ruelas.

When the victim returned with the police in tow, Gatti swore his innocence, and the girlfriend corroborated his insistence that he’d never laid a hand on the man. Arturo’s fists were usually his best friend, but in this case they betrayed him: it turned out he had hit the would-be swinger so hard that the telltale marks on Gatti’s knuckles perfectly matched the pattern of the staples from the guy’s hair implants.

On a March evening eight years ago in Worcester, Massachusetts, in the company of the Irish boxers Jim Rock and Cathal O’Grady, both of whom had disposed of undistinguished American opposition earlier in the evening, I had raced back to the hotel to watch the telecast of Gatti’s fight against Oscar De La Hoya.

For the five rounds it lasted Gatti showed little beyond an almost superhuman capacity for absorbing punishment. By the time the ringside physician ordered the referee to halt the carnage, he was bleeding from several cuts, his face battered and swollen, and the television announcers suggested that the noble warrior might finally have reached the end of the line. When the boys asked me if Gatti would fight again, I replied: “You saw how outclassed he was tonight. What would be the point?”

The point, one supposes, is that boxing defined who Arturo Gatti was; he could no more have walked away from the game at that point than he could have stopped breathing. And to further illustrate how wrong I was in my prognosis that night, think about this: if he had done the sensible thing and called it quits then, he would have never engaged in the three fights for which he will be most remembered – his loss to Ward in 2002’s Fight of the Year, and his wins in two equally great rematches.

Gatti even won another title before he was done. In 2004, he beat Italian Gianluca Branco to win the WBC light welterweight championship, and held on to it for two years before losing it to Floyd Mayweather Jr. More than a decade earlier he had outpointed Tracy Harris Patterson to win the IBF 130lb title.

But it is his performance in several of the ones he lost that remain most vivid. The enduring image remains of Gatti grimacing through pain as unimpeded blows rain off his head, only to revive and mete out equivalent punishment. It happened three times in the fights with Ward, but back in 1998 we’d seen the same thing in his back-to-back losses to Ivan Robinson, and not long before that in another blood-and-guts fight against Ruelas in which he rallied back from the brink of defeat to score a fifth-round TKO.

After nearly killing one another in their three fights, Gatti and Ward became the best of friends, and continued their rivalry on the golf course. When trainer Buddy McGirt resigned after Gatti’s loss to Carlos Baldomir, Ward agreed to train him for his next fight, and Micky was in the corner when Gatti was stopped by Alfonso Gomez.

At Saturday night’s boxing card in Newark, they dimmed the house lights just before the Tomasz Adamek-Bobby Gunn cruiserweight title fight for a video tribute to the Human Highlight Film, which was followed by a ceremonial 10-count. Since his old promoter, Main Events, was staging the show, that might have been expected, but in Florida the same night he was similarly eulogised at a Don King show.

In almost every recollection someone can be counted upon to point out that Gatti “was never in a bad fight”, but apparently he was in at least one.

The Brazilian constabulary has concluded that, following an argument between the honeymooners, Amanda Rodrigues Gatti sneaked up behind her husband of a few days and stabbed him in the back of the head with a knife.

A few dozen of his professional opponents could have warned her that stabbing Arturo Gatti in the head was a good way to ruin a knife.

Gatti, alas, had apparently drunk himself to the point of insensibility, and Amanda was able to garrote him with the strap of her handbag without him regaining consciousness.