Boxing promoter Johnny Bos still finds time to put on a show

loading...

It’s been a few years since Johnny Bos was in Bangor. But when he was around he sure put on a show. He liked heroes and villains and had a hero in Lewiston’s Joey Gamache. He’d tell anyone who’d listen that in addition to being a nice guy, Gamache was the best fighter in the world in his weight class.

Flamboyant in a cowboy hat and fur coat. Crude-talking. Bringing in girls from a strip joint to hold up the cards for each round and laughing about it at press conferences. That was Johnny Bos. The Howard Cosell of boxing agents, telling it like it is or at least how he saw it through his aviator sunglasses.

He demanded your attention. For goodness sake, he once had Gamache on TV during the evening sportscast to promote an upcoming fight. Gamache and his opponent battled each other with Rock ’em, Sock ’em Robots on live TV.

Bos was in Gamache’s corner early on in the fighter’s career and was also there when it came to an end one Saturday night in February 2000.

Since receiving a reported $2 million in the settlement of a lawsuit with the United Kingfield Bank in August of 2001, Gamache has been difficult to find. His father says his son is trying to leave his celebrity behind and fade into the life of everyday man.

Gamache’s preference for seclusion may also be due to a lawsuit that likely will be filed on his behalf in the next few weeks against the New York State Athletic Commission over events surrounding Gamache’s February 2000 fight with Arturo Gatti.

Bos, in his usual irrepressible style, is more than willing to point out the heroes and villains in Gamache’s final fight.

“There was a crime perpetrated that night. It ended [Gamache’s] career.”

Bos says he, himself, was one of the villains.

“That fight should never have happened. I’ve never cheated one of my fighters out of a penny. If there was one thing I ever should have done in my life, it was stop that when [Gatti] didn’t make weight.”

But this was a fight Gamache wanted. He had walked into HBO headquarters and sold the fight.

“I told them, ‘This is the perfect fight for you. It’s two white boys who bleed,'” Gamache said in an interview three years ago.

The fight was contracted at 141 pounds. Bos says things were wrong from the beginning.

At the weigh-in Gatti was proclaimed to weigh 141 on the button. Bos says Gatti was heavier.

“Gatti got on that scale and that scale jumped to the top and didn’t move. He looked at me scared like ‘are you going to make me lose more weight?’

“The commissioner announced his weight and told him to get off the scale. [Commissioner] Tony Russo announced Gatti at 141. No way. Not when that thing’s hitting the top.”

By the time Gatti stepped into the ring the next night, he had gained 19 pounds. HBO staff weighed both fighters prior to the fight. Gatti checked in at 160 pounds while Gamache was up from 1401/4 to 144. The difference in size between the two fighters was obvious.

Gamache paid for it. He was knocked unconscious in the second round.

“I thought he was OK. But his dad was nervous. He was shaking. He said, ‘I always knew this could happen in boxing.’ I told him it was OK,” Bos said.

Bos said Gamache was out “for a couple of minutes” and when he came to, he didn’t want to stay down.

“Joey told me he wanted to get up and walk back to the dressing room. They wanted to take him out on a stretcher.”

Eventually Gamache won the doctors over.

“Joey walked out of that ring. He said he thought of his mother, his sister, his friends watching him – he didn’t want them to see him carried out of the ring,” Bos said.

That was two years ago. Other than working with young fighters, Gamache hasn’t been back in the ring professionally.

The world according to Bos is now a business office in New York City. It is boxing gyms and arenas. For tax purposes it also includes Florida, but it doesn’t include Maine anymore. Sure he still talks to Joey Gamache. He just doesn’t come to Maine to do it.

“I’d be arrested,” he said. “It happened before. They showed up with three suits and two uniforms at the [Olzubek] Nazarov fight in Portland and had me arrested. They were telling me that I owed more income tax in Maine than I had made in the whole country.”

That’s Bos. Shouting his problem to the world and quickly identifying the villain. He uses the word “shylocks” talking about the state tax collectors.

Then he says something even more outrageous.

“You know, that Bobby Amsler fight was one of the most humanitarian fights I’ve seen in my life,” Bos said over the phone from his office in New York City.

“Humanitarian” and “fights” are two words one rarely would find used in the same sentence. Particularly if you saw the Joey Gamache-Bobby Amsler fight at the Bangor Auditorium in the summer of 1993.

Gamache’s first punch of the night was a short right to the Amsler’s body. Moments later Amsler began spitting blood. He spat blood and took a beating for more than four rounds before the fight was stopped in the fifth round. Little more than a year later, Amsler died of leukemia.

Of course, Gamache had no idea his opponent was sick. But still, what did he do that was so humanitarian?

“For Joey to have carried him for five rounds. That was a humanitarian thing,” Bos said.

He wasn’t joking. That’s Johnny Bos.

Don Perryman can be reached at 990-8045, 1-800-310-8600 or dperryman@bangordailynews.net.