Vince Bagnato; Toronto boxing promoter had an unerring eye for talent
Hyfler/Rosner
Toronto boxing promoter had an unerring eye for talent
Part of a family that is regarded as de facto boxing
royalty, he left the fisticuffs to his six brothers and
chose a ringside role. He also ran a winery and wrote a
memoir that became a musical
LISA FITTERMAN
Special to The Globe and Mail
October 14, 2008
While on a stroll in Toronto with his long-time buddy Vince
Bagnato a few years ago, Doug Paolini recalls a man rushing
up to greet the slight, dapper boxing impresario as if he
was a long-lost brother and thanking him profusely for
advice that had changed his life for the better. He watched,
curious, as Mr. Bagnato smiled delightedly, hugged the man
and said how happy he was to have been able to help.
Afterward, Mr. Paolini asked who the man was.
"I never met that guy in my life!" Mr. Bagnato replied, not
missing a beat.
The encounter underscored his ability to put folks at ease
and make them feel as if they were being heard, even if he
didn't always remember that he had once listened, said Mr.
Paolini, a lawyer for the Ontario government. "Vince really
loved people and when he talked to them, he left an
impression in their hearts," he said. "There were so many
people he helped and he never thought twice about it. Months
or years later, they remembered him. How could they forget?"
How could they, indeed? In his trademark jaunty cap and
turtleneck sweaters, Mr. Bagnato, a fixture on Canada's
boxing scene as a trainer, manager and promoter, believed in
giving everyone a fighting chance, no matter their
background. Besides the boxers with colourful names such as
Jimmy Nobody and Mike Half-a-Buck, there were the battered
women he trained to stand up for themselves and the former
prison inmates he found work for because he didn't believe
that fighting chances should be limited to just one. Chuck
(Spider) Jones, a former gang member and Golden Gloves
champion who is now a talk-show host on radio station CFRB,
recalled meeting Mr. Bagnato at the fabled Sully's Gym in
west end Toronto. "I'd just got out of Millbrook
[Correctional Centre] after serving two years less a day and
Vince got me a couple of jobs, just from people he knew,"
Mr. Jones said. "He sat me down and told me very sternly
that I could do better than I had done. He was like that."
Nick Briante, a retired insurance executive, credits Mr.
Bagnato for saving his life in another way - namely,
training, and lots of it. After suffering a serious heart
attack while working for an insurance firm in Toronto in the
late 1990s, he worked with Mr. Bagnato to get into shape.
The two men ran five kilometres five mornings a week,
skipped rope, punched bags and practised the fancy footwork
that is de rigueur in the boxing ring.
"It paid off. On 9/11, for example, I was at the New York
Insurance Department on a consulting contract, which was
close by the World Trade Centre," he recalled from his home
in New Jersey. "We didn't hear the first explosion, but,
boy, did we hear the second ... We had to evacuate the
building just as the South Tower came down and I walked all
the way up to 34th Street and back again that evening to
take the ferry home, about five hours on my feet. Vince put
me in the kind of shape that allowed me to survive."
Vince Bagnato was born in a house on Dundas Street in
Toronto, among the youngest of five sisters and seven
brothers in a boisterous Italian-Canadian family that would
become de facto Canadian boxing royalty. They lived in a
working-class, immigrant neighbourhood known as "The Ward,"
near the courthouse and old city hall; a place where kids
played stickball in the streets, meals were loud and
everyone knew everybody else's business.
Vince's father, Joe Sr., who emigrated from Calabria in the
late 19th century, worked long hours for Canada Customs and
expected his many offspring to behave themselves because
they didn't live in what he called a "bumma house." Vince's
mother, Grace, was the family's lynchpin. A strong and
stubborn woman from Dunmore, Pa., she moved with her family
to Toronto in the early 20th century and married Joe Sr.
when she was still but a teen. In between giving birth to 25
children (12 of whom survived), she wanted so much to
communicate with her neighbours that, along with a fluency
in Italian, she learned languages such as Ukrainian, Polish,
Yiddish and became a bridge between them and the
English-speaking world. People came to her for help and
advice. In 1921, she was appointed the first female
Italian-Canadian interpreter in Ontario's court system, and
when the Italian Canadian Society presented her with a car
in recognition of her work on behalf of the community, she
became one of the first women in Toronto to drive.
When she died suddenly in her sleep at the age of 57, it was
a terrible blow. But she'd raised survivors and scrappers,
kids who were accustomed to sleeping three to a bed and
making the most of whatever they had. Even though young
Vince had problems in school and never made it much past
Grade 6, he knew what his mother had accomplished and always
used his quick wit and imagination to get by. Much of his
childhood was spent in the local movie theatre; he admired
tough guys like Jimmy Cagney and Humphrey Bogart, fell in
love with anything to do with cowboys and learned the lyrics
to practically every song written by composers such as
Irving Berlin and Cole Porter. All he had to do was listen
to them once or twice.
It wouldn't be until the 1970s that Mr. Bagnato would learn
the word "dyslexic," and be told there was a physiological
explanation for why he found letters and numbers so fickle.
He never let the condition stop him, though, even writing a
memoir, Half-a-Buck: Nobody and Me, which was published in
1983 and was soon turned into a Toronto musical.
"He wrote most of the lyrics for the music, too," said his
wife, Sharon Bagnato. "He loved to sing. It was a part of
him. He'd sing around the house, loud and in tune."
And boxing, well, that was part of him, too. Not so much the
actual fighting, which he left to other family members like
Joey, a Canadian and British Empire lightweight champ, or
Vic and Paulie (the baby of the family), who each held
Canadian amateur titles at one time or another. For 60
years, Mr. Bagnato used his gift of the gab, sense of drama
and an unerring eye for talent to work with some of the most
exciting Canadian boxers to ever step into a ring, from
Nicky Furlano to Steve Molitor. It wasn't the brute force
knockouts that impressed so much as a boxer's understanding
that what they were doing was a craft, a series of feints,
parries, jabs and quick judgments that often were the
difference between winning and going down for the count.
Over the years, he owned a winery called Casa Bagnato,
played a fight manager opposite actor Tony Curtis in the
Toronto-shot Title Shot and started a small renovation and
restoration company. He ran marathons until cancer wouldn't
let his body do so any longer.
Throughout, he watched, dismayed, as boxing hit a downturn
in Ontario. There were all sorts of possible reasons, he
knew, such as a lack of support from the provincial
government and the subsequent stereotyping of boxing as a
violent sport with few redeeming qualities; although he
tried to get the government to institute a pension plan and
other benefits for boxers, it was all to no avail.
But there were bright spots, such as the high profile annual
fundraising matches he mounted at the Royal York Hotel for
on behalf of the Shaw Theatre Festival. For him, it was a
perfect marriage of boxing and theatre, which were sometimes
hard to tell apart. And he loved that George Bernard Shaw,
had been an amateur boxer who turned his experiences into a
novel called Cashel Byron's Profession. Of course, in the
novel, the main character wins the girl, becomes world
champion and one for the ages - just as stories are supposed
to end.
VINCE BAGNATO
Vincent Anthony Bagnato was born in Toronto on Feb. 21,
1932. He died on Sept. 26, 2008, at his home in Oakville
after a five-year battle with prostate cancer. He was 76. He
leaves behind his wife, Sharon, his children, James, Joe ,
Sherry, Vincent, Lee and Ron. He also leaves his sisters
Helen Haynes and Grace Frankie, and his brother, Paul, plus
grandchildren Michael, Mathew, Jonathan, Kailee, Liam,
Paige, Kaitlin, Tak and Anne.