Vito Antuofermo, the seventy years of the warrior of the ring who went to dinner with Al Pacino

Seventy years, as many as the stitches with which they sutured his face on the night in which he became an icon of courage and suffering. Vito Antuofermo he does them today: the first 15 are done in Palo de Colle, in the province of Foggia, the rest in the United States. In the ring, however, always as an Italian, which explains the regret of not having been able to represent Italy at the Olympics – in Munich 72 – as instead his great idol, Nino Benvenuti, had done. He had the credentials, he had won the Golden Gloves, but in the then ferocious separation between amateur sport and that of money, a sin of naivety had cheated him. He’d pocketed $300 for a match in Queens and practically unwittingly turned pro. And to think that boxing didn’t even have to do it. But one day he happened that “Are you a fighter? Ok, how!”. He was told by one of the policemen who had stopped him after a fight between tough people in a Brooklyn club. He invited him to the police gymnasium, where an already experienced boxer had punched him. The day after, however, he had reappeared: it meant that there was fabric. Rodolfo Sabatini, the Roman organizer with an infallible nose, brought him to Italy, not surprisingly he set up world meetings with people of the caliber of Carlos Monzon. Vito had put some of him into it, beating an Emile Griffith who was no longer the one in the trilogy with Benvenuti but still remained a legend.

Courage and suffering began to show them in Rome, the Palazzo dello Sport: fifteen tremendous rounds against Maurice Hope which cost him the loss of the European title he had taken in Germany against Dagge. “Antuofermo tends to parry punches with his face”, Gianni Brera said of him speaking to Domenica Sportiva with ill-concealed skepticism. “I actually took less than it seemed, I was good at dodging.” The judgment was affected by the scenic drama of his matches, as a fearless fighter, where blood was never lacking. It didn’t take much for the browbones to shatter.

A big problem that became a nightmare in the most remembered match of his career, against Marvin Hagler in Las Vegas. The middleweight world championship was up for grabs: Antuofermo had conquered it by beating Hugo Corro in Montecarlo, a man on whom the – rarely so improper – label of Monzon’s heir weighed like a ton. In front of him was a wonderful boxer, and here the etiquette was terribly appropriate. Marvin Marvelous Hagler stepped into that ring with the anger of someone who knows he’s great but doesn’t feel gratified by the world. A state of frustration, that of the bald man of Brockton, exacerbated by the fact that the other, the predestined, got into the ring that same night. The face and smile that all of America liked and that the following year would become the little boy of the new president of the United States Ronald Reagan: Ray Sugar Leonard.

Hagler started like a fury, Antuofermo had a hangover from a bronchitis and, as if that weren’t enough, he couldn’t even resort to an old trick he explained to us on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of that match: “At the beginning of his career, injuries I wore the polish that women use for their nails and the skin held a little more. But then they didn’t let me anymore…”. In the first rounds there seemed to be no story, then slowly Antuofermo dragged Hagler into his jungle, and the match became a wild challenge. Seventy stitches, the judges recognized that stoicism and awarded the par. The title remained with the holder: “I defended it with blood,” he said. It was the high point of his career, also because in the next fight the title went to England, in the hands of a man with ice eyes and a non-existent smile, Alan Minter: “A Venezuelan judge had two points for me, but the high they were pro-English and outvoted him. It was a theft.” Two more worldwide attempts followed, but by then the browbones could no longer stand the stress.

Once he got out of the ring, he led a quieter life: there were no more people determined to bring him down, but there weren’t even the spotlights anymore. The opening of a pizzeria, the distribution of Coca Cola, then a job at the port. He tried to regain his former glory with a few comeback meetings in the mid-eighties (“It wasn’t a good idea”), he regained the spotlight instead, but this time without the need to put nail polish on his face. It doesn’t work in the cinema. A part in the last appearance of Vittorio Gasmann (”La bomba”) and above all the role of Anthony Squigliaro, the bodyguard of Joey Zasa, one of the less recommendable characters of the Godfather part III. “Al Pacino chose me. When we shot at Cinecittà, we went to dinner together in the evening”. And if you please.