By Matt Christie
“YOU can’t go around being blacked out drunk with a pistol. It’s dumb, it’s irresponsible, it’s fucking bullshit,” says Pittsburgh’s Paul Spadafora, the former IBF lightweight champion who when blacked out drunk in 2003 shot his future wife with a pistol.
Today, with his skin aglow, he looks terrific. His dark mane is brushed back to reveal an impressive hairline, his neck shows off the kind of veins that suggest he’s exercising regularly and his slats – those muscley bits between the shoulder blades and neck – tighten his t-shirt.
It’s 9am in Las Vegas. He lies on his sofa and we talk for an hour. His voice is croaky, so much so it sounds like he needs to clear his throat, but it turns out the gruffness is a permanent fixture and the cough is not required. Towards the end of our chat – probably the wrong word given what’s divulged – it’s clear he’s excited to get to work. It will involve coaching young fighters – “seven or eight” of them, including his son, Gino – at his nearby gym that he opened last year.
He trains hard himself, doing 12 rounds first thing before passing on his years of experience to his pupils. His dream is to make a world champion from scratch. He talks passionately – and at length – about his methods. At the age of 49, eleven years after this last fight, Spadafora is clearly taking care of himself.
It hasn’t always been this way. It might not always be this way.
When an active world champion he would split his time between drinking himself doolally, and fighting and training. For three months he would live the life of a hopeless alcoholic before using the first 21 days of his training camp as detox. Then he would train for another 60 or so. Then he would win a world title fight. Thus, he thought he had it under control. It was his existence for several years and, after all, he’d never lost a fight.
The lowest point came in October 2003. After successfully defending his championship eight times, he shot his girlfriend Nadine after she told him he’d probably had enough to drink that day. “I was way out of control at that point,” Spadafora admits, “I was on my way to death.”
A world champion and blind drunk, trouble punctuated every day of his life.
“The week before [the shooting] some dude tried to stick me up in the bathroom. I had my pistol right against his forehead and I said, ‘Bro, you got about two seconds to get the fuck out of this bathroom or I’m gonna blow your head off’… I said to myself after that: ‘The next time I pull a pistol on someone, for whatever reason, I’m gonna use it.’ I felt like I couldn’t walk around with a pistol and act like I was gonna use it and then not use it.
“I was out drinking, I wanted to keep drinking. Nadine was driving, she gets out the car and comes up on me and…” a scuffle ensued and he shot her below the breast. “For her to forgive me, I mean, we’re married now. What would make you want to be with someone like that? I was blacked out of my fucking mind and she’s witnessed me in that mode millions of times, so for her to understand that that wasn’t me, and it wasn’t me…” His voice tails off again. “When you’re in addiction and strung the fuck out like a porch monkey, that’s not who you are, that’s not me. I don’t even think like that person anymore, it’s much more clear, it’s like night and day. I don’t walk around with no guns on me, no pistols on me, I don’t have days when I get blacked out. That’s fucking bullshit.”
SEPTEMBER 24,1999: Paul Spadafora poses for a portrait in 1999 in New York
(The Ring Magazine via Getty Images)
That bullshit was his way of life. He went to prison, then he made a comeback of middling success and lost his first fight at the age of 38. Then, in 2014, he went back to the bullshit. “When I retired, my addiction was so bad, I was back to nothing. I had nothing. I was doing nothing.
“My girl [Nadine] came to Pittsburgh and she was like, ‘Paul, you look terrible. Please come with me and give it a try.’ I did, and now I’m in Las Vegas. I feel a lot better. I feel great, actually. I’m living a normal life. I wake up and I’ve got a family, I’ve got my son upstairs. I can’t even explain it.”
It’s too lazy to list Spadafora’s misdemeanors and then merely champion his recovery, however. He deserves more than that.
Children are a product of their environment and Spadafora’s environment was hellish in the extreme. His mother lived with a man who would later be convicted of pedophilia. Paul lived with that pedophile too. “That shit ain’t normal, as a young kid, living with a pedophile,” Spadafora says. “That ain’t normal watching some mo fucking scumbag do that to people. [Back then] knowing that I can get his ass hooked the fuck up, knowing that he belonged underneath the jail, but knowing I can’t really do that because, if I do that, I ain’t getting no money, I won’t have no clothes, I won’t have no place to live, I won’t have no food. I won’t have… you understand what I’m trying to say? That shit right there is the hardest part.”
When he spent time with his estranged father, who like his mother was a drug addict, he felt little love. “I kinda think my father didn’t think I was his son,” he says, clearly still hurt. “It was a little bit difficult.” Spadafora Snr encouraged his son to drink homemade wine from the age of seven. Two years later, at only 33 years old, Dad was dead from a drug overdose.
Spadafora estimates he went to “30 or 40 schools” and fighting came naturally. Angry, lashing out, he even fought the principle at one of them. Throw in the hangovers that boomed through his brain and it becomes an unthinkable way of life for a child. That he achieved anything at all from a start like that, let alone going on to become a longstanding world boxing champion, should tell us more about Paul Spadafora than any drunken rampage or drug binge.
At the age of 16, he got shot in the leg by a police officer. He mentions this fleetingly, like it was just one of those days. It meant he couldn’t box for a year. He could no longer use his leg to generate significant power in his punches. He redesigned his style for the better, he worked on turning defence into attack and, after perfecting the art of counterpunching, he became a cannier, slicker fighter. “The Pittsburgh Kid” became a young professional, one wise beyond his years.
So well known was he by now, the fans came in their droves. According to local journalist Mike Bires, Spadafora was Pittsburgh’s fourth sporting franchise after the Steelers, the Pirates and the Penguins. “Spadafora’s rise to the upper echelons of boxing elevated his status as the second coming of ‘The Pittsburgh Kid’,” writes Bires. “The first, of course, was Billy Conn, a light-heavyweight in the 1930s and ‘40s. It evoked memories of other Pittsburgh boxing greats such as Harry Greb, Fritzie Zivic and Teddy Yarosz… During those hometown fights before packed and enthusiastic crowds, Spadafora’s fans would chant ‘Spaddy! Spaddy! Spaddy!’ It was akin to attending a Steelers home game when fans chanted ‘Here we go Steelers, here we go’.”
As is so often the case with those not used to it, success and money stole the magic away – almost overnight. Spadafora won his world title in August 1999 and went from fighting regularly to sporadically. He had plenty of money in his pocket and plenty of time to spend it. Away from the gym, he was surrounded by the wrong people. “I don’t know where any of these mother fuckers are at today,” Spadafora laughs, remembering at the moronicness of youth. “I must have hundreds of thousands of my dollars out there somewhere. I haven’t had a phonecall in years, it’s unbelievable. I tell my son all the time: ‘Gino, watch who you surround yourself with.’ I had always had friends but as soon as I won the title, I had friends with their hands out.
“I used to think dumb shit like, ‘How am I world champion and have money and my best friend is on the corner of the street selling crack? That don’t even make sense.’ I felt like I had to help him out. I was paying people’s rent for a year and shit like that.”
He daren’t dwell on the past for too long, however; the hardest act of forgiveness is always to oneself. Though he no longer thinks about drugs – he calls that “just a phase” – alcohol remains a “day to day struggle.” Reliving those early years with the writer of his book, Chris Scarnati, caused him to brielfy relapse. Though clean for two years, the book’s title, Paul Spadafora: Fighting To The End, is profoundly prophetic.
“My mother is 73 years old, she’s addicted to crack,” he says. “My father died when he was 33 when he OD’d. My brother was on drugs, my little brother died of crack cocaine. He was the type of person who I thought was never gonna die because he was built like that I guess – but he wasn’t. That shit [crack cocaine] is for the birds, man. There’s nothing good about that shit. What it turns you into, you’re just a shell of yourself. You start lying to yourself. You can’t do shit. All you are doing is trying to get the next one [hit of drugs]. It’s like a rat race. The next one, the next one, the next one.”
Spadafora again mulls over the murderous hand he was dealt and laughs once more. “If I’m not fighting until the end, then I better fucking be real careful. If I don’t fight until the end, it will be the end.”
Happier Times: Spadafora with his partner