By the time I met Goody Petronelli in 2006, the Brockton gym where he had trained Marvelous Marvin Hagler had seen better days. It was on Ward Street, now “Petronelli Way.” The block was lonely at sundown, made lonelier by the sound of empty beer cans rolling across the pavement, and chain link fences rattling in the wind.
Inside, the gym was still daunting. It felt hard, unforgiving. The walls were an homage to Hagler: 1970s fight posters, framed newspaper clippings, a colorful wall-sized mural of Hagler in his glory. Yet at night, with no fighters around, the place had the feel of a long-neglected barracks. Intensely bright lights illuminated the barrenness of the place.
Meanwhile, white-haired men shuffled in and out of Goody’s office. “If my wife calls,” one of them said, “tell her I’m not here.” I recognized one of the guys as Tiger Moore, one of Hagler’s old sparring partners. He looked jolly in a faded red warmup suit. When the phone rang, it wasn’t anyone’s wife, but a local matchmaker looking for a female featherweight to fill an undercard slot. After this hiccup of activity, the old gym went silent as a monastery. The only sound was the humming of an electric clock.
I was writing a magazine story about Goody, and there he was, sitting behind a desk, his big-knuckled hands folded in front of him. The walls of his small office were covered in framed pictures of Hagler, black and white scenes from his amateur days.
Goody had a gentle voice and a thick New England accent, giving everything he said a warm, homey feel. When I told him I had lived in Brockton as a kid, his eyes brightened up.
“You should’ve stopped by,” he said. “I’d teach you how to fight.”
It was the kind of no-nonsense, straightforward offer that had once caught the attention of a teenager named Marvin, a sullen boy who simply stopped by one day. He’d been clumsy at first, with no apparent aptitude for fighting, but he returned a few days later with a vow that he could do better.
“He was a hard-working kid,” Goody said. “And very precise. Even just lacing up his shoes, he wanted things perfect. And he learned fast. I’d show him things, then he’d go home and practice all night in front of a mirror.”
Goody’s boxing philosophy was simple: take care of the basics. Therefore, Goody schooled Marvin in the fundamentals. Marvin treated them like holy scripture. Because Marvin was short, Goody nicknamed him “Short stuff,” which eventually became just “Stuff.”
Go and get him, Stuff…remember the basics, Stuff…
“I don’t think Marvin had been around many white people,” Goody said. “One time he got angry about something, he says, ‘Why should I listen to you, whitey?’ My brother Pat and I just laughed at him. But Marvin got used to us.”
If Goody was an authority figure, his brother Pat was the playful uncle, sneaking Marvin a candy bar after a rough day. Neither Goody nor Marvin enjoyed press conferences, so Pat shined as Marvin’s mouthpiece and became his business manager. Marvin would later ask Pat to be the godfather of one of his children. Once, when Marvin was preparing to fight in San Remo, a reporter asked, “Marvin, how is your Italian?” Marvin said, “Which one? Goody or Pat?”
During my first visit to Goody’s gym, he handed me a business card. Underneath his name it read: “The Sole Trainer of Marvelous Marvin Hagler.” He’d had it made because he disliked the way journalists referred to him and Pat as Marvin’s “co-trainers.” In fact, Pat was the businessman. Goody was the boxing man. Goody’s rare distinction was that he’d trained Marvin from the first time he put on gloves to his final fight. “Be sure to say that in the article,” he said. “I was Marvin’s only trainer.”
Goody was 82 when I met him, but he still worked with fighters. He looked frail when he held the pads for some oversized kid. Yet he was immovable, an old tree refusing to bend. “Just say I’m 26,” Goody said. “When you tell people your age, that’s all they talk about.”
I had heard a rumor that the gym was struggling. Even those who admired Goody were doubtful that young fighters wanted to work with a man his age, in a gym that creaked like an old attic. Goody admitted that business was slow, but he wasn’t concerned. Things would pick up, he said.
Goody spent most nights in his office with a few of his cronies. They rarely talked boxing. They talked about Brockton, people they knew, their favorite restaurants. One of them carried a sketch pad and drew passable caricatures of fighters. Pat wasn’t part of the gym anymore. Goody explained that Pat was ill and had “trouble getting around.” More recently, Goody’s wife underwent an operation and was home recovering. Hagler’s half-brother, Robbie Simms, dropped by now and then to do some shadowboxing and work up a sweat, late at night when no one was around.
The gym felt like a clubhouse, and these were the last dues-paying members.
“Every day I look at the front door,” he said. “I’m still waiting for another Marvin Hagler to walk in.”
At the end of our first session, Goody raced out of the place with his pals, three old men sprinting to their cars. It had become a rotten neighborhood.
Guarino “Goody” Petronelli had fought professionally back in the 1940s, until a broken wrist forced him to quit. After a long hitch in the U.S. Navy, Goody planned to open a gym in Brockton with Pat and a friend, fellow Brockton native and retired heavyweight champion, Rocky Marciano. When Rocky died in a plane crash in 1969, Goody and Pat went ahead and opened a gym above a hardware store downtown.
Success eluded them, even when Marvin turned pro. Talented as he was, Marvin toiled in high school gymnasium shows and half empty arenas. Throughout this difficult period, Goody and Pat wouldn’t take a cut from Marvin’s small paydays, saying he could pay them later. “We knew what we had in Marvin,” Goody said.
During those lean years, boxing insiders mocked the brothers as a couple of rubes holding Marvin back. Yet the Patronellis were suited to handling Marvin and his many moods. Opponents often praised Marvin for the accuracy of his punches and his conditioning, the results of Goody’s old-school methods. And though the Petronellis were unproven businessmen, Marvin eventually topped Sport magazine’s list of the highest paid athletes for 1983, 1984, and 1987. Unscrupulous types often promised him the world if only he’d leave the Petronellis, but Marvin’s bond with the brothers was shatterproof. Marvin called the arrangement, “the unbreakable triangle.”
I wondered if all that money changed Marvin.
“I don’t think money changed him,” Goody said. “What changed him was just fighting for a long time. When a fighter gets older, he starts to worry about things. For his last couple of fights, he felt a bit off. That bothered him.”
I ask about Marvin’s partying days, which included a lot of cocaine and domestic problems. Goody deflected it all.
“When it was time to work, he was always professional. That other stuff, I think he kept it hidden from Pat and me.”
And what was it like when Marvin said he was retiring from the business? “I gave him a hug,” Goody said. “I told him he’d done a good job.”
Goody must’ve known there’d never be another Marvin but admitting such a thing was like admitting his real age.
There were some other fighters. There was a pretty good one who was making real progress, but he decided to move to Europe where he thought he’d get more endorsement deals. There was also a has-been former middleweight titleholder who lived in a nearby state. His father called Goody and asked, Will you train my son? Goody said sure, but he’d have to come to Brockton. That was the end of the conversation. Here was some jerk Marvin would’ve cut in half, and he’s playing stubborn, as if Goody’s wisdom wasn’t worth a 40-mile drive.
Just a year earlier Goody had trained Kevin McBride, an unheralded young heavyweight who scored an upset win over a faded Mike Tyson. It was Goody’s last moment in a spotlight. Unable to capitalize on beating Tyson, McBride had vanished from the scene.
“I heard his wife didn’t want him to fight anymore,” Goody said with a shrug.
Clearly, Marvin was Goody’s masterpiece. Everyone else paled in comparison. Yet when I tried to steer the conversation to Marvin’s big money fights with Tommy Hearns and Ray Leonard, Goody gave the impression that the fun had ended by then when everybody got rich. Or maybe he felt enough had been said about those fights, which he said were “overhyped,” and was more interested in the early years, when each of Marvin’s victories felt like a big one.
I asked Goody to name his proudest achievement with Marvin. Without hesitation, Goody said it was when Marvin won the Nationals in 1973.
“To watch him go from being a chubby 16-year-old to the best amateur in the country in just a couple years, that was the highlight for me,” Goody said.
With a hint of regret in his voice, Goody said there was something that bothered him.
“People never got to know Marvin,” Goody said. “They knew him as the fighter. But he was such a great guy. I wish there were more like him.”
When the magazine story came out, Goody called and thanked me. In all my years as a writer, he is the only person to do that. This, I imagined, was why Marvin adored him, why he still called Goody once a month from his home in Milan, phone calls that I know the old man treasured.
Goody died in 2012 at 88. Pat died four months earlier. The gym was shuttered in 2011 and has been replaced by an 18-unit luxury apartment complex. Though it’s difficult to believe, Marvin is gone, too.
On my final visit to Goody’s office, we talked about Marvin’s induction into the International Boxing Hall of Fame. Goody was thrilled that the scarlet robe Marvin wore for his title-winning fight with Alan Minter was on display in a glass case. That was the night British fans threw bottles and debris into the ring, and the Petronellis used their bodies to shield Marvin and hustle him back to the dressing room. Minter’s fans also broke the windshield on Marvin’s limousine. The new champion rode back to the hotel sitting on glass shards. On a night they should’ve celebrated, the little crew from Brockton was dodging bottles and sitting on broken glass. But they did it together. That was the story being told to me. It was one of loyalty.
When I’d set out to interview Goody, I was half-hoping to learn about secret deals made in the backrooms of Las Vegas casinos. Instead, Goody talked about devotion, commitment. He was still teaching the basics.
And then we were done, and the lights were turned out, and we all left together. Behind us was a room with some old boxing equipment, and a mural of Marvelous Marvin Hagler, gazing out across an empty, cold gym. In 2024, the city unveiled a statue of Marvin. But it seemed incomplete. There should’ve been bronze figures of Goody and Pat, too, standing with their champion, the unbreakable triangle still intact.
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