Donato Paduano of Montreal

   This 5'5 1/2" out-of-shape former Montreal boxer, shown in 1983 at age 34, won $200,000 as a pugilist in the 1970s.
   Paduano was 12 when he came with his family from Campobasso Italy and started boxing the next year.
  In 1967 he went pro, training at the Olympic Boxing Club on St. Lawrence Street.        
    Paduano beat Joey Durell for the welterweight crown in 1969, getting ranked third in the world in 1970 and then losing his crowd in 1972 to Clyde Gray.

Paduano in 2012

   He retired at the age of 27 on 10 April 1975, with a record of 41-8-1, saying that he found it boring to go to the gym.  
   He got a job at Pepsi doing public relations.
   "I was wondering what I was doing there. I couldn't accept not being recognized in the street. I was looking for my name in the papers. I couldn't accept being a retired boxer," he told Ronald King of La Presse in a 1980 interview.
   "When I beat a Nigerian in the Olympics the dressing room was too small for all those who wanted to congratulate me and when I lost 2 years against an Englishman there was one person who came by."
   After quitting he spent three years partying, making up for the lost time from all the discipline and sacrifices he was required to make as a boxer, he said.
   He blew his wad on gambling and drinking and lost his home and his wife left him with the kids.
   He made a brief and unsuccessful comeback attempt.
    On January 21, 1983, the unemployed and retired Paduano was nabbed in a car near Mississauga with Roger Barriere , Claude Yvan Pepin and Christine Robillard.

   He was in Toronto "to catch some broads," he said.
   Police found 47 grams of cocaine in a room he was sharing and charged him with trafficking.
   Charges were dropped after co-accused Roger Barriere died after catching a bad case of murder. He was found dead in the trunk of a rented car in June 1983.
   He moved back in with his parents in St. Leonard, across the street from the home he lost.
   Paduano is still alive but does not appear to have penned the autobiography that he promised to write in 1980.

  Great story about Paduano here.