Gatti was way more fundamentally sound and athletic than Provodnikov, who's really just a brute with an iron chin.. Gatti had some skills, he just chose not to use them most of the time for some reason.
Provo would have beaten the ever living F*CK outta Gatti! Bum ass Gatti would have never been on the verge of beating a quality fighter like Bradley. He's a man who was twice owned by Ivan Robinson.
Provo would have stopped Gatti but he would have been busted up pretty good. When Gatti stepped up against elite competition he got waxed. Provo may not have won but he was in the fight to the end, even having a chance to win. And Matthysse is elite competition. Matthysse would have KO'd Gatti inside of 5.
I like your assesement. It is very possible Gatti would have been KO'd. He wouldn't have cared. He'd be ready for the next one! But, Provo was there to the end, like you said. I think he could hang with ANY 140 fighter....if he could improve his approach, he'd actually be a force to be reckoned with...if he isn't already. I'm not sure there are a lot of fighters willing to slug it with Provo.
What a beating it would have been. Gatti would lose to the following fighters - Matthysse, Provo, Maidana, Rios, Garcia, Crawford, Broner (yes, even Broner). Gatti was ****.
Gatti had decent boxing skills and pretty good speed of hand and foot (more so at 130), but it didn't take much to catch him clean and draw him into a war. Gatti boxed pretty well against the good but smaller Tracy Harris Patterson. People (HBO) made a big thing out of Gatti outboxing Micky Ward and Jesse James Leija, but Ward was a fringe contender, and both guys were at the end of their careers. In his prime, Gatti still lost to Angel Manfredy, twice to Ivan Robinson, and went life-and-death with Wilson Rodriguez and Gabriel Ruelas, who was actually pretty talented, but not the same fighter he had been due to his psyche from the Jimmy Garcia tragedy. No one would ever accuse, say, Ricky Hatton of being some really skillful boxing technician, but he outboxed Ben Tackie handily and used a good deal of movement. Outside of the smaller Patterson (who caught a bad break in the rematch when his bodypunch was ruled low), Gatti's displays of his boxing in which he got praised, were also Tackie-level fighters (actually probably lower level than him).
Andre is also a very strange comparison for Ricky. Ricky never had anyone accuse him of being defensively responsible.