" Dropped
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Ken Garduno
I feel like I should let you know what you’re in for. This is a long story about a juggler. It gets into some areas that matter in all sports, such as performance and audience and ambition, but there’s absolutely a lot of juggling in the next 6,700 words. I assume you may bail at this point, which is fine; I almost bailed a few times in the writing. The usual strategies of sportswriting depend on the writer and reader sharing a set of passions and references that make it easy to speed along on rivers of stats and myth, but you almost certainly don’t know as much about juggling as you do about football or baseball. We’re probably staring at a frozen lake here.
A few juggling videos are embedded below. I hope they help. We may fall through the ice anyway.
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The greatest juggler alive, maybe of all time, is a 40-year-old Floridian named Anthony Gatto. He holds 11 world records, has starred for years in Cirque du Soleil, and has appeared as a child on The Tonight Show, performing in a polo shirt and shorts, juggling five rings while balancing a five-foot pole on his forehead.
His records are for keeping certain numbers of objects aloft for longer than anyone else. Eleven rings, 10 rings, nine rings, eight rings, and seven rings. Nine balls, eight balls, and seven balls. Eight clubs, seven clubs, and six clubs. To break this down a little: There’s one person in the world who can juggle eight clubs for 16 catches,1 and that’s Gatto. As for seven clubs, maybe a hundred people can get a stable pattern going — for a couple of seconds. It’s difficult to even hold seven clubs without dropping them; your hands aren’t big enough. Gatto can juggle seven clubs for more than four minutes. “That’s insane,” says David Cain, a professional juggler and juggling historian. “There’s no competition.”
Three years ago, Gatto posted a video to YouTube called "Anthony Gatto 7 Ball World Record." The video shows a man of medium height with short dark hair and a W-shaped goatee. He wears a gray tank top, athletic shorts, a headband, and sneakers. He doesn’t look like a circus performer; he looks like a bro heading to the gym.
Standing in a residential driveway, he juggles seven balls for 11 minutes and 38 seconds, for thousands of catches, as his tank top darkens with sweat and three neighborhood kids look on with increasing boredom. (In a gag at the beginning of the video, Gatto pays the kids $5 to be his audience.) When he drops a ball, Gatto says, with mock grandiosity, “And that’s how you break the world record, kids. One day you, too, can be world champions.” The previous record was 10 minutes and 12 seconds — also set by Gatto. The message of the video is basically, I can set whatever record I want, anytime I want. See how boring that is?
Since 2010, Gatto has juggled in Cirque du Soleil’s La Nouba, a show based at Walt Disney World in Orlando. Recently, though, I heard a rumor that Gatto was getting ready to retire from juggling to open a coffee shop. I did some Internet searching and discovered he now runs a concrete company in Orlando. It’s called Big Top Concrete Resurfacing LLC. The “T” of the Big Top logo is in the shape of a circus tent, but otherwise there’s no hint of Gatto’s achievements on the company website. “We are committed to offering a cost effective solution to tearing out and replacing old, damaged and deteriorating concrete,” reads the “About” page. “From stained micro-toppings to metallic floor finishes, counter tops and garage floor epoxy coatings, we have the solution for you.” A small head shot shows what looks like a smiling Gatto. Next to the head shot is a name. The name is not the one that has amazed audiences for the last 30 years. “Owned and operated,” the page says, “by Anthony Commarota.”
How did the greatest juggler in the world end up working in concrete?
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Commarota is his birth name, but the vast majority of jugglers don’t know that. They know him only as Gatto, the name of his stepfather, Nick Gatto, an ex-vaudeville acrobat. It was Nick who first taught Anthony to juggle, in 1978, a few months before Anthony turned 5 years old. As a younger man, Nick had traveled and performed with a three-man comedy acrobatics troupe called Los Gatos, and now he ran a tobacco shop in Baltimore. He kept a trunk of circus props at the store. In the beginning, Nick showed Anthony how to balance paper cones on his head, and to bounce a ball on his head and shoulder; it wasn’t until Anthony had shown a knack for balance that Nick taught him to juggle three balls. It was just for fun. “I noticed that after a few weeks, his progress was becoming more and more rapid,” Nick later said in a documentary about the two men, Gatto: From Vaudeville Acro-Cat to the King of Juggling. “So rapid that at times he didn’t even have to learn to do the higher number. Like when he went from three to four, he never had...