For years he was out there — a sturdy little son of a bitch who walked forward and kept hitting his opponent with his best licks, resolute and unflinching before whatever punishment came his way.
Hail, César!
For years this kid from Culiacán, Mexico, would use the early rounds to calibrate his distance and then — with an executioner’s unhurried assurance — step through punches to uncork withering left hooks to the ribs and liver and straight right hands to the head, shot after shot, until the other guy’s subconscious sent an SOS to his brain: Enough already.
For years the other guy might dance on tiptoe or, for a fleeting instant, get the foolish notion that he could stand nose to nose and trade with Chávez. Didn’t matter. Do what they would, J. C. Chávez kept coming like some horror-film rogue, unrelenting in the terrible punishment he handed out to whichever consenting adult stood in front of him.
In a career dating back to 1980, he methodically pounded out the best of his generation — Mario Martinez, Ruben Castillo, Roger Mayweather, Rocky Lockridge, Juan LaPorte, Edwin Rosario, Jose Luis Ramirez, Meldrick Taylor, Hector Camacho, and Greg Haugen — while winning world titles as a super featherweight, lightweight, and super lightweight.
Mind you, he didn’t just beat them — he usually diminished them, leaving them as ghosts of what they had been. Those who had the temerity to fight him, really fight him — like Rosario and Taylor — would never again flash the skills they’d brought into the ring against Chávez. Chávez’s blows rewired them for failure. Others, like John Duplessis and Lonnie Smith — who ran from him for fear of how they might end up — were left with reputations as scaredy-cats, their marquee value permanently damaged.
“I didn’t just want to beat him, I wanted to punish him. I was as angry as I’d ever been going into a fight.”
For years Julio César Chávez did all this — dominated the world’s wiry fighting men as nobody else had, winning titles and championship purses — and guess what? For years nobody gave a good goddamn.
Chávez’s is the story of stunted glory — of a fighter who only lately has come to be appreciated after years during which he built a record (87-0, 75 knockouts as of June 1993) and a reputation rooted in as ambitious an agenda as any fighter of his day has had.
Eighty-seven and zero in 13 years as a professional. Figure it out. That’s a workaholic’s calendar — and an anachronism in a day when fighters are encouraged to parcel out their appearances lest they walk into the wrong punch and out of the big money. These days discretion is the better part of valor — and the market economy.
A confession: I’m as guilty as anybody else for failing to recognize right off what a gem Chávez is. And therein lies a short treatise on the practicalities of boxing commerce.
Start with this: Winners keepers, losers weepers. Success begets success, but it doesn’t always occur in the blink of an eye. There is more than wins and losses to separate the favored few champions from the rest.
Style has a good deal to do with it. Certain fighters grab you viscerally. On October 25, 1985, as the boxing reporter for The New York Times, I saw an unknown named Mike Tyson, in a prelim in Atlantic City, lay the business end of a left hook on his opponent, who went down with his eyes spinning like the wheels of a slot machine. It was not so much that Tyson finished the poor schnook in only 37 seconds — it was the authority the kid showed in doing it. He radiated a fury that would soon make him America’s gladiator, Rambo in short pants, and that fury got under your skin. I was curious. A few weeks later, on November 15, 1985, I parked my car in the driveway of the 14-room Victorian house in Catskill, New York, where Tyson had been raised by Cus D’Amato, and did the first of many interviews I would do with a fighter who would mesmerize the world over the next seven years.
The point is, some fighters have that elemental spark, and it jump-starts their success and their rewards. Whether it’s fair is another story. Marvelous Marvin Hagler, whose acceptance by the public was, like Chávez’s, a long time coming, used to see his nemesis, Sugar Ray Leonard, as a pampered prince of the sport, and it griped him. But Leonard’s was a crowd-pleasing style; Hagler’s was more blue-collar. Not only that: Leonard’s progress through the ranks — largely on his own terms — seemed to mock Hagler’s struggle. For instance, in June 1977, when both men appeared on the same card in Hartford, each scoring a quick knockout, Hagler earned $1,500 in what amounted to his 36th fight as a professional, and Leonard got $40,000 for the third fight of his career.
I saw Chávez up close for the first time in June 1986, against Refugio Rojas (T.K.O. No. 7) on the undercard of Camacho versus Rosario at Madison Square Garden, and again that December, against a former world champion, Juan LaPorte (win No. 12), on the undercard of Bonecrusher Smith versus Tim Witherspoon, again at the Garden.
Chávez wasn’t flashy. He hadn’t the showman’s wide-eyed pleasure of Sugar Ray or the brute swagger of Tyson. No special vibes radiated, suggesting a unique character. At the time he was the World Boxing Council super featherweight (130-pound limit) champ, and he seemed a workmanlike, competent fighter.
It was nearly a year later, in November 1987, when Chávez stepped up in class and fought the World Boxing Association lightweight (135-pound limit) champion, Edwin Rosario, and changed my perspective forever. Rosario, a Puerto Rican with a potent punch, figured to give Chávez a stiff fight. But in the weeks leading up to the match, he made a bad miscalculation, offending Chávez with slurs against Mexicans (the women were “whores,” the men “fags”) and against the fighter’s mother, Isabel.
As Chávez would tell me later, through his interpreter Gladys Rosa, “I didn’t just want to beat him, I wanted to punish him. I was as angry as I’d ever been going into a fight. The insults were muy grosero.”
Oh Lord, did Chávez punish him. That night in Las Vegas, he hit Rosario again and again, with body shots that reverberated under the desert skies-noisy, clubbing blows that had Rosario wincing and the ringside boxing press goggle-eyed with amazement. Soon he was alternating the body attack with straight rights to Rosario’s head, punches that left Rosario’s face bruised and swollen, as though he’d been set upon by a horde of bees.
“It was the only time,” said Chávez of his 11th-round knockout of Rosario, “I cried for joy at the end of a fight. It was in the dressing room in Las Vegas, and I was on the phone to my mother in Culiacan. The room was full of people. When everybody saw I was crying, they all started crying, too. It was something very, very beautiful.”
The performance against Rosario was very Chávez — methodical and muy clásico — thudding, well-placed punches that, as we johnny-come-late-lies of the boxing press came to realize, were the signature of a special fighter. This fighter hadn’t the sensationalist flourishes by which others — like, say, Camacho — would titillate the public, drawing attention to their crafted personae. No, Chávez was, as they say in certain gyms, “straight paper” — a no-nonsense working professional who put his essence into the night’s action.
With each victory the Chávez image — the unrelenting warrior with the wrecking-ball left hook-was reinforced. His fights were systematic assaults and, once he locked into his opponent’s rhythm, that left hook eventually reduced the other man to slow-motion. With Chávez what you got was a willful and measured show of force. He always worked well within himself, venturing what was necessary to overcome his foe and never overreaching. Straight paper: Do the job and get on back to Culiacán.
Against the International Boxing Federation junior welterweight (140-pound limit) champion Taylor in March 1990, he caught a break when the referee, Richard Steele, stopped the fight with only two seconds left and Taylor ahead on the scorecards. Luck, some called it. But luck, as baseball executive Branch Rickey once said, is the residue of design. And in that bout, Chávez would not give in to impending defeat. With 25 seconds left in the match, he hurt Taylor with an overhand right, then knocked him to the canvas with another right. That is a pretty fair working definition for making one’s own luck.
Julio César Chávez is an acquired taste.
For a long time, he was a neglected star, given short shrift by the press, the public, and the money men. It’s only lately that folks are coming to appreciate him, and only lately that he has begun to cash in big. Nineteen thousand-plus showed up at the Thomas and Mack Center in Las Vegas to see him beat up on and decision boxing’s resident villain, Camacho, last September, and more than 132,000 — the largest crowd in boxing history — were in Mexico City’s Azteca Stadium when he toyed with Haugen this past February before stopping him in five rounds. Chávez was reportedly guaranteed $3 million for each fight, his most lucrative paydays as a professional.
By then he was widely viewed as the best fighter, pound-for-pound, in boxing — a mythical title for which W.B.C. welterweight champion Pernell Whitaker and W.B.C. super welterweight champion Terry Norris have had their adherents. An opportunity for Chávez to advance his claim to pound-for-pound superiority lies ahead: As of press time, he is scheduled to step up to the welterweight (147-pound limit) class this September and challenge Whitaker in San Antonio. Meanwhile, Norris has been clamoring for his shot against Chávez, offering to fight him at a weight well below the super welterweight limit of 154 pounds.
Whatever the outcome of his future battles, the 31-year-old Chávez is no longer a stranger on the boxing landscape. Finally, he is recognized for the unique fighter he is — drawing praise from both the ticket-buying fans and his peers.
“He’s amazing,” says Vinny Pazienza, a two-time world champion himself. “It’s incredible how he keeps winning. Look at him. There’s not one thing that he’s great at. He’s not very fast. He’s not a big one-punch knockout puncher. He doesn’t have good defense. But he just wins. What a tough son of a bitch he is.”
As epitaphs go, that’s one any prizefighting man could live with.
That toughness is the legacy of the struggle Chávez faced growing up in Culiacán. Julio was one of ten children raised in a converted railroad car.
“My father, Rodolfo, worked as a train conductor,” says Chávez, “and that’s how we came to live in the railway car. The government owned it, and we paid rent on it. Back then I would wake up at four in the morning and run through the streets selling newspapers.”
Chávez attended the local school and supplemented his newsboy’s wages by washing cars and painting houses. In his free hours, he would play soccer and baseball and watch his older brothers work out as fighters.
To Julio, his brothers were very ordinary. When they would lose, he would tell them that someday he would do better. Then came his first bouts, informal matches out on the. streets, and a sober reassessment of what a tricky proposition boxing could be.
“I was ten years old,” says Chávez, “and my hero was a local fighter, Juan Antonio Lopez. Juan Antonio had a sister named Pilly, and she was tough. Very tough. Not a dainty girl. She looked like a little bull. We would put the gloves on. Crowds would gather around, some of them making wagers. We fought maybe 50 times over that year, and she used to give me a very tough time. She’d punch and punch, and if she couldn’t hurt me that way, she’d kick me. I’d get very, very tired.”
For Chávez the matches against the girl discouraged his pursuit of the sport for a while. But he continued to follow Lopez’s career and even spent time hanging out with him. Through that association he was soon mimicking Lopez’s boxing moves so skillfully that by the time Chávez was 15, Lopez introduced him to Ramon Felix, who managed Jose Luis Ramirez, an eventual world champion. Lopez told Felix that Chávez had the talent to be a champion himself.
Sparring against professionals in the gym, the amateur Chávez became confident in what he could eventually realize as a fighter. He turned professional in 1980 and, fighting on a nearly monthly basis, quickly established himself as a comer.
In April 1981, in his 12th bout, he fought Miguel Ruiz in Culiacán, a match that has sometimes clouded assertions about Chávez’s undefeated status. The story goes that Chávez was originally disqualified for knocking Ruiz out with a punch that landed after the bell ending round one.
“But the next day, a three-member Culiacán boxing commission voted to overturn the referee’s decision and give Chávez a first-round knockout,” says Earl Gustkey, boxing writer for the Los Angeles Times.
Sometime later Bob Yalen, the boxing honcho for ABC-TV who moonlights as a fight historian, looked into the circumstances of the Culiacán commission’s decision and learned that Chávez’s manager, Ramon Felix, had used his influence to get the decision changed.
“Felix admitted as much to me,” says Yalen. “Even kind of laughed about it.”
For a while some record books listed the bout as a disqualification defeat for Chávez, and, while a few still call it that, most record-keepers now list the bout as a victory for Chávez. But know this: The accounting of those early bouts is riddled with inconsistencies, the particulars depending on whose record is the source.
Whatever. Chávez made steady progress after the Ruiz contretemps, and by September 1984 he had beaten Mario Martinez, the W.B.C. super featherweight champion, for his first world title. But while he would enjoy artistic success in the years that followed, he would gain pitifully little recognition. It was as though Chávez’s career had gone into the witness-protection program. What happened?
“Look,” says Bert Sugar, editor and publisher of Boxing Illustrated, “this is a guy who could have learned English and didn’t want to. He feels comfortable with who he is. And who he is is a boxing legend in Mexico. That’s his identity. He comes into the ring with the sombrero and Mexican flag, and he carries the hopes of a nation on his shoulders. Yes, had he learned English it would have gone a long way to helping him become recognized on this side of the border. But Julio was proud being who he is. And that became part of his problem in gaining recognition.”
Another problem, some insist, was having Don King as his promoter. King’s fixation with heavyweights — mostly Tyson during the prime Chávez years — curbed his devotion to Chávez. When Iron Mike was King’s meal ticket, Chávez appeared to be an afterthought of the promoter’s — and Chávez often felt he paid for it with the almighty peso. He bitched and moaned about not getting his money’s worth in purses, and would occasionally jump to another promoter before King would woo him back, an exercise that more than once entangled Chávez in litigation that cost him money.
“Unfortunately for Chávez, he has let the promoter become bigger than him,” says Seth Abraham, who is in charge of boxing for Time Warner Sports, which includes Home Box Office and its pay-per-view cousin, TVKO.
Abraham speculates that had Chávez had Mike Trainer, the man who maneuvered Sugar Ray Leonard, as his guiding force instead of King, Chávez could have become bigger than Leonard.
“Because,” says Abraham, “there is a greatness about Julio that has never fully been tapped. He is a fighter for the ages. But he has had to share the spotlight with his promoter. Don King’s philosophy is that the promoter is sometimes as big as the star, but never smaller. In the case of Chávez, it hurt the fighter. In the case of Tyson, it was irrelevant.”
“Mike Trainer understood the fighter should be first, last, and every chapter in between,” Abraham continues. “He let Ray Leonard be the star all the time. And if Chávez had had that kind of promoter, there’d be a greater appreciation for his ability. He is a wonderful man, but very few people know that. He is thoughtful, polite, and self-effacing.”
Add to that a dutiful son. Early in his career, he used his ring earnings to improve his family’s circumstances.
“First, I bought the land that the railroad car was on,” says Chávez, “then I knocked down the house and made a new one for my parents. Every bit of money I made in boxing went to that house. A concrete house, two floors high. Because all the money went to the house, I had so little that when I married my wife in July 1985, I lived in my parents’ house for six months.”
There’s no shortage of luxury accommodations now. Chávez and his wife, Amalia, have three sons — Julio Jr., six, Omar, two, and the infant Christian — and they have the material ease he could only dream about as a boy.
In Culiacán, Chávez says, he has five income-generating office buildings, land, and ten homes that he rents. Chávez owns 20 cars, a beach house in nearby Altata, two homes in Los Angeles, and is presently building what he refers to as his “dream house” in Culiacán.
“The entrance is going to have three big white columns,” says Chávez. “Fifteen thousand square feet with a gym, eight or nine bedrooms, a swimming pool, tennis courts.… Do I play tennis? No. But they’ll be there for the guests.”
When Chávez is at leisure — and not in training — he tends to float along the social currents, hanging with his coterie of amigos while easing through his days on, as the Coneheads might say, mass quantities of alcoholic beverages. Here’s Camacho, recalling how the good times rolled when he flew to Culiacán on a private jet with Chávez and hung out in April 1992.
“It was for four, five days,” says Camacho. “Spent time at his house. Went to the beach. It was something out of the ordinary. A lot of drinking beer, man. He’d hand you a beer and no food. ‘Hey, where’s something to eat?’ Forget it. It’s cute. Nothing wrong with it. I’m not criticizing.”
As Camacho described it, in those social settings, Chávez was content to fold into the background and not be the center of attention. But the muted ego of that private persona should not be construed as an indifference to appearances. The easy-timer in Chávez is transformed in the public context.
When Showtime asked Chávez to cut a promo for the delayed broadcast of his victory over Camacho, he was in his suite at the Las Vegas Hilton just hours after his victory. As Showtime producer Earl Fash recalls, “It was after the fight and it was a mob scene. There were 50 people in the hallway, another 30 in the suite outside the bedroom, and maybe 30 more in Julio’s bedroom. Julio was on the phone to the president of Mexico when we showed up and told him what we needed.”
“Well, he wanted to make sure he was as presentable as possible, for at the time, he had a minor bruise on his cheek and on the side of his forehead. So he put on makeup to hide the bruises and then got into a suit and tie. He wanted to be the consummate professional for what were, in effect, ten- to 15-second spots. And he wanted to do the spots as good as he could. He practiced and practiced and did eight takes, telling the people in the room, ‘Please. Quiet.’”
That underlying pride is razor sharp when the context is boxing. Abraham recalled a lunch he partook with Chávez, Tyson, and King a few years back.
“There was a discussion about who Chávez would like to fight,” recalls Abraham. “And· Julio pointed at Tyson and, through an interpreter, said, ‘I’d like to fight him.’ I know it sounds like a throwaway line, but I am telling you, he was not kidding. It was the equivalent of Babe Ruth calling his home-run shot during the ‘32 World Series. Very few athletes have the balls, the chutzpah, to do that. And that was Chávez.”
“His world is Culiacán and the ring,” Abraham adds. “The pride is inner. He may have his baubles and jewelry and cars, but it’s not that important. He takes far more pride in his record and in the fact that he’ll fight anybody. It’s why I don’t think he was kidding. There is within him a love of combat and a belief in himself. ‘I will find a way to win.’”
Keen eyes of fans among us might notice that October, 1993, falls out of sequence for our Legacy publication system. We work steadily on a sort of 50-40-30-20 years ago sequence as the month progresses. That said, at least in our slice of the world, apparently October 1986 had little noteworthy happening. Honestly if “Eye of the Zombie” marked the big album release, “Shanghai Surprise” led in movie theaters, and “The Prince of Tides” in book form topped the charts (recently republished), well, it was a less than dynamic time in history. … In fairness, Chernobyl had just melted down earlier that year, and people were still in a strange mental state. … So we put in a pitch hitter. Sometimes life calls for that.
