THE MACHO MAN : Maybe Camacho Is a Kid at Heart, but He’s Growing--and Unbeaten

Hector (Macho) Camacho is the 1980s version of Dennis the Menace, which tells you as much about the ‘80s as it does Camacho.

He’s a sprite, but in an urban-ethnic kind of way that has long since elevated mischief into felony. Had Dennis grown up in Spanish Harlem, well, maybe he’d have done time at Rikers Island, too, probably for “borrowing” Mr. Wilson’s car.

Certainly, Camacho, 23, is no meaner at heart than our cartoon character. On the other hand, he is no less prone to an innocent kind of trouble, at least innocent by his own cheerful way of reckoning. Didn’t he always gas up the cars before he returned them?

Here’s Camacho at his every-day best:

Two days before his fight with World Boxing Council lightweight champion Jose Luis Ramirez, in a press conference that was intended to show boxing at its decorous best, Camacho went from table to table releasing balloons, which hung thereafter from a low ceiling, occasionally fouling promoter Don King’s hair.

Then when things got slow--that is, slow for Camacho--he sailed a can of soda out into the press. And he tried to get something going between two rival heavyweights sitting at the dais.

Once, when Camacho was idly trying to puncture a balloon with a pencil point, while some poor boxer was trying to wax eloquent, the man who taught Camacho to read at the advanced age of 15, covered his face and sighed, “Oh, God.”

Then Patrick Flannery recovered to further appreciate his pint-sized work in progress. “Well, it could be a lot worse,” he said. “Five years ago, he’d have been dancing on the tables like Treat Williams did in ‘Hair.’ ”

So, you see, Camacho has come a long way, although almost everybody agrees he still has a way to go.

In boxing, his path may not be quite so long. He has only to overcome the plodding but tough Ramirez tonight at the Riviera to gain title No. 2, one short of his avowed goal

Insiders give him a good chance at that. The undefeated Camacho’s hand speed, his slickness and his subversion of whatever rules govern boxers in the ring make him a good candidate for boxing immortality, or at least a title or two more.

Still, he may not be ready for a visit to the White House.

People are working on that, but it is possible that the one-time junior-lightweight champion, for all his skills, will be remembered more for his flamboyance out of the ring than in. This is not a fellow, after all, who has made much effort to conform to the rest of society. Let the White House come to him.

His style of dress, to begin with, is outlandish enough to make Liberace look blue-collar. He wears enough jewelry to make Mr. T look like a man who only dabbles in accessories. It must be great fun to watch Camacho walk through a metal detector.

And that little ponytail, a kind of ‘80s cowlick, sort of sets him apart in elite society, as well.

The Macho look, actually spelled out with a gold chain of enough heft to bow larger men than Camacho, has set some people off, no question. It’s a little threatening. Yet, when Camacho enters the ring in a leopard loincloth, he doesn’t really mean anything by it. It’s just an extravagance of style.

Extravagance, really, is what Camacho is all about, and this doesn’t just mean the furs, the Lamborghini. He is also extravagantly talented, as his 26-0 record suggests.

Yet the extravagance extends to his personality as well. He lights up rooms. In interviews he becomes as charismatic as Billy Graham, poking questioners for emphasis, acting out little vignettes of his strange life, pacing back and forth, alternating between a husky whisper and a full-blown shout. He never lets up.

It is this energy that, in the past, has gotten him into his celebrated jams. Flannery, the teacher at Manhattan High School who rescued Camacho from illiteracy if nothing worse and who still attends his growth in an unpaid capacity, said that so much energy is not a lot of fun to contend with for a teacher or anybody else of authority.

“Try to imagine him in a classroom, vaulting through an open window with a window pole, jumping over podiums,” said Flannery, who took on Camacho after he had been bounced from seven other schools. Flannery shook his head at the recollection.

Yet, Flannery insisted, for all the trouble Camacho got into, Camacho never once did anything remotely evil. “He was just playful,” he said. “Though real playful.”

Camacho’s playfulness, combined with only the vaguest notions of morality and legality, did get him in trouble, real trouble. Three-and-a-half months at Rikers is not served as the consequence of a childish prank. Rikers is the real deal. To most people, grand theft auto transcends mischief.

Yet that never occurred to Camacho. “It was my way of having fun,” he said. “If I stole a car, in my mind I was borrowing it. It was just part of a game. I’m young, 15 or 16. I’m having fun. Can I get away with it or not, a game, right?”

It was a game he won as much as lost. He only took the very best cars--they always belonged to an uncle if anybody asked--and gave them the very best care, washing and buffing. And what about filling them up before he returned them?

“That part might be exaggerated,” Camacho said, laughing. He thought he knew where that part of the legend got started, though. “Once I did fill up a car at a gas station and peel out without paying.” So he guesses, yeah, you could say he filled up his victim’s cars.

The “fun” was virtually nonstop. Shoplifting was another great game, before he had learned to drive. Illustrating both his determination and his sense of what is play was his theft of 30 GI Joe dolls. His mother found them and threw them in the incinerator.

“Next day, I come back, I got 34 GI Joes,” he has told Sports Illustrated. “Got the airplane, got the helicopter, got a starship.”

But he did lose that little game in the end, the first time when he was caught with a Pinto after a 30-block car chase, and another time after he was caught joy-riding with a friend, which is why he found himself in Rikers.

There he was, the father of a newborn son and the winner of the Golden Gloves tournament, doing time. It never occurred to him that he was a man of potential until he was in Rikers and one of the inmates said to him, “What are you doing here?” That turned him around.

So it was that Camacho turned his talents to boxing, which was a game with no downside. Losers don’t go to prison as a matter of course. And he was good at it. He won three Golden Gloves titles in all and then began his dazzling pro career.

To be sure, the career hasn’t been dazzling nonstop. After winning the WBC junior-lightweight title in 1983, there has been a kind of doldrums. He made just one defense and then had contract problems with King and personal problems with his manager, Billy Giles. Because of that, he has fought only five times in two years and his stardom has been largely stunted.

But those problems now seem past. Giles, who had announced that Camacho was “drowning in drugs,” has been sent packing. And Camacho is back with King, happily, thanks to a $500,000 purse for this HBO fight.

He doesn’t expect Ramirez to be any problem, not after all he has gone through.

Ramirez, 26, is tough, though. He began his professional career at the age of 14, fighting for 50 pesos. After 95 fights, of which he has won all but four, he remains as baby-faced as Camacho.

But Camacho is promising to mark it up real good and then go on to real glory. “I’m growing into something I dreamed,” he said. “People have already recognized me as a champion, now they’ll recognize me as a macho man.”

Certainly he’s grown into a more macho man than the bantam rooster who terrorized Spanish Harlem.

“Here’s how far he’s come,” Flannery said proudly. “He leaves my apartment one day, walking down the stairs because he never takes the elevator, and shouts up to me from the street. He wants to show me something. He shows me a neighbor’s door with the key still inside it. He had just walked on by it. He says to me,. ‘See how I’ve changed.’ The old macho man might have opened the door and looked around and borrowed something.”

In time, in a lot of time, Camacho could make Dennis the Menace look like a hardened criminal. And if doesn’t, well, who thought he’d come this far?

Fight Notes Hector (Macho) Camacho is now trained by Los Angeles’ Jimmy Montoya, who has champions already in Juan Meza and Richie Sandoval. Montoya was once known strictly as a purveyor of opponents. . . . Jose Luis Ramirez, admittedly not the attraction, will get only $400,000 for this fight, less than the challenger. All the same, it’s a career high. Though a champion, Ramirez has yet to command respect as much more than a tough puncher. Although he has fought at least 94 times, he hasn’t beaten many name opponents. Ray Mancini and Alexis Arguello both hold decisions over him, as does Edwin Rosario, the man he later beat for the title. . . . The undercard features a heavyweight fight between two highly unpredictable contenders, Mitch (Blood) Green and Trevor Berbick. Thursday, Green did a nice impersonation of a madman and had to be restrained during Berbick’s remarks at a press conference. Berbick, meanwhile, was explaining how his food had been “doped” before a 1983 fight with S.T. Gordon. ‘It was my way of having fun. If I stole a car, in my mind I was borrowing it. It was just part of a game. I’m young, 15 or 16. I’m having fun. Can I get away with it or not, a game, right?’

--HECTOR (MACHO) CAMACHO