Now, He Has Come to Realize the Only Important Thing He Lost at the Time Was His Cool

Each man is entitled to greet adversity in his own way. The poet, Kipling, said triumph and disaster were twin impostors and should be treated just the same.

Athletes are not always convinced. Take prizefighters.

Jack Dempsey, after a terrible beating in his first fight with Gene Tunney, was able to joke. “I forgot to duck,” he shrugged to his wife, Estelle.

But Floyd Patterson, on the other hand, after losing to Sonny Liston, was mortified. He slipped out of town in the dead of night and was picked up by the cops two state lines away, speeding away from his humiliation wearing a false beard and dark glasses. He thought he had let the world down.

Jaime Garza can relate. Jaime Garza is a world-class bantamweight who looked like the most devastating thing to come out of the border towns since Pancho Villa.

He had a sledgehammer right. He was fast, tricky and was widely perceived to be as durable as the desert. No fewer than 12 of his first 30 fights ended in one-round knockouts, 9 ended in two-round knockouts and 6 in three rounds. If Jaime had a fault, it was that he wasn’t in the ring long enough to become a seasoned pro. He had 35 fights, but altogether they didn’t add up to more than three or four 10-rounders.

One of the unprofessional things he did was lose his temper. This is never a good plan in sports, but in prizefighting it is disastrous. There’s a pugilistic proverb that a man who goes into the ring with blood in the eye will come out of it with it all over him.

Jaime won the World Boxing Council’s super-bantamweight title (122 pounds) and was 40-0 in his career with 38 knockouts when he signed for a televised title defense in Kingston, N.Y., in 1984 against Juan (Kid) Meza, an in-and-outer from Las Vegas. It was supposed to have been a showcase bout for Garza, not really a contest at all.

But pre-fight publicity in this era of Ali seems to call for a certain amount of name-calling, bogus hype, finger-pointing and schoolyard bantering.

It can be dangerous to the name-caller. Benny (Kid) Paret lost his life in the ring after infuriating Emile Griffith with taunts questioning Griffith’s manhood.

But in Jaime Garza’s case, it was harmful to the taunted not the taunter.

Some guys fight out of a crouch, others out of a stick-and-run. Jaime fought out of a cold rage. Meza had sneered at him at the weigh-in and press conferences until Garza had lost not only his cool but his skill.

“I was so mad, I wanted to kill him,” Garza said. “I couldn’t even remember where I was or what I was doing. I turned it into a street fight. I knocked him down and I didn’t even know it. My mind went blank. It was like the two of us were locked in a dark room and one of us was going to come out alive.”

Ringsiders attest that he gave Meza a terrible beating for the first two minutes of the first round.

“His face was all beat up, but I was still upset by the things he said to me,” Garza said. “I wanted to destroy him. It was like I was out of control.”

Two things happened. He made Meza desperate, and he made himself vulnerable. A left hook whistled out of nowhere and caught a wide-open Garza flush on the chin. The referee stopped the bout with only 15 seconds to go in the round.

Garza lost more than a fight. He lost his identity. He knocked himself out colder than Meza did. He couldn’t face his friends. He couldn’t face the world.

“I got in my car and drove back and forth between Texas and Los Angeles. It was like I was running away from myself. I got speeding tickets, I went on shopping sprees. Look! (He held up an armful of gold watches, rings and bracelets.) How many clocks do you need to know what time it is?”

He found Jaime Garza harder to get away from than his ring opponent had. He even transferred his anger to the referee.

“Why did he stop it? I’ve been worse hurt in other fights and came back to win on instinct. I want a referee who will let me get killed in the ring.”

His manager, Bennie Georgino, contradicted him. “It was a good stop. I would’ve thrown in the towel if he didn’t stop it.”

Garza finally stopped running when he realized that a pugilistic career that read 40-1 is hardly a cause to spend your life in sackcloth and ashes.

“I had a talk with myself. I said, ‘Hey, you’re not being professional. Fighters get beat. I beat lots of guys.’ ”

Jaime returned to the ring with a new outlook. And it served him better than his left hook. He began to dispatch opponents with the dispassionate efficiency of a guy fixing the plumbing. He doesn’t even dream of getting even with Meza.

“Naw,” he scoffed. “He’ll just be a number if I fight him again. Except, this time, I’m not going to help him.”

Jaime will fight Carlos Linares under the dome at the Spruce Goose exhibit in Long Beach Wednesday night. If he loses this time, he promises, he will not hit the highways like a getaway car in a crime spree.

The professional approach is exemplified by the old-time pitcher who got racked for a game-winning home run by a rookie. The pitcher turned and as he watched the ball sail out, spat, stuck his glove in his pocket and said, “Son of a gun hit a good pitch!”

And if Dempsey can say “I forgot to duck,” who is Garza to think he has to hit the road forever?

Professionalism is just learning not to take it personally.