He Earns a Fistful of Respect

I have never been a fan of the prizefighter, Julio Cesar Chavez.

I am now.

I thought he was overrated. I thought he was too small, too slow, couldn’t punch hard enough, couldn’t box oranges.

He really wasn’t impressive. All he seemed to bring into the ring with him was an infinite capacity to stand pain, absorb punishment and remain upright. In the old days, they’d dub a fighter like this the Rubber Man and use him as a trial horse, a kind of complicated punching bag for the real contenders.

How he won 68 fights with no defeats confounded me. All I could think of was Leo Durocher’s line about Eddie Stanky: “He can’t run, he can’t hit, he can’t field--all he does is beat you.”

My colleagues wrote that Chavez was, pound for pound, the best fighter in the ring. I thought that was sacrilegious. Sugar Ray Robinson was the pound-for-pound fighter. They invented the term for him. He could do everything Chavez couldn’t--punch, box, move. He only got hit every other eclipse of the moon.

Julio Cesar Chavez fought like a guy on snowshoes. He made his fight like an oncoming train. Nothing nifty about it.

Sometimes, you find out more about a man in a fight he loses. I found out about Julio Cesar Chavez in a fight he lost in Las Vegas the other night.

Oh, I know the record books will say Julio Cesar won that fight but, take my word for it, he didn’t.

He took a right proper licking for 11 1/2 rounds. At least I thought he did. So did two of the ringside judges. A guy who was not so sure was referee Richard Steele. Well, he was closer to the action than any of us.

Perhaps you saw it, perhaps only read about it, but Julio fought a pretty nifty, speedy Philadelphian, the ex-Olympic gold medal winner Meldrick Taylor. Now, Taylor was not 68-0 but he was 24-0-1, which is the next best thing. He had one draw to mar his record.

He gave Chavez a pretty good going over most of the fight at the Hilton in Las Vegas. He repeatedly got off first and winged three punches to Julio’s one. He dug lefts in Julio’s body that seemed to lift him two feet in the air.

In a way, he made only one mistake in the whole fight: He got up. That is to say, he got up at the count of five when he got knocked down at the end of the 12th round.

When he got up, the referee stopped the contest. There were two seconds-- 2 seconds! --left in the fight. It was the most astonishing hook in the history of the fight game. More than 9,000 jaws dropped in the arena, and on cable television, millions couldn’t believe their eyes.

It is possible there were not 10 seconds to go in the fight when he got knocked down. The red light was blinking in the corner over his head, signaling that. If the count had gone to nine, he could have been saved by the bell and won the fight. Under modern rules, the only round in which you can be saved by the bell is the last.

You didn’t know whether to laugh or get mad. At first, it looked as if good old pugilistic gamesmanship was at work here. Bear in mind that Chavez is a Don King fighter and that King still wields considerable influence over the conduct of the sport.

What was Steele stopping this contest for? Well, he explained, not altogether convincingly, that he was able to see when Meldrick got up, that the fighter was badly hurt.

Indubitably. But then Steele said he didn’t want Meldrick to absorb any further punishment.

From whom? From his corner men? They were going to slap him around with wet towels, were they?

There were only two seconds left in the fight. I told you, Julio Cesar is slow. He couldn’t get across the ring in two seconds, let alone start to land punches.

By the time Steele would have wiped off Taylor’s gloves, the final bell would have rung.

Now, I yield to no man in my belief that you cannot stop a one-sided fight too soon. But I must admit you can stop one too late.

But, having said that, and before you call your congressman, let’s examine the performance of Julio Cesar in that fight. Let us render to Cesar the things that are Cesar’s.

I am not sure he deserved to lose it.

It is the notion here that the point system is not always felicitous in judging the outcome of a fight. Fights used to be to the finish and, although that seems barbaric, there are times when you should take into account the relative condition of the fighters at the finish.

I will tell you why: There are certain fighters who more or less concede the first few rounds of a championship fight to their opponents. They are exploring, not fighting, probing for weaknesses. If early rounds counted, in war, Germany and Japan would have been the winners of World War II. Let’s put it this way: They had a great first half. But you don’t score a football game by quarters or a baseball game by innings.

Julio Cesar Chavez strikes me as being that kind of a fighter who would discount the early rounds. He is like a plumber trying to find out where the leak is. When he finds it, he goes to work on it.

There was the interesting discovery at the fight Saturday night that, as the rounds wore on, you began to notice a peculiar thing: Taylor was doing all the landing--but Taylor was doing all the bleeding, too.

Chavez’s punches might not look all that impressive, but their results are. Taylor was swollen in both eyes and bleeding from the nose and mouth as the bout wore on. Even if he had won, it could not have done him a great deal of good. He looked like a guy who had just been run over by a truck.

Chavez is a study in indomitability. His heart, pound for pound, is the biggest in the game today. He didn’t win the fight by the Marquess of Queensberry rules. But Richard Steele might have served a kind of poetic justice at that.

Julio Cesar Chavez not only didn’t lose a fight, he gained a fan. I’m a fan from now on.