BOXING / EARL GUSTKEY : Gilberto Roman: One of the Best of the ‘80s

The news came as a shock. A world-class Mexican fighter was dead. Then, when it was learned later that Gilberto Roman had died in an auto accident Thursday, it opened old wounds, old heartaches.

Roman’s death on the highway from Mexico City to Acapulco occurred eight years after another great Mexican fighter, Salvador Sanchez, had died in an auto accident.

Sanchez was 23 when he lost control of his new Porsche one night while driving alone, at high speed, on a highway north of Mexico City. He crashed into two trucks and died instantly.

Sanchez was a brilliant champion, his best fights still ahead of him. He was 43-2 at the time, 9-0 as the World Boxing Council featherweight champion. If he had lived, it’s not out of the question to imagine his name in lights today on the marquees of Las Vegas.

Roman, at 29, had passed his peak and, in fact, had told friends recently he had retired from boxing, although he hadn’t announced it publicly.

“I talked to him only 10 days ago,” said a distraught Nacho Huizar, often a promoter of Roman’s fights in Mexico.

“Gilberto and I and a lot of his other friends, we all had a big lunch at the Crown Hotel in Mexico City. He told us he was through boxing, that he wanted to find a good business to run somewhere in Mexico.”

That may have been on Roman’s mind Thursday, when he and four friends set out on the five-hour drive south, to Acapulco. He left his pregnant wife, Eva Patricia del Moral, and his 7-year-old daughter, Gabriela, at his Mexico City home.

Police said the car in which Roman was a passenger was struck by a truck near Chilpancingo, 130 miles from Mexico City. All five people in the car were killed.

Until he lost his World Boxing Council super-flyweight championship to Nana Konadu of Ghana last November in Mexico City, Gilberto Roman was a legitimate world champion. In fact, between 1986 and last month, Roman was one of the most successful champions of the 1980s.

He was 13-3 in world title fights. For his career, the two-time super-flyweight champion was 54-6-1, with 35 knockouts.

Roman was a solid technician, an exceptional defensive boxer. He was compact and sturdily built. His muscular build always suggested a power puncher, yet he was more technician than blaster.

“He was so sound fundamentally that every time I went to see him fight, I always felt he would gear his game up to just a notch above the level of his opponent, just enough to win,” said Dean Lohuis, longtime Southland boxing statistician.

The 5-foot-3 Roman belonged in a “How to Box” video. His punches were short, economical, precise, accurate. No one ever saw Roman desperately flailing away. If no punch was there, none was thrown. His Guadalajara adviser-promoter, Rafael Mendoza, liked to call Roman “the Sugar Ray Leonard of the flyweights.”

“If Gilberto was a middleweight, he’d be fighting Leonard and Roberto Duran today and he would beat both of them,” Mendoza said a year ago.

Roman’s upset loss to the hard-hitting Konadu shocked many of those who knew him best, but not close associates. Konadu knocked Roman down five times and easily won a decision in Mexico City in November.

His old friend, Huizar, suggested Friday that Roman had been simply burned out by this demanding sport.

“He used to be the hardest trainer you ever saw, but not the last two or three years,” he said. “He was very tired. He’d been boxing since he was 9 years old. When he told us at lunch he was through with boxing, he seemed very happy.”

Roman represented Mexico at the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games, where he lost a 3-2 decision in the quarterfinals to the eventual flyweight gold medalist, Petar Lessov of Bulgaria.

He turned pro in 1981 and was 40-3 in 1986, when he won the WBC 115-pound championship for the first time, from Jiro Watanabe. He lost the title to Argentina’s Santos Laciar in 1987 but regained it in 1988 from Jose Rojas.

Three of his last five fights were at the Forum, including successful 1989 title defenses against Juan Carazo and Laciar. His last fight was June 10, when he lost on cuts to Moon Sung-Kil in Seoul. It was his 16th championship fight.

When he stopped Daniel Zaragoza at the Forum in April and won the WBC super-bantamweight championship, Quail Valley’s Paul Banke inherited Zaragoza’s mandatory defense in Seoul against South Korean Lee Sung-Hoon.

Or thought he did.

Banke and his manager, Bob Richardson, are scheduled to leave for Seoul on July 9 for a title fight there July 28.

“We’re not fighting Lee,” Richardson said the other day.

“OK, who is Paul fighting?” he was asked.

“I have no idea,” he said.

Only in boxing.

Lee is the WBC’s top-ranked contender, but Richardson says he was told by a Seoul promoter that Lee would not be the opponent. When Richardson asked who it would be, the promoter told him: “We’ll get back to you on that.” That was several weeks ago.

There are four South Koreans ranked among the top 10 fighters in this month’s WBC super-bantamweight rankings.

“All we can do is prepare,” Richardson said. “Paul’s training very hard, he’ll be ready for anyone . . . but it’d be nice to have a name.”

Boxing Notes

It looks as if the next Mike Tyson-George Foreman doubleheader will be held in Atlantic City, N.J., Sept. 22. Tyson is to fight Alex Stewart, and Foreman’s opponent will be Italy’s Francesco Damiani. Both should be considerable improvements over Henry Tillman and Adilson Rodrigues, both of whom were beaten early by Tyson and Foreman June 16 at Caesars Palace.

Promoter Bob Arum said Donald Trump has reached “agreement in principle” for the show, scheduled for the day after the proposed Buster Douglas-Evander Holyfield championship fight at the Mirage in Las Vegas. Wonder how the beleaguered Trump’s bankers feel about his shelling out a $3-million site fee for the Tyson-Foreman show?