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The Best Fighter in the World

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P ound for pound is a cliche of the fight game invented for the late, great Sugar Ray Robinson, a pugilist whose awesome skills transcended weight, class, division or any other artificial category. Many thought he was simply the best there ever was.

What he did in the ring was poetic. It wasn’t a fight, it was a recital, a solo. The opponent was just part of the backdrop.

Sugar Ray retired the title with him. Pound for pound went into pugilism’s mothballs.

Part of the problem was Muhammad Ali. At 220 pounds, he did the things Sugar Ray had done at 160.

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They were cut from the same mold. Brilliant, thrilling, even flashy, they brought beauty and grace to a cruel sport. They put on a ballet, not a brawl. They fought at long range, like two battleships. None of those ugly clinches, rabbit punches or body hooking of your club fighters.

Watching Robinson fight was like watching Mays bat, Koufax pitch, or, for that matter, Kelly dance. A work of art.

They’re dusting off the cliche now. For the first time in a quarter-century, or since the real Sugar Ray retired, they figure they have a pug who rates the comparison.

Julio Cesar Chavez is nobody’s picture fighter. He makes his fight like an oncoming freight. He’s a swarmer, a body puncher. His speed is not remarkable. He’s as hard to discourage as an insurance salesman, as painstaking as a guy building a ship in a bottle. He goes after his man like a guy chopping a tree. He doesn’t swing and fall back like the big hitters. He keeps chopping till the other guy disappears.

What he does appears so unremarkable, the first time you see him fight, you begin to wonder if somebody isn’t using his name. Guys build tunnels with more flash than this.

A Sugar Ray fight was such a tour de force, he took to fighting only one minute of every round in his declining years. But there was enough incandescence in those 60 seconds to light up the ring and dazzle the judges and the audience to the extent Ray could go into semi-retirement the other two minutes and still win the round.

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Ray’s fights were like operas, brilliant, heart-stopping arias followed by long periods of gloomy drum rolls and oboes.

But if you could set Sugar Ray’s bouts to music, you could set Julio Cesar’s to the sound a hammer makes clanging on an anvil.

They are all of a piece. The opponent starts out dancing, streaking, popping those flourishes of jabs, hooks and crosses. Chavez just plods. He ignores the head, bangs rock-like fists on the unprotected parts of the opponent’s anatomy.

He appears to be losing on all cards--until suddenly the other guy begins to look like something crawling out of a train wreck. The face gets gray, the knees get weak, he starts to wince a lot.

Chavez’s fight with Meldrick Taylor was prototypical. Taylor, elusive, swift, slick, piled up points like a guy raking in chips with aces. Chavez was not distracted. He was like a guy looking for a pot of money he was sure was in there someplace.

Taylor began looking like a guy who smells smoke. He began to run. But not fast enough. Chavez dumped him in a corner with a right cross that scrambled him so thoroughly the referee stopped the bout with only two seconds remaining. It was the latest any fight had ever been stopped, but referee Richard Steele defended himself by saying he had no intention of presiding over a homicide.

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Julio Cesar Chavez fights three minutes of every round and throws rocks. He has probably the hardest fists since Marciano. If Roberto Duran had hands of stone, Chavez has hands of concrete. Where they hit, you hemorrhage.

But what makes the fight game resurrect the old pound-for-pound accolade is not his style but the fact that he has had 73 fights and never lost one. Not even the original Sugar Ray could put up those kinds of numbers--Jake LaMotta beat him in Fight 40. It’s doubtful if any other fighter in history ever did. Or will.

It will come as no surprise to anyone who ever fought him that Julio Cesar Chavez was so hyperactive as a child they made a fighter out of him to get him tired enough to sleep at night. He had more stored energy than a coal mine.

“I couldn’t sit still,” he says.

He is still so hyped up, he paces in his sleep. Most fighters hate the training grind. Julio is glad he has bags to punch, ropes to skip and partners to spar. Otherwise, he gets restless. It’s all he can do to sit down between rounds.

What comes as a surprise is that the young Chavez lost the first gloved fight he ever had. To a girl.

“It was the sister of a friend,” he recalls, laughing. “She beat me good.”

Far from being humiliated, even in macho Mexico, Julio was amused. Also motivated.

When you win 73 anything in a row, you are in an elite of your profession, sport or otherwise. DiMaggio hits in 56 consecutive games and the baseball world still can’t believe it. An end catches a touchdown pass in 100 games, a basketball player makes 80 consecutive free throws, a jockey wins eight races in a day, he’s in a class by himself.

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Win 73 out of 73 fights and you become the pound-for-pound champion of the world. Julio Cesar Chavez has not only won 73 fights in a row but four titles--super-featherweight, lightweight, super-lightweight, junior welterweight.

He goes for 74 against New Orleans’ John Duplessis on the Tyson-Ruddock card at Las Vegas Monday night, risking his super-lightweight title as well as his pound-for-pound title.

Does he know who the original pound-for-pound champion was?

“I have seen videotapes of his fights,” he said. “I see him as one of the great champions of all time. I am honored to be associated and to be mentioned with a great champion like that.”

You get the feeling the man who gave the world the pound-for-pound title in the first place might approve of this successor, and might be honored, too.

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