His Attack Is Simple, to the Point

It’s the eyes that give Julio Cesar Chavez away. They are alert, dangerous. A hunter’s eyes. They are the eyes of a wild animal peering out from beneath the underbrush. Sizing up his quarry. The eyes of a crouched leopard. They are calculating. They are wary, watchful, without pity. You see them, you back away.

Chavez has done something none of the great ones ever did in pugilism--win 84 fights without a loss. To conjure up how impressive a feat that is, you have to know that the great Willie Pep won 63 in a row before his first loss. Rocky Marciano never lost. But he was only on his 49th fight when he quit. The legendary Sugar Ray Robinson lost his 41st fight.

Eighty-four fights are a lot to have, never mind win. Jack Dempsey had 78 in his career. (Chavez has 71 knockouts. One of them, over Miguel Ruiz, took place after the bell, which resulted in a brief disqualification for Chavez, later reversed and ruled a one-round knockout. And five months later, he knocked out Ruiz in one round again.)

The fight mob has a term for these kinds of pugs. They call them “pound-for-pound” the greatest in the game. English translation: With these skills, if they weighed 220, they would beat the world.

Chavez makes his fight like a lion chasing a zebra. It looks frenzied, reckless. It isn’t. It is methodical, relentless, tireless. He has never taken a backward step in his career. He cuts off the ring, he blocks retreat, he is like a general who knows he has the superior forces and has only to get the enemy to stop and fight.

It is not flashy. There are no dazzling displays of fisticuffs or footwork. Chavez is like a surgeon. Except that, when he probes for a weakness, he exploits it. His program is to take a bad situation and make it immediately and infinitely worse.

There is no secret to his attack.

“He fights you three minutes of every round and he throws rocks,” the veteran handler, Eddie Futch, has said.

His name should be Rocky. He is an anomaly among Mexican fighters, who are probably pugilism’s bravest. But if they have a fault, it would be that they do not learn their trade from the wily old masters in the drafty gyms of Philadelphia and New York, the bent-nose pail-carriers who teach their young charges that it is not unmanly to slip or block a punch or get out of harm’s way, that it is sometimes macho to duck and run.

Chavez looks easy to hit. He isn’t. He takes blows where they should be taken--on his gloves, not his ears. Not that it matters. He is as indestructible in motion as a locomotive. And equally unstoppable.

Growing up in Culiacan, his idol was the bantamweight champion of the world, Ruben Olivares, who won 60 consecutive fights and the title in the late 1960s and ‘70s until the cantinas began to do to him what his opponents couldn’t. Kid Tequila was his toughest opponent. Chavez was a well-kept secret for his early years. Nobody north of Navajoa got to see him. He scored knockouts in 25 of his first 26 fights--until he came to the attention of promoter Don King, after winning something called the super-featherweight championship from somebody named Mario Martinez. King put the act on Broadway, so to speak, or, at least, Las Vegas, where Chavez destroyed a pretty good featherweight named Roger Mayweather.

It soon became apparent that guys who fought Chavez got increasingly discouraged as the evening would wear on. He had several opponents quit in their corners. His technique was simple: Mount a devastating body attack. When they dropped their guard, he knocked them out. He almost never took anybody out early. He punished them severely. Like Marciano, he seemed to put a lot of opponents into retirement--or wheelchairs.

Chavez is 30 now, and Don King has convinced the world that he is a pocket Dempsey. They matched him with a college boy out of Indiana last Sunday in Las Vegas’ Mirage hotel.

Marty Jakubowski didn’t look like much on paper. He didn’t look like much on foot, either. He seemed to confuse fighting with track and field. He ran like a thief for the six rounds he lasted. He ran backward, faster than anybody since Mussolini’s army. Chavez could beat him, all right. But first, he had to find him. Jakubowski went around the ring like an Indy car around a track. He moved so fast, you had to look two feet in front of him or you would miss him.

He screamed bloody murder when they stopped the fight, but, if it had gone a few more rounds, he wouldn’t have been able to scream. Talking would have been no piece of cake, either.

Chavez spent the night like a guy catching a bus, but when he caught up, Jakubowski would get out of there like a guy leaving a hotel fire. No one could figure why Jakubowski objected to stopping the fight. He never started it.

One trouble with being the “pound-for-pound” champion, though, is, your contemporaries resent it.

During the post-fight interview in Vegas the other night, first Terry Norris, the World Boxing Council super-welterweight champion, irritated Chavez by demanding a showdown fight.

Then, Greg Haugen, who will be Chavez’s next opponent in a mid-February Mexico City extravaganza and who has the liberal social slant on things of a Josef Goebbels, got into the picture when a visiting journalist asked Chavez, “How do you respond to Haugen’s charge that your record is ’80 victories against Mexican cabdrivers?’ ”

Shot back Chavez: “I say Haugen is a racist and a bigot, and I’m going to shut his face once and for all on February 20.”

It can be seen from all this that being the pound-for-pound champion is not all sombreros in the air and two ears and a tail. On the other hand, Haugen might want to amend his judgments. Or he may wind up, pound-for-pound, a giant hamburger in Mexico on Feb. 20. As soon as he sees those eyes coming, he may want to run for the Land Rover.