Sweet Swinger : Michael Carbajal Is a Nice Guy in What Can Be a Nasty Game

During the summer of 1987, at the Pan American Games in Indianapolis, an American boxing team was getting its brains beaten out every day by an outstanding Cuban team.

The exception was one American boxer, Michael Carbajal, the team’s 106-pound light-flyweight from Phoenix.

Carbajal started by beating a Cuban and was rolling toward what seemed a certain gold medal. Then, in the gold-medal match against Puerto Rican Luis Rolon, Carbajal was unexpectedly flat and listless. He lost a decision.

His brother, Danny, was asked what had happened.

“If I tell you, you have to promise not to put it in the paper,” Danny Carbajal said.

The bargain was made.

“OK, Michael had a temperature of 101 last night,” Danny said. “He had the sweats all night, and he has a very sore throat.”

“Why don’t you want that in the paper?”

“Because Rolon is a very nice kid, and he’s just won a gold medal. His family is really excited about it. We don’t want to say anything that would take away from it.”

That’s the Carbajal way.

Sometimes, nice guys do finish first.

Carbajal fights Mexican light-flyweight champion Humberto Gonzalez on Saturday night in a pay-per-view showdown of the world’s two toughest little men.

In the making for two years, it’s a meeting of the International Boxing Federation’s light-flyweight (108 pounds) champion, Carbajal, and the World Boxing Council’s champion, Gonzalez.

Carbajal still lives with his brothers and sisters on Fillmore Street, just off downtown Phoenix. It’s what one would charitably call a tough neighborhood. There are graffiti and trash about, along with abandoned cars.

Danny, Michael’s older brother, lives next door in a house built in 1910. When Michael was 10, Danny built him a tiny back-yard gym with a six-foot ring. Michael still works out there part of the time, but does his serious training at a downtown gym.

The Carbajals can’t tell you how hot it gets in the back-yard gym in the summer, because the thermometer only goes to 120.

Early in his pro career, when Carbajal earned his first $50,000 purse and needed a car, he bought a 1962 Chevy. At roughly the same time, Danny treated himself to a 1979 Jeep. “Around here, Danny and Michael aren’t what you’d call big tippers,” a family friend once said.

As Michael’s earning power grows in boxing, why haven’t they fled to someplace like Scottsdale?

“Why? This is my neighborhood. I grew up here,” Michael said. “I might buy a place one day for my mom and dad, but I’ll still stay here.”

Far from running from their dilapidated, troubled old neighborhood, the Carbajals are trying to improve it. They are acquiring a vacant lot on their street and say they will build a youth boxing gym there.

“I grew up on these streets,” Michael said. “I know the pressures a lot of these young kids feel. I want to give them a chance to get off the streets.”

And when they build that gym, there won’t be any splashy news conference.

They will just do it.

It’s the Carbajal way.

At the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, in the gold-medal light-flyweight bout, Carbajal was robbed of a decision against a Bulgarian, Ivailo Hristov. At that time, it was the worst Olympic boxing decision many longtime observers could recall.

But an hour later, judges produced an even worse verdict--the Roy Jones light-middleweight match with South Korean Park Si-Hun. That one was so bad, it nearly got boxing kicked out of the Olympics.

So only for an hour or so was Michael Carbajal the famous victim of a judges’ mugging in Seoul.

After the Carbajal decision, in the interview room, frustrated reporters poked and prodded the Carbajals for 20 minutes, trying to extract outrage.

They didn’t understand.

It wasn’t the Carbajal way.

“I guess it just wasn’t meant to be,” Michael Carbajal mumbled.

His dignity remained intact in a manner strikingly similar to that displayed four years earlier in Los Angeles by Evander Holyfield, who was tossed out of the Olympics on a questionable foul call by a Yugoslav referee.

Las Vegas promoter Bob Arum, who has promoted all of Michael’s fights, calls the Carbajals “charming, decent people.”

“Danny is a very soft-spoken guy, but very smart, too,” Arum said.

“There’s no bluster. When he sits down to negotiate with me, he talks very softly but very firmly. He’s several times talked me into paying Michael more than I wanted, but he’s done it without ever raising his voice.

“The two of them are unlike any others I’ve ever dealt with in boxing. They’re not at all like the people who abuse me verbally.”

Carbajal has fashioned a 27-0 record since turning pro four years ago. His two toughest battles were his 1990 IBF title fight with Mungchai Kittikasem of Thailand in Phoenix, when he won his title, and a 1991 close call with Javier Varguez in Las Vegas.

In what turned into a brawl, Carbajal stopped Kittikasem in seven rounds. His fight with Varguez was unexpectedly difficult, the decision so close that many reporters there scored it for Varguez.

Whatever, Carbajal is 8-0 in championship fights. And he’s favored to beat Gonzalez, who has a 35-1 record. Carbajal-Gonzalez was once viewed as a match in which two light-flyweights, for the first time, would each earn $1 million.

But Gonzalez tripped over a virtually unknown Filipino, Rolando Pascua, who knocked him out at the Forum in 1990.

“It’s just the way it is,” Carbajal said, shrugging his shoulders. “There’s nothing I can do about it.

“It just means I’ll have to beat him and move on to someone else to get that really big payday.”

You can’t even get this guy angry by pointing out that the purse he will make Saturday, $300,000, is pocket change compared to what heavyweights make. They can fall down in front of the cameras and earn $1 million.

“There’s nothing I can do about that, either,” he said, with another shrug.

“I don’t know why it is. I think guys in my weight class show people a lot more action. Little guys are making more all the time. Maybe our day will come.”