CHAVEZ’S ATTITUDE IS . . . : Down to Earth : Unbeaten Boxer Leaves His Mountain to Prepare for Bout Against Whitaker

Julio Cesar Chavez has come down from the mountain, so the transformation from sacrifice to symbolism has begun.

He is in Los Angeles--his loud, rumbling city of good luck--moving from hotel to gym to dinner at a friend’s house, gulping down the brown air that he says makes him fuerte --strong.

He is down from the Mexican mountain village of Temoya, where he has spent several weeks training near a shrine of the Otomi Indians, who live as they did centuries ago. From there, Chavez comes here, where he has added a new red Ferrari to his car collection.

“Always, before every one of my fights, I come here,” Chavez says through an interpreter in the back of a limousine taking him to the Azteca Gym in East Los Angeles.

“I like to sacrifice and battle very hard in the mountains . . . and when you come here, you feel strong.”

Sacrifice and denial, then strength.

“Temoya is a place that’s isolated from everyone,” Chavez says. “You can only concentrate on your training there. There are no distractions. You live life in a very different way. There, you learn to value life, to appreciate the things you have.

“This,” Chavez says, meaning Los Angeles, “is a place where I feel very good, thank God. People are a little pushy at times, but I accept it. It comes with the flow.”

Here, he cannot walk through the narrow lanes of Olvera Street without drawing a swarm of well-wishers who scream when he climbs onto a wooden platform and dons a sombrero.

Here, he can barely watch the action when he goes to the Forum to see the fights because of the fans pouring toward his seat.

Here, he walks across a hotel lobby right in front of Raider Coach Art Shell and draws more attention.

Julio Cesar Chavez has come down from the mountain, and it is not quiet anymore.

“May-hee-co! May-hee-co!” They shout. “Cha-vez! Cha-vez!”

Chavez says: “I love the people around me and I know that they love me. . . . But sometimes it’s very tiring. To move away from it all, you kind of need it.

“(After retirement) I don’t want to be around people. I am going to be sure I can just be alone. Very quiet.”

But for now, in the last days before Friday’s fight in San Antonio against Pernell Whitaker, Chavez accepts and abides by the pull of his fans.

When you have an 87-0 record--his only defeat, a referee’s decision on a foul early in Chavez’s career, was reversed a few days later--are the World Boxing Council junior-welterweight champion, have never been knocked down and are considered Mexico’s No. 1 sports figure, what you say and do takes on monumental importance.

“I know I symbolize something,” says Chavez, 31. “I don’t really know what.”

Chavez acknowledges that his resistance to moving from Culiacan, his hometown, is part symbolic, that he will not run from the place that nurtured him. And he grudgingly concedes that other parts of his life--his devotion to family, his sacrifice in the mountains, his pride in Mexico--do have great meaning to others.

*

The limo doesn’t leave the front of the hotel until Chavez is ready, which he is not. Three other cars are ready to go, but he sits in the back, staring out the window.

Then the side door opens and Chavez lets out a loud, happy roar, “Omaa-aaaar!” Suddenly, Omar, his 3-year-old son, is in the limo, and now it can go.

For the next 15 minutes, as the car nudges through traffic, a national hero holds his son to him.

In the gym, Omar is a warrior, of course, putting on his father’s gloves, attacking the legs of the man commonly referred to as the greatest pound-for-pound fighter in the world today with high-pitched battle yells.

In the car, on his father’s lap, he throws elbows that find a neck, a cheek, a chin.

“Stop,” his father says. “You might hurt me.”

“No,” Omar says, laughing. “You are too strong.”

Chavez teases Omar about the family’s new pet, a baby lion.

“Did you name the lion Macho Camacho?” he asks Omar, playfully referring to Hector (Macho) Camacho, the fighter Chavez beat last year--also the name of one of the family’s dogs.

“No, not Camacho!” Omar corrects, “Leo.”

“I am the lion,” Chavez says.

As the limo passes the Forum, Chavez tells his son to look, that this is the place where Chavez won two world titles--his first, Sept. 13, 1984, and his third--May 13, 1989.

Omar looks, staring at the building as if it were a shrine.

“When the children are with him, they motivate him,” says Chavez’s wife of nine years, Amalia, who has joined her husband in Los Angeles with their three sons--Julio, 7, Omar and Cristian, 9 months.

“Sometimes I will just send the children to him when he is training, and that motivates him,” Amalia says, “gives him life.”

In May, before Chavez’s last fight, a sixth-round technical knockout of Terrence Alli in Las Vegas, Omar was not there to ride with his father before the fight.

Omar, namesake of the 4-year-old brother Chavez lost 11 years ago in a car accident, was ill then, in fact could barely breath.

Suffering from severe meningitis, Omar was in a hospital in Culiacan.

“Julio was not even aware of the (youngster’s life-threatening) condition,” Amalia says.

“Everyone was telling me, between the doctor and Julio’s friends and the family, not to tell Julio anything, not to distract him. And I held it for many weeks,” Amalia says.

“But when the doctor who examined him said he refused to take the case because it was so complicated, and he couldn’t ensure the child would live, that’s when I broke and I felt I had to share it with my husband.

“I didn’t want him to fight. Everything to me is my children and my husband. There is nothing more important. I begged him and begged him.

“I was surrounded by tons of people, but I felt totally alone. The only person I needed and wanted at that time was my husband, and he was the only one who couldn’t be there.”

Chavez was torn between his responsibility to fight and his duty to his family.

He considered canceling the fight, and broke training to take his son from Culiacan to a hospital in San Diego. He went through with the fight when Omar recovered days beforehand.

“That, to me, is truly a miracle,” Amalia says.

But before the fight, Chavez did not sleep, and withdrew deeper into himself than usual.

“I think people somehow see him as so invincible they think nothing can affect him,” says Gladys M. Rosa, Chavez’s public relations assistant. “His family means a great deal to him. A young man growing up as poor as he and with the disadvantages he had. . . . That’s the one reinforcement he had.

“His family to him is his only prize possession. That’s the only thing that kind of makes him move. He still is not able to talk about his brother’s death.”

This is the man who has 75 knockouts? Who knocked out Meldrick Taylor in the final seconds of the final round of their 1990 fight when he was about to lose?

Other fighters seem to summon energy from their own flamboyance and braggadocio. Chavez stays calm, confident and unaffected.

“This is a great advantage,” Chavez says. “I seem very serious. My opponents, they say, ‘Aw, I can take this one.’ But when they see me in the ring, when I transform myself, then they say to themselves, ‘God, what have I put myself into?’

“And that is when I make them pay for everything they have said.”

*

In a recreation center boxing ring in Inglewood, Chavez is working in the intense heat, hearing the roars of onlookers.

Since he was a teen-age street fighter, Chavez has trained himself, using his own rules and motivation.

He speaks of himself as a fighter by nature, but the intensity in the ring contrasts so starkly with the serenity in the days before the fight, the gentleness with his children. . . .

Myth and mystery, mirth and magic.

“Julio is a man who, although people see him or view him as very simple, he’s actually very complex,” Rosa says. “He has the ability to share a certain part of himself with the public, but he always holds in and reserves that inner part.

“I think people maybe now are seeing a little bit more of him and getting greater understanding than they have in the past.

“But I think Julio will always be a mystery. He likes it that way.”

*

In America, the loud and fast talkers often become super-heroes, and Chavez does not even speak English. In America, he will never be as famous as Muhammad Ali or Sugar Ray Leonard, or even Roberto Duran.

But those who think he has missed his chance here are missing an essential part of Chavez.

“I like the way I am,” Chavez says. “I feel good with the way I am. I don’t need to be like an Ali or a Leonard or anyone. I am Julio. In Mexico, Ali and Leonard are not known well.

“I am Mexican, and people tend to forget that.”

Says Ruben Castillo, a knockout victim of Chavez in 1985: “I think Julio couldn’t care less about (fame in America). Julio is Julio, and he knows that, and he’s big as he needs to be in Julio’s mind. Julio is comfortable being Julio, which is the best fighter in the world today.

“He’s the man who put 120,000 in a stadium in Mexico City (for the Greg Haugen fight). Tell me anybody else--Ali, Leonard, whoever--who could do that.”

Chavez has bristled at times under the promotion of Don King, who used Chavez as an undercard fighter through much of the Mike Tyson era, but Chavez now seems pleased with King and their relationship.

The fight against Whitaker is merely another payday--about $4 million--and defeat is not something he considers.

It is also his opportunity to claim a fourth world title, Whitaker’s WBC welterweight belt.

“Whitaker is just another fighter,” Chavez says. “I am not scared of any of the tricks they will try to pull and the junk he talks. I am a natural fighter, not a made-up fighter. I am not a fighter created in a gym.

“The real truth is that I am better than they are. I am a man with 87 wins in 87 fights. I’ve done such hard work and am so well prepared that I am relaxed, I am calm. I am not worried. It’s not part of my makeup.”

Chavez often speaks longingly of retirement, though, saying it could happen in two or three years--”or maybe sooner.”

One-hundred victories is a goal he calls “something very pretty, very nice, incredible--but it’s difficult.”

“I am not as old as George Foreman, not as old as Roberto Duran,” Chavez says, mentioning two members of the over-40-and-still-fighting club. “I still have a lot to give. That’s why I push myself at this time.”

But trying to pile up 100 victories means 13 more training trips, 13 more one- or two-month spans away from Amalia and the children.

Is it worth it?

“I am looking forward to my trophies and crowns, because I’ve earned them,” Amalia says. “It’s impossible to go out with him alone. I went to the movies with him last night, and 10 people went with us.

“I hope it won’t continue this way. We’ve had conversations where Julio has said to me, ‘During this time, it’s very difficult for me.’ And I completely understand. That’s why I don’t put any pressure on Julio at all. He has all the freedom that he needs.

“But he recognizes that once he retires from boxing, that will be completely different. We will have a home life, a life that we both have built and look forward to.

“People will always have excuses and will always want to pull, but there won’t be any more excuses. It’s not whether he can, it’s that he must. “

*

When Chavez fights, millions watch. But not his wife.

If he should beat Whitaker, Chavez will charge around the ring, do interviews, then bolt to a telephone to tell her what has happened. He has never had to tell her he has lost.

“During the Camacho fight, I received calls saying that Julio lost in the third round, Julio was cut,” Amalia says. “So now I refuse to listen to anyone. The minute he gets in his room, he picks up that phone and he calls me instantly.

“Until I hear his voice telling me what happened, that’s when I’m fine, and I’m calm, not sleepy. Put on the music, drink a Coca Cola, celebrate.

“I dance alone at home, knowing he’s fine.”

She dances and waits--for the day he comes home for good.