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Chavez Has to Fight to Finish for Decision : Boxing: He survives head butt in first round and gets unanimous victory over Kamau.

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

Julio Cesar Chavez, cut up and forced to crank it up in the late rounds, survived another one Saturday night.

Suffering from a gash over his left eye after a first-round head butt, and given all he could handle by lanky, long-reaching challenger David Kamau, Chavez officially retained his World Boxing Council super-lightweight title by unanimous decision before 4,500 at the Mirage.

But judging by the unofficial indicators--Chavez’s fevered, worried expression as he winged wildly at Kamau in the final rounds--Chavez did not win this bout as much as he salvaged it.

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Even on the judges’ cards through seven rounds, Chavez knocked down Kamau with a short left in the eighth and powered through the tiring Kenyan until the 12th-round bell sounded.

“I want everybody to see, even though they say I’m old and should retire, I can still do it in the ring,” Chavez said through an interpreter after the fight. “I’m still Julio Cesar Chavez of old.”

In the first half of the fight, however, Chavez, 33, was beaten to the punch and beaten up by Kamau, who showed surprising resiliency and ruggedness throughout.

The main questions about Kamau coming into this fight centered on his ability to stay away from Chavez’s body punching and his taste for heavy, world championship contact.

Kamau, who waited for this shot at Chavez for more than a year, absorbed plenty of hard shots from Chavez but never was in serious danger of being knocked out.

Chavez (96-1-1), who says he hopes to retire after fighting Oscar De La Hoya next year in his 100th bout, blamed his slow start on the cut, which caused him to paw blood out of his eye continually, and blamed referee Mills Lane for not temporarily halting the fight when the butt occurred.

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In the ring immediately after the fight, Lane told Chavez he missed the call on the Kamau butt. Because Lane did not recognize the butt, if Chavez had to quit due to the bleeding, the victory would have been given to Kamau by knockout.

After the fight, Chavez was stitched up by his private doctor and did not attend the post-fight news conference.

But in the ring, when the decision was announced, he looked relieved that his short-term retirement plans had not been soured. Chavez is slated to fight WBC lightweight champion Miguel Angel Gonzalez in either November or December and is tentatively scheduled to face De La Hoya next May.

Kamau (26-1), for his part, claimed that the eighth-round knockdown should have been ruled a slip--Kamau’s feet appeared to slide under him just as Chavez delivered the blow.

“To me, I won the fight, because the knockdown was not a knockdown, it was a slip,” Kamau said. “He pushed me.

“I thought he won maybe two rounds at most.”

Kamau also argued that a Chavez slip in the last round--where replays clearly showed that Chavez lost his feet without getting hit--should have been ruled a knockdown.

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For many, the result was an echo of past curious Chavez endings, including his majority-decision draw against Pernell Whitaker in September of 1993, and his head-butt-shortened decision victory in his rematch against Frankie Randall in May of 1994.

Judge Larry O’Connell of England scored it 116-114, Anek Hongtongkam of Thailand had it 116-113, and Carol Castellano of Las Vegas had it 117-110.

The Times scored it a draw, 114-114.

In an earlier fight, Terry Norris, only a month after regaining his WBC super-welterweight belt for the second time, successfully defended it by stopping David Gonzales with one second remaining in the ninth round.

Norris (40-6, 25 knockouts) knocked Gonzales down in the first and fifth rounds, and was pounding Gonzales (40-5) viciously in the ninth before referee Richard Steele stepped in to end it.

Michael Carbajal knocked down Goya Garcia in the first round and battered him at will before finally stopping him at 1:46 of the third round in a junior-flyweight fight.

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