He Seeks to Climb Back Into His Prime

The wrinkled newspaper clipping from Mexico City said Julio Cesar Chavez was going down.

“His body will be broken,” it read. “It is too late for him to change.”

In the middle of a ring lined with sycophants, Chavez clutched the clipping with the thumb of his white boxing glove.

He waved it in the air like a burning torch.

He howled.

But only one person was howling with him.

It was the reporter who had given him the story.

Howling with fear.

“Not my paper! Not my paper!” he said.

As if Chavez was going to climb through the ropes and deck him.

As if Chavez is capable of surprising anybody anymore.

As he prepares to box in front of devoted Southland followers for the first time in seven years--tonight at the Pond of Anaheim against Joey Gamache--it is apparent this legend has a much bigger battle to fight.

The one to maintain, well, the legend.

Where once Chavez could sell out a house in a day, the 18,000-seat Pond will be only two-thirds full.

Where once he could fill a gym on a hot afternoon--hundreds came simply to watch him do sit-ups--he recently attracted fewer than two dozen to the La Habra Boxing Club.

Where once every laugh turned into a roomful of laughs, today he sometimes laughs alone.

Well, OK, his handlers also chuckled last week when he spit water on them.

“This fight is the start of a new era for me,” Chavez said.

It certainly seems that way.

An era in which he is no different from dozens of other slow-slinging, hard-living, fast-wrinkling pugs.

We last left him drowning in blood and excuses after suffering a fourth-round technical knockout at the fast hands of Oscar De La Hoya in their June 7 summit.

Since then, he has:

--Been charged by Mexican officials with committing more than $1 million in tax fraud.

--Been sued for divorce and accused of spousal abuse by his wife, Amalia Carrasco.

--Ducked both problems by staying out of sight, ensconced in havens from East Los Angeles to the mountains in upstate New York.

“We cannot tell you where we were,” said Jose “Buffalo” Martin, his trainer. “Because we may need to use those places again.”

One of the reasons this fight is not sold out, perhaps, is that Chavez missed its first promotional press conference because he could not be found.

He claims innocence to both the tax and abuse charges. He has not been arrested and has seen his three children, but none of this is befitting a man who fought 92 times before suffering his first unreversed defeat.

And certainly, one might think, not befitting a champion of the people.

Which is what Chavez claims he is.

As opposed to De La Hoya, who since winning his championship June 7 has done such boring things as marshaling parades, funding scholarships and buying inner-city gyms.

“They say De La Hoya is pretty boy,” Chavez snorts. “I am prettier.”

That’s what this is all about, of course. Not Gamache, not Anaheim, not a $1.4 million purse.

It’s about De La Hoya. It’s about their tentative rematch next spring.

It’s about Chavez maintaining his strange hold on this community’s Mexican-American boxing fans against all common sense.

Chavez, 34, says he will retire if he loses tonight.

Yeah, and he really thinks those newspaper stories about his broken body are funny.

“De La Hoya, that is the fight I am waiting for. We will then see who the real champion is,” Chavez said.

He maintains that the cut over his left eye--which began bleeding in the first round of that first fight--was actually suffered in training three weeks earlier.

Only now Chavez is adding a new spin--saying that the cut was reopened in a collision with his 3-year-old son while they were roughhousing five days before the fight.

“For De La Hoya not to realize I was not ready for the fight, he is full of it,” Chavez said. “I came to that fight cut. I should not have gotten into the ring. It will be different next time.”

It is different already. Those who watch Chavez spar these days wince, and not because anyone is getting hurt.

“What is happening now is, Julio is drawing back when he punches, so you can see them coming, and it lessens the impact,” sparring partner Jeff Mayweather said. “And he really doesn’t go all out much anymore. Some days, maybe.”

He has not knocked out anybody in nearly five years. In his last 12 fights he is 9-2-1.

Many have read the stories of De La Hoya walking into the Forum and being greeted with chants of “Cha-vez! Cha-vez!”

But that may be changing too.

Chavez was leaving the La Habra Boxing Club after a recent workout, signing autographs and posing for photos with several fans, when a cry was heard from a guy standing next to a pickup truck.

A working-class guy with a tattoo.

A Chavez sort of guy.

“De La Hoya!” he shouted. “De La Hoya!”