One Key to Vargas’ Future Might Be Escaping His Past

If only life could be simple for Fernando Vargas.

If only he could spend all his time in the ring, facing men who want to smash his nose, break his ribs and close his eyes.

Ah, the good life.

But eventually, the final bell rings and Vargas must slip through the ropes and out into the real world.

Here, life is not always so easy.

True, Vargas has a lot going for him. At 22, he is the International Boxing Federation junior-middleweight champion, he is 18-0 with 17 knockouts and, on Saturday, he will have the biggest fight of his young career, taking on Ike Quartey in Las Vegas’ Mandalay Bay Events Center.

Should Vargas win--he’s a 2-1 favorite--even better things appear to lie ahead. More fame, more status, much more money and possibly an even bigger fight in October--against Felix Trinidad for supremacy in the 154-pound division.

And beyond that, if Vargas remains unbeaten, perhaps the ultimate showdown for him, a match against the object of his scorn, his Southern California rival, Oscar De La Hoya.

So what’s the problem?

Simply put, you can take the fighter out of the ‘hood, but Vargas says it’s a lot harder to get the ‘hood out of the fighter.

Vargas ran with a rough crowd while growing up in Oxnard. He was a renowned street fighter long before he discovered the La Colonia Youth Boxing Club, where he honed his skills.

Many hoped that, with a promising career ahead, with the chance to break into the Latino endorsement market dominated thus far by De La Hoya, with the opportunity to provide financial security for himself and those around him far into the future, Vargas had left his wild life behind.

But those hopes appeared shattered last August when Vargas, a cousin and three friends were arrested in the beating of a 23-year-old man in the home of a woman Vargas was visiting. Vargas has been charged with felonious assault and conspiracy to commit a crime, and could face as much as eight years in prison if convicted. He is scheduled to appear in Santa Barbara Superior Court on April 26.

Vargas continues to maintain his innocence.

“I don’t blame nobody but myself for what happened,” he said, “but I am not guilty. I am confident that I will be exonerated.”

But he does admit that the whole incident was like a left hook out of the dark, waking him up to the reality of his new position in life.

“I knew I was a world champion,” he said, “but I didn’t know I had gotten this big. I got a call from Australia telling me I was on the front page over there [because of the incident]. Man, I didn’t know I had reached this level.”

And now that he knows?

“I’ve learned a valuable lesson from this whole ordeal,” he said. “God gave me a gift that has not been given to a lot of guys, and I have to use it. . . .

“I look at how I lived as a kid, and I wonder, ‘How am I still here?’ I am not going to lie to you. I was not the best kid in the world growing up.”

But for all his problems, the worst things that happened to Vargas as a youngster were several suspensions from school for fighting. The ugly incident in Santa Barbara last summer raised a red flag of awareness that he may have drifted much further down the road to disaster.

“You have to remember,” said Gary Shaw, his promoter, “that sometimes he’s not Fernando Vargas, that sometimes he’s just a 22-year-old kid from Oxnard who has gotten much bigger than he realizes. He has to remember that he has a responsibility to his family.”

Vargas says he is cutting some of his ties to his past, but acknowledges it isn’t easy.

“I’m still young,” he said, “but I’d be stupid if I didn’t learn from the whole situation. I realize now I have to know who is around me all the time. I’m still going to go out to clubs once in a while and kick it, but then I’m going to leave it there. You just can’t hang with all the people you once did.

“It’s going to be hard for me to do. Yeah, we’ll always be together because those people will always be there in my heart and I’ll always be there to help them. But when they say, ‘Let’s kick it,’ I’ll just have to tell them, ‘I can’t do that.’ ”

David Reid can relate to Vargas. A 154-pound champion until he lost his World Boxing Assn. title to Trinidad last month, Reid, 26, also struggled to cut his roots in his hometown of Philadelphia, where he was once jailed on drug charges.

“The streets will eat you up,” he said. “Sometimes you’ve just got to get up and go. Your friends want to hang with you all the time, even in training camp. When you say, ‘Man, I got to train,’ they don’t like it. It’s hard to come up in the ‘hood. Sometimes, your friends are your worst enemies. So you have to pick your friends. And sometimes, to be the best at what you want to do, you’ve just got to leave your friends alone.

“It may seem great having a posse on the way up. But, as soon as the money goes, the posse goes.”

The hardest part of severing old connections, said Reid, can be guilt.

“Sometimes they think you think you are too good for them,” he said. “They think you should stay in the streets with them. Most of the guys I hung around with are in jail. Or dead.”

Vargas also deals with guilt. He expects to be accused of thinking he’s gotten too big for his old buddies. But he doesn’t plan on allowing them to force him to leave his hometown.

“I still come back to Oxnard,” he said. “I still go back to Colonia. I still see my homies cruising like I did when I was a kid.

“But it’s totally different now. I can’t let them pull me back down. If I did, where does my family go, back to the fields where they once were? I don’t think so.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

The Fight

Fernando Vargas (18-0, 17 KOs)

vs. Ike Quartey (34-1-1, 29 KOs)

Card begins 6:45 p.m. Saturday, HBO

at Las Vegas

Mandalay Bay Events Center