One More, Dry

By Bill Plaschke

May 25, 2005 12 AM PT

The last time I tried to interview Los Angeles’ favorite boxer, he kept me waiting 6 1/2 hours in the family room of his condo.

Then he sneaked down a back staircase, climbed into a car, and drove off to get drunk.

Julio Cesar Chavez was a lying bum then, and he is a lying bum now.

This is what I am thinking Tuesday afternoon, seven years later, sitting in the coffee shop of a downtown hotel, waiting to give an aging pug one more chance.

I have arranged to talk to Chavez about Saturday’s farewell card at Staples Center, a sentimental, sold-out event featuring bouts by Chavez and his son, Julio Jr.

I want to talk not about fighting, but fatherhood, about Chavez’s sobering up, spreading the love, sharing the ring next to a boy who once rode there on his shoulders.

Then one of his handlers appears.

“You can’t talk to him,” he says in Spanish. “He took a sleeping pill. He will be resting all afternoon.”

What? Deja fooled? I throw up my hands at the same time publicist Bill Caplan rises to his feet.

“I don’t believe it,” Caplan says. “This is not happening again.”

Caplan grabs my elbow and leads me to an elevator and soon we are on the 16th floor, standing on thick carpet outside heavy suite doors.

Caplan ignores the privacy signs and starts banging.

“Julio, come out and talk to this man!” he shouts.

Bang, bang, bang.

“Julio, we know you’re in there.”

Bang, bang, bang

“Julio, wake up, wake up.”

After five long minutes of this, someone inside begins shouting in Spanish. I can’t ascertain every verb and noun, but I believe the person is saying he is fully prepared to punch our lights out.

Bang, bang, bang.

“We hear you! Come out! Come out!”

The aging, round, bespectacled Caplan thinks he has the greatest boxer in Mexican history on the ropes, and he will not give up.

I phone the front desk to inquire about a rollaway stretcher.

Then the door swings open, I cower, Caplan ducks.

And Julio Cesar Chavez, popping out wearing only a towel wrapped around underwear, smiles.

“Bathroom,” he says in Spanish. “I was trying to tell you that I was in the bathroom.”

Chavez laughs and invites us inside. Caplan kisses him several times, wipes his enormously sweaty brow and asks, if Julio is finished, could he please now use that bathroom?

“I just need 10 minutes,” I say.

“I give you an hour,” Chavez says.

“Why so talkative?” I say.

“This is for my son,” he says.

And so, for one of the few times in his 25-year career, Chavez says something that could never get lost in translation.

And so, it appears, the macho has truly mellowed.

Although his handlers will still lie for Chavez the boxer, Chavez the father apparently will no longer lie for himself.

“I would die for my son,” he says.

Trying to fight at age 40-something, without a relevant bout in five years, might seem like a stake through the heart of a reputation.

But Chavez, who will battle barely breathing Ivan “the Terrible” Robinson, doesn’t seem to care, because 19-year-old Julio Jr. will be fighting about an hour earlier.

“It’s amazing to hear the people shouting for him, ‘Cha-vez, Cha-vez’ for him, just like they do for me,” Julio says. “I love hearing that. I want to help him keep hearing that.”

Because of his son, an 18-0 lightweight, Chavez says he has fixed a drinking problem that sent him into a late-career tailspin.

The decision was made on the day his son said he was afraid of his father coming to his fights.

He wondered, what if he looked outside the ring and saw Julio Sr. drunk and fighting with other patrons?

A stunned Julio Sr. could offer only one counterpunch.

“I told him, ‘OK, I’ll make a promise to you, I will stop drinking if you keep fighting and stay clean,’ ” Julio says.

He says he has been sober since December.

His son says he notices.

“Does anybody like seeing your father drunk?” Julio Jr. says. “He’s stronger now. He looks better now.”

Chavez says he also wants to make a deal with his legendarily devoted fans.

These are the folks who have packed every makeshift ring during his recent eight-city promotional tour, hundreds crammed into tiny gyms and parking lots, long lines recently waiting for more than four hours outside Staples Center for autographs.

Even Oscar De La Hoya could never claim this much love in this town.

In numbers and passion, no other local athlete can.

“All the drinking and emotional problems I had, I really let the fans down,” Chavez says. “I lost my respect for them. I did not give them my best effort.”

Yet his fans have remained relentless, from the Angel players who surrounded him before a recent game at Dodger Stadium to the hundreds who stood in 97-degree heat to watch him spar east of San Diego.

“I thought the people would cuss me and reject me,” Chavez says. “But they only cry with me.”

So now, for the 114th time in a career that has featured just five losses, he will sweat for them.

As fights go, it will be awkward and unsightly and meaningless.

But as emotions go, for the first time in years, it will be real.

Chavez shrugs.

“On Saturday, people will be saying, ‘Oh, I believe in Chavez,’ or ‘Oh, get out of the ring and never come back.’ ”

Or, perhaps, they will say both.

As he walks us to the door, a photo of his son held tenderly in a hand of steel, you get the feeling that would suit the father just fine.

Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Plaschke, go to latimes.com/plaschke.

MAIN EVENT

Julio Cesar Chavez

vs. Ivan Robinson