Wiley rolls with the punches

When Grover Wiley of Omaha walked into his hometown gym, the C.W. Boxing Club, for the first time, he was greeted with sneers, scowls and suffocating silence.

The grunts and groans of the fighters and the sound of leather exploding on punching bags and jump ropes whipping through the stifling air all faded away as everybody in the building focused on the intruder.

Wiley couldn’t have gotten any more attention if he had been a Martian.

Instead, he was a 17-year-old high-school wrestler, short but muscular, a white kid stepping into an all-black environment.

“What do you want?” asked Midge Minor, who ran the gym.

“I want to box,” Wiley said.

“Everybody wants to box,” Minor said. “Go home. Do 150 sit-ups and 150 push-ups and then come back.”

That Wiley did, and more.

He came back to the gym the next day and the next and the next.

A wrestler since age 8, Wiley’s introduction to boxing had been crude and undisciplined. When a snowstorm canceled school, Wiley and some buddies went to a friend’s house and engaged in an impromptu boxing tournament in the basement.

It was the first time Wiley had put on boxing gloves, but hardly the last. After knocking out all comers -- five or six, as he recalls -- Wiley, who already had qualified for a state wrestling tournament, dropped out and headed to the C.W. gym.

It wasn’t easy in the beginning.

“The first couple of months, I got beat to death,” Wiley said. “I’d go home sore every day.”

“He sure wanted to do it,” Minor said. “I had a lot of tough fighters there, and he took a lot of whuppings, but he kept showing up every day. Finally, I thought I might have something there.”

“They soon realized I wasn’t going to quit,” Wiley said. “And so, the people there took me in like family.”

That was 15 years ago.

On Saturday night at Madison Square Garden, Wiley will again step into a environment where he will be greeted by sneers, scowls and a lack of respect. He will face Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. in a 150-pound match on the undercard of the Miguel Cotto-Zab Judah welterweight title fight.

Wiley is here because he beat Chavez’s father in the Mexican legend’s final fight. Now, Wiley is being given a chance to beat the son as well.

But he doesn’t seem to have much of a chance.

Chavez Jr. is everything Wiley is not. While Wiley has struggled to a mediocre 30-9-1 record with only 14 knockouts, most of his matches against fighters politely referred to as tomato cans, Chavez Jr. is 31-0-1 with 24 knockouts. While Wiley, with a late start to his career and no reputation, had to battle through the amateur ranks, Chavez Jr., benefiting from his name, sailed into promoter Bob Arum’s Top Rank organization and was put on a course designed to protect and nurture him.

“At first I saw him only as an interesting attraction,” Arum said. “He couldn’t fight. Well, maybe a little bit.”

There was never any doubt, at least in the younger Chavez’s mind, that he was going to follow in his father’s footsteps, no matter how big those footsteps were. Chavez Jr. had been following his father to the gym “since I can first remember,” he said.

He was a cute kid with an oversized pair of gloves in those days. When Oscar De La Hoya and Chavez Sr. fought the first time, Chavez Jr., then 10 years old, would get in the ring with his younger brother, Omar, and shadow box after his father had sparred, bringing a lightheartedness to the camp.

There was no such lightheartedness on Sept 26, 2003, when Chavez Jr., all of 17, made his professional debut in Culiacan, Mexico, against Jonathan Hernandez. Chavez Jr. won a four-round decision.

While the name may be the same, the styles of father and son are different because of their different body frames. Chavez Jr. will never be meaner than his father, but he is leaner, and taller by four inches at 5 feet 11. That has given him the ability to employ a more mobile, smoother boxing style than that of his father. But Chavez Jr. still mixes in the savage body punches that were his father’s trademark.

Chavez Sr.’s involvement in his son’s career consists of approving opponents and reviewing Chavez Jr.’s performances afterward.

It can’t be easy living up to such a famous name, especially in his native Mexico, but Chavez Jr. just shrugs off the pressure.

“It is something I was born with,” he said of his name. “People expect more of me. There is nothing I can do about that.”

He is confident, however, he can fight his way out of that imposing shadow.

“I’m a human being, an individual,” he said. “And someday, I am going to be a world champion on my own.”

For now, Arum is happy with the progress shown by the 21-year-old Chavez.

“He now is becoming a real fighter,” Arum said. “He lives and breathes boxing. He has made tremendous improvement, the kind that has blown us away.”

And he just might blow Wiley away.

Consider the fact that Wiley has lost four of his last five fights, the exception being Chavez Sr., who was 43 years old with 115 fights under his expanded belt before Wiley stopped him in the fifth round of their 2005 fight in Phoenix.

In the other four fights, Wiley was stopped twice, once in the second round and once in the fifth, and lost the other two by decision, the last time being in March to Dmitriy Salita.

Consider also the motivation of Chavez Jr.

“This will be something special,” he said through an interpreter. “I want to take revenge for my father. I am very hungry for that.”

Wiley, now 32, also is hungry, for some long-awaited recognition.

“This could be great,” he said. “I could be the guy who gives the father his last loss and the son his first loss. That’s history right there.”

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steve.springer@latimes.com