Camacho Had Own Mix of Style and Substance

Published

12 years ago

November 27, 2012

That old camera commercial featuring charismatic tennis player Andre Agassi advised viewers that “style is everything.”

Boxing fans knew better than to blindly buy into that sales pitch. Style counts for something, of course, but it’s hardly everything. Even substance doesn’t always count for everything; there are more than a few very good fighters who haven’t made the breakthrough to superstardom because they lacked a certain panache, an ability to make the public care about them in large part because of the power of their personalities.

Hector “Macho” Camacho, who was 50 when he was removed from life support on Saturday in Puerto Rico, four days after being shot in the face by an as-of-yet-unknown assailant, managed to bridge the gap between style and substance maybe as well as any boxer in recent memory. He posted a 79-6-3 record, with 38 victories inside the distance, in a 30-year professional career that spanned from 1980 to 2010, winning world championships in three weight classes. That is more than enough certification of the substantial talents he brought into the ring.

Style? He had oodles of that, too, inciting friend and foe alike with outrageous comments, even more outrageous costumes and shouts of “It’s Macho Time!” whenever he made one of his flamboyant entrances. There were many fans of the Macho Man who liked his package of bluster and brilliance, and even more who reviled him for it. Ultimately, though, it didn’t matter much to him if you watched him to cheer or to boo, so long as you ponied up for a ticket.

“Over the years, people have said I’m crazy,” Camacho once said. “And I am. Crazy like a fox. My act is a smart act. It sold lots of tickets.”

If it was an act, it was a convincing one. Camacho didn’t turn off the constantly flowing faucet of controversy whenever his rumbles inside the ropes had concluded; he generated headlines outside the arena as well with frequent brushes with the law, crafting a reputation as a bad boy and hell-raiser that called to mind the many similar indiscretions of, say, Mike Tyson. If there was a difference, it was that Tyson hit a lot harder and his demeanor generally was cloaked in anger and surliness instead of an impish wink.

Perhaps it is that wink, a sense that he was pulling a prank on everybody that we either laughed at or we didn’t, but paid attention to nonetheless, that separated Camacho from a host of imitators who lacked his distinctive ability to entertain or enrage. It is no small feat of legerdemain, given the fact that Camacho’s boxing style, upon closer examination and through the prism of historical reflection, shouldn’t have drawn so many in to begin with.

A defensively brilliant tactician who engaged only at his discretion, he was a master of clutch-and-grab tactics, infuriating and frustrating opponents with quick, not particularly damaging flurries followed by arm-entangling bear hugs, a process to be repeated over and over.

Prior to his atypical June 13, 1986, slugfest with iron-fisted Edwin Rosario in Madison Square Garden, Camacho frequently chose to stand and trade when the more prudent course of action for someone with his lack of a putaway punch might have been to continually stick and move. And although Camacho – who had gone into the Rosario fight with a 28-0 record and 15 KOs — escaped that trial by fire with a split-decision victory, retaining the WBC lightweight title he won 10 months earlier on a unanimous nod over Jose Luis Ramirez, he came away convinced that his long-term health and longevity hinged on making the sort of strategic adjustments that would significantly reduce the punishment he might otherwise incur.

Did it work? No question. Think about it: In 88 pro bouts spread over three decades, including matchups with some of the biggest bangers in the business, Camacho never lost inside the distance and only was knocked down twice, in his 32^nd pro bout, against Reyes Cruz, a 10-round unanimous-decision victory on June 25, 1988, and in his 68^th one, a 12-round, unanimous-decision loss to Oscar De La Hoya on Sept. 13, 1997. That is not to say there weren’t occasions when Camacho was tagged hard; he was, particularly in the latter stages of his career when he was less mobile and his flawless defense developed cracks. But from his pro debut, a four-round points nod over David Brown on Sept. 12, 1980, to his final ring appearance, a unanimous-decision loss to Saul Duran on May 14, 2010, Camacho was dropped just those two times, in 673 rounds. Then-heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson was knocked down seven times in one round in the first of his three bouts with Ingemar Johansson.

Prior to Camacho’s March 6, 1989, bout with Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini for the vacant WBO junior welterweight title, I summed up the differences between the fancy-stepping Puerto Rican icon Man and the relatively plodding Mancini, who was ending a –year retirement from the ring, thusly in my story for the Philadelphia Daily News.

Camacho is a sniper, a guerrilla, a master of the sneak attack. If they allowed bushes and trees to be placed strategically around the ring, the misnomered “Macho Man” would make full use of them. He would spring from cover for a volley of low-caliber punches before slipping beyond the range of the other guy’s big guns. Fighting Camacho is like bleeding to death from a thousand small nicks. Mancini, on the other hand, is boxing’s answer to Pickett’s Charge. He is a proponent of the frontal assault. Fighting Mancini is like running through a minefield in snowshoes.

On that night in the Lawlor Events Center on the University of Nevada-Reno campus, Camacho again sent Mancini into mothballs by winning a split decision that the crowd didn’t like but was entirely justified.

So what was it about Camacho that enthralled us for so long?

He had a great back story, which is always helps to pique public interest. Born in Bayamon, Puerto Rico, as a toddler he moved with his family to New York’s high-crime Spanish Harlem, interspersing displays of undeniable boxing talent (three consecutive New York Golden Gloves championships as a teenager) with a flagrant disregard for legalities. In 1977, the year he won the first of those GG titles, he served 3½ months for grand theft auto.

“Getting in trouble the way I did was my way of having fun,” Camacho said of his youthful indiscretions. “If I stole a car, in my mind I was borrowing it. It was just part of a game.”

It comes as no surprise then that Camacho could be irritating to his own promoters, managers and trainers, not to mention opponents. He almost always had difficulty making contract weight, having to lose as many as five pounds on the day of the official weigh-in, which back then often was held on the morning of the event. In addition to food, he also had a taste for controlled substances (he pleaded no-contest to possession of cocaine in 1988, the first of several such incidents) and night life. It wasn’t unusual to spot him on the dance floor in hotel discos at 2 a.m. a few days before he was to fight.

Patrick Flannery, for 31 years an employee of the New York City public school system, first met Camacho when he was a 15-year-old problem student whose class attendance was spotty and his adherence to established rules even more so. Flannery became an adviser of sorts to the wild child, making for a long-term relationship that became something of a running comedy routine.

Flannery told reporters of the time that Camacho, who preferred to sleep in the nude, awoke, ready to boogie, late one night in his hotel suite. But Flannery had hidden all of Camacho’s clothes, in the hope that the missing threads would somehow persuade the fighter to remain in bed and get his rest.

“He went out stark naked in the hall,” Flannery said. “He went all the way to the elevator before I caught up with him and threw him a pair of pants.”

Camacho’s choice of apparel was even more curious during ring entrances that were pure spectacle. At various times he stepped inside the ropes clad as an Indian chief, Roman centurion, matador, gladiator and designer-loincloth Tarzan. If you liked the getups, you might cheer. If you were there to cheer for the other guy, you probably booed.

“When I do good, they boo me,” Camacho said of his frequent tweaking of the cash customers. “When I do great, they boo me. If they don’t boo me, I get mad. When I make love to my girlfriend, she boos me.”

And Camacho’s method of making love apparently was as unconventional as everything else he did. There was the time he was driving down a stretch of rural road in Florida when he was stopped and arrested for “doing the wild thing,” which is to say making whoopee with a female who was straddling him. Hey, when the mood strikes you …

“My personality has been misunderstood,” Camacho said of his penchant for occasionally making the wrong kinds of headlines. “When people meet me face to face, they like me. And that surprises some of them, because they keep hearing all this crap about what a bad guy I’m supposed to be.”

More than a few of those who didn’t quite get Camacho were his neighbors in Clewiston, Fla., where he built a house in the country with the perhaps unrealistic idea of gaining a bit of privacy.

“I just wanted to be alone for a while, you know?” he said of his break from the New York/San Juan rat race. “I raised chickens, geese, cows, horses.”

Presumably, the good citizens of Clewiston never had seen a farmer the likes of Camacho, whose return to nature did not entail significant behavioral or sartorial modification. It was a case of culture shock on both sides.

“People didn’t want me to be myself and I refuse to do that for anybody,” Camacho said of his failed attempts to gain acceptance with the locals on his own terms. “It was mostly a racial thing. The rednecks down there didn’t understand me, which is all right because this is America. You can feel about something or somebody any way you want to feel.”

Camacho’s life in retirement was less than tranquil in other ways. On Feb. 12, 2011, he was shot three times near a housing project in San Juan. Shortly after that he faced a felony child-abuse count for allegedly picking up a teenage son by the neck, slamming him to the ground and stomping on him at his ex-wife’s home in Orange County, Fla. That would be the ex-wife who twice filed domestic abuse complaints about him before their divorce was finalized. And don’t forget that the shooting that ultimately cost Camacho his life also ended in the death of the other person sitting in the car, Adrian Mojica Moreno, whom police said had nine bags of cocaine in his possession at the time. Those circumstances figure to at least raise suspicions that Camacho again had crossed over into the dark side of his notoriously split personality.

But one thing about Camacho has remained beyond dispute, now and forever.

“Some people come to cheer for The Macho an, some come to boo him,” he said. “But in the end, they all go away saying, `Boy, can that guy fight.’”

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Bernard Fernandez

Avila Perspective, Chap. 289: East LA, Claressa Shields and More

Published

1 day ago

July 25, 2024

David A. Avila

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Avila Perspective, Chap. 289: East LA, Claressa Shields and More

East Los Angeles has long been a haven for some of the best fighters around if you can keep them out of trouble. For every Oscar De La Hoya or Seniesa Estrada there are thousands derailed by crime, drugs or drinking.

Boxing has always been a favorite sport of East L.A. Every family has an uncle or two who boxes.

On Friday, 360 Promotions’ Omar Trinidad (15-0-1) fights Viktor Slavinskyi (15-2-1) in the main event at Commerce Casino, in Commerce, CA. UFC Fight Pass will stream the fight card.

The City of Commerce used to be part of East L.A. until 1960 when it incorporated. It’s still considered to be part of East Los Angeles, but informally.

Plenty of fighters come out of East L.A. but few make it all the way like De La Hoya and Estrada. Will Trinidad be the one?

The first world champion from East L.A. or “East Los” as some call it, was Solly Garcia Smith back in the late 1800s. Others were Richie Lemos, Art Frias and Joey Olivo. There is also 1984 Olympic gold medalist Paul Gonzalez.

Once again 360 Promotions brings its popular brand of fights to the area. On this fight card includes two female bouts. One features Roxy Verduzco (1-0) the former amateur star fighting Colleen Davis (3-1-1) in a featherweight fight.

All that action takes place on Friday.

Elite Boxing

The next day, also in East L.A., Elite Boxing stages another boxing card at Salesian High School located at 960 S. Soto Street in the Boyle Heights area of East Los Angeles.

Elite Boxing has promoted several successful boxing cards at the Catholic high school grounds. The area is saturated by many of the best eateries in Los Angeles. Don’t take my word for it. Check it out yourself and grab some of that delicious food.

Boxing has long been a favorite sport of anyone who lives in East L.A. It’s a fight town equal to Philadelphia, Brooklyn or Detroit. There’s something different about the area. For more than 100 years some of the best fighters continue to come out of its boxing gyms. Some will be performing on these club shows.

For tickets or information go to www.eliteboxingusa.com

Claressa Shields in Detroit

Speaking of fight towns, pound-for-pound best Claressa Shields who won two Olympic Gold Medals in boxing, moves up another weight division to tackle the WBC heavyweight world champion Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse on Saturday, July 27, at Little Caesars Arena in Detroit, Michigan.

DAZN will stream the heavy-duty fight card.

Shields (14-0) cleaned out the super welterweight, middleweight and super middleweight divisions and now wants to add the big girls to her conquests. She will be facing Canada’s Lepage-Joanisse (7-1) who holds the WBC belt.

The last time Shields gloved up was more than a year ago when she fought Maricela Cornejo. Don’t blame Shields. She loves to fight. She loves to win. The last time Shields lost a fight was in the amateurs and that was three presidential administrations ago.

Shields doesn’t lose.

I wonder if Las Vegas even takes bets on her fights?

The only fight she may have been an underdog was against Savannah Marshall who was the last opponent to defeat her. And that was in 2012 in China. When they met as pros two years ago, Shields avenged her loss with a blistering attack.

Don’t get Shields mad.

Perhaps her toughest foe as a pro was in her pro debut when she clashed with Franchon Crews-Dezurn in Las Vegas. It was four rounds of fists and fury as the two pounded each other on the undercard of Andre Ward and Sergey Kovalev in November 2016.

That was a ferocious debut for both female pugilists.

Assisting Shields on this fight card will be several intriguing male bouts. One guy you should pay special attention is Tito Mercado (15-0, 14 KOs) a super lightweight prospect from Pomona, California.

Many excellent fighters have come out of Pomona including Sugar Shane Mosley, Shane Mosley Jr., Alberto Davila and Richie Sandoval who just passed away this week.

Sandoval was best known for his 15-round war with Philadelphia’s Jeff Chandler for the bantamweight world title in 1984. Read the story by Arne K. Lang on this link: https://tss.ib.tv/boxing/featured-boxing-articles-boxing-news-videos-rankings-and-results/81467-former-world-bantamweight-champion-richie-sandoval-passes-away-at-age-63 .

Fights to Watch

Fri. UFC Fight Pass 7 p.m. Omar Trinidad (15-0-1) vs Viktor Slavinskyi (15-2-1).

Sat. ESPN+ 12:30 p.m. Joe Joyce (16-2) vs Derek Chisora (34-13).

Sat. DAZN 3 p.m. Claressa Shields (14-0) vs Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse (7-1), Michel Rivera (25-1) vs Hugo Roldan (22-2-1); Tito Mercado (15-0) vs Hector Sarmiento (21-2).

Omar Trinidad photo by Lina Baker

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Arne’s Almanac: Jake Paul and Women’s Boxing, a Curmudgeon’s Take

Published

2 days ago

July 24, 2024

Arne K. Lang

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Jake Paul can fight more than a little. The view from here is that he would make it interesting against any fringe contender in the cruiserweight division. However, Jake’s boxing acumen pales when paired against his skill as a flim-flam artist.

Jake brought a 9-1 record into last weekend’s bout with Mike Perry. As noted by boxing writer Paul Magno, Jake’s previous opponents consisted of “a You Tuber, a retired NBA star, five retired MMA stars, a part-time boxer/reality TV star, and two undersized and inactive fall-guy boxers.”

Mike Perry, a 32-year-old Floridian, was undefeated (6-0, 3 KOs) as a bare-knuckle boxer after forging a 14-8 record in UFC bouts. In pre-fight blurbs, Perry was billed as the baddest bare knuckle boxer of all time, but against Jake Paul he proved to have very unrefined skills as a conventional boxer which Team Paul undoubtedly knew all along. Perry lasted into the eighth round in a one-sided fight that could have been stopped a lot sooner.

Jake Paul is both a boxer and a promoter. As a promoter, he handles Amanda Serrano, one of the greatest female boxers in history. That makes him the person most responsible (because the buck stops with him) for the wretched mismatch in last Saturday’s co-feature, the bout between Serrano and Stevie Morgan.

Morgan, who took up boxing two years ago at age 33, brought a 14-1 record. Nicknamed the Sledgehammer, she had won 13 of her 14 wins by knockout, eight in the opening round. However, although she resides in Florida, all but one of those 13 knockouts happened in Colombia.

“We found that in Colombia there were just more opportunities for women’s boxing than in the United States,” she told a prominent boxing writer whose name we won’t mention.

The truth is that, for some folks, Colombia is the boxing equivalent of a feeder lot for livestock, a place where a boxer can go to fatten their record. The opportunities there were no greater than in Hot Springs, Arkansas, in 1995. It was there that Peter McNeeley prepped for his match with Mike Tyson with a 6-second knockout of professional punching bag Frankie Hines. (Six seconds? So it would be written although no one seems to have been there to witness it.)

Serrano vs Morgan was understood to be a stay-busy fight for Amanda whose rematch with Katie Taylor was postponed until November. Stevie Morgan, to her credit, answered the bell for the second round whereas others in her situation would have remained on the stool and invented an injury to rationalize it. Thirty-eight seconds later it was all over and Ms. Morgan was free to go home and use her sledgehammer to do some light dusting.

The Paul-Perry and Serrano-Morgan fights played out in a sold-out arena in Tampa before an estimated 17,000. Those without a DAZN subscription paid $64.95 for the livestream. Paul’s next promotion, where he will touch gloves with 58-year-old Mike Tyson (unless Iron Mike pulls a Joe Biden and pulls out; a capital idea) with Serrano-Taylor II the semi-main, will almost certainly rake in more money than any other boxing promotion this year.

Asked his opinion of so-called crossover boxing by a reporter for a college newspaper, the venerable boxing promoter Bob Arum said, “It’s not my bag but folks who don’t like it shouldn’t get too worked up over it because no one is stealing from anybody.” True enough, but for some of us, the phenomenon is distressing.

—

The next big women’s fight happens Saturday in Detroit where Claressa Shields seeks a world title in a third weight class against WBC heavyweight belt-holder Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse.

A two-time Olympic gold medalist, undefeated in 14 fights as a pro, Shields is very good, arguably the best female boxer of her generation which makes her, arguably, the best female boxer of all time. But turning away Lepage-Joanisse (7-1, 2 KOs) won’t elevate her stature in our eyes.

Purportedly 17-4 as an amateur, the Canadian won her title in her second crack at it. Back in August of 2017, she challenged Cancun’s Alejandra Jimenez in Cancun and was stopped in the third round. Entering the bout, Lepage-Joanisse was 3-0 as a pro and had never fought a match slated for more than four rounds.

Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse

True, on the women’s side, the heavyweight bracket is a very small pod. A sanctioning body has to make concessions to harness a sanctioning fee. Nonetheless, how absurd that a woman who had answered the bell for only 11 rounds would be deemed qualified to compete for a world title. (FYI: Alejandra Jimenez was purportedly born a man. She left the sport with a 12-0-1 record after her win over Franchon Crews Dazurn was changed to a no-contest when she tested positive for the banned steroid stanozolol.)

Following her defeat to Jimenez, Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse, now 29 years old, was out of action for six-and-a-half years. When she returned, she was still a heavyweight, but a much slender heavyweight. She carried 231 pounds for Jimenez. In her most recent bout where she captured the vacant WBC title with a split decision over Argentina’s Abril Argentina Vidal, she clocked in at 173 ¼. (On the distaff side, there’s no uniformity among the various sanctioning bodies as to what constitutes a heavyweight.)

Claressa Shields doesn’t need Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse to reinforce her credentials as a future Hall of Famer. She made the cut a long time ago.

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Former World Bantamweight Champion Richie Sandoval Passes Away at Age 63

Published

4 days ago

July 22, 2024

Arne K. Lang

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Richie Sandoval, who won the WBA and lineal bantamweight title in one of the biggest upsets of the 1980s and then, not quite two years later, suffered near-fatal injuries in a title defense, has passed away at the age of 63.

News circulated fast in the Las Vegas boxing community on Monday, July 22, the grapevine actuated by a tweet from Hall of Fame matchmaker Bruce Trampler: “Boxing and the Top Rank family lost one of our own last night in the passing of former WBA bantamweight champion Richie Sandoval. It hurts personally and professionally to know that Richie is gone at age 63. RIP campeon.”

Details are vague but the cause of death was apparently a sudden heart attack that Sandoval experienced while visiting the Southern California home of his son of the same name.

Richie Sandoval put the LA County community of Pomona, California, on the boxing map before Shane Mosley came along and gave the town a more frequently-cited mention in the sports section of the papers. He came from a fighting family. An older brother, Albert “Superfly” Sandoval, became a big draw at LA’s fabled Olympic Auditorium while building a 35-2-1 record that included a failed bid to capture Lupe Pintor’s world bantamweight title.

Richie was a member of the 1980 U.S. Olympic boxing team that was stranded when U.S. President Jimmy Carter (and many other world leaders) boycotted the event as a protest against Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan.

As a pro, Sandoval’s signature win was a 15^th-round stoppage of Jeff Chandler. They fought on April 7, 1984 in Atlantic City. Chandler was making the tenth defense of his world bantamweight title.

Despite being a heavy underdog, Sandoval dominated the fight, winning almost every round until the referee stepped in and waived it off. Chandler, who was 33-1-2 heading in and had avenged his lone defeat, never fought again.

Sandoval made two successful defenses before risking his title against Gaby Canizales on the undercard of Hagler-Mugabi in the outdoor stadium at Caesars Palace. In round seven, Sandoval, who had a hellish time making the weight, was knocked down three times and suffered a seizure as he collapsed from the third knockdown. Stretchered out of the ring, he was rushed to the hospital where doctors reduced the swelling in his brain and beat the odds to save his life. This would be Richie’s lone defeat. He finished his pro career with a record of 29-1 (17 KOs).

Bob Arum cushioned some of the pain by giving Richie a $25,000 bonus and offering him a lifetime job at Top Rank which Richie accepted. And let the record show that Arum was good to his word.

A more elaborate portrait of Richie Sandoval was published in these pages in 2017. You can check it out HERE. May he rest in peace.

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