Looking Back at Whitaker-Chavez: A Bitter Pill for “Sweet Pea”

Published

7 years ago

September 12, 2017

If you thought Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie and William Travis were outnumbered at the Alamo, try to imagine how Pernell Whitaker and his small band of supporters must have felt the night of Sept. 10, 1993, in the Alamodome, within walking distance of the mission-turned-fort where 200 or so “Texicans” and other volunteers fought to the last man against a vastly superior force led by General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. When the 13-day siege ended on March 6, 1836, in the dusty little town of San Antonio, “Remember the Alamo!” became a rallying cry that led to Texas’ liberation from Mexican rule and, eventually, the granting of U.S. statehood on Dec. 29, 1845.

As Whitaker, the WBC welterweight champion, made his ring entrance for a title defense against Mexican national hero Julio Cesar Chavez, virtually all of those in attendance – variously listed at anywhere from just shy of 57,000 (according to the San Antonio Express-News) to 70,000-plus, although the consensus seems to right around 60,000 – were vociferous Chavez fans. And that was more than all right with Whitaker. The man known as “Sweet Pea” earlier in the week had acknowledged that Chavez was indeed the overwhelming crowd favorite, but shrugged it off by saying, “I like to go on the road and take the hometown fans out of it,” even if San Antonio, by now a bustling city, ostensibly was American turf and not Mexico’s.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the emphatic victory Chavez’s army of fans assumed he would register en route to running his record to 88-0. He was befuddled and out-boxed from the get-go by the clever southpaw from Norfolk, Va., who pulled an assortment of spins, crouches and sidesteps from his seemingly bottomless trick bag. By and by, the deafening roars of support for El Gran Campion, widely considered the best pound-for-pound fighter in the world, devolved into desperate pleas for a rally and, toward the end, stunned silence. When the verdict of the three judges was announced after 12 rounds, a majority draw that enabled Whitaker to retain his title and saved Chavez from taking his first loss, the sound you heard from a rabidly pro-JCC audience that supposedly was going to riot if their man did not win sounded more like a giant sigh of relief.

Although one judge, Texas-based Jack Woodruff, scored the fight for Whitaker by a still-too-close 115-113, Franz Marti of Switzerland and Mickey Vann of England each saw the bout as a 115-115 standoff, ignoring CompuBox punch statistics that showed the champ landing 91 more scoring shots. Writing for Sports Illustrated, William Nack called the Alamodome the “scene of the crime” that had been perpetrated upon Whitaker, and the controversial decision nothing less than “bald-faced larceny.”

Twenty-four years have passed since Whitaker was denied his just due. The rematch many presumed would take place because justice and common sense dictated that it had to, never came. Accusations and counter-accusations flew like tracer rounds from a machine gun, with the Mexico City-based WBC again targeted for criticism for possibly stacking the deck in favor of a popular Mexican fighter. Whitaker and his Main Events support team, most notably the always-excitable Lou Duva, were incensed, citing Whitaker’s only loss to that point – by hotly disputed split decision to then-WBC lightweight champion Jose Luis Ramirez on March 12, 1988, in Levallois-Perret, France – as proof that easily passing the eye test isn’t always enough when you are going against a Mexican in a WBC-sanctioned title bout. As was the case with Whitaker-Chavez 5½ years later, Whitaker appeared to cruise against Ramirez, but judges Newton Camps and Louis Michel went with Ramirez by respective margins of 118-113 and 116-115, while Harry Gibbs submitted a more realistic scorecard of 117-113 for Whitaker.

Duva, Whitaker’s co-trainer, and Shelly Finkel, his manager, publicly said that the fix must have been in, leading WBC president Jose Sulaiman to file a $1 million lawsuit against them for slander. The legal action was dropped when Duva admitted he had no direct evidence the WBC had prearranged for Ramirez to win.

Having a perhaps even more egregiously wrong decision come down against Chavez, Duva and Whitaker went ballistic.

“The rat bastards!” yelped Cap’n Lou. “I told you we were going to whip (Chavez). Then they stole the fight from us.”

Said Whitaker: “I knew this might happen. But still it was like a bad dream. It was like someone put a knife in me and twisted it.

“I want to tell the world that I beat the unbeatable. From now on they’re all going to look at me and say, ‘There’s the guy who beat Julio Cesar Chavez.’ I whipped his ass, and easily. I mentally and physically beat him. I put an old-fashioned project beating on him. A housing authority beating. A ghetto beating.”

Taking a different view was Don King, Chavez’s promoter, who chortled, “Oh, yeah, I thought it was a draw” when asked if the decision was justifed and a repeat pairing advisable. “Nothing like a draw for a rematch.”

But there would be no do-over, not that media realists really expected one. When asked if he would order an immediate rematch to clear the air and settle any doubt as to who was the better man, Sulaiman said, “Ah, but there is no need for a rematch as Whitaker has retained the title on the draw. He is still the champion.”

That was another way of saying that no one connected with Chavez was going to let him anywhere near Whitaker again. One of the boxing’s most accepted truisms is that styles make fights, and the “Fiasco at the Alamo” had served up ample proof that Whitaker’s unorthodox style was as ill-fitting for Chavez as Bermuda shorts on a polar bear.

Nor were Marti and Vann disposed to question their own performances in the judging of a fight nearly everyone else thought Whitaker had won.

“Some people thought one guy won; some people thought the other did,” Vann said of the furor that arose as soon as the decision was announced. “Who’s right? We’re right. I got it right, and that’s it.” Of those who disagreed with him, Marti shrugged and said, “Not everybody knows how to score a professional fight,” the implication being that thousands of on-site spectators and countless more on HBO Pay Per View did not possess his keen powers of observation.

The scoring of a boxing match is subjective, of course, and opinions sometimes vary. What’s the familiar saying? Oh, yeah, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. To say the outcome of Whitaker-Chavez was an abomination, a stick-up by pencil, might be stretching a point; there have been worse miscarriages of justice in a sport where cynicism always is in plentiful supply. Still, Chavez’s insistence, even after all these years, that he was the actual aggrieved party lands somewhere between delusional and purposeful prevarication.

“I thought I won the fight,” Chavez maintained at the time, a contention he has repeated often. “I was not happy with the referee (Joe Cortez). I thought he allowed too much. I want a rematch.”

In 2012, a few days before his son, Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. was to take on Marco Antonio Rubio in the Alamodome, Chavez Sr. still maintained he deserved the victory because all Whitaker had done “was run.”

Controversy or not, that trip remains a highlight of my decades of covering boxing. Maybe that’s because San Antonio is my favorite city to visit in Texas, but probably more so because it marked another opportunity to see two of the best fighters of their era share a ring, even if one was at the top of his game that particular night and the other wasn’t.

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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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