Can Edwin Valero revive boxing in Venezuela

When WBC world lightweight champ Edwin Valero makes his first world title defense back home in Venezuela on December 19, it will mark the first time in just over 9 years that any Venezuelan fighter has defended a world boxing title in his home country. That is by far the longest period the nation has gone without hosting a world title defense by a Venezuelan world champion since Carlos Hernandez became the first from his country to hold a world boxing championship in January 1965.

More significantly, since 2001, when the country had 37 live pro boxing shows, the number of fight cards has declined steadily by over 600% to just 6 professional shows in 2008, the lowest number since 1952. Valero’s world title defense this month at the once-legendary Nuevo Circo bullring (capacity 12,000) will headline just the 7th pro fight card the country has seen in 2009. That marks the first time in nearly 60 years that the nation has had 2 consecutive years with less than 10 live boxing shows a year.

How has the pro boxing landscape become so barren in one of the traditional Latin American powerhouse nations in such a short amount of time? Over 30 Venezuelan fighters have held world titles since Hernandez won his in 1965 and 9 have claimed world championships in the new century alone. Alexander Munoz has had 2 separate reigns and 10 world title bouts as WBA super flyweight champion (7 of them title defenses) and not a single one was held back home in Venezuela. After dethroning previously unbeaten Eric Morel in Puerto Rico in December 2003, Lorenzo Parra held the WBA flyweight for over 3 years, but none of his 6 title defenses were held in Venezuela. Parra’s only world title bout on home turf came in June 2008, when he moved up 3 weight classes to unsuccessfully challenge visiting WBA champ Celestino Caballero from Panama. Out of 72 world title bouts that Venezuelan fighters have competed in since the turn of the century, only 3 have been held in Venezuela; of the 36 that were world title defenses, only 2 were held in the country—the most recent being Felix Machado’s successful December 2000 defense of his IBF super flyweight title (which he defended 3 more times outside the country).

Even the 28-year-old Valero (a personal friend of Venezuelan president-for-life Hugo Chavez) came by his homecoming title defense in back-door fashion. After winning the WBA super featherweight crown in Panama in August 2006, Edwin’s 4 successful world title defenses were held in Japan or Mexico. The hard-hitting southpaw then moved up to 135 pounds and after having a long-standing U.S. medical suspension lifted, won the vacant WBC lightweight title in April 2009 on a Golden Boy Promotions show in Austin, Texas. Valero had hoped to make the first defense ofthat title in the U.S. in November, but when his work visa was denied by U.S. officials, a high-profile title defense at the recently restored Nuevo Circo bullring in Caracas became the fallback plan. Valero and his handlers claim the visa denial was politically motivated, because of Edwin’s friendship with the controversial Chavez, whose image is tattooed on the fighter’s chest, embedded in the Venezuelan national flag. U.S. officials have declined to comment on the matter, but Valero was quoted shortly thereafter as saying “I want to live in Venezuela and be part of the recovery of national boxing”…implicitly acknowledging the sport’s drastic decline back home.

The venue for Valero’s much-anticipated homecoming fight, El Nuevo Circo (“new circus’), was once a legendary bullring that was first used in 1919. It became a popular boxing venue from the 1950s until the early 1980s, and hosted such national boxing legends as Betulio Gonzalez, Luis Estaba and Rafael Orono, but was gradually displaced as a major sports venue after the construction of the Polyhedron in 1974 and was closed down completely in 1997. Restoration of Nuevo Circo began in early 2009 and it was reopened in October with a high-profile free concert and much fanfare. Many wonder if Edwin Valero’s first world title defense in Venezuela, held with great fanfare in a legendary venue can revive the country’s faded pro boxing scene, but there is no easy answer.

The massive economic problems the country now faces developed over the past decade and the systemic damage that has been done to the national economy cannot be turned around overnight. According to the internationally respected magazine The Economist, “the underlying cause is the government’s failure to plan, maintain and invest in necessary infrastructure…after 10 years of neglect, there is no simple fix for crumbling infrastructure”. Since the boisterous Chavez nationalized the private power industry in 2007, there have been a half-dozen nationwide electrical blackouts, all this despite being one of the most oil-rich nations in the entire world. The debilitating chill which the collapsing economy has created in the national business climate has essentially turned the country into an economic “basket case”.

For 2010, The Economist has projected for Venezuela a national inflation rate of 31.4% and a minus-3.4% decline in GDP (gross domestic product). The World Bank recently released its annual World Development Indicators, which ranked the country #7 among the world’s “riskiest economies”, along with impoverished nations tragically lacking Venezuela’s rich petroleum reserves or other abundant natural resources. Just months ago, the World Economic Forum released its 2009-10 Global Competitiveness Report, which rates nations based on a wide range of economic factors. Of the 133 nations analyzed, Venezuela consistently ranked in the bottom 1-3% for almost every factor relating to a healthy business climate: http://www.weforum.org/pdf/GCR09/GCR20092010fullreport.pdf (page 338)

Professional boxing is, among other things, a business and although a series of high-profile world title defenses on home turf by Edwin Valero or other Venezuelan world champs can definitely boost the sagging morale of the pro boxing community there, it will most probably take a substantial amount of time and a significant amount of economic investment to help Valero fulfill his lofty goal of bringing about “the recovery of national boxing”. There is always the possibility that the Chavez regime could provide significant government subsidies to restore the vitality of the once-thriving pro boxing scene, similar to what the Soviet Union and Cuba used to do with their amateur boxing programs in days gone by.

Based on a widely publicized incident that transpired in Venezuela earlier this year, some hold out a ray of hope that the Chavez regime could actually back up its bold words with some positive government intervention on behalf of the fight game. When he moved this past summer to close two of the country’s world-class golf courses, he denounced the sport of golf as “a sport of the bourgeoisie” and not a “true people’s sport”. Perhaps someone will point out to the mercurial Venezuelan leader that professional boxing IS a true people’s sport, complete with a rich tradition of lifting impoverished masses of neglected youth into opportunities to make something of their lives, both athletically and economically. Where would wayward street kids like Roberto Duran be today if not for the phenomenal opportunities they have received from the fight game?

Only time will tell, but by subsidizing a national sports infrastructure built on a foundation of boxing gyms, complete with trainers and instructors, and high-profile spokesmen like Edwin Valero, President Chavez has a unique opportunity to lift impoverished youth AND elevate pro boxing from the grass-roots level on up…if he somehow finds it within himself to put his money where his mouth is.