SAN ANTONIO – Saturday, Hector “Machito” Camacho Jr., fighting for the first time in 16 months, dropped an overmatched opponent on the red canvas of an outdoor ring erected in La Villita’s Maverick Plaza about a two-minute stroll from the River Walk. Meanwhile at ringside, and on message boards everywhere, and on YouTube, debate about Bradley-Pacquiao continued, though in significantly politer terms.
Camacho’s comeback, as these things go, does not appear a particularly serious one. He is George Foreman, with the religious awakening and cheeseburgers but without the stopping power. Camacho is a Puerto Rican welterweight/junior middleweight/middleweight/super middleweight, not an American heavyweight, and so he also must rely on shtick more than Foreman did. Shtick is a family specialty, though; cry not at all for Machito.
His dad, without whom the Camacho name in Puerto Rico would be more obscure, by far, than the Chavez name in Mexico, does not care a whole lot about his son’s conversion to Islam, one that finds Junior prefacing statements with “God is great” and donning a white thobe that clings more than billows at ringside. Saturday, Camacho’s shiny silver trunks, too, clung, in a summer look that said, Whoa, even I didn’t think my ass could get this full. And “full” is good a word as any to describe Camacho’s physique.
Four and a half years ago, when he weighed an embarrassing 173 pounds in Scottsdale, Ariz., for a fight the day before Super Bowl XLII, Camacho said he thought maybe he should get down to 147, to prove he was serious. He’s not down there yet, though he claimed Friday he weighed as little as 157 before his opponent fell-out and he learned the sacrifice they were trucking up from Corpus Christi would be well over the middleweight limit. That sacrifice, J.D. Charles, caught a Camacho left uppercut to the belly in the second minute of their main-event tilt and went down and stayed down. Afterwards, he said he could have gotten up but didn’t. With the short notice and purse they offered him, in other words, he’d more than fulfilled his obligation when the 120th second passed. Camacho didn’t grandstand or insult Charles.
Therein lies a little of the appeal Camacho holds for those who’ve crossed paths with him during his 16-year campaign. He can actually fight when he wants to and is so wonderfully self-deprecating, and therefore empathetic, he would never fault a fellow prizefighter for wanting effort. Camacho understands the exact brutality of our sport and talks candidly about it. In all his court-jesterliness, he is, when the bell rings, additionally a reminder of something Carlo Rotella wrote in an excellent 2003 book called “Cut Time”:
“The lowliest of professional opponents . . . can fight better than almost everybody else on earth. Any one of them could beat the hell out of the typical top-flight contact-sports jock remotely his size, and any one of them could single-handedly clear out a bar full of fight-goers, writers, and other smart alecks who dismiss him as a stiff when he boxes in the ring.”
Camacho, seeming stagy but sincere, tells you he is embarrassed about what shame he’s brought on his career. Then he tells you about the women he enjoyed during that run – and you realize the insincerity of those lines about shame. For a short, chunky kid with a birthmark that runs the left side of his face, he’s done things to women more than reason expected. Where his father was a character, a leading actor in many a hijinks, Machito is a storyteller, a supporting actor who doubles as narrator. Had his reflexes been a tad slower, he’d have made a good cameraman in gonzo pornography – such is his charisma, timing and capacity for disarming inquisitors.
“F–king the girls I was f–king in my days?” Camacho Jr. explained in the foyer of Allstar’s Gentlemen’s Sports Club, Friday. “You can’t blame me, man! I was f–king the baddest girls, from Switzerland and Europe. You cannot blame me, man!”
Ah, the effects of the camera. Saturday, a third ringside experience in as many weeks brought another chance to reflect on what happened in Bradley-Pacquiao, and what happened to those at ringside and those at home. Locked in a narrative that said Pacquiao would win an easy decision, after the sixth round, many a serious ringside journalist on a tight deadline – thank Pacquiao’s fascination with the NBA playoffs, in part, for that – put his head down and wrote while the last 15 minutes of the fight happened. Then he turned-in a scorecard that was not close as perhaps it should have been, for a fight all three professional judges saw turn on a single round.
The home viewer? He was treated to an experience that bore only a derivative resemblance to reality, and primed for another outrage. That outrage was nearly universal, but rather than fixate on the “universal” part of that clause, in a maniacal search for absolute consensus some have fixated on the “nearly” part. Well. You’ll get no apologies for those three ringside scorecards that dissented, so stop asking.
A few days after the latest unconscionable robbery that is the reason no one will ever watch another prizefight again in the history of humankind, apropos of nothing at all I had a conversation like this:
“I like the ‘blue raspberry’ slurpees at 7-Eleven better than real raspberries.”
“You know those drinks are filled with artificial sweeteners, concocted in laboratories to be delicious, unfilling, and to make you buy more, right?”
“They still taste better.”
The televised-fight experience – with its infallible commentators, scorecards and superduper slow motion – may well taste better than the real, ringside experience. But for goodness’ sake, do not tell a gardener that the corn-syrupy, synthetic blue mess in a plastic cup you got at the corner store tastes “more like real raspberries” than what he picks from red canes.
Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com
