SAN ANTONIO – There’s a fine barber shop in the basement of the historic Gunter Hotel in the center of this city’s downtown, it’s called Barber Shop and has three barbers and a shoeshiner and a barber’s pole and Playboy magazines, and if its banter isn’t quite of an Ice Cube flick, it’s just as manly and fun. Since every barber shop could use a boxing writer, and since a boxing writer encounters few venues so appreciative of his gifts, I spend a half hour every month giving an editorial review of prizefighting’s calendar, 1974-present.
Austin is 70 miles up I-35 from here, and Austin middleweight Brian Vera, who fights Mexican “Son of the Legend” Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. at StubHub Center in Carson, Calif., Saturday, apparently has an interested relative who frequents the same barber shop. And so, every month for what feels like seven, I’ve been asked when Vera is going to get to fight Chavez, a request for information to which I confess honest ignorance, citing Chavez’s unpredictability and eliciting, without fail, a question like: What the hell is wrong with that kid?
And as I climb in the chair, I tend to say, “Where does one begin?”
Lost in the justifiable concern about Sergio Martinez’s knee after the extraordinary conclusion of his otherwise unmemorable match with Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. 53 weeks ago, the last time Chavez fought, were the lasting effects of the beating Chavez sustained, a beating that included 300 flush shots to the Mexican’s head by a man who knew how to do it with gusto. Chavez has an uncanny flair for midwifing others’ resentment. Even the men whom Chavez defeats, in an original twist, rarely have good things to say about him, a surprising departure from the tradition of saying the guy who beat me is a great champion because, well, I wouldn’t lose to a nobody.
Speaking to Sergio Martinez four months after he and Chavez made one of the more rapturous 90 seconds prizefighting has accomplished, a half of the 12th round nearly unbearable in its suspense and just as nearly the opposite of what Día de Independencia Mexicana ’13 yielded, the Argentine had little good to say about Chavez, a rarity for Martinez, rarely dismissive of his ambassadorial duties.
Martinez implied several times and with uncharacteristic urgency marijuana – the drug for which Chavez tested positive and received an absurdly harsh fine and suspension – was the least of Chavez’s banned-substance affairs, wondering how a man with so little use for weight control or proper camp comportment was so strong after 34 1/2 minutes of collecting five or so concussing shots every minute. That Martinez saw the final 90 seconds of his September match with Chavez as a sum of his own poor choices, misjudgments of time and space and improvisation manifesting themselves as carelessness, was an unsurprising turn for a world champion jealously guarding life’s controllable moments. That Martinez would not cop to a tittle of admiration for a former opponent, too, was unsurprising when that former opponent remained a future opponent. That Martinez would take a lobbed question about a challenger winning a bit of his respect, though, and use it as the doorway into a room of specific accusations and untrammeled resentment was a surprise and a half.
It was a peek at the peaks of what Chavez piques so uniquely among prizefighters that no one empathized even slightly with the abuse he suffered from Martinez’s left hand, which hand rendered Paul Williams instantly unconscious two years before, or wondered where it might leave Chavez’s career. Such is the sentiment Chavez inspires that even today, as a fight that was considered for June and has been moved all round the calendar and western states finally draws near, no one attributes any of Chavez’s camp injuries to anything but sloth. But slothful as Chavez was, imagine such indolence now confronted by a mind that may not be more than 2/3 right, a trainer and dad whose mind cannot possibly be rated that well, and an opponent who rightfully regards this match as a career opportunity, which it might be.
Brian Vera is good enough, as he showed against Andy Lee and Sergio Mora and Serhiy Dzinziruk, to surprise opponents who do not take seriously his limited pressuring style, and he’s also the sort of grinder boxing likes to see matched against those it resents. Vera is the constant, of course, and Chavez is the variable; in the very unlikely case that Saturday’s opening bell finds the same Chavez it found for round 1 in Thomas & Mack Center a year ago, Chavez will handle Vera the way he handled Peter Manfredo and luckless Andy Lee, wearing them down by channeling others’ hatred for him – yes, and again, Chavez knows exactly where he stands with you – and beating on them for royalty’s sake.
This time Chavez will have his dad in his corner, too, where Junior will be able to ignore him more easily than when dad was credentialed by TV Azteca to be ringside and bark maniacal instructions at a son physically incapable of executing more than half them and mentally equipped for perhaps their first tenth, barking directly over former chief second Freddie Roach’s strong preference for a quiet, respectful corner.
What Vera stands to gain by beating Chavez is at least an argument for a larger future payday on HBO, banishing for a moment a thought he could be Rigondeauxn, while Chavez might with a win return to the superfight-cashout sweepstakes, nominating himself for a supporting-actor role in Andre Ward’s 2014 pay-per-view debut, and a chance to don once more his pink briefs and show those tired “24/7” episodes the aplomb with which he carries the Chavez name.
Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com