The ?Lush Life? tour?or is it ?Louche???continued for Julio Cesar Chavez, Jr., last night when he churned out a unanimous decision over overmatched and undersized Marcos Reyes over 10 slapdash rounds at the Don Haskins Convention Center in El Paso, Texas.
Our favorite wastrel, bruised pastel blue (with a hint of cobalt and a dollop of American Rose), looked through after Andrzej Fonfara walloped him into submission last April. But Chavez opted for a new trainer, Robert Garcia, and a quick turnaround to keep the peanut gallery rollicking.
For a while, Chavez was an exciting grinder in the ring. Not talented enough to overwhelm the opposition, Chavez was often in back-and-forth slugfests. He was also a boon to writers with a little imagination. But his reverse-eureka moment seemed to arrive sometime after signing a contract to face Sergio Martinez in 2012. Who knows how much of what happened before that fight?which was a mismatch from the moment it was announced?should be, or could be, read in a Freudian light? From Remezcla, after Chavez defeated Brian Vera in their rematch last year:
Although Chavez was effective against the limited Vera, his crude stampeding methods will be easy pickings for world-class professionals. There is a good chance that Chavez realizes this. In an interview with NacionESPN in 2012, Chavez admitted that he suffered from anxiety and insomnia before his fight with Sergio ?Maravilla? Martinez. These confessions, better suited for a Dr. Phil session, are not what you usually hear from a prizefighter.
In addition, Chavez barely trained for the biggest fight of his career and, to make matters worse, failed a post-fight drug test for marijuana. All of this may have added up to what Jose Torres, twice the fighter in his heyday than Chavez will ever be, once said about his frame of mind after winning the light heavyweight championship of the world: ?I thought it was a big thing. I thought it was a big thing, and then it really affected me psychologically, it changed the values, I became more important to myself. In other words, I became so fatalistic, and I started thinking differently, I started thinking about, I had morbid thoughts, I was afraid to die. I don?t know, some kind of bullshit psychologically.? Then again, maybe not.
Now 29, Chavez already seems like a relic or an artifact. Nearly three years have passed since Chavez came within a punch or two of toppling Sergio Martinez, but it might as well have happened in another lifetime. These days, Chavez, 49-2-1-1 (32), doubles as a genuine villain as well as a symbol of the wasteland Showtime Championship Boxing has become. Only three fighters have headlined SCB this year?Chavez, Deontay Wilder, and Gary Russell, Jr., and Showtime sachem Stephen Espinoza seems all but oblivious to subscribers who may actually be interested in prizefighting. Thankfully, Espinoza maintains a blowhard Twitter account at odds with his shabby performance as a programmer. Even his biggest achievement?helping to broker Mayweather-Pacquiao?depended on HBO for realization.
In the past, Chavez has been a ratings draw, but at least when Chavez was on HBO, his size advantage came against fighters in their own weight classes?with Brian Vera being the post-Martinez exception. Reyes, however, emerged from the Operation Rod Salka Manual: a middling pro two weight classes above his best division.
Until he was mulched into a near-standstill late in the fight, Reyes, 33-3 (24), mixed jabs and flurries with side-to-side movement and isolated uppercuts in close. But when he was muscled into the ropes, Reyes took thudding shots to the ribs followed by the occasional whipping hook to the jaw. Chavez, a meandering pressure fighter, alternated attacking with slacking and opened up in the closing seconds of each round as much, apparently, to prepare himself for a respite on the stool as to impress potentially wavering judges. It should be noted that Garcia, who specializes in training fighters who are phobic about beam scales, added nothing new to Chavez, whose clumsiness seemed more apparent than ever.
In the fifth, Chavez scored with one unerring jab after another, disrupting the tempo and forcing Reyes, 27, to re-set on the perimeter. Although Reyes, who switched from southpaw from time to time, landed his share of combinations and worked the body effectively from time to time, he lacked the firepower to keep Chavez at bay. In the ninth, Chavez, by then well ahead on the scorecards, wheedled Referee Jose Guadalupe Garcia into deducting a point from Reyes, Chihuahua, Chihuahua, Mexico, after a clash of heads left ?Junior? bleeding from a gash above his left brow. It made no difference in the scoring: 97-92, 98-91, and 96-93, all in favor of Chavez, who failed to make weight?twice!?in what was already billed as a ?catchweight? bout. Officially, Chavez was 170 ? pounds and Reyes was 168 ?.
It may have been an optical illusion, but Chavez resembled a cruiserweight when he answered the opening bell. More and more, equal terms?the bedrock of prizefighting?seem out of the question. Fighters demand catchweights, skip weight altogether, or accept fights only when the opposition has faded enough to become non-threatening. In that sense, Chavez, Culiacan, Sinaloa, Mexico, is part of the zeitgeist and not necessarily an innovator, but his lack of character both in and out of the ring makes him as loud a target as possible for the slings of hecklers who also despise his antics between the ropes. His showboating act against the much smaller Reyes, for example, was a grotesque parody of machismo and his open weeping after taking a head butt was cringe worthy.
Once again, Chavez was booed lustily by the crowd, but he seemed unmoved by the response, aware, perhaps, that there are no longer any consequences for his transgressions?until the next time he faces a solid pro, no doubt.
