During his golden years, he was the King of Spanish Harlem. He didn’t just walk the streets. He floated through them, his garish sequin-studded outfits sparkling in the sunlight and the neon-studded nights.
“What time is it?” he would shout.
The answer seemed to bounce off the walls of the enclave that is home to the second highest percentage of public housing in the United States and came roaring back to back with the soul of a salsa beat:
“Macho time! Macho time! Macho time!”
He was a hero in a place where heroes had limited shelf time. It was a place known as Spanish Harlem. But to its ethnic residents it was simply “El Barrio” and a prize fighter named Hector Camacho was its unchallenged king.
Showtime has brilliantly documented his rise and his fall in a show, “Macho: The Hector Camacho Story.” Directed and co-produced by two-time Emmy Award winner Eric Drath, it will debut Friday at 9 p.m., just two weeks after the eighth anniversary of Camacho’s fatal shooting in Bayamon, Puerto Rico.
His was hardly an easy life to chronicle. For every Puerto Rican who migrated to New York City from the Island and to every housing project born Neo-Rican, Macho Camacho was a star who brought light to every corner of El Barrio.
And then this star that gave hope to a place where discrimination and darkness too often prevailed, morphed into the unthinkable. Gone was the star and in its place a comet blazed toward inevitable destruction.
Only those closest to him could tell his story — his mother, his sisters and his lifelong friend, Rudy Gonzales. All then were there at the beginning and in this film, they explain the way it was.
His sister, Raquel fills in much of those details. He was expelled from six school — “not expelled,” Macho tells Drath, “thrown out.”
“He went to jail as a kid for auto theft,” she recalls. “Bruce Lee was is idol (perhaps a clue to Camacho’s marvelous hand speed and foot speed as a champion). “One time he was nodding at the table and my mother looked in his eyes and said, ‘Are you on drugs?’ And he told her, ‘No, I’m all right.’”
But he was already in the early stages of his drug abuse.
He was the family’s darling from the very beginning. When, as a kid, he won the Golden Gloves, they were all there. As he became a hero to all Puerto Ricans, they basked in his reflection.
Year later, after his death, Juan LaPorte, a childhood friend and a successful boxer cut through the facade and told a reporter: “Inside, he was just a kid looking for something. The people around him didn’t have the guts or strength to lead him in the right direction. There was no one strong enough to put a hand on his shoulder and tell him how to do it.’’
His excesses went unchecked at the same time that El Barrio made him a hero. A local businessman tells boxing telecaster Tim Ryan: “He was special. He was the best thing to ever happen here. CBS recognized this. He was our poster child every time he boxed.”
“Boxing was his way out of the ghetto,” Teddy Atlas said. Then the trainer and analyst explained the quality that made Camacho special as a boxer — foot speed, hand speed foot and a unique jab, which according to Atlas, was Camacho’s own invention.
“Most jabs are traditional. The fighter turns it over as he throws it to increase power and to set up what follows. But Camacho threw his straight, didn’t take the fraction of a second necessary to turn it over. So he saved time. His jab got there much more quickly. It was bang-bang.
“He out-jabbed you because his got there first. It came from a cheek high position. It sacrificed power for speed and it created situations because it got there first.”
He climbed boxing’s long, tall ladder, On the night of Aug. 7, 1983, at the Hiram Bithorn Stadium, in San Juan, Puerto Rico, he challenged Bazooka Limon for the vacant WBC super featherweight title.
In San Juan, it was the fight of the year. A young son of Puerto Rico daring to challenge a former champion from Mexico who had held two titles. For Camacho, as well as the Island itself, it was a momentous occasion.
But it almost fell apart. That afternoon, Rudy Gonzales was frantically summoned to Camacho’s hotel. Camacho was threatening to jump out of the window. They talked him down.
There was no sign of his awful problem on fight right. He came into the ring garish and cocky, and Limon was gone in the fifth round. To the boxing world, Camacho had become the bookmark between Mike Tyson and Sugar Ray Leonard. To Spanish Harlem, he simply reinforced his role as the charismatic King of El Barrio, its unofficial mayor without portfolio.
He kept on winning. He married. He divorced after his wife Amy charged him with domestic violence. Camacho won major titles in three weight divisions: WBC super featherweight, lightweight and WBO light welterweight. But one fight would change his life forever.
Camacho was born in Bayamon. Edwin Rosario in Toa Alt, 15 minutes apart by car. As their careers progressed, it was inevitable they would finally meet in the ring. Before his mother took the family to New York City, they each fought in the same weight class but never against each other.
On June 13, 1986, after a six-month layoff, Camacho fought Rosario in Madison Square Garden. Saddled with ring rust, Camacho was dead even after four rounds. Then a single punch changed his life.
Rosario caught Camacho pulling away from a right hand and rocked him with a left hook.
“I wanted him to throw that hand so I could counter,” Camacho said after the fight. “But my timing was off and he got cute. I’d block one and he’d come again. Pow! I thought, ‘Oh, Lord. Pow! Pow! How do I stop this?’’’
He barely made it through the fifth round. In the 11th round, another Rosario hook staggered him. He was lucky to survive that and the final round. The split decision he barely won was his ultimate epiphany.
He was determined never to go through that again. Gone was the Camacho who charged and threw punches from all angles. In its place was a safety-first fighter.
When he reluctantly fought the great Julio Caesar Chavez, it made him a sitting duck. He took a savage beating. It wasn’t his last fight. But it should have been.
The rest of the story unfolds as Gonzales remembers it — the drugs, the wild episodes and the torturous efforts of Camacho to find something. “I am a champion but I am a junkie first,” Camacho once said.
Gonzales was loyal. The story might have ended sooner had he been anything less.
The final act was played out in a parked car in front of a Bayamon bar. An open packet of cocaine lay on the floor. He and a friend had been shot in the face.
He died four days later.
The King of Spanish Harlem was gone.
The killers were never found.
