Encountering Barrera: Deregulation, bad experiences, and Edwin Valero

It’s easy to find a professional athlete who will talk to you about his strengths. It’s only slightly harder to find one who will tell you about his peers’ weaknesses. A professional athlete who will speak to you in good faith about his own weaknesses, though, is a rare thing.

Those were my thoughts Thursday afternoon as I walked up the Alamodome ramp to Parking Lot A. They were thoughts that came courtesy of an interview with Mexican Marco Antonio Barrera. Still under the spell of Barrera’s courteousness, friendliness and apparent openness, I was about an hour from noticing something I’d missed with Barrera.

He hadn’t told me half as much as I’d imagined.

Barrera was at Alamodome to help Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. promote Top Rank’s “Latin Fury 15,” which happens June 26 in San Antonio. Until last week, “La Furia de México” had a different Mexican in the co-main event. Jorge Arce was scheduled to fight Puerto Rican Eric Morel but sustained a fight-canceling gash in sparring. That meant Barrera’s match with Brazilian lightweight Adailton De Jesus acquired a new importance and mandated his presence at a rescheduled press conference, Thursday.

Barrera, dressed in a striped charcoal suit with a raspberry-sherbet tie, arrived late and strode in the arena with his wife. He stood on stage beside Chavez and posed for pictures, looking darker and duller than usual. He spoke in the hastily acquired English he’s been using since Golden Boy Promotions decided he had crossover potential five years ago, and he told us his goal was to win a fourth world title. Then he switched to Spanish and became Barrera once more.

His upcoming match with De Jesus will add nothing to his legacy, a legacy that includes a historic trilogy with fellow Mexican Erik Morales, a legacy that will win him a first-ballot vote to the International Boxing Hall of Fame. He understands his role in this promotion; he lends his name, a famous one in Mexico, to the name of Chavez’s dad, a more-famous one in Mexico.

Certain people radiate with intellectual horsepower. You find them occasionally on college campuses, rarely in corporations, and almost never in professional athletics. It is not the athlete’s place to supply such radiance, and to look for it is often a sign of envy: What kind of society values this guy a thousand times more than me?

Barrera is an exception. As you interview him in Spanish, a language he’s mastered, you feel him examining you right back. There’s no moral intent, per se; he doesn’t seem to care if you’re honest or will treat him honestly. Rather, he examines you as a rival, as though he wants you to challenge him with a question. He’s confident you can’t, of course, confident to a point that is often taken for arrogance. He shows no defensiveness.

Now that he’s done protecting the Golden Boy Promotions brand as a “partner,” he is accessible. Now that he’s temporarily under Top Rank’s banner, he is even more accessible.

Top Rank lets you put hands on its people. It understands the importance of access better than its rivals. It allows public arguments within, or even against, the media, because it understands what a younger generation of promoters has yet to learn: So long as people talk about you and your event, whatever they say, they promote your event.

Thursday, I didn’t want the interference of a translator, and I sure as hell didn’t want Barrera’s English-speaking imposter. I wanted the most eloquent prizefighter I’ve met, alone, and in Spanish. I approached the table where Barrera and his wife waited for print media to finish interviewing Chavez, shook Barrera’s hand and told him that whatever he opined of my questions, he should understand they were good-faith inquiries from someone who admired him.

“Of course,” he said, and he smiled.

I asked him why, demons, he returned. What did he hope to gain by fighting on?

“Something to prove, there is not,” he said. That sentence was about as different in Spanish as it looks in English. He didn’t say there was nothing to prove, in the double-negative way of pedestrian, if still proper, Spanish. He used an alternative emphasis.

“The open television in Mexico permits more people to see me now,” Barrera said. “People who did not, before, have the opportunity to see Barrera. There are Mexicans who know solely the Barrera from that last time.”

In 2006, just before its presidential election, Mexico passed the “Ley Federal de Radio y Televisión.” This law effectively deregulated Mexican television, in the name of bringing digital cable to the people, and eventually returned boxing to free channels. Like most deregulation ploys, though, it disproportionately enriched a very small number of people. A Mexican Supreme Court ruling in 2007 delayed its implementation. And there would be further delay in converting average Mexican cable viewers’ hardware. Barrera’s contention, then, is that very few of his countrymen were able to see him for most of his career.

Since 2007, Barrera has fought thrice. A 2008 fight happened in China. An early 2009 fight was the Mexican equivalent of an Off-Off-Broadway show, in Zapopan, Jalisco. And then there was that U.K. fight 14 months ago.

“That was a bad experience,” Barrera said, of his match with English sensation Amir Khan. It saw Barrera’s upper forehead sliced opened and bleeding freely in the first round. U.K. officials, though, allowed the fight to continue until the fifth round, at which time the result went from a no-decision to a technical-decision in Khan’s favor.

“It is an experience that I am going to erase,” Barrera said. “If a fourth championship comes along the way, good. But I return to erase that fight.”

At this point in our interview, someone handed Barrera a cell-phone with a picture of the cut. It was a scripted move, and as a script is beneath Barrera, I moved away from it:

As someone who admires you for your intellect as well as your boxing, I am nervous, if not sad, about your return, I said. Tell me how I am mistaken.

“To the contrary, friend, you are not mistaken,” Barrera said. “Boxing is filled with bad experiences. Many bad experiences.”

And when you bade farewell to “this beautiful sport” at Mandalay Bay in October of 2007?

“That was all about my promoter,” Barrera said, and he laughed. “I was not happy with my promoter, and I did that to escape them.”

The day after Barrera easily survived 12 rounds with Manny Pacquiao, never imperiling himself or Pacquiao, en route to a unanimous-decision loss, I wrote of his relationship with Golden Boy Promotions: “Barrera had become an overqualified employee in De la Hoya’s company, a guy who was too smart for the corporation, quietly resenting each new workday and the boss who caused it.”

“Exactly,” Barrera said, when I paraphrased this for him.

A better reporter would have plumbed the depths of Barrera’s resentment for his former promoter, a resentment he didn’t seem at all interested in hiding. Instead, I asked Barrera about a curious relationship he’d developed with a man whose life ended terribly last month.

On that night of your goodbye to boxing, I reminded him, you brought Venezuelan Edwin Valero on stage with you. You complimented him at length and called him a friend more than a sparring partner.

“We invited him to the city,” Barrera remembered of that training camp. “It was a friendship. A very good friendship. That night, I said he would beat Pacquiao. That was true. Unfortunately, they were never able to have that fight.”

And when he heard that Valero had murdered his wife, on April 19, before apparently committing suicide in a Venezuelan jail cell?

“I regretted it, I felt very badly,” Barrera said. “We waited to hear confirmation of the news. I regret it even now. I flee that date. But none of it surprised me. (Valero) had many psychological problems.”

I thanked Barrera and his wife, both, for being the people they have been, and for handling their celebrity with such grace.

On my way out, I stopped and spoke to Carlos Hernandez – who now resides in San Antonio – because on my way in, Jesse James Leija had told me Hernandez and Edwin Valero had trained together and been friends in Los Angeles. Few prizefighters are charismatic or likable as Hernandez. When I asked him if he were surprised by the news of Valero’s end last month, Hernandez shook his head.

“I wasn’t surprised,” Hernandez said. “But we didn’t talk about family much in the gym. We talked about other things.”

Such as?

“Venezuelan politics,” Hernandez said, and we both smiled at the oddity of such a conversation in the gym. “He was really into it.”

“Too into it,” Hernandez’s wife added.

Bart Barry can be reached at [email protected]