Mexican “Son of the Legend” Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. – the man whom middleweight champion Sergio Martinez alternately calls “a lie” and “the lie” – likely lost the chavezweight championship of the world to Bryan Vera, Saturday, were we able to get scorecards in what Shakespeare called honest hands (“And put in every honest hand a whip / To lash the rascals naked through the world”), but that is irrelevant to both Chavez’s legacy and his promoter’s immediate plans. And probably Chavez didn’t lose boldly as television said he did.
Live from the inanely named StubHub Center in Carson, Calif., came Chavez’s 173-pound fight with Texas middleweight Bryan Vera, a man long on chin as he’s short on defensive wherewithal, in a match that presented what scoring difficulties come whenever one man hits another disproportionately harder and less often than he gets hit. Official scores all went for Chavez: 96-94, 97-93, 98-92. My scorecard did not concur, finding for Vera, but as my vantage came via television’s profoundly distorting lens, I’ll defer to personal experience and flee our sport’s social predators as they perpetually pack in pursuit of dissenting judges.
Regardless of record or baubles, it is enough to see Son of the Legend struck repeatedly, is it not? So goes the strategy for promoting Chavez henceforth, in a subtle way fans recognize even when they do not grasp it: the more outraged a man was with Saturday’s decision, the more hardily he hoped for a larger and better opponent to do Chavez wrong and thorough-like, for attendance figures show very, very few disinterested folks feel strongly enough about Bryan Vera or his career to demand a rematch, and if the remainder of strong feelings about Saturday reasonably then can be summarized as “I’d like to see Chavez’s bitch ass beat unconscious,” will anyone be sated by a rematch with little Bryan Vera so much as a run-in with super middleweight champion Andre Ward, or something vengefully served by light heavyweight champion Adonis Stevenson?
How rich it was to see Junior deftly maneuver the compulsories of Saturday’s prefight-promo video (not “Punching in the Rain” but the other one), citing his professionalism and habit of making weight, every time, in a manner nimbly unconscious of his same body having missed weight at least three times, four if one counts the postponement, and having missed it in a way to make his fight-contract a fight-expand, a miss so gloriously wide countrymen Erik Morales and Jose Luis Castillo now appear pikers beside him. It was an out-of-body trick Chavez pulled, talking about himself like a talent scout proud of this Chavez kid, disciplined as he is, before he treated the inexpressible joy of pending fatherhood – and show us a professional fighter not prone to sympathetic pregnancy symptoms! – in what might have been a piece of only slightly embarrassing symmetry, had the Legend in the moniker “Son of the Legend” spoken of his ineffable pride at siring a lad like Junior, had the HBO production crew not already spent its budget making it rain elsewhere.
Bryan Vera outworked Chavez, while neither out-defending nor out-slugging him, making furious an HBO broadcaster otherwise reliably derisive of judges who score activity alone, but so what? Cheering for Chavez to get beaten is a thing that transcends what petty barriers otherwise divide us; who but Son of the Legend – his country casting about for a new hero, anything to look away from Cinnamon Alvarez for a spell – agrees to fight at a rust-removing 162 pounds then takes the scale 2 1/2 from the light heavyweight limit, smiles jubilantly, raises his hands triumphantly, and hits a most-muscular pose in peach micro briefs?
And that was not the best of Chavez’s stylishness – as he would go on to tire expectedly in the second half of Saturday’s fight and ape his vanquisher, the aforementioned Sergio Martinez, dropping his hands, hanging his arms loosely, and hopping at Vera with lead power shots. Fortunately nothing tragic happened at StubHub Center, and let us not conflate tragedy with travesty, because Chavez was not conditioned well enough to do his signature left-shoulder corral and whale Vera for more than five-second increments.
Had Chavez a whit of conditioning, he might have beaten Vera severely, as the Texan’s defensive tactics approached self-sabotage in their carelessness; Vera dropped his right hand as an offensive prerequisite – he did not attack, even with his left, until his right was secured on the metallic-rust waistband of his trunks, allowing himself to be hit flush with left-hook leads, the successful landing of which surprised Chavez enough to embolden him. It is not a just world that sees someone like Chavez so much better outfitted for combat than someone serious as Bryan Vera, but there was nothing just about the entirety of last week’s spectacle, and but for the 34-minute denuding Martinez performed on him in 2012, the concluding 90 seconds of which saw Chavez nearly return himself to regally adorned splendor, what about Chavez’s career has even feinted justice’s way?
A thought that came to mind between rounds Saturday, as Chavez Sr. called for a right cross to the body that would be the most debilitating blow his son landed in 30 minutes: Does the Legend ever imagine what it would be like to fight Son of the Legend, does he ever shunt fatherly considerations and empathize with those men who have none of the benefits given his son, benefits he did not have? Does Julio Cesar Chavez, in other words, ever suspend disbelief and catch himself accidentally cheering a Bryan Vera to whup his son, the way his longtime fans now do?
Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com
