By Bart Barry-
Sometime last week or the one before, the ballot arrived for this year’s International Boxing Hall of Fame election. It had too many great fighters to choose only five, but rules are rules. I don’t recall the other four I chose. They weren’t necessarily four who will get in but borderline candidates I hope to help. My fifth vote went without hesitation to a man whose name appeared alphabetically towards the bottom: Israel “El Magnifico” Vazquez.
This won’t be a persuasive piece, necessarily, so much as a light exposition, an examination, a chance to write once more about my favorite prizefighter.
I didn’t vote for Vazquez to be in the IBHOF because I believe you should, or should agree that I did. I won’t list the most-prominent fighter on this year’s ballot for whom I did not vote because I know his misanthropic fans and haven’t a desire or reason in the world to hear from them again – and he’s getting in anyway. I don’t have reductionist criteria to which I cling for making decisions about who belongs in a hall of fame or deserves of-the-year awards because I feel no compulsion whatever to justify these decisions. I watch prizefighting often enough to write a weekly column and trust the rest to intuition. I don’t argue about these things, either; this column is an asymmetrical medium.
There is no one I have covered in this, our beloved sport whom I admire more than El Magnifico. Nobody I can think of who gave more of the best part of himself to our sport, either, making naught but world championship fights in his prime and losing his career and right eye to the quality of opposition he faced. And in a sport of counterintuitively decent men, too, he’s the most decent I’ve met.
My first Las Vegas card I covered for this site was Marco Antonio Barrera’s 2006 tutoring of Rocky Juarez, and that night’s co-comain featured the best fight any American aficionado saw live, much less in person, that year. Vazquez came off the canvas twice and ground Jhonny Gonzalez to dust seven years before Gonzalez put a stamp on Abner Mares.
Man, could Vazquez grind! He had innate a sense as any of another man’s accumulating weakness; he saw with a jeweler’s loupe the first fissures in an opponent’s will. Once he saw the fissures he pressured them unto cracks and pieces and pieces of those pieces, regardless what counterpunches hit him en route.
He had many plans, too, not just a plan A, which means he was nothing like the kamikaze some wrongly credited him with being. He stayed on his stool, after all, in the first of his three fights with Rafael Marquez. He wasn’t able to breathe and said he wouldn’t fight on. If that keeps him off someone’s defunct Gatti List, so be it.
What it proves is Vazquez’s volition; it proves that every time he marched through his era’s best super bantamweights he did so voluntarily, capable as he was of calling-off the match if the contest became futile. Oscar Larios (63-7-1, 39 KOs), Jhonny Gonzalez (68-11, 55 KOs) and Rafael Marquez (41-9, 37 KOs): Vazquez fought these men a collective eight times and went 5-3 (4 KOs). He knocked-out two of them in rematches after they’d stopped him, and in the case of the third, “Jhonny” Jhonny, he knocked-out Gonzalez after being dropped by him a twotime.
El Magnifico’s legacy is, of course, his trilogy with Rafael Marquez. As aficionados bemoan the recesses and tuneups granted men like Deontay Wilder and Tyson Fury and Saul Alvarez and Gennady Golovkin, they’re reminded Vazquez and Marquez fought one another consecutively in three matches that spanned less than a year. Marquez stopped Vazquez in March, Vazquez stopped Marquez in August, and they made the 2007 fight of the year seven months later.
It’s the best fight in the best trilogy I’ll ever cover.
You can confirm all that on YouTube. What you can’t confirm is how ruined, broken even, Vazquez was in the postfight pressconference after his victory. There he was, his face like a powdered Halloween mask – allwhite but for lipstick circles where his eyes and mouth should’ve been. He humbly mumbled his praise of Marquez through torn, swollen lips and graciously ceded the microphone to Marquez’s jackass promoter and assistant manager and their braying about protesting some detail nobody remembers. Eleven years later, and that scene still boils.
Sixteen months after Vazquez won 2007’s fight of the year, good fortune put me at a dinner table with him in New York City, where the BWAA honored him and my mentor and friend Norm Frauenheim. Who knows how many surgeries Vazquez’s right eye had undergone by then.
El Magnifico was there with his wife’s brother, and before dessert Vazquez’s cuñado loped over to take pictures with what bedizened models accompanied the evening’s presenters. Vazquez and I exchanged incredulous glances, and I told El Magnifico his brother-in-law was gaming every woman with a line about knowing Israel Vazquez.
“Pero, yo soy Vazquez,” he said, and he motioned to himself and started laughing. “I’m Vazquez!”
I don’t care if empiricism says there are fighters more deserving of IBHOF induction. I don’t care if someone knows so little about prizefighting that he looks at the 27 losses listed above, or the 5 losses (4 KOs) on Vazquez’s résumé, and scoffs at someone being dumb enough to vote for Vazquez and admit it in a column. Frankly, I don’t care if this is the last of my columns you ever read.
Israel Vazquez epitomizes for me everything that makes prizefighting worth its writing.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry