By Bart Barry-
Three Saturdays from now a comain at the Dallas Cowboys’ practice facility will feature Nicaragua’s Roman “Chocolatito” Gonzalez, the once king of our beloved sport. Chocolatito will challenge Birmingham’s Khalid Yafai for Yafai’s WBA super flyweight world title. It will be the third time Chocolatito fights since what Srisaket Sor Rungvisai did to him in 2017. It likely won’t go well for Chocolatito.
It’s the sort of return that appears to be financial-advisor-mandated more than love-o’-the-game compelled.
How dare I? Well it’s the weight mostly. In some longlost video or other familiars of Chocolatito’s crowed after his second and brutalest loss he’d been manipulated somehow or other to make fights at super flyweight.
Now he’s back at that weight in a tilt with a legitimate titlist who knows how to punch and be punched at 115 pounds, and more troublesome still: Yafai made his prizefighting debut at 122 3/4 pounds. Chocolatito’s own debut, 15 years ago, happened at 108. No need to bore you with the maths, dear reader, but 14 pounds on a man who weighs not much more than 100 is an appreciable bit, and more appreciable still on a man who invites contact the way Chocolatito does.
If there’s a lasting strike against Chocolatito as a stylist it lies in how much he allows and always has allowed opponents’ gloves touch him. Chocolatito is a proper prizefighter and showman, mentored by a modern master of the craft, the late Alexis Arguello, and the craft until recently required a man be punched to achieve celebrity and wealth. That is how Chocolatito learned to fight, then, before men learned to extend their careers by specializing in defense and mic skills, igniting in ticketbuyers a frothing lust to see them slept, and pundits adapted themselves to modern metrics, going along with a charade the best fighter is he who fights least.
If Chocolatito, pre-Rat King at least, did not often catch punches flush on his chin he nevertheless caught plenty on his shoulders and wrists. Even a novel dissuasion technique of his – hanging the hook between an opponent’s right shoulder and ear such that the opponent’s cross necessarily drove Chocolatito’s left knuckles into the side of his aggressor’s head – required an opponent’s right wrist at least to crash against Chocolatito’s upper left arm or shoulder.
Which wasn’t any problem when Chocolatito was young and nimble and big as those who challenged him. That stopped quite abruptly in 2016, when Chocolatito made a successful if illadvised challenge for Carlos Cuadras’ super flyweight title. Chocolatito did what he’d always done and well as he’d always done it but the effect it took on Cuadras was disproportionately less than anticipated. And that anticipated what’d come next even while few of us did.
Srisaket Sor Rungvisai is an excellent and bruising prizefighter but hardly the man we expected to unseat the world’s best. Sor Rungvisai did so with quite a bit of skill but even more physicality. Just that suddenly the headbutts and whatnots that favored Chocolatito, always, favored his opponent moreso. If Chocolatito looked a man threadbaring himself in his first match of 2017 he looked worn and desperate by September of that year, when Sor Rungvisai’s misses moved him round the canvas. Sor Rungvisai was happy to trade with Chocolatito, and a few minutes into their rematch it was a mismatch.
Not since Roy Jones Jr.’s collapse did a man considered invincible look so immediately vincible. Since then Chocolatito has been semiretired, fighting twice in 29 months against men with a cumulative 10 losses and four draws on their dossiers, sparring partners honored to share a mat with him. Even so.
A couple months ago in Tokyo against Diomel Diocos, a man of impeccable courtesy and a chin that floats, Chocolatito looked initially dull, needing a round and a half too long to victimize a designated victim. Because at 115 pounds his punches no longer pack, Chocolatito exerts more throwing them, both tiring and disbalancing himself; even the feckless Diocos managed to get an uppercut in position for Chocolatito to impale himself. Luckily for Chocolatito, of course, Diocos, in the homestretch of a 1-4 year and seven fights since his last knockout, hadn’t a prayer of hurting Chocolatito, who looked more sheepish than vicious in finishing him.
Unluckily for Chocolatito, the whole thing now looks a setup, doesn’t it? In Frisco, Chocolatito will fight under a British promotional banner a man the BBC calls Britain’s longest reigning world champion. What do you think that portends?
Hint: “A chance to justify a rubber match with Sor Rungvisai!” mightn’t be the answer.
No, the purpose of Yafai-Gonzalez is to get the Brummie a hall-of-fame scalp en route to a higherpaying affair with higherweighing men. Fair is fair, right, and it’s all in the game, yes, but one hates to see it in realtime, a man once an example of boxing’s best qualities made an example of a different sort altogether.
A couple hours ago, when I set about this column, I believe I planned to name it “Why I’ll be in Frisco” – and now I realize why I won’t be.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
