The Border Fence, Brownsville 
The Contender
But for one youthful mistake, Jesus Chavez could be the super featherweight champion of the world. Instead, he’s facing a heavyweight challenge: how to get back in the ring and redeem himself.
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The streets around the gym and the school were the turf of a gang called the Harrison Gents. “I wanted to be part of that action too,” Gabriel recalled. “Hey, these guys hang out and smoke weed, and they got all the girls. They always called me Boxer. One day I walked out of school and this kid said, ‘We got this thing to do. You want in?’ Sure. Then they’ll really like me. They had a delivery van full of bread and a sawed-off shotgun. There were three of us. On the way, I was thinking, ‘Man, we got this getaway car that smells like a bakery.’ We put on hooded sweatshirts, one stuck the shotgun in an umbrella, and we went in a supermarket. I was backing him up. We made a lady empty the safe, then ran outside and got away. One minute I’ve got homework in my hand and the next I’m robbing somebody? I threw away my friends. I threw away my family. I threw away living in the United States.”
As soon as Gabriel was arrested, he confessed. His devastated parents didn’t have the $7,000 needed to make his bond, and he told them not to borrow it: He had made the mistake and was the one who had to deal with it. For the next eight months his world was a savage Cook County jail wing known as the Gladiator School. He participated in a Scared Straight—style program, in which inmates counseled trouble-prone teens. His court-appointed lawyer told him before his trial that he might be looking at thirty years, so he copped a plea for seven and a half. He did three and a half. He was processed at Joliet and then sent to medium-security Illinois River. He finished out his sentence at Stateville, the maximum-security prison where Oliver Stone filmed much of Natural Born Killers. His parents would make the long journey when they could. “I’d get off work on Christmas Eve,” remembered his father, “and we’d drive all night in ice and snow, then sleep in the car a couple of hours because we had the money for only one night’s motel. We didn’t want him to be alone in that place on Christmas.”
As his release neared, the INS initiated deportation proceedings. Gabriel had no money, so he had no lawyer. In April 1994 he got out of prison and was immediately put on a plane to Mexico City. He had the $50 given all discharged convicts by the State of Illinois.
At least he spoke Spanish. With the help of a sympathetic cabbie and a bus driver who cut him a deal on the fare, Gabriel made it to Chihuahua and his grandparents’ home, in the town of Delicias. He stayed only a few days—his father had arranged for a plane ticket, if Gabriel could make it across the border. A U.S. guard on the bridge in El Paso heard his American accent and waved him through, and Gabriel was soon on a Southwest Airlines plane to Chicago. Austin, a city he had never seen, was the first stop. The sun was shining brightly, and the plane came in over lush green hills and the Colorado River’s winding string of indigo lakes. He saw people water-skiing. “What a pretty place,” he thought. “If I could just start my life over, it would be somewhere like that.”
Back in Chicago he encountered friends who were still getting high, robbing people, on their way to prison or an early grave. “I can’t do this,” he said to his parents. “I can’t be here.” In passing, he told his mother about the longing he had felt staring out that airplane window at Austin. After a moment she reminded him they had some family there.
RICHARD LORD’S BOXING GYM sits among a block of metal buildings on North Lamar Boulevard that other tenants use for storage and small industry. The musty little gym is cold in winter, and on summer afternoons a large thermometer often reminds us we’re doing this to ourselves in 102-degree heat. My fiftieth birthday was a convenient excuse to give up sparring, but hitting something that can’t hit back is a terrific way to get rid of a long work day.
Richard is a bowlegged man of 43 with a long pedigree in boxing. In the sixties his father, Doug, managed and trained a stellar welterweight world champion, Curtis Cokes of Dallas. After graduating from UT, Richard turned pro as a super featherweight. He could punch, but the hallmark of his career was his outrageous conditioning. He lost just once and reached number eight in the world rankings, but the title shot never came, and he retired in the eighties.
Richard’s gym draws a lot of young men and women who can fight. I can’t remember the first time I saw the new prospect, but I recall Richard’s wary excitement the day he got a call from Tom O’Shea in Chicago. “He told me there was a tremendous talent who might come around. Said he got in some trouble up there, but he was a good kid. He just needed someone to give him another chance.” Gabriel Sandoval walked into Lord’s gym the same day.
The kid had two amateur fights in Texas and then turned pro for a $350 payday in August 1994. He told Richard, who didn’t know how illegal he was, that he wanted to be known as Jesus Chavez. Good name for a young Hispanic fighter dodging the INS and reinventing himself—the Mexican hero and champion Julio Cesar Chavez was then at the top of the pro game. It was also good cover for his amateur past up north. “That’s how we got the pro fight,” Richard said, laughing. “Lewis Wood had won thirty-five amateur fights and his first four as a pro. The only guy who’d ever beaten him was Oscar de la Hoya. Gabriel Sandoval they would have found out about. But Jesus Chavez? He’s got no record; he’s from Austin. Sure, bring him on.”
Jesus’ parents �ew to Houston for the bout. It was the first time he’d seen them since he left Chicago. As he walked toward the ring, the emotion of the moment overwhelmed him—he was crying. From the outset, Jesus and Wood went toe-to-toe. The angles of Wood’s attack were throwing Jesus off, and midway through the fight Jesus realized that Wood was a converted left-hander, so he started fighting left-handed himself, confusing Wood. Jesus won a rousing upset decision over a fighter who now holds a North American featherweight title.
Two weeks later, Jesus was again supposed to lose in San Antonio to Rudy Hernandez, a national Golden Gloves champion making his pro debut. Gale Van Hoy, a labor union official, was one of the ringside judges. “It was Rudy Hernandez Night,” he said. “They were handing out �yers, had a mariachi band. This other kid comes out in ragged trunks, old shoes, with a towel over his head, and just destroys him.”
In January 1995, in his fifth pro fight, Jesus lost a split-decision eight-rounder to Carlos Gerena. All of us at the gym shrugged it off: Gerena had boxed internationally and was on a track with well-greased skids. Our guy was living in the gym. He had a tiny room with a bed, a beanbag chair, a stereo, and a TV that didn’t work. He kept up with Richard’s rugged training regimen, sparred, and pushed us through our wheezing workouts. A couple of times his goading made me angry, but I was fascinated with how much he knew. “Relax your hand,” he told me once when I was trying to make my left uppercut more than a clumsy shove, “and raise your left heel just a little.” The heavy bag popped loudly and bounced on the end of the chain. At the end of a day we often sat on the ring apron talking about things far removed from boxing. When he grinned, his small teeth parted, and his eyebrows shot up with an air of impish wonder. He was an optimistic soul.
One day he introduced me to a pretty young woman who had short brown hair. Terri Glanger was studying photography at UT, and they once shared a ride to a San Antonio Golden Gloves tournament, where she took pictures. Her Jewish parents, immigrants from South Africa, owned several fitness stores in Texas. On the drive to San Antonio, he had told her about himself, which took her aback. But now they were dating. She picked him up at the gym at night—he didn’t have a car.
“We’d go out to a restaurant,” he said, “and I’d ask her to order for me. ‘Well, Gabriel, do it yourself.’ But that’s what prison does to you, man. I was too scared to tell a waitress what I wanted to eat. Terri told me I’d better start to think beyond boxing, and she really stayed after me to get my GED, which I did. She helped me study for it, and it was okay that I was doing stuff at an eighth-grade level. Then I went to meet her parents, and driving up she said she’d told them everything.” He laughed. “‘Let’s see now. He’s Catholic, he’s Mexican, he’s been in jail, and he lives in a boxing gym. Way to go, Terri. You can really pick ’em.’”
I thought he lived in the gym that year because he was poor and dedicated. But he also did it because he feared subjecting his relatives and their children, with whom he had lived, to the anguish of seeing him hauled off in handcuffs. When he called himself Jesus Chavez instead of Gabriel Sandoval, he wasn’t lying—those are his names. But it’s also a common Hispanic tactic of evading the INS. He got back on the radar screen in 1995 when he went to get a driver’s license and his papers weren’t in order. He was in a holding cell and would have been deported that day if Richard hadn’t known someone in the system who was a boxing fan. Released on his own recognizance, Jesus hired a lawyer who pursued a strategy of hope and delay. For a while it worked.
ON AUGUST 1995 RICHARD STARTED PROMOTING fights in the downtown Austin Music Hall. The Brawls in the Hall had two attractions: the novelty of skilled women boxing and the furious pace of Jesus’ main events. Politicians wanted to be seen with him, and law enforcement officials started bringing him kids who were in gangs to help turn them around. They were amazed at how he got through to them.
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