Standing Eight
Prologue
Copyright Adam Pitluk 2005
With five minutes until fight time, the boxer moved restlessly in the tunnel of the Arena Theater in Houston. He wore a white gym towel like a poncho, with the middle cut out for his head to fit through, and his closely cropped black hair was wet from the sweat. Boxers are supposed to perspire before they fight, but his pores were working overtime. The 21-year-old pugilist had perspired clear through his towel, and the wet terrycloth clung to his torso as though he had worn it through a carwash.
He threw punches into the air and quickly moved his head from side to side to loosen his neck muscles while the saltwater dripped from the seams of his towel and collected in a pool around his feet. He stood 5-feet 6-inches tall with wide brown eyes, a pudgy nose and thick eyebrows and eyelashes. His muscles expanded and contracted as he bounced in place, which made the tattoo of a skull wearing a top hat on his right shoulder appear as though it were dancing. While his body continued to pulse with each undulating step and with each methodical movement, his face remained stoic.
Richard Lord, the trainer, stood behind the boxer and kneaded his charge’s shoulders with both hands. “Come on, champ,” Lord said to the boxer from behind. “This is the moment you’ve been waiting for. This will make those 100-degree days in the gym worth the work. You feel good?”
“I feel real good,” he replied, keeping his eyes fixed on the blue boxing ring 20 yards down the walkway. “I’m ready for this guy. I’m ready.”
“O.K. champ. You know what to do in there. He’s gonna come out strong and try to push you around. I don’t want you to let ‘em do that. I want you to control the momentum. You set the tone. Remember your technique and fight the kind of fight you want to. Make a strong impression. Take control.”
“Take control,” the boxer repeated. “T … take … control.” As he muttered the words, his eyes began to well up with tears. His bottom lip trembled as he tried to fight back surging emotion, but the harder he tried to stay stone-faced, the more his once-intense face cramped up. And the more his face cramped, the harder he blinked.
Lord sensed his fighter’s heavy heart. He knew that the boxer’s parents were in the audience and realized how much this fight meant to his family. The trainer, however, had a job to do. He had to keep his fighter’s head in the game. Although he sympathized with his charge’s emotional state, Lord decided he’d have to take control and harness those emotions: turn those tears of concern into tears of rage.
Lord grabbed his fighter’s arm and turned him around brusquely. “Look at me: Forget about all those people. You hear me? Forget they’re there. You have a job to do. You’re a professional now, you got that? A professional. This is business.”
The boxer turned back around and faced his destiny 20 yards away as three more tense minutes passed. Lord resumed his rubdown. “Come on, Jesus. Get loose.”
Strange. He still wasn’t used to people calling him Jesus. But this was a new beginning: new professional status, new hometown, new name. With that, the announcer entered the ring and a microphone lowered from the rafters.
“Ladies and gentlemen, our first bout is scheduled for four rounds. Introducing first, the challenger, making his professional début here tonight. From Austin, Texas, lets hear it for Jesus ‘El Matador’ Chavez!” Boos thundered in the boxer’s ears. A small fraction of fans cheered, but the boos outnumbered them and came from all around.
Sitting in the middle of the arena – among the hostile fans and the reverberating hisses – were Jesus and Rosario Sandoval, the boxer’s parents, and the boxer’s kid brother, 12-year-old Jimmy Sandoval. Mom and dad had pooled their savings and bought the $750 plane tickets – the cost for three to fly to Houston from Chicago at last minute’s notice – to watch their oldest child make his professional boxing début . They seemingly ignored the unruly spectators surrounding them and clapped fanatically as their boy made his way to the ring.
The boxer tried to choke back the sobs as he trotted towards the squared-circle, but seeing his mother, father and younger brother in the audience and knowing how much they had sacrificed to make the trip was too much for the already-tense boxer to handle. Tears started streaming down his face, which caused his mother to start crying as well. The boxer’s heavy breathing, coupled with his guttural moans, caused him to slightly asphyxiate. He was completely overwhelmed with emotion as he made his way towards the ring for this, his first professional fight. This was his crowning moment: he had made it through an obstacle course laden with hope, despair and despondency in order to have the opportunity to showcase his pugilistic talents in front of a capacity crowd.
Then there was his family, and the young boxer wanted nothing more than to make them proud – to show them that he’d become someone.
And Jimmy. His younger sibling was there. The kid idolized his Big Brother. The boxer needed to make a statement on that night: successful professional boxers don’t have many “L’s” on their record. If he was to become any kind of contender later down the road, he needed to make a memorable first impression in his professional début . And that prospect daunted him.
Jesus Sandoval knew it was up to him to hold the family together and to keep them from making a public spectacle. He looked at his son firmly, clenched his fist, and nodded. His son took the cue, and with his red boxing glove, wiped the tears from his face.
The boxer entered the ring and raised both hands, which touched off another wave of boos. Houstonians did not come out that August night in 1994 to see the début of Jesus Chavez, but rather, to see the professional début of their native son, Lewis Wood. A hard-hitting southpaw and veteran of the Houston Fire Department, Lewis was a man’s man. A violent fighter in the ring, he was the type of guy the Houston working class could relate to. He was grounded, dedicated, a family man after the bell and outside the ring. This was Wood’s first professional fight, too, and the firefighter was already looking beyond his opponent to his first major bout and big payday.
Two years earlier, Wood lost a tough amateur fight to would-be gold medalist Oscar De La Hoya in the last round of the U.S. Olympic tryouts. He hadn’t lost another fight since. Because he performed so well as an amateur, Wood’s professional unveiling was highly anticipated by boxing pundits. Local fight fans, who already prided themselves on their resilient hometown amateur, attended this fight in droves to witness the beginning of a new era for Houston boxing, where the lightweight would be king.
“And his opponent,” the announcer resumed, “fighting out of the blue corner and wearing red, white and blue trunks, also making his professional début here tonight, let’s hear it for our own Lewis, the ‘Fighting Houston Fireman’ Wood!”
The two boxers approached each other in the center of the ring and the referee gave instructions. Lord continued to rub his fighter’s shoulders, kneading increasingly harder as his fighter repeatedly blinked.
Wood took his opponent’s eye twitching to be a sign of fear: Neither Wood nor his trainers recognized the boxer named Jesus Chavez for an ex-convict named Gabriel Sandoval who had the tick since he was a child. They didn’t know that by twitching, the boxer was pumping up his muscles. His biceps, triceps and forearms pulsed with each hard blink. They didn’t figure their opponent picked up a vicious temperament to accompany his involuntary motions while in prison. And since the Lewis Wood camp didn’t know the opposing fighter’s identity, they had no way of knowing that although this was Jesus Chavez’s first fight, in his former life he had an amateur record of 95-5 and three Golden Glove championships. But what was more, Jesus Chavez and Gabriel Sandoval were the same person; an undocumented Mexican immigrant.
When the boxer started blinking, it wasn’t out of fear, but rather out of white-hot anger. Lord sensed the confidence growing in his fighter. The harder he kneaded the boxer’s shoulders, the tauter they became. Chavez’s mind wandered from the reality of his first professional fight and transported him back to the yard at Stateville Maximum Security Prison in Illinois. Lewis Wood was no longer his professional opponent, but a rival gang member who had just called him out and wanted him dead. And in prison, when someone calls you out, you strike first and beat him until his eyes bleed.
Lord gave his fighter some last words of instruction: use that jab, set up a left hook to the body, and follow it up with a right upstairs. He removed the wet towel from over Chavez’s head and slapped him on the ass. The bell rang and both boxers, wanting to make a strong first impression, charged to the center of the ring and began throwing measuring jabs. Wood caught Chavez with a hard left cross midway through the first round, which sent the crowd into a frenzy and which clouded El Matador’s head for the remaining opening minute. But that did not stop the challenger from swinging away. His opponent’s lefts were seemingly coming from all directions. Chavez realized in the first round that he was fighting a southpaw. Since this fight was booked on last-minute’s notice, and because Lord was following a course he’d plotted early in their training to only put his boxer in the ring with the toughest opponents available, neither of them had a chance to scout Wood. They prepared to fight, yes, but the measures they took were training for training’s sake. Midway through the first round – before Lord even had a chance to report to Chavez that Wood was left-handed – Chavez already recognized that fact and responded accordingly. Chavez withstood a bombardment of strong lefts by Wood. But before the bell sounded to end round one, Chavez adjusted his stance and began trading left-handed bombs with the stronger boxer. When he returned to his corner after round one, Lord gruffly barked out orders of encouragement.
“You look good out there,” he said, taking Chavez’s mouthpiece out and rubbing his bicep. “He caught you, but you took it. That’s the best he’s got. And you already took it! Watch those lefts and try to slip a right in there, and we’ll walk outta this joint with a win.”
The bell rang to signal round two, and Chavez sprinted to the center with a renewed confidence. Lord did his job: he reassured his fighter, even though the trainer’s face told another story. Lord was confident that his boxer had the tools to beat Lewis Wood, but he continued to grit his teeth and furrow his brow when Chavez was out of eyeshot. Wood had caught El Matador, and Lord knew that there was more where that came from. In fact, Wood had an entire barrage of combination punches in his arsenal that Chavez hadn’t sampled yet. Lord knew that his boxer would never give up, though. El Matador had an iron will, and the only way he would go down was if Wood were to knock him unconscious. That’s what Lord feared the most; his professionally inexperienced fighter wouldn’t know if he’d been licked and if he should take a knee. But that’s not how Lord trains his boxers. And that’s not how Chavez approaches a fight.
As Lord watched his prodigal son, he saw a Jesus Chavez he had not seen before. Gym training is one thing, live competition is another. Chavez, a right-handed fighter, entered a left-handed slugfest with the natural southpaw, Wood. The hometown favorite was being matched blow-for-blow in the center of the ring. Wood landed a powerful shot to Chavez’s forehead halfway through the second round, and the fireman winced more than the punch’s recipient. The fireman had thumped Chavez’s skull so hard that he broke his hand on his opponent’s head, snapping El Matador’s neck back violently. And even still, this unknown from Austin shook off the blow and pressed forward. Wood threw a hard left, and Chavez returned with an even harder shot. Come round four, the hometown crowd of white and Hispanic boxing fans started cheering for Chavez: He was fighting with such pure passion that his energy became contagious. And the Mexican-Americans, previously rooting for their hometown favorite, Wood, began to cheer for one of their own.
El Matador was an underdog – an opponent scheduled as an automatic mark in Wood’s “win” column. Yet the fighter that showed up on that night was no pushover or easy mark. This Chavez guy came to throw leather, and if he were to win, his countrymen would likely rally to his corner. To beat the favorite would require pulling for the underdog, and many Mexican-American fight fans in attendance clearly identified with the underdog.
Wood managed to string together a hard one-two-three series in the waning moments of the fourth and final round, and while more experienced fighters have buckled and crumbled from such ferocious punches, Chavez’s taut upper body was like rubber as the blows bounced off. Lord learned something about his boxer that night: the 100 amateur matches Jesus fought, the three-plus years of prison brawls and Lord’s own difficult training regimen so thoroughly conditioned the boxer that a rival 126 pound fighter could not deliver a damaging-enough punch to put El Matador on his back.
The fight went to the judges scorecards as both pugilists mugged for the crowd. Pandemonium engulfed the arena as the fight fans – and fighters – anxiously awaited the decision. The announcer reentered the ring, and the spectators fell silent for the first time all night.
“Ladies and gentlemen, after four rounds of boxing, we go to the scorecards. Judge McCowan scores the bout 37-39. Judges McCullough and Martin score the bout 39-37 for your winner, by split decision, Jesus ‘El Matador’ Chavez!”
The audience clapped and hooted with delight: they got their money’s worth. Richard Lord lifted a jubilant boxer into the air. Chavez’s parents and brother climbed into the ring, and Lord released his charge, who ran up to his younger brother and hoisted Jimmy above his head. Jesus Chavez had won his first professional fight. El Matador blew kisses to Wood’s hometown crowd. He had managed to overcome incredible odds and had beaten an up-and-coming contender in a strange city.
Lewis Wood and fellow fighters on the professional boxing circuit were one challenge. But the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, Chavez would learn, proved to be an entirely different and much tougher opponent. 
