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But even if all of these events were very successful fundraisers (and they were), there was no reason to think there’d be a regular audience for pro boxing. As recently as three years ago, you couldn’t find boxing coverage on the Statesman sports pages. The only venue for world title fights was tit bars with pay-per-view (now, that’s confusing). If you really wanted to see boxing live, you had to drive to San Antonio. Austin just wasn’t a boxing town.
Then Jesus Chavez came to town.
Over the past three years, Chavez has packed the Austin Music Hall for eight brawls, won three titles, and seen his fight purse grow from $300 to $20,000. Gross proceeds from the brawls have jumped from $35,000 to $50,000. At the first mention of a brawl, ringside seats are snapped up by folks ranging from the old guard of Austin like Robin and Bud Shivers to a cyber vanguard like Origin Systems founder Richard Garriott. Politicos like Senator Gonzalo Barrientos bound on stage to congratulate Chavez. The Statesman not only covers the Chavez fights but has become a sponsor of the brawls with publisher Michael Laosa’s assistant Kember Mueller crooning the national anthem at five of the eight events. In three short years, Austin has become a boxing town with a hometown boxer.
Only Chavez isn’t from Austin. He isn’t even a U.S. citizen, yet. (The case is in front of a San Antonio judge.) And if the Stateville Correctional Institution in Joliette, Illinois hadn’t had him deported upon his release, he never would have come to Austin.
Actually what happened was after serving five years for armed robbery, Chavez got out of Joliette on April Fool’s Day, 1994 and was deported to Mexico City with $20 in his pocket. He made his way to Juarez, crossed the border into El Paso and called his family in Chicago, who sent him money to fly home. On his way there, his plane stopped in Austin. As he flew over the lakes, he thought what a beautiful place this was — beautiful enough to mention it to his mother who told him he had an uncle living here.
Not long after his Chicago homecoming, he started to hang with the Harrison Gents, the same gang with whom he’d gotten arrested for armed robbery. Chavez wasn’t looking for trouble. He just liked the streets. “It wasn’t that I was bad in school or had a crummy home life,” says Chavez. “I did pretty good in school and I love my family. I just like running with my friends.”
Chavez didn’t turn to boxing to redeem a troubled childhood. It was something that he fell into and liked, that’s all. He liked it better than swimming. That was how it all began. He was 10 years old when his father took him to the park for swimming lessons. Swimming was going to replace karate lessons, which cost too much. Chavez wasn’t really happy about it, but it was better than nothing. “I really hated doing nothing.”
It turns out the swimming lessons were within earshot of the boxing lessons. “I heard this bell coming from the basement of a building in the park and I looked in and saw them boxing,” says Chavez. “And it was like it. That was what I was going to do. And the lessons were free.”
He joined the Matador Boxing Club under the former Olympic boxing coach, Tom O’Shea. “Jesus was one of the most courageous boys I ever had in my gym. Most boys, you see fear or excitement in their eyes when they get into the ring. But with Jesus, there was calm and a real joy in his eyes.”
By the time he was put behind bars at 16, Chavez achieved an amateur record of 90-5-5, already a three-time Golden Gloves Champion who had reached the semifinals of the National Golden Gloves competition twice. “Jesus should have never had that happen,” saya O’Shea. “He wasn’t that kind of kid. His family was always at the fights. He did well in school. It was one of those single moments in a person’s life that can be really horrible or really great.”
Now that Chavez was out of jail, his parents wanted to make sure that he wouldn’t be confronted with one of those “horrible moments” again. So they put him on a plane back to Texas to stay with his uncle and out of trouble.
Chavez didn’t intend to move to Austin. It was supposed to be a vacation, a place to relax, kick back, maybe get back in shape. “That was why I started looking for a boxing gym,” says Chavez. “To get in shape. Maybe I’d find a couple of amateur fights. Maybe not.”
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photograph by John Anderson |
Even though Chavez was carrying about 30 extra pounds and smelled like cigarettes, Lord could tell he had a fighter in his gym. “He knew how to throw down on the heavy bag,” says Lord. “His punches had a fluidity and sharpness. I could tell the way he snapped his punches that he’d had some fights.” Not only did he have talent, but he seemed to have the heart of a fighter: the will to train to be a great fighter. It wasn’t long before he was dropping weight, climbing the steps at Memorial Stadium, and running up Guadalupe on his daily 10-mile run.
Chavez worked construction by day and trained at night. Lord got him a couple of amateur bouts which he won easily. “I knew he had the ability to be a great fighter after that first amateur bout,” says Lord. “It was his first fight in five years with a guy 10 pounds heavier, and I could see him adjust his fight plan to counter that guy. That’s hard to teach a fighter.”
In August (three months after he started training), Lord asked Chavez if he wanted to turn pro. Chavez didn’t hesitate. “That meant a lot to call myself a professional something,” says Chavez. “Before I got sent up, I was planning to go to North Michigan University on a boxing scholarship and study criminal justice. With a record, I can’t do that. So I wasn’t sure what I could ever do to call myself a professional.”
He just had to figure what his professional name would be. His full name was Jesus Gabriel Sandoval Chavez. When he arrived in Austin, he went by the name he used in Chicago: Gabriel Sandoval. But he wanted to break with the past, so he took the name Jesus Chavez. His ring name, though, would pay tribute to Tom O’Shea’s boxing club: the Matadors.
On August 4, 1994, Jesus “El Matador” Chavez met undefeated Lewis Wood in a four round match-up in Houston and won in a unanimous decision. After that, Lord put Chavez on a fast track. “He didn’t need the kind of fights that would give him professional experience,” says Lord. Instead, he called up the matchmakers for fights that would push Chavez to advance his career.
Lord was ready for a fighter like Chavez to walk into his gym. When he stopped boxing 11 years ago, he opened up his gym at North Loop &
N. Lamar and took all comers. Women, men, kids. It didn’t matter to Lord. He thought boxing was for everyone.
And with every potential fighter, Lord would take them as far as they were willing to go. He was always willing to make a deal to train them. If they did well and hung in there, Lord guided them to the next level either on the amateur or professional circuits. Some actually had promise. One guy looked like he might qualify for the ’92 Olympics. Another nearly won the Golden Gloves title and then turned pro. A pro hopeful made it as far as television contract negotiations with promoter Cedric Kushner.
As enthusiastic as they were to box, each one lost the drive to keep training and stay focused. The fights are one thing. Training is another. Running, weight lifting, sparring, jumping rope, working the bags and abdominal crunches seven days a week in some combination is intense. But Lord won’t let his fighters cut corners. As one slogan in the gym reads: Good luck is the residue of hard work.
“Richard is hard, man,” nods Chavez. “He is real hard. I know he’s right. But it’s hard work.”
A year after Chavez’s first pro fight, Lord decided to promote a match in Austin. “I called up all the people and businesses who used to support me when I boxed here and they were willing to do it again.” On August 25, he staged the first brawl in the Austin Music Hall, and 2,000 boxing fans filled the hall.
The fight was a 10-rounder with Hector Vicencio. When Chavez came out of his corner, he looked ferocious. Calm, fierce, controlled punches. Never hesitating. Stalking Vicencio, cutting off the ring and finally knocking him out in the sixth round. Even a boxing novice could see the talent and elegance in Chavez. The crowd went nuts.
That was the beginning of the hometown following. Not only was Chavez a beautiful fighter to watch, but in a venue like the Austin Music Hall, you probably weren’t sitting too far from someone who had trained in the gym with Chavez, or seen him at Hyde Park Gym or maybe even mixed it up with him in a mosh pit at the Pearl Jam concert. Everyone was telling their Chavez story. And even if you didn’t have one, you could walk away from that first brawl feeling like you did, feeling like you were on the inside, part of that beginning when a hometown star starts to rise.
The first brawl was Chavez’s 10th professional fight. With his pro career well underway and the hometown reading the sports pages, Lord started Chavez on his title march. In the world of boxing, titles are a big deal. At their simplest, they are a way of placing fighters in some rank order. But they’re also the spoils. If you’ve got a title, fighters come after you. If you don’t have one, you want one and you often have to get in line to fight for one.
Chavez got his first crack at a title six months later — 18 months after turning pro, an amazingly short period of time by most standards. In March 1996, he won the WBC Continental American Featherweight title in Brownsville in a 12-round unanimous decision.
As titles go, the WBC Continental American division is small time but it’s a start. The world titles are the ones that matter and there are only three of those: the World Boxing Council (WBC), the International Boxing Federation (IBF), and the World Boxing Association (WBA). But the only way to get to a world title is by winning the continental titles like the North American Boxing Federation (NABF) or the United States Boxing Association (USBA). And the opportunity to win one of those fell into Chavez’s lap the following August.
The Gamez brothers in Brownsville purchased the sanctioning fee for the NABF featherweight title which happened to be undefended. Their fighter, Javier Jaurequi, was the national champion of Mexico rated #13 by the WBC. So they were looking around for a worthy but beatable opponent. Chavez was made to order. Jaurequi’s record (36-5-1, 26KO) dominated Chavez (15-1, 9KO) but it looked respectable enough so that the match wouldn’t be a romp.
Lord figured there were 2-1 odds against Chavez, but the Gamez brothers didn’t have a ready-made audience base in South Texas so they agreed to stage the fight in the Music Hall. Even if a win wasn’t a sure thing, a sold-out hometown crowd would be.
The Austin fans were ready. This was the fourth Brawl in the Hall, and even if you didn’t have a clue about the stakes of this fight or the odds, you could feel the tension in the air. The Gamez brothers had packed the house with as many fans as they could give tickets to. Jaurequi taunted Chavez in the first four rounds. Chavez wobbled under Jaurequi’s left hook. But Chavez kept coming, countering Jaurequi’s punches and tying him up on the ropes. Spirited on by his fans and his own will, Chavez won the fight in a
12-round decision and claimed the NABF Featherweight title, and the #7 spot in WBC ratings, just two years after his first pro fight. “His rise has been meteoric,” says Lord. “He was ready for it and so was I.”
Lord put the word out that they were interested in bigger fights and possibly being represented by a top promoter. But they weren’t too anxious. They could afford to wait. Besides, the hometown base was growing, so they staged a few more Brawls in the Hall.
On March 3 this year, Lord staged Brawl 8. The main event was Chavez against one of San Antonio’s best loved hometown boys, Louis `The Louisville Slugger’ Leija, for the NABF Super Featherweight title. The match-up drew the interest of Fox Television and, for the first time ever, a pro fight was televised from Austin.
It was like Chavez was made for TV. His aggressive style made for an exciting match right from the first bell. “He’s got that dog fight in him,” says Lord. “He always comes out hard and strong, but he’s always reading his opponent. He’s got this ability to read their punches before they’ve even thrown them. He reminds me of Roberto Duran in his heyday.”
By the sixth round, Chavez was in charge, and the ref stopped the fight. Chavez won by a TKO and strapped another NABF title belt around his waist. (Unable to hold two NABF titles in different weight classes, he relinquished the NABF Featherweight title.)
Fox was thrilled with Chavez’s performance. In replay after replay, they showed Chavez’s aggression and finesse. The commentator couldn’t spew enough adjectives. It was like they had discovered a rising young boxer star. Not surprisingly, that was Chavez’s last brawl in the Austin Music Hall.
A month later, Chavez and Lord flew to Atlantic City for a 12-round match-up with former world champion Louie Espinosa. Just before the fight, Lord and Chavez had dinner with Lou Duva and his son Dino, president of Main Events Promotions, and signed a three year contract guaranteeing Chavez six fights a year until he becomes a world title holder. After that, he is guaranteed four fights a year. The next night, the hometown audience turned on their television to see Chavez beat Espinosa in nine rounds in Atlantic City.
By signing with Main Events, Chavez joins world class fighters like Evander Holyfield and Pernell Whitaker in Lou Duva’s stable of fighters. But more than that, his paydays will start at $20,000 and, depending on what happens, could rise into the millions. Earnings like this will make it impossible to see him again in the Austin Music Hall. Impossible not only due to limited venue size, but also because private venues, large television advertisers (like Budweiser, for example), and the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission (TABC) don’t mix.
Hometown fans have one more chance to see him, on Tuesday, June 10 at the 7,500-seat Travis County Expo Center in what is being billed as the KO at the Expo. (At press time 4,000 tickets had been sold.) The KO at the Expo will also be televised live on the USA Network’s Tuesday Night Fights. After that, Lord isn’t certain when Chavez will fight in Austin again. “We have a fight tentatively scheduled with HBO in the fall, and that could be here. But it isn’t set.”
Lord thinks the brawls will still go on, that there is support there and he has some great young fighters in his gym. Maybe there is support. Maybe another fighter will emerge. Maybe. It would be fun. It’s been a helluva ride watching Chavez.
As for Chavez, he hopes to stay in Austin. His case to become a U.S. citizen is pending before a judge in San Antonio. Chavez hopes it will be resolved soon so that he can continue to train here and travel to bouts.
“[Austin is] my hometown. You’ll still see me running up Guadalupe.”
Lindsey Lane is a writer living in Austin. She has trained at Lord’s Gym and has assisted Richard Lord on a few of the brawls.
This article appears in June 6 • 1997 and June 6 • 1997 (Cover).