And Wilfred still only fifteen.
So there are finally those things that can only be learned by facing other lunatics who started boxing at seven or so years old. After 111 amateur bouts, Wilfred turned pro and had his first official fight on November 22, 1973, seventy days after his fifteenth birthday.
His first opponent owned the unlikely name of Hiram Santiago. The fight took place in Puerto Rico and was a junior-lightweight contest, meaning neither fighter weighed more than 130 pounds. The 130 pounds belonging to Santiago heard the bell signaling the start of the fight but never heard one declaring the end of the first round. Before that second bell could sound, Benitez, who would not later be known for his punching power, separated Santiago from his senses, from his ability to stand upright. The first-round knockout was not a contest; it was not a test in any meaningful way nor really any kind of learning experience. What it was was a confirmation. Hiram Santiago started to confirm what others thought they had seen in that backyard ring. Further confirmation came a mere eight days later in St. Martin against Jesse Torres. Torres lasted until the second round before getting knocked out.
After knocking out his next three opponents in a total of ten rounds, the fifteen-year-old must have felt as if his hands were made of stone. Then Benitez fought Victor Mangual in Puerto Rico. On April Fool’s Day 1974, Victor Mangual, despite being thoroughly outclassed and losing every round, became the first opponent to go the distance against Benitez. The eight-round fight was a necessary learning experience for a fighter who would later establish his greatness principally by outboxing his opponents not stopping them; although there were still plenty more knockouts to follow including one in the third round against Juan Disla later that month.
Enter the inimitable “Easy Boy” Lake. Benitez easily knocked out Lake in the first round on May 11, 1974, but it must have been the most compelling, competitive first-round knockout in boxing history because the public apparently clamored for a rematch and three months later, after three more Benitez knockout victories, they got one. “Easy Boy” entered the rematch an enthused fighter. He vowed not to repeat the pugilistic mistakes made three months earlier. This time, he thought, he was armed with valuable insight he had gained on his back. What’s more, he was a quantifiably better fighter now. Five times better it turns out, as he lasted until the fifth round this time before again being knocked out. (The Easy Boy Lake career would not be a stellar one, not helped, surely, by the fact that three of his first four fights were against Benitez.)
Goyo kept Benitez busy. After Lake, he fought three more times in 1974 for a total of twelve fights that year, all wins. The following year was almost as busy with Benitez adding eleven more victories in as many fights. After beating Marcelino Alicia on September 1, 1975, by second-round knockout, Benitez’s professional record stood at 23-0 with 19 knockouts. He was every minute of sixteen years old.
What was it like to oppose Benitez those days? Benitez was the worst kind of opponent because he made you feel primarily the futility of your effort. His nickname was the “Bible of Boxing” because all his punches were technically perfect. His other nickname was “Radar” and that was the real problem for his opponents. Getting punched in the face makes you want to punch the person back. Problem was you couldn’t hit Benitez. His reflexes were otherworldly and he was a heavenly counterpuncher. When you miss a punch you leave yourself open. Against Benitez all you did was miss punches and all he did was tag you in response. He had tremendous hand speed with scientific accuracy. Along with his reflexes, he was equipped with other tremendous defensive skills, even at sixteen. You wanted to think, in the ring and elsewhere, that the more effort you expend the more successful you’ll be, that hard work rewards itself. But against Benitez the opposite was true. The more punches you threw the more you got hit with nothing to show for it. You were prepared to give a great effort and you did, but here was this sixteen-year-old punk calmly channeling inexplicable ability to severely punish your effort. Except for a nagging tendency to skimp a bit in training and a lack of overwhelming power, an expected consequence of that kind of slick hand speed, Wilfred Benitez appeared to be a boxer without weakness.
Of course the deck was stacked. Benitez may have been only sixteen but he was a future Hall of Fame boxer. His opponents through 1975 were just that, opponents. The question was no longer whether Benitez was a special boxer. At any given time there are about a hundred boxers in the world who fit that description. The relevant question was whether Benitez was special even when viewed within that pool of humans. Goyo and Wilfred decided to find out.
Benitez had gotten physically bigger during his two-year career. He was now fighting at junior-welterweight with its weight limit of 140 pounds, ten pounds heavier than when he started. That weight division was ruled by one man. The Junior Welterweight Champion of the World was a Colombian fighter named Antonio “Pambele” Cervantes. Cervantes was a dominant champion and a national hero to Colombians. After becoming champion in 1972, he had made fifteen successful title defenses scoring twelve knockouts. Champions want, principally, to remain champion, but the great ones also want to be challenged. Cervantes decided that his next defense would come against Benitez on March 6, 1976, in San Juan’s Hiram Bithorn Baseball Stadium.
The announcement of this fight was received less than enthusiastically by some of Boxing’s cognoscenti. It was negligent mismanagement, they said, to put a seventeen-year-old boy, even one with that record (25-0 20 KOs), in the ring with an accomplished thirty-year-old champion who had fought 86 times. Regardless of Wilfred’s innate ability, the highly skilled Cervantes represented a tremendous jump up in class from the guys Benitez had fought to that point. Specifically, of the five opponents Benitez fought leading up to the Cervantes fight, three of them were fighting their first professional fight and the other two were a combined 13-20-1. Based on that alone, it was highly doubtful that any seventeen-year-old could ably adjust to this suddenly far higher level of competition and perform admirably, never mind win the fight. Perhaps Cervantes agreed and reasoned that fighting Benitez in his homeland would generate decent interest, and money, with minimal risk.
Back then there was a belief, the vestiges of it still occasionally heard today, that in order to take a champion’s title by decision, especially one who had reigned as long as Pambele, you had to clearly outperform him. If it was close, the champ got the benefit of the judges’ doubt.
When the day finally came to fight, it must have dawned on Pambele fairly early what was happening. He must have realized that nothing external would help him overcome this challenger. Factors like experience, will, heart, determination, the aforementioned champion’s scoring advantage, those things count most when the talent level between the two fighters is close. Pambele had lost fights before, though not in five years, but he had certainly never been on the wrong end of a talent gap like this. It didn’t matter how much Pambele wanted to remain champion or even how much Benitez wanted to ascend to the throne. It was all about the talent gap and it was astounding this gap. Astounding not only because of Benitez’s age but also because of the immense quality of his opponent. Pambele was no washed-up fighter ready to be taken. After losing a split decision to Benitez that night, Cervantes would go on to win his next thirteen fights over the next four years. He would regain the championship, once Benitez vacated it to move up to welterweight, and defend the crown seven more times until finally coming across, at age thirty-four, another all-time great in Aaron Pryor who would stop him in the fourth and essentially end his career as a championship-caliber fighter.
Against Benitez, Pambele couldn’t do anything while his opponent did as he pleased. Benitez’s hand speed and impenetrable defense controlled the fight from the opening bell. It was a brilliant performance. After fifteen relentless rounds of this, Wilfred Benitez became the youngest world champion in the history of Professional Boxing.
How could it have happened? How could a seventeen-year-old have done this? Wilfr
ed Benitez was among a small handful of the greatest boxers ever to step into a ring. This did not become true because of what he accomplished on March 6, 1976, rather he accomplished what he did because the above was true. Comparisons to Sugar Ray Robinson and Willie Pep poured in for the kid with the ear-to-ear smile who boxed with balletic artistry.
After successfully defending his title two months later with another work of art, Benitez took the summer off to enjoy his new status. Getting Wilfred to train properly for fights became increasingly difficult for Goyo. The Cervantes fight, for which he did train semi-diligently, had only confirmed what Wilfred believed from the start: the usual rules didn’t apply to him, to someone who had what he had.
That summer, the United States sent probably its best Olympic Boxing team ever to Montreal for the summer games. The 1976 team, which included two future heavyweight champions in the Spinks brothers, Michael and Leon, won five gold medals but had one unquestioned star—Ray Leonard. Sugar Ray Leonard won one of the five golds and the camera loved his face, his name, and his relative articulateness. After the games, Leonard retired saying he would never box professionally. He would almost immediately change his mind and fight.
Meanwhile Benitez would only fight when it counted, with minimal training in between. But these were big-time fighters he was fighting now and not surprisingly the performances became shaky. A draw against Harold Weston in New York, for example, during which a seemingly disinterested Benitez was clowning to the crowd, what the hell was that? It was time to right the ship, so the Benitez camp went back to old reliable “Easy Boy” Lake for a third encounter. Predictably, Lake was again the picture of ease; he regressed and went out in the first round. (This loss sent Lake into a nine-year retirement with a record of 0-4, all the losses by knockout.)
Now Benitez was hardly training at all for his fights.
He was a welterweight now, fighting at 147 pounds. The welterweight division was a glamour division steeped in history. The former home of true greats like Henry Armstrong and Sugar Ray Robinson, the division was about to experience a dramatic resurgence with brilliant boxer after brilliant boxer passing through its doors. These guys could hit but Benitez wouldn’t train, wouldn’t properly prepare to face them. Before fighting Bruce Curry, a very good undefeated (15-0) fighter for whom Benitez should have trained a minimum of four weeks, Benitez trained for seven days. It showed. Despite winning a close ten-round decision, Benitez was knocked down for the first time in his career. His innocence thus lost, he then tasted the canvas twice more that night. No flash knockdowns either these visits to the canvas; Benitez, the defensive genius, was thisclose to being taken out by goddamn Bruce Curry! But he wasn’t. He survived and won and in the process showed the kind of courage any great boxer must have. Solely because of his heart and talent he had lived to fight another day, with the relevant other day occurring three months later when he fought an immediate rematch with Curry. Despite training only ten days this time for a guy who had given him all sorts of trouble, Benitez won a ten-round decision handily. Then, after a six-month layoff caused by his contraction of Hepatitis, Benitez utterly dismantled the very good Randy Shields in six rounds and just like that he was back on track.
But in this new division he was not the champ, he was one of many welterweight contenders. The Welterweight Champion of the World was Mexican great Carlos Palomino. Palomino had been champ for about three years after knocking out John Stracy in England. During that time he had successfully defended his title seven times, five times by kayo. Overall, the twenty-nine-year-old’s career record stood at 27-1-3 and he had not lost a fight in nearly five years. His next defense would come on January 13, 1979, against Benitez. Palomino was favored.
At nineteen years of age, Benitez was attempting to win his second world title. He had willingly ceded control of the junior-welterweights back to Cervantes in ambitious recognition of his growing body. The increased weight limit made proper training even less of a priority. For the Palomino fight, a monumental career-defining contest, Benitez trained fifteen days.
Despite this negligence, when January 13, 1979 arrived Benitez easily dominated Palomino to appropriate his title. It happened over and over; as the presumably naturally larger man, Palomino repeatedly did what he was supposed to do by backing Benitez into the ropes. What happened on those ropes, however, would forever change the way Benitez was viewed in boxing circles. Because it was there, his back on the ropes and Palomino firing punches, that Benitez destroyed the champ. It wasn’t a case of him leaning on the ropes so as to induce Palomino to punch himself out a la Ali’s rope-a-dope against Foreman. Such a strategy would only ever work against a 230-pound fighter anyway and would be lunacy against a welterweight who could throw punches forever. No, what Benitez did in this fight was lean on the ropes while somehow avoiding getting hit and countering Palomino to death. It was one thing to be unable to hit an opponent whose constant movement in the ring makes him an elusive moving target. It was quite another, and a special kind of evil torture for Palomino, to be unable to hit someone who is standing in one spot and has nowhere to go. For fifteen rounds Palomino rarely laid a glove on the preternaturally calm Benitez, also k.a. the New Welterweight Champion of the World.
Benitez’s performance against Palomino shook the boxing world. For the second time in his career, Benitez had destroyed a highly respected champion who hadn’t lost in years. More significantly, it was evident during both fights that he was markedly better than these accomplished champions. Some started calling him already the greatest defensive fighter in the history of Boxing. Moreover, even in a sport where the premier athletes were often in their early to mid-twenties, the fact that Benitez was only nineteen years old was not lost on boxing observers who felt he could get even better.
After defending his title two months later with a unanimous decision victory over the Harold Weston who had earlier fought him to a draw, Benitez was firmly entrenched as the best welterweight in the world and a strong argument could be made that he was the best boxer in the world period. In 1979, Muhammad Ali, perhaps the greatest heavyweight of all time, had retired and while the new champion, Larry Holmes, was clearly the best heavyweight in the world, no one was willing to call him the best fighter in the world pound for pound. Carlos Monzon, the great middleweight champion (160 lbs.) who ruled seemingly forever (record 14 title defenses), had also retired two years earlier. Alexis Arguello was undoubtedly a great fighter at that time. The current junior-lightweight champion (130 lbs.) was, like Benitez, a two-time champion, having earlier vacated his featherweight crown (126 lbs.) to move up. Unlike Benitez, however, Arguello had lost fights (4) and had even been stopped. Nor was Arguello, who admittedly had scintillating, explosive power in either hand, casting into doubt the basic tenets of the sport.
But, in truth, any discussion of the world’s best fighters at the time must necessarily center on the welterweight division Benitez now ruled and the dark spectre of Roberto Duran was the new looming presence in that division. Duran was a maniacal, intensely malevolent fighter who won the lightweight crown (135 lbs.) in 1972 then mercilessly ruled that division for seven long years. During those years he held the crown without interruption while fighting a remarkable 38 times. Overall his record was 67-1 with 53 knockouts. His only defeat was a close nontitle decision loss to Puerto Rico’s Esteban DeJesus, a loss that so enraged Duran that he later fought DeJesus twice more and knocked him out cold each time. He was a vicious ruler too; after dismantling one opponent and sending him to the hospital he promised to not stop there and send him to the morgue if they fought again. The Panamanian’s “hands of stone” had terrorized the division to the point of boredom, so a couple of weeks after Benitez ascended to the throne, the twenty-seven-year-old Duran vacated the lightweight crown, skipped the junior-welterweight division altogether, and became a welterweight.
Also in the division was a twenty-year-old kid named Thomas “Hitman” Hearns. Hearns had won his first seventeen fig
hts, all by knockout. Two months after Benitez beat Harold Weston by decision, Hearns fought Weston and iced him in the sixth round detaching Weston’s retina in the process and thereby ending its career.
But really the public had already decided on its favorite welterweight. Ray Leonard, with his Olympic background and telegenic smile, was seen as the miniature but logical successor to Muhammad Ali. This anticipated succession drew strength from the fact that Leonard was trained by Angelo Dundee, the man who had trained Ali throughout his brilliant career. Another Ali was probably too much to ask for, but with The Greatest gone Sugar Ray was clearly the most popular fighter in the sport. Moreover, his 25-0 record against good competition suggested there was ample substance behind the compelling style although many still stubbornly insisted he was a mere creation of Television. Whatever the truth, because of his star quality, Leonard was an attractive opponent. His appeal would draw the interest of that portion of the public not normally interested in Boxing and would therefore mean more money for the person across from him.
A Naked Singularity: A Novel Page 47
