The Good Son by Mark Kriegel

Author:Mark Kriegel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press

Chapter 12 | The Ballad of Bobby Chacon

Now more than ever, Ray was the most sought-after opponent in boxing. Hector Camacho, of Spanish Harlem, tried to bait him into a title shot, his manager calling Mancini “a middle-class sissy.”342 Representatives for Olympic gold medalist Howard Davis practically campaigned for a chance. And Bobby Chacon would get gleamy-eyed at the subject of Mancini. “That’s the one I want343 more than any of them,” he said.

“I can make all344 of them a lot of money,” said Ray.

But the prospective superfight remained Aaron Pryor. “Pryor–Mancini would be345 a war,” wrote the Daily News’s Dick Young. “Also a gold mine. Conservatively, promoters figure it to be worth $4 million to each man.”

“Megabucks,”346 said Ray. “Aaron Pryor and myself is a match everyone will want to see. Our styles fit each other. We’re both from Ohio. And let’s face it: It’s black and white, and that’s what sells.”

Problem was neither Ray’s manager nor his promoter knew what was left of their fighter. Arum hadn’t traveled to the Feeney fight, but he had heard from his Italian partner, Rodolfo Sabbatini. “Sabbatini told me the kid didn’t have it anymore,” says Arum. “He put him in with a bum and Ray struggled.”

And nothing in the seven months since—the layoff, the Kim questions, the broken collarbone, even Ray’s emergency tonsillectomy in July—had done anything to lessen these doubts, either. Enter Romero, another southpaw, who had never fought outside his native Peru.

“Romero is the lightweight347 champion of Peru,” wrote Dick Young. “This means he has beaten a truckload of guys named Luis and six llamas.”

Even at 30–0–1, he only had twelve knockouts. “Another mandatory, but not dangerous,” said Arum. “A bum from a country that had hardly had a professional fighter.”

Romero’s purse was reportedly $80,000. Ray figured to gross about $750,000, with $600,000 guaranteed for the scheduled fifteen-round championship bout. Then he would fight the thirty-one-year-old Chacon, a big name, big money fight, but not nearly the risk posed by Pryor.

Ray’s vintage training sessions with Griff, conducted once again at Grossinger’s Hotel and the Times Square Gym, generated a new flurry of favorable coverage. He rolled seventy-five-pound logs up a steep hill. He ran with ninety-pound sandbags, then he put the sandbags on his back and pumped out sets of push-ups. He waded into shoulder-deep water and threw punches at half-hour intervals. All told, he sparred 125 rounds348 in preparation for Romero.

But it was easier to fool the fourth estate than his own cornermen. Ray never had a surplus of talent; rather his genius was an ability to train at full physical and emotional capacity, and fight in a ferocious state that seemed to gladly exceed normal human limitations. If training was his devotion, Ray had been a happy monk, his body and brain hermetically sealed from distraction and doubt.

“He had to be mentally and physically 100 percent to win his fights,” says Tank. “He couldn’t have one without the other. But now the worst thing that could come into his mind, kept coming in.

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