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`Sweet Pea’ Was One Of A Kind-awesome read.
http://www.maxboxing.com/Bernard/Fernandez060707.asp
Pernell Whitaker momentarily appeared to be perplexed, as he might have been had someone walked up to him and said something in Mandarin Chinese.
Not that any translation was really needed. Whitaker understood the question, all right. But how should a fighter as singularly unique as “Sweet Pea” respond when asked which of today’s fighters remind him of himself? It would be akin to someone beseeching Michaelangelo to list all the house painters whose ceiling work closely paralleled his own.
“There are no other Pernell Whitakers,” the one and only said. “You can say somebody else might be close, there ain’t nobody really like Pernell Whitaker.”
Whitaker, of course, is correct. No fighter today -- no, not even Floyd Mayweather Jr. -- presents a close enough approximation to Whitaker’s defensive genius to rate as another pea in his exclusive pod. But there is a baseball great enshrined in Cooperstown whose artistry might be the closest thing to a match.
Former Cardinals shortstop Ozzie Smith was the “Wizard of Oz,” a spray hitter of modest accomplishment whose reactions in the field were otherworldly. Smith was elected to his sport’s Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility mostly on the basis of his airtight glove, incredible range, nanosecond reactions and soft, sure hands.
Ozzie stands as proof that you don’t need to be a slugger to be immortalized. The same might be said of Whitaker, who more than made up for his lack of power with an array of instinctive moves that certified him one of the most elusive targets in boxing history.
On Sunday afternoon, in the central New York village of Canastota – less than an hour’s drive from Cooperstown – Whitaker, 43, joins two other legends of the ring, Roberto Duran and Ricardo Lopez, in the Class of 2007, the 18th group of inductees into the International Boxing Hall of Fame.
But while Duran and Lopez embellished their undeniable boxing skills with vivid splashes of power-punching, Whitaker (40-4-1, 17 KOs) was the master craftsman, someone more likely to frustrate opponents with guile than to batter them senseless.
“It’s a wonderful feeling when you can hit a man and he can’t hit you,” Whitaker, now the most unlikely of trainers, said this past Saturday in Atlantic City, where one of his newer pupils, heavyweight contender Calvin Brock, appeared on a pay-per-view card headlined by the WBO heavyweight championship matchup of soon-to-be-dethroned titlist Shannon Briggs and victorious challenger Sultan Ibragimov.
“I’m not a gorilla,” Whitaker continued. “The name of the game is boxing. It’s not about going in there and brawling it out.”
For years, Whitaker was considered the best pound-for-pound fighter in the world, or very close to it. And he achieved that distinction without the quick-strike capability that excites fans with a penchant for bloodlust. He made you miss and then he made you pay. With few exceptions, his stoppages were the result of cumulative damage.
But don’t call his style boring. Excellence should never be considered boring, and few who ever have laced up the gloves could approach the Norfolk, Va., native’s gift for avoiding danger. When he was at his best, Whitaker was a moonbeam, a shadow, a rainbow. You could see him and sense his presence, but he couldn’t really be captured and placed in a jar.
“Most of the time, my fights were so one-sided that they couldn’t hit me,” Whitaker said, matter-of-factly. “It could have been a little boring. People wanted to see me get hit, too. They wanted to see the other guy crowding me, brawling with me. I wouldn’t allow that.”
But, as is the case with many artists, it took some time for the public to recognize a specialized skill set that did not conform to what many believed boxing was, or should be. Many fight fans demand heavy metal; with Whitaker, you got exquisite chamber music.
It was not always so.
During a storied amateur career in which he won 201 of 214 amateur bouts, including gold medals at the 1983 Pan American Games and the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, Whitaker registered 91 knockouts, a high percentage of victories inside the distance when you consider that those fights were only scheduled for three rounds.
One of those stoppages came in the Olympic 132-pound title bout, against Puerto Rico’s Luis Ortiz. Even now, Whitaker says that mounting the medal stand and having the gold medal placed around his neck rates as his proudest accomplishment in boxing.
“Nothing else I do in life will top that feeling,” Whitaker says now. “My first goal was to win the gold medal. I mean, think about it. The Olympics comes around only once every four years. You got one shot to win it, and that’s it.”
But what of the assorted professional championships – at one time he reigned at lightweight, junior welterweight, welterweight and junior middleweight -- gathered during his 16_-year career? Surely those had to be high on his list of ring thrills, right?
Uh, well, kind of.
“My whole thing was defending,” Whitaker says with the haughty imperiousness that so many remember. “Anybody can win a world title. A real champion holds onto it.”
Even today, Whitaker gives the impression that, if he only could work himself back down to 147 pounds (he’s says he about 165), he could climb inside the ropes and flummox a lot of world-rated twentysomethings. This is a man who is not easily impressed, not even with the honors and recognition that continue to flow his way.
Like his impending induction into the International Boxing Hall of Fame, for instance.
“I didn’t know it was coming this soon,” Whitaker said of his election in his first year of eligibility. “It hasn’t really dawned on me yet. It wasn’t a goal of mine to make it into the Hall of Fame. I thought people got in when they were, like, 60 or 70 years old. I thought I’d be one of those 60-year-old guys, rolling up there in a wheelchair.”
But, Whitaker allowed, “I’m ecstatic about it. A lot of guys don’t get in on the first ballot. I’m going into the house where the legends are. It’s going to be a little emotional.”
Emotional? That would be a switch. On the job, “Sweet Pea” rarely allowed fight fans, or his opponents, to catch even the tiniest of glimpses of whatever feelings he kept locked away on the inside. Anyone who thought they could unnerve him with clumsy bull-rushes or prefight posturing soon found that there was nothing that could be done, physically or verbally, to rattle his cage. Oh, sure, Whitaker was prone to showboat occasionally, but even then he did so with the remorseless eyes of a feeding Great White shark. He was a highly efficient machine, and machines programmed to perform a function don’t gush, or cry, or rage.
Pernell Whitaker was not the kind of fighter the average fan could instantly love. Most gradually, and grudgingly, came to appreciate him for his art. In his pro debut, on a Nov. 15, 1984, Madison Square Garden card that also showcased fellow Olympians Evander Holyfield, Meldrick Taylor, Tyrell Biggs and Mark Breland, Whitaker was regarded as little more than a setup man. But he stole the show from his more celebrated Olympic teammates, totally outclassing an undefeated Texan, Farrain Comeaux (who was 8-0 at the time), to win on a second-round stoppage.
It was a sign of things to come. The easy got easier, Whitaker winning his first 15 fights while casually demonstrating just how effortlessly he could hit and not be hit. Even when he came out on the short end of a highly dubious split decision in his first world title shot, against WBC lightweight champion Jose Luis Ramirez, the unflappable southpaw reacted almost with indifference. If any arm-waving and screaming was to be done, that duty fell to Whitaker’s excitable co-manager and trainer, Lou Duva.
“The people saw what happened,” Whitaker shrugged, secure in the belief that the truth resided more in spectators’ eyeballs than in two incompetent judges’ scorecards.
Two fights later, Whitaker got his first world championship belt by pitching a near-shutout against IBF lightweight titlist Greg Haugen and, on Feb. 18, 1989, and on Aug. 20 of that year he corrected the robbery-by-pencil in his first meeting with Ramirez by winning a similarly one-sided decision.
Most of Whitaker’s bouts thereafter followed the familiar script. His against-the-grain first-round knockout of WBA 135-pound champ Juan Nazario on May 19, 1990, made him the first undisputed lightweight king since Duran, and over the next couple of years he added Rafael Pineda’s IBF junior welterweight and Buddy McGirt’s WBC welterweight straps.
But Whitaker never became a truly sympathetic figure until the night of Sept. 10, 1993, at the Alamodome in San Antonio, when he defended his WBC welterweight crown against the undefeated and hugely popular Mexico hero, Julio Cesar Chavez, who came in 87-0 with 75 wins inside the distance.
Whitaker seemingly gave “JC Superstar” a boxing lesson, frequently employing one of his signature moves, a dip to his haunches, as an evasive tactic. An increasingly frustrated Chavez swatted at air as Whitaker spun, slipped and glided around the ring like Baryshnikov.
The majority draw that was announced – judges Franz Marti and Mickey Vann each scored it 115-115, while Jack Woodruff saw Whitaker as a 115-113 winner – did not elicit cries of outrage from the pro-Chavez crowd of 63,000-plus so much as sighs of relief.
But although Lou Duva went ballistic, Whitaker did not. After all, he half-expected to be jobbed.
“I knew I wouldn’t get nothin’ from the judges,” Whitaker reasoned. “I am on (Chavez’s) turf. It’s a political thing.
“It happened, it’s over, but I’m taking it in stride, as a victory. I’m a good sportsman. The fans are going to be my judge. I’m just glad the fight was on TV because millions of people saw what happened.”
In a sense, the Chavez “draw” might have marked the last time we saw Whitaker at or near the top of his game. After two more WBC welterweight defenses, he won the WBA 154-pound crown on a unanimous decision over Julio Cesar Vasquz before going back to welterweight to reclaim the WBC title with a points nod over Scotland’s Gary Jacobs. But even though he extended his winning streak by four more fights, Whitaker was beginning to show slight, almost imperceptible signs of slippage heading into his April 12, 1997, defense against another fan favorite, Oscar De La Hoya.
De La Hoya’s unanimous-decision victory was met by some skepticism, although not nearly so much as was the case when Whitaker was obliged to settle for the draw with Chavez. No one could have known it then, but Whitaker would not win again. His bout with Andrei Pestriaev, which originally was announced as a unanimous decision for Whitaker, was changed to a no-decision when Whitaker tested positive for drugs.
In his final two fights, Whitaker lost a unanimous decision to the younger, stronger, bigger Felix Trinidad and was stopped for the only time in his career, in four rounds by journeyman Carlos Bojorquez on April 27, 2001.
The first few years after his retirement from boxing were not pleasant ones for Whitaker. In June 2002 he pleaded to cocaine possession in Virginia Beach, Va., five months after he was caught in the courthouse with a small packet of the drug. Then, in June of that year, he was convicted of felony cocaine possession after a judge found he violated the terms of a previous sentence by overdosing on cocaine in March. He served 27 months in prison.
Other fighters have struggled in retirement with personal and financial mishaps, but Whitaker knew he had a way back into the light.
He would become a trainer, passing on the accumulated knowledge of his years as boxing’s foremost escape artist. It seemed a strange choice then, and now, for someone who insists he is not a fight fan, who does not watch the sport on TV and who steadfastly refuses to break down tapes of his own fighters or their opponents.
Even Whitaker admits he never thought he would enter this next phase of his boxing life.
“Nobody thinks that because you think you’re going to fight forever,” Whitaker said when asked if he had ever pondered becoming a trainer. “We all want that. But time goes fast and you got to move on.
“It’s a big adjustment. I’m still learning. Everybody can’t be Pernell Whitaker. I got to understand that. I got to give these guys what I think they can do and build on that. I got to take what someone does best and make it work for him.
“The main thing is to be consistent. You can’t just do it once or twice and then don’t see it no more. I tell my guys, `Find what works, stick with it and ride it ’til the wheels fall off.”
In addition to Brock, Whitaker also works with Dorin Spivey and Raymond Briggs.
“I hope so,” he said when asked if he could become as accomplished a trainer as he was a fighter. “I can’t fight the fights for them. But if they keep it going, they’re going to have good results.”
Someone asked how Whitaker would fare at 135 pounds against Duran, whom many believe to be the greatest lightweight of all time.
“I knew that was coming,” he said with the hint of a smile. “Obviously, I’m not going to say that this man would beat me. But it would have been something to see. I’m pretty sure he would say the same thing.
“I will say that Roberto Duran was a heck of a lightweight. He dominated the lightweight division for a long time. Then I came along.”
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Sweet Pea is the best. Is and always will be my favorite fighter ever. I just I could have been older to see him fight more.
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