Mayorga: DLH....interesting article

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By Teri Berg (May 6, 2006) Photo © HoganPhotos.com
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Or is “El Matador” simply boxing’s latest incarnation of the circus barker, a role perfected by Muhammad Ali, the undisputed champion of selling wolf tickets?

It’s tempting to compare the infamous Nicaraguan fighter to the fearsome Huron antagonist in James Fenimore Cooper’s novel “The Last of the Mohicans.” For starters, Mayorga so resembles Wes Studi, the Cherokee actor who portrayed Magua in the 1992 movie, that one is tempted to think someone’s DNA migrated south not all that long ago. Their eyes are alight with tribal ferocity. They share high, proud cheekbones nicked by acne pits that strike even casual observers as a mark of Cain. The same misshapen noses, mirthless smiles and mocking laughs. Even the hair – Mayorga’s blond and orange dye jobs the 21st-century version of Magua in the mid-18th century, when Europeans’ powdered wigs were met with his savagely intimidating Mohawk.

No doubt Mayorga looks the part of the villain. Like the kind of guy who, in another life, would utter sentiments like “When the Gray Hair is dead, Magua will eat his heart.” In this life, the 32-year-old super welterweight told reporters last week, “I’m going to detach his retina or stop his heart.” In Magua’s context, his declaration is terrifying because of its believability and all-too-real possibility. Given Mayorga’s time, though, his prediction is just plain hammy.

Still, never mind the campy beer-swigging-and-two-pack-a-day-smoking-habit hype. That Mayorga spent his teen years in Managua as a knife- and gun-wielding gang leader moves his legend beyond the marketing department. So do his arrests over the years for charges ranging from theft to assault to rape. The letters spelling “El Matador” tattooed on his neck might be over the top in terms of rhetorical flourishes, but there’s no denying the dark, and palpable, power of his other prominent tat, the one that reads “El Loco.”

That’s not to say Mayorga is a loon. Surely, he couldn’t have gotten this far in the admittedly wacko world of boxing if he were certifiably sociopathic or otherwise pathologically unstable. But there is something not right about him, isn’t there? That something – that off-ness – puts one in the mind of Ron Artest or Bobby Knight.

Remember Artest’s request that the Indianapolis Pacers give him some time off during the NBA season so he could promote a CD he’d produced? Or when “Tru Warier” applied for a job at Circuit City during his rookie season with the Chicago Bulls – just so he could get the employee discount?

Call to mind Coach Knight’s fits of bizarre anger: how he assaulted a Puerto Rican police officer at the 1979 Pan Am Games because his team couldn’t get into a gym to practice; and how he kicked his son during a game, choked a player in practice, tossed a chair across the court after a ref’s perceived blown call, and generally chewed out anyone who he thought had crossed him. ESPN did a bang-up job of rehabilitating the Texas Tech coach’s rep with this year’s reality show “Knight School,” but anyone courageous enough to look in his eyes – or Artest’s, or Mayorga’s – when he’s on a tear cannot come away from it without understanding that there’s something about him that’s just a few degrees past plumb.

It’s not as if Mayorga, like Artest and Knight, is not all there. All the parts seem present, but not quite put together in the right order, like Picasso’s “Nude and Still-life.” But the Spanish cubist, though he could arguably be described as nutty in his own right, intended the deviations on his canvasses. The aberration one senses in Mayorga strikes one as not so tightly controlled.

Mayorga’s own crude stab at self-promotion can be blamed for his habitual and annoying showboating. Those god awful camouflage trunks, his tap-dancing on Felix Trinidad’s fight poster, the sophomoric hair-color changes, the uninspired trash talking he indulges in far too often, and some of his obnoxious behavior in the ring. But it’s his peculiarities that make him offer up his chin to his opponents, like a coke-fueled Tony Montana in “Scarface” inviting the bullets that eventually killed him. That deviance makes our man by definition unreasonable and unpredictable at times, and therefore dangerous.

Sonny Liston, were he alive and able to articulate his view of Cassius Clay leading up to their Feb. 25, 1964 showdown, might have echoed these sentiments. His wife, Geraldine, said as much on the eve of the fight.

“Sonny thinks that boy is crazy!” she told a reporter. “That boy Cassius – crazy. Out of his mind.

“And you never know what to expect from a man like that. You never know what to expect from a madman.”

The lengths Clay went to at the time to paint this early masterpiece prob’ly did seem more than a little out there. He stormed the ring and press conference after Liston’s rematch with Floyd Patterson; he drove to Denver to mock Liston at home; he tailed him from the Miami airport to harangue him as Liston arrived for training camp; he exploded in a taunting frenzy at the weigh-in (heretofore unheard of) that cost him $2,500 of his purse. And throughout every stunt, Clay talked some of the sweetest and provocative trash in sporting history – an editorial comment we can make only now, in hindsight.

“Liston thinks I’m a nut,” Clay said before their fight. “He is scared of no man, but he is scared of a nut. Now he doesn’t know what I’m gonna do.”

The man who became Muhammad Ali, of course, wasn’t insane whatsoever. He simply knew how to get inside his opponents’ heads and put butts in seats long before his approach became, first, de rigueur and then cliché. Would that this first historic “woof ticket” that Clay sold to heavyweight champion Charles “Sonny” Liston had a stub! The scope of that ticket’s influence – on Liston, on Ali’s future opponents, on boxing and sports in general, and on American and worldwide popular culture – is mind-boggling.

Mayorga, too, presents himself as a baaaaad maaaan. All that smoking and beer swilling, etc. But the Ali shtick doesn’t stick for this champ. It’s easy to see it doesn’t mean anything to him, that he’s just going through the motions of the act like an old soap opera actor on the verge of retirement.

And, besides, it’s not these staged exploits that instill doubt and fear in his opponents. For example, reporters have been asking Mayorga for weeks why he hates Oscar de la Hoya so much. He feeds them some scripted reasons, which even he doesn’t seem to believe. Mayorga hates de la Hoya because the latter insulted his mama? Please. Because DLH once vanquished an over-the-hill Julio Cesar Chavez? Uh-huh. Because “The Golden Boy” kept him from celebrating his cumpleaños with his family? Yeah, right. Because the WBC 154-pound champ will “live and die” for his title belt? Ho hum. Mayorga never gives a reason that has any juice, but you just know there is real loathing – and there’s something about that loathing that’s a little off.

In the run up to Saturday night’s fight, the closest Mayorga has come to articulating whatever’s rational behind his grievance was when he said, “Of all the fighters in boxing, Oscar is the one I like least.

“He’s a pretty boy, and it makes me want to beat him.”

Well, now, that’s something to work with. As rank as it may be, that’s something honest.

And Oscar de la Hoya does seem to have buzzed his way under some bonnets.

Not with the commentariat, certainly. Oh, they wonder about his abilities, of course – especially since he hasn’t fought in a year and a half, and last time out Bernard Hopkins beat him like a stepchild. But, they say, “The Executioner” was so much bigger than Oscar! The “balanced” reporting done on boxing’s last best pop star could rival Fox News in its objectivity. DLH has been one of those rare fighters whose talent, teen-idol good looks and charm, and Horatio Alger backstory rocketed him past the borders of the sport and up into the stratosphere of global celebrity.

But at this point DLH has become what Ali was on the eve of his first bout with Leon Spinks – entirely too well liked for far too long, and thus part of the establishment. And there was never a BMOC who didn’t inspire a contrarian view. As Ishmael Reed wrote on the eve of Ali-Spinks I, “The stars were for Ali, but the busboys were for Spinks.”

The busboys these days can be found lurking around online message boards, getting a word in edgewise among all the Oscar love. Here are a few of the more spirited takes on DLH:

“I will give it to Mayorga -- de la Hoya is my worst hated fighter.”

“Mayorga is the bad guy in this fight. I always root for the bad guys. Oscar likes the role of the good guy – it’s like he should be getting manicures and cuticle trimming.”

“Isn’t de la Hoya some fruity pop singer???? If so, I hope he gets his ass kicked.”

“I like Mayorga's s**t talking and I hate Oscar.”

“Nobody who takes a year (off) from fighting to make a CD full of Latin love songs and routinely wears make-up in public can kick Mayorga's ass.”

“Oscar de la Hoya is gonna be sent back to the music studio.”

“I've disliked Mayorga since he beat Forrest, but I will be rooting for him in this fight.”

That’s cold right there.

Colder still have been Mayo’s attacks on DLH’s manhood, a (perhaps overly) valued commodity for those steeped in Hispanic culture. One of his favorite insults is to call “The Golden Boy” a maricón, the same Spanish slang Benny Paret used to taunt Emile Griffith before their fateful 1962 fight that led to the death of “The Kid.”

Oscar de la Hoya may strike some as a sort of metrosexual goody-goody, even as Disney-fied – say, Mowgli to Mayorga’s Shere Khan, Simba to Mayo’s Scar, Aladdin to his nasty Jafar; that is, sweet and handsome, but devoid of personality as well as a measure of that all-important masculinity.

At the same time, however, our villain is no arch villain.

No one has forgotten Felix Sturm’s solid showing against DLH, who – to echo one of Mayorga’s less inspired barbs – indeed looked the part of Mayo’s chubby grandma at the time. And when you throw in de la Hoya’s loss to Shane Mosley from 2003 and that he has a 6-4 record since Sept. 1999, “The Golden Boy” hasn’t shined for quite some time.

I’m also inclined to believe de la Hoya is nervous about Mayorga – that the thuggish Nicaraguan has gotten in his head. Not with the chicken dance or the lame-o chatter about swapping his WBC belt for DLH’s wife, nor with the clichéd insults to de la Hoya’s so-called ethnic pride. If de la Hoya is apprehensive, it’s because 1) he knows his own physical potential is limited, 2) Mayo’s potential has not yet been met, and 3), to put it rather indelicately, Mayo has a screw loose.

Unfortunately for rebels and contrarians, that doesn’t mean Mayorga has gotten any better since 2004, when Felix Trinidad handed him his smart ass on a platter.

To enter the ranks of arch villains – the Maguas, the Scars, the Bobby Knights, or the “Toughest Pawnee,” as Wes Studi’s fearsome character was called in “Dances With Wolves” – one must not only be “loco,” able to dish out some hurt and willing to suffer the slings and arrows of being a thug in a goody-goody world. One also has to improve upon one’s villainy, to develop its traits with more discipline and care than a weekend hobbyist tinkering in his den or even a workman toiling daily at his craft.

Knight’s place in the pantheon of arch villains is secure, for example, because he was a superior coach as well as an unrepentant scofflaw and nut job.

Mayorga, though, is trying to hang his hat on the two latter qualities without improving upon the threat that lies behind his “badness.” A thug is only a thug if he can back that badness up. Anything less and he’s just a run-of-the-mill punk. And punkish is how Mayo looked against Tito and even a beatable Cory Spinks – like a one-dimensional, undeveloped street brawler who’s maneuvering before a bout exceeds it by far once the bell rings.

Our anti-hero insists he’s more disciplined this time around. That he’s smoking less and has taken his training seriously. For de la Hoya, Mayo has stuck to a regimen – a strategy most serious boxers take for granted. Sound like a master craftsman to you?

He’s watched no film of his opponent, a point of weird pride, and there’s been no talk of how Mayorga has improved his game – whether his defense or working inside or keeping at the jab. The best he can offer is that he won’t drop his gloves and invite disaster as he did versus Trinidad.

In the end, I’m not willing to count Mayo out before the fight starts. De la Hoya presents too many problems, not the least of which is how the buzz leading up to Saturday night’s fight is not his focus on taking away Mayorga’s WBC belt but whether “The Golden Boy” will fight Winky Wright, Floyd Mayweather or Trinidad on Sept. 16. And you can’t underestimate an unpredictable and slightly nutso slugger like this champ.

I like Mayorga’s chances for Saturday night, and I’ll admit his flakiness sometimes amuses me. Further, if I were de la Hoya or anyone who stood across the ring from him, I’d be more than a little scared too. (And he should rightly scare the hell out of any woman as it is.)

Mayo’s brand of scariness though hasn’t, and probably won’t, transcend his street punk vibe to the reaches of arch villainy.

Then again, when the Magua of boxing promoters, Don King, is in your corner and you’re pocketing millions of dollars without discipline or craftsmanship, why aspire to a higher calling?