good article on vargas

Vargas’ Spirit Still Willing, But Body is Failing Him

By Bernard Fernandez

It is an intriguing irony that Fernando Vargas was born on Dec. 7, 1977. Pearl Harbor Day seems especially appropriate for a fighter who has initiated so many wars, both verbal and in the ring, to come into the world, no doubt kicking and screaming all the way.

“El Feroz” doesn’t turn 29 for another five months; by all rights he should still be in his prime for several more years. But calendars are not always the most accurate gauge of how much time someone in Vargas’ demanding profession has left on center stage. Although the two-time junior middleweight champion is as full of bile and bombast as he ever was, the marvelous instrument – his body – that enabled him to convert all that pent-up anger into explosive action would seem to be in disrepair.

This is a guy who in recent years has been had to deal with a bulging disc in his back, an inability to control his weight and the taint of a steroid scandal. And that’s just the physical stuff. Only psychologists are equipped to provide insight into Vargas’ continuing anger-management issues, which seemingly have not been tamped down by the aging process or changes in his support crew. The next time you hear Vargas give credit to an opponent will be the first time. Anyone standing in the opposite corner is the enemy, someone not merely to be defeated, but to be destroyed.

Poet Dylan Thomas might have been describing Vargas when he wrote “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.” If ever there was someone prone to rage, rage against the dying of the light, it’s the kid from Oxnard, Calif., who grew up poor and fatherless, forever ready to lash out at whomever was handy.

Heading into Saturday night’s HBO Pay Per View rematch at the MGM Grand with Shane Mosley (42-4, 36 KOs), who stopped him on an 10th-round technical knockout on Feb. 25, Vargas (26-3, 22 KOs) is considered by many to be a once-finely tuned machine in need of spare parts that no longer are in stock. That school of thought holds that he is like a rusting Porsche on cinder blocks, as close or closer to the junkyard than he is to full and glorious restoration.

It is possible, of course, that Vargas can reach back in time and rediscover those qualities which made him a prodigy, an 18-year-old Olympic medalist and a 21-year-old professional world champion. It also is possible that he is one more defeat from being rendered irrelevant, prematurely designated for the scrap heap to which his more recent performances have hinted.

“I was still winning the fight,” Vargas insists in reiterating his version of his stoppage by Mosley, which ended when referee Joe Cortez concluded that Vargas’ grotesquely swollen left eye put him too much in peril to continue. “Shane can’t say he had me on the ropes and he was punishing me. When (Cortez) stopped it, I was putting pressure on him.

“Shane didn’t want this (rematch). He got pressured into it. Now we got it and I’m thankful to God for that. The other two fighters (Felix Trinidad and Oscar De La Hoya) that beat me would not give me a rematch, and they openly admitted that I have been their toughest fight.”

And so it is in Vargas’ distorted view of what is, what should have been and what might yet be. No one ever really has defeated him; Trinidad, De La Hoya and Mosley all have benefited from dubious scoring decisions or hasty rulings by referees who would not allow him to fight on. He has been ducked and conspired against by the fearful, wrongly judged for circumstances beyond his control by those who don’t know all the facts.

“Fernando is stronger than he’s ever been,” says Vargas’ strength and conditioning coach, Robert Ferguson. “He is stronger, tougher, more mature. He is at a really high level right now.”

If Vargas shocks the growing number of skeptics who have all but written him off, boxing will have regained one of its biggest draws and better performers. And if he doesn’t … well, even his detractors will have to look back and admit that he has given us one helluva ride.

In many ways, Vargas is a downsized, Latino version of Mike Tyson, another seething product of America’s meaner streets to whom he frequently has been compared. But Tyson didn’t rage against the dying of the light so much as to accept it, putting on sunglasses and meekly acquiescing in losses to the pedestrian likes of Danny Williams and Kevin McBride because his inner fire had long since burned out.

Vargas might be limited by his chronically aching back, but it would come as a surprise if he ever ceased his struggle for excellence. He makes every fight a personal vendetta, inventing excuses if need be to make every opponent an object of derision and hatred.
To hear Vargas tell it, that Sequoia-sized chip on his shoulder was placed there by a father, Javier Vargas, whom he has met only once, in 1998, when the older man called to congratulate his progeny on having won the IBF 154-pound championship on an eight-round technical decision over Yory Boy Campas. Not that the kid was prepared to welcome back the absentee dad into his life.

“He’s a maggot,” said Vargas, who admits to being a schoolyard bully who spent as much time in detention as in the classroom.

“Sometimes I wish I was normal,” he said before his 2000 bout with Trinidad. “I never had any direction in my life. I never had a father to tell me, `Son, you shouldn’t do that.’ I did what I wanted. Most of the time, it was my fault. Sometimes it wasn’t. The principal, she didn’t care.

“Anyway, I went home and was flipping channels when I saw these kids my age on TV, boxing. I knew about people like Mike Tyson, what he did, but I didn’t know kids could do it. And they were handing out trophies to these guys. I wanted one of those trophies.”
So Vargas marched himself down to the local gym, where, in Eduardo Garcia, he found not only his coach, but the father figure that he had been lacking.

Naturally gifted and forever hissed off at the hand which he’d been dealt, Vargas compiled a 100-5 amateur record and, at 16, became the youngest U.S. national champion. The 1996 Atlanta Olympics came next, and a lucrative offer to turn pro under the auspices of Main Events, the promotional company which had given Evander Holyfield, Pernell Whitaker and Meldrick Taylor their starts. But although his new handlers stressed family values, Vargas, the perpetual orphan who felt at home only inside the ropes, forever was spoiling for a fight.
There was, for instance, the night he scored a fourth-round TKO of veteran Ross Thompson, whom Vargas spat upon after he had been driven to the canvas.

“I spit on the guy because he took it to the where I’m from, the streets,” Vargas explained. “I thought to myself, `This is a street fight,’ and all I wanted to do was to hurt this guy and to knock him out. I am a professional athlete, but if you want to take it to the streets, I can do it that way, too.”

Sparring partner Levon Easley must have wondered what he had done to tick Vargas off during training camp in Big Bear, Calif., leading up to the Dec. 2, 2000, bout with Trinidad. Easley lasted only 1½ days before he left, saying, “Don’t worry about paying me. Just get me out of here.”

Obviously pleased with the high attrition rate, Vargas said, “I sent eight – no, nine – guys home. They couldn’t deal with the sparring. But I’m not here to go soft on anybody. I’m in the business of hurting people, and business is good.”

Trinidad heard about what was going on in his rival’s camp and found it disturbing.
“None of my sparring partners left, and that’s because we treat them as human beings,” he said. “I feel all those fighters (in Vargas’ camp) went home not so much because Vargas is so ferocious, but because he is no sparring partner. Vargas will see a big, big difference if he thinks he can do to me what he did to them.”

On fight night, Trinidad knocked Vargas down twice in the first round with left hooks – the first time Vargas had ever been down as a pro – and floored him three more times in the 12th round before referee Jay Nady stepped in to stop it. Oh, Vargas had his moments – most notably, in the fourth round when he dropped Trinidad with a counter left hook – but he sustained a fearful beating from which, some believe, he has never recovered.

Vargas also faded late in his Sept. 14, 2002, 11th-round TKO by De La Hoya, after which he cited back stiffness for his inability to sustain some early momentum. Before the fight, of course, Vargas had demeaned De La Hoya as a golden fraud and a sissy.

“He was talking too much,” De La Hoya said of Vargas. “I don’t understand. Why talk so much trash about another fighter? It’s like Tiger Woods talking bad about Jack Nicklaus.”
Floyd Mayweather Sr., De La Hoya’s trainer, put it another way: “Vargas is nothing but a hoodlum, a thug and a wannabe gangster.”

Away from the ring, Vargas has been just as much a lightning rod for controversy. He was suspended for nine months and fined $100,000 by the Nevada State Athletic Commission following his bout with De La Hoya for testing positive for stanozolol, the same steroid that cost sprinter Ben Johnson his 100-meter gold medal in the 1988 Seoul Olympics. He also settled out of court in 1999 after being accused of assault in the beating of a man with a golf club.

Now that he might be at his final crossroads, you have to wonder if Vargas, for all his wealth and success, has found the sort of contentment that might carry over into his post-boxing life. Yes, he has three sons with his longtime companion, Martha Lopez, but where would he be without that chip on his shoulder?

“I moved to Spanish Hills (a gated community in tony Camarillo, Calif.), where there are no people who speak Spanish,” Vargas said a few years ago. “I’m cool with everybody, but they didn’t exactly greet me with a basket of goodies. I invite my neighbors over whenever I have a party, but they still call the cops on us.”

i like vargas in this fight, i think the momentum he had at the end of the first fight and i think its gonna carry over ;)