It is 43 years since Bobby Chacon won the WBC Super-Featherweight title against arch rival, Rafael Limon. Their fourth meeting proved the most poignant as it came in the same year Chacon had contemplated suicide following the suicide of his wife Valerie, who had wanted Chacon to quit boxing.
Back in the Winter of 1982, boxing, the great harborer of lost souls, raconteurs and those scrambling from past or place had yet another of her famous stories to tell. It wasn't the silver screen redemption arc of Rocky Balboa in the third instalment of his Rocky franchise which enjoyed a long run at the cinema and its title track Eye of the Tiger had clung to US Billboard number 1 until the end of the summer too. In the charts of Limon's Mexico the youngster Luis Miguel was riding high, with Directo al corazon, broadly translated as Right to the Heart. The the story of Bobby Chacon, the tumult of his life, particularly during this period are as infamous and incredible as anything conjured for the big screen.
The fourth and final fight between Bobby Chacon and his rival Rafael 'Bazooka' Limon was layered with similar tragedy of love and loss, the validation of victory and the barbarity of the contest in the same way Stallone had laced Rocky III. Like those cinematic punch ups, Chacon v Limon IV is more than just a fight. It is an exclamation mark in the life of Bobby Chacon, a man who's wife Valerie shot herself in the face in the depths of the turmoil of her husband's inability to divorce himself from the sport she had encouraged him to embrace. Purely as a spectacle, the fight stands proudly as arguably the greatest slug-fest of the period despite a litany of worthy candidates it competes with.
Irrespective of promises made to Valerie, the ultimatums, the tears and the days and weeks she spent absent from the home, whereabouts unknown, haunted by Chacon's on-going career, Chacon couldn't relent. Defeats and deadlines which were meant to end his time as a prizefighter came and went, but still he wouldn't stop trying to clamber back to the WBC Featherweight title level he'd first conquered as a 22-year-old in 1974.
In the March of '82, Chacon had been in training camp in Sacremento for a fight with club fighter Salvador Ulgarde when he heard the news of his wife's passing. At the fighter's insistence, the fight went ahead. The next day. His wife's wedding ring hanging on a chain around his neck as performed the pre-fight rituals. It proposed coldness, the fight physician commenting that his heart beat as undisturbed by conversation about his wife.
In the intervening hours, Chacon had driven back to see his beloved wife before her body was removed from the 20-acre farm he'd bought in Oroville, California. Selected for its remote location it was hoped to insulate, by geography at least, their three children from the vagaries and influences of the city-life he'd once known. Were these words the creative flourish of a screenwriter, Stallone perchance, they would surely have been dismissed for their fantasy. And yet this was Bobby Chacon's actual life in 1982.
Beneath the lights, where Chacon felt most at peace it seemed, his career had been one of ups and downs. From that triumph as a baby-faced puncher, emboldened by the edge only an adolescence spent on the streets tends to impart, he remained eternally torn between his two wives, boxing and the childhood sweet heart, Valerie, who had and given him three children. It was this truth that appeared burdensome for a sensitive woman. She would cry when Chacon was cut, hurt and beaten up in to losses to legends like Ruben Oliveres, Alexis Arguello and his nemesis 'Bazooka' Limon.
Throughout his career, dedicating himself to the monastery of training and the purgatory of weight-making had proven problematic for Chacon. Speaking to the Boston Globe's Steve Marentz in the aftermath of Valerie's death, friend and some time trainer Frank Sarecho commented on how difficult he had found this aspect of life as a fighter.
He couldn't train. He was too lazy and wouldn't sacrifice. When he first walked into a gym, they should have taught him, but they didn't. And then it was too late. They never taught him how to eat right. He always had trouble making weight."- Frank Sarecho, former trainer talking to the Boston Globe in 1982.
Nine months on from the tragic death of his wife, and victory in the fight which had followed, and another modest outing in June, Chacon climbed the ropes to face Limon, the WBC Super-Featherweight title was at stake and surely, in Chacon's mind, a prize even greater than the green and gold belt he so desperately craved. The Sacremento Memorial Auditorium was, as always for Chacon fights, packed with his loyal fans and the fight was broadcast by the ABC's Wide World of Sports for a nationwide audience. Redemption the hope the fans all carried into the venue but excitement was the guarantee. Spectators loved Chacon. His decade of exciting fights and the weight of his struggle in life offering him authenticity and something akin to a cause to follow.
As their fourth contest, neither man could hope to boast of something new, some new tactic or punch the other hadn't previously seen. Familiarity between two fighters often leads to a poor match, both men become cautious and deliberate, or alternatively, like Chacon and Limon, it can just accelerate the fight to its most intense phase. Removing the 'feeling out' stage entirely. In the last days of 15 rounds championship fights, it seemed impossible that the volume of punches deployed by both men in the early rounds could be sustained without one of them wilting. The two exchanged numbing power shots from the off. A brooding dislike had always existed between the pair, adding yet more dimension and explanation to the attritional warfare they engaged in.
Chacon was put down by a heavy left from Limon's Southpaw stance in the 10th and had touched down in the third too. Potentially defining moments, but still Chacon fought back. A headbutt had cut Chacon in the fourth too. Combat was rough back then. Chacon's own right hands landed frequently and with the type of ferocity and regularity too rarely seen in the modern era. With just 15 seconds left in the 15th round with the fight on a knife-edge on the scorecards, Chacon finally found a breakthrough of his own as Limon lurched toward him, still swinging, his legs barely beneath him through the combination of exhaustion and the damage accrued.
The fight was now about that most cinematic of qualities, the intangible 'heart'. With all that Chacon had endured to get to the last round, to the fight, to still be boxing, perhaps it was all meant to be this way. A crowd, standing in the aisles, cheering 'Bobby, Bobby!' his nemesis before him, a degree of redemption to be plucked from the night air.
Boom. The first of two right hands from Chacon put the champion down heavily and enabled Chacon to edge the resulting decision on the cards and lay claim to a world-title 8 years after his first. Those two shots are the collective memory of the finish, and I'm not sure Limon truly beat the count, but nevertheless, in the moment before they land, Chacon lands a right uppercut to Limon's chest. Right to the heart.
Directo al corazon.