Juarez reminds; Leija recalls

SAN ANTONIO – Three miles east of the Alamodome stands Freeman Coliseum in the southwestern part of an enormous lot it shares with AT&T Center, home of the Spurs. Saturday evening Freeman felt cavernous because it was mostly empty, especially compared to the Vicente Fernandez concert nextdoor. Nevertheless old Freeman allowed a redemptive act to happen in its ring, an act made by Houston’s Rocky Juarez – boxing’s serial contender.

There stood Juarez prefight, waiting in the smoke of an improvised made-for-televisión walkway next to a curtain that covered empty space in the back of an historic old arena, where a locker room and a steep gray ramp and little else were. He was in white, green and gold, and serious. Serious is the word; none other works for Rocky – not charismatic or enticing, certainly, though perhaps humble.

Juarez is humble and serious, like a Mexican prizefighter with a countenance more Asian than Spanish, though Texas-born, and once a standout in USA Boxing before it was an embarrassment. Professional is the other word for Juarez, a man who, no matter what palpable discouragement preceded his career’s palpable disappointments, soldiered forward, pressuring and attacking in a style nostalgic for a 15th round, without ever quite getting to the place that makes special fighters.

There was a moment in most every prime-Juarez fight when he, as the shorter man with the shorter brown arms, maneuvered himself through footwork efficient and proper to just the spot from which to throw decisive punches. Then he paused. It was rarely more than an instant, but an instant that still expands in supporters’ minds today till it is mostly what they recall of Juarez’s championship challenges.

That instant when Rocky paused to ensure all was just right, and everything got away. The opponent, shocked by his good fortune, escaped, or did something – a parrying jab or wildly missed hook, or anything – that caused Juarez to doubt himself, reset and return to the hard task of maneuvering back in range (or get caught, one time, with an audacious right-uppercut lead Juan Manuel Marquez threw his way in their 2007 fight in Tucson, Ariz., when the air audibly escaped the hydraulics of Juarez’s fighting spirit). Rocky: walking to his corner, red blood streaming from a deep and accidental cut, smart enough to wonder how the hell he’d got hit with such a punch, schooled enough to know what it portended.

Rocky: head bowed, seriousness and frustration all over his face, but not urgency, no urgency, shuffling to his corner after each round of his second fight with Marco Antonio Barrera, a Las Vegas rematch of a 2006 fight Juarez deserved to win in Los Angeles four months earlier, a second fight whose closing bell saw Barrera, spiteful in a way few yet realized, spit his mouthguard in his palm and chase Juarez to the Houstonian’s corner to tell him, as Barrera recounted in the mall at Caesar’s Palace an afternoon later: I will always be a master, and you will always be a student.

Before five months had passed there was Juarez at Desert Diamond Casino in a “Solo Boxeo” main event, when Telefutura still had a franchise of which it was proud and protective, willing to fight for a fraction what he’d been paid on Mexican Independence Day. “The way I look at it, this is the most money I’ve ever made for a Telefutura fight,” Juarez said with a nod, not a shrug: serious. He got other chances, and he never got there. So he became an opponent, a target with a name and something of a following, whose defeat might bolster the credibility of a new promotional signee.

Do not doubt that was the plan Saturday when Juarez, 0-6-1 these last four years, got matched against Antonio Escalante, recent signee of a three-fight deal with Golden Boy Promotions. Aside from the main event, the blue corner – from which Juarez fought – went 1-5, Saturday. But Juarez, the b-side who emerged from that improvised white smoke to precede the new signee to the ring, made a professional spectacle of himself, throwing properly leveraged if less telegenic punches at Escalante, dropping him in the third and finishing him in the eighth, and drawing a line beneath Golden Boy Promotions’ inability to spot talent and inability to learn to spot talent.

There was, for once, a small sense of joy at a Juarez fight, especially in the shiny black chairs of Freeman Coliseum’s tiny, empty media section, where a very few of us who’d attended a number of Juarez fights smiled at Rocky’s unlikely accomplishment. In its size and location – now 20 rows back of the ring – and dwindled attendance, Freeman Coliseum’s media section worked well as any metaphor for the boxing community at large when the honorary 10-count came for trainer Emanuel Steward, who passed away after a short fight with a vicious disease, Thursday.

This followed a reminder of how small boxing’s community is, Friday afternoon, when James Leija, one half of Saturday’s Freeman Coliseum host, Leija-Battah Promotions, spoke about Steward, who, posterity oughtn’t forget, worked Leija’s corner at Alamodome in the first of Leija’s four matches against Azumah Nelson, 19 years ago.

“I even posted something on Facebook where it was he and I in the ring when he worked the corner,” said Leija. “During my whole career, it was one of those things where, whenever he sees you, he says, ‘I’ll never forget those guns at the Alamodome.’ He always brought that up, and that was one of those things we had going: ‘I remember walking out to the ring, and those guns blaring.’

“During the fight, he was saying, ‘Keep your jab up high, keep your jab up high.’ What he meant by that was: Don’t drop your jab, because Azumah Nelson’s trying to counter.

“We’d talk in Vegas or wherever we saw each other, and he’d go, ‘I’ll never forget those guns!’

“And he always had that smile.”

Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com