By Norm Frauenheim
Bob Arum ripped Donald Trump. Mocked him, too, from a bully pulpit on a stage for what the promoter called the No Trump Undercard. It was clever advertising and might have generated as many pay-per-view sales as Manny Pacquiao’s decision over Timothy Bradley in the main event.
Part show and part substance, part satire and part serious, it was mostly words, another political debate during a political season as silly and tiresome as any boxing news conference ever could be.
But it had a face, too.
Oscar Valdez’ face.
In one promising featherweight, Valdez personifies two cultures that Trump wants to divide with a wall. Valdez’ roots are on both sides of the border between Arizona and Mexico. He went to grade school in Tucson. He began to box there. Then, he moved to Nogales on the Mexican side of the border where he became a two-time Mexican Olympian. He speaks like an American kid. He speaks like a Mexican kid. There’s no wall big enough to separate the American from the Mexican in Valdez.
“I’m not really into political end of things in the USA,’’ Valdez said before delivering the card’s best performance, a fourth-round stoppage of Evgeny Gradovich, the self-proclaimed Mexican-Russian and the IBF’s former 126-pound champion, at Las Vegas’ MGM Grand. “But what I do know is that I that I wouldn’t want Trump to be president of the United States. It would affect other countries.
“Mostly, I’m just focused on this fight. But I’m also excited to be on this card. Knowing that we have Bob Arum’s support on what he’s calling the No Trump Card, it just brings a little more flavor to it.’’
More edge to it, too.
In addition to Valdez, the April 9 card included Gilberto Ramirez, who won a WBO title became the first Mexican to win a major super-middleweight belt with a decision over Arthur Abraham, a German of Armenian descent. There was also junior-welterweight Jose Ramirez, a 2012 U.S. Olympian, faces Manny Perez of Denver in a bout scheduled for 10 rounds. Ramirez, the son of farm workers in central California, is an activist in water conservation.
Valdez, Gilberto Ramirez and Jose Ramirez were the collective face of what Trump’s proposed wall opposes, Arum said. Trump loves to talk about winners. On Arum’s card, however, he was the loser. Mexico 3, Trump 0.
“Without a wall, they just show that, back and forth, great things happen across the border between the two countries,’’ Arum said.
There is already a wall along much of the border between Mexico and Arizona, where there was a heated immigration controversy about six years ago with the state legislature’s passage of SB 1070.
Valdez, who fought in Tucson in December, has traveled through that wall’s checkpoints often, visiting his mom and grandmother in Tucson and his family in Nogales.
“I’m blessed to have grown up on both sides,’’ said Valdez, who now lives in Hermosillo when he’s not training in Southern California. “Having grown up in Mexico means so much to me. My culture, my family, is everything. Having grown up in the United States means so much. It’s so important to know English. It’s meant so much to have gone to school in Tucson and still have friends and family there. It will always be my second home.’’
In part, Valdez’ emergence as a featherweight contender is a symbol of Arizona’s resilience as a boxing market. It’s always been a good one, yet it all but disappeared for a couple of years in the wake of SB 1070.
Mexican advertisers stayed away, forcing Arum to move a Jose Benavidez Jr.-featured card in 2010 out of the state and to Chicago early in his career. The controversy even prompted Jose Sulaiman, the late president of the World Boxing Council, to issue an edict, asking Mexican fighters to boycott the state. Some did, some didn’t. But the impact knocked Arizona out of the ring of viable markets long enough to wonder if it would ever come back.
It has, it is, because of the gyms that dot the state’s Sonoran desert like cactus. From Phoenix to Tucson, from Michael Carbajal to Oscar Valdez, there’s always another one. Good fighters are part of the landscape. Part of the culture.
At some point, Valdez, who stopped Gradovich with the best left hand from a fighter with Arizona roots since Carbajal, hopes to fight again in Tucson, although his rapid ascent might keep him in bigger markets. In the immediate aftermath of his victory over Gradovich, there was talk he would wind up on the Terence Crawford-Viktor Postol card on July 23, also in Vegas at the MGM Crawford.
“I do know people – cousins, friends, family — who have been deported, especially in the state of Arizona. There was a time there when it got really crazy. You know, it was sad. Just sad. I know my friends. They’re not terrorists. They just come to work, come to make a better life.’’
Fight for one, too.
