I voted for Israel Vazquez simply because he is my favorite prizefighter

By Bart Barry-

Sometime last week or the one before, the ballot
arrived for this year’s International Boxing Hall of Fame election.  It had too many great fighters to choose only
five, but rules are rules.  I don’t
recall the other four I chose.  They
weren’t necessarily four who will get in but borderline candidates I hope to
help.  My fifth vote went without
hesitation to a man whose name appeared alphabetically towards the bottom: Israel
“El Magnifico” Vazquez.

This won’t be a persuasive piece, necessarily, so
much as a light exposition, an examination, a chance to write once more about
my favorite prizefighter.

I didn’t vote for Vazquez to be in the IBHOF
because I believe you should, or should agree that I did.  I won’t list the most-prominent fighter on
this year’s ballot for whom I did not vote because I know his misanthropic fans
and haven’t a desire or reason in the world to hear from them again – and he’s
getting in anyway.  I don’t have
reductionist criteria to which I cling for making decisions about who belongs
in a hall of fame or deserves of-the-year awards because I feel no compulsion
whatever to justify these decisions.  I
watch prizefighting often enough to write a weekly column and trust the rest to
intuition.  I don’t argue about these
things, either; this column is an asymmetrical medium.

There is no one I have covered in this, our
beloved sport whom I admire more than El Magnifico.  Nobody I can think of who gave more of the
best part of himself to our sport, either, making naught but world championship
fights in his prime and losing his career and right eye to the quality of
opposition he faced.  And in a sport of
counterintuitively decent men, too, he’s the most decent I’ve met.

My first Las Vegas card I covered for this site
was Marco Antonio Barrera’s 2006 tutoring of Rocky Juarez, and that night’s
co-comain featured the best fight any American aficionado saw live, much less
in person, that year.  Vazquez came off
the canvas twice and ground Jhonny Gonzalez to dust seven years before Gonzalez
put a stamp on Abner Mares.

Man, could Vazquez grind!  He had innate a sense as any of another man’s
accumulating weakness; he saw with a jeweler’s loupe the first fissures in an
opponent’s will.  Once he saw the
fissures he pressured them unto cracks and pieces and pieces of those pieces,
regardless what counterpunches hit him en route.

He had many plans, too, not just a plan A, which
means he was nothing like the kamikaze some wrongly credited him with being.  He stayed on his stool, after all, in the
first of his three fights with Rafael Marquez. 
He wasn’t able to breathe and said he wouldn’t fight on.  If that keeps him off someone’s defunct Gatti
List, so be it.

What it proves is Vazquez’s volition; it proves
that every time he marched through his era’s best super bantamweights he did so
voluntarily, capable as he was of calling-off the match if the contest became
futile.  Oscar Larios (63-7-1, 39 KOs),
Jhonny Gonzalez (68-11, 55 KOs) and Rafael Marquez (41-9, 37 KOs): Vazquez
fought these men a collective eight times and went 5-3 (4 KOs).  He knocked-out two of them in rematches after
they’d stopped him, and in the case of the third, “Jhonny” Jhonny, he
knocked-out Gonzalez after being dropped by him a twotime.

El Magnifico’s legacy is, of course, his trilogy
with Rafael Marquez.  As aficionados
bemoan the recesses and tuneups granted men like Deontay Wilder and Tyson Fury
and Saul Alvarez and Gennady Golovkin, they’re reminded Vazquez and Marquez
fought one another consecutively in three matches that spanned less than a
year.  Marquez stopped Vazquez in March,
Vazquez stopped Marquez in August, and they made the 2007 fight of the year seven
months later.

It’s the best fight in the best trilogy I’ll ever
cover.

You can confirm all that on YouTube.  What you can’t confirm is how ruined, broken
even, Vazquez was in the postfight pressconference after his victory.  There he was, his face like a powdered
Halloween mask – allwhite but for lipstick circles where his eyes and mouth
should’ve been.  He humbly mumbled his
praise of Marquez through torn, swollen lips and graciously ceded the
microphone to Marquez’s jackass promoter and assistant manager and their braying
about protesting some detail nobody remembers. 
Eleven years later, and that scene still boils.

Sixteen months after Vazquez won 2007’s fight of
the year, good fortune put me at a dinner table with him in New York City,
where the BWAA honored him and my mentor and friend Norm Frauenheim.  Who knows how many surgeries Vazquez’s right
eye had undergone by then.

El Magnifico was there with his wife’s brother,
and before dessert Vazquez’s cuñado loped over to take pictures with what
bedizened models accompanied the evening’s presenters.  Vazquez and I exchanged incredulous glances,
and I told El Magnifico his brother-in-law was gaming every woman with a line
about knowing Israel Vazquez.

“Pero, yo soy Vazquez,” he said, and he motioned
to himself and started laughing.  “I’m
Vazquez!” 

I don’t care if empiricism says there are fighters
more deserving of IBHOF induction.  I
don’t care if someone knows so little about prizefighting that he looks at the 27
losses listed above, or the 5 losses (4 KOs) on Vazquez’s résumé, and scoffs at
someone being dumb enough to vote for Vazquez and admit it in a column.  Frankly, I don’t care if this is the last of
my columns you ever read.

Israel Vazquez epitomizes for me everything that
makes prizefighting worth its writing.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry