By Norm Frauenheim –
PHOENIX – The streets have always been part of Michael Carbajal’s identity.
He’s endured them. Survived them. Fought because of them. They’ve left their mark, scars still there like deep cracks in an old sidewalk outside of his Ninth Street Gym, which was a church about a century ago.
It’s still a bully pulpit, but punches do all the preaching these days. You can hear the choir in the rhythm of a speed bag.
Step out of the gym and down the street, Fillmore, and you’re at Carbajal’s childhood home.
I’ve walked that street with him often and asked what keeps him there. He looks at me, eyes flashing like sparks off flint, as if to say I don’t understand.
For years, I didn’t.
Today, I do.
That was delivered definitively this week at a Phoenix City Council meeting just a few miles of roadwork from Ninth Street and Fillmore. Carbajal was on the agenda, Item No. 65. From liquor licenses to zoning issues, the session began with the usual process. Think about your last visit to the Motor Vehicle Division. Take a number, please.
But, suddenly, it went from protocol to poignant with Item No. 65, a resolution to rename one of those streets after Carbajal.
Ordinarily, council meetings in any city don’t attract a crowd. But this one did. From Carbajal friends and neighbors to those who had a role in his ring career, dozens were there.
I was there, too, and I was lucky enough to speak in his behalf. I was asked to.
Ordinarily, that’s not the job of a journalist, sports or otherwise. I had covered Carbajal’s career during my years at The Arizona Republic.
I was there in Seoul when he got robbed of a gold medal at the 1988 Olympics.
I was there in Las Vegas when he got up twice and knocked out Chiquita Gonzalez in a dramatic 1993 Fight of the Year, a fight as memorable as any in the history of boxing’s smallest weight classes.
I was there in Mexico City in 1994 in front of at least 30,000 Gonzalez fans, then unhappy at California’s Proposition 187, controversial immigration legislation.
Carbajal was Mexican only in name and heritage on that night, which ended in Gonzalez wining a debatable decision in a second rematch.
For those Mexican fans, he was a convenient American target for their anger at the California proposal. They drank, threw debris and waited for Carbajal to enter the hostile arena as if he were the bull that the place had been built for.
About an hour before opening bell, I saw Carbajal, seated with his hands taped and ready to take that long walk through a gathering storm.
He was a lonely figure at the end of a long dark tunnel that was his dressing room.
All the while, restless partisans stomped their feet in unison.
The noise had an angry beat, one that echoed a fundamental cliche: You can’t play boxing. I looked at Carbajal and wondered what I would feel at that moment.
One word: Terror.
I think I would have headed for the parking lot, jumped into a taxi, gone to the airport and boarded a flight in a panicked escape to Cabo San Lucas.
But I also knew then that I admired Carbajal. It’s hard to be objective about courage, and I saw plenty of it on that night in a 108-pound kid off the streets of Phoenix.
Over the years, I was often accused of crossing the line. I was told I had gotten too close. I can’t deny that. But I won’t apologize for it, either.
Boxing, itself, is different than any other sport in traditional journalism, now a dying craft. Trust is hard to come by from fighters who grew up mistrusting cops, teachers and a gringo reporter from a big daily that had not paid much attention to their neighborhoods.
In more than a decade as the Suns beat reporter, I had worked hard to keep my distance. But those traditional lines weren’t there in trying to cover Carbajal, a tough Mexican-American from a dangerous neighborhood just a few blocks from The Republic’s newsroom.
Through it all, there was controversy, an inherent part of almost any ring career. After all, prizefighting is controversial, almost by definition.
There were arrests, police investigations, shootings, gang allegations and ominous rumors. It was part of the Carbajal story and part of the reason I would ask him: Why, Michael, why do you stay here?
He has for the same reason he took that long ring walk on that night in Mexico City three decades ago. His adherence to a dangerous craft is as unshakable as his ties to those streets in a dangerous neighborhood.
Turns out, his friends, neighbors and a few retired cops understood that better than a gringo reporter.
They spoke to the city council before and after I did at Wednesday’s meeting Retired cops, who had worked Carbajal’s neighborhood, confirmed there was trouble, but they said, it didn’t come from Michael.
By the time it was my turn to take the podium, I realized that legacy — a word so overused to be almost meaningless – is still relevant in Carbajal, now 56 and 25 years removed from his last fight in 1999.
Younger neighbors, who weren’t even born when he was fighting, know him and identify with him because he’s still there. Their challenges were his challenges.
For Phoenix, he continues to be a living piece of tangible history. In my two minutes before the City Council, I talked about how the Phoenix area has become an emerging market for promoters from all over the world.
Eddie Hearn, of London’s Matchroom Promotions, has been staging cards in Phoenix and Glendale for the last couple of years. Hearn is putting together a Jesse “Bam” Rodriguez-Juan Francisco Estrada SuperFly showdown, projected for June 29 at Glendale’s Desert Diamond Arena.
“There are a lot of educated fans here,’’ Hearn said repeatedly when he was in Phoenix, representing John Ryder in January for Ryder’s stoppage loss to Jamie Munguia.
There are, because of Carbajal. At recent cards, I’ve often been approached by young fans who tell me that their dads used to read me all the time when I was writing about Carbajal for The Republic.
Those sons are Hearn’s educated fans, the demographic that has turned the Phoenix market into a go-to place for promoters and networks.
They also represent Carbajal’s ongoing legacy, an avenue to what the emerging market has become.
There are no avenues in Carbajal’s neighborhood. But there will be a street, from Ninth to Tenth, named after him. The Council voted to attach Michael Carbajal Way onto the street signs. It was a unanimous decision, 9-0.
It’s appropriate. The streets that created him will soon be named after him.
