By Brent Matteo Alderson
Some people love to watch fights, they love to see people getting hit, and they love the art of boxing, the physical confrontation, the battle. And I do love watching a good scrap, try to watch as many as I can, but more than that I like to follow the fistic universe. The politics with the networks, the promoters, and the fighters. The fighters’ lives and how their worlds are turned upside down by a loss or a win.
In other sports, if your team loses, but you perform well it doesn’t really matter. Patrick Ewing and Barry Sanders never won championships yet they made millions and are considered two of the greatest players to ever participate in their respective sports, but fighters are different. With just one win or one loss their careers can be made or their dreams shattered. Just ask Buster Douglas or Meldrick Taylor. One fight, that’s all it takes.
Well after reading Johnny Tapia’s biography, Mi Vida Loca: The Crazy Life of Johnny Tapia (Volt Press, 289 pages) by Johnny Tapia and Bettina Gilois I realized how therapeutic boxing can be and the extent to which a fighter’s life in boxing can affect their lives outside of it and I’m not just talking about financially. In certain instances boxing can be the ultimate refuge for tortured souls as was the case with Johnny Tapia when on numerous occasions his desire to fight in the ring influenced him to abstain from giving into his life long addiction to drugs.
Tapia always fought with fire, with an ambition and desire that is rare even to the greatest of prize fighters and the book extensively delves into those experiences that molded Tapia into a fighting machine and one of the greatest fighters to ever come out of New Mexico. It touches upon the special relationship he had with his proud and often times abusive grandfather and how growing up in a house with 16 cousins conditioned him to take beatings far worse than the one he got from Marco Antonio Barrera.
And Johnny Tapia’s life is exactly how he describes it; crazy. Johnny’s mother was murdered, stabbed over thirty times with scissors, he never knew his father, was kidnapped as a boy and locked in a closet and burned with cigarettes for two days and those are just a few of the horrendous things that Johnny experienced, which would have mentally crippled any man.
Still, Johnny who happened to be born on Friday the 13th found refuge in the ring and channeled all of his inner demons to motivate him to fight and train with fury and the book follows his career as it coincided with his outside the ring experiences. If you’re a Tapia fan and followed his career, which probably climaxed with his win over cross town rival Danny Romero in one of the biggest fights to ever take place below the bantamweight division you should pick up a copy.
It’s a simple read and Tapia along with Bettina Gilois wrote the book to read like an intense fictional novel that will have you reading until its finished. The book is awesome. I picked it up and finished it in one day. I just couldn’t stop.
Notes:
I always underestimated Tapia because he wasn’t a big puncher and because he held the WBO title and always thought Romero was going to beat Tapia since he was the child prodigy with rare power, but Johnny proved me wrong and easily out-boxed his younger stronger opponent.
I thought the Wright-Taylor fight could have gone either way. A draw was just.
I hope Roy loses his next fight because I don’t want him to get beat up by Bernard, then guys like Steve Kim will keep going on how Roy was overrated even though he easily out boxed a 28 year old Hopkins.
Check out the latest edition of the Ring, I have an article on Jorge Arce and Rosendo Alvarez.
Please e-mail any comments to BoxingAficionado@aol.com
