The greatest fight in junior middleweight history.
The high point of a Hall of Fame career.
The reason one fighter fell short of a Hall of Fame career.
The perfect fight at the perfect time.
Too much, too soon.
The junior middleweight championship fight between Felix Trinidad and Fernando Vargas at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas 25 years ago today, on December 2, 2000, could rightly be described in all of the above ways. Which one-liner deserves the emphasis? Which is its legacy?
A quarter-century later, that all remains a matter of perspective.
Who do you think of first: the man whose power prevailed or the man whose heart made it a war?
What do you picture first: Trinidad jumping on the ropes in premature triumph twice or Vargas climbing off the deck in dazed defiance four times?
And what is your opinion: that Vargas was rushed into the fight or that Trinidad was always going to be a notch above him?
This is either the story of a Puerto Rican icon prevailing in his most grueling challenge, displaying all the power, resilience and guile – and the trademark punch – that made him great … or it’s the story of a Mexican-American warrior solidifying enduring popularity while shaving years off his athletic prime by refusing to stay down.
Of course, in some measure – perhaps equal measure – it is both of those things. And whichever fighter you think of first, Trinidad-Vargas is an absolute classic that would have been 2000’s Fight of the Year if not for Erik Morales and Marco Antonio Barrera finding each other.
It was the second-best fight of the year 2000, perhaps a top-10 fight of the 2000s so far and probably the finest battle ever at 154lbs (unless you think Jarrett Hurd vs. Erislandy Lara surpassed it in 2018, which I do not) – and it’s crazy to think how close Trinidad-Vargas came to being over 11 rounds sooner than it was, which would have meant none of those superlatives.
In 2009, while compiling an article series for HBO’s website on the 10 best HBO fights of that decade, I asked Felix Trinidad Snr – “Tito’s” father and head trainer – if the 12th-round KO of Vargas was his son’s greatest win. He said the victory that meant the most was the controversial decision in 1999 over Oscar De La Hoya. But …
“In terms of the drama, and the attraction of the fight, the Vargas fight was the best fight, in that it produced Tito showing his great heart of a champion,” Trinidad Snr said.
The 27-year-old Trinidad entered the ring that night with a record of 38-0 (31 KOs), including 18-0 in title fights. He’d reigned for more than six years at welterweight, capped with the disputed majority decision over De La Hoya, then made the probably overdue decision to go up to junior middle. And his Y2K campaign had been magnificent. He battered ’96 U.S. Olympic gold medalist David Reid. He obliterated Mamadou Thiam in three rounds. And that set up a major pay-per-view showdown with Reid’s Olympic teammate Vargas.
Vargas, five days shy of his 23rd birthday, scarcely had more professional fights than Trinidad had title fights. He was 20-0 (18 KOs) and, in his previous three fights, mirrored Trinidad’s run over the same stretch. “El Feroz” won a disputed majority decision over future Hall of Famer Ronald “Winky” Wright in December ’99. Then he scored a career-best victory over Ike Quartey. And then he dispatched Ross Thompson in four rounds to set up the clash he’d been calling for, to determine who was the king of the 154lbs division.
“It was clear that [promoter] Main Events was rushing Fernando,” longtime HBO blow-by-blow man Jim Lampley told me in 2009. “And they were rushing Fernando because they wanted him and them to make whatever money he was going to make in the ring before he got into so much trouble outside the ring that it would end his career.”
Yes, there was a pending legal case against Vargas stemming from a 1999 assault charge. But that was only a minor factor, then-Main Events matchmaker Carl Moretti told me in a 2018 podcast interview. “The opportunity to fight Trinidad and the size event that it was and the money involved dictated more,” he said.
Lampley’s former broadcast mate Larry Merchant is more aligned with Moretti: “Many people say he was rushed,” Merchant said in ’09. “I never bought into that, because at the end of the day the idea is to make money, and he had an opportunity to make an awful lot of money, and he did.”
Vargas himself may not be the most reliable, impartial source as to whether he was rushed, but his 2009 comments are telling just the same: “I asked for it. I’m the one that wanted it. I said before that this Mexican wasn’t going to run, and I didn’t run.”
It also must be noted that it was a different time in terms of how quickly top American Olympic prospects were moved. Vargas and Floyd Mayweather both won alphabet belts in 1998, just two years and change after competing in the Atlanta Olympics, and Reid won his in March ’99. Vargas was not an outlier in being eager to challenge himself against pound-for-pound elites so soon after turning pro the way he would be in 2025.
And the Trinidad-Vargas fight was viewed as a near pick-’em coming in. The Californian was only a very slight +140 underdog at the Las Vegas sportsbooks. An HBO web poll the day of the fight found 56% of respondents picking Trinidad. When host James Brown put HBO analyst Emanuel Steward’s feet to the fire moments before the ring entrances, Steward pulled his feet away and said, “This is the first fight in my life that I cannot pick a winner.”
It took all of 21 seconds after the opening bell for it to stop looking like a toss-up. Vargas had the majority of the crowd of 10,067 at the Mandalay Bay Events Center on his side during the introductions, but it was Trinidad’s fans making all the noise when he hurt Vargas with the first serious left hook he threw, crashing it into the hinge of El Feroz’s jaw. A mere 26 ticks had come off the clock when Vargas hit the canvas for the first knockdown of his career.
Vargas, who later told me Trinidad’s punches “felt like fuckin’ baseball bats,” waded right back into battle still damaged, and Tito knew it and put him down again with another hook, this one on the point of the chin. As referee Jay Nady began to count over Vargas, the Puerto Rican star hopped onto the ropes in a neutral corner, believing, some 45 seconds into the fight, that it was over.
“I thought that the fight was going to end very soon,” Trinidad told me through a translator in 2009. “When I get to the ropes, it’s like a custom. People tell me, ‘Don’t waste energy jumping on the ropes. You are losing energy, don’t do that.’ But I trust in my conditioning. When I floored him two times, I was going to destroy him, to end the fight. I got a little wild. He was hurt, but he made it through the round.”
Vargas did indeed make it through the round – fighting flat-footed the rest of the way, but ducking punches reasonably well, seeming mostly recovered (at least until he walked to a neutral corner at the bell).
It’s easy to forget this now, armed with the knowledge that Vargas was stopped in four of his five defeats, but prior to facing Trinidad, there was no reason to think Vargas had anything short of a stellar chin.
A jab appeared to buzz Vargas again in the second. But then he settled in. The third round was notable mostly for the thumb of Vargas’ left glove causing Trinidad’s right eye to swell and for Tito getting a warning for a low blow, allowing Vargas two minutes of much-needed rest.
Through three rounds, the story had been Trinidad’s sensational start and Vargas’ admirable recovery. But there was not yet any reason to believe we had a real fight on our hands. Twenty-seven seconds into the fourth round, Vargas dropped Trinidad with a left hook – the fourth knockdown of the Puerto Rican’s career. And we had a real fight on our hands.
Tito got up and looked steady, but his subsequent actions suggested he was either a little buzzed or just wanted to take an extra measure to slow Vargas’ momentum. Trinidad fired off a left hand below the belt. Nady penalized him one point, and now the two minutes Vargas took to shake it off represented a break Trinidad likely welcomed.
“To me, it looked in the first minute and a half of the fourth round like Fernando had made this amazing transformation from having been lost at sea and too callow for this experience in the first round, and suddenly he was controlling Trinidad,” Lampley said in 2009. He proceeded to call Trinidad’s low punch “the most calculated and intentional and devastatingly effective low blow I ever saw.”
Trinidad objected to that characterization.
“I’m going to tell you right now that it was accidental,” the retired three-division ex-champ said nine years after facing Vargas. “I have never used dirty tactics in a fight.”
Whatever the intention, the knockdown and point deduction made it an even fight, 36-36, through four rounds. Vargas appeared the more energetic and accurate puncher in the fifth. Trinidad answered with two-fisted power shots in an outstanding sixth round that saw both men engaging in high-level, close-range combat, displaying both defense and aggression – matching the quality of the action in the first Morales-Barrera fight 10 months earlier, if not quite matching the pace.
Trinidad lost another point in Round 7 on a punch that replays showed landed on the beltline. For those who scored the round for Trinidad but then deducted that point to make it a 9-9 round, it was plausibly a 64-64 fight through seven rounds, a score I can’t recall seeing in any other fight I’ve covered.
But even if the fight was knotted up on the cards, Trinidad was gathering momentum. In fact, point deductions aside, he swept the sixth through 10th rounds on all cards.
In the midst of that came a Round of the Year contender in the ninth. Trinidad wobbled Vargas with a long right hand. El Feroz fired back with hooks upstairs and down. The final minute was pure war. CompuBox stats said they tied with 32 punches landed apiece over the three minutes.
Vargas lost a point of his own for a low blow in the 10th, and it was increasingly obvious that he was wearing down. Papa Trinidad told his son after that round, “He’s yours. He’s got his mouth open, and he’s tired.”
But Vargas, his left eye now swelling, wasn’t quite done. In the final five seconds of a close 11th, he landed a series of clean shots, making Trinidad’s legs dance ever so slightly. Both men thrusted a fist in the air when the bell rang to end the penultimate round.
As in the opening round, though, Trinidad, the best left-hooker of his era, struck early in the 12th. It was a right hand that froze Vargas, setting him up for the colossal hook that caused his head to bobble as he melted to the canvas. For the second time in the fight, Trinidad leapt on the ropes, thinking the job was done.
But again, Vargas showed heart, getting right up and bouncing on his toes. And again, Tito clipped him on the chin with a left hook and put him right back down. The fight was well out of reach and either Nady or Vargas’ corner could reasonably have stopped it, but it didn’t end until 1:33 of the round, Nady waving it off just as Vargas was crumpling to the canvas for a fifth time courtesy of a right hand.
Maybe Trinidad’s scaling of the ropes after the initial knockdown was a bit premature, but his father believed the second knockdown of the round should have spelled the end.
“I believe that they should have protected Vargas,” Trinidad Snr said in 2009. “Eduardo Garcia is a great trainer, but ultimately, Vargas was not protected. He should have been protected in that fight. Not only the corner, but the referee also. The referee should have protected Vargas. When those things are taking place inside the ring, you have to think about not only the punches your fighter is receiving, but also, who is the person throwing those punches?
“Vargas was a great champion, but Vargas didn’t have anything at that point, after the second knockdown [of the 12th round]. He was totally unable to defend himself.”
In 2018, during a podcast interview primarily focused on his 2002 fight against De La Hoya but also touching on what happened against Trinidad, Vargas admitted, “I only remember bits and pieces of the fight. On the way to the hospital, after the fight, I was in the ambulance with my [future] wife. And I asked my wife, I was in and out, in and out, so, I go, ‘Baby, did it look bad, when I went down?’ She goes, ‘You got up every time.’ I said, ‘What the fuck are you talking about? What do you mean I got up every time?’ … I didn’t know that I got knocked down five times.”
That punishing night did not mark the end of Vargas’ career as a top-flight fighter, but it’s certainly reasonable to observe that he was never the same, particularly in terms of punch resistance. He suffered a troubling knockdown in his next fight, against Wilfredo Rivera. He was stopped in the 11th by De La Hoya. He was stopped twice by Shane Mosley. In his final fight, he was knocked down twice en route to a decision loss to the limited Ricardo Mayorga.
I asked Vargas in ’09 if the Trinidad fight took something out of him.
“Honestly, I think it did,” he said. “Because I never got hurt before, and after that fight, the punches started taking their effects quick.”
In 2018, he added, “Do I feel that, if I had not [taken] that fight, I would have lasted longer in boxing? Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely.”
Trinidad said the same, in a way that Vargas could perceive as complimentary.
“You can see Vargas was different,” Tito said. “There was one Vargas before fighting me. There was another Vargas after that fight. I’m sure that if Vargas never fought me, and he fought against all the fighters that he fought after me, Vargas could have beaten all of them. … He could have knocked all of them out – De La Hoya, Mosley – if he had never fought me.”
Merchant wasn’t of the same belief when we spoke in 2009.
“Did it ruin the rest of his career, or did it just expose certain limitations?” Merchant asked. “I think he had certain limitations, but through his youth and ambition and hunger and drive, he was able to battle through them.”
Merchant added that he didn’t feel it was a mistake for Vargas to take the Trinidad fight so young. If he’d waited another year or two, the opportunity and payday might not have been there for him. And if the fight had still come together later, “probably the same thing would have happened in the fight,” he said.
Vargas made plenty of money in his 11-year pro career (an estimated $25 million in total purses) and engaged in several major fights after Trinidad – and accomplished enough to at least get his name on the International Boxing Hall of Fame ballot.
“I think that at the end of the day, at the end of the career, he just was not one of those super-elite fighters,” Merchant said. “I think that Trinidad and Oscar and Shane were just a little too good for him. But a lot of fighters would have settled for his career.”
Trinidad, meanwhile, did put together a Hall of Fame career, entering alongside his rival De La Hoya in 2014, the first year of eligibility for both of them.
And Tito was going in on the first ballot with or without the Vargas fight. But Lampley is among those who thinks December 2, 2000, at Mandalay Bay was Tito’s finest hour.
“The De La Hoya victory is still open to philosophical and tactical debate,” Lampley said, whereas “this was a rampaging, big-hitting puncher’s triumph over a kid with a world of talent and potential. It was a big credibility-builder for Felix.”
Among other things, it secured for him The Ring’s Fighter of the Year award for 2000. I was the managing editor of the magazine at the time, and was in Vegas to present whichever boxer prevailed with a Fighter of the Year belt at the post-fight press conference.
Vargas had the Quartey and Thompson wins coming in. Trinidad had the Reid and Thiam victories. Our editorial staff agreed that if either man won without controversy, there could be no reasonable opportunity for anyone to surpass him for top honors for the year.
We had two separate nameplates made, and I snapped the correct one onto the centerpiece of the belt. I called Editor-in-Chief Nigel Collins to quickly confirm the decision and made my way to the presser.
When Trinidad emerged from his dressing room after a long delay, his swollen eyes hidden behind dark shades, Don King Productions publicist Alan Hopper summoned me to the dais to present the belt.
And King proceeded to announce that a representative of The Ring was there to honor Trinidad as the No. 1 fighter in the world, pound-for-pound.
That was not what the belt said, nor what our pound-for-pound rankings said, but I was given no opportunity to speak into the microphone – it was all I could do to get myself a 10-second window to hand Tito the belt before the junior middleweight champ began speaking.
As Trinidad spoke, I informed King that the belt was for Fighter of the Year, not pound-for-pound supremacy. King nodded and turned his attention away from me in a way that effectively said, “I said what I said, now get off my dais.”
So I returned to my seat facing the dais and listened as Trinidad intermittently spoke in Spanish and shed tears, emotionally and physically drained.
He had assumed for a fleeting moment that he was on his way to one of the shortest, easiest nights of his career. Instead he endured one of the longest and hardest.
The result was – among other things – the greatest fight in junior middleweight history, the high point of a Hall of Fame career and the perfect fight at the perfect time.
Eric Raskin is a veteran boxing journalist with nearly 30 years of experience covering the sport for such outlets as BoxingScene, ESPN, Grantland, Playboy, and The Ring (where he served as managing editor for seven years). He also co-hosted The HBO Boxing Podcast, Showtime Boxing with Raskin & Mulvaney, The Interim Champion Boxing Podcast with Raskin & Mulvaney, and Ring Theory. He has won three first-place writing awards from the BWAA, for his work with The Ring, Grantland, and HBO. Outside boxing, he is the senior editor of CasinoReports and the author of 2014’s The Moneymaker Effect. He can be reached on X, BlueSky, or LinkedIn, or via email at RaskinBoxing@yahoo.com.
