Roman Gonzalez is tucked in the back corner of a café in a strip mall in Anaheim, and he looks like he needs another coffee. Reporters have flocked to the star du jour, Devin Haney, but one of the greatest fighters of this generation is 100 feet away, mostly unbothered, all by himself, wearing a tracksuit and a sleepy grin just earnest enough to raise his brow and plump his cheeks.
“Chocolatito” will look to win another world title on Saturday night in Frisco, Texas, when he battles Khalid Yafai for the WBA world super flyweight championship. It’s a fight that was discussed as far back as late-2017. The discussion surrounding Gonzalez back then was slightly different than it is now.
Gonzalez suggested facing Yafai immediately after his second loss to Srisaket Sor Rungvisai, the only losses of his career with the latter being the only time he’s been knocked out. During those fights, Gonzalez was still considered by many to be the top pound-for-pound fighter in the world.
But a pair of lengthy, year-plus layoffs on the heels of a clean knockout loss created an erasure of Chocolatito in the present tense. When he was on top of the sport, he was one of the faces of HBO Boxing. These days, HBO Boxing doesn’t exist, and there is a new generation of fighters weighing 115 pounds and below who have garnered acclaim in his wake, including Julio Cesar Martinez, who returns to action on Saturday as well. As a result, Gonzalez is treated like a relic of a bygone era.
It’s jarring to see Gonzalez as the B-side of a fight against anyone his size, but such is the case this week, even if it’s deserved given that he is indeed the challenger. Perhaps even more so than Ricardo Lopez and Ivan Calderon before him, Gonzalez brought attention and respect to the sport’s smallest weight classes. Whereas Lopez and Calderon cracked the pound-for-pound lists based on long and meritorious service, Gonzalez had boxing’s intelligentsia agreeing a 115 pounder was indeed the very best fighter on the planet.
“I feel very happy to see a lot of young kids and new fighters in my weight class coming up and getting opportunities in the sport. I’m happy they’re having opportunities to get their families ahead in life,” said Chocolatito through a translator.
Those who plant the seeds often don’t get to enjoy the fruits they cultivated, and Gonzalez may very well wind up in that category. For his second bout with Srisaket, Chocolatito earned the most he ever has, $600,000, almost half a million less than Michael Carbajal and Humberto Gonzalez in 1994 in their ceiling-shattering 112-pound clash. It’s uncertain how sweet the fruits to be enjoyed are, even at this point, for the sport’s little guys. Gonzalez has amassed a good sum over the years, but that took an absolute outlier of a career and reaching the sport’s pinnacle. Some of his contemporaries in this era continue to scrape by, even at the highest level. Jay Harris, for example, who challenges Martinez for a 112-pound title, continues to work at an Amazon warehouse in order to support his habit of being a world class fighter.
For fighters like Harris, Martinez, and in particular his opponent Yafai, Gonzalez provides hope that it’s possible for fighters of their stature to gain the respect of the broader boxing public. Yafai has declared Gonzalez to be his hero on many occasions.
“I feel very flattered that he said that, I feel very honored that he considers me his hero. But a fight is a fight, and we’re going to see in the ring,” said Gonzalez.
Yafai is far from the only active fighter to idolize Chocolatito. Gonzalez’s name has frequently come up over the years when current fighters were asked about others fighters they liked to watch or borrow techniques from. In that sense, Chocolatito is like the critically acclaimed indie act that gets cited by more financially successful musicians. It’s a tacit acknowledgment that they’re superior skills-wise, but because they’re outside of their orbit, it’s seen as a respectful indication that they’re students of the artform and not ripping them off. A welterweight won’t admit to studying Terence Crawford, for example, because they might fight him one way. But they can freely admit to studying Gonzalez. The sport’s little guys are more like a fraternity however--they understand one another’s exceptional struggle, and Chocolatito is their leader.
“Everyone I have ever shared the ring with, I consider my friend,” said Gonzalez. “I’ve fought everybody in the division except for Yafai. I think it will be a hell of a fight, an amazing fight, and after that, it will be even greater to go for the unification.”
If Gonzalez were to go on another championship run, he would enter pretty rare territory. There are very few examples of fighters below 115 pounds having great success after the age of 30. The reasons for this are likely simple physiological ones--making such a minute weight is taxing on the body and can only be done for so long, and can be done more easily by young, spry fighters who enter the divisions in Asia, Central America and Africa every month. Case in point: Perhaps the three greatest fighters in the history of the division Gonzalez now occupies, Khaosai Galaxy, Jiro Watanabe and Sung-Kil Moon, all took losses and retired shortly afterwards at the age of 32 or younger.
A prime Gonzalez was like watching a fighter in a video game with 99 overall attributes playing on double speed. His combination of perfect technique, speed and hyper aggression and the ability to not have to negotiate between them makes him a stylistic unicorn in the ring. As the years have gone on and his opponents have gotten a little larger, Chocolatito has been getting hit a little more, and hurt too, as he reckons with the inability to comfortably make lower weights but also the inability to change his given physical structure.
Gonzalez attributes his 2017 losses, and recent layoffs, to mistakes in training, but also more critically, a nagging knee injury that forced him under the knife.
“I’ve taken care of myself, but that doesn’t mean I’ve been taking it any easier. I’ve been training harder, actually. Maybe it’s because before I didn’t have a planned workout schedule, and now I do. I feel good, I feel rested. I think the time off after the knee surgery has given my body a total reset,” said Gonzalez. “But, we know the younger you are, the more energy you have.”
So how much energy does Chocolatito have left? Gonzalez has had to endure plenty during his career, including the deaths of the two most important teachers in his life, Alexis Arguello, and his longtime trainer Arnulfo Obando. Everything around him doesn’t look like it once did, from his most inner circle to the squared one in which he makes his living, and they’re lonelier and tougher than before.
Between sips of his new coffee, Gonzalez ponders the brunch menu, but abstains as the tables around him flag down the waitress for second helpings.
“I think the sacrifices have been worth it,” Gonzalez says with a nod. “I’m confident in God that more opportunities will come so that I can keep going.”