March 17, 1990

29 years ago From Boxrec: Chavez earned $1.4 million, and Taylor got $1 million. Dr. Flip Homansky, who examined Taylor after the fight, said, "Meldrick suffered a facial fracture, he was urinating pure blood, his face was grotesquely swollen...this was a kid who was truly beaten up to the face, the body, and the brain." The fight was named Fight of the Year and Fight of the Decade by The Ring. After the fight, Taylor said he was having too much difficulty getting down to 140 pounds and moved up to the welterweight division. Chavez was comfortable at 140 and stayed at junior welterweight. The rematch didn't happen until 1994, when Taylor went back to 140 to meet Chavez. In the last seconds before the 12th and final round of last Saturday night's super lightweight title fight in Las Vegas, Lou Duva was hunched over the puffy, battered face of Meldrick Taylor, screaming at his fighter above the din of the crowd. Duva, Taylor's comanager, pleaded with Taylor to do what he had been doing so flawlessly for 11 rounds against Julio César Chávez, the WBC's undefeated super lightweight champion. "Get close to him!" Duva shrieked. "Stay inside. Don't stand up and let him hit you. Do like you've been doing: Put your head on his chest and keep turning him around." Taylor, the finely chiseled 23-year-old U.S. Olympic 126-pound gold medal winner in the 1984 Games, and at the moment the IBF's 140-pound champion, was putting on the most smashing performance of his life. From the opening bell he had been beating Chávez to the punch, leaning on him and at times forcing him backward with flurries of hooks, jabs and straight right hands in bewilderingly quick combinations. Chávez, a 27-year-old native of Culiacán, Mexico, had arrived at the Hilton Center with a record of 68-0, including 55 knockouts, and with the reputation of being, pound for pound, the finest fighter in the world. But now, suddenly, near the close of a tumultuous evening during which many in the crowd of 9,130 were waving Mexican flags, repeatedly chanting Chávez's name and rising whenever he landed a punch, it seemed clear that all Taylor had to do was survive the last round to seize Chávez's title. Then Taylor made the very mistake that Duva feared he would. With only a minute to go in the fight, Taylor backed away from Chávez and stood up. Seeing his opportunity, Chávez staggered Taylor with a quick, powerful overhand right to the face. Chávez is a relentless, remorseless fighter when he has an opponent in trouble, and now he was stalking a weary, wounded Taylor like a cat circling its prey. With 25 seconds left, Chávez caught Taylor with another right hand. Badly shaken again, Taylor reeled after Chávez along the ropes. Chávez landed a hook and a grazing right hand, then missed with an uppercut, which Taylor countered with a weak, pawing jab. Dropping the jab as it fell short, Taylor left himself open, and that was all Chávez needed to rescue the hour. Setting himself, Chávez drove a vicious right over the jab. It struck Taylor on his left cheek and sent him collapsing on his back in a neutral corner, the back of his head nearly striking the ring post. He reached out his hands to grab a strand of rope. Slowly, groggily, Taylor found his feet as referee Richard Steele, standing squarely in front of him, picked up the count from the timekeeper at five. At almost the same moment, the red light began flashing on top of the ring post, indicating that fewer than 10 seconds were left in the bout. Meanwhile, Duva began climbing the stairs leading to Taylor's corner, screaming at Steele that one of his own assistants had told him that time had already run out in the fight. Duva was pursued by Kenny Bayless, an inspector from the Nevada State Athletic Commission; had Duva set foot in the ring, Taylor could have been disqualified by Steele. Afterward, Steele said he had not known how much time remained in the fight. "I don't think about time when I'm in the ring," he said. "I think about the fighter's condition." Steele also said that he had not seen the red light blinking, despite the fact that it was going on and off directly behind and above Taylor's left shoulder. As he finished his standing eight-count, Steele was looking hard at the only two things that mattered at that point: Taylor's eyes. "Are you O.K.?" Steele asked him. Taylor, who later said that he could not hear the question above the noise, did not answer. "I saw a great fighter who was beaten," said Steele. "His eyes, his condition, told me that he'd had enough. Meldrick Taylor got up, but I was not going to let him take another punch." Only two seconds were left in the fight when Steele raised his arms in the air and waved the bout to an end. Duva went berserk. Figuring that his boxer was probably winning on points, Duva leapt through the ropes and went racing over to confront Steele. "Unbelievable! Unbelievable! What the hell are you doing?" he yelled. "What did you stop it for? He was on his feet at five!" Steele did not respond. He simply turned and walked away. As security guards climbed into the ring to protect the fighters, the spectators stood by their seats and applauded for several minutes in a moving, almost reverential tribute to Chávez and Taylor. In the weeks leading up to the bout, many boxing observers had thought it might rank among the best fights of the past 10 years, and it more than fulfilled those expectations. At times the battle recalled the barn-burning, give-no-quarter featherweight title fights of the late 1940s and early '50s between Willie Pep and Sandy Saddler. The matchup was ideal, with the older, more cunning and implacable Chávez, who hits hard from both sides, against the younger, quicker Taylor, a Philadelphian who entered the fight with a 24-0-1 record, including 14 knockouts, and who has two of the fastest hands in the sport. Chávez is a destructive body puncher, particularly when he has an opponent on the ropes. Thus, Taylor spent most of his 12 weeks training for the fight by working the center of the ring and by staying out of the corners. Chávez never did pin Taylor on the ropes. Instead, Taylor took the fight to the middle of the ring, spinning off the ropes whenever he found himself there, and leaning on Chávez as he worked the body and head with hooks and uppercuts. At times, as the two boxers drove their heads into each other's shoulders, Chávez and Taylor looked like two horned animals locked in bitter territorial combat. With Taylor winging the jab and moving in circles around the center of the ring, Chávez lost the first round on the scorecards of all three judges. From his seat at ringside, Taylor's promoter, Dan Duva, Lou's son, exhorted Taylor to control the fight from the center. "Make him back up," Duva kept saying. "Get off the ropes. Get out. Turn and walk away. Don't stand in front of him." Chávez pursued Taylor, looking for a chance to fire the overhand right, and he and Taylor battered each other inside with hooks. By the second round, Taylor was bleeding from the mouth. Chávez was hitting harder, but Taylor was scoring repeatedly with his jab and hook. He was throwing more punches and making Chávez miss. Taylor dominated the early rounds, and then the fighters quickened the tempo in the fifth. In the sixth, the predominantly Latin crowd began chanting their man on: "CHA-vez! CHA-vez!" Although Taylor was winning, he was suffering the more visible punishment. In the middle rounds his left eye began to close, and his face became swollen and lumpy. His mouth and nose were bleeding, and his white satin trunks were streaked with his blood. But Taylor never stopped moving and banging away. He would land an average of 38.1 punches a round to Chávez's 21.5, and 128 jabs to Chávez's 37. By Round 8, doubling up on the hook, Taylor had Chávez backing up, and Dan Duva was yelling, "Now you got him, Mel! This is your time in history!" The action intensified in the ninth. Both men worked the body in close with hooks and uppercuts and with winged shots as they came out of the crouch. For the first time they appeared tired, but then in the 10th Taylor put on his show of the night. Looking to seal his apparent win, he scored early with a right hand-left hook combination, which snapped back Chávez's head amid a halo of sweat spray. Chávez recovered quickly, boring in and driving Taylor back with a jarring right hand to the head. However, as he had been doing all night when he was tagged, Taylor began firing punches from all points on the compass. He raked Chávez with three fast right-left combinations, scored again by doubling up with a left hook, caught a hard right by Chávez and banged Chávez with a right of his own. There they stood, in the middle of the ring, furiously snapping punches at each other—lefts and rights, jabs and uppercuts. At the bell, the crowd was on its feet and cheering wildly in appreciation of a truly remarkable show. The fighters went at it again in the 11th, pounding each other at center ring, until the bell finally rang, and Taylor, now tasting victory as surely as the blood in his mouth, threw his arms in the air in triumph as he walked back to his corner.