By Steve Kim
This Saturday afternoon, Juan Lazcano goes into the lion’s den to face Ricky Hatton in his hometown at the City of Manchester Stadium, more than one year after his last bout - a 12 round loss to Vivian Harris in February of 2006 that he believed had ended his career.
A few months after the loss to Harris, I saw him at the weigh-in for the initial encounter between Oscar De La Hoya and Floyd Mayweather at the MGM Grand Garden Arena. As I ran into Lazcano - who I had gotten to know well over the years from his days at the Wild Card Boxing Club in Hollywood, California - I asked him his future plans. Surprisingly, he said he had made up his mind to retire.
Well, obviously, like many others before him, he changed his mind.
"There wasn't anything else," he would explain via cell-phone from Houston, Texas, just a day before he would travel to England. "After that performance, I just felt that wasn't the fight I wanted, that wasn't the way I wanted to go. That's the path that I took, but it was more business than anything. I took it because it was a good business opportunity, it was a good purse in the end. I didn't have the passion. I was tired and everything and I just didn't stretch myself. I said, 'If that's the way it's going to be, then I don't want it. I don't want to look at boxing like a job. I'd rather do something else. So that's what it was."
To Lazcano, boxing had always been a passion, not just a place to punch a clock and collect a paycheck. But unlike other fighters, he was able to replicate those competitive juices in a different realm as he bought into a JR's Texas Barbecue in his hometown of
Sacramento.
"I took on a different world title fight and it was big," he says of his business venture. "It was out of my realm but I did my research and I did that and I accomplished that. It's the same thing as a fight except without the physical punches. But the mental part of it and everything else, the risk involved is just as big."
During his hiatus outside the ring, his daughter would turn 15 and celebrate her quinceanera and his stepson would graduate from high school. But during all this, Lazcano opened up his own gym and stayed in shape, juuuust in case.
"They offered me a fight with Demetrius Hopkins last year," he recalled. "It wasn't something that I wanted. Not just the fight itself; the purse was very, very low and I was not interested at all. I declined on that one. So things were kinda at a standstill but then I started training just to keep myself busy and the business venture kept me motivated and it got my juices flowing. It was like greatness in a different area - but it was greatness and it was a dream that I had and I confronted it and I took action on it. It was a giant to me but I took it on."
But what gnawed at Lazcano was that for all his success in business and for as productive of a career he had as a professional boxer, he was never able to reach the mountaintop. He had never won a major world title, coming up short in 2004 against Jose Luis Castillo for the WBC lightweight title. And two years later he was in line to face Hatton, but he would bypass that opportunity, citing a sore hand he suffered in his previous bout against Ben Tackie.
He admits that not taking the Hatton fight then was a mistake.
"Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But when this thing fell in my lap again, it was like, 'Wow, this is God sent.'"
But does Lazcano have a realistic shot here, especially in light of the fact that Hatton has never been defeated as a jr. welterweight and Lazcano is coming off a 15 month layoff? But this is where Lazcano gets downright Biblical.
"I'm going to make a believer out of you, just listen to this. This year my birthday fell on Easter, OK, bit deal. Well, I turned 33 - that's the age Jesus died - except I was resurrected, that was my birthday. Not only that, I went through an actual resurrection in my soul, my spirit, as a fighter, as a person. And this whole thing has brought me back. I didn't take this fight for the purse, it was more the opportunity and an opportunity for me to really prove myself that I am pound-for-pound material. All along, it's been a mental thing and the business and all these other things help me realize that. It was just mental things keeping me back, that I wasn't believing fully. Once I made a shift, I was like, 'OK, I'm moving forward, I'm entering the Promised Land and I'm not going to take no for an answer.' The only difference between me and other guys that are on the pound-for-pound list is that they believed it and they worked at it.
