Sergio De La Pava - A Naked Singularity

The announcement of this fight was received less than enthusiastically by some of Boxing’s cognoscenti. It was negligent mismanagement, they said, to put a seventeen-year-old boy, even one with that record (25-0 20 KOs), in the ring with an accomplished thirty-year-old champion who had fought 86 times. Regardless of Wilfred’s innate ability, the highly skilled Cervantes represented a tremendous jump up in class from the guys Benitez had fought to that point. Specifically, of the five opponents Benitez fought leading up to the Cervantes fight, three of them were fighting their first professional fight and the other two were a combined 13-20-1. Based on that alone, it was highly doubtful that any seventeen-year-old could ably adjust to this suddenly far higher level of competition and perform admirably, never mind win the fight. Perhaps Cervantes agreed and reasoned that fighting Benitez in his homeland would generate decent interest, and money, with minimal risk.

Back then there was a belief, the vestiges of it still occasionally heard today, that in order to take a champion’s title by decision, especially one who had reigned as long as Pambele, you had to clearly outperform him. If it was close, the champ got the benefit of the judges’ doubt.

When the day finally came to fight, it must have dawned on Pambele fairly early what was happening. He must have realized that nothing external would help him overcome this challenger. Factors like experience, will, heart, determination, the aforementioned champion’s scoring advantage, those things count most when the talent level between the two fighters is close. Pambele had lost fights before, though not in five years, but he had certainly never been on the wrong end of a talent gap like this. It didn’t matter how much Pambele wanted to remain champion or even how much Benitez wanted to ascend to the throne. It was all about the talent gap and it was astounding this gap. Astounding not only because of Benitez’s age but also because of the immense quality of his opponent. Pambele was no washed-up fighter ready to be taken. After losing a split decision to Benitez that night, Cervantes would go on to win his next thirteen fights over the next four years. He would regain the championship, once Benitez vacated it to move up to welterweight, and defend the crown seven more times until finally coming across, at age thirty-four, another all-time great in Aaron Pryor who would stop him in the fourth and essentially end his career as a championship-caliber fighter.

Against Benitez, Pambele couldn’t do anything while his opponent did as he pleased. Benitez’s hand speed and impenetrable defense controlled the fight from the opening bell. It was a brilliant performance. After fifteen relentless rounds of this, Wilfred Benitez became the youngest world champion in the history of Professional Boxing.

How could it have happened? How could a seventeen-year-old have done this? Wilfred Benitez was among a small handful of the greatest boxers ever to step into a ring. This did not become true because of what he accomplished on March 6, 1976, rather he accomplished what he did because the above was true. Comparisons to Sugar Ray Robinson and Willie Pep poured in for the kid with the ear-to-ear smile who boxed with balletic artistry.

After successfully defending his title two months later with another work of art, Benitez took the summer off to enjoy his new status. Getting Wilfred to train properly for fights became increasingly difficult for Goyo. The Cervantes fight, for which he did train semi-diligently, had only confirmed what Wilfred believed from the start: the usual rules didn’t apply to him, to someone who had what he had.

That summer, the United States sent probably its best Olympic Boxing team ever to Montreal for the summer games. The 1976 team, which included two future heavyweight champions in the Spinks brothers, Michael and Leon, won five gold medals but had one unquestioned star — Ray Leonard. Sugar Ray Leonard won one of the five golds and the camera loved his face, his name, and his relative articulateness. After the games, Leonard retired saying he would never box professionally. He would almost immediately change his mind and fight.

Meanwhile Benitez would only fight when it counted, with minimal training in between. But these were big-time fighters he was fighting now and not surprisingly the performances became shaky. A draw against Harold Weston in New York, for example, during which a seemingly disinterested Benitez was clowning to the crowd, what the hell was that? It was time to right the ship, so the Benitez camp went back to old reliable “Easy Boy” Lake for a third encounter. Predictably, Lake was again the picture of ease; he regressed and went out in the first round. (This loss sent Lake into a nine-year retirement with a record of 0–4, all the losses by knockout.)

Now Benitez was hardly training at all for his fights.

He was a welterweight now, fighting at 147 pounds. The welterweight division was a glamour division steeped in history. The former home of true greats like Henry Armstrong and Sugar Ray Robinson, the division was about to experience a dramatic resurgence with brilliant boxer after brilliant boxer passing through its doors. These guys could hit but Benitez wouldn’t train, wouldn’t properly prepare to face them. Before fighting Bruce Curry, a very good undefeated (15-0) fighter for whom Benitez should have trained a minimum of four weeks, Benitez trained for seven days. It showed. Despite winning a close ten-round decision, Benitez was knocked down for the first time in his career. His innocence thus lost, he then tasted the canvas twice more that night. No flash knockdowns either these visits to the canvas; Benitez, the defensive genius, was thisclose to being taken out by goddamn Bruce Curry! But he wasn’t. He survived and won and in the process showed the kind of courage any great boxer must have. Solely because of his heart and talent he had lived to fight another day, with the relevant other day occurring three months later when he fought an immediate rematch with Curry. Despite training only ten days this time for a guy who had given him all sorts of trouble, Benitez won a ten-round decision handily. Then, after a six-month layoff caused by his contraction of Hepatitis, Benitez utterly dismantled the very good Randy Shields in six rounds and just like that he was back on track.

But in this new division he was not the champ, he was one of many welterweight contenders. The Welterweight Champion of the World was Mexican great Carlos Palomino. Palomino had been champ for about three years after knocking out John Stracy in England. During that time he had successfully defended his title seven times, five times by kayo. Overall, the twenty-nine-year-old’s career record stood at 27-1-3 and he had not lost a fight in nearly five years. His next defense would come on January 13, 1979, against Benitez. Palomino was favored.

At nineteen years of age, Benitez was attempting to win his second world title. He had willingly ceded control of the junior-welterweights back to Cervantes in ambitious recognition of his growing body. The increased weight limit made proper training even less of a priority. For the Palomino fight, a monumental career-defining contest, Benitez trained fifteen days.

Despite this negligence, when January 13, 1979 arrived Benitez easily dominated Palomino to appropriate his title. It happened over and over; as the presumably naturally larger man, Palomino repeatedly did what he was supposed to do by backing Benitez into the ropes. What happened on those ropes, however, would forever change the way Benitez was viewed in boxing circles. Because it was there, his back on the ropes and Palomino firing punches, that Benitez destroyed the champ. It wasn’t a case of him leaning on the ropes so as to induce Palomino to punch himself out a la Ali’s rope-a-dope against Foreman. Such a strategy would only ever work against a 230-pound fighter anyway and would be lunacy against a welterweight who could throw punches forever. No, what Benitez did in this fight was lean on the ropes while somehow avoiding getting hit and countering Palomino to death. It was one thing to be unable to hit an opponent whose constant movement in the ring makes him an elusive moving target. It was quite another, and a special kind of evil torture for Palomino, to be unable to hit someone who is standing in one spot and has nowhere to go. For fifteen rounds Palomino rarely laid a glove on the preternaturally calm Benitez, also k.a. the New Welterweight Champion of the World.