Sergio De La Pava - A Naked Singularity

Wilfred had broken his ankle in three places while crumbling to the canvas so, with the necessarily-idle recovery time, he didn’t fight again for almost a year. This, of course, would have been a good time to retire, even at twenty-four, but that kind of thing never happens so we’ll move on. The truth was he needed the money. Tax problems, bad investments, all those things people always say when they’ve somehow managed to squander absurd sums of money. If he retired he would have no hope of getting back what he had lost. So instead he did what he’d done since he was seven. He fought.

He fought the decent Mauricio Bravo in Aruba on March 30, 1985, and knocked him out in the second round. Maybe the layoff had been the best thing for him he thought and this notion gained credence when he followed that victory with a seventh-round knockout of Danny Chapman in July. Now he could step it up again, the thinking went, and his next fight would be against the undefeated (22-0 19 KOs) Kevin Moley in Madison Square Garden.

Moley was a pretty good fighter who had been carefully nursed by his management team to an undefeated record. What happens in Boxing though is that eventually the protected kid with the stellar record has to fight someone legitimate. When that point is first reached, as it had been with Moley, what customarily happens is the fighter will fight someone who still has a recognizable and respected name but who is far enough along on his decline as to pose no real threat. Moley’s team identified Wilfred as that individual. They reasoned that he was nothing more than the shell of a once-great fighter and as such would represent an easy yet superficially impressive victory for their fighter. They were both right and wrong. They were right that he was a shell. What they failed to realize is that even the shell of a great fighter can often beat a merely good one. They got what they deserved those fucks. After being dropped by a right fifteen seconds into the fight, Benitez got up, made the sign of the cross, and proceeded to give Moley a thorough ten-round pasting. There were actual flashes of the old Benitez as he lay against the ropes impervious to his opponent’s attack, doubled and tripled up on his jab, and repeatedly bounced short straight punches off Moley’s melon. Maybe he was back all the way Benitez thought. Those other incidents weren’t signs after all, just a temporary lull. Damn he was still only twenty-six.

In the ring, after the fight, Benitez was excited. He grabbed the microphone that had been used to announce his victory and addressed what had been a supportive Garden crowd in broken, halting English. At times he seemed to have trouble speaking, it was one of those uncomfortable situations. But he managed to thank the crowd for coming to watch him fight at the stadium of Madison of Madison Square Garden . He told them he was born in New York but added that he was raised in Puerto Rico. He said he liked fighting in New York. He finished by yelling God bless you all because God has made me winner again! God bless you! to loud cheers. Off that he would not be retiring.

Coming off the Moley victory, Benitez signed for a similar fight against Matthew Hilton. Hilton was a highly marketable, white($$), Canadian, twenty-year-old with a serious left hook who was being groomed as one of Boxing’s next big stars. He was undefeated (18-0 13 KOs) and coming off one of those impressive-in-name-only victories against former middleweight champion Vito Antuofermo. Benitez actually trained properly for this fight and came into the ring in shape knowing that a victory over the high-profile Hilton in a nationally televised fight would likely gain him the Hagler title shot and big payday he had blown with his loss to Hamsho. He would be back in the Greatness conversation, still with a chance to make more history.

Early on it was one of those good news/bad news deals for Benitez. The bad news was that Hilton had really heavy hands, or I should say hand —the left one. He showed this by dropping Benitez in the first with a good body shot. The good news was that he was slow as an hourglass and somewhat amateurish in the way he set up to throw punches, telegraphing everything that was coming. He was the kind of guy a prime Benitez ate for lunch, frustrating to no end with his defense before winning a decision. This was where the further bad news came in, however, because Benitez looked awful. Every punch that landed solidly, and there were more of these than ever before, seemed to at least stagger Benitez. He took a beating from this chump who in a just universe would have been honored to hold Wilfred’s spit bucket. He got hit clean, hard, and often while the Montreal crowd chanted for Matthew, Matthew . In the sixth he got caught with a severe left hook to the head, the kind of punch he never got hit with before. He must have wondered what was going on. He must have wondered this as he stumbled back against the ropes and the twenty-year-old came in firing more punches he couldn’t get out of the way of. It should have ended there but it didn’t. On the basis of some now-remembered, long-ago-installed instinct Benitez moved his head just enough and Hilton got tired just enough that soon Wilfred was firing back and, whenever the ref intervened, shaking his legs in the hopes they would return.

If Benitez was in a ring he was trying to win. It didn’t matter that he couldn’t or even that he knew he couldn’t. If he fell and shattered his ankle he tried to stand on it and continue. If a twenty-year-old was hitting him with punches he had easily avoided in the past there was nothing you could do about it. You certainly couldn’t stop fighting, you couldn’t quit. No, you took the punches best you could and fired your own back in the general direction they were coming from. You made movements that had been ingrained in you since before puberty and for some reason you hoped the ref wouldn’t stop the fight. And in the eighth Benitez got hit with so many consecutive solid punches that the referee came very close to the fighters and appeared to be on the verge of stopping the fight. Except that when he looked closely at Wilfred’s eyes to see what was there he saw him shaking his head no and grinning in the universal boxing sign for this guy can’t hurt me . But he could. The ref didn’t stop the fight then but in the ninth it didn’t matter. Against the ropes as Hilton threw everything he had, Benitez was only barely surviving when he got hit with a particularly savage left hook. The punch shot Wilfred’s chin to the left and the top of his head in the opposite direction. He slumped to the canvas, his left arm becoming entangled in the ropes so that he fell on his chest, his left shoulder suspended by those ropes and the left side of his face at the referee’s feet. He raised his head and looked up at the ref. He slowly shook his head and blinked his watery eyes. He wanted to stand up and keep fighting. He wanted to clear his head and last the round. Then he could recuperate between rounds and even though he had lost every round to that point, had been down twice, he would come back and win the fight, give Hilton the type of beating that would make his people regret they ever considered putting their guy in the ring with him. He would win because he was WILFRED BENITEZ and that was reason enough. So he tried to stand and put himself in a position where Hilton could legally throw more punches at his head. Where you would have covered up and cried, he tried to stand. He couldn’t, didn’t come close, and when the count was over the ring doctor rushed into the ring as the announcers openly feared for his safety.

It was over. All of it. Everyone could see it except the eyes that mattered. What Wilfred saw in the ring with those eyes was the same thing he had always seen. He saw openings and opponent mistakes; opportunities to hit and moving gloves to avoid being hit with. The difference was that by the time his damaged brain would send the signal to his body it would be too late. Too late to expose the opening and, what was worse, too late to avoid the incoming punches the way he had done so easily for so long. And when those punches would land the same brain that since age seven had absorbed the shock of incoming skull had had enough and that brain would rebel by starting to partially shut down.