The Trazancos fight, in March 2006, was in Kobe, Japan, where Valero was by then based – denied a license in the United States when a routine prefight scan revealed a small spot on his brain. Prior to facing Valero, Trazancos was an unremarkable but respectable 21-7-1. Not until his nineteenth fight was Valero extended past the first round, when Genaro Trazancos made it all the way into the second. Watching him train – not fight or even spar, but train – became a hot ticket in SoCal. He sparred how he fought, at 100 miles an hour and with terrifying and irresistible ferocity. “What do you feed this guy?” Mike Anchondo, another future titlist, asked Hernandez. Lazcano promptly left the gym and didn’t come back. With fewer than eight total rounds under his belt, he sparred future lightweight titlist Juan Lazcano. After racking up eight first-round KO wins, he began training and fighting in the United States, out of Hernandez’s gym in California. Valero knocked him out in the first round. He turned pro in July 2002 in his native Venezuela. After he defeated Francisco Bojado in the amateur ranks, Bojado’s trainer, Joe Hernandez, called him a “monster.” In hindsight, perhaps the very nature of Valero the boxer makes his emergence as Valero the murderer that tiny bit less surprising.īecause even by the standards of professional prizefighters, even as a participant in a sport that glorifies one competitor relieving the other of consciousness, Valero stood out from the start for his sheer, unadulterated violence. When even the likes of Oscar de la Hoya continue to reflect on the almost traumatic experience of sparring Valero, it is perhaps worth spending time to reflect on why, despite the way in which he ended his and Jennifer’s lives, many in the industry continue to reflect on his 27 career fights, his 27 career KO wins, and just how great he might have been. And, despite its best efforts, boxing continues to attract new fans and even fans who may not have been born when Valero was rampaging through the professional ranks, and who may not know his story. (I once spent a large part of a televised interview with Tyson discussing his love of pigeons.) Writing about Valero poses the same quandary, so allow us to be unambiguous at the start: Edwin Valero was a murderer, and it is as the killer of his wife that he should be remembered above all.īut before he was a murderer, he was a boxer thirteen years after his death, he continues to send shivers down the spine of those who faced him in the ring, even in sparring. To write about those men without mentioning their foul deeds is to surrender moral responsibility, and yet we all do it. And let’s not even mention the truly repugnant Davey Hilton and his almost equally foul family. Felix Verdejo is a murderer of the most cold-blooded type. Ike Ikeabuchi is apparently completely insane. Heavyweight champion Tyson Fury is an apparent homophobe. Floyd Mayweather, Jr, Hall of Famer, is a serial domestic abuser. Mike Tyson, Hall of Famer, is a convicted rapist. Don King, one of the most celebrated promoters in history and an inductee in the International Boxing Hall of Fame, stomped a man to death. The sport and the business that surrounds it are riddled with the unsavory: Frankie Carbo, who once controlled much of the sport in the United States, avoided the multiple murder raps against him largely because witnesses had a habit of falling out of hotel room windows. He had two more fights and scored two more knockouts two months after his final victory, he stabbed Jennifer to death in a hotel room and the next day, hanged himself in his jail cell.īy both necessity and design, boxing populates itself with the dregs of society and then pretends to be mortified when confronted with the inevitable consequences. Valero would not fight in the United States again. In hindsight, I can’t help but wonder if it was fear, not of the stranger Valero was hugging but of the man himself. At the time, I chalked it up to feeling out of place, to not speaking the language, perhaps even shyness. He didn’t speak English, and I still don’t speak Spanish, but by week’s end he and I were greeting each other with a smile on our final encounter, before he set off for the Frank Erwin Center in Austin, Texas, to destroy Antonio Pitalua in two rounds and run his record to 25-0 (25 KOs), he wrapped me up in a bear hug.Īs he did so, I glanced over his shoulder and saw his wife, Jennifer, and their two young children, standing close together as if in a protective huddle, looking at us with what seemed to me to be uncertainty or even anxiety. More accurately, I met him several times in the same hotel lobby during the same fight week.
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