'Chicanito' stood tall in every sense

AMERICA AT LARGE:The recent death of Genaro Hernandez brings back memories of an unlikely meeting, writes GEORGE KIMBALL

BACK WHEN he started boxing in the mid-1980s, East LA was fairly bursting at the seams with other fighters named Hernandez (over the course of his pro career he fought two of them himself, neither a relation), so it made sense that Genaro Hernandez would be assigned a sobriquet – in his case, Chicanito.

The term did not, as was often supposed by non-Spanish speakers, have fowl connotations. Rather, it was a diminutive loosely translated as “Little Chicano”, or “Little Mexican”, which was somewhat amusing, because if there was one thing he was not, at least in the company in which he campaigned, it was little.

Hernandez had 41 fights between 1984 and 1998, when he hung up his gloves for good, and from start to finish he weighed pretty much exactly 130lb. Since he stood nearly 6ft tall this made him the tallest super-featherweight/junior lightweight in captivity, and over the latter half of his career he held, with one brief interruption, a world title at that weight.

His final record, 38-2-1, only begins to tell the story. The two losses came at the hands of the best fighters of his generation, Oscar De La Hoya and Floyd Mayweather Jr, and the lone draw on his record occupies a place all its own in boxing lore, since it came in a 28-second fight in which not a single punch was landed. In a 1993 WBA title fight in LA, Raul Perez head-butted Hernandez, none too expertly at that. A vein in Perez’ forehead was spouting blood like a geyser, and the fight was terminated and declared a technical draw without a punch being thrown. When they met in a rematch two months later, Hernandez knocked Perez out in eight.

The bout that may epitomise Hernandez’s career came in 1997 when, two years after the De La Hoya loss, he challenged Azumah Nelson for the WBC title in Corpus Christi, Texas. Hernandez was leading on the scorecards in a close fight when, well after the bell ending the seventh, Nelson smashed him in the throat. WBC president Jose Sulaiman made his way to Genaro’s corner and assured him that if he was unable to continue Nelson would be disqualified. Although he was being offered the title on a silver platter, Hernandez declined and instead fought on to the finish, winning on a split decision.

He won his first title in France and made two defences in Japan, but because his constituency was in California he did most of his fighting there, and in his US fights never got farther east than Texas. Since I was based in Boston, this in turn meant I practically never covered his fights live, but watched his career play out on television. In fact, when we ducked into a side room to share a private moment during the cocktail hour preceding the Boxing Writers’ Awards dinner two years ago this week, it marked the longest conversation of our lives.

Shortly after the death of long-time Sports Illustrated writer Pat Putnam, the Boxing Writers’ Association of America had established an award in his honour. Then, just before the BWAA dinner in 2008, some Swift Boat-types (originally a political lobby group of Vietnam vets who targeted John Kerry’s presidential campaign in 2004) unearthed fresh information confirming that Putnam had in fact not served in the Marine Corps, had not fought in the Korean War and had not been a Prisoner of War, as he had claimed in barroom conversations.

That Putnam repeated his fanciful accounts in barroom conversations was beyond dispute, but, as I wrote at the time, “he never attempted to make them part of his official resume.

They were never a consideration in helping get him a job. They weren’t included in his official biographies at the Miami Herald, at Sports Illustrated, or at TheSweetScience.com, for which he wrote following his retirement from SI. He never publicly represented himself as either a veteran or a POW. He never attempted to join groups representing either. He never applied for veterans’ benefits, he didn’t ask to be buried with military honours and he certainly didn’t ask the BWAA to label him a war hero or to name an award after him.

In short,” I concluded, “if Putnam is going to be posthumously convicted of anything, it should be of slinging bullshit in a bar. If that were a hanging offence, we’d all be in trouble.”

The BWAA had hastily removed all vestiges of his name from the award, and, given a year to think it over, had now over-corrected, creating something called the Bill Crawford Courage Award. Named for a boxer-turned- Congressional Medal of Honour winner, the ground rules for the new award were couched in militaristic trappings, and specified that it would annually be presented by a Medal of Honour winner.

When the vote that year produced a dead heat, Genaro Hernandez and I became co-recipients, sharing the first so-named Bill Crawford Award for Courage.

Normally the dinner took place at whatever swank mid-town hotel would cut the BWAA the best deal, but the 2009 dinner was held at the Capitale, a fortress-like 19th century edifice designed by Stanford White as the headquarters for the Bowery Savings Bank, lending an even more stately aura to the proceedings.

So when Genaro and I ducked out to get our stories straight, it became apparent he was nearly as uncomfortable with the whole proceeding as was I. My misgivings were compounded by my feelings about the shabby treatment accorded Putnam’s memory, but both Chicanito and I felt that according a militaristic veneer to the honour we received was both inappropriate and, in another sense, disrespectful of more authentic heroism.

After all, Bill Crawford and other Medal of Honour winners had come by their awards by consciously risking their lives. Genaro and I had been diagnosed with Stage Four cancer, which, while unpleasant enough, is hardly comparable. It isn’t exactly a mission for which one altruistically volunteers. Once diagnosed, we each deal with it as best we can, but courage and bravery are not part of the equation.

“All we can do,” Genaro Hernandez sighed to me that night, “is the best we can to live from one day to the next.”

His loss to Mayweather came in his last bout, and provided the first of Money Boy’s world titles. Hernandez remained close to boxing, working as a television commentator for both English and Spanish-language broadcasts, as well as for CompuBox, the computerised punch-counting service to which most major boxing networks now subscribe.

In 2008, he was diagnosed with rhabdomyosarcoma, a rare form of head-and- neck cancer usually found in children. By the time we got to the Capitale a year later the disease appeared to be in remission, but any optimism was short-lived. Earlier this month, on June 3rd, he announced he had ended all treatment and was entering hospice care to await the inevitable. Four days later he was dead. He leaves his wife, Lillian, and two children, Amanda (19) and Steven (11).

He was 45.