LOOKING BACK
Light-heavyweight hardman Yaqui Lopez tells Tris Dixon about a career that failed to land him a world title but saw him go down in history as one of the best in a golden era. Today, he’s just grateful he’s around to tell his story.
Catching up with Yaqui Lopez – one of the best in a light-heavy golden era
IF I COULD DO IT ALL AGAIN I WOULD DO THE SAME AGAIN. BUT MAYBE THIS TIME I’D BE A LITTLE SMARTER”
NEW JERSEY, 1980 – He poured on the pressure, his body gleaming with sweat and his blue velvet shorts now sodden. His trademark mop of black hair tremored wildly. There was venom in every shot. Hooks. Uppercuts. Right hands. He had put away lesser men with just one of those punches. His gloves swirled in a tornado-like fashion.
There was nothing coming back. The title was his. Blood tipped from a wound between his eyes, but he was not the one in trouble, he was the one on the verge of victory; he just needed to land one more shot. One more shot landed. And then another. And another. And another.
Then, arm weary, he stopped. He bit down on his mouthpiece. He could do nothing but accept the punishment that suddenly came back his way. Estimates are that around 30 storming Yaqui Lopez blows had failed to put Philadelphia’s WBC lightheavyweight champion Matthew Saad Muhammad away that night in the Playboy Club in Mcafee.
Instead, Saad grimaced through the avalanche of 1980’s Round of the Year, deep into their hurtful Fight of the Year, and then Matthew, as Matthew did, turned the screws himself.
Both men would write themselves into the record books that night, their names etched in stale crimson on yellowing pages, their futures all the more murkier for the ludicrous violence.
Stockton, California, 2019 – It’s nearly 40 years on from that contest. Saad Muhammad was the winner and defended his crown a further four times while Lopez never won a world title in four attempts, thrice at light-heavyweight and then a token try at cruiserweight when that division was almost brand new. Saad paid a heavy price for the beating he took at the relentless fists of the Stockton warrior. Sure, he made every fight hard, but in many ways that eighth round – or the subsequent heroic climax – was an absolute peak for him and then struggle set in. Beset with boxing-related neurological issues from all those wars and fighting on too long he died in 2014 at 59.
Lopez is 67. “So far so good,” he says, when asked about his health after boxing, falling just shy of adding the customary “touch wood.”
He’s lived in the same homely bungalow for decades with wife Beatrice, with posters of his fights all over the living room walls. He’s less than two miles from the Fat City Boxing Club, a non-profit gym he runs looking for contenders, champions and hoping to save lost souls. Yaqui was never one of those but while the boxing club might have been his destiny it was not his first choice.
Born in Zacatecas, Mexico, young Yaqui’s dreams of becoming a bullfighter were, legend has it, destroyed when a bull gored through his ankle. There was no Plan B, at least not right away.
After his family moved to the West Coast, life became about girls, school and hanging out. That only changed when he gave a friend a lift to see his girlfriend and Lopez met the girl’s sister. Yaqui would later fall for the sister, Beatrice, mesmerised not only by her beauty but by the fact that her dad, Jack Cruz, was a boxing promoter.
“And I asked her if her father could teach me boxing, and she said, ‘Really?’ I said, ‘Yes,’ and it started there. She’s been my wife 47 years and her father was with me through my whole career. Boxing didn’t come to me naturally but I worked hard, I listened to my handlers and my managers and I learned.” Lore has Lopez at 13-3 as an amateur and then when he turned pro, a hungry Mexican lost among faceless masses on the bustling California boxing scene, he hoped he might make it on to a fight poster, that he might be a main event, get in one of those 10-round fights. They might sound like modest goals but that was a lofty ambition for a boy who was being trained and managed by his future wife’s pops just to impress her and who made 50 bucks in a four-rounder on his debut. But things changed and moved quickly. The kid could really fight. He boxed with a reckless abandon and he rapidly absorbed everything, whether in the gym or in the ring.
Before long he was part of the roaring 70’s lightheavyweight era and there had never been a time like it. There probably won’t be another like it, either. The top 20 at 175lbs was littered with landmines; slicksters, brawlers, technicians, counterpunchers. And they came from the world over, battling each other for the WBC or WBA belts, the only world crowns of the day. There was Victor Galindez from Argentina, John Conteh from England, Matthew Saad Muhammad, Eddie Mustafa Muhammad and Marvin Johnson in the USA, Yugoslavia’s Mate Parlov, prison boxer James Scott, there was the ‘Jewish Bomber’ Mike Rossman and there were more on the way, Dwight Qawi, Michael Spinks and others.
SAAD MUHAMMAD TOOK A LOT FROM ME AND FROM OTHER FIGHTERS. THAT’S WHY HE’S NOT HERE NO MORE”
There was also a supporting cast of Richie Kates, Eddie Davis, Jesse Burnett, Mike Quarry… You could go on. Not many divisions have been as talented or treacherous. There was no way of making progress by going around the best, you had to go through them and in just his fourth fight Lopez got Burnett. He lost, too, but took the lesson. “We fought an eight,” he recalls. “That is how I learned. The first time I fought him in Stockton, California, in my hometown and in the last round my manager told me, ‘Go get him, Champ. He’s really tired.’ I turned round and I said to my manager, ‘I’m really tired, too!’ “I told myself I had to run more, and when that fight was over, I ran a quarter of a mile more each day until I hit nine, 10 miles easy. I trained hard.”
He wound up battling Burnett four times in all. That’s what happens when no one wants to fight either of you. They went 2-2. Through the ensuing years Lopez went to war. He exceeded those 10-round dreams and bagged a few world title fights, then decided over 15 rounds.
Yes, he may have lost to the mercurial Conteh in Copenhagen because, he claims, he travelled just four days before the fight leaving him jetlagged. Yes, he may have lost to James Scott because Scott “was on something.” Yes, he may have lost to Galindez (twice) in Italy, where the Argentine was hugely popular. But each story, colourfully regaled, is marked by asterisks which, in turn, is delivered with a sigh. “No excuses.”
“It was a good time to be a light-heavyweight. I think it was the best era of light-heavyweights,” he admits, proud to have been involved in the midst of a 175lbs earthquake.
His first shot came against Liverpool’s “great boxer, hard to hit, with a pretty good left hand,” John Conteh. He lost over 15 rounds to the classy Englishman.
Yaqui won a couple more times before the year was out and through 1977 and 1978 he fought 14 times. Two of them were to Galindez for the WBA belt, once for the NABF title to Saad Muhammad (then fighting as Matt Franklin), there was a win over Rossman and a 15-round decision to put his rivalry with Burnett to bed.
He felt Rossman’s conservative and well-connected team brought him in as fodder thinking the battles had taken their toll on Lopez. But, firstly, they hadn’t. Secondly, Yaqui was only just getting started. He battered Rossman until the Philly man couldn’t come out for the seventh. “I was not done yet,” Yaqui smiles. “I was alive still.”
The first fight with Saad was a ferocious war in the Philadelphia Spectrum and Lopez wilted in the 11th. All it did was sew the seeds of a rivalry that would later make history. “Matthew told me that night, ‘When I win the championship of the world, I will give you a rematch.’ He was a man of his word. He was good. And I believed him because you know the guy, right away you could see he was always a good guy. We were enemies in the ring but outside the ring we were friends. Inside the ring he had a job to do and he did it better than I.”
A few months after Matthew won the world title with a typical blood and thunder war against Marvin Johnson, Lopez was being attacked in jail.
Inside the walls of Rahway Prison paced the formidable James Scott. He had been banged up on a robbery charges, but before they threw away the key (he was finally released in 2005 and died in 2014) the prison used him as the figurehead of their boxing programme. He was an intimidating guy who’d spent the majority of his life in reform even before his life sentence.
One of the things Yaqui best remembers is the ring walk. From one holding room the door would open ahead and he would walk to the next one. The door behind him would close and then the next one would open. Eight times in all, he says, before he wound up in the prison sports hall and on TV to fight Scott, who won over 10 rounds.
“I got the flu. No excuse about it,” he says. “My father in law, Jack, didn’t want me to fight but when you need the money you have to fight, so I said, ‘I’m alright.’ And by the time of the fight I felt better, a lot better. But James Scott’s people – or maybe himself – made a few calls to my hotel and they told me, ‘We’re going to get your son, and this and that,’ because I took my wife and son with me [to fights]. And then when we went to the weigh-in and everything you were supposed to take the tests, you know, the drug tests. And you’re supposed to pee in a glass and they give it to the doctors and they go with me and I pee and then they went to go with James Scott and he said, ‘Hell no, I don’t need to pee.’ I hit James Scott good to the body and I see his eyes go red, he kept coming and I know he was on something. I know he was on something, but no excuse, you know?”
No matter. This was in the days before legacies were built on gleaming records with predictable outcomes. Two victories later and he was back in with Saad for the WBC title. It was the year he let the thrilling champion through his fingertips, perhaps he was just one clean shot from securing the green and gold he had coveted in that famous eighth session.
It was in many ways the pinnacle for Yaqui. It is what he is most known for today. And in case you didn’t think his year could get any harder, he boxed another all-time great light-heavyweight just three months after the 14-round New Jersey bloodbath. The excellent Michael Spinks – future champion at light-heavyweight and heavyweight – stopped him in seven, though
Lopez enjoyed some early success.
“He was a good fighter, too,” Yaqui goes on. “He was an awkward fighter. You would expect some punch and he’d hit you with another kind of punch. He was awkward, but he hit good. He hit me in the temple hard and I went down in the fifth or sixth round. I started pretty good and I thought I was ahead when he knocked me down but he was younger than I and I had a lot of fights already when I fought him. He was a better man than I.”
Maybe that last hurrah against Saad Muhammad had been just that. Maybe it finished them both.
So many fighters struggle to walk away. By the end there was nothing left to give following a four-round loss to WBC cruiserweight champion, Carlos Deleon in 1983.
“In a way it was hard but in another way no,” he explains, softly. “My father told me I had nothing to prove no more, and my father in law told me the same thing.
“To tell you the truth I have no regrets and if I could do it again I would do the same thing but maybe I would have been a little more smart,” he smiles.
“I weigh today 188lbs so I’m pretty good. I exercise in the morning, I walk three miles every day.”
Two damaged discs in his back cause him to gulp down the occasional pain pill and “in the cold my neck, my back, my hands, everything’s sore, but I cover up pretty good and I go to work.”
And how does it feel to be known as one of the best in the sport never to win a world title?
“That sounds pretty good to me,” he sighs, contently, the mop of jet black hair replaced by wavy grey locks. “I like that because in my times in the old days we fought, we really fought, and right now they go less rounds and they don’t fight like we did. They don’t give the fans and the crowd the excitement that they used to. Some do although it’s not like before. But I love it, still after so many years.”
So many years after he was one punch away from scoring the biggest victory of his life against his greatest rival. To close the story where it began, Lopez, this time, really offers no excuses.
“I never thought that Matthew was finished [in the fight]. I did some damage to him in the eighth round big time but he got his second wind and I never got mine. When I felt the cut between my eyes and my nose I felt the heat, I knew it was warm blood and I said, ‘It’s now or never. Either I get him, or he gets me.’ I threw a hundred punches, a lot of punches, and I hit him pretty good and he took it. I hit him with everything and he recuperated and he beat me. He knocked me down four times in the 14th round. He surprised me but he took a lot – from me and from other fighters – and that’s why he’s not here no more.”
Saad Muhammad died from neurological issues related to ALS, Lou Gehrig’s Disease.
“It’s like I tell you,” Yaqui goes on, happy to have seemingly come through it all unscathed. “He was a good guy and the good guy is gone.”
Saad Muhammad and Yaqui Lopez. Round of the Year. Fight of the Year. Inextricably linked. Two good guys who punched lumps out of each other and embraced like brothers when they were reunited at a boxing event 30 years later; Lopez could recall their fights, Saad’s fading memory told stories of shadows and lights. That’s the price of glory. For Yaqui, the contentment he now has for life was worth falling just short of a world title.
“Boxing is not easy,” he says. “If you want to be somebody in boxing you have to work hard. It’s all about dedication. There’s a lot of dedication, determination, you have to have the heart, the guts, to do things, to wake up early, go run, go rest or go to work, there’s a lot of work. You have to love it to do it. If you don’t love it, don’t do it.”
That is said with the infinite wisdom that whether the sacrifice is worth it or not there is a price to pay, and whether it’s paid in glory or in blood it’s often paid in full.