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.

Edwin valero death photos