Cobrita Gonzalez vs Goyo Vargas
Posted: 26 Sep 2012, 19:02
Two guys who were great for perhaps one night only, but managed to make me a fan of fighters from a continent away: Alejandro "Cobrita" Gonzalez & Gregorio "Goyo" Vargas.
They both had many similarities. They were both Mexican, obviously, & they had cool-sounding nicknames. They introduced me to the wisdom of a single-minded commitment to body-punching, the joys of big spangly heavily-tassled shorts & the eerie, destructive poetry inherent in watching Latin Americans who really know their shit fight on the inside; the rhythm of the punches, the swiftness with which they switched from attack to defence or body-shots to head punches... They fought with ferocity & technical steadiness that belied their ridiculously young ages. They birthed an obsession for me with any preternaturally well-balanced dude who can throw a textbook lead left uppercut & has a polysyllabic Spanish name which has continued to this day (those on the Brit forum are probably sick of my ill-placed outbursts of man-love directed at Senor Marquez, & the special "Highly Official Come On JMM Mega-thread" I insist on creating whenever I think he might lose). So you can blame them both equally for that (you'd think it would be Chavez, but I only got to see Chavez at the tail-end, when he was scraping draws & technical decisions & struggling with the likes of David Kamau. Even then I could tell he was something special, but I could see he was already past it & never got to see his lightweight heyday until the advent of the Internet. Finito Lopez I didn't get to see until he beat Alvarez, & by then the end was near for him, though I had followed Chavez & Finito's exploits in the boxing press with avidity). Gonzalez & Vargas also both had careers built around one shining moment fighting for the WBC featherweight title, careers which invited vast amounts of speculation & promise, yet ground away in, if not mediocrity, then certainly far from the storied heights which had been predicted for them on the basis of their breakout performances.
Oh yeah, & they both decked the fvck out of Kevin Kelley.
All right all right, Jesse Benavides did that as well. & Goyo got his face all beat out of shape & lost to the Flushing Flash in a great, great fight & Gonzalez nearly got beheaded by KK until he beat the New Yorker up enough to make his trainer do the compassionate thing. But both men showed more in their fights with Kelley than you'd ever want to see from human beings. They spat out blood & exchanged furious barrages of punches with the New Yorker, giving performances that make Rocky seem pedestrian & restrained by comparison. You'd be hard-pressed to come up with two better fights (unless you have access to the complete Kevin Kelley career set. He had a war with everyone. I liked him too. But anyway...).
They, along with the other 122-126 lb luminaries with which I have been circle-jerking, uh, reminiscing about with Rover recently, are why I'm here, at 33 years of age, writing this on a fuckin' Internet boxing forum when I really should be doing something grown-up & productive, like doing drugs off teenage hookers. These two fighters ignited a flame, appealed to my tragic sense of drama & astonished me with just how cool a human being could look beating the shit out of another one.
& now here, for your edification & delight, I ask you to riddle me this: If you can imagine that it was they, not Morales or Barrera (& actual historical context provided by the rise of the Prince notwithstanding) in some Bizarro fantasy parallel universe got to fight each other three times, at varying stages of their mutual effectiveness, for vast piles of cash, who would've come out on top? Who would've won the initial, barnstorming match, when they were both unquestionably great (well, okay, great-looking, which when you're an impressionable teenager is near enough the same thing), taking the Cobrita of the Kelley fight up against the Vargas of the Hodkinson match? Who the disappointing second encounter, when they know each other a touch too well & their styles clash unexpectedly? & who would triumph in the rubber event, when their skills are dissipating but their pride is as vast as ever?
They both had many similarities. They were both Mexican, obviously, & they had cool-sounding nicknames. They introduced me to the wisdom of a single-minded commitment to body-punching, the joys of big spangly heavily-tassled shorts & the eerie, destructive poetry inherent in watching Latin Americans who really know their shit fight on the inside; the rhythm of the punches, the swiftness with which they switched from attack to defence or body-shots to head punches... They fought with ferocity & technical steadiness that belied their ridiculously young ages. They birthed an obsession for me with any preternaturally well-balanced dude who can throw a textbook lead left uppercut & has a polysyllabic Spanish name which has continued to this day (those on the Brit forum are probably sick of my ill-placed outbursts of man-love directed at Senor Marquez, & the special "Highly Official Come On JMM Mega-thread" I insist on creating whenever I think he might lose). So you can blame them both equally for that (you'd think it would be Chavez, but I only got to see Chavez at the tail-end, when he was scraping draws & technical decisions & struggling with the likes of David Kamau. Even then I could tell he was something special, but I could see he was already past it & never got to see his lightweight heyday until the advent of the Internet. Finito Lopez I didn't get to see until he beat Alvarez, & by then the end was near for him, though I had followed Chavez & Finito's exploits in the boxing press with avidity). Gonzalez & Vargas also both had careers built around one shining moment fighting for the WBC featherweight title, careers which invited vast amounts of speculation & promise, yet ground away in, if not mediocrity, then certainly far from the storied heights which had been predicted for them on the basis of their breakout performances.
Oh yeah, & they both decked the fvck out of Kevin Kelley.
All right all right, Jesse Benavides did that as well. & Goyo got his face all beat out of shape & lost to the Flushing Flash in a great, great fight & Gonzalez nearly got beheaded by KK until he beat the New Yorker up enough to make his trainer do the compassionate thing. But both men showed more in their fights with Kelley than you'd ever want to see from human beings. They spat out blood & exchanged furious barrages of punches with the New Yorker, giving performances that make Rocky seem pedestrian & restrained by comparison. You'd be hard-pressed to come up with two better fights (unless you have access to the complete Kevin Kelley career set. He had a war with everyone. I liked him too. But anyway...).
They, along with the other 122-126 lb luminaries with which I have been circle-jerking, uh, reminiscing about with Rover recently, are why I'm here, at 33 years of age, writing this on a fuckin' Internet boxing forum when I really should be doing something grown-up & productive, like doing drugs off teenage hookers. These two fighters ignited a flame, appealed to my tragic sense of drama & astonished me with just how cool a human being could look beating the shit out of another one.
& now here, for your edification & delight, I ask you to riddle me this: If you can imagine that it was they, not Morales or Barrera (& actual historical context provided by the rise of the Prince notwithstanding) in some Bizarro fantasy parallel universe got to fight each other three times, at varying stages of their mutual effectiveness, for vast piles of cash, who would've come out on top? Who would've won the initial, barnstorming match, when they were both unquestionably great (well, okay, great-looking, which when you're an impressionable teenager is near enough the same thing), taking the Cobrita of the Kelley fight up against the Vargas of the Hodkinson match? Who the disappointing second encounter, when they know each other a touch too well & their styles clash unexpectedly? & who would triumph in the rubber event, when their skills are dissipating but their pride is as vast as ever?