Juan Antonio Lopez bids farewell at 52
Posted: 29 Jun 2004, 19:20
The man who discovered Julio Cesar Chavez, Mexico's Juan Antonio Lopez, passed away today at just 52.
The Culiacan man had been battling cancer and leukemia.
Lopez was a friend of Chavez's father and agreed to take Julio down to the gym as a boy. "From his very first spar," Lopez said of Chavez, "his left hook to the body was a thing of beauty."
But Lopez was a fighter, too - a fighter who upheld all the proud traditions of Mexican battlers. I watched him go 10 hard rounds with Wilfredo Gomez in a challenge for the WBC super-bantamweight title in 1982 on the Holmes-Cooney bill in Las Vegas. He gave Gomez a great scrap but eventually succumbed to a brutal left uppercut to the body (Gomez knocked out all 17 of his super-bantamweight title challengers).
Just take a couple of minutes to look at the names on Juan's record. They don't make 'em like him any more.
http://www.boxrec.com/boxer_display.php?boxer_id=002096
The Culiacan man had been battling cancer and leukemia.
Lopez was a friend of Chavez's father and agreed to take Julio down to the gym as a boy. "From his very first spar," Lopez said of Chavez, "his left hook to the body was a thing of beauty."
But Lopez was a fighter, too - a fighter who upheld all the proud traditions of Mexican battlers. I watched him go 10 hard rounds with Wilfredo Gomez in a challenge for the WBC super-bantamweight title in 1982 on the Holmes-Cooney bill in Las Vegas. He gave Gomez a great scrap but eventually succumbed to a brutal left uppercut to the body (Gomez knocked out all 17 of his super-bantamweight title challengers).
Just take a couple of minutes to look at the names on Juan's record. They don't make 'em like him any more.
http://www.boxrec.com/boxer_display.php?boxer_id=002096