boxing, a life less ordinary - Johnny Tapia
Posted: 14 Feb 2005, 09:14
This article was written a couple of years ago now when it looked likely tapia would face scott harrison, apologies to those who have read the article already, for those who havent this guys life would make an awesome movie.
Not sure of writers name.
Boxing: A life less ordinary
Johnny Tapia survives on a knife edge. The bloody murders of his parents made him a brutal fighter, but it also spawned an addiction to drugs which nearly killed him three times
ANOTHER night, another fight and another coma in the life of Johnny Tapia. It looked like the end again, but he came round, he sat up and he checked out of yet another hospital in the middle of the night. The rehab starts the second I can walk, insisted Tapia in Glasgow last weekend. He was ringside, dull eyed and impressed with Scott Harrison. Sitting next to Tapia was promoter allegedly and he has a plan, a sensible plan, a plan that makes sense in a business that seldom does.
Johnny Tapia, triple world champion and miraculous survivor of three brief encounters with death in emergency rooms during the last decade, is on Harrison's list.
I would like to fight Scott because he is my type of fighter, admitted Tapia. He comes to fight, he comes straight out because he is a real fighter, he has a lot of balls.
Less than six weeks ago Tapia was caught in the middle of a wild mystery in Nevada. First reports placed him at a house on the outskirts of Las Vegas and a long way from the merry dreamers on the neon strip. The police raided the house, the news was sketchy, the details vague, but drugs were found and nobody was surprised when Tapia's name was mentioned. That same night Tapia collapsed at his home in Las Vegas and was rushed to hospital and news spread that he was in a coma. It was another coma in the crazy life of Johnny Tapia and that was just six weeks ago.
Tapia was in Glasgow to look at Harrison and to show people that he had recovered from his latest encounter with the extremes of drug use. A fight with Harrison had been mentioned in the days before the first bell sounded last Saturday at Braehead Arena and when Tapia arrived in town the rumour looked like fact. It can be made providing Johnny passes all of the required medicals and all of the tests and then only if he starts to see sense about the money, claimed Warren.
Tapia arrived in town courtesy of Showtime, the US cable company that has apparently fallen in love with Harrison. They are keen to get Tapia in a fight and Harrison would be ideal. It was Showtime that paid for Tapia and his wife Teresa to be ringside. Tapia remains a serious attraction on US television, a serious name even with the regular encounters with hospital emergency rooms.
Tapia was still in his mother's womb when he first went to an emergency room. His dad was a gang member in Albuquerque and was shot on the street one night. It was the first violent episode ofTapia's life. Tapia's dad never stood a chance.
When Tapia was seven he was in a car that went off a cliff and the female passenger next to him died in front of his eyes. The same eyes that lack any warmth, emotion or depth now. Less than 12 months later his mother was added to the death list. Tapia never saw her die, but he heard her screams from his grandparents' house. He heard her cry out but nobody believed him on that dreadful night. Nobody wanted to believe a small, tortured boy of eight.
His mother was raped, stabbed 22 times with an ice-pick and hanged but she didn't die that night. Assailants unknown, terror complete and just a few hundred feet away, alone in his bed, was a small, sad boy. He listened to the sounds that made him an orphan and since that night his life has been a place of hopeless faith.
His mother didn't want to die, she didn't want to leave her little Johnny and for 90 hours she survived in a perilous state under observation in the eerie gloom of yet another intensive care unit. Nobody would let him see her, nobody would let him say goodbye. She died and eight-year-old Johnny Tapia was left on his own.
His grandparents took control and he lived in their house in Albuquerque, but forget about happy families. At nine his grandfather started taking the skinny kid to bars. There was obviously a shortage of dogs in Albuquerque because Tapia was paid dollars to fight other children, other derelict boys and girls in the afternoons at bars for the entertainment of wicked men. It was no surprise that the little kid was good with his fists, good with his wits and never bothered about pain. Nobody could hurt me physically. Come on, how could anybody hurt me, said Tapia. It's a question that I have never been able to answer.
It was not the conventional childhood, Tapia continued. I'm not really sure it was a childhood, but I like to fight, I like to box and I was good. He still is, even at 36.
When Tapia was 11 he joined a proper gym and fought 123 times before turning professional in 1988. He went 17 fights without defeat and was making a name for himself, but he was also close to the filthy shadows on the street that make the dark trade of boxing look like an evangelical calling.
In 1990 he won his first professional title when he stopped Rowland Gomez for the USBA super flyweight championship. The fight was on US TV and he fought four more times in 1990 before the cocaine took total control. He went missing from the ring for nearly four years. He was 23, unbeaten in 22 fights, a real prospect but most of all, he was a junkie.
It was a terrible time, never easy for one moment even when I was winning in the ring because I was losing the fight outside the ring. It just got too much and I had to walk away from boxing for the street life, said Tapia.
When I stopped boxing my life was over, but I met Teresa and that was the start of my new life. But even my new life has not been easy.
At his side in a hotel in Glasgow Teresa sits and listens. She has heard it before, seen it before, but Johnny is her life. They met when she was 18 and he was out of his brain on cocaine and amazingly they fell in love. She has been next to him ever since.
In 1993 the phone rang by my bed in the early hours and I knew it was about Johnny. It was always about Johnny at that time of night and I had to run to the hospital, said Teresa.
It was very late when I got there and I saw a priest and I knew it was serious. Johnny had overdosed and he was clinically dead for almost one-and-a-half minutes. Dead in front of my eyes, but then somehow they managed to resuscitate him.
He wanted to go and eventually they let me take him home that time. When we got home he was there about five minutes before he vanished. I was back waiting by the phone. I knew then I had to get him back in the ring, Teresa continued.
In 1994 Tapia did climb back through the ropes. The pull of the ring was for a time stronger than the junk that was ruining his mind and life. But it was not over and twice since then Teresa has had to watch in helpless silence as the medics fight to beat her husband's latest overdose.
When Tapia returned to the ring in 1994 his crazy life got just a bit crazier. Just seven months and five fights after resurrecting a career that looked destined to end with the boxer collapsed over a crack pipe he managed to win a world title. It was a miracle. A truly grim fairy tale for a ravaged fighter. After 10 defences Tapia beat his local rival Danny Romero to win another world title. And after one more defence he moved from super flyweight to bantamweight and won his third world title at a second weight. It was 1998 and Tapia was a legend.
I had to stay in the ring because it is the easiest way for me to stay alive because I'm never far from where I have been before and I don't think I will ever be that far away to feel totally safe, said Tapia.
In 2001 he quit again after his car was riddled with bullets and depression kept him from the gym, but he returned in 2002 and was treated like a hero in an unlikely comeback fight at London's York Hall where he received a 10-minute standing ovation. In April last year he beat Manuel Medina to win the International Boxing Federation's featherweight title at Madison Square Garden, but he was stripped of the gaudy bauble for agreeing to fight Mexican idol Marco Antonio Barrera last November. He lost on points and his career was put on hold. Then came the news six weeks ago that Tapia was back in trouble.
I'm clean now, he told me in Glasgow. I was clean yesterday but I don't know about tomorrow. I fear for the time when I stop fighting.
Not sure of writers name.
Boxing: A life less ordinary
Johnny Tapia survives on a knife edge. The bloody murders of his parents made him a brutal fighter, but it also spawned an addiction to drugs which nearly killed him three times
ANOTHER night, another fight and another coma in the life of Johnny Tapia. It looked like the end again, but he came round, he sat up and he checked out of yet another hospital in the middle of the night. The rehab starts the second I can walk, insisted Tapia in Glasgow last weekend. He was ringside, dull eyed and impressed with Scott Harrison. Sitting next to Tapia was promoter allegedly and he has a plan, a sensible plan, a plan that makes sense in a business that seldom does.
Johnny Tapia, triple world champion and miraculous survivor of three brief encounters with death in emergency rooms during the last decade, is on Harrison's list.
I would like to fight Scott because he is my type of fighter, admitted Tapia. He comes to fight, he comes straight out because he is a real fighter, he has a lot of balls.
Less than six weeks ago Tapia was caught in the middle of a wild mystery in Nevada. First reports placed him at a house on the outskirts of Las Vegas and a long way from the merry dreamers on the neon strip. The police raided the house, the news was sketchy, the details vague, but drugs were found and nobody was surprised when Tapia's name was mentioned. That same night Tapia collapsed at his home in Las Vegas and was rushed to hospital and news spread that he was in a coma. It was another coma in the crazy life of Johnny Tapia and that was just six weeks ago.
Tapia was in Glasgow to look at Harrison and to show people that he had recovered from his latest encounter with the extremes of drug use. A fight with Harrison had been mentioned in the days before the first bell sounded last Saturday at Braehead Arena and when Tapia arrived in town the rumour looked like fact. It can be made providing Johnny passes all of the required medicals and all of the tests and then only if he starts to see sense about the money, claimed Warren.
Tapia arrived in town courtesy of Showtime, the US cable company that has apparently fallen in love with Harrison. They are keen to get Tapia in a fight and Harrison would be ideal. It was Showtime that paid for Tapia and his wife Teresa to be ringside. Tapia remains a serious attraction on US television, a serious name even with the regular encounters with hospital emergency rooms.
Tapia was still in his mother's womb when he first went to an emergency room. His dad was a gang member in Albuquerque and was shot on the street one night. It was the first violent episode ofTapia's life. Tapia's dad never stood a chance.
When Tapia was seven he was in a car that went off a cliff and the female passenger next to him died in front of his eyes. The same eyes that lack any warmth, emotion or depth now. Less than 12 months later his mother was added to the death list. Tapia never saw her die, but he heard her screams from his grandparents' house. He heard her cry out but nobody believed him on that dreadful night. Nobody wanted to believe a small, tortured boy of eight.
His mother was raped, stabbed 22 times with an ice-pick and hanged but she didn't die that night. Assailants unknown, terror complete and just a few hundred feet away, alone in his bed, was a small, sad boy. He listened to the sounds that made him an orphan and since that night his life has been a place of hopeless faith.
His mother didn't want to die, she didn't want to leave her little Johnny and for 90 hours she survived in a perilous state under observation in the eerie gloom of yet another intensive care unit. Nobody would let him see her, nobody would let him say goodbye. She died and eight-year-old Johnny Tapia was left on his own.
His grandparents took control and he lived in their house in Albuquerque, but forget about happy families. At nine his grandfather started taking the skinny kid to bars. There was obviously a shortage of dogs in Albuquerque because Tapia was paid dollars to fight other children, other derelict boys and girls in the afternoons at bars for the entertainment of wicked men. It was no surprise that the little kid was good with his fists, good with his wits and never bothered about pain. Nobody could hurt me physically. Come on, how could anybody hurt me, said Tapia. It's a question that I have never been able to answer.
It was not the conventional childhood, Tapia continued. I'm not really sure it was a childhood, but I like to fight, I like to box and I was good. He still is, even at 36.
When Tapia was 11 he joined a proper gym and fought 123 times before turning professional in 1988. He went 17 fights without defeat and was making a name for himself, but he was also close to the filthy shadows on the street that make the dark trade of boxing look like an evangelical calling.
In 1990 he won his first professional title when he stopped Rowland Gomez for the USBA super flyweight championship. The fight was on US TV and he fought four more times in 1990 before the cocaine took total control. He went missing from the ring for nearly four years. He was 23, unbeaten in 22 fights, a real prospect but most of all, he was a junkie.
It was a terrible time, never easy for one moment even when I was winning in the ring because I was losing the fight outside the ring. It just got too much and I had to walk away from boxing for the street life, said Tapia.
When I stopped boxing my life was over, but I met Teresa and that was the start of my new life. But even my new life has not been easy.
At his side in a hotel in Glasgow Teresa sits and listens. She has heard it before, seen it before, but Johnny is her life. They met when she was 18 and he was out of his brain on cocaine and amazingly they fell in love. She has been next to him ever since.
In 1993 the phone rang by my bed in the early hours and I knew it was about Johnny. It was always about Johnny at that time of night and I had to run to the hospital, said Teresa.
It was very late when I got there and I saw a priest and I knew it was serious. Johnny had overdosed and he was clinically dead for almost one-and-a-half minutes. Dead in front of my eyes, but then somehow they managed to resuscitate him.
He wanted to go and eventually they let me take him home that time. When we got home he was there about five minutes before he vanished. I was back waiting by the phone. I knew then I had to get him back in the ring, Teresa continued.
In 1994 Tapia did climb back through the ropes. The pull of the ring was for a time stronger than the junk that was ruining his mind and life. But it was not over and twice since then Teresa has had to watch in helpless silence as the medics fight to beat her husband's latest overdose.
When Tapia returned to the ring in 1994 his crazy life got just a bit crazier. Just seven months and five fights after resurrecting a career that looked destined to end with the boxer collapsed over a crack pipe he managed to win a world title. It was a miracle. A truly grim fairy tale for a ravaged fighter. After 10 defences Tapia beat his local rival Danny Romero to win another world title. And after one more defence he moved from super flyweight to bantamweight and won his third world title at a second weight. It was 1998 and Tapia was a legend.
I had to stay in the ring because it is the easiest way for me to stay alive because I'm never far from where I have been before and I don't think I will ever be that far away to feel totally safe, said Tapia.
In 2001 he quit again after his car was riddled with bullets and depression kept him from the gym, but he returned in 2002 and was treated like a hero in an unlikely comeback fight at London's York Hall where he received a 10-minute standing ovation. In April last year he beat Manuel Medina to win the International Boxing Federation's featherweight title at Madison Square Garden, but he was stripped of the gaudy bauble for agreeing to fight Mexican idol Marco Antonio Barrera last November. He lost on points and his career was put on hold. Then came the news six weeks ago that Tapia was back in trouble.
I'm clean now, he told me in Glasgow. I was clean yesterday but I don't know about tomorrow. I fear for the time when I stop fighting.