The Showtime network’s premiere of a documentary on Hector “Macho” Camacho — Macho: The Hector Camacho Story — was a reminder of the boxer’s talent and showmanship but also of human frailty.
Camacho seemed to have the world at his feet, a champion in three weight divisions. The CBS network, which televised a number of Camacho’s fights, hailed him as the next superstar of boxing.
But, as veteran CBS broadcaster Tim Ryan noted in the documentary, Camacho was having issues with cocaine as far back as his 20th pro fight, in 1983. That was when Camacho met a solid lightweight contender named John Montes in Alaska.
Ryan revealed that on the eve of the fight the CBS production team received a phone call from one of the fighter’s handlers saying that Camacho was trying to jump out of a window. “He was completely out of his mind, drug-wise,” Ryan recalled. Yet on the day of the fight Camacho was his old self again, knocking out Montes in the first round.
All was well that ended well — that time, anyway. But CBS, which had an arrangement to televise Camacho’s fights, was uneasy. “We were grateful for the fact that he had recovered and that the fight went on, but it was a source of great concern to us from that point forward because we knew he was dealing with, you know, the demons,” Ryan said.
Born in Puerto Rico, raised by his mother in New York’s Spanish Harlem, Camacho won amateur titles and became a source of pride for his community. But the “street” in Camacho never really left him, as the documentary makes clear.
There was a glimpse of emotional turmoil when Camacho, returning to the ring after eight months’ inactivity, stopped Louie Burke, a respectable fighter from New Mexico, in five rounds in January 1985. Camacho broke down in tears when interviewed by Tim Ryan in the ring after the fight. “I just hope people keep supporting me, be my friend, because I need friends,” Camacho wept as the broadcaster put a consoling arm around his shoulders.
It says a lot for Camacho’s sheer talent and toughness that he was able to reach the heights he did when dealing with a cocaine issue.
A champion at 130, 135 and 140 pounds. Camacho had what could be called blinding speed. His right jab flashed like lightning from out of his southpaw stance. At his best he triggered off combinations at an astonishing clip.
“He was just slick, super fast, strong-willed, confident,” Sugar Ray Leonard, who supplied expert commentary for a number of Camacho’s fights and later met him in the ring, told the documentary. “His footwork was just incredible. The movement, the uppercuts, the hooks — he had the whole package.”
I think Camacho’s greatest performance came when he outclassed Mexico’s rugged and dangerous Jose Luis Ramirez to win the WBC lightweight championship in an all-southpaw fight in August 1985. Camacho entered the ring in what Los Angeles Times reporter Richard Hoffer described as “a suit of lights, his trunks spangled with the colors of a post-nuclear rainbow, his cape a sparkling red-white-and-blue.”
When the fight began, Camacho’s performance was no less dazzling. He dropped Ramirez in the third round and won practically every round. “It was a brilliant performance, made at the expense of the workmanlike but outclassed and much bloodied Ramirez,” Hoffer wrote.
But a change came over Camacho after his very tough, split decision win over Puerto Rican rival Edwin Rosario at Madison Square Garden in June 1986. “Rosario may not have won the fight but he easily won its two biggest battles. In the fifth and 11th rounds , he hurt Camacho and may even have had him close to a knockout,” Wallace Matthews reported in Newsday.
Camacho, who suffered a bloody nose and a cut over the left eye, acknowledged it had been a close fight but told reporters he felt he had won by being the more skilful boxer. However, he also made it clear that didn’t want to be in too many more fights like the one with Rosario. “I fought a war and I can tell you right now, Hector Camacho don’t like no damn wars,” Sports Illustrated quoted Camacho as saying after the fight.
Although Camacho continued to win he employed more of a safety-first style after the Rosario bout. Fight fans started to turn against him. Camacho had weight-making difficulties heading into his lightweight title defence against fellow-southpaw Cornelius Boza-Edwards, the Ugandan who had settled in London, at Miami Beach in September 1986. Although he won comfortably on points, a weary Camacho was just looking to keep out of trouble in the closing rounds.
“Some of the fans jeered more than cheered the Macho Man,” Tom Archdeacon reported in the Miami News.
New York Post columnist Dick Young was scathing about Camacho’s performance. “If I want to see dancing, I’ll put on an old Fred Astaire movie,” Young wrote.
By 1987 Camacho’s wild life outside the ring was becoming common knowledge. The term “living on the edge” was used in a New York Post headline. Camacho boxed just once in 1987. He gave up his WBC lightweight title to box at 140 pounds.
“Camacho, once one of boxing’s hot properties, has nearly faded into oblivion through inactivity and a hit-and-run style that is mostly run,” Jon Saraceno noted in USA Today.
In 1988 there was an arrest on charges of cocaine possession and assault (he allegedly pulled a gun on a juvenile). Camacho, it seems, felt he was misunderstood. “Maybe if I die young like Elvis or Bruce Lee I’ll be recognised as a great person — but I don’t want to have to wait that long,” USA Today quoted Camacho as saying.
Camacho won a world title at a third weight with a split decision victory over former lightweight champion Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini (who was returning to the ring after four years’ inactivity) at Reno, Nevada in March 1989, to become WBO junior welterweight champion.
Image: Showtime.
I was ringside for one of Camacho’s last big wins, a unanimous but unpopular 12-round decision over a fired-up Vinny Pazienza at Convention Hall, Atlantic City, in February 1990. The crowd of 12,134 cheered for the popular “Pazmanian Devil” but Camacho was too smart and too clever. It was Camacho’s 39th win in a row and I reported for Boxing Weekly that he fought better than he had in years although “he needed all his guile and boxing skills”.
A year later Camacho lost his 140-pound title on a split decision to the less gifted but industrious Greg Haugen. He regained the title from Haugen, also by split decision, but the once speedy boxer was clearly slowing down.
I was on site at the Thomas & Mack Center in Las Vegas in 1992 when Julio Cesar Chavez gave Camacho a brutal beating for 12 rounds. Camacho showed a true fighter’s heart that night. No one could have blamed him for quitting on his stool. But he stuck it out to the final bell. Boxing philosopher Teddy Atlas saw this as something of a redemption fight for Camacho. “It was almost like he said: ‘I’m going to take that punishment that you think I deserve,’” Atlas told the documentary.
Camacho’s last notable victory came when he stopped a 40-year-old, long inactive Sugar Ray Leonard in the fifth round of a middleweight bout in March 1977.
Although Camacho went the distance in welterweight title fights against Oscar De La Hoya and Felix Trinidad and outpointed Roberto Duran in a meeting of ageing former champions, the glory days were far behind him. His last fight was as a 48-year-old, a decision loss to an undistinguished opponent. Two years later he was dead, having been shot and killed in the city of his birth, Bayamon, Puerto Rico.
The murder seems something of a mystery, the motive unclear. According to the documentary, police believe they know who killed Camacho. But no arrest has been made.
It was a sad, one could say squalid, end for the fighter whose performances once glittered as brightly as his sequinned ring outfits.
As for Camacho’s descent into drugs, Sugar Ray Leonard explained it as only an ex-champion can — the search for something to replace the magic words “and the new champion…”
“There’s no better words to hear. I can’t even emphasise enough what it means to us,” Sugar Ray told the documentary. “And when we don’t have that any longer, we go for something else that’s gonna try to duplicate it, the alcohol, the drugs, whatever the case may be.
“I was no different than he was. But I was able to pull back, and just stop.”
Sugar Ray could stop; Camacho couldn’t. He died far too young at the age of 50. The words of F. Scott Fitzgerald “Show me a hero and I’ll write you a tragedy” were surely never more apt.
Main image: Showtime.