“And he thought these guys were powerful people in the sport, and he couldn’t understand why they couldn’t handle the situation, why they couldn’t get him reinstated, why they couldn’t hire the right people on the medical end or the legal end to work things out, and I know he began to get disillusioned at this point.”
“He never gave up on himself or his own career, but he was frustrated with his promoter, which was the then-fledgling Golden Boy Promotions, and his manager, who was Oscar De La Hoya’s dad,” recalls Fischer. Valero’s fast-rising career was suddenly on hold, and as it remained on hold, he began to harbour doubts about those who were guiding it. And where New York went, the rest of the Association of Boxing Commissions went too. With that, the New York State Athletic Commission promptly refused him a licence. That was probably the result of a motorcycle crash he’d had in 2001, before he turned pro. By the end of the year his record had grown to 12-0, the first-round knockout streak still in perfect shape, and the young fighter was on the verge of making his HBO debut.īut in January 2004, while the boxer was undergoing a routine medical in New York in advance of that HBO bout, an MRI revealed a small spot on his brain, a possible sign of cerebral hemorrhage. One month later, he took on Roque Cassiani once again, the fight was stopped in Valero’s favour inside the first round. On July 19, 2003, Valero faced off against Emanuel Ford in Maywood, California. It was a record of ring rapidity that would continue when he began fighting in the States.
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“I think Lazcano sparred with him two or three times and decided he’d be better off at Joe Goossen’s gym in the valley sparring with Joel Casamayor.”Īt the time that Valero was taking care of future world champions, he had fewer than eight full rounds of professional boxing under his belt: eight contests, each of which he had won inside three minutes. “Lazcano couldn’t hang with him,” says Fischer. And then I saw him spar, and my God, he was having an easy time with guys he shouldn’t have been having an easy time with.”Īmong those guys was Juan Lazcano, who in September of that year would annex the lightweight title from Stevie Johnston. “The first time I saw him just train, just going through all the stations in this really cramped gym, and watching him skip rope and go from a double-end bag to a speed bag to a heavy bag and shadow-boxing, his intensity set him apart from most professional fighters that you saw. “I saw him train about three times before I ever saw him spar, and I was immediately awed by him,” recalls Doug Fischer of The Ring, who was one of the first journalists to see the young super-featherweight in action shortly after he arrived at Joe Hernandez’s gym in Vernon, California in the spring of 2003. Those early years, he would tell confidantes when he first arrived in the United States, were times of theft and motorcycle gangs, of finding an outlet for a tightly-coiled rage, a rage that seemingly never left him, even when he channeled it into the challenges of boxing. It was this shaky foundation that guided him to the prizefighting ring and from which that ring provided escape it is likely in this harsh, angry soil that the seeds were sown that would ultimately erupt with shockingly violent finality.
And before he was a boxer, he was a boy, born in Venezuela on Deceminto a life of poverty and hard knocks that led to street fights and trouble with the police from a tender age. BEFORE he was a murderer, Edwin Valero was a boxer.
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