Kevin lole from yahoo sports wrote awesome piece enjoy.
In the wee hours of Dec. 7, not long after Manny Pacquiao had knocked out Oscar De La Hoya at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas, super welterweight prospect Alfredo “Perro” Angulo and his promoter, Gary Shaw, were walking through the casino when they were greeted by a swarm of boxing fans looking for an autograph.
As Angulo signed, the stoic look he normally carries was replaced by a devilish grin.
Shaw noticed the cat-ate-the-canary smile on his fighter’s face and knew something was up, though he wasn’t sure what. He turned to Angulo as they were leaving the casino and had signed the last autograph and asked him what was so funny.
“They all thought I was [Antonio] Margarito,” Angulo told him.
But six weeks later, a similar scene played out twice in Los Angeles, where Margarito lost his WBA welterweight title in front of a Staples Center-record crowd of 20,820 fans by a ninth-round technical knockout to Shane Mosley.
“My son, Jared, was driving that night and he dropped [Angulo] and I off at the front and went to park the car,” Shaw said. “So many fans were coming up to him that Jared made it to his seat before we did.”
An even bigger swarm greeted Angulo as he was leaving an HBO-sponsored postfight party later that night. This time, everyone knew exactly who he was. The Hispanic fans who had turned out in extraordinary numbers that night were now telling Angulo he had to carry the banner for them.
It’s a banner Angulo is eager to carry. He was supposed to face former undisputed welterweight champion Ricardo Mayorga in the main event of an HBO-televised card from the BankAtlantic Center in Sunrise, Fla., but the always unpredictable Mayorga pulled out when he couldn’t convince promoter Don King to pay him more.
After a series of other fighters were offered and then declined the bout, promoters eventually settled on veteran Cosme Rivera.
Through it all, the implacable Angulo (14-0, 11 knockouts) simply took it all in and awaited the word on his opponent.
“I never talked to him about it, because no matter who I would have offered him, he would have said yes,” Shaw said.
Angulo’s trainer, Clemente Medina, said he occasionally has to hold the reins, because Angulo, 26, tends to forget he’s still a developing fighter.
“I think he’d fight the heavyweight champion if we’d let him,” Medina said.
If heavyweights fought with the abandon and the courage and the fearlessness that Angulo does, boxing would be in a much stronger position. There’s rarely a person who walks away from one of his fights feeling cheated.
Medina constantly has to remind him to at least consider defense when he’s in the ring, because Angulo is so concerned with putting on a show and piling up the punches.
“To tell you the truth, I don’t really notice when I get hit by the punches,” Angulo said. “It’s the trainer who has to tell me.”
The 2004 Mexican Olympian had his coming out party on an HBO telecast in Primm, Nev., on May 17, where he stood toe-to-toe and exchanged punches that would have knocked out a horse with Richard Gutierrez.
Angulo never flinched and finally forced Gutierrez to wilt under the high-powered onslaught. He won by fifth-round technical knockout and a cult hero, if not an outright star, was born.
“I wasn’t getting a lot of interest in him, but after that fight, you can’t believe the number of calls I got from people – reporters, my friends, people at venue, TV people – who all said, ‘I have to see this guy. When’s he fighting again?’ ” Shaw said. “When I watch him, my heart goes into my throat, because he’s so fearless he’ll wade through anything, but he has a great, great chin, too, and [tremendous courage].”
He’s also taken an interest in marketing himself, the rare fighter who wants to excel at all sides of the game. To that end, he began using the Rosetta Stone software program to learn to speak English and is finally getting comfortable with English-speaking reporters.
In some ways, he reminds Medina of another charismatic fighter he once trained. Francisco “Panchito” Bojado was a good-looking, personable fighter of whom great things were predicted.
But though Bojado had great boxing skills, he looked like he’d rather be going through a tax audit than training for a fight.
“Alfredo likes to go forward and make a good fight, because he’s a showman and he likes to get the people into it and make them happy,” Medina said. “But he’s not one dimensional like people think he is. He can box and he’s picking up a lot on his defense.
“Bojado was an exceptional boxer, but Angulo is more intelligent in every aspect of the game.”
Assuming Angulo gets past Rivera – and that shouldn’t be a great task – there are a world of possibilities for him. One is to face the winner of the March 7 showdown in San Jose, Calif., between James Kirkland and Joel Julio, like Angulo both top prospects.
An Angulo-Kirkland fight might be a modern-day Hagler-Hearns shootout, but Shaw preached patience when it comes to making that.
Shaw, more than nearly any active promoter, is willing to put his fighters in against elite competition. But he’d be doing a disservice to both men, he insisted, if he made the fight in a few months.
“It would be a spectacular, classic fight and I’m dying to see it myself,” said Shaw, who used to promote the heavy-handed Kirkland as well. “But here’s the thing with that: Make that now, and you’d have all the hard-cores going crazy to see it, but you wouldn’t do the business with it that you would if each of these guys had three, four more fights on television.
“If I asked ‘Perro’ now if he wanted the fight, he’d say yes. Of course he would. And I know the kind of kid Kirkland is and he’d say yes right away, too. But that’s a fight that someday, people are going to tell their kids, ‘I was at the Angulo-Kirkland fight.’ We have to let that one cook a little. But it will happen.”
It will happen if Angulo has anything to say about it, at least.
“In this game, if you want to be a champion, if you want to do great things, then you have to fight all the great champions,” he said. “There’s no running. Just get in there and fight. That’s what I do.”
And that’s why we love him.
Watch HBO Video about Angulo. Click Here