His round, normally impassive face illuminated by a wide, eager grin, Nestor ”The Kid” Obregon congas down the aisle from the dressing room, his gloved fists resting lightly on the shoulders of the tiny woman who precedes him.
Despite her gold shoes, slinky black pants and black shirt trimmed with sequins, a large Cuban-flag applique and the letters S-I-L-V-I-A, it would not be inappropriate to assume the woman is Obregon`s mother or even his grandmother. Do not make such a mistake.
Bouncing gently along, the pair progress slowly toward the boxing ring`s red corner, pausing just long enough for the woman to rush into a smothering embrace with Roberto Duran, the four-time world champion who sits ringside between two aides, his gold jewelry sparkling under the hot, harsh lights.
In the ring, the 27-year-old Obregon looks almost lost in this vast room with its milling crowds, clanging bells and stale air clouded by raucous shouts, smoke and the penetrating aromas of beer, mustard and perspiration. Obregon is a small, squarely built Nicaraguan, slightly round-shouldered and quiet, and despite a record of 24 wins and only six losses, he has just come back into training after half a year off. Is he strong enough, adequately conditioned and sufficiently bloodthirsty for what lies ahead?
That night, in the first of two main events at Hollywood`s Diplomat Hotel, in Hollywood, Fla., Obregon would face Steve Larrimore, a trim, well-muscled Bahamian who stands a good head taller and outweighs him by half a pound.
Still, ”he`s happy,” says his trainer, Silvia Torres. ”He`s not nervous. But he`s overweight now, and in my experience, it`s too much weight for his size. But I`m not the manager. He signed the contract. He wants to fight, so I cannot stop him. But I tell him, `After this match, you have to come down in your weight. I want you to win, because you`re a nice fellow.`
And he is. He is a good, good, good boxer. Very professional.”
Perhaps no other organized human activity has been so celebrated for its gritty history of courage and grace and so damned for its conspicuous brutality, and yet. . . .
”When you go into the boxing ring,” says Torres, her eyes flickering glory and memories, ”you do not think of that. You are looking around. You see the crowd, all the people. You are up so high, you feel you are in the sky. You know what that means?
”It means for once in your life, you are a star.”
At 74, Silvia Torres is an anomaly: of advanced age in a sport that exalts and adores the young, a woman who has managed to create a haven for herself in what is almost exclusively a masculine subculture. In one way or another, she has been involved with this strange world virtually forever, and familiarity has bred ease and acceptance. The ring has been her meal ticket and her passport to the world, her living and her life.
From time to time, there have been other jobs, but they have been mere sidelines, interruptions. For Torres, there can be only one career, and it is not for nothing that the compact car she drives is a red Plymouth Champ.
”I cannot sit home, watch TV,” she says. ”I have been working all my life. I have to stay active in something, so now I come to the gym every day, help the boys. . . . ”
The promoters organize fights. The manager supervises the boxer`s career. But it is the trainer who must refine the raw human elements of speed, coordination, stamina, balance, strength and mental agility into a well-oiled punching machine. It is the trainer who puts the fighter through his daily runs and workouts; monitors his weight, his sleep, his timing, his habits;
elevates his confidence and helps him stave off the ruinous demons of defeat, despair, fatigue and laziness.
Between fight rounds, it is the trainer who huddles with the fighter over the spit bucket, bombarding him with tips and encouragement, rinsing his mouth, toweling off his sweat and sometimes-since being hit is often more a factor of boxing than hitting-his blood.
”She does a heck of a job in the corner,” says Irv Abramson of Hollywood, a ring judge who also publishes Boxing World. ”She knows how to handle herself.”
”I tell the boxer when he`s got his right hand, or left hand, to use it,” says Torres. ”Or maybe I just say, `Cover your face.` Because inside the ring, they cannot see so good. Outside, I can see better how the fight is coming. You have always to be watching. You have always have to know how your fighter is doing.”
It is often said that a trainer`s hardest job is to convince a young boxer who has been knocked down to shake off the fuzz, scramble to his feet and come back swinging. The first-hand knowledge of how it feels to be flattened by a blow so quick and secretive one does not even see it coming evolves less from the shock of the punch itself than from one terrible revelation: If this happened once, it can happen again. The possibility is always present, lurking within every opposing jab or uppercut.
”If they want to be champion, they must say, `Even so, I make it,”`
says Torres, who now works with about 14 fighters in Miami. ”I tell my boys, `You do the best you can, but perfect yourself first. Make a good job of the fight. I hope you win, but if not, I want you to be a professional.` When Duran goes into the ring, he gives you the best, the best all the way. That`s all I have to say, `I am the best,` thinking all the time that way. I know. I remember.”
When Silvia Torres was still a child in Havana, as young as 6 or 7, her parents were killed in an auto accident. With no siblings and no other relatives nearby to care for her, she soon was absorbed into the household of a neighbor, Lazaro Dominguez, who early in the century had been a national champion boxer.
”He and his wife took care of me,” says Torres, ”and because they could not leave me alone in the house, Lazaro took me to the gym every day. He showed me how to fight. He taught me to keep one foot back so no one can push me down and to take good care of myself in the ring. He showed me, exactly, everything he did to become champion of Cuba.”
Soon, Silvia`s pugilistic aptitudes had the neighborhood buzzing, and clever Dominguez had begun to set up bouts to show her off. ”I fought with anybody he put me against,” Torres remembers. ”We even used the big gloves. He would pay me, I think, 50 cents, which I spent for the movies, my transportation and my ice cream. I would say, `Lazaro, I got to fight Sunday?` He would say, `Yes, you prepare.` And the people would come to the house and see the fight. They would pay him, I don`t remember, 10 cents, maybe a quarter. Sometimes he put me up against a boy, too. He put me with so many boys. He could not find enough girls. I beat them all.”
By 16, Torres had turned pro. ”I never liked other sports,” she says.
”Other sports had too many people involved. I liked to be alone in the corner. I wanted to be the star. Lazaro told me, `You will be champion someday,` and I believed him.”
With only about a dozen female fighters from whom to draw opponents, women`s boxing in Cuba was a raw, undefined sport in the early 1930s. ”There were no weight divisions,” says Torres, who, at 5 feet tall is only 14 pounds heavier than her old fighting heft of 115. ”It was anyone against anyone. We wore one-piece bathing suits and high boots. We used the same gloves, same tape, same rules as men. We would fight three minutes on, one minute rest. I went for 10 rounds all the time. Sometimes I went in as the main event.”
The history of women`s boxing is a sketchy tale at best, and authoritative statistics on bouts from the `30s and `40s simply do not exist. Silvia Torres says she defeated all the other female boxers to become Cuba`s champion. She says she then fought in Lima, in Caracas, in Jamaica, Indiana, Miami-16 bouts in all and always ending up the victor, even against the Chilean woman known as Tarzana, who outweighed her by 30 pounds. ”I became world champion,” she says. ”I was world champion until 1948, when I retired.”
”I would have to believe her,” says veteran fight promoter Angelo Dundee. ”She`s a doll, a very, very sweet lady. I know her a million years. I`m not going to negate anything she says. The lady is not a fabricator. She`s sincere. She`s honest. She`s special. She`s still got the energy of a young lady, someone a third her age.
”When I see ladies like Silvia Torres, it`s a joy,” says the man who once managed Sugar Ray Leonard, ”because, what the hell, she gives boxing a little something, you know. A little class.”
In 1947, Torres wed Cuban boxer Lino Garcia. It should have been a dream match, but the marriage faltered after only two years.
”When I get my champion of the world, I decide I want to travel all over,” she says, ”and he was offended, so we divorced, and I never remarried. Never. So after I retire from boxing, I go to the gym and practice for one year professional wrestling, because the only way to travel is if you wrestle. Then Cuba had about 30 women professionals. In those days, it was real wrestling, not fake. The money was for the winner, and the losers got nickels, pennies, so I wanted to win.
”I beat all the women wrestlers for about seven years, and then I came up to the United States, and I got to go to more places than you`re going to believe. I think 400 matches total. I was in France, in Spain, England, Australia and all South and North and Central America. There is no place that I was not going to wrestle,” including the big time of the Roseland Ballroom in Taunton, Mass., and New Bedford`s Woodrow Wilson Auditorium, where Torres was promoted as Latin American Champion 3 Rating and pitted against ”Miss Hippie” from Canada.
For much of the 1970s and early 1980s, Torres lived in Massachusetts, where she held various positions with the municipal court in Chelsea near Boston and was for a time a licensed Gospel Church minister. ”I had my own little chapel,” she says, ”and I marry 200 or 300 people and baptized the babies. But then I decide to come back to the corner.”
After moving to South Florida two years ago (”I decided if I`m retired, I might as well be in a warm place”), she began to drop by the old Miami Gym to visit an old friend, Jose Caron Gonzalez, who then owned the facility.
”I start to work with some of the boys, all volunteer. I like it.” Now, in addition to Obregon, her fighters include Robinson Sanchez, a quick, earnest junior lightweight with more than 30 wins; Luis Monzote, the continental miniflyweight champion, and former world flyweight champion Prudencio Cardono.
It is axiomatic that a new guy walks into a boxing gym like this one almost every day. Some make it; most do not.
”I recommend starting early,” says Torres. ”Somebody who is older is no good. A boy needs six months, a year at the gym if he wants to be a professional. If he wants to be an amateur, he can start right now, but today, many kids don`t want to be amateurs. I tell you why. Amateurs get no pay.
”All the boys I take here, I say, `You keep away from drugs. Drugs kill your mind and kill you, too. If your mind is not clear, you will never be a clear fighter.` And I think the boys follow me, because they know, an old lady, a professional lady, I never have been arrested with any kind of record in the whole world. I want to be a clean lady, not only for my career but for myself, for my life. I want to be an example to anybody in the world.”
”She`s good with the guys,” says Dave Clark, trainer of Liberty City`s Robert ”Little Joe” Daniels, who in November captured the World Boxing Association`s cruiseweight title. ”She`s pretty tough, but they like her. It`s hard. A woman has to be around this business all her life, but they respect her, and they do what she tells them.”
Back at the Diplomat, the outcome of the Obregon-Larrimore bout is growing more apparent with every tick of the clock. Obviously outclassed, Obregon is spending too much time against the ropes. At its best, a professional fight is thoughtful and full of action, a flurry of punches delivered so fast and with such calculation it is difficult for even those at ringside to determine where they have landed. However, since soon after the opening bell, Obregon has looked sluggish and clumsy. He is now clearly tired. His fists seem made of lead.
The longest fight in history went 110 rounds and lasted more than seven hours, and Obregon must think he already has set a new record. By the third round, he has a nosebleed, and a cut has opened under his right eye. Finally, at one minute, 45 seconds into round No. 4, officials stop the charade and hand Larrimore his 17th professional win.
Silvia Torres gives her fighter a fierce, affectionate hug. ”I wanted the fight stopped,” she will say later. ”I did not want him to be hurt.”
She then turns to Steve Larrimore and raises his arm in victory, but there can be no doubt at this moment who the champ is.
