Thank You, Chegüí

As many of you know, there are occa­sional instances in which I stray from the topic of the pas­sion of bil­lions and have to talk about some­thing that is going on in the world or my life.

In this par­tic­u­lar instance it is the latter.

While work­ing at ESPN, I was a for­mer box­ing fan that had gone the way of dinosaur.   I was enam­ored by the sport because of fight­ers like Sal­vador Sánchez, Roberto Durán, and ¨Sugar¨ Ray Leonard.  I was dis­il­lu­sioned by it for the farce that it became.  Iron­i­cally, I was ¨stuck¨ doing the sport I had fallen out of love with but that all changed quickly.  My first night work­ing on box­ing saw me try­ing to take an older man that was work­ing there as the  ana­lyst and took him with me around cam­pus on our way to the voiceover booth.  A cheery soul that laughed at every turn.  He smiled at every face, regard­less of whether he knew them or not.   He car­ried him­self in a dig­ni­fied fash­ion; more impor­tantly he car­ried him­self with a great spirit. He always had a thirst to live and do it in a pas­sion­ate way. That was José ¨Chegüí¨ Tor­res.   His pas­sion for box­ing gave me the desire to ¨rec­on­cil­i­ate¨ with the sport I con­sid­ered dead for a good part of my adult life.  He

I had the honor of work­ing with him and saw him as a man full of life.  He was a man that radi­ated life and there was no way in which some of that zest would rub off on you. I was the per­son in charge of super­vis­ing the voice overs for var­i­ous inter­na­tional box­ing pro­duc­tions done in Bristol.

The more I got to know him, the more I wanted to know about him.   The more I talked to him, the less I knew about any­thing.  But what made him so unique was that he was will­ing to teach you, he was will­ing to inform you.  ¨Chegüí¨ didn´t just talk to you, he brought you into a con­ver­sa­tion.  He didn´t just talk about his life, he brought you into it.  There were times he would talk to me about his life in Tribeca and how he would talk about  ¨Bobby¨ (DeNiro), which he saw at his favorite deli every so often.  He would talk to me like I met him in his liv­ing room the night before.  He was per­son­able yet an intel­lec­tual of the sport.  As an author and a writer, he encour­aged me to write.  So for that I was always grateful.

He would also talk about his wife, Ramona as a kid would when encoun­ter­ing a seri­ous case of ¨puppy love¨.   If there was a cou­ple that I truly want to emu­late it was these two peo­ple.  Their love was as strong as it was the first day they met.   She was always his faith­ful com­pan­ion.  She was there by his side.  Look at the def­i­n­i­tion of true love and there has to be a pic­ture of those two together.   It was endear­ing to see those two love­birds at one of the cubi­cles prior to going on the air.

I never got to see him fight, but I did get to expe­ri­ence snip­pets of the man he was.  When Floyd Pat­ter­son died, he was try­ing to do every­thing in his power to go to New Paltz, NY to pay homage to his fallen col­league.  I remem­ber hav­ing to Mapquest the direc­tions for him to get there, whether he went or not I will never know.  What counts in the end of all of this was that he wanted to be there for a per­son that was impor­tant in his life.

One of the final times that I saw him was when we did a box­ing card and it was Tor­res´ 70th birth­day.  His smile was a micro­cosm of the the appre­ci­a­tion for the love peo­ple had towards him.  Whether it was when he won the sil­ver medal in the 1956 Olympics, or at Madi­son Square Gar­den (a place he called home for sev­eral of his big fights dur­ing his hey­day in the 1960´s), or the recep­tion he got every time he vis­ited his beloved Puerto Rico.  He was appre­cia­tive of the love he got from his fans after win­ning the WBC and WBA light heavy­weight titles from Willie Pastrano.

There he was Maradona and DiS­te­fano.  There he was Pelé and Riv­elino.  He always took that appre­ci­a­tion with that smile.

I might just be a per­son that Chegüí encoun­tered for a short period of time, but he for­ever touched me.  For that rea­son I send out my deep­est con­do­lences to Ramona, his fam­ily, as well as the other peo­ple that he touched in Puerto Rico and all over the world.