*

For Namús, the sobriquet ‘Bombón Asesino’ (‘Gorgeous Assassin’ or ‘Killer Peach’ - take your pick), which she’s always hated, was becoming an embarrassment. After poking and prodding her way to a string of uninspiring points decisions, which were even booed on occasion, she found her game here when it most mattered. “I’d always insisted that I wasn’t a knock-out artist,” she said, “which is not to say that I’d never gone looking for a knockout. This was the first time, though, that I really felt powerful and that I was hitting hard, and I went all out to ensure my opponent felt it too. My fists found their mark and the end came faster than expected.”

“Namús only needed 1 min 50 seconds to annihilate her opponent,” wrote Dani Alonso Jr for Lo Mejor del Boxeo, but those 110 seconds included a standing count. Stunned by a left-right combination, the Mexican girl was caught by an uppercut and a right to the temple as she tried to make for the ropes, and the fight was effectively over. The Argentinian referee gave her a standing count but, as the commentator pointed out, she was only semi-conscious. Namús retired to a neutral corner (only for the referee to direct her to that of her Mexican opponent) and stood there sucking air into her lungs. Within seconds of the resumption, Hernández was in trouble again, staggering backwards, gliding her hand along the top rope as though it were a banister, and this time the referee brought the proceedings to a definitive halt. “It was an intense fight from the start,” explained the referee. “I gave the Mexican girl one more chance, but she was very groggy, which is why I stopped the fight. The Uruguayan girl is very powerful and has very long arms.”

“He was right to stop it,” conceded Hernández. “She hits really hard and I felt those punches. There was no way I could recover in time.” It was several minutes, apparently, before her head cleared.

*

The two were said to be disputing the WIBA ‘Youth’ title, which is limited to fighters beneath the ages of either 21 or 22 (depending upon which source you believe). Since, however, Hernández’s age was given by most sources (including her own local paper) as 22 and by El País, which conducted a long interview with the fighter, as 27, that hypothesis looks a bit sick – especially since the names being touted for Namús’s first challenger are those of Tanyah Freeman, who (according to El País) is 35, Wendy La Motta, who according to Boxrec was born in 1972, and Letícia Rojo, who by her own admission was born in 1982. On the other hand, those journalists who concluded it was in fact the full WIBA Super Lightweight title that the two were disputing must also be wrong, since that title (currently held by Duda Yankovich) is said to be Namús’s long-term objective.

It makes no sense, but never mind; suffice it to say they were fighting for a belt. There are so many of the cumbersome things in the sport that no one can be expected to keep track of all of them. Besides which, a belt, at the best of times, is nothing more than a ‘maguffin’, which in Hitchcock parlance is a bone of contention the exact nature and significance of which are of no importance but which serves as a plot device.

*

Hernández, a design student who enjoys creating web sites, had arrived in Montevideo ten days in advance of the fight with her trainer, whom she shares with Cristian Mijares. The pair surprised the Uruguayans with immediate demands for a hotel with a gymnasium and a sparring partner the same height as Namús. “Cripes!” thought Amaya, the co-promoter. “They’ve come to win!”

*

A journalist visiting the offices of WBC Executive Secretary Mauricio Sulaimán recently was struck by the comeliness of the female champions whose pictures were on the wall. “How come you’re all so pretty?” he asked Zulina Muñoz. “Aren’t you afraid of losing your looks? Are women boxers less vain than other women?” “Actually,” replied ‘La Loba’, “it was vanity that got me into boxing in the first place. I went to the gym to lose weight.”

The photogenic (and much photographed) Bombón Asesino is said to have turned down long-term modelling contracts. As well as being tall and sublimely proportioned, she has an Evangelista-like talent for reinventing herself from public appearance to public appearance and even from shot to shot – not always successfully it has to be said, perhaps because she does lack vanity; that strange cap, for example, (no doubt foisted upon her by a sponsor) that she wore for the anthems made her look clownish and gawky, but some extraordinary photographs emerged from the fight. Even when we know from the video that she’s pulverizing her opponent as the shutters click, in the stills she seems lost in a kind of reverie, like Rodin in Stefan Zweig’s account of the sculptor at work, so utterly absorbed in the pursuit of perfection that he forgets altogether that there’s someone else in the room. The referee breaks in on her as she’s applying the finishing touches, wielding her glove as adroitly as a paintbrush. But for the interruption, one could imagine her standing back a moment later to contemplate the effect.

What she does, of course, is go berserk; and you can see that, with her squeals of celebration as she rides around the ring on the shoulders of her trainer, she’s twisting the knife in the gut of the vanquished Mexican. But without realizing she’s doing so, until, yes, the thought does perhaps occur to her, and she climbs down and goes over a second time to her opponent to console her, clasping her in a long embrace: “What was I telling her? That the real boxers are the ones that pick themselves up. I could see she was distressed, with tears in her eyes that were attributable to more than the mere pain of the punches, and I put myself in her position. I told her not to worry; that she'd had everything against her, and that that had made it very difficult for her,” Namús explained. “ I wouldn't have liked it in her position, if everyone had just left me alone while my opponent was celebrating."

Later Namús went round to the hotel where her opponent was staying. "I’d bought her a present and wanted to say goodbye because she was leaving early the next morning. She's a very humble and unassuming girl, I realized from our brief conversation. We're going to keep in touch. What I’d have liked would have been to take her to the Feria de Tristán Narvaja (Montevideo's famous flea market). Unfortunately it wasn’t possible."

*

Two days earlier. Another country. Another belt. Here, it’s the Mexican Flyweight title, won only ten weeks earlier by Sandra Hernández, that’s at stake, the challenger being ‘the female De La Hoya’, ex world champion Mariana Juárez, who’s been out of the country for six years and out of the sport for eleven months – injured, initially, and later, giving birth. The bill is entitled ‘Perfume de Nocaut’, which we don’t need Babel Fish to translate.

Juárez shows no signs of ring rust. As expected, her height is a decisive advantage. Fast as her fists may be, Hernández can’t use them because she can’t get close enough. Mariana teases and torments her, changing her stance repeatedly to prevent the youngster developing any kind of rhythm, goading her from a safe distance with the jab and hurting her with hard counters when she attempts to respond. La Jornada compares them to a rapier and a tank, except that when Juárez does get careless and the champion does her worst, the artillery makes no impression – the tank is firing blanks – whereas the rapier, it appears, is armour-piercing. As well as humiliated, the young champion is getting hurt. It’s a bit like a bullfight. In the red corner, anger and muscle: in the blue corner, sang froid and steel. No charge goes unsanctioned; each time a fresh wound is inflicted. Banderilla or vara, Juárez never steps aside without striking; the next day, there will be bruises all over her opponent’s face and neck.

A bullfight has three acts (or tercios), and at the beginning of the final tercio, the faena, in which the bull will be killed, the matador dedicates it to some individual, often a friend. Juárez has already told us for whom she will be fighting – her baby daughter, Daphne, who means everything to her and for whom she now has to provide – and can dispense with the formalities. If anyone else has a baby daughter in the precincts of the arena, parental discretion is advised.

“Juárez cruised through the first nine rounds,” writes Alfredo Jaime Gómez “but in the tenth she suddenly stepped up the pace”. Hernández had been adamant at the press conference that there could be no knockout because “we each know the other too well to permit ourselves to be struck where it does most damage”, but Juárez had gainsaid her, and now she proves her point. She’s left herself two minutes – eight less than a matador is allowed, but more, it turns out, than she needs. Dazed by a succession of jolting right hands, Hernández leaves her jaw exposed, and the kill is as clean as one could wish it: a right cross to the point of the chin – the brain’s Reset button – and while her nervous system is scrambling frantically to reboot, she’s defenceless: out on her feet. There are only six seconds remaining but the referee has no option but to stop the fight.

*

Juárez’s triumph is greeted in the hall with an ovation and in the press with headlines like “Mariana crushes a rock”. Returning from a long layoff and fighting in Mexico for the first time in six years, she has surpassed everyone’s expectations, not only outsmarting but outlasting her younger opponent, with an exhilarating burst of speed in the home straight that electrifies and excites the crowd. Mexico City is the home of both women, but it’s from the slender waist of Juárez that the keys of the city now dangle on their golden chain.

She looks like a mermaid at times with those golden braids. She’s no such thing though. The first woman, with Ana María Torres, ever to box professionally in a macho, predominantly Catholic country, she’s fought injustice, innuendo, injury, indifference… – all the ‘in...‘ things – as well as harassment and hostility in the gymnasiums, and she’s beaten, or beating, them all. This time she and Hernández were the main attraction with the male bouts padding the bill, and they drew a big crowd, too. The ‘Perfume de Nocaut’ is a fragrance that sells, it would appear, even in Mexico, and the next gate no doubt will be bigger still. This fight, she had said, would be ‘a springboard’ to project her back onto the international stage. Afterwards she confessed: “if I’d lost, it would have been all over for me.”

She and Torres, with their blood-soaked, internecine encounters, proved long ago to everyone willing to be convinced that the women could be just as tough as the men. But there was no last act, no climax, no catharsis on those occasions; the two fighters cancelled each other out; and the criticism persisted that women’s fights are boring because they lead nowhere. They won’t be saying that again in Mexico City for a while.

*

Hernández is as magnificent in defeat as Juárez in victory. She might have been forgiven for supposing that Juárez had done her utmost to make her evening as painful and humiliating as possible. First off, the ex world champion should have been defending the Mexican title on the 16th July not challenging for it: If she hadn´t stood aside in May and let Hernández dispute the newly inaugurated title with the more highly ranked Gabriela ‘La Pelusa’ González, she’d have defeated González (almost certainly) and Hernández would have entered last night’s fight as the challenger, from which position there’s rather less distance to fall. She might also, when owning that Hernández hadn’t become Mexican champion by accident, have pointed out that she herself hadn’t become world champion by accident either, instead of just letting the youngster run her mouth off and then making her look ridiculous in the ring. It might have been kinder, too, either to knock her out sin demora or let the fight go the distance, but not toy with her for nine rounds and knock her out six seconds from the end. But there’s no self-pity, no rancour and no hint of reproach either in Hernández’s manner or in her words. If so much as one of those thoughts has crossed her mind, she accepts evidently that boxing is (to use the Spanish phrase) la ley de la más fuerte (the survival of the fittest or, literally, ‘the dominion of the strongest’) and that – within the limits of the rules – as long as Juárez remains the stronger, it is her writ that runs and she can do as she damn well pleases.

There are no sour grapes, either, from Hernández. When she consents (rather bravely) to give an interview the next day to la Jornada, she makes no secret of the fact that she’s in pain – ‘physical and mental’ – and little attempt either to conceal the fact that she’s been crying: She speaks with the thin voice of someone who has suffered an upsetting experience. She wants to ‘understand’, to ‘assimilate’, her defeat. “Being beaten,” she says, “can be useful”. She remembers a time during her amateur career when she put together a whole string of victories. “My enthusiasm began to wane,” she says, “and I became almost lethargic.”

Hers isn’t the routine (learned) reaction of the ‘good sport’. Nor is it the spiteful cataloguing of symptoms we see sometimes from beaten fighters that is designed not only to enlist our sympathy (which is fair enough) but also to invoke our anger (which is not, because their idea is that we will direct it at their opponents). We see it rarely and only from female fighters it has to be said, for whom, on occasion, the disappointment, perceived humiliation and raging impotence of defeat becomes a cocktail so unpalatable that, rather than just swallow it and get on with their lives, they resort to passive aggression (“look what she did to me, daddy!”) as a way of getting even.

Hernández doesn’t. Even though she’s only 23 – and had even seemed younger at the weigh-in, when she let Mariana Juárez braid her hair for her and put her arm round her as though she were her baby sister as they posed with the belt – she exhibits remarkable maturity in defeat, blaming her failure on lack of professional experience but remaining proud of past accomplishments. And rightly so. Not only are almost all the girls she’s defeated (some forty-six in all in her career as an amateur and two since she turned pro) taller than her, but she’s holding down two jobs (in a toy factory and in a street market) plus boxing at the same time.

And she shouldn’t even be alive. Five years ago she was knocked down by a car and spent two days in a coma. The doctors thought she’d suffered severe brain damage and were afraid also that they’d have to amputate her leg, which was broken in three places. Her thorax, too, was broken and she suffered an injury to one eye. “The doctors said it would be better if I died,” she told La Jornada, “because (if I survived) I’d be mad or one leg shy.”

Mad is what she went later, when she was confined to bed for three months (“I wanted to fight the whole world. It was then that I became aggressive”), but the physical injuries healed. A year after the accident, however, she plunged into a severe depression from which boxing offered a way out. She threw herself into it with utter conviction. “When you’ve felt death that close, it changes you for ever,” she says. “You feel you’ve survived for a reason. I believe I’m here because I have unfinished business.”

Even though in the event, as she now sees, her experience in the amateur division didn’t cancel out that of Juárez in the pros, she remains proud of her achievements. In her flat in the colony Ejército de Oriente, she shows the interviewer her trophies, her ‘golden’ gloves, the cards on which she’s featured, the press clippings mentioning her name. What two days earlier had been the centrepiece of the display – the Mexican flyweight championship belt – is conspicuous, of course, by its absence.

“There’s nothing to be done now,” she says with resignation, but stops there, reminding herself, as Namús will remind the other Hernández two days later, that “all of them – even the greatest champions – have been defeated at some time or other.”

*

On the 22nd, J. Arturo Contreras reported: “The new Mexican flyweight champion, Mariana Juárez [15(8)-5-3] visited the offices of the Federal Boxing Commission on Monday, where she was eulogized by the members, boxing journalists and managers who gather there once a week. Juárez, an ex world champion, offered last week a demonstration of intelligent boxing and power to dethrone the far-from-negligible Sandra Hernández [2(1)-2(2)-0]. Hernández is a brave girl, who left her heart in the ring. In the end, though, her own lack of experience and the boxing resources of Mariana combined to close the door on any surprise. If she learns a bit of defence, Sandra will be a strong candidate for both domestic and international titles. Commissioner Jaime Clavel described Juárez and Hernández as having been 'the protagonists of an exciting fight from which emerged a new national champion and future champion of the world."

*

Mariana Juárez returns to the ring in Tijuana this evening to fight Diana González for the WBC International title, weighing in yesterday at 50.1 kilograms to her opponent’s 51. The ‘Bombón Asesino’, for her part, returns to the Palacio Peñarol on the 13th September on a bill named in her honour ‘¡NAMÚS ATACA DE NUEVO!’. In the weeks since the fight, she has scarcely been out of the limelight. There were at least four clips of her triumph on You Tube last time I looked, posted by fans appending predicates like ‘The Most Beautiful Boxer in the World’ to her name. She’s been supplementing her income again by modelling and was granted the ultimate accolade of a spot on Uruguayan TV’s ‘Celebrity Bowling’.

The losers, as is often the case, seem to have dropped completely off the radar. Against the ‘rock’ (Sandra Hernández), the Fates seem to have conspired with particular cruelty. The cup has been dashed from her hands just as she was raising it to her lips. No sooner had she established herself as the best at her weight in her home country – on the launch-pad, as she put it, of an international career – than the ex- (and perhaps rightful) world champion returns like Odysseus after a long absence, and she is routed, and the rest of the suitors along with her.

One got the sense during the build-up to the fight from headlines like ‘Sandra Hernández facing a baptism of fire!’ that people knew this would happen and were rubbing their hands with glee. I could understand the girl she defeated to take the title in the first place resenting perhaps Hernández’s habit of dragging her name into every interview and reminding everyone that she had entered that fight too as the underdog; and Hernández was perhaps naive to conclude from the fact that Juárez hadn’t hurt her when they’d sparred together on an earlier occasion that she was incapable of doing so in a real fight, but you’d really have to have overdosed on Greek tragedy to conclude she was punished justly for her arrogance (or hubris as the ‘Lit. Crit.’ brigade used to call it until Greek scholars set them straight). She was a little brash (in a sweet way), and she overstated her chances, but that’s no crime. I don’t suppose in any case that Juárez drew out her agony on purpose to punish her for anything she’d said. It’s more likely that, unsure after a year out of action as to whether or not she could go the full distance, she held back in the early stages to obviate the risk of gassing and leaving herself vulnerable at the end. As Namús herself pointed out in the interview with La República, punching hard is very tiring; the choice she (Namús) made was to go flat out from the start and see whether or not her punches were hurting; if not, she planned to throttle back to conserve energy. Juárez appears to have made the opposite choice and delayed her sprint until she was sure she had enough stamina to sustain it to the line.

Like the Uruguayan, too, she was perhaps uncertain as to what would be the effect of an all-out attack and first fully aware of her own strength when she tightened her grip in the last round, and the rock crumbled like biscuit through her fingers.