America at Large:If it wasn't for bad luck I wouldn't have no luck at all. - Booker T Jones (Born Under a Bad Sign).
His full name is Jesus Gabriel Sandoval Chavez and for over a dozen years he has fought under the nom de guerre "El Matador", but he probably ought to change it to something simpler, like Job.
He was born in Mexico but grew up in the United States and considers himself an American. (The INS, which has deported him twice, disagrees.) Chavez was 17 and living in Chicago when he assisted a friend in the botched robbery of a grocery store. He served four-and-a-half years in prison and was expelled from the country after his release.
Chavez hadn't set foot in Mexico since he was 10 years old, when the INS shipped him across the border with $50 in his pocket. He would shortly learn that in the land of his birth he was regarded as a "Pocho", meaning discoloured, or rotten - the Mexican equivalent of what Gringos call a "wetback".
He quietly slipped back across the border and took up residence in Austin, Texas, where he began to box. It has been observed, accurately, that while prison probably didn't rehabilitate him, boxing did.
Even when he began knocking out opponents he didn't attract much attention outside the southwestern United States, but by 1997 he had won 21 of 22 fights and was poised to challenge for a world title when the government figured out that this Jesus Chavez who was fighting on national television was the same Jesus Chavez it had run out of the country three years earlier.
Chavez was deported again. While a battery of lawyers appealed his case, he spent nearly three years plying his trade south of the border. He won 10 fights in Mexico and another in Poland before the INS relented and granted him a visa to rejoin his mother in the US.
In November of 2001, Chavez got his first crack at a world title. The undefeated Floyd Mayweather jr stopped him in the ninth round of their super-featherweight championship fight in San Francisco.
When Mayweather moved up to lightweight a year later, Chavez got another crack at the title and beat Thailand's Sirimongkol Signwangcha.
In his first defence, he met Erik Morales and dropped a decision in Las Vegas.
He subsequently underwent surgeries on two injuries - a torn rotator cuff and a torn ACL in his left knee - sustained in the Morales fight, and was out of the ring for the next 15 months.
In his first fight back, he handily outpointed Carlos (Famoso) Hernandez to earn yet another title shot, this time for the IBF lightweight championship. Chavez scored an 11th-round TKO over Leavander Johnson to win the world title, but any celebration was subdued. Johnson collapsed in his dressingroom and was rushed to hospital. He underwent brain surgery but died without regaining consciousness.
Chavez maintained a vigil at the hospital and flew to New Jersey for the funeral, even though he wasn't sure how he would be received. (Warmly, it turned out. He still maintains contact with Johnson's family.)
Chavez sought professional counselling to help him deal with depression and the trauma of having killed, albeit inadvertently, a man in the ring.
"Leavander was a true warrior with a tremendous heart," Chavez recalled a couple of weeks ago. "Every day I think of him and say a prayer for him and his family. He will never be forgotten."
With the support of his own family and Johnson's, Chavez prepared for a return to the ring and a career-high $500,000 pay-day in a HBO fight against Marco Antonio Barrera, only to have the bout derailed by injuries. He had two more surgeries, one to his other shoulder and another on a torn right biceps tendon.
He was matched against a fellow Mexican-born American resident, Julio Diaz, last November, but the title bout had to be postponed when Chavez underwent an emergency appendectomy. And lest everything else appear to be going too well, he and his wife, Aundida, divorced last year.
By the time Chavez climbed into the ring against Diaz at the Silver Spurs Rodeo Arena in Florida last Saturday night, it had been a year and a half since he had thrown a punch in anger.
"It has been a long journey for me, both mentally and physically, but I think that I have done a pretty good recovery on those issues. I have never really fought any easy opponents," said Chavez a few days before the bout.
"Taking on Diaz in my first outing after 16 months is quite a task for me, but I have been in this situation before. I'm looking forward to boxing again."
Chavez-Diaz was the second of three world title bouts scheduled for Don King's "Super Saturday" card in Kissimmee.
The Chavez comeback didn't last long. After two relatively lacklustre rounds (we gave them one apiece; three judges awarded both to Diaz), the fighters had just gotten to mid-ring to begin the third when Diaz lashed out with a jab.
Chavez tried to roll with the punch, at once avoiding it and positioning himself to counterpunch, but as he shifted his weight from his left to his right side, his right knee buckled and the leg went right out from beneath him. He pitched forward to the canvas and lay there twitching, no more than 10 feet away from where we sat, while Frank Santore counted him out.
"It just gave out on me," Chavez would recall later. "And that was supposed to be my good knee."
It was the first time in 47 professional fights that Chavez had taken a 10-count. Now the question looms: has his star-crossed career merely taken one more wrong turn, or will this latest mishap end it entirely?
