This was Jose Fuentes. If you remember him at all, and you must be an old-timer at the fight clubs if you do, you remember a tough little Mexican kid with a wild left hook, weak on brains but strong on heart. Young Pancho Villa the Third, he used to call himself. No champion, never in the big money, just another one of the kids who come along for a while, who only know how to throw roundhouse punches with either hand and to bounce up after a knockdown without bothering to take their count and get their wind. The kind the fans go crazy about for a year or two and then don’t recognize when they’re buying peanuts or papers from them outside the stadium a year or two later. Club fighters, they’re called, a dime a dozen, easy to hit and hard to hurt. At least, hard to knock out. Plenty of hurt, sure, plenty of pain, but that all comes later, when they can’t seem to get fights any more, when they start hanging around the gym. Not training, not working, just sort of hanging around. Now there are plenty of bums hanging around the gym every day in the week.
