SecondsOut.com:”Chavez-Duddy: A Fighting Heart Isn?t Enough”

Writes Thomas Hauser at SecondsOut.com:

“John Duddy sat in the ‘green room’ at The Alamodome in San Antonio on the evening of June 26th. Before the night was done, eight thousand fans would watch him do battle. Hundreds of thousands more would see him on television. Few people have an audience of that magnitude at any time in their life.

“The room was comfortably large, but it wasn’t really a dressing room. There were no lockers or shower.

“Decades of sacrifice, pain, passion and dreams were about to crystalize into a fist fight. John would step onto a small square of illuminated canvas, where he and Julio Cesar Chavez Jr would try to beat each other senseless.

“There’s an ebb and flow to a fighter’s career. An unexpected loss can send his fortunes plummeting like a one-day twenty-percent drop in the Dow Jones average. On occasion, a fighter enters the ring, knowing in advance that he’s about to engage in a crossroads fight. Win, and he takes a giant step forward. Lose, and he might never climb back to where he was before.

“This was a crossroads fight. It wasn’t for a world title (which crossroads fights often are). But after this fight, regardless of the outcome, Duddy’s future as a fighter would be vastly different from what it had been before.

“‘A win would mean great things,’ John had said three days earlier. ‘The winner has a good path in front of him.'”

Read the full article HERE.