When he was a young man, Estrada’s grandfather John was an amateur boxer. In 1947, the elder Estrada (who looks like a cross between the spitting image of the younger Estrada and Sir Ben Kingsley) entered his first tournament. His first fight was refereed by Jack Dempsey, of all people.
“The guy I was matched with was bigger than me,” John Estrada told me hours after his grandson’s win last Saturday night over Orlando Lora. “But my trainer told me, ‘He’s a winger; meaning he throws wide punches. Just stay tight and shoot down the middle and you’ll be fine.’ So I did. I busted his nose up, he bent at the waist and I went at him. Finally, Dempsey jumped in and stopped it. He raised my hand and I looked up at him and was like, ‘Whoa.’ He gave me an old-fashioned trophy cup that I have to this day. And the day David wins a world title, I’ll give it to him.”
As he heard John tell me this story, Estrada, who I spent a couple hours with after his big win Saturday, watching a replay of the fight on ESPN and picking his brain about it, could only smile to himself and nod in a way that said, “I want that cup more than the title.”
Estrada is an all-action type of fighter. He always comes to fight and had the honor of ESPN making his fight with Kermit Cintron back in 2006 an instant ESPN Classic fight. But losses over the years to Andre Berto, Shane Mosley, Jesus Soto Karass and a controversial one to Luis Abregu have kept him off that title track. But like a true warrior, Estrada hasn’t given up. He understands that it isn’t how you win, but what you do when you lose that defines character. In Estrada’s case, he decided to make a major change in his life and career.
“Things weren’t going to well for me in Miami as far my career and all that,” said the Chicago-born Estrada. “So I figured I’ve got to move back to where it all started. So I moved back to Chicago with a certain amount of money. Pretty soon all my money was all gone. I was frustrated, like thinking, ‘What am I going to do?’ Finally my trainer Fernando Hernandez stepped to me and said, ‘I can help you, but you’ve got to be serious about this. You’ve got to do everything 100%. You’ve got to listen to me, trust me, trust the people I’m going to put you in contact with and we’re going to make it happen.’ I looked at him in the eyes and told him ‘OK. Let’s do this.’ So we started training, the weight started coming off. We started getting rust out of me in the gym. Then I finally got my manager, Wasfi Tolaymat, who I met. He invested in me. He believed in me and he finally got me a fight which is the fight before this one. I stopped the guy [Chris Gray] in the sixth round and after that, through my friend [boxer/promoter] Sammy Merza, I ended up meeting my promoter Mario with Boxing 360. And then we just kept training hard, maintaining the weight, doing everything I am supposed to. Mario got me this fight and that’s where the story ends. That’s where it starts. This is the beginning of something big.”
So why now? What was it that precipitated a change in a fighter who had already reached the 30-year benchmark? After all, the maxim is, once a fighter gets to a certain age, he is who he is and will always be.
“It has everything to do with two factors,” explained Estrada. “Not getting so heavy in between fights. Because you know that with weight loss, you look good and everything and in your mind you feel strong but when it comes down to it, making that weight sucks the energy out of you. You ain’t got sh*t to show for it. It always comes back to haunt you in the last three rounds. Ten, 11 and 12. You don’t have nothing left, especially when if you’re in a rough fight where you are giving it all you got, where you’re both going to war. You need every ounce of energy and everything to get where you can finish that fight. When you have to lose 40 or 50 pounds, you don’t got it for the last three rounds. So that was one of the things. The other thing is finally listening to my trainer. I always have had a problem with that, but for some reason, I listen to Fernando. I do what he tells me what to do. We connect. I don’t know what it was before, but I’m not missing it now. So everything is falling into place.”
Fighter turned trainer “Fearless” Fernando Hernandez is a gregarious former junior middleweight contender, once ranked as high as ten in the world. With fights against Mikkel Kessler, Raul Frank, and Frankie Randall, Hernandez carried into this relationship experience that only a fighter who has competed at a high level can possess. The two had actually met in an amateur Nationals tournament that featured Kelly Pavlik, Ricardo Williams, Calvin Brock, Estrada and team captain Hernandez. The two exchanged numbers after becoming fast friends and kept in contact over the years. It wasn’t until Hernandez told him to come on back to Chicago that Estrada and Hernandez hooked up as trainer and fighter.
“I met David 15 years ago, in the nationals,” Hernandez told me. “We were both amateurs. So this is like destiny. I think all of this is more about commitment. David is more committed. He realized that time is not on our side and he turned over a new leaf and decided to be serious about it. Rather than wait until the last minute and lose 40, 50 pounds, he walked around maybe ten, 15 pounds over the limit. He listened to the dietary consultant that I gave him. He did everything that I told him to. I even sparred with him. Whatever it took. I went beyond the call of duty for this one.”
Soon after the training began, Yagobi and Tolaymat entered the picture to complete the team. Yagobi’s theory on how to treat his fighters is simple: give them what they need to do their job, never put them in fights simply for the money, and finally “give them that pinch of love that lets them know they are cared for.” Looking at Estrada both in the ring and after and observing him with his team, that extra bit of attention showed.
Part of that game plan included watching some tape of Lora, but not to the point where either fighter or trainer were married to any one idea going into the fight.
“I watched tape and I had David do a little bit of research,” Estrada explained. “We both watched two or three rounds of [Lora]. We didn’t want to focus on that too much because in boxing, the same fighter might not show up. So I said ‘Let’s not get too caught up in that.’ But we saw some of his hands habits. Saw that he switched a little bit. Saw that he wasn’t really in against stiff competition. That was enough. I didn’t want to overdo it. At the end of the day, it was about what David Estrada did. He ate right. He trained right. And he listened and he got what was just due to him. It’s real simple.
“I told David just be real alert,” Hernandez continued. “The kid is 26-0, undefeated with 18 knockouts. We can’t take a guy like that lightly. David is the kind of guy that, if you’re Shane Mosley, Berto, Kermit Cintron, Lora or whoever you are, he’s going to treat you the same. That’s just David’s nature. He’s a warrior. And I just had to almost play psychologist. I had to tell him, ‘You can’t look at things like that. We have to respect everybody’s record and everybody’s power. And at the end of the day just be real precautious, don’t look for the knockout it will come.’ I was actually going to be satisfied with a couple of knockdowns. At the end of the day, David’s veteran spirit came out and he exceeded what I thought he was going to do.”
From the first moment of the fight, a change was evident in Estrada. He came out and landed a hard straight right to start off. Low to the ground in his stance, with his hips cocked underneath him and a tighter than normal defense, Estrada kept Lora busy with combinations up and down, while mixing in hard right hands, left and right hooks that seemed to land flush every time he threw them.
Lora would come back for a final rally in the fifth, opening up with a blistering left hook that Estrada ate flush, but was unfazed by. Once again, for him it came down to his conditioning.
“The kid had decent power,” said Estrada. “But what makes somebody’s power less is when you are in real good shape. That makes it easier to take a punch. He did land a couple clean ones but instead of hurting me, they just pissed me off. I didn’t feel strong. I was strong. The other thing is this is like make-believe. Just because you look good- and you know I’ve been doing this strength training or whatever- and I look good you have it in your mind ‘Yeah I’m in shape.’ You really ain’t in shape. All you trained for is to lose weight. You didn’t train for the fight. This fight, I trained for the fight. Losing weight wasn’t a factor at all.”
By the end of the middle rounds, Lora’s will was broken, he had a cut that required 25 stitches and was taking the kind of beating that ruins careers and makes others. It was a thorough victory. Out of all the wins he had, Estrada puts this one above the rest.
“I would say so yeah,” he said. “I would say this is one of the best performances of my career.”
When it was over, Estrada had won himself a WBC regional belt and a shot at someone in the top ten. An added bonus was the Yagobi’s phone started ringing off the hook. But for now, Team Estrada and Boxing 360 will simply savor the moment.
“We didn’t get the belt,” said Yagobi. “They’re going to send it to us. We’re just going to go home and enjoy the moment. We’ll have a conference late this week and strategize. They already want us to fight some names. The already told us immediately after the fight. I got some calls. I said, ‘You know what? We’re going to let it soak. We want to absorb this thing. Enjoy this moment and then decide who we want to fight.’”
It’s easy to raise your hands after a victory. Everyone around you is cheering, raising you on their shoulders, screaming your name. What isn’t easy is remembering, in that moment, that you just beat a man down to get this prize. Estrada certainly didn’t.
“He wanted to go to the hospital and check on Lora,” Yagobi said of Estrada. “We went to two different hospitals. We finally found him. [Estrada] said, ‘I can’t eat, drink or do anything to celebrate before I found out how he is doing.’ We all went there. We saw him. We talked to him and we all told him that he was a warrior and we respect what he did in that ring. And we just want him to be healthy and we wished him all the best. He really appreciated that we took the time.”
So now comes the time when Estrada gets to look over the crop of fighters out there in Welterweight-Land and see who wants a piece of him and who he wants a piece of. It’s a nice feeling after the struggles of the past couple years. And if Estrada had his druthers?
“I think [WBC titleholder Andre] Berto”, said Estrada. “I really want a rematch with Berto because I’m a man and I can admit it. He’s the only one who ever put me on my back so I want a rematch. It was a good fight. I’ve heard in interviews and stuff where he said it was once of his toughest fights, so I think it would make for a good fight.”
But all in due time. For now, this team of men, Yagobi, Hernandez, Estrada, Tolaymat and the rest of the Boxing 360 stable are savoring their man’s moment. How sweet it is when a plan comes together.
““We knew before the fight, he was going to stop [Lora],” said Yagobi. “He was physically and mentally ready for this fight, you understand? When I told him who [he was fighting], he said, ‘It doesn’t matter. I’ll stop whoever is in front of me. A very important thing is that we have a great chemistry. It’s good energy, positive energy. From the manager, trainer, promoter, fighter, we’re all on the same page. We all decide what we are going to do together. We do the work outside and he does it in the ring.”
“One thing I have to say is that we all have good communication,” added Hernandez. “In a nutshell, one word: family. We’re all a family.”
And with that, they all toasted Estrada’s victory. After a moment, Hernandez turned to me and added, “We all know that David Estrada has fought the who’s who of boxing and its shame that he hasn’t fought for a world title. He’s not really a world title challenger yet because he hasn’t had the opportunity to fight for a world title. He has beaten four undefeated fighters. What’s it going to take for him to get a world title shot? He’s the gatekeeper…”
“Not no more,” interrupted Estrada with a smile. “I just handed over the keys to somebody else.”
Follow Gabriel at twitter.com/Gabriel_montoya or email him at maxgmontoya@gmail.com
Become a fan of Maxboxing at www.facebook.com/MaxBoxing
