The Legend’s Son returns to returning

SAN ANTONIO – Mexican “Son of the Legend” Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. returns to this city sometime in the next few days, returns to a local scale sometime Friday afternoon, and returns to an ring Saturday night against Austin’s Bryan Vera. The middle spectacle, Friday’s, should prove the week’s most suspenseful, and if Chavez somehow misses weight also its most tragic. If Chavez makes weight, evincing proper preparation for his rematch with the profoundly limited Vera, though, let us hope Saturday’s match does not end tragically.

But for that possibility, this is all a bit tired, isn’t it? The “Road to Chavez Jr. vs. Vera II” promotional piece felt obligatory as a husband’s trip to the mall. Gone are the mildly alluring touches of collaring whichever journalists were in town for whichever other event, to give aficionados a chance at least to see admired writers mention, in very short clips, why they think this fight may be compelling (with the flashed and handsome exception of our site’s intrepid editor at 1:21). Instead we get HBO’s commentary team rehashing what they said the night of the first fight with what they’ve digested since, in promotional spots that boast all the journalistic panache of actors from this season’s cast of “Dexter” holding their fists aloft while advising viewers they’ve been buzzed – and if that is a mashup, as the kids are calling it, of two different networks’ original programming concepts, it’s honestly arrived at because no enterprising mind should keep 2014’s thus-far-banal prizefighting offerings compartmentalized.

That promises to change, at least in spirit, Saturday, when this city opens its gracious arms to a rematch of a not particularly compelling 2013 match, one that finds Chavez once more collecting his father’s back wages from his promoter or his network or his Mexican fans, a collective that must be dwindling.

Into the curiousness of this arrangement meanders Junior, never hurried, marking promoter Top Rank’s return to a city whose venues it has not graced in the 23 months since used the force to smash apart Aaron “Jedi” Jaco in the debut of Leija-Battah Promotions, an outfit that looked a temporary license-holding company for - and -based promoters, alike, before evolving, quickly and audaciously, into something more and better. What consequently drove the local promoter from Top Rank after one show is anyone’s guess, but it was a thing that did carry consequences, as Top Rank has since made medium-sized Texas shows in Houston, Dallas, Corpus Christi and Laredo but not Alamo City, a place where Son of the Legend began to become more than a mascot by decisioning John Duddy in 2010 at Alamodome, the venue where his father, The Legend, set an attendance record still standing.

There’s no telling how ticket sales might be going for Saturday’s show for a couple reasons: First, there isn’t an engaged local promoter endeavoring to recoup its large investment by blitzing inboxes with promotional tidbits, and second, with most of the money for this fight coming exclusively from HBO, there’s not nearly the same urgency there was round this time last year when, openly snubbing his proximate rival, Mexico’s Saul “Canelo” Alvarez declined to fight on Floyd Mayweather’s May undercard – firing the starter’s pistol on a frantic effort to find a venue, and accompanying local entrepreneur, to host Alvarez on short notice. What resulted, an April match between Alvarez and New Mexican Austin Trout, brought nearly 40,000 fans to Alamodome, an attendance figure that established in a bold stroke Alvarez’s coveted standing as Mexico’s most popular prizefighter. Alvarez then sprinkled cinnamon in his promoter’s gears in September, winning perhaps 90 seconds of his 36-minute match with Mayweather.

Displaying his father’s relentlessness and talent for smashing microscopic fissures into gaping wounds, then, Chavez Jr. snatched the corona right off Alvarez’s bowed redhead by icing his countrymen’s bruised national pride, 14 days later, with a victory over Bryan Vera that is remembered, still, for its preparation, savagery and workrate.

Oh, if ever a sentence were typed round derisive giggles.

Instead of doing something memorably good or even forgettably bad, Son of the Legend chose that inauspicious time to hold a pound-auction at the Friday weighin, having done the considerate thing, he explained for HBO’s “Road to” cameras, and informed the Vera camp ahead of time he would weigh, well, something higher than what 168 pounds he was legally obliged to make. Then Son of the Legend made a lionlike contender of Bryan Vera, a good guy of good work ethic and giver of a goodish impersonation of Colorado’s Mike Alvarado, were Alvarado not a once-great high school athlete.

Wait, Vera a “contender”? Yes, contender: As Son of the Legend reminded viewers, apropos of his figurative hunger – unmistakable in its modesty for Junior’s literal hunger – he was a “world champion” once, wearing proudly the garish, gold- and-whipped-pea strap the WBC stole from lineal champion Sergio Martinez in 2011, making Chavez technically a champion and making Vera technically a contender – cute a reminder as any that Vera outworked television’s original “Contender,” Sergio Mora, in August 2012 at the converted Alamodome venue called Illusions Theater, in a Leija-Battah- promoted rematch of Vera’s finest hour, a controversial 2011 decisioning of Mora in Fort Worth, an hour not nearly fine as Vera’s decisioning of Chavez Jr. in a September match official judges, alone, scored widely for Son of the Legend.

We circle back to Saturday, then, meandering round the subject like a pothead in peach underwear doing living-room laps for roadwork – so great is his hunger as world champion – to address briefly a match that should not be competitive, and, one prays, will not end tragically for Vera. Whatever long list of bad habits Vera’s trainer Ronnie Shields credits himself with red-penning from the Austinite’s dossier, he sure as hell did nothing for Vera’s plunging right hand, a hand Vera holsters at his waist before throwing either glove at opponents. That flaw portends nothing good for Vera.

I’ll take Chavez, then, KO-11, in a terribly lopsided spectacle even Junior’s legion of detractors will wish had been stopped after nine.

Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com