Genius with the Samba Beat: Golden Bantam Eder Jofre Was the Complete Fighter
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Genius with the Samba beat: Golden bantam Eder Jofre was the complete fighter By Mike Casey When it finally happened, nobody could quite believe it. Eder Jofre had been beaten. It didn’t seem possible and people had begun to wonder if it was even allowed. Far from the sun-kissed shores of his native Brazil, before 12,000 wildly cheering Japanese fans at the Aichi Prefectural Gym in Nagoya, the masterful genius of a boxer who could do it all had lost his bantamweight championship to the perpetual little buzzsaw that was Masahiko ‘Fighting’ Harada. News of such cataclysmic events took an age to trickle through to the average boxing fan in the stark and simpler days of 1965. There was no Internet, no twenty-four hour news stations and no mention of boxing on the TV or radio unless Muhammad Ali had done something else to ruffle the feathers of the silent majority. When I finally saw the result in the newspaper, tucked away at the bottom of the page in the form of a two-liner, I seriously wondered if the sub-editor had lunched for a little too long at his favourite watering hole and accidentally transposed the names. Nobody expected Eder Jofre to lose to Fighting Harada, because Jofre was a genuine wonder of a fighter who didn’t lose to anyone. Not since the days of Panama Al Brown and Manuel Ortiz had a bantamweight champion looked so dominant or stood so toweringly over his peers. Eder had mastered his division with such a sublime and disciplined combination of skilful boxing and brilliantly timed power punching that old and new sages alike were hailing him as a Sugar Ray Robinson in miniature. There didn’t seem to be an element of the game at which the Brazilian didn’t excel. As well as skill and power, Jofre was one of the ring’s great thinkers who combined excellent speed and timing with almost saintly patience. A tall man for a bantamweight, he never looked awkward or gangling in the semi-crouch from which he plotted and fired his artillery. Ever jinking, bobbing and weaving, he was able to co-ordinate his thoughts and actions seamlessly and with devastating effect. It was Eder’s preference to play a chess match with his opponent, assessing the other man’s strengths and weaknesses and drawing his early fire before beginning the systematic process of breaking him down. But if the game plan went awry and an old- fashioned fight was called for, Jofre was no less efficient at biting the bullet and winning through. He possessed an uncanny ability to adapt and re-invent his style in the heat of battle, as his cool brain worked out the logistics and formulated the appropriate game plan. Of all the men who have held the bantamweight and super-bantamweight crowns since, only the prime Erik Morales has shown this writer such comparable versatility. Before the sensation against Harada in Nagoya, Eder Jofre had won forty-eight and drawn two of his fifty fights and had seen off such sterling challengers to his throne as Piero Rollo, Ramon Arias, Johnny Caldwell, Herman Marques, Jose Medel, Katsutoshi Aoki, Johnny Jamito and Bernardo Caraballo. But the great man was wavering over his future, which was probably his undoing. Jofre could see the finishing line and funny things happen to even the greatest athletes when they hit the home stretch and race for the wire. They suddenly stop doing what comes naturally as the urge to bask in their glory takes hold. Jofre was undefeated, a sporting god of sorts and a hero to the Brazilian people, who paid him homage in much the same way they worship their sacred soccer players. There was no fighting man alive like their ‘Jofrinho’. The stage was perfectly set for Eder to retire and cement his legend as the great invincible. But then he began to talk about it, as fighters do. Before the final obstacle had been hurdled, he let it be known that he had other things on his mind. Masahiko Harada was a furious fighting man, a former world flyweight champion who had moved up to hunt bigger game, but he was accorded little chance of defeating even a distracted Jofre. Most of those in the know reckoned that the Japanese warrior, for all his fire and fury, would be picked apart and dismantled inside five rounds. The fight was a storming and exciting affair, in which Harada was fearless and relentless in his attacks. Jofre had gone to Japan to find one last dose of glory. Instead he found his nemesis. Eder’s studious, reconnaissance mission of the early rounds, the foundation on which he built his brilliant work, slowly turned to quicksand against this whirlwind of a challenger. Harada was tireless, punching all the time, a man who saw his big chance and believed he could grasp it. Jofre had always found a way of handling such impudent pretenders. Like an expert angler outsmarting the canny and slippery marlin, he would give them so much line and then reel them in. But this man Harada was something else, the Aaron Pryor of his era in his ferocity and sheer persistence. He was chewing up the line and he wanted to eat the angler for good measure. Jofre sacrificed the early rounds in his attempt to analyse and compute his feisty challenger, a deficit he would never claw back. Eder was caught in a storm and the gifts that the gods had bestowed upon him were suddenly being snatched back. Never had his defences been so penetrated as Harada found his chin repeatedly with rapid-fire shots. Like any great king who has reigned unvanquished for so long, Jofre’s mind couldn’t seem to accept that time was running out. He jabbed, he countered effectively with vicious punches, but never with sufficient urgency or consistency. He was waiting for that inevitable moment when his magic would make his challenger turn to dust. That moment never came. Harada crossed the line to win a split decision and was suitably modest and sporting in the afterglow of his wonderful achievement. “I was lucky to win,” he said. “It was a very close fight. I was fighting hard all the time. If the boxing authorities believe Jofre is entitled to a chance to regain the championship, and he wants that chance, I shall give it to him.” While the deflated Jofre was left to mourn the glorious retirement that never was, his manager Abraham Katzenelson dutifully excused him. Abe protested before and after the match about the Japanese gloves and had tried to import a pair from Mexico. The Japanese gloves, he argued, were too rough. But when was anything too rough or tough for the great Eder Jofre? True to his word, Harada gave Jofre his return a year later in Tokyo. But the writing was on the wall for Eder six months before, when he was held to a draw by the tough Manny Elias in a tune-up fight in Sao Paolo. The genie had escaped the bottle, the magic was gone. Harada beat him unanimously and that was that. It was the spring of 1966 and the great career of Eder Jofre was over after fifty-three fights. Or so it seemed. Gym When a young boy is raised in the back room of a boxing gym, he is going to spend his life either loving boxing or hating it. Eder Jofre loved the game and yearned to be a great fighter. Standing before a mirror, he would imitate the world class boxers he had seen and religiously practice every aspect of his chosen discipline. Studious and serious, he made excellence his benchmark. He couldn’t abide anything less and worked like a demon to expunge any weaknesses from his make-up. So many naturals of the sport waste their talent because they never fully grasp its rarity or significance. What made Jofre special was that he appreciated the value of the precious diamond in his locker and still wanted to heighten its gleam. His progress was impressive when he graduated to the professional ranks in 1957. Eder won ten of his twelve fights that year, showing early flashes of the power and grace that would enable him to cut a swathe through two weight divisions. His early progress was checked by a couple of draws with Argentina’s Ernesto Miranda and a stalemate with Ruben Caceres in Uruguay. One could imagine the meticulous Jofre making a mental note of those two names for his further attention. The Brazilian maestro ploughed through everyone else as he registered the first notches on a knockout tally that would reach 50 by the time he had completed his nineteen-year, 78-fight career. He quickly proved that he could overcome adversity, bouncing back from his first knockdown as a pro to stop the capable Jose Smecca in seven rounds in 1958. Eder met up with Ruben Caceres again in 1959, leaving no doubt as to who was the superior man as he knocked out Ruben in nine rounds. Jofre was on the cusp of his first wave of greatness, and emphatically stamped his class on the division in his glittering campaign of 1960. He settled his unfinished business with Ernesto Miranda with two successive victories for the South American title and then waged one of the great modern bantamweight wars with the dangerous Jose ‘Joe’ Medel at the Olympic Auditorium in Los Angeles in August.