Gnawing, helpless monotony: David “The Destroyer” Lopez (1977-2017)

By Bart Barry-

Thursday night Mexican contender David “The Destroyer” Lopez and his son were attacked in Nogales, Sonora, Mexico, Lopez’s hometown, while driving in Lopez’s pickup truck. Lopez was declared dead at the site of the shooting and his son was taken to the hospital in critical condition. No motive for the shooting is currently known, or at least none is being reported by Mexican media. The murder of Lopez is a boxing death that appears to have nothing to do with boxing but leaves anyone who covered Lopez’s career with what gnawing sense of helpless monotony one feels after receiving tragically bad news.

I did not know Lopez well but sat ringside for seven of his matches in Southern Arizona at Desert Diamond Casino, a property of Tohono O’odham Nation not technically in Tucson though nearby. More to the point Desert Diamond Casino is an hour’s drive north on I-19 from Nogales, a bordertown that exists in both Arizona and Sonora – effectively a single city with a large wall slicing its middle – once a place of reasonably safe diversion. Many aficionados made that drive northwards to Desert Diamond; Lopez drew disproportionate to his talents. He was a durable spoiler type, a natural underdog, an attrition fighter, without any particular punch or charisma. For a stretch, though, 2005-2009, Lopez was Nogales’ hometeam, and 800-1,000 Arizonans and Sonorans reliably attended his every match.

When Oscar De La Hoya and Richard Schaefer created they began hosting bimonthly cards at Desert Diamond as a farm league of sorts for their growing stable of prizefighters. The cards were exceptionally well constructed by local matchmaker Roger Woods and exceptionally well attended for what were effectively Spanish-language telecasts of club shows. Invariably Golden Boy would send one of its partners along, too, Marco Antonio Barrera or or Bernard Hopkins or De La Hoya himself, and Desert Diamond’s publicity team would ensure those guys were available for interviews with local media. After each undercard match publicists would visit the press table and ask if anyone were interested in a postfight interview then lead the winner and loser to a small conference room in the back, beside the fighters’ dressing rooms, and let us ask whatever we wished. During those four years every Golden Boy fighter – Juan Manuel Marquez, , Robert Guerrero, Kassim Ouma, Deontay Wilder, Rocky Juarez – spent time in that small conference room politely conversing with the same dozen reporters. (Even Richard Schaefer occasionally dissembled for our amusement.)

Back then Telefutura’s fantastic “Solo Boxeo” program was at its best and the main and comains were generally excellent. But no one drew like The Destroyer. Lopez built his fanbase quickly and passionately with a TKO loss to Colombian Fulgencia Zuniga the first week of 2005, just before Zuniga made another wonderful Arizona fight with Mexican Jose Luis Zertuche – not long before both Zuniga and Zertuche got pistonstroked by Kelly Pavlik. The loyalty Lopez’s fans showed was the sort best founded upon a courageous loss – these were middleaged, workingclass, bordertown men who didn’t respect or trust sparkly things. Lopez returned to Desert Diamond four months later in the comain of a card that marked Alfredo Angulo’s professional debut, coincidentally, and began a torrid streak that saw him go 8-0 (4 KOs) at Desert Diamond, while converting himself from a narrow middleweight to an even narrower super welterweight in the hopes of a world title challenge.

That challenge came eight months after his final match at Desert Diamond, in the form of a lopsided decision loss to Austin Trout. It broke the spell for Lopez. He fought six more times in the four years that followed and posted a typical, career-unwinding record of 2-3-1 against foes like Jose Uzcategui in venues like the Salinas Storm House.

Even that torrid run of eight Desert Diamond wins in four years isn’t particularly torrid-looking, is it? Yet there was something electric about Lopez’s fights in that venue, an accidental chemistry of performer and stage few enjoy and no one quite explains.

Lopez was somewhat prickly after his matches, much like Desert Diamond’s other synonymous performer, Jhonny “Jhonny” Gonzalez, and memorable for his terse, tense answers about wanting his title shot. At the ringside media table we didn’t really understand Lopez’s popularity but didn’t deny it either. Guys who wrote for Tucson papers knew they had to cover Lopez because local interest in Lopez was genuine. Sincere inquiries about The Destroyer’s outsized popularity from Phoenix journalists generally got some jocular variation of “Because he’s ‘The Destroyer’!”

We didn’t understand his career and evidently understood the fortunes of his retirement even less. If someone’d’ve asked me to name Desert Diamond fighters I expected to have pleasant lives after boxing I mightn’t have named Lopez straight away but if the followup question had been “What about David Lopez?” I’m certain I’d have said “Yup, him too.” Some sort of dreadful twist changed that Thursday night. The tenor of the reports from Mexico suggests Lopez was a target – the victim of heavily armed shooters, not a traffic dispute gone to lunacy.

Mexico has always been a dangerous country in the style of every other region of the Spanish conquest and possessed of a cultural view of death quite different from its neighbor’s to the north. But the last decade’s internal war has created a toxicity that beggars scale. It poisons the root of a people famous the world over for its humility and friendliness; every Mexican has been traumatized by it regardless of residence. David Lopez’s death is a reminder unpleasant as it is unneeded.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry