By Neal Pollack
Fernando likes to look good, so before every bout he chooses a different hooded sweatshirt in which to make his initial appearance. That night he came out of the locker room waving his gloved hands in the air, wearing a sleeveless gray jersey with black and gray stripes down the middle. He did a little dance for the crowd, which was definitely on his side. Then he allowed his cornermen to remove the shirt.
“Two kicks, Fernando!” came the screams from his corner. “Get your kicks in!”
He didn’t come close in round three, though he threw a couple of hammer punches. In round four Hudson began to look tired, and by round five Fernando was pummeling him with solid combinations. He was also landing good kicks. It seemed like he had a lot of energy, and Hudson, while hardly finished, was plodding around the ring. Fernando danced away, moved in, threw a few punches, brushed off a couple jabs, and danced away again. He was in control of the fight. He let Hudson back him into the ropes, took a couple of body shots, and then extended his arms wide. He exploded from the ropes. His right arm was whirling and wild. The hammer was coming down.
Over the next year Fernando became more proficient as a fighter, but he ran out of money and had to return to Campeche to live with his mother. He told her that he wanted to go back to school. She replied that he wasn’t any good at school–instead, he should get a three-month student visa and go to work in the United States. His older brother Juan was already in Chicago. Soon Fernando joined him.
When Fernando first arrived in 1989, Degerberg Academy was already a world-famous martial-arts school. Fred Degerberg, the boulder on the billboard, was at the very pinnacle of his profession. Degerberg was born in 1945 and as a young man had a close friendship with his grandfather, Rocco Jannuzi, a professional boxer who fought out of Racine, Wisconsin. Rocco told Fred that in the old days every bar in Chicago had a little ring in the back for impromptu boxing matches. An up-and-coming fighter, or one on his way down, could easily get two or three fights a night. A fight on the north side would be followed by one on the northwest side. A south-side bout might precede a west-side one. Chicago was a boxer’s paradise, maybe the best fight town in the country until about 1950, when the action began to drift toward the east coast and toward Las Vegas and California.
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“I fought this black guy,” Fernando says. “His nickname was TNT. The guy, he was taller than me. Taller. He saw my fights a couple of times. He was fighting more like Sugar Ray, you know? He was hitting me, just getting close, and he was up against me. He didn’t knock me down. He was taller than me, long reach. He fight smart. He threw the jab. I was getting close to him to do my workout, and he’d wrap me. So we went the five rounds like that. I went crazy. I tried to knock this guy out, but I couldn’t. He kept moving back and forth.” TNT earned the unanimous decision, but he promised that Fernando would have a rematch soon.
