The Glory Ring Days of Schoolboy Bobby Chacon
By Robert Brizel, Head Real Combat Media Boxing Correspondent
*Photo Credit: Boxer Rec
Looking back on the great lower weight boxers of recent memory post pandemic, one of the first historical names to come up from my subconscious unintentionally was ‘Schoolboy’ Bobby Chacon, a former world featherweight and super featherweight champion who fought out of Pomona, California. It has been seven years since Chacon passed away. With exception of Alexis Arguello and Ray Mancini in world title bouts, between 1972 and 1988 Chacon ruled the lower weights in his 66 professional bouts, winning his last seven bouts in a row without getting another world title shot. The only opponent of Bobby’s last seven opponents to go the distance was Freddie Roach.
Chacon won his first 36 bouts, save two losses to former world bantamweight and featherweight champion Ruben Olivares. Chacon would later defeat Olivares, lose and win against veteran Arturo Leon, lose and draw with Rafael ‘Bazooka’ Limon, and lose and win with Cornelius Boza-Edwards. Chacon’s revenge victories over Limon and Boza-Edwards came in world title bouts, when his win counted most.
In his time, Bobby was the Latino version of Jerry Quarry, enjoying outrageous popularity among the California Hispanic sports scene. Three thorns haunted Bobby during his career, and after his career ended. First was the suicide of his wife Valerie, who wanted Bobby to quit boxing because she feared boxing’s aftereffects in the long run on her husband. Second was Bobby’s decision to forfeit his World Boxing Council World Super Featherweight title for avoiding mandatory challenger Hector ‘Macho’ Camacho, in order to challenge World Boxing Association World Lightweight champion Ray ‘Boom-Boom” Mancini in the higher weight class. Third was the death of his son Bobby Chacon Jr., who was shot and killed in a gang fight at age 17. Drugs and alcohol, and fights with his second wife, were common knowledge during his career’s waning days. Less well known was Bobby’s dementia in later years, and his life in a room on a California skid row collecting cans, forgotten by his two daughters, before Bobby died in a California hospice at age 64 in September 2016.
Chacon was nicknamed Schoolboy because of his youthful good looks and because he turned pro while studying at California State University at Northridge. A member of the international Boxing Hall of Fame, and the West Coast Boxing Hall of Fame, Chacon was born November 28, 1951, to Mexican immigrants in Sylmar in San Fernando Valley. His father deserted the family. A schoolyard brawler, Bobby graduated from San Fernando High School and attended a junior college in Northridge while working at a Lockheed factory. Like Jerry Quarry, demons of dementia from countless toe to toe wars, many televised, eventually took their toll. Bobby, like so many other boxers, was left to fend for himself with no friends after the lights had faded away, swept alone into the sands of poverty from where he came before boxing enabled him to escape the inner city ghetto he returned to in the end.
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