Manny Perez – Not Such An Underdog
Manuel Perez was supposed to be just another tomato can. It was supposed to be merely a set-up bout Feb. 24 at the Dover Downs Hotel & Casino. The ring in Delaware was supposed to be another Waterloo in Perez’s low-level boxing career, a tuneup for Edgar Santana’s return to the ring in a North American Boxing Association light welterweight title fight.
Perez would lose the fight to Santana, a 7-1 favorite, then go back to Denver with his 16-8 career record and his two jobs — one as a truck driver and another working the register and stocking shelves in a liquor store. And Santana would get a good workout.
But a strange thing happened on the way to further obscurity. Perez beat the bigger, allegedly better and tougher Santana. Whupped him, in fact, winning a unanimous, 10-round decision in front of an ESPN “Friday Night Fights” audience. Perez now has a World Boxing Association interim light welterweight title fight scheduled for July 21 in Cancun, Mexico. He’ll likely be another big underdog, with a 17-7 record, matched against Johan Perez, 15-0, but Perez dares to dream.
Can this modern-day, 28-year-old “Rocky” keep the fairy tale going? One thing is certain: It’ll be tough to outwork Perez in or out of the ring.
“I talked to my wife (Leann), and I look at my sons every day, and I said to her: ‘This is it. I’m going to make a good run at the rest of my pro career, starting with this fight,’ ” Perez said of the Santana fight. “I said: ‘I’m going to change everything. I’m not going to go in there and fight timid. I’m not going to go in there and be backed up or let up at all.’ I said, ‘I’m going to fight hungry from this point on.’ ”
Perez acknowledges a victory over Johan Perez won’t allow him to quit his day jobs. The winning purse is roughly $12,000, and 33 percent of that would go to manager Steve Mestas and trainer Jacob Ramos. Add in the taxes, and Perez would be lucky to clear $5,000. But Perez swears his boxing career is not about striking it rich.
“I fought once for a dollar,” he said. “I had a fight with a guy where the purse was $1,000, but he didn’t want to fight suddenly, and I just told him, ‘I’ll give you my entire share of the money if you do it.’ I took one dollar, but they still took taxes out of it. I got a check for 66 cents.”
Family is everything
Perez is one of 11 children, but he has essentially been estranged from his parents since he was young. He was born in Honolulu, where his father was stationed in the military. Problems in the home led to Perez, then 9, and his siblings moving to Denver, where his aunt and uncle — David and Hilda Medina — became primary caretakers.
Money always was tight, but for the most part Perez remembers his upbringing fondly, thanks to loving relatives and four brothers and six sisters.
“We raised each other, and we did a pretty good job. We’re all doing pretty well for ourselves. I can’t imagine my life without them or my aunt and uncle, who we really called our mom and dad,” Perez said.
“He’s a very responsible person,” Hilda Medina said. “Even when he was little, he’d be helping me clean or helping me take out the trash. Both of my brothers were in Golden Gloves, and that’s where he got his love of boxing. They were always shadowboxing with him.”
But Perez’s youth was anything but idyllic. He dropped out of high school early and fathered two boys with a woman with whom he no longer has a relationship.
Still, he said he stayed away from drugs and forged a path that today has him working a full-time job at Inline Distributing, a supplier of construction industry products. He works in the warehouse and drives a delivery truck.
Until recently, he also worked at his brother-in-law’s Denver liquor store. His brother-in law has plans to open a microbrewery, and Perez said he will work there too.
Perez’s typical weekday goes like this: wake at 4 a.m., run about 3 miles, come home and get ready for work, put in a 10-hour shift with Inline, get to the gym and train for a couple of hours.
“Probably very few would do what he’s done with the things he’s faced,” said Leann, for three years Perez’s wife. “He could have been a statistic, but he refuses to let that happen.”
Leann is expecting the couple’s second child this summer, so she won’t be able to attend the fight in Cancun. It will be the first fight she will miss in his pro career.
“That’s going to be really hard. I’m always there and always the loudest one in the stands. You always know I’m there,” Leann said.
ESPN’s Teddy Atlas: Perez the definition of a fighter
At 5-foot-7 and a weight fluctuating between 135 and 140 pounds, Perez is not an imposing figure. But he is known for his tough chin and smart, methodical style. After more than 100 amateur fights, he turned pro in 2004 and won his first six bouts. He lost four of the next nine , however, and entered the fight in Dover as a handpicked setup expected to go down without much of a fight.
Against Santana, who had a 4-inch height advantage and a stockier build, Perez consistently landed close-in body blows. He won on points 96-94 on all three cards, landing 40 percent of his punches to Santana’s 27 percent. When the judges awarded him the decision, Perez fell to his knees.
“The whole idea of what a fighter is, is what Perez illustrates. It’s overcoming, finding a way,” ESPN boxing analyst Teddy Atlas said after the decision.
Still, Perez enters his next fight as an underdog. But nobody is going to be calling him a tomato can.
“People are going to start respecting us a lot more,” Mestas said. “I’m confident we’re going to be world champions after July 21. He’s a boxer who will just walk you down and keep grinding you. He’s probably one of the smartest fighters I’ve ever seen.”
On a recent training session at the Grudge gym in Wheat Ridge, Perez slammed punches into the protective padding worn by Ramos, filling the room with echoes.
When it was over, he went back home for a meal, a shower and bed. The 4 a.m. alarm clock was only a few hours away.
“I’m pretty much always on the go. Even on my days off, I’m doing things like cutting somebody’s hair or doing yardwork for someone. That’s just my nature,” Perez said. “I come from a loving family with wonderful siblings and my auntie and uncle, and I like to be involved in something with them. Life is short, and you’ll never get any of this time back.”
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