What makes a fighter, a boxer, scary? Wicked punching power? A genuinely nasty personality and demeanor? Thoroughly intimidating stare-down abilities that frighten not only the other guy in the ring, but us fans looking on also?
Maybe all these things and more.
Here today, or tonight, when its dark and the wind may be howling as the kids come calling, screeching out “trick or treat,” let’s take a look back at some of the scariest, most frightening of all fighters.
In no particular order:
Edwin Valero.
Valero really is the stuff of nightmares, and not at all in a fun and friendly, ‘Happy Halloween’ way. Valero, a man who was seemingly possessed, both when he was in the ring and when he was out of it (pardon the pun), was actually a good fighter and a potentially great puncher. But his ring achievements aside, Valero is best known today for the brutal murder he committed, with the crazed fighter tragically taking the life of his own wife. Valero then took his own miserable life in his prison cell, the tortured former champion hanging himself.
In short, if there’s a place called Hell, Valero is down there burning.
Sonny Liston.
Liston was a man capable of turning a rival fighter’s legs to jelly, both with a punch and with a baleful stare before hostilities had even got going inside the squared circle. Liston had truly chilling punching power, while one look, one bad look, from Sonny, would see many a proud fighter cave in mentally. Yet, away from his media-portrayed dark side, Liston was said to be a genuinely nice guy, a man who loved kids and had a terrific sense of humor.
Liston has for some time become known by plenty of people as the most misunderstood fighter of them all.
Mike Tyson.
How could Tyson not make such a list? Capable, when in truly crazy mode, of biting a man’s ear or of trying with all his might to break another ring foe’s arm, Tyson was at one time capable of giving plenty of kids nightmares. Tyson was ferocious in his prime, and he routinely chucked out some scary sound-bites: “I was trying to catch him on the tip of his nose, so the bone would go up into his brain,” Tyson once said of an opponent.
Tyson, like Liston, had a genuinely kind side to him, but for many, he would always rank as the heavyweight terror nobody could ever defeat before things fell apart.
Carlos Monzon.
Some say “Escopeta” deserves to rank as the greatest middleweight of them all. But one thing Monzon did not deserve was his freedom. It was a truly ghastly turn of events that saw the end of both Monzon and his wife, Alicia Muniz, in February of 1988. Monzon, who had already shown a dark side to his nature, strangled Muniz into an unconscious state before throwing her (and himself) off a balcony. Monzon, when confronted by authorities, claimed the incident had been the result of an accident.
Monzon, who had cold blood in his veins when he fought (legally), had a chilling mixture of ice and red-hot rage coursing through his veins when his dark side overwhelmed him.
