Jerry Lazar paced back and forth beside the ring, hoping for a chance to prove himself. From looking at him you’d never have guessed that he was the lightweight champion of Tuesday Fite Nite, a weekly exhibition at the north-side nightclub Zafire. He was short and thin, weighing 140 pounds and standing five feet, six inches. His cheeks were smooth and round, and at 24 he spoke with the gentle voice of a boy who’d just entered puberty. He was clad in black mesh shorts with a matching tank top, his nickname in white lettering across the back: BABYFACE.
The crowd wanted to see a fight and began chanting: “Puss-y! Puss-y! Puss-y!” Stoic, the man ignored them. At ten minutes to four the house lights went up, illuminating the scattered chairs and empty plastic cups littering the floor. “Come here!” Galva ordered the guy, resting his arms on the ropes. “You a big bitch.” The man ignored him. Galva smiled and waved. “Good night, everybody! Thank you for being here.” Security was clearing the club, and the crowd shuffled out onto Elston. They’d hang out on the sidewalk while the cars screeched off into the early morning.
In June 1997, a few months after abandoning his dream, he heard about a late-night fighting competition at Tropicana de Cache, a salsa club in Bucktown. The following Tuesday he flashed the club’s bouncer a fake ID and stepped onto the dance floor.
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At first the fights attracted only a modest, exclusively Latino crowd, but word of Frankie Cruz, the fights’ first champion, spread quickly. “Frankie was like a human log,” says “Crazy Loco” Luis Roman, a former referee at the fights. “He would just put his hands down by his sides and let you beat on his face. And the crowd went nuts for that.” Amateur boxers, martial artists, and gangbangers alike flocked to the club, trying to take down Cruz for a $1,000 purse, but none of them could.
In November 1997 channels two, five, and seven all ran stories on the Tropicana’s amateur fighting. “It’s dangerous and illegal,” warned Channel Five’s Warner Saunders as the camera zoomed in on “Hurricane” Carter pounding a pinned challenger with his elbow. But it wasn’t illegal, and the week after the news stories ran, attendance jumped from 300 people to 1,000.
“Then his friend got into the ring,” Lazar recalls. “He was taller and bigger than the other guy, and I stomped him in the second round.” The DJ played “We Are the Champions” as Lazar accepted a Little-League-sized trophy from a blond girl in a bikini. Fans on the floor and in the balcony roared as he hoisted it into the air. “When I stepped out of the ring Ruben asked me, ‘Do you want to be a champion?’ When he first asked me, I was thinking, ‘Hell no.’ I didn’t think it was for me. And he was like, ‘Why? I’ll pay you.’ I still didn’t think I would do it, but this friend of mine talked me into it. He was like, ‘Why don’t you? People will know you and everything.’ A few weeks later I was in there and everyone was calling me Babyface.”
Before long his soft voice began to echo throughout the club. “I think it was his tenth fight, I told him to get on the microphone,” says Galva. “He didn’t want to do it, but I was like, ‘You’re kicking everyone’s ass, you might as well say something!’”
