IT'S PANIC STATIONS

We all knew Juan Lazcano was a good fighter, but he seemed to elevate himself to a new level with his 11th-round hammering of Stevie Johnston on the Mosley-De La Hoya show in Las Vegas. The win earned him the World Boxing Council’s mandatory challenger’s spot in the lightweight division. If Floyd Mayweather moves up to light-welter, as expected, Lazcano will face tough ex-champ Jose Luis Castillo of Mexico for the vacant title.

Lazcano, 28, is an example of grit and perseverance prevailing over adverse circumstances. He is a father of four but he and wife Lourdes had their first child when little more than children themselves (a son, Tony, now aged 14).

He was once offered the chance to meet lightweight champ Floyd Mayweather Jr on short notice but declined, even though he says that Home Box Office would have paid him $1 million. He felt he needed more time to prepare for the biggest fight of his life. Had he gone through with the opportunity he would, he says, have been selling himself short, which is something he would never do.

He looks tough and fights tough and you just know that he would never back down from anyone, but in non-business hours Lazcano is a charming, courteous man, immediately likeable.

I chatted with his wife, Lourdes, at ringside after Lazcano’s overwhelming victory over Stevie Johnston and she said she knows enough about boxing to shout advice although she isn’t sure her husband always hears it. She said: “I see improvement in him all the time. He works so hard, and every fight, I think he’s getting better. When he was offered a million dollars to fight Mayweather we thought: ‘Wow, a million dollars’ but Juan wanted to be true to himself and give himself the best chance to win that fight, and we knew it was the right thing to say no. He’s a great father, great husband, great friend, I feel blessed to have someone in my life like him.”

Born just across the border in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, but raised in El Paso, Texas, from the age of two months, Lazcano now lives in Sacramento, California, where he is promoted by long-serving Don Chargin, who says of him: “Juan is one of those hard-working kids who keeps getting better. He likes to fight. Jose Luis Castillo is a real tough fighter but Juan has more things he can do, and I see Juan winning.”

Chargin has long been a believer, as has Lazcano’s trainer, Freddie Roach, who told me before the fight that Stevie Johnston would get overpowered in 10 or 11 rounds, that he wouldn’t be able to keep Lazcano off for 12 rounds. And Lazcano’s very impressive win over the two-time lightweight champ was the one that, I think, convinced everyone in the boxing trade.

Not only was Lazcano intense, he showed solid ring sense. Nothing, one felt, was going to stop him that night.

Lazcano, having dropped Johnston in the first round, got floored himself in the second. Speaking over the phone from his home in Sacramento, he recalled: “The referee warned me [for a low blow], then he warned me again, and I lost focus, but I wasn’t hurt at all. I thought: ‘OK, I knocked you down, you knocked me down, we’re even.’ Before the last round I had dug in some really good shots to the body and I was able to catch him with the right hand.”

He got top-quality southpaw sparring with Joel Casamayor for that fight. “He’s quick, quicker than Johnston, I thought,” Lazcano said. “I didn’t find Johnston that quick, because of Casamayor’s speed.”

Now he is on the threshold of becoming champ, a long way from the proverbial humble start.

Lazcano says he was “born into boxing — my father and grandfather were boxers”.

His father, Juan Sr, trained him at home from the time Juan was four years old. “But at age of eight he took me to the local boxing gym in El Paso, which was outdoors behind a bar,” he said.

As a youngster growing up in the West Texas border town, Lazcano became known as someone who would defend the underdogs.

“I never did drugs or run with gangs,” he said. “I talked with everyone. I did stand up for the little people, the kids that couldn’t defend themselves. The bullies would try to pick on them. I never liked that because I was bullied as a little kid. I got to an age, about 12, 14, where I knew what I could do with my fists and if something was out of line, I stepped in and they’d say: ‘You wanna fight?’ and I’d say, ‘Well, OK, let’s fight, then.’ So we’d fight, and after that we’d be talking to each other in the candy store. But I stood up for what I thought was right.

“I was a slim, wiry guy, not too big, and the tough guys couldn’t believe I could fight — but I could take care of myself. I didn’t have to fight too much because the word starts spreading, you know. But it’s all part of growing up in a tough neighbourhood.”

He won a Texas Golden Gloves titles and boxed in the national championships in the junior and open class during an amateur career that has been estimated at 135 wins, 15 losses.

With a child to support, he worked in menial jobs, as a waiter, carrying out groceries from a supermarket (“I was a bag boy,” he joked), but there was never much money. He said he didn’t want to go to his parents for help. “Having a family at a young age taught me independence,” he said.

Lazcano turned professional at 18 and his first loss was on a six-round decision to a journeyman Mexican fighter, Jose Manjarrez, in July 1994.

He says he doesn’t like making excuses but that he broke his right hand in that fight. “I had him on the verge of a knockout but I hit him on top of the head with a right hand,” he recalls. The pain was so bad, he says, he thought the broken bone was going to go right through the glove. He was out of the ring for nine months and it took two years, he said, before the hand was fully healed.

His only other defeat came in June 1998, against the capable Golden Johnson, who went on to meet Shane Mosley for the lightweight title. It was a third-round stoppage and it came at a time when Lazcano felt his career was going nowhere; he just wasn’t “up” for the fight.

“I take it as a good learning experience,” he said of the loss to Johnson. “That was just life humbling me. I am glad now, because that made me take boxing seriously. If I saw Golden Johnson I would thank him for it. He caught me, I went down and got up and the referee stopped the fight. I was winning the fight up until then. Right after that I was thinking: ‘I got what I deserved.’

“I had no hunger, no nothing, going into the fight. I was a pretty hot prospect, but I hadn’t fought for a year, my money had gone, I didn’t have the motivation, I was just shattered, and the guy caught me at the right time. It knocked some sense into me, and it made me work the way I work, and it made me what I am today.”

Lazcano came back strongly. In June 2000, he had an exciting knockout win at the Mandalay Bay casino hotel in Las Vegas, overpowering veteran Wilfredo Vazquez, a three-weight world champ from Puerto Rico who was attempting a comeback as a lightweight at the age of 39, in nine rounds.

But then came what many saw as a disappointing performance, a debatable points win over veteran contender Jesse James Leija. “It was right after my Wilfredo Vazquez fight,” he said. “I felt burnt out because I went right back into training. I had really got up for Wilfredo Vazquez.”

Now, though, Lazcano is fighting better than ever. He knocked out former junior lightweight champ John-John Molina in the 11th round of a war in what was probably his most significant victory prior to meeting Stevie Johnston and he is on a run of 19 consecutive wins, with a won-lost-drawn record of 33-2-1, 25 opponents halted.

In an age where fighters give themselves nicknames, Lazcano says his moniker of “Hispanic Causing Panic” was bestowed by a friend, Harold Anderson, because of his fighting ability.

“Harold’s a black guy and I was in a fight with a few of his friends, and, incredibly enough, this skinny guy — I don’t know how I did it — but I got through all three of them. After that he started calling me Hispanic Causing Panic. He lives in Kansas City but he’s always at my fights.”

Lazcano said he enjoys going to schools and encourages children to make the right decisions and get a good education. “I finished high school and I got a year and a half in community college,” he said.

Talking about the Mayweather fight that he declined, he said: “You’re not going to buy my dreams and what I stand for. I wanted the amount of time they give everyone else, three months, two and a half months — not two weeks.

“My strongest point is having no ego,” he said. “I am willing to learn. And my faith. That’s my strength. I talk to God every night and read the Bible, and read the Bible to the kids.

“Yes, we go to church and people say: ‘Are you religious?’ but I refuse to fall into that category. I have a relationship with Him. All the praying gets done in camp. I pray whether I’m fighting or not. Every day humans are all in a fight, whether your kids are getting out of control or whatever, it’s always a fight to be a good person and be the best you can be and not get sucked into the corrupt things. So I pray daily. I need it — I’ve got four kids.

“Sometimes it’s a struggle because of the way the world is. It’s pretty easy to go bad, but I don’t want to go that route. I want to do nothing but good, as much as I can, not only to my family but to my friends that are around me.”