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Jose Guadalupe Pintor wasn’t cut out to be a celebrity. A quiet, gentle little man from the Cuajimalpa neighborhood in Mexico City, he might have gone through life as unnoticed as your average street vendor, had it not been for the fact that early on, he was tested and found to be a natural-born warrior.
Lupe wouldn’t back down, when older kids tried to crowd him out of his ice cream vending territory on the streets of Cuajimalpa. He fought them off with a ferocity that later would win the respect of boxing fans throughout the world when he squared off against some of the greatest ringmen of his time.
There was nothing fancy in the Pintor fighting style. He was an honest workman, who never gave less than his best. Hard-nosed, determined, and brutal are recurring words in his resume. He was also hard-hitting, and relentless—as well as courageous, and proud.
“Lupillo,” as he was sometimes called, began his pro career in 1974 at age 19, in Tijuana. He looked good, but not great, in a couple of Inglewood Forum appearances the following year, and was outboxed by Alberto Sandoval at the Forum early in 1976. That loss stuck in his craw, until he avenged it by tracking down and stopping the elusive “Superfly” in a title bout four years later.
Pintor won the world bantamweight title in a most unconvincing manner, being awarded a “gift” decision over the great Carlos Zarate in Las Vegas on June 3, 1979. But any notion that he was what the trade calls a cheese champ went out the window over the next three years as he defended the title successfully against Sandoval, Eijiro Murata, Johnny Owen, Albert Davila, Jose Uziga, Jovito Rengifo, Hurricane Teru, and Seung-Hoon Lee, while besting Jose Luis Soto and Jorge Lujan in non-title bouts.
The Johnny Owens fight was especially brutal, and the gallant little Welshman left the ring in a coma from which he never recovered. Pintor was deeply troubled by that tragedy, and considered resigning his title and walking away from boxing altogether. But three months later he returned to the ring, encouraged by a “Good Luck!” message from the Owens family, with whom he had become close.
Brutal is the word that best describes the bloody war of wills in which Pintor lost to the great Puerto Rican Hall-of-Famer, Wilfredo Gomez, in a bid for the WBC super-bantamweight title, in 1982. Knocked down several times, the gritty Mexican kept taking the fight to one of the greatest punchers of all time, until finally succumbing in Round 14. That fight took something out of Pintor. He was never quite the same warrior again—though he did subsequently win that same title by decisioning Juan Meza in Mexico City, in 1985. He lost to unknown Billy White in his next bout, and retired after losing his title to Samart Payakaroon in Bangkok, Thailand, on Jan. 18, 1986.
Sadly, the modest little Cuajimalpa ice cream vendor attempted a comeback eight years after he had retired from the ring. Slow and bloated, twenty-five pounds over his true fighting weight, he had nothing left but his great courage.
We choose to remember Lupe Pintor as the great champion he surely was: iron-willed, incredibly determined, and tough as a keg of nails.
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