Playboy Magazine South Africa November 2013 November 2013 | Page 79

the Hygrades and Nuyorican Original motorcycle
clubs. Puerto Rican colors flying. I am edging 75
miles per hour. “This is like a drag race,” Jennifer
says. “The Indy 500 or something.”
That is the description I use later, when I meet
Héctor Camacho Jr His father’s funeral cortege is
like the Indy 500.
Héctor Jr grins. Not wistful. Wry. Machito, they
call him. Boxer like his old man. Says, “Exactly
how Pops woulda wanted it.”

THE SON
Héctor Camacho Jr was training for a fight in
Kansas City last November when his wife took
the call. His father was on life support in a
San Juan hospital. Coma. Brain dead. Abuelita
Maria ready to pull the respirator plug. “My wife
didn’t say nothing at first,” Machito says. “But
I could tell the moment I saw the look on her
face. Didn’t even ask how. Went out for a walk.
Prayed and cried all night. Next day I asked what
happened. She said, ‘He got shot.’ ”
Single bullet. Entered the left side of 50-yearold Héctor Sr.’s jaw, sliced his carotid artery,
destroyed two vertebrae in his neck, lodged in his
right shoulder. Shot while sitting in the passenger
seat of a late-model Mustang outside a bar in
Bayamón, Puerto Rico. Seven at night. The driver,
Adrián Moreno, capped three times, died on
the scene. Moreno’s pockets stuffed with nine
glassine envelopes filled with cocaine.
“Damn streets,” Machito says. “I told him to
stay the hell off the streets. I’d say, ‘You’re old
now. You have granddaughters. Change your
life around, Pops.’ He’d just smile and say,
‘Everything’s good. I’m the Macho Man.’ ”
Bayamón is scary, dangerous at night.
Particularly along the infamous 167 Avenue,
the town’s main artery that runs just west of
San Juan. Bakery near the bar in question;
Pentecostal church and paint-ball arcade flanking
the very spot, in front of a lawyer’s office, where
Macho was shot. Seems an innocuous enough
neighborhood in daylight. “But once the sun
goes down it’s like two different countries,” says
a former New York City narcotics detective who
worked in Bayamón on the Drug Enforcement
Agency's joint drug task force. “That strip of road,
that whole area, turns. People buying heroin and
coke. We were cops, for Christ’s sake, and they
used to warn us never to stop at a red light after
dark in Bayamón or else we’d get carjacked.”
Macho’s oldest son, one of four boys, nods his
head. All of them sensed it. Their father’s high
life a movie set waiting to be struck. Subtraction
by addiction. “The cocaine was his downfall,”
Machito says. “He loved that fuckin’ drug.”
I catch up with Héctor Jr on a brisk, sunny
February morning in upper Manhattan, the edge
of El Barrio. Making a promotional appearance
at a milk and soda warehouse. A handsome
and bearded light-middleweight, Machito flew
to New York from his home in Panama to fight
on an undercard in Brooklyn. But one of the
headliners busted a rib in training and the entire

slate was postponed. His lawyer set up the
promotional gig to salvage a few bucks out of the
trip. “With what happened to his father, he’s got
about a year left to capitalize on his name,” the
lawyer tells me. “Less if he loses his next fight.
He’s no kid.”
Machito is thoughtful, funny, honest. A
convert to Islam, he holds no illusions about
the fight game, about his old man, about his
own shadowed space between the two. At 34
years old, with a 54–5–1 record that includes 29
knockouts, he recognizes he is on the downside
of a prosaic career. Still, not many fighters can
say they fought on the same card as their dad

He had a great chin. He
was on the floor, what,
three times in 88 fights?
And never knocked out.
He never gets credit for
his chin.
three times – both winning all three. The sparring
together, the tips in the ring, the life lessons on
the street, perhaps they make up for the fact that
Macho wasn’t much of a father.
“I don’t think he knew any better,” Machito
says. “He didn’t have his own father around.”
The pattern repeated starting with Machito’s
birth. His father, then 16 and coming off the
first of his three amateur Golden Gloves boxing
titles, missed the occasion. He was doing his first
stint in New York City’s infamous Rikers Island
detention center for car theft. A few months after
his release he was back inside, convicted of
being an accessory to a carjacking.
“The kid was trouble,” says retired NYPD
detective Juan Checo, who worked Spanish
Harlem during Macho’s teenage years. “He
would have been just another of the hundreds of
skels we put away who nobody would have ever
heard of if he hadn’t become such a great boxer.”
Macho had arrived in America at the age of
three after his mother, María Matías, separated
from her husband and moved her four children
at the time from Bayamón into a New York City
housing project. She doted on Macho, then her
youngest, and he grew up spoiled an d wild,
running with gangs, street fighting. His idol was
Bruce Lee, and when one of his high school
teachers noticed his flair for karate, he convinced
Macho to channel that athleticism into boxing.
“I may not have agreed with the way he lived
his life outside the ring,” says Machito of his
father. “But he was still a special man. And
you want to know something? He never lied
to me, no matter what the circumstance. He
was always honest. His heart was great. He
enjoyed life, and the people loved him. He
was just an overgrown kid. He had toys. All his
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NOEMBER 2013

karate things. His nunchakus. His fighting sticks.
Played with them all the time. At home he would
change clothes four or five times a day. Put on
a Superman outfit, then walk out dressed like a
ninja. Then the Spider-Man costume.”
Despite his success in the ring, committing
felonies was another habit Macho never
outgrew. His rap sheet is long and varied, drugs
and alcohol inevitably involved. A warrant was
issued for his arrest as recently as last year in
Florida for allegedly assaulting his youngest son.
Perhaps the most bizarre incident occurred in
2004 when Macho was convicted of clambering
through a skylight to burglarize a Gulfport,
Mississippi computer store. He pissed on the
rug and made off with a pile of laptops. Police
found ecstasy pills when they caught up with
him in a hotel in Biloxi. Seven-year sentence
was commuted. Served less than three weeks.
A notorious tax scofflaw over his lifetime,
Camacho owed several states and the federal
government more than half a million in back
taxes, with New Jersey still going after him for
$300,000 at the time of his murder. Didn’t seem
to bother him. Not much did.
“One time he had to take a drug test,” says
Machito. “He was on probation, and he had
been getting high for a couple of days. We
were driving, and I said, ‘What are you, fucking
crazy? You got a drug test today. You’re gonna
get caught.’
“So he pulls over into a project. Sees this little
kid, calls him over. ‘You behaving in school? You
being good with your mother and father? You
want some money?’ Kid nods
his head yeah. He says, ‘I’ll
give you a hundred dollars
if you pee in this cup
right now.’ The kid peed
in the cup and he
gave him a hundred
dollars and we left.”
I mention to
Machito that I’ve