Mi Vida Loca

It isn't often that one of those teary-eyed sports documentaries moves me. Most of the time the damage to the athlete in question is self-inflicted and no amount of operatic drama on the tragic rise and fall would change it.

But I have to admit, the piece done by James Brown for HBO on Johnny Tapia which aired last night was not the standard fare of good athlete gone self-destructively bad.

While listening to his up and down saga which recently culminated with a cocaine-induced coma, I couldn't really get a grip on why Johnny Tapia was different from any number of other charismatic athletes who veered off the course of a successful career and on to a path toward tragedy.

Not until I heard the story of his mother getting raped, stabbed 22 times with scissors and a screwdriver and killed right before his eyes without ever getting a chance to say goodbye to her.

While he was spilling his guts to James Brown, holding back tears over his continued rage, over his battles with addiction, over the bipolar disorder that helps create and simultaneously destroy his angels and his monsters, I couldn't help but marvel at not only how much he's overcome in his life, but that he even has a life any more to overcome.

No doubt his wife Teresa's angelic demeanor is a great help. At one point Brown asked Tapia if he cared whether or not he lived or died and Tapia replied that while he loved boxing and he loved his family, he didn't mind dying if it quelled his inner pain. Brown, in a respectable fit of good interviewing, then turned to Teresa and asked her how that reality made her feel. I don't recall her exact quote but something along the lines of how she would sometimes stare at him for long moments of time trying to remember every detail of his face and his smile because she really couldn't be sure whether or not she'd ever see him again.

The best part about the piece is that the fact that Tapia eventually (after a 3 year drug suspension) became the WBO junior bantamweight champion is almost irrelevent to the human interest angle of the story. He could have been any individual with a terrible history and an unrelenting struggle to survive and it wouldn't have diminished the impact one iota.

I don't know when/if it will be rebroadcast by HBO but if you get a chance to see it, the time spent is well worth it. It isn't often that I'd feel sorry for a guy with a 125 page arrest record but I think in this case, he's one down and out athlete I'll be rooting for to make it.