The Big Return

They noticed him because it’s hard not to notice Marty Maestas, a compact bundle of muscle and spark and a smile he flashes nearly as often as he breathes.

They see him every day at the gym where he works as a maintenance man and works out maintaining his body for the dream that sustains him.

Marty “Machine Gun” Maestas, 45, wants to get back in the ring.

He’s wanted that since his last boxing match in 2000, when he was knocked out, taken to a hospital and then suspended indefinitely by the New Mexico Athletic Commission.

With the support of a group of men who have taken notice of him at the gym, he’s fighting back. One of those men is state Sen. Sander Rue, an Albuquerque Republican.

“This guy is so stoked,” Rue said. “He trains so hard. He’s in great shape. As far as he’s concerned, he’s ready to go.”

But before that can happen, Maestas has to prove to the commission that he is healthy enough to take on a sport that has nearly killed him.

Health, though, is not the only thing Maestas says he has to prove.

“I’m on the road to being a winner, not a loser,” he said. “I’ve been a loser all my life.”

As a light middleweight from 1995 to 2000, he lost plenty — 14 out of 18 matches. Nine of his bouts ended with his being laid flat by a knockout. Two of his fights landed him in the hospital — the first time in 1997 when doctors said he had suffered a stroke.

“I almost died,” he said nonchalantly. “I had blood clots in my head. But I still fought 10 times after that. I couldn’t figure out why I sometimes had no feeling on my left side. Nerve damage, I assumed.”

When he lost his last fight in 2000, officials suspected he had been felled by cocaine use and complications from his stroke.

Maestas, though, blamed the loss on failing to drink enough water and losing 20 pounds in two weeks to make weight.

“I lost weight too fast,” he said. “I collapsed from dehydration, not brain damage, not drugs.”

There were those who thought he had been unfairly judged or pushed too quickly into fights he wasn’t ready for, that he had a talent for boxing had he been given the chance.

“Machine Gun was an exciting fighter. A crowd pleaser,” Albuquerque boxing promoter Lenny Fresquez told the New Mexico Boxing website in 2002. “He didn’t always win, but he always came to fight.”

Maestas has had to fight his whole life.

He left his home and his family, broken by divorce and his difficult ways, when he was 15 and obsessed with making it big as a break dancer in New York City. For six months, the high school dropout worked toward that endeavor in Bushwick, a ragged neighborhood in Brooklyn, before returning to Albuquerque in the 1980s to form the Majestic Floor Warriors, which he says was the city’s first professional break-dance group.

“We taught kids how to put negative energies into positive,” he said.

But he had yet to learn that himself.

Maestas ended up on the streets — with the occasional stay in jail — smoking marijuana, snorting speed and hustling people for money at the Downtown bus station. At night, he slept on the rooftops of bank buildings, where heating vents kept him warm.

It was during one of his stays in what was then the Downtown jail that he became obsessed with the idea of boxing. From a thin sliver of window, he could watch Bobby Foster, then a Bernalillo County sheriff’s deputy, sparring outside the jail. Foster had been a light heavyweight world champion before retiring from the ring in 1978 and taking up the badge.

“He was the greatest,” Maestas said. “As soon as I got out, I started training.”

He was 27, old in boxing terms for a beginner.

“All the kids have been boxing all their lives, like when they are 5 to 18, in comparison,” he said. “But that means I haven’t been hit as many times as they have in the head.”

Maestas’ regimen includes running three miles a day, shadowboxing for 15 minutes straight and fast, sparring, working out. Again and again.

This time, he wants to fight in the junior middleweight division — a weight he says suits him better.

He is clean, sober, driven and, he thinks, smarter, having finally obtained his high school diploma in 2009 — proof, he said, that his mind is sound.

“He thinks that if he is smart enough to graduate, then he must not be all punched out,” Rue said. “He wants to show the world he can come back from all that he has been through. That’s his dream.”

The commission has asked Maestas to provide an MRI of his brain to clear him to fight again. That’s an expensive proposition for a maintenance man and erstwhile boxer.

Which is where Rue and the men at the gym come in. For weeks now, they have been working on a way to get Maestas that MRI. Last week, Rue said they were getting closer.

“We are all just keeping our fingers crossed that this can work for him,” Rue said.

Boxing has nearly killed Maestas, but it has also saved him. No one knows, though, what it will do to him now.

A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest, as the Simon and Garfunkel song “The Boxer” goes.

What Maestas hears is the clang of a bell, signaling the beginning of Round 2.

UpFront is a daily front-page news and opinion column. Comment directly to Joline Gutierrez Krueger at 823-3603, jkrueger@abqjournal.com or follow her on Twitter @jolinegkg. Go to www.abqjournal.com/letters/new to submit a letter to the editor.
— This article appeared on page A1 of the Albuquerque Journal