BERSERK

A debut biography focuses on a Venezuelan boxer’s troubled life and times.

Stradley’s book, the first installment of the Hamilcar Noir series, tells the story of champion boxer Edwin Valero. Valero was born in 1981, joined children’s criminal gangs early on, started drinking and doing drugs before hitting puberty, and soon began winning amateur national boxing championships. He made his professional boxing debut in 2002 and rose quickly in the fighting ranks, briefly holding a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records for the highest number of first-round knockouts in his super-featherweight division. Along the way, his ferocity and ability in the ring drew comments from expert sports watchers, many of whom are quoted in the work as saying things like “Every now and then in the sport of boxing you see somebody come along and you’ll say, ‘That’s a guy that’s got the goods.’ ” As the author observes, “With a style suited to the professional ranks, and a hunger for fame, Valero could invade these lower weight classes like the Visigoths sacking Rome.” Alongside this portrait of growing fame and professional success, Stradley darkens the picture of Valero’s personal life, in which heavy drug use (and no doubt repeated head trauma) gradually took over and turned the fighter into what the author refers to simply as “a Rorschach test made in blood.” The drug use made him intensely paranoid. He suspected his wife was having an affair, that strangers were cheating him and intending him harm, and that the “police, Venezuelan gangsters,” and even his mother “were conspiring against him.” In 2010, “loaded to the gills” with cocaine, he supposedly killed his wife in a hotel room and later took his own life in custody. Stradley narrates all of this in a clipped, hard-hitting narrative style that makes no excuses and offers no apologies. Boxing fans interested in this minor tragic figure should be captivated.

A gritty, absorbing account of a boxer who couldn’t defeat his own inner demons.