Ninety minutes before his bout against Jose Sanmartin would begin, Mauricio Lara sat in a curtained off dressing room area inside the converted bull ring he would be fighting in that night enjoying an airplane-sized bag of salty snacks. Lara was laughing and joking with team members, and his good friend and featherweight titleholder Emanuel Navarrette, looking wholly unconcerned with his scheduled task in the ring.
Every fighter’s personality is different outside of the ring than it is inside of it, but few flip the switch quite as dramatically as Lara does. During the week of the fight, Lara was cheerful, acting almost as a welcoming ambassador for fellow fighters and workers involved with the promotion, greeting everyone at the fight hotel whether they approached him or not. Lara expressed great pride in being able to headline a show in his hometown of Mexico City, and the grin on his face proved it.
When media members asked about Leigh Wood, whom he was scheduled to face for the WBA featherweight crown in late September, he expressed that he felt Wood was an honest man and that his injury was legitimate. Once in a while, when asked specifically about Sanmartin, he would give glimpses of the monster he would transform into when the bell sounded.
“I’m a train without brakes, nobody can stop me,” he told reporters, while holding his young daughter. “I’m going to destroy him.”
While walking to the ring, Lara’s smile remained as he relished the sounds of the live mariachi band playing him in. His promoter Eddie Hearn later remarked that he was a little concerned watching his entrance because he had never seen Lara smile before.
The moment his robe was removed and his introduction began however, Lara morphed back into his fighting identity, one of the most overtly violent and animated boxers on the planet.
Lara’s fighting life is full of these dichotomies. His sparring sessions contain none of the decorum that most fighters’ sparring sessions do. Lara wails away on his partners like he wants to badly hurt them. The hallmarks of cooperation are nowhere to be found. Then, after pummeling his partners, Lara spends the night on bunk beds in a ranch house with them, playing Playstation and chatting about life while gazing out the window at the threes that pattern the vast countryside.
In the mornings, Lara enjoys running and stretching in the mountains, where he says the air is cleaner and the nature surroundings are peaceful, as if he needs serenity before the brutality he plans to commit.
In Sanmartin, Lara found a willing recipient of his power shots, the absolute ideal style matchup for him. Sanmartin tried to crowd Lara and absorb blows on his arms and with his gloves—in other words, standing directly on the train tracks. It was a valiant approach, standing directly in front of Lara who laughed, snarled and uncorked his brand of unhinged offense.
After two rounds of one-sided offense, Lara received the fuel to hit yet another gear, a low-blow from Sanmartin. An animated Lara winced, marched around holding his groin and generally started to look annoyed. Whatever barriers he’d erected mentally to keep himself under control in the fight were now toppled. When the action resumed, seconds before the end of the round, Lara raced over and landed a left hook to the body and an uppercut that snapped Sanmartin’s head back. Prior to the fight he’d promised that the fight wouldn’t go past four rounds, but in this moment he’d decided it wouldn’t go three.
In the third round, Lara wobbled Sanmartin with a sweeping right hand that forced Lara to take a knee. Presented with a wounded opponent, Lara is ravenous, and before long he had Sanmartin trapped on the ropes, unleashing punches and in a fugue state ignoring the few Sanmartin offered in an attempt to escape. Just as the referee was going to wave the fight off anyway, Lara cracked Sanmartin with a left hook that sent him into a seated position, his back leaning through the divide between the middle and bottom ropes.
What makes Lara both thrilling to watch and compelling to analyze is that he disregards boxing convention altogether. At times his wide, windmill swings border on the comical, but they’re anything but. It’s jarring to see a fighter in a world title picture fight with such untethered rage and reckless abandon, the way one might look in a street fight, fueled by sheer emotion and guided by nothing other than the desire to harm the person in front of them. Lara carries that approach into high level boxing.
There is, of course, technique and nuance to his approach. In the midst of the wide-swinging frenzy, Lara will still bring a few straight shots up the middle, or shorten his left hook and let it go with a mere turn of the elbow. However, Lara’s knockouts since his explosion onto the world scene in 2021 have felt especially frightening.
Lara scrubs off the veneer of boxing being sport and turns it into pure carnage. His knockout win over Emilio Sanchez earlier this year will be shortlisted for Knockout of the Year. The frenzied, leaping left hook that bent Sanchez backwards evoked memories of Deontay Wilder’s knockout of Bermane Stiverne in 2017, both in terms of the position the victims were rendered in while unconscious, but also in the unrestrained, brutal way it was delivered.
Following his win over Sanmartin, Lara clearly still needed time to decompress before he could go back to the kindly version of himself. When asked about Leigh Wood, Lara now said he was convinced that he was faking the injury that caused their fight’s postponement completely. And when asked about Josh Warrington, he coldly declared that he wanted to “end his career.”
Lara carried his daughter in his arms back to the locker room. He says she is the reason he wants to become world champion, which is perhaps instructive when understanding Lara. Aitana was born just two months prior to him facing Warrington for the first time. Boxing wasn’t something Lara even enjoyed, or dedicated himself to fully at first, by his own admission. Prior to the Warrington fight, Lara wasn’t the same Bronco we see now—in fact, that’s the very reason Warrington selected him from a field of four prospective opponents. But the birth of his daughter provided the fuel he needed to become something greater. How else could someone muster the kind of ferocity he fights with without tapping into some kind of protective instincts? How do you defend against a man possessed?
In his neighborhood of San Felipe de Jesus, there is a mural of Lara painted on a roadside wall. The image of his face appears next to superstar luchador Psycho Clown. It’s fitting, not just that he appears next to another one of Mexico City’s favorite sons, but next to a man who becomes someone entirely different when they enter a ring too. When Lara leaves the ring though, having cashed a check towards his daughter’s future, one perhaps far away from that neighborhood, he can smile once again.
Corey Erdman is a boxing writer and commentator based in Toronto, ON, Canada. Follow him on Twitter @corey_erdman