For Shawn Estrada, competition is about more than just a medal
OLYMPICS
U.S. middleweight boxer will be thinking of his gravely ill father when he climbs into the ring Saturday in Beijing.
BEIJING -- Juan Estrada knows time is not on his side. So like a battered fighter waiting for the bell, he holds, clinches, leans against the ropes -- anything to stay on his feet a little longer.
Doctors told him he had two weeks to live. That was six months ago, yet Estrada isn't ready to go just yet. For 23 years, he has been training his son to be an Olympic boxer. Saturday afternoon at Beijing Workers' Stadium, that son, Shawn Estrada, will climb into the ring for the first time in the Games.
And Juan Estrada has determined that nothing, not even death, will prevent him from seeing the fight.
"I asked God to let me live," he said in Spanish. "That's why I'm here."
It's also a big reason why Shawn will be in China. Because on the eve of the final qualifying tournament, with Estrada's Olympic hopes bleak, the boxer broke training to see his dying father, who has liver and kidney problems.
That visit changed everything.
"His sickness, I don't know, it just gave me a lot of energy to fight," said Estrada, who qualified for the Games by winning the middleweight title at the tournament. "He tells me every day 'The reason I can't give up is because of you.' That's why I train hard.
"He can't make it to China, but he's going to get to see me in the Olympics."
Father and son haven't always inspired one another. In fact, there was a time about five years ago when they barely spoke to one another with the son, tired of his father's incessant badgering to box, leaving his parents' East Los Angeles home to live in a friend's garage.
"I just thought there was more," Shawn said. "We have a hate-love thing."
Estrada was speaking of his father, but he could say the same thing about his all-consuming sport, which gave him everything -- medals, trophies, travel opportunities -- at the same time it robbed him of the opportunity to have a normal life.
"It was boxing, boxing. Sleep, eat, everything boxing," he said. "I just got tired of it."
But Juan sacrificed too. A promising lightweight as a young man in Mexicali, Mexico, he had to give up boxing to support his family. So it fell to his three boys to fulfill the dream. And of the three, Shawn was the best.
"From the time he was 6 years old I would take him from school to boxing, from school to boxing," Juan said.
And when Shawn had won everything there was to win and had beaten everybody there was to beat in Hanford, Calif., Juan moved the family to Los Angeles.
