Puerto Rico Mourns Wilfredo Gomez, the 'Bazooka' Who Knocked Down a Division

One of the greatest fighters the island ever produced has died at 69, leaving a record of 17 straight title defenses by knockout and a place at the center of boxing's golden rivalry years.

Puerto Rico is in mourning for Wilfredo Gomez, the fighter known across the island and the sport simply as Bazooka, who has died at the age of 69. Gomez died on the night of October 10, his son, Wilfredo Gomez Jr., confirmed in an interview with Telemundo, according to Primera Hora on October 11. By October 13 the loss led the island's news, with the San Juan Daily Star's local section fronting Puerto Rico's grief.

The record Gomez leaves is one of the most extraordinary in boxing. He was a three-division world champion, holding titles at super bantamweight, featherweight and super featherweight, with a professional ledger of 44 wins, 3 losses and 1 draw, and 42 of those wins by knockout. The figure that defines him, though, is a streak. Across his reign at 122 pounds, Gomez defended his title 17 times, and he won all 17 of those defenses by knockout. Power like that does not merely win fights. It empties divisions, and it made Gomez one of the most feared punchers of his era. He was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 1995.

His single most famous night was a defeat. In 1981, Gomez moved up to challenge Mexico's Salvador Sanchez and lost, the first blemish on his record, in a bout that has lived in boxing memory ever since as one of the great chapters of the Puerto Rico and Mexico rivalry that gave the sport so much of its drama. That fight, and the rivalry it belonged to, placed Gomez at the center of boxing's golden years, when the featherweight and junior-featherweight classes carried a glamour the heavier divisions could not match.

Primera Hora's report noted that Gomez had suffered brain damage associated with his long career in the ring, a detail that sits heavily over any celebration of a knockout artist's life. The violence that made him a legend exacted its price, as it has from so many fighters of his generation, and the island's grief is colored by the knowledge of what the sport takes even from those it exalts.

For Puerto Rico, Gomez was more than a champion. He was a figure of national pride in an era when the island's fighters announced themselves to the world with their fists, a lineage that runs through the decades of Puerto Rican boxing that followed him. Generations of young fighters on the island grew up on the legend of the 17 knockouts and the night he stood across the ring from Sanchez. That is the Gomez being mourned this week, the puncher who made Puerto Rico a boxing nation and whose name, Bazooka, still carries the sound of the thing he did better than almost anyone.

The tributes that filled San Juan's front pages on October 13 were for a sporting life lived at the very top of a brutal trade. Wilfredo Gomez was 69. The record is 44 and 3, with 42 knockouts and 17 straight title defenses ending the same way. The island will not see his like soon, and it knows it.