Stansbury Park • The belt is red with a golden eagle and golden gloves, and the boxer won it with an overhand right. The punch buckled his opponent’s knees as his body crashed to the mat. In the middle of a ring in the middle of the country, Jose Haro raised his arms in celebration last June, the United States Boxing Association’s new featherweight champion. Today the champ pulls the belt from a silver case so someone else can hold it. It is far heavier than it looks.
Almost a year has passed since Haro fought the fight he hoped would change his life, since he knocked out Daniel “Twitch” Franco, since Franco fell into a coma, and Haro wonders when, or if, he will box again. The Utah fighter has agreed to three different matches with three different boxers since last June, only to have each back out for different reasons.
“I think it has a lot to do with the Franco fight,” Haro said recently. “I think the way the fight ended, I honestly do feel like it puts fear in people.”
‘Hard Luck Haro’
The name on the belt reads “Jose ‘Pepito’ Haro”, but the boxer is often referred to by another nickname: “Hard Luck Haro.” In 2015, Haro was shopping at a West Valley City Walmart when he was chased into the parking lot and shot, the bullets piercing both of his feet. He fought back from that brush with death. When he could only get fights as an underdog, he took on favorites and bested them. This latest hardship, however, has Haro considering ending his boxing career.
“I’m so frustrated with boxing. I can’t catch a break,” he said. “I’m not making enough fighting once a year. Is it really worth me putting myself at risk?”
Over his career, Haro has become one of the biggest names in Utah’s small boxing community. He was on the Junior Olympic team as an amateur and has gone on as a pro to compile a 14-1-1 record, with eight knockouts. But at 30 years old, Haro has never fought for the kind of payday he feels he deserves.
After the Franco fight, Haro thought he was set for a world title shot in London with the International Boxing Federation featherweight champion, a British fighter named Lee Selby. In the end, Selby’s team picked a different opponent. The man showed up to the fight overweight and was disqualified.
“I had every assurance that fight was happening,” Haro’s agent, Whit Haydon, said. “It had a bad effect on Jose. He kind of hid out for three or four weeks after the fight got pulled from us. He took it really hard.
“I think it did come down to somebody feeling he was too hot,” Haydon added.
In March, Haro planned to be part of a card at Madison Square Garden before his opponent pulled out because of illness. Last weekend, Haro was supposed to be in Kansas defending his USBA title — only to see another opponent pull out, this time because of injury.
(Chris Detrick | The Salt Lake Tribune) Boxer Jose Haro poses for a portrait at his home in Tooele Friday, Dec. 22, 2017.
Haro is the organization’s featherweight champ. But a year after winning the belt, he wonders how long he’ll be able to hold onto it before he’s forced to vacate his title.
“I think they’re seeing my situation and that’s why I’m still the champion,” he said. “They’re seeing it’s not my fault that I haven’t been fighting.”
A clean hit
When Haro stepped into the ring in Sloan, Iowa, on June 10, 2017, he thought his life was about to change. He thought a knockout of Daniel Franco would clear the path for bigger fights, bigger paydays.
And so Jose Haro was thinking “knockout.”
Haro doesn’t like getting hit. His father made him take boxing lessons after he caught him shoplifting candy as a boy. Sometimes he wishes it had been singing or golf. But once he’s in the ring, he has to do it.
“I have to knock his block off before he knocks mine,” he said. “After that we can go back to being friends. But when I’m in that ring, I’m thinking I’ve got to knock this [expletive] out.”
Haro thought the fight should have been stopped earlier. But in the eighth round, Franco swung and Haro ducked, and answered back with a right hand. A clean hit.
“I think about it all the time,” Haro said.
Franco was taken to a hospital and placed in a medical coma as doctors addressed his brain bleed. They also found skull fractures and a separate brain bleed from before the Haro fight, Franco’s father told the L.A. Times last year. A portion of Franco’s skull was removed. Nearly a year later, Franco has progressed in his recovery. In a recent interview with BoxingNewsOnline.net, the 26-year-old said he had begun attending school. But Franco, once a promising prospect, will never fight again.
Haro wonders how it will affect him if and when he ever gets back in the ring.
“It’s hard sometimes because I think to myself, ‘How am I going to react the next time I get in the ring?’” he said. “Am I going to fight the way I always fight, or am I going to hold back?”
Paying the bills
“Always have a Plan A,” Haro says.
Memorabilia from his favorite football team, the Seattle Seahawks, photos of his five children, and reminders of the success he’s had boxing fill the office in his home in a new subdivision in Stansbury Park.
But boxing doesn’t pay for the roof over them.
“Boxing has never paid my mortgage or my car or anything,” he said. “That’s just by hard work. My wife working, me working.”
(Chris Detrick | The Salt Lake Tribune) At his home in Tooele on Friday, Dec. 22, 2017, boxer Jose Haro holds the championship belt he won by defeating Daniel Franco.
Haro delivers Pepsi, waking up each day at 3 a.m. to lug cases of soda to stores around the valley. He thinks the work has hurt his shoulder. Unlike boxing, he knows the work will provide a steady income for his family.
“This boxing world is so grimy,” he said. “The only way to make it is with a lot of luck.”
Boxing, some years, has cost Haro money. He makes between $5,000 and $10,000 per fight. Then he pays his manager, his cut-man, his trainer, his taxes.
“Sometimes it’s not worth it,” he said. “But it’s that hope. I have hope. If I continue to win, I might get that big fight and a good payday.”
Haro is 30 but looks younger. He feels much younger, too, he said. He thinks he could fight for another four or five years. But when he thinks about Franco, he thinks about his own family — and he wants to make sure if he’s ever hurt badly that the fight was worth it. Because both men knew the dangers of their sport, the objective, and the brutality required to win. And in the end, it has redefined both of their lives.
“It feels,” Haro said, “like I won this belt for nothing.”
