Do you think mayorga is a bad person or just a nutcase

False dichotomy. People are complex.

 

To be fair Mayorga came from nothing. His upbringing would have less than ideal. No excuses but I can see him being a nut job. Apparently his arms have scars from knife fights and ran with gangs as a kid. I recall one quote from him along the lines of “It was either dig ditches or go fight for a living”. Not much of a choice. He’s a sportsman I don’t watch his fights to learn about ethics or religion.

From a website:

• He was born on October 3, 1973 to Eddy and Miriam, who lived in Managua, Nicaragua. The family struggled with finances. His father had a small bakery shop and his mother was a housewife. Ricardo had a rough childhood and he grew up amidst fistfights almost every other day.
  
  
• These poor conditions made him tough and he grew up to be a very short tempered, ferocious teenager. He admired his father for all the hardships that he went through to provide for the family. When he was growing up, almost every essential commodity such as electricity, clean water and medical services were scarce in the city.
  
  
• Ricardo did his early schooling from his hometown, and as he had already developed a knack for fighting and bodybuilding, he was never good at studies.
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• While he was in a military school in Managua, one of his teachers asked him to try his hands at sports, but sadly it was found that Ricardo wasn’t particularly good at sports either. All he enjoyed was getting into brawls and fights and that’s what compelled him to learn boxing. His elder brother Jaime was already a boxer and this helped him a bit.

 

This is a good read and puts Mayorga in perspective. From espn before the Spinks fight.

Mayorga was born on Oct. 3, 1973 in Nicaragua decimated a year earlier by an earthquake that killed nearly 10,000 people and left nearly 200,000 homeless. His childhood was a crash course in survival. One of six siblings whose parents were destitute farmers, he lived in a house with no electricity and no running water. A sixth-grade dropout, he took to the streets, picking pockets, hitting the discos, stealing bikes, riding wild bulls at local fairs for 20 pesos and fighting.

When Ricardo was 11, an older brother, Jaime, pushed him into the ring at the local neighborhood gym. Over the next 10 years, Mayorga had a staggering 112 amateur bouts, winning 107 of them. The five losses? All to southpaws.

Celebrated in Managua as a rising star, a possible heir to Central American legend Roberto Duran, Mayorga turned pro in august 1993. He fought in Latin America for seven years, going 2131. King didnt find out about him until December 2000, when he was in Turmero, Venezuela, for the WBAs KO Drugs program. WBA president Gilberto Mendoza urged the promoter to take a look at Mayorga, who was on a local card. King signed him on the spot, and a little over a year later, Mayorga won the WBA welterweight title with a fifth-round knockout of Andrew Six Heads lewis at the sovereign Center in reading, pa.

As Mayorgas name took wing in America, so did his legend, fed by stories he loves to tell about himself. He says he was a national arm wrestling champion as well as a five-time freestyle bicycle champ. He says he was undefeated in 84 street fights as a teenager. He says a tough guy once put a gun to his head, but Mayorga took it away from the guy and beat him with it. Then there is the time he flipped his SUV (it rolled four times), the 11 arrests (most for street fights), the pile of womens panties, the part ownership of the brothels

And the drag racing. Get him started on the drag racing, and his voice soars into a melody of love for his two nitrous-charged Hondas. The races, the fans, the excitementhe loves it almost as much as he hates training. Just last month, some guy in Managua challenged him. The stakes: their cars. El Matador blew the guy away, and when the loser handed Mayorga the keys, the champion gave them back, saying that anyone with the balls to race him deserved his own car.