“Life has given me more blows than boxing,” he confesses Jose Luis Pacheco, better known in the popular imagination as ‘Dum Dum’ Pacheco, a boxer who first achieved glory as an athlete after being released from prison, then as an actor in some mythical films that were box office successes and who almost arrived in the United States from the hand of Frank Sinatra.
PachecoBorn in 1949 in Madrid, he lived his childhood in Alejandro Dumas street, in the vicinity of the old Vicente Calderón, whose construction caused his family to move further south of Madrid, to the Carabanchel neighborhood. The street was part of his school and also of his sentence in those difficult sixties.
He entered the street band ‘Los Ojos Negros’ as a child and in one of the many altercations in which he was involved was when he threatened the owner of a nightclub to allow the group Los Dayson to play, of which a young man was part Camilo Blanes, later known as Camilo Sesto. “I did not have much relationship with him but I know that he thanked me for that gesture. His brother told me once we met,” he recalls.
Franco, Jesús Gil, Pedro Carrasco, Perico Fernández, Tony Leblanc, Bruno Lomas, Mickey Rourke and Frank Sinatra are some peculiar characters with whom ‘Dum Dum’ Pacheco was related
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At that time, with fights and robberies the order of the day, in the end he ended up in jail, where he coincided with Jesus Gil. “I became a good friend of his to the point that he gave me an Atlético card to go to the stadium. In fact, whenever I went to the field I sat next to him in the box.”
He got out of jail because he managed to save the life of Saturnino Garcia Guirao, the prison priest. “That allowed Don Leoncio, the director, to grant me my freedom and go out on the street again,” he told EFE. Pacheco, whose intense life comes to light again with the reissue of the book ‘Piss blood’ (Autsaider División Sesuda), written in his own handwriting, as he emphasizes.
When he got out of jail he started training with Pampito González at the Palacio de Deportes, he found refuge in boxing and touched glory. First as an amateur, with 90 victories in 93 fights, and later as a professional, with 109 fights, 73 wins by KO, 14 by points and 22 losses. His potential on the ring earned him the nickname of ‘Dum Dum’What did the journalist wear? Julio Cesar Iglesias because its blows were as powerful as the bullets of that name, which are ridged at the tip and, when hitting the target, open and cause more damage than normal.
The victories allowed him to achieve numerous Spanish championships and be number one in Europe. It was then that fame and recognition knocked on his door. “I was going down the street and I wouldn’t stop signing autographs, it was an incredible thing,” he recalls. Pacheco, who continues to boast of his friendship with Pedro Carrasco, which he witnessed at his wedding with Rocío Jurado.
“One of the last people who saw Pedro alive was me,” he says. Pacheco, also a very good friend of Alfredo Evangelista, Urtain, a “person we all appreciated”, and Perico Fernandez, of which he confesses that “he died because of a woman who made his life bitter.”
At the end of the seventies, installed in the social circle and with many friends from the show business, he entered the cinema. First with ‘Juventud druggada’ (1977) and then with six other films directed by illustrious such as Manuel Summers O Mariano ozores, with which he burst the box office in ‘I did a Roque III’, with Andres Pajares Y Fernando Extended.
“They were very successful films and that, to this day, they continue to be seen. In fact, I still charge some copyright,” he says. Pacheco, who was also joined by “a very great friendship” with Tony Leblanc.
“He was a very good actor and a very good person. Sometimes we made gloves at the Sports Palace because he also liked boxing a lot and even became a promoter of evenings,” he says.
By then I had already died Franco, whom he met in person and with whom he sympathized ideologically. “Vicente Gil, the Caudillo’s doctor, who was also my president in the Boxing Federation, told me that Franco wanted to meet me. So I went to El Pardo and there he asked me to wear the legionnaire’s cap whenever I went up to the ring. And I have done that ever since. “
46 years later, Pacheco ensures that Franco He “appreciated” him, a relationship that at the time caused him many antipathies and more when he said that his idols were the Caudillo, Hernan Cortes Y Elvis presley. “Elvis for being the best singer in history and Hernán Cortés because I discovered his story in the book ‘The God of the rain cries over Mexico’, by László Passuth”.
That whirlwind of fame, boxing and celebrity ended, to a large extent, when in 1982 he suffered a serious car accident returning from Almería to Madrid. Recovery was slow, he spent a while without competing and then everything would not be the same.
From that period he had a dream to fulfill. Go to the United States with Frank Sinatra. “While in Marbella, I saw some men who were going to beat Frank Sinatra and I prevented it. As there were three or four of them I approached them and with a few punches I threw them to the ground and saved him from the attack.”
“Later, as a sign of gratitude, when he sang in Madrid, Frank Sinatra dedicated a song to me saying that he was a great man who had saved him. There was talk of the possibility of going to the United States to fight, but it could not be because of the accident. “, he confesses Pacheco, which claims that he learned languages when he traveled to compete. “That’s why I was able to make friends with people like Frank.”
Frank Sinatra He wasn’t the only Hollywood star he was associated with. “I also met Sean Connery in Puerto Banús,” he recalls.
The last thirty years ‘Dum Dum’ Pacheco He has spent them living in the Madrid neighborhood of Hortaleza, where he leads an anonymous life. He went through different jobs as head of security at the residence of the Prime Minister of Saudi Arabia in Madrid or public relations in discos on the Costa de Levante.
What he does not forget is his great friends, like the rocker Bruno lomas, and the golden years when he shared a table and tablecloth with artists at the Italian restaurant Alduccio, very close to the Santiago Bernabéu. There they shared confidences of boxing, a sport that “now does not interest anything, has lost its essence.”
Precisely through boxing there was some revelry with Mickey Rourke. “He had been a boxer and, when he was in Spain, the Federation called me to tell me to go see him box in Oviedo. I took the car and we were there for a week. I laughed because he told me that, after shooting ‘9 and a half weeks ‘Kim Basinger told him that she didn’t work with him anymore because he smelled bad. “
Successes, failures, glory and underworld. A roller coaster of emotions dotted the life of ‘Dum Dum’ Pacheco, popular iconography of Spanish sport transcribed in the pages of ‘Piss blood’, a biography, for the times, politically incorrect.
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