Mike Tyson called Tapia one of the greatest fighters ever. He won 59 fights, 30 by knockout; lost 5; and drew 2. He was knocked out only once.

His left jab was punishing, and he claimed not to mind being hit. He sometimes stuck out his tongue to taunt opponents.

“Johnny sees things well,” Freddie Roach, Tapia’s trainer and a member of the World Boxing Hall of Fame, said in an interview with Sports Illustrated in 2002. “Sometimes by the book, it would be wrong to do the things Johnny does, but he’s such a natural fighter, he gets away with it.”

John Lee Tapia liked to point out that he was born in Albuquerque on Friday the 13th in February 1967. Larry Merchant, the boxing analyst, told Playboy in 2004 that Tapia was “a five-to-one underdog to survive his own childhood.”

Tapia’s mother, Virginia, died on May 28, 1975, according to a police report that said her body was found stabbed 26 times with scissors and a screwdriver. Not included in the police report was young Johnny’s memory of being awakened by screaming and looking out the window to see his mother chained in the back of a pickup truck driving by the house, Sports Illustrated said.

He was brought up by his grandfather Miguel with eight other family members in a three-bedroom house in Albuquerque. Miguel, an amateur boxing champion, taught him pugilistic skills. Tapia was the 1983 National Golden Gloves light flyweight champion, and the 1985 Golden Gloves flyweight champion. His first pro fight was in 1988.

His past regularly came back to haunt him.

Just two and a half weeks before his loss to Ayala in 1999, the phone rang in the gym where Tapia was training. A police officer told him that his mother’s killing had been solved. The murderer had died in 1983 after stumbling drunk into the middle of a busy Albuquerque street where he was hit by three cars and dragged to his death. The investigation had been reopened at the behest of Tapia’s wife.