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Employees at Time Warner Cable in San Antonio were lined up on Tuesday to get the autograph of a particular boxer. He also faced television cameras and print reporters during his day in Texas.
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Said boxer will be a guest at the Arizona Diamondbacks game against the Phillies tonight in Phoenix. And during the promotional tour for the biggest fight of his life, he will visit Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Introducing David Diaz, holder of one of the four lightweight world championship belts. Never heard of him? That's OK.
He is not exactly a household name, but he is the guy who is going to defend his title against Manny Pacquiao on June 28 at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. Pacquiao, a junior lightweight champion and one of the most popular fighters in the world, is moving up in weight.
With longtime publicist Bill Caplan at his side Tuesday, Diaz went on a get-acquainted trip to San Antonio that included several hours at Time Warner, the parent company of HBO, which will televise this card on its pay-per-view arm.
We then caught up with Caplan and Diaz as they sat at the airport awaiting their flight to Phoenix. Tonight at the baseball game, Diaz is scheduled to be a guest on the Diamondbacks' Spanish-language radio broadcast. Caplan will then take him through the press box and have him shake hands with some of the baseball writers.
Caplan has been on this road 40-plus years. But it's new to Diaz, whose biggest victory came Aug. 4 when he won the championship with a unanimous decision against Erik Morales in Rosemont, Ill., which is near Diaz's hometown of Chicago.
A victory against Morales sounds good to the ear, but in reality Morales was washed up. Afterward, he announced his retirement.
So, who is David Diaz? What would he want people to think about him in regards to his persona outside the ring?
"That I'm just a guy, a regular guy who you can come up to and have a conversation with and laugh and joke around," Diaz said via telephone. "Easy-going guy."
Diaz grew up in the rough Humboldt Park section of Chicago. He was one of nine siblings, but the only one born in Chicago and not Mexico. One of his brothers passed away in 1998.
"It was hard for my parents to feed us because we came from such a big family," Diaz said. "Since I was the last one, I was the baby. I had it pretty much easy. My brothers and sisters are the ones who went through the hard stuff so they could make it easier for me.
"We lived in a rough neighborhood. But did I experience the roughness? I had good parents and a good activities base that kept me away from that and boxing was one of them."
