Thursday, December 15, 2005
Top cross country runner to be featured on CBS Sports
 Rey Alvarez, a junior psychology major from Danville, Illinois, will be featured on “CBS Sports Presents Championships of the NCAA” fall recap on Christmas Day. Alvarez is USI’s top cross country runner this year and a Golden Gloves boxing champion. He transferred to USI in fall 2005 from Rend Lake Community College in Ina, Illinois. The show will air at 3 p.m. CST on Sunday, December 25, on WEVV Channel 44, the Tri-state’s CBS affiliate. In October 2005, the Evansville Courier & Press published the following feature on Alvarez by staff writer Tom Wyrwich. Books first, ring later on Tucked away in a corner on the second-floor track, suspended from a white beam by five strong chains, the punching bag is waiting at USI's Recreation Center. It slightly sways back and forth as runners jog past it, and it waits for the kid that can really make it move with thundering punches that come split-seconds after each other and seem to never stop. But while the bag waits, the kid runs. He runs because running gives him what the bag can't: an education. Three years ago, Rey Alvarez set aside a promising boxing career to run college cross country and get the degree that had eluded so many others in his family. But just because the junior chose running, it doesn't mean he misses the bag. He misses everything about boxing. The reverberation of the canvas as he hops around his corner in his pre-fight ritual, looking into the eyes of his opponent. The ring of the 12th-round bell, when he would put his arm up in the air before the referee could, confident he's won. The pride of standing on a podium to receive a medal. Alvarez misses it so much he has to hide everything - posters, tapes, medals, trophies - from plain sight in his apartment's bedroom so he doesn't get motivated to go back. But he will go back to the bag, permanently, someday. But for now, he has to run. The Danville, Ill., home of Domingo and Hermelinda Alvarez had few luxuries. Domingo worked in a grain elevator, Hermelinda in a cereal factory. The added costs of raising the two grandchildren, Ricky and Rey, they adopted from their daughter left little expendable income. But the big screen TV in the living room was a luxury, one a devoted boxing fan like Domingo always wanted. On Friday nights, Ricky and Rey, twins so identical Hermelinda still can't always tell them apart, would huddle around it with Domingo and watch fights. When there wasn't a live fight on, Domingo could pull a recorded bout out of his chest of labeled tapes, which had about 200 fights in it. On one Sunday when Rey and Ricky were 8, Rey wore an old USA Boxing shirt of Domingo's to church. Sal Salvidar, a boxing trainer in Danville, approached him after the service. "You a boxer?" he asked. "No." "We're going to have to get you in the gym." Excited, confused and anxious, Rey replied: "What are you talking about?" "Don't you want to be a boxer?" Of course he did. He and Ricky did a five-day beginner's training with Salvidar and were hooked. When Salvidar's gym closed shortly after that, Mario Garza, a relative of the Alvarezes, opened a gym out of his garage and began to train them. When he was 12, Rey went on a 37-match winning streak. At age 15, he beat James Lester, a nephew of boxer Tommy Hearns, to earn a spot on the U.S. Junior Olympic team. He competed in the 2001 Junior World Championships in Mexico City. He has still never been knocked out. "Now that I look back, I'm so glad I learned when I did," Rey Alvarez said. "It's so hard to get the movement down, how to get your punches right, and it's all instinct now for me." Doctors told Rey's birth mother and grandmother he might not ever walk. It was right after his birth, and a foot problem was requiring him to wear a special shoe. He couldn't walk then, only crawl, but by the time he was 9, Rey was running two miles each way, twice a day, to boxing training. His first organized race was a two-mile meet in eighth grade, and Rey and Ricky had only one day of practice. They received their jerseys at the race and they ran in basketball shoes. Out of what Ricky estimates were 200 runners, Ricky took second and Rey finished third. The coach pleaded for them to run again. "I'm a boxer," Rey told him. "No," the coach pleaded. "You have to stay after school and train." "You're crazy," Rey told him, and he and Ricky quit that day. If it hadn't been for Domingo, who pleaded for Rey to run again, he might have not come back. And Rey might have not become one of Illinois' best runners and receive a full scholarship to Rend Lake Community College in Ina, Ill. "None, let me tell you this, none of my kids wanted to go to college," Domingo says. "For some reason, Ricky and Rey just wouldn't take no for an answer. They wanted to go to college." For a family that has seen its children go into the military or straight into the work force after high school, if not during it, Ricky and Rey wanted to set a new example. "We had a scholarship," Rey says. "Nobody in our family has had one. We were going to get our education." The brothers went to Rend Lake together, where they ran cross country and track together and roomed together. In their freshman year, Rend Lake won the junior college national championship. In his two years, Rey was a 10-time junior college all-American between cross country and indoor and outdoor track, and he has become USI's No. 1 runner. At the Loyola University-Chicago meet on Oct. 1, Rey approached the last kilometer of the 8K race in 16th place. That's when he heard coaches Mike Hillyard and Miles Krieger. "It's the 12th round, Rey," they screamed. "Make your move!" In that final mile, Rey moved up seven places to ninth, making the last stretch count like he would the end of a fight. He can't wait until he can go back and fight. He hits on the bag in the Rec Center once or twice a week, although it's not even that frequently this time of year, when he keeps his focus on the races. When he graduates, most likely in May 2007, Rey plans to get back into the ring and make a run at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. The goal certainly is not implausible. No American boxer qualified at his weight class, 119 pounds, for the 2004 Games. "Rey was a hell of a boxer," Ricky says. "In the lighter weight classes, there's always the possibility." |
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