VALENCIA — Fernando Vargas doesn't spend a lot of time dwelling on the approaching final act in his boxing career, the last lap represented by his Sept. 8 bout with Ricardo Mayorga.

Oh, occasionally it crosses his mind, happily, that this is the last time he'll have to push his 5-foot-10, 29-year-old body down to some artificial weight requirement. (For this fight, it's 162 pounds, and with a month to go, he's within 8 pounds.) For the most part, though, it's business as usual.

At the end of the day, though, as he drifts off to sleep, he allows himself to think ahead to that night at Staples Center, and how he wants that last lap to be a victory lap.

"I close my eyes," says Vargas, "and I start thinking about the entrance, the atmosphere, what punches I'm going to throw, what I'm looking for, what I've been working on, and finishing.

"And my thing is to be able to thank my fans after the fight, to get the ring-announcer mike and thank them: Say something in Spanish, say something in English.

"And I see that. I envision that before going to sleep."

When that final farewell comes, it will cap a boxing career including 100 amateur victories, a berth in the 1996 Olympics, just more than a decade as a professional fighter — he made his pro debut in March of 1997 — and two terms as a world junior middleweight champion, once with the IBF belt (making him, at 21, the youngest champion in the division's history) and once with the WBA crown.

The path to Vargas' final bout has not always been a straight one. There were legal problems (a conviction in a 1999 assault case) and boxing ones (a nine-month suspension for a positive steroids test he blamed on supplements given to him by his conditioning coach at the time).

The mistakes are worth recalling here primarily to note that once made, they were not repeated. The Vargas who prepares to leave the ring is a more mature, more grounded individual than the one who left — a family man, a businessman. An adult, instead of a kid heading the wrong way in a hurry.

"Here I was 10 years old," he says, "locked up in juvenile hall, six batteries, going nowhere quickly before I found boxing. I was running away from home, sleeping in alleys. I had nobody to guide me.

"I started being successful in boxing, and all this fame came, and you know, you make mistakes. And the intelligent thing, the right thing, is to learn from them. Take something so you can say, OK, I made a mistake here and continue learning, so that this does not happen to me again.' "

The learning curve has shaped Vargas' business life, as well. Early in his career, he struck up a friendship with Joe Pecora, who brought Vargas in to make some personal appearances at Pecora's cellular stores. A bond formed then, and only grew when Pecora — now the boxer's business manager and vice president of his newest venture, Vargas Entertainment Promotions — began urging him to mind the financial details of his boxing career.

"He said, Look at these expenses they're trying to bill you for — $700 worth of dinner? For two people?' And these are promoters that are billing you. They take the 20 percent off the top, and then still bill you for expenses. It's crazy.

"So my man Joe Pecora started opening my eyes. It's like, What the heck is this? $30,000 for airfare, or rooms and board.' I'm like, What?' "

It bothers him enough that he vows he'll make sure the fighters he promotes will get every penny due them — "Promoters can get plenty doing it the right way," he says — and rankles him enough that, were he able to go back now and give a younger Fernando Vargas some advice, he would start by cautioning him about the business side of boxing.

"I would say, you can't trust nobody — very few people — in boxing. You can count them on your hand. I'm lucky that I have two people that I trust most with my career, and that's Joe Pecora and (manager) Shelly Finkel.

"So you want to see all your contracts, you want to see your bout agreements, you want to see the site fee, you want to see everything. Everything goes into the pot.

"That's what I want to teach my fighters, exactly how this works. And if they want to go with somebody else, that they think is going to be able to handle them better, and not show them anything, then go for it."

Such concerns are a far cry from the focus of the young Vargas, who was a boxer first and a businessman not at all.

"It was just fighting," he says. "I just wanted to be the best I could be. That was always my dream, for people to say, That's one bad Mexican.' "

But those days and that Vargas are gone, like the fast-lane life that came with his early success.

"Everybody was my friend. Everybody wanted to roll in the limo with Feroz, and go to the clubs with Feroz, and hang out with Feroz," he says, invoking the Spanish version of the nickname, "Ferocious," suggested by former Star writer Bill Williamson.

With maturity, though, came the realization that some of those "friends" were anything but.

"I still have real close friends and we still hang out," he says. "But I hang out with my family a lot, and hang out with my kids, hang out with my man Joe, with everybody that's close to me, and have a good time."

He'll have a little more time for such things once the Mayorga bout is behind him, but not that much. In October, he'll be off to Thailand to shoot Oliver Stone's next movie, the third film in his budding acting career. He'll keep working out, to stay in shape for his film work. He'll have his business ventures.

In short, he'll do everything he can to stay busy, because to do otherwise, he knows, is not a good idea.

"I've said it before: When you have time, money and fame, those are not elements that are going to be good for you," he says.

The young Fernando might not have known that. The older one certainly does, though even he can be surprised by how far he's come and how much his life has changed.

"If you were to tell the younger Fernando that he would be a happily married man," says Vargas, "with four beautiful babies, fame, fortune and whatever you want, and thankful to God in your heart like you've always been, I think he would have been like, I don't know about that.'

"But it is what it is, and I'm humbled by everything God has blessed me with. And that will always be with me."

— Contact Star columnist David Lassen at dlassen@VenturaCountyStar.com.