When Nonito Donaire accepted a fight against Rigondeaux, in terms of styles, their fight became the closest existing proxy to something of the magnitude of Pacquiao versus Mayweather Jr.
As Pacquiao had once blazed into the sport, Donaire had annihilated world-class competition over the last year. Nobody had done more to make lower weight classes exciting, and he was being rewarded with massive exposure on HBO and million-dollar paydays for each fight. In the process, Donaire had become Pacquiao’s successor, riding a twelve-year, thirty-fight winning streak. He’d never looked stronger than going into his fight against Rigondeaux.
The fight against Donaire, caught in the glare of Radio City Music Hall, in the heart of the Big Apple, was precisely the kind of opportunity for which Rigondeaux had abandoned Cuba. Teófilo Stevenson had turned down Muhammad Ali. Félix Savón had laughed in the face of the $20 million he was offered to fight Mike Tyson. Now Guillermo Rigondeaux, their successor, had taken the bait and been granted a stage. Rigondeaux finally had his chance to do for boxing what Orlando Hernandez had done fifteen years before in baseball, pitching for the New York Yankees in the World Series just after crossing the Florida Straits. A win for Rigondeaux sent a message not just to Fidel Castro or Cuban athletes, but every Cuban—period—that if one were willing to fight for it, the American Dream might still exist. While the fight was a huge risk for Donaire and Rigondeaux, both boxers knew that within that risk lay the opportunity for greatness—perhaps the only opportunity.
When I started covering Rigondeaux’s story in Tijuana, hardly any reporters were interested in anything having to do with him. However, as Rigondeaux’s profile rose, my work chronicling his journey gradually offered me more opportunities than I’d ever had before to reach a wider audience with his story. After an editor from ESPN asked me to write a story about his fight against Donaire, Rigondeaux’s Miami management invited me to interview him at Madison Square Garden. After chasing Rigondeaux around the world, suddenly all it took to reach him was a subway fare from my apartment to greet him at his weigh-in at Madison Square Garden the day before the fight.
I waited nervously until he’d finished making the rounds with the media and posing with Donaire in front of the cameras before I blindsided him with a tap on the shoulder. I waited for him to turn before I offered my hand to congratulate him and wish him luck. I wasn’t sure where we stood after Miami.
“Campeón.” Rigondeaux smiled as he turned.
“Well,” I began, taken aback. “This was the dream, wasn’t it?”
Rigondeaux paused for a moment before he hugged me. It wasn’t a side of him I’d seen before.
“It’s right there at the door, April thirteenth.” He laughed. “After I talk with you I’m going to go outside for a hotdog.”
How much more American could you get?
“From Tijuana to here in New York is a long way.”
“That’s right,” he said, exposing the gold over his front teeth. The gold took me back to his first words to me in Havana about having melted his Olympic gold medals into his mouth.
“Is this why you left?” I asked him.
“I think I deserve this. I’ve worked very hard.”
I told him it was special for me, having followed him this far, to see him have this opportunity.
“Claro. I’m happy to see you. We’ve known each other for some time now. I expect you to be here tomorrow to see what I have to show the world.”
That flung my mind thousands of miles away to his home, where I knew his biggest fan wasn’t able to watch.
“Other than your son,” I told him, “nobody wants to see it more than me.”
Just then two ghosts from Cuba’s boxing past who had recently joined Rigondeaux’s entourage approached us, pleading with Rigondeaux to get something to eat. It was Ramon Garbey and Joel Casamayor. These two men were not only my Cuban trainer Héctor Vinent’s former Olympic teammates, they were also the ones, after they had defected for Miami, who ultimately cost Vinent his career in Cuba. The government was sure Vinent would follow their lead. Now both of their boxing careers were over, too. Now Rigondeaux finally had two men beside him who’d traveled a similar path, yet Rigondeaux was on the brink of going even further. Casamayor slung a Miami Heat leather jacket over Rigondeaux’s back and they ducked off from the reporters to escape Madison Square Garden for their hotel.
12
The Fight
Maybe all fighters are ultimately cursed into full expression of their being. Inside a ring, troubled histories have always had the frail hope of unpacking their burden on a loser’s future. All fighters carry their past into a fight like a candle into a hurricane.
Along with six thousand people at Radio City Music Hall, I watched Rigondeaux treat that hurricane like a breeze. From the opening bell, aside from one slipup getting knocked off balance and down in the tenth round, Rigondeaux controlled the entire fight against Nonito Donaire. Rigondeaux entered the fight a three-to-one underdog based on his widespread dismissal as an amateur. After the final bell, only Donaire had looked the part of an amateur.
Rigondeaux dominated 2012’s Fighter of the Year with such ease the crowd booed the majority of the fight.
I watched the fight from ringside, standing beside another notorious Cuban defector, Livan Hernandez, El Duque’s brother, who had flown from Miami to New York just to watch his countryman compete at the highest level. Livan had left Cuba himself in 1995, before Duque, leaving behind his $6-a-month job for the World Series and the World Series MVP for the Florida Marlins. “I love you, Miami!” were Livan’s famous first words after hoisting the trophy over his head. His brother El Duque, back in Havana, thrown out of baseball by Fidel, had watched the scene from a broken-down television while he plotted his own escape.
“Everybody says I was just an amateur,” Rigondeaux said after the fight. “But I was a star as an amateur, and I am a star as a pro.”
Yet, after Rigondeaux’s victory, Bob Arum offered his own assessment of his fighter’s star power in America: “The only way Rigondeaux could be a household name is if Fidel came over and co-promoted with me.” Arum laughed.
*
Fidel Castro had used Guillermo Rigondeaux, as he had all his athletes, as a symbolic pawn in his political chess game against the United States and capitalism. However, Rigondeaux’s life had even more in common with a pawn outside of this role. Pawns are the only piece on a chessboard that can never go backward and, provided they can reach the end of the board, they are the only pieces that can transform into something far more powerful than when they began the game. For Rigondeaux, that transformation at the end of the board meant crossing ninety shark-infested miles and making it to the United States. After his victory over Donaire, Rigondeaux became a new symbol for Cuba and the United States, one that seemed to show that any Cuban could make it and perhaps the American Dream was still alive.
What of the cost of Rigondeaux’s decision to leave? How did it compare to Héctor Vinent, Félix Savón, and Teófilo Stevenson’s decision to stay? After spending time with four of Cuba’s greatest champions, trying to discover what the best solution was to an impossible choice, the only thing that remained clear was that both choices required courage. In fact, either decision required more courage than any human being should be expected to have. In the end, it all came down to what they were fighting for.
Bibliography
Fainaru, Steve and Ray Sánchez. The Duke of Havana: Baseball, Cuba, and the Search for the American Dream. New York: Villard Books, 2001.
Price, S. L. Pitching Around Fidel: A Journey into the Heart of Cuban Sports. New York: Ecco Press, 2000.
Sánchez, Ray. “A World-Class Boxer Finds Himself in a Bureaucratic Fight.” South Florida Sun-Sentinel, November 18, 2007.
Acknowledgments
I’d like to thank the following for their kindness, generosity, and time in helping me with this book: Guillermo Rigondeaux, S. L. Price, Steve Fainaru, DBC Pierre, Ray Sánch
ez, Leon Gast, Austin Brown, Bobby Cassidy, Kurt Emhoff, Robert Cohen, Ronan Reinart, Michael Collins, Jonathan Gray, Bruce Meyerson, Kenneth Slawenski, Curt Fischbach, Jorge Alarcon-Swaby, Mollie Glick, Julie Greicius, Mads Bunch, Peter Horoszko, Elizabeth Szilagyi and my family.
About the Author
BRIN-JONATHAN BUTLER is a writer and filmmaker. His work has appeared in ESPN magazine, Vice, Deadspin, The Wall Street Journal, Salon, and The New York Times. Butler’s documentary, Split Decision, is an examination of Cuban-American relations and the economic and cultural paradoxes that have shaped them since Castro’s revolution through the lens of elite Cuban boxers forced to choose between remaining in Cuba or defecting to America.
A CUBAN BOXER’S JOURNEY. Copyright © 2014 by Brin-Jonathan Butler. All rights reserved. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
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