Hyde’s phone rang again. This time he didn’t bother to wander off as the conversation escalated into another argument.
“They don’t know where he is,” Hyde said, jamming his phone in his pocket. “He’s fuckin’ AWOL. But I’m sure he’ll show. He has to show. He has a fight in less than two weeks.”
“What the hell gave you the idea to try this out?” I asked. “Getting out Cuban boxers over here, I mean.”
“This is fun.” Hyde laughed. “Way back I had my first professional show back in Ireland. I spoke to one Michael Flatley—”
“Lord of the Dance Michael Flatley? The dancer?”
“A dancer worth $640 million.” Hyde smiled broadly. “Like me, he’s a boxing nut. So after I had my show, Flatley said, ‘You’re missing a superstar in the making. Someone that we can all get a feel for and follow through to eventually winning big titles, especially world titles.’ I says, ‘Where you going to get one of them?’ He said, ‘Maybe go to one of the poorhouses of the world and get one.’ I t’ought”—Hyde giggled uncontrollably for a second—“Where else you gonna go? Why skip Cuba?”
Why skip Cuba? It was left hanging there in all its rhetorical splendor. Right then everything about Rigondeaux’s story eerily entered Broadway musical theater territory again. I felt as if I’d just listened to one of the starring actors relive his audition for the guest-starring role of Fagin, with Rigondeaux as his Artful Dodger. Michael Lewis, the author of Moneyball and The Big Short, among many other bestsellers, wrote his first feature for Vanity Fair, in which he called Cuban athletes the most expensive human cargo left on earth. Back in the 1990s, a Cuban American living in Miami named Joe Cubas had done it with baseball and was hailed by 60 Minutes as “The Great Liberator.” There was nothing written in the rules of baseball that said he couldn’t help Cuban baseball players defect, so Joe Cubas had devoted his life to the enterprise. Since then, venture humanitarianism across those treacherous ninety miles has never been more lucrative. If you could get athletes out, professional sports were offering bigger money than ever to put them on an American stage.
“Have you gone on the record about how you did this?” I asked Hyde.
“No.” He winked. This buoyant attitude Hyde had about his time in Cuba was something he clearly reveled in. “I been asked a million times for the story from loads of places, but I’m not sure if I want to tell what was involved. I took far, far too many chances doin’ it on me own.”
I looked around for Rigondeaux through the tunnel of the parking lot out to Vine Street and back to the entrance of Wild Card, where hordes of tourists were already lined up to buy T-shirts and take photos at the gym where Manny Pacquiao, the most famous fighter on earth, trained for his championship fights. Now Rigondeaux and Manny Pacquiao shared Freddie Roach as their trainer. The press had been largely dismissive of Rigondeaux or any Cuban fighter’s chances in professional boxing. They were cursed with a “boring amateur style.” They were too technical. They sought only to “score points and beat computers” rather than opponents. On the business side of things, Cubans were, by far, the hardest sell in the sport. Unlike Puerto Ricans in New York or Mexicans in California, Miami and the rest of America didn’t care enough to pay to watch Cubans fight. If baseball was a hard sell in Miami, which it was, fat chance with a marginalized sport like boxing. Yet when I asked Roach if Rigondeaux had the potential to become a professional champion, Roach countered that Rigondeaux, fresh off the boat, could have beaten several world champions on the same day.
And it seemed he was correct. Since leaving Cuba, Rigondeaux had breezed to victory in all five of his first professional fights. Outside the ring, however, Rigondeaux had struggled through a great deal of litigation with his management. After signing with Hyde, Rigondeaux had also signed a managerial contract with an attorney named Tony Gonzalez, who brought Rigondeaux to Cuban American promoter Luis DeCubas. I assumed issues related to that mess explained the heated discussions Hyde was having with the folks in Miami involved in Rigondeaux’s career.
Hyde told me that Rigondeaux was living in the small apartment adjacent to the entrance of Roach’s gym. Roach commonly let new fighters who had come to train with him in L.A. use the apartment until they found a place of their own. A Cuban restaurant up the street called El Floridita was where Rigondeaux had most of his meals. He didn’t go out at night, and his handlers from Miami had assigned an assistant to be with him at all times to keep an eye on things.
Hyde’s phone rang and he paced off and returned quickly, red-faced. “This is fucking ridiculous. Hyde looked at his watch and shook his head. Rigondeaux, Hyde confessed, had been AWOL since the night before. Something had happened during sparring the previous day. Rigondeaux had been battered by a teenaged Mexican amateur. Roach and Hyde had even filmed it. With a fight around the corner, Rigondeaux had arrived in Los Angeles from Miami on short notice, completely out of shape. He had been worked over so badly by the Mexican teenager that Freddie Roach had refused to work his corner in the upcoming fight. Rigondeaux’s people in Miami insisted he still fight.
“I’m his manager,” Hyde asserted. “Freddie Roach is his trainer. If his trainer refuses to work his corner on the basis that he’s in danger, I won’t let him fight. If I won’t let him fight, legally he can’t fight. That’s that.”
“Dad.” Tommy pointed.
“What, son?”
“There he is.”
Both Hyde and I looked and saw Rigondeaux and a goofy assistant in a Cuban Olympic tracksuit marching briskly through the tunnel toward us in the parking lot. Although Rigondeaux was wildly upset, screaming into his phone, his face was frozen and gargoyle-like. Before Hyde had a chance to say anything, Rigondeaux and his assistant swung over to the set of stairs leading to his apartment and sprinted up, slamming the door behind them. A moment later they emerged with some heavy gym bags slung over their shoulders and dragging luggage behind them.
“He looks like he’s not staying in L.A. long,” I said.
“No, he doesn’t,” Hyde agreed. “Let me sort this out.”
Rigondeaux approached us, ignored Hyde, shook my hand distractedly while muttering the traditional Cuban boxer salutation of “Campeón,” and then ordered his assistant to present me with a rolled-up poster. To break the bizarre confusion, Rigondeaux’s assistant smiled—offering a glimpse of the diamond-studded $ over his front tooth—and opened up the poster to show me Rigondeaux’s signature.
“Vamos,” Rigondeaux said under his breath.
“What’s going on here?” Hyde asked them. “We had an interview scheduled hours ago.”
“Miami,” Rigondeaux grunted icily.
“What?”
“Miami.”
Just then a taxi rolled up through the tunnel and popped its trunk. Rigondeaux and his assistant calmly turned, loaded their luggage, and got in. A moment later they were gone while Hyde, his son, and I stood speechless.
“Cubans,” Hyde lamented.
Over the next few days newspapers and Web sites reported that Rigondeaux was once again suing Hyde to break free of his contract, firing Freddie Roach, and pulling out of his upcoming fight with a minor injury.
5
New York, New York
Four A.M., the phone rang.
“I have a sticky offer for you, lad,” Gary Hyde said on the other end of the line, just before stepping onto a plane in Dublin bound for the United States. “Very sticky.”
Hyde told me he had taken out a life insurance on himself for €3.5 million that afternoon. He had just left his family in tears, begging him not to get on a plane for Rigondeaux’s next fight in Tijuana. After the failed Los Angeles trip, Hyde had set up an injunction barring Rigondeaux from going ahead with his next fight. In return, Rigondeaux and his backers in Miami had sued Hyde to get out of Hyde’s signed contract and sent a first-class ticket to collect Freddie Roach so that he could work Rigondeaux’s corner. Roach had turned them down flat, reiterating he would never
work an unprepared fighter’s corner. Then Hyde won the latest lawsuit against him and retained control as Rigondeaux’s manager. Once the court issues were resolved, Hyde quickly negotiated a multiyear promotional deal between Rigondeaux and Top Rank, the biggest promoter in boxing, which assured a title fight if Rigondeaux could get past his next opponent. The title fight was also promised on a Manny Pacquiao undercard scheduled for Cowboys Stadium in Dallas, Texas, which meant massive international exposure for Rigondeaux and a guaranteed six-figure purse—more money than he’d ever seen in his life.
“Well, lad, while my legal mess with Rigondeaux and Miami is, for the moment, behind me, there are certain threats that have been floated my way going into Rigondeaux’s next fight in Tijuana. To begin with, Tijuana looks roughly about as safe as Iraq right now. I Googled it this morning. Seventy thousand fuckin’ people dead from the drug trade alone. Part of that drug trade’s portfolio is the human-smuggling trade that I messed around with. There are some angry Cuban Americans who would like to see harm come my way. Do you see where this is going?”
“Threats?” I asked.
The real trouble, Hyde explained, wasn’t anything to do with the general danger in Tijuana. The real risk for Hyde, now that his managerial contract with Rigondeaux had been upheld in U.S. courts, was gangsters in Miami finding their own court of appeal in Mexico. Hyde pointed out that “anyone could hire someone for peanuts and blow my head off. Or they could hire the police to frame me with drugs and let me rot away in a Mexican prison. Or they could kidnap me. Life isn’t worth nothin’ down there.” Hyde added that some of the people he was “playing with” in Miami had “serious connections” to the underworld. Hyde’s own security detail refused to accompany him across the U.S.-Mexican border, given the risks. “That’s why an hour ago my entire family was in tears, begging me not to leave when I left home for the airport.”
I asked him why, given the risks he’d laid out, anyone would bother going ahead with it.
“I haven’t lived my life letting people push me around.” Hyde laughed. “So, I still owe you that interview I promised. I’m a man of my word. My question is this—if you really want to get it—does all of this sound worth it?”
“Your security detail said no?”
“My security lads said no way. I’ve taken chances before flying to Cuba, and my family knew those chances, but this is the first time they had tears in their eyes, asking me not to—”
“This is an incredibly stupid move,” I said, pondering my own incredibly stupid participation.
“We’re one fight from a title, lad. This is my fighter’s dream. This is my dream. A few months from now he’ll be in front of sixty thousand screaming people fighting for a world title in Dallas! They’ll all be screaming without knowing half of what we know about how he got there. Everything we been through to get here and we just have to get through this. I can’t not be there, lad. You met him in Cuba. You know what he and I have been through to get to this. You know why it’s worth it.”
I wondered whether some of what they’d “been through” together had motivated Rigondeaux to repeatedly sue Hyde for his freedom. Or perhaps Rigondeaux took orders strictly from his people in Miami. Hyde certainly had protected an unprepared Rigondeaux, whereas his people in Miami were content to run the risk of letting him fight, despite the fact that a loss would bury his professional career. Maybe pressures outside the ring were getting to Rigondeaux, too. His family was still back in Cuba. His mother had just died, and he’d told Freddie Roach that imprisonment awaited him if he dared set foot back on the island to attend her funeral.
“If you wanna throw caution to the wind and come down there with me, I’ll guarantee you that interview that got botched in Los Angeles and I’ll also give you an interview myself. I’ll tell you how I got all these lads out. If neither of us is killed or kidnapped, you’ll have total access with him in Tijuana. You can have access to him as long as I’m his manager. Wherever in the world he fights, you’ll be right there. Hell, you can be in our dressing room with him, and when he goes out to that ring, you can join us and come on in with him.”
“Where you’re saying you’ll be assassinated during the opening bars of the fucking Mexican national anthem.”
“That’s optimistic, lad. Rigondeaux’s the visitor in Tijuana, so the Cuban anthem would be up first. I reckon whatever Mexican Lee Harvey Oswald equivalent wouldn’t wait around that long.”
I tried to put the situation in perspective. Here was a wealthy man with a staff of thirty people who worked under him that he could have sent to do this, and yet he was willing to be murdered and risk never seeing his family again to personally attend a boxing match. He was offering me the chance to take a bullet, be kidnapped, or be framed with drugs and therefore never see my wife or family again, so that both of us could get up close to the fucking patron saint of family-lessness, Guillermo Rigondeaux. And Rigondeaux, for all we knew, hadn’t improved since the last time we’d seen him, just after getting his ass kicked by a fifteen-year-old back at Wild Card.
But what if he won? A title shot in a seventh professional fight was unheard of. No other sport would allow you to get up close with your career’s high-water mark that early on. More than anything, I wanted to know if that championship payoff would make everything he’d sacrificed worth it.
Even better, what if Gary and I didn’t get kidnapped, or framed with drugs, or murdered, or spend the rest of our lives rotting in Mexican prison and Rigo won?
“Don’t get on the plane,” I said.
“Ah, lad,” he laughed. “Not you, too.”
“Don’t do it.”
“It’ll make it that much sweeter, won’t it?” Gary suggested. “Who gives a fuck if it’s more dangerous than Baghdad before you even consider my circumstances down there. How long have I been fighting Miami over this? Castro was easier, for fuck’s sake.”
“Don’t do it.”
“Imagine it down there! You wanted your story, here it is! Do or die. For all of us. He has Tyson’s old trainer working with him now. Ronnie Shields. Brilliant trainer. Everything’s in place. Meet me in Los Angeles. I’ll pick you up. We go down to TJ through San Diego for the weigh-in, shoot back, next day’s the fight. Piece of cake. Where’s your spirit of adventure, lad?”
“Let me understand something, Gary,” I began. “The best-case scenario if someone goes after you is that we’ll be sharing a cell in a Mexican jail for the rest of our lives.”
“Fuck ’em!” Hyde roared. “I didn’t come this far to be pushed around. So you in or out?”
6
San Ysidro, California, U.S.-Mexican border, Tijuana
August 20, 2010
I mean the fact that there’s even a market for Cuban defectors, to me, always seemed so perverse really. A whole market grew up around the geography and the politics, the supply and demand of these super gifted athletes.
—Steve Fainaru, Pulitzer Prize–winning coauthor of The Duke of Havana
Cuba has always been a treasure chest for outsiders obsessed with her loot. This didn’t change all that much as pirate ships gave way to the regular procession of cruise ships that enter Havana’s harbor today. During the nineteenth century, the American government offered vastly larger sums to purchase the island from Spain than they did for Louisiana from the French or Alaska from the Russians. It wasn’t for sale. The U.S. Treasury still issues an annual check for $4,000 to Fidel Castro for the lease on Guantanamo Bay, which no Cuban ever negotiated, and that can never increase or expire.
Back in 1492, Columbus described encountering Cuba as “the most beautiful land that eyes ever beheld.” Of course, this was just an unexpected detour from the real objective of his voyage. Fortunately, the Taíno island natives quickly brought everything back into focus for Columbus when they greeted their visitors with offerings of gold (which held no value in their society) and happily reported, when asked, of other areas where more could be found. Columbus promptly en
slaved the natives and enlisted them to mine for any and all gold that could be seized and returned to Europe.
Columbus and his men also rounded up the Taíno wives and female children and sold them into sex slavery back in Spain. Once the remaining natives of Cuba fully understood that insatiable lust for the island’s natural resource was the reason behind Columbus and his men’s continued presence, they dispensed whatever gold they had into the sea in hopes of ridding the island of its intruders. Farther inland, where the sea wasn’t readily available, the Taínos found rivers to dump their gold in protest. By the 1530s, nearly all the Taínos were wiped out by a combination of genocide, slavery, starvation, suicide, and disease. Nearly five hundred years later, athletes like Rigondeaux had replaced gold as the most lucrative treasure Cuba boasted. History repeats itself with Cuba’s loot again entering the sea in protest, but this time the protest is in opposition to the original Taíno values—the ones that saw gold as worthless—now advanced by Castro’s government. These days, Cuba’s treasure wants to go where it can cash in.
*
“Did you ever hear about the Caribbean Queen?” Gary Hyde asked me. He was wearing a fine tailored suit for our joint voyage, just as we closed in on the U.S.-Mexico border, the busiest port of entry in the world. Our rental car settled into the general morass of border gridlock. “The most famous smuggler running people back and forth between Cuba and Mexico? The one Castro personally put a bounty on?”
“The most famous human smuggler was a woman?” I asked.
“Of course not. The Cuban army routinely shoot at smuggler’s boats and smugglers, but they have orders not to shoot at women. So the Caribbean Queen conducted his business in drag.”
Everything was getting weirder the closer we got to Tijuana.
A Cuban Boxer's Journey Page 4
