“Do you feel the revolution betrayed you or did you betray the revolution?” I began.
Rigondeaux jumped out of his chair and stood over me like a soldier called to attention. “I’m not a traitor! I did not betray my country. I went back to Cuba from Brazil. I did not betray my country. I returned. If I had known they would never let me box again in Cuba, I would not have returned and none of this mess and scandal would have happened.”
“So your intentions in Brazil were never to defect?”
“No.” Rigondeaux shook his head sullenly. “I would have stayed.” He sat back down in his chair and held out his open palm to me. “Now I’m going to ask you a question. When I came back from Brazil, what did all of my accomplishments count for? You are not Cuban, so I want you to answer me that question. Because they prohibited all the athletes to even come near me. Anyone who dared talk to me knew they would be sanctioned.”
“Your story sounds very similar to Héctor Vinent’s.”
“That’s the problem in Cuba. You can be the biggest thing at a given moment and at the same time you are nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“You are the same as everyone else. You are a champion and it means nothing. You don’t have a dollar and you have to walk everywhere because most of us don’t have cars or houses. We are like dogs. After all your time is over you end up telling stories on a street corner about when you used to be a star.”
“Is it true that Teófilo Stevenson defended you against Fidel?”
“Yes,” Rigondeaux answered, knocking the arm of his chair with his knuckles and holding up the same hand. “We spoke with the comandante together to see if he would give me another opportunity. I’m grateful for that with my life. The comandante said no.”
“Did Fidel betray you?”
“A traitor is someone who goes to war and runs away. This is sport. I never turned my back to fight against Cuba or anything like that. A traitor is someone who goes to war and changes to the opposite army. That’s a traitor.”
“What were you fighting for in Cuba?”
“In Cuba what can you say? You have to say for your country and the revolution because if you say something else they take you and hang you so you can’t say anything else.”
“I understand the official version. But for you, what was it that you fought for?”
“I fought so that I could get a house or a little car. There is nothing bigger to get in Cuba. Maybe being able to buy a little bit of clothes.”
“Most Cuban boxers are afraid to talk about their lives back in Cuba.”
“A lot of stuff I really feel I can’t say because I have a family and I’m here and I can say whatever I want, but they are still in Cuba and they would be the ones to pay for it.”
“After Brazil, when you were sent back to Havana, were the police following you?”
Rigondeaux laughed and shook his head. “Everywhere I went. When he came”—he pointed to Hyde—“I couldn’t enter a hotel with him. I had to stay in the lobby. The best fighter in Cuba couldn’t enter a hotel. Imagine that. I had a nice Mitsubishi Lancer, like the one in The Fast and Furious, which they took away from me. I earned it for my Olympic medal. They didn’t take my house, but only because I had my wife and children. Otherwise they would have taken that, too.”
“Is America what you expected it to be?”
“I have fought four hundred seventy-five fights and never made a dollar. I have fought all my life. I’ve seen the world because of my fighting.”
Rigondeaux held up his iPhone and laughed. “In Cuba you could work ten years and still not be able to afford this phone. This phone is worth seven hundred dollars, and where are you going to find seven hundred dollars in Cuba? In Cuba if you have a million dollars you can’t go to a car dealership and say, “I want a Mercedes,” because they are going to arrest you and take away that money. They will want to know where that money came from. Here if you have the money you can get what you want with no worries.”
“Does it ever scare you that someone like Mike Tyson could make and lose four hundred million so quickly here?”
“I came here to succeed and help my child in Cuba and my family so that is never going to happen to me.”
“Were you scared coming here?”
“I left behind all of my family. Here you have to stay on top of things or you will get eaten by the lion. The United States is the best country in the world without a doubt, but the real best country in the world is Cuba. You know why? Because you don’t have to pay rent, or pay for water, electricity, or for education. You don’t have to pay for hospitals. Here you can buy a house, but if you don’t have the money to keep paying you get kicked out. In Cuba that doesn’t happen.”
“Do you miss Cuba?”
“I fought four hundred seventy-five fights for Cuba. I fight for Cuba now. I haven’t lost a fight in ten years. Twice I’ve won a hundred fights in a row against the best amateurs in the world. I could have become the first man in history to win four Olympic gold medals. What would that have gotten me if I’d stayed in Cuba? Nothing. After I was done, like a drunk on a street corner, I would be asking people whether they remember when I used to fight when I was a champion. I would end up just like Héctor Vinent. You saw him. That’s how he is now.”
“What’s the most important thing about Guillermo Rigondeaux’s story?”
“I got here when everyone thought I was dead and the Cuban government figured I was their trash. They figured I would never attempt to escape again. They laughed about that. But I’m here. That’s what most inspires me. In Cuba when you win all you get is a handshake from Fidel and that’s it.”
“How do you feel about Fidel now?”
“I can’t say anything about that. I have family in Cuba. My thing is sports. That’s politics. All I can say is that anybody can make a mistake, but it shouldn’t cost you your entire life like it did for me.”
“If Cuba changed would you go back?”
“I would go right back to Cuba.”
*
The next day we crossed the border back into Tijuana and waited with Rigondeaux in one of the arena’s private dressing rooms at the end of a long corridor. The preliminary fights were already going on and the crowd was already noisy. Being in the room felt like being inside a burst blister—all the paint on the walls was scratched and scraped and the flooring chipped and gutted. The place stunk. It wasn’t all that different from dressing rooms in Cuba. It was located at the end of a tunnel that intersected with another main artery, descending like a plank toward the curtain separating the fighters from the audience.
Rigondeaux paced, relieving tension with little flicks of his arms or gentle kicks in the air. He kept his head down and looked up only to offer a face as blank as a dial tone. He’d done this hundreds of times before and it showed. Hyde had told me on the way down to the fight that if Rigondeaux beat his opponent here, his next payday in Dallas would increase more than sixfold, up to $125,000. Maybe that was on his mind.
As the minutes drew nearer to his sixth professional fight against Jose Angel Beranza, Rigondeaux’s new trainer, Ronnie Shields, asked him to come over and sit down to have his hands wrapped.
On a whim, I leaned over to Gary Hyde and whispered, “So who was this mystery kid who fucked Rigondeaux up in sparring back in L.A.?”
“Freddie Roach had never seen him before. I’d never heard of him. My son filmed the whole thing and so did Freddie with the security cameras. He wasn’t great or anything. Just brave.”
“And he was just some amateur from Mexico off the street?” I asked.
“Might have been sixteen. Soft. Nothing special about him in the least.”
“How many people were there watching?”
“Regular afternoon crowd. Whoever this guy was, he just didn’t seem to give a fuck about any double Olympic champion. He walked into Wild Card and pointed to Rigo—maybe he didn’t know who he was—and said he wanted to fight. He might have bee
n a little bigger but not much. After the second round Rigo was gassed and this Mexican looked like he was in a Rocky movie. Freddie came over after and says, ‘Someone might have been exposed today,’ but Rigo was just not in shape.”
“And nobody ever saw this Mexican again? Nobody caught his fucking name?”
“Not that I know of.” Hyde shook his head. “I should have signed the fucking kid right there on the spot. Wait—”
“What?” I asked.
Hyde looked past me down the hall and squinted. “I t’ink your man is right t’ere at the opposite end of the tunnel.”
I looked fifty feet down the tunnel but saw only some chubby little Mexican kid standing next to a gym bag, putting on some gloves I assumed were his dad’s.
“Where?” I asked frantically. “I only see that kid.”
“Dat’s him.”
“No.”
“Yep. Dat’s him. How freakish a coincidence is that?”
I spun around and pulled Mucho away from taking photographs of Rigondeaux and pointed at the kid down the hall.
“Get some photos of that kid! He’s the one from L.A.!”
I watched Mucho race down the hall and wave like a maniac to get the kid against the wall of the corridor to pose for a few shots.
“You’re sure that’s the fucking guy?” I asked Gary.
“It’s him. No shadow of a doubt.”
I hadn’t been very subtle about this discovery. Gary elbowed me in the ribs, and I turned my attention back to our dressing room. Rigondeaux was glaring down the hall at Mucho taking this kid’s photos. Whether or not he identified the kid as easily as Gary had, he wasn’t pleased with what was going on. He clenched his jaw and cast a dirty look in my direction before Shields finished taping his gloves and asked him over to warm up in a little volleyball court behind one of the doors. Maybe this would be my last time covering one of Rigondeaux’s fights.
A few minutes later, a production assistant from FOX Deportes, the network broadcasting the fight, notified Rigondeaux that his fight was up. Everyone on the team gathered behind him as he lifted the hood of his robe over his head and stared down the plank leading to the curtain. It was the first time I’d ever seen Rigondeaux in person look peaceful.
Gary Hyde had a taxi with the engine running outside the arena as our getaway. After six rounds enduring Rigondeaux’s placid symphony of assault, Jose Angel Beranza simply quit. Rigondeaux dropped him twice in the fourth round. Rigondeaux coasted to victory and was booed every round by the Mexican audience. Deafening chants of “Bicicleta! Bicicleta! Bicicleta!” protested Rigondeaux’s textbook Cuban style of methodically picking apart his opponent and shielding himself from all risk. At the same time that Rigondeaux’s arm was raised in victory, we snuck out of the arena and raced back to the border into San Diego.
“Still alive.” Hyde grinned. “It’s quite a jump from here, lads. Next up, my first title on the Pacquiao undercard in Dallas, on the world stage.”
7
Dallas, Texas
November 2010
Eighteen months before Rigondeaux’s title shot in Dallas, his debut professional fight was televised on ESPN. The announcer calling the fight introduced Rigondeaux and his narrative to America like this:
Guillermo Rigondeaux has been waiting for this moment to start a career many feel is destined to be dynamic. For most Cuban amateur stars a moment like this will never arrive. Years of sweat of sacrifice go into becoming a world-class fighter yet the reward attached to that risk isn’t there. Now, for Rigondeaux, the sky’s the limit. Free from communism and diving headfirst into the pure marketplace of pro boxing.
Only six fights later, Rigondeaux had reached boxing’s current brightest stage: a Manny Pacquiao pay-per-view blockbuster fight inside the brand-new, 105,000-person capacity, billion-dollar Cowboys Stadium. Estimates of 70,000 people attending were floated around in the press. It was a long way from Tijuana and even farther from Havana. It was Rigondeaux’s best chance at vindicating all his reasons for escaping Cuba.
When I inquired about press credentials for the fight I was laughed off the phone by the first person I talked to. I called back and a different woman politely informed me that the fight had received more requests for press credentials than any fight in the history of the sport. I called Pacquiao’s trainer, Freddie Roach, and he told me the same thing. But this was boxing, after all, and the closer you get to it, the more you discover that nobody who makes a living off of it entered through the front door. There is no regulation, no oversight, and zero established prerequisites for getting in. Whether through corruption or shortsightedness, boxing had never modernized like all the other sports. Even as its relevance in popular culture continued to diminish, it remained just as rebelliously the Wild West of sports. There was always a way in; you just had to find it. That rule about asking for forgiveness rather than permission seemed like the best place to start.
I showed up with Mucho Macho to meet Gary Hyde and Rigondeaux for Press Day at the Gaylord Texan, the resort where everyone associated with the fight was staying. Bob Arum, Top Rank’s CEO, the most powerful promoter in boxing, had scheduled a massive press conference to introduce the big fight and everyone on the undercard. The Gaylord was the size of a city: Fifteen hundred rooms spread out beyond the lobby, lost somewhere behind the “Lone Star Christmas” display, which centered on a six-story tree adorned with 12,000 ornaments and standing under the gleam of 1.5 million lights. I sniffed around and snuck into the press room at the hotel, which was bigger than the arena in Tijuana where Rigondeaux had just fought. A dozen radio shows were being broadcast at once. There were rows of desks for the press corps and fighters milling around, posing.
Since nobody was likely to give a fuck if some unknown was working on a book, I told Top Rank, the promoters of the fight, that we were working on a documentary about Rigondeaux. I’d heard that Bob Arum had just come back from a humanitarian visit to Cuba and that he was one of a rapidly diminishing, dying-off group who’d visited Cuba pre-Fidel also. The documentary angle offered free publicity for a fighter Arum had just signed. I’d gotten the idea about a documentary from a letter a stranger had written me. I’d written a few things for small publications on Cuban boxers by then and had given some interviews about Rigondeaux. I asked Israel Sports Radio, a radio program to which I’d given an interview about Cuban boxers, to list me on their Web site as their official “boxing correspondent” and to pester Top Rank for credentials. A photographer and filmmaker from Queens named Brett Garamella, who had just gotten back from a trip to Havana, had read some articles of mine and was particularly interested in Rigondeaux’s story since the defection. He’d gone to school at the University of North Carolina, S. L. Price’s alma mater, loved Price’s book, and wrote me that if I ever wanted to make a documentary, to give him a call. So I did just that, and he said he had a camera and would work for free if I could get him in. “I might not be the smartest guy in every room I walk into,” Brett confessed, “but I promise you I have the biggest balls.” Hired. So with Mucho and Brett, we had ourselves a modest film crew riding the wave of our little conspiracy with Ari Louis, the owner of Israel Sports Radio.
After a handful of rejections, Top Rank agreed to grant “preliminary” credentials on behalf of “Jew Radio,” and we were in. I scrambled to raise some more money and found a producer back home who was willing to refinance his house to scrape together $10,000 for a trip to Cuba hunting down illegal interviews with Teófilo Stevenson and Félix Savón. What began as a red herring became something I took seriously. The documentary could explore the rewards and costs of Cuba’s most famous boxers rejecting or accepting lucrative offers to leave the island. Split Decision was born right then.
An hour later we met back up with Gary Hyde in the lobby of the hotel, where he was waiting for Rigondeaux to arrive and check into his room before the press conference with Bob Arum. Rigondeaux showed up dragging one bag of luggage while his co-promoters from Miam
i followed behind him. This was the same group, Caribe Promotions, who’d taken Gary Hyde to court over Hyde’s contract with Rigondeaux. The greeting between Gary and company was brief and perfunctory. The Miami crew consisted of Boris Arencibia, a former judo champion who’d defected from Cuba at eighteen; Luis deCubas, who’d left Cuba at the age of nine, back in 1966, for twenty-seven inches of snow waiting for him in St. Paul–Minneapolis and been involved with nearly every Cuban defector in professional boxing; and Eddie Marin, the so-called Spam King of South Florida, a multiple felon dating back to 1983 who, according to wide news reports, swapped a lucrative living from cocaine for some real money pumping out a quarter billion spam e-mails a day.
As I was trying to sort out the next move while also exercising some caution with Rigondeaux’s co-promoters, Brett, true to form with his claim of balls over brains, beamed approval and ingratiated himself with the Caribe Promotions guys with tales of his recent trip to Cuba. “Que bola?” (What’s up?) he kept repeating in Cuban slang to a sullen yet slightly bewildered Rigondeaux. While Brett was auditioning for the Eddie Haskell role on the sitcom of Rigondeaux’s life, Mucho pulled out a massive folder of photos from Tijuana from under his arm. Brett urged everyone to get up to Rigondeaux’s hotel room to have a look. Meanwhile, Brett was filming all that was going on. Suddenly Rigondeaux’s trainer, Ronnie Shields, showed up with a strength coach and they embraced everybody as Jorge, the Miami crew’s security guy, arrived with the room key. Everyone began gravitating toward the elevator as Brett sprinkled more Que bolas on Rigondeaux and encouraged him to pose before the camera. This was one of the few social obligations Rigondeaux didn’t mind.
A Cuban Boxer's Journey Page 7
