One of the most alluring aspects of boxing is it’s candid examination of humanity.
Seldom does life offer one a 36-minute window of opportunity to culminate their life’s work. But tomorrow Guillermo Rigondeaux receives that.
Born in Cuba, Rigondeaux learned boxing as a trade in a nation where the discipline is instructed under a severity comparable to their military. They train with specificity and strict regiment during the day and wander this streets as drunks by night. Contending this fate, Rigondeaux tried to defect while in Brazil competing in the 2007 Pan American games to seek refuge in America. Captured by Cuban officials, he was then deemed an enemy of Castro, deported back BY Castro, and locked in one of Castro’s mansions as punishment. Years later the Cuban cartel smuggled his from Havana to Miami.
Rigondeaux is an impoverished prince. He is a two-time Olympic gold-medalist, holds an amauter record of 463-12, and happens to be the most skilled boxer who has ever lived. Yet he’s treated as a disenfranchised immigrant who has been denied every opportunity at glory. Until tomorrow. Fate has afforded him a title-fight against one of the pound-for-pound champions of the world. With all the stipulations in place, if he loses he will essentially be blackballed from the sport.
Tomorrow Guillermo Rigondeaux will have the opportunity to manifest a lifetime’s worth of work into a win that will cement him as the best boxer in the world. Anything short will cost him his career. Boxing, the sport that takes just as much as it gives, will intimately capture the humanity of a man conditioned by trials and neglect as he attempts to achieve utter glory.
Written December 8th, 2017.