A Cuban Boxer's Journey by Brin-Jonathan Butler

Author:Brin-Jonathan Butler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2014-04-01T16:00:00+00:00

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 been 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?”

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