An announcer once mentioned, while calling a Rigondeaux fight, of waiting for the El Duque of the boxing ring. He mocked that he hadn't seen him all night Rigondeaux was fighting.
Well, last Saturday I saw boxing's version of El Duque take the stage and lay waste to boxing's best with relative ease. And the ease itself hadn't required learning a solitary thing since having left Cuba. Rigondeaux's talent was fully formed on the first day he stepped on American soil and he was perfectly suited back then of doing what he did last weekend.
But now he finally had a chance to prove it. And he did.
Cuban kismet being what it is, I was standing next to El Duque's brother Livan at ringside. We watched Rigondeaux masterfully assert not just his legacy, but also those of all the Cubans who came before him. Teofilo Stevenson, Felix Savon, Hector Vinent, and a host of others, summarily dismissed as unready for the professional ranks by the experts, now, through Rigondeaux's routing of the sport's 2012 Fighter of the Year, get a new appraisal and hopefully a fair shake of not just being qualified as great amateur fighters.
That being said, the crowd seemed pretty clearly to be comprised of about 98% Donaire fans, 1.5% general interest fans, and .5% Cuban/Rigondeaux fans. Going forward with such a technically brilliant, yet fan unfriendly style is going to be a serious challenge for the career of someone on the brink of turning 33. But maybe this is enough.
Stevenson never had Ali, nor Savon and Tyson, and Vinent didn't get De La Hoya––Rigondeaux did get Donaire, and it was Donaire that looked like the amateur without a clue how to handle the situation.
No comments:
Post a Comment