An excerpt went up on Sports On Earth for A Cuban Boxer's Journey: From Castro's Traitor to American Champion yesterday in an anticipation for today's release of the book. Amazon's Kindle Singles has selected the book for their series. Ring Magazine will carry a review of the book in their mid-June issue written by the very gifted Brian Harty (if you haven't read his piece on Floyd Mayweather and the dynamics of boxing today I can't recommend his work enough). S.L. Price and I recently did a podcast together on Cuba yesterday, today, and tomorrow you can listen to here. If anything possesses you to approach my book, you're bound to get avalanched a whole lot by Price's brilliant Pitching Around Fidel . Price's book has just been reissued with an epilogue that explores where A Cuban Boxer's Journey picks up the baton with some of the characters from his story. Price has been a real mentor to me and terribly generous with his time and support so I hope if you haven't read his book you might give it a try. It's one of the most fair, evocative depictions of life in Cuba (not just sport) that I've encountered in trying to research as much as I could for my own work.
Pushing Cuba and boxing related material isn't the easiest sell these days, so I'm very grateful to all the people who've put time and energy into helping my book reach people. I don't think I've brought much to Cuba beyond my own overwhelming confusion but I'm hugely pleased that confusion might be of some value seeking to understand the blur of Cuba tussling in the dirt of history against their powerful neighbor to the north for so long. I tracked down as many voices as I could to weigh in on Cuba and the results only confused me more. Perhaps you'll parse the riddles and poetry far more readily than I was capable. While Cuba's wardrobe has always enthralled the world with cars, cigars, and rum, the island itself and her people were always infinitely more compelling to me. If you toss away attempting to reconcile, what Nabokov once described as "the facts of the fiction" from the "fiction of the facts" you arrive places I've never been before inside my own mind and feelings. That's what I tried to offer with this book.
Next week a new longform article will go live from SBnation exploring the intersection between Yasiel Puig's superstardom in the United States and Teofilo Stevenson's legacy back in Cuba. It's my fourth effort with Glenn Stout, editor extraordinaire, and we're excited with the results. A short film will accompany the piece taking a look at Muhammad Ali and Teofilo Stevenson's great fight that never was. It will be the first time most will see footage from the interview I had with Stevenson back in May of 2011, his last before his death. I'm not sure what to say about that interview. I've sat across from Mike Tyson, George Foreman, Lance Armstrong and been fortunate enough to ask the questions I was most interested in asking but no one I've ever sat with affected me quite like Teofilo Stevenson. It was as close as I'll ever come to sharing a cigarette with Achilles.
So, 5:07 in the morning of the first day of my 35th year, hoping this note finds everyone well and thanks as always for your support. Hoping those kind enough to pick up a copy of the book enjoy what they find and my own obsession with the subject matter offers something of worth in exchange for your generous investment of time. It takes talent to tell a shitty story with Cuba, land of 11 million people living at the extremes, so I'll be hoping, fingers crossed, I fell short on that score with you.
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