New Essay On Addiction At The Rumpus: Through the Dam

You can click on the link here: Through the Dam

Havana, Cuba and the Friends You Haven't Met Yet

“And let’s have no displays of indignation. You may not have known, but you certainly had suspicions. If we’ve told lies you’ve told half-lies… And a man who tells lies––like me––merely hides the truth. But a man who tells half-lies… has forgotten where he put it.

Mr. Dryden from Lawrence of Arabia

I had a grandfather who left Hungary in 1956 as a refugee while Russian tanks were rolling around outside his family's apartment in Budapest. The tanks outside her window are one of my mother's first memories. Ten years later my mother followed him to North America. My grandmother and uncle remained behind for the rest of their lives.

My grandfather and I never had much warmth for one another as people. He shared my mother's eyes yet lacked the warmth and kindness she possessed behind them. My favorite fact about him was that a woman he loved married someone else and he showed up at the wedding and hung himself during the ceremony. I always wondered if his dry, almost gasping voice was a souvenir from this experience.

He expected me to reach out to him and I could never find much about him to justify bothering. There had been cruelty against my mother and I held it against him without ever caring to explore his obvious pain. We had a weird bridge of pragmatism stretching over our divide. There wasn't so much resentment as understanding about the futility of our relationship. Nothing formally was established, but we stopped communicating before I was a teenager and he was dead not long after my 20th birthday and his 80th. We were both born on June the 3rd.

The last year of his life the only times I heard his voice was in the Hungarian songs he would sing my mother on her answering machine. It was such an uncharacteristically sweet, charming act I wasn't even sure how to approach asking my mother about why he'd begun regularly doing it. She visited him at the hospital as often as she could in the last days of his life and seemed to put to rest her own pain with him as he struggled into kindness toward the end.

There were silly, petty issues with his will where obvious desires he's had to look after people were complicated by fears of being exploited. There was very little money in the first place yet desires to offer something to my mother were botched at the end and she never for a moment complained despite her own financial strains. She laughed about how typical it was of him and her expression changed.

"Darling," she began, in the Count Chocula accent, "the two of you never had much closeness. I'm sorry for that. For both of you. He was a better man than I think you realize."

"Maybe I was wrong not to try."

"If you could go anywhere for two weeks. Anywhere in the world. Where do you think you would go?"

"Cuba. I just finished The Old Man and the Sea and found out he's still alive. He's 103. If I could go anywhere I'd go to Cojimar and meet him."

"Okay, then today your grandfather is sending you and your brother to Cuba. I will buy two tickets with the five thousand dollars your grandfather left me. I think he would enjoy this present for the two of you."

"Are you serious?"

"Yes," she smiled. "So you will have look up many of my friends in Havana."

"You have friends in Havana?"

"Of course I do."

"Who? I've never heard you mention knowing anybody in Cuba. I've never heard you mention knowing a Cuban anywhere."

"Why would I mention people I haven't met yet? But they're there. You'll see, Bwinny."

***

And I did. And yesterday one of the nicest, now with her husband, successfully escaped after years of trying.

No Mas Revisited

New piece up on ESPN.com regarding Cuban amateur great and Guillermo Rigondeaux close friend and teammate Erislandy Lara:

http://espn.go.com/blog/Boxing/post/_/id/2573/what-more-could-angulo-have-given-us

Teofilo Stevenson and Guillermo Rigondeaux Short Films In the Works

Negotiating something right now that would bring out two little films on the lives of Teofilo Stevenson and Guillermo Rigondeaux into the world. Nudging a little closer to that happening...

Teofilo Stevenson and Guillermo Rigondeaux Short Films

Right after Guillermo Rigondeaux's pummeling of ESPN 2012 Fighter of the Year Nonito Donaire, two offers came in for short films based Teofilo Stevenson and another on Rigondeaux himself. While the Miami Herald ran a front page feature on my work with Stevenson, accompanied by a brief clip from Split Decision, I have never publicly aired any footage from the last formal interview (albeit illegal) Stevenson ever granted. By far in my nearly 4 year journey exploring Cuba through the prism of Cuban boxers rejecting or accepting money to cross the Florida Straights, Stevenson's interview is the most explosive and moving thing I've ever captured. The short will explore his reasons for rejecting millions to fight Ali and the consequences, for better or worse, of that decision. The short will also explore Ali's fascinating relationship with Stevenson, including visiting the island twice and donating millions to Cuba in opposition to the embargo.

The Rigondeaux short will be a little different. While Rigondeaux's certainly achieved the dream he had back in Havana of defeating professional boxing's best, I've never been able to shake the feeling of viewing him as a kind of Orpheus-like figure: never able to look back. My aim to is to make an attempt at doing that for him, and an audience, and look at the cost of leaving.

An exciting and complicated element of these two shorts is the obvious sense that to quantify the costs of staying or going in Cuba, as an athlete or an ordinary citizen, exposes an impossibly obscene choice to impose upon any human being.

The sour truth you discover meeting the extraordinary Cuban people is that Faustian bargain is in either decision. Which goes a long way to explaining why no Cuban family on the island or off it has been spared the damage of fracture.

Guillermo Rigondeaux After Nonito Donaire

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.

Rigondeaux Crushes Donaire in New York to Take Titles

If Floyd Mayweather had routed Manny Pacquiao in the same manner Rigondeaux schooled Donaire, they'd hail the performance as genius. Instead the chorus chimes in that it was boring.

Rigondeaux was a Stradivarius in the ring and didn't allow Donaire had an answer or a plan B. Given the accolades showered on Donaire after the last year, how is it Rigondeaux fails to reap the credit he deserves for an achievement like this?

I don't get it.