By Thomas Gerbasi
Kermit Cintron loves boxing. Unfortunately, for most of the last eight years his right hand hated it, and it reminded him during practically every one of the 12 fights he engaged in since initially injuring it in 2007 against Jesse Feliciano.
Cintron was the IBF welterweight champion of the world at the time, on his way to either a big rematch with the only man to beat him up to that point, Antonio Margarito, or rising star Paul Williams. He got surgery on his moneymaker after the Feliciano fight, but it didn’t take.
Eventually, he would fight Margarito again, as well as Williams, losing both. There would be big wins over Alfredo Angulo and a draw with Sergio Martinez, but the right hand was rarely the potent weapon it was when he earned the nickname “Killer.”
“My hand was never the same since that fight (against Feliciano),” he said. “I avoided the surgery, and I honestly finished it off with the Ronald Cruz fight. I knew I couldn’t continue my career unless I had the surgery I needed.”
The Cruz fight in March of 2014 was only his third since 2011, and while he won a close decision, Cintron’s lasting memory of the bout was the pain in his hand. This time, he knew he had a choice to make – get the surgery or quit. He got the surgery.
More than 17 months after his win, Cintron, 35, is back in Reading, Pennsylvania, back working with one of his original coaches, Joe Pastore, and ready to make a return to one of the sport’s most interesting divisions at 147 pounds, or even 154 pounds if the opportunity is right. Either way, the Boricua Bomber wants to make another run.
“I’m trying to get back on track with my career,” Cintron said. “I’m back with Joe, he’s getting me ready with my strength and conditioning, as well as with the boxing part of things, and he’s trying to get me back to my old ways – not so much counterpunching and backing up. I’m excited now that my right hand is a hundred percent, and I’ll be able to punch with it a hundred percent.”
Pastore, who, along with Marshall Kauffman, took Cintron up the welterweight ladder in the early part of his career, is as no nonsense as they come in this business. So even with Cintron sitting next to him, there was going to be a straight answer given when he was asked if his former protégé could pull this off in his mid-30s.
“He’s my friend first, so if I didn’t think he had it, I would tell him,” Pastore said. “But I believe that he does.”
The man at the helm at the East Reading Boxing Club has plenty of reasons for thinking this way, and you have to take him seriously, even if only because few, if any, in this business know Cintron better than he does.
“We had a real strong bond when we got together,” Pastore explains. “It was more like brothers than it was a working relationship, but life happens and things take people in different directions and we went our separate ways for a while. It was definitely a strain on both of us – he had some harsh things to say about me, I had some harsh things to say about him. But we got rid of the cause of the problems, and when him and I first got back together and sat down and talked, I knew that the physical ability was always there, but Kermit had to be in the right state of mind. There couldn’t be distractions in other aspects of his life.”
Cintron says those distractions are a thing of the past. His personal life is in order, he’s a free agent promotionally, and he just wants to fight. Most importantly, he wants to fight with a healthy right hand, and he’s had one as Pastore puts him through his paces.
“At first I didn’t know what to think of it,” Cintron said of his first days in the gym post-surgery. “But after the second time doing pads with Joe and just throwing my right hand, it felt good not feeling any pain at all.”
Of course there were the psychological scars from fighting so long with one good hand, but Pastore believes that those issues have faded away as well.
“It’s been a challenge,” he said. “But in the last couple months, it’s really starting to turn around. He’s coming forward again and starting to reassume the role that he had on his way up when he first burst onto the boxing scene, which is an aggressive, come forward, boxer-puncher that can take a shot if necessary.”
It’s a style that Cintron made his name with as he raced out to a 24-0 pro record. Margarito took that “0” in their first fight in 2005, and Cintron soon broke with Kauffman and Pastore to work with Emanuel Steward, then Ronnie Shields. In Pastore’s eyes, those relationships produced mixed results, yet now that the two old friends are working together once more, he’s not trying to reinvent the wheel, just hoping to remind Cintron that when he was at his best, he fought as an attacker, not as someone hoping to fire back when fired upon.
“I don’t have to teach him to fight,” Pastore said. “He already knows how to fight. I’m just reminding him of what it was that made him great and what it was that made everybody talk about him to begin with. I thought Emanuel Steward was a good fit for Kermit when he was training with him. Then he moves on to Ronnie Shields, and I thought that was a disaster. You don’t take a 5-foot-11 power puncher and turn him into a backpedaling volume puncher. But one of Kermit’s greatest strengths as a fighter can also be one of his greatest weaknesses, because he’s very coachable, and unfortunately if he’s with a coach that doesn’t understand his style and his physical attributes, the results are gonna show in the fight. So that coachability winds up being a hindrance for him because if you watch the fights when he was with Ronnie Shields, you can see a guy that’s caught between styles.”
Pastore is doing everything in his power to make sure that isn’t the case anymore, and Cintron is on board. So what’s the plan? Pastore would like to see his fighter in the ring no later than the end of October, and while that fight will likely be a tune-up bout, after that, the duo has its sights set on some big names.
“Amir Khan and Keith Thurman are two guys I’d love to fight,” Cintron said, and Pastore agrees, throwing in the name Danny Garcia as well.
“The division is good right now, as far as a lot of big name fighters, but I believe a hundred percent of Kermit is capable of beating anybody at 147 to 154,” Pastore said. “Thinking Kermit can beat those guys is not a disparaging remark against them. He’s my fighter, he’s the guy I train, the guy I’ve been with for 16 years. I have to think my guy’s the better guy, and I do.”
Most importantly, Cintron believes too.
“There is unfinished business,” he said. “Yeah, I’ve been a world champion and I’ve fought in some big fights, but I know that I still have a lot in me, and that’s why I’m still in it.”