Rigondeaux's lonely success story / Cuban Boxing System / Lara article

It's an older article but for those who haven't seen it. It's a good read...if you aren't interested in reading then don't. The first time Brin-Jonathan Butler met Guillermo Rigondeaux, a two-time Cuban Olympic gold medalist, he didn't recognize him. In the small, outdoor Rafael Trejo Gym in Havana, a disheveled figure stood at the doorway, black cap perched on his head, designer knock-off T-shirt hanging over his slight frame. Butler, who had come to Havana to film and interview other famed Cuban boxers, asked Hector Vinent -- himself a two-time gold medalist and a trainer at the gym -- who the man was, assuming Rigondeaux to be a local. "That's the greatest boxer who ever lived," Vinent said. Rigondeaux, polite and all smiles, approached to shake hands. Gold teeth glistened brightly from his mouth. Making small talk, Butler casually asked about the origins of his brilliant dentures. Said Rigondeaux: "I melted my Olympic medals into my mouth." Rigondeaux (9-0, 7 KOs), 31, is set to defend his junior featherweight title against Teon Kennedy (17-1-2, 7 KOs) on the undercard of Manny Pacquiao's bout with Timothy Bradley Jr. on Saturday, and his reported $103,000 haul for the fight will be a sum beyond the wildest dreams of all but a handful of his countrymen. When he steps into the ring at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, it will be because he bolted from a system in which so many Cuban athletes remain captive. It's a system that makes them national heroes, but gives them no freedom. A system that celebrates their talent, but suffocates it all the more. A system that demands an athlete to stay, but gives him almost no choice but to leave. Some choose to remain, forever entangled in the system. When Muhammad Ali was in his pomp, three-time Olympic gold medalist Teofilo Stevenson was offered $5 million to defect and fight. Stevenson's response? "What's a million dollars compared to the love of eight million Cubans?" Butler, who is currently filming a documentary on the fighter, recalls how Rigo was "completely radioactive politically" on that day in the Havana gym. Nothing could endear him to his boxing compatriots. "His was the saddest face I had seen in Cuba in my time there," Butler said, "and that country had a lot of sad faces." Butler's film chronicles the alternately heroic and tragic journey that Cuban boxers embark on when they defect. It paints a landscape not of black-and-white ideals and morals, but rather the sea of grey that Cuban boxers are forced to navigate long after they've stepped off the smugglers' boats. Originally in Cuba to train as a boxer, Butler, who has an amateur background, became intrigued by the amount of Olympic training talent readily available to him for as little as $6 a day. But this was quickly superseded after his first meeting with Rigo and his realization of the political storm surrounding a fighter many consider to be one of the greatest amateurs of all time. "I wanted to understand why the coaches were not talking to him and looked so scared that he had even stepped into the gym, given his great reputation," Butler said. "I consequently found out that summer Guillermo was a national soap opera, he was on the news daily, and that Fidel had spoken out about him as a traitor." Four months prior to Butler's encounter with Rigondeaux in Havana, the fighter had attempted to defect while participating at the Pan American Games in Rio de Janeiro. On July 22, 2007, Rigondeaux and teammate Erislandy Lara (now a highly ranked professional junior middleweight) disappeared ahead of their scheduled weigh-ins. Discovered by Brazilian authorities, they returned to Cuba three days later disgraced, ostracized and begging for forgiveness, little of which was forthcoming. "Betrayal for money is one of the favorite weapons of the United States to destroy Cuba's resistance," Castro said in the week after Rigo and Lara's defection attempt. "They were simply knocked out with a blow to the jaw, paid for by American dollars. There was no need for a count." At the time of the defection, Cuban trainer Roberto Quesada told the Miami Herald that "from experience, they will be treated like soldiers who deserted from the army. … They may not realize it, but as boxers they are dead." Later that week, Fidel Castro used the exact same analogy. Rigondeaux and Lara would not box for Cuba again. By the time Rigondeaux decided to defect again, in 2009, Hyde had already established the necessary connections to successfully extricate world junior champion Ismaikel "Mike" Perez from Cuba. And it was those same connections that helped Hyde finally get Rigo to the United States. "Money makes the world go 'round, and those people make money from customers," Hyde said of the human smugglers. "So all I had to do was become that customer, which I am, and get the people who are giving the service to trust me." Hyde started his quest to find Perez a way out of Cuba in Cancun, Mexico -- a known hot spot and midway point for human trafficking between the United States and Cuba. After a week of walking through various Cuban restaurants in the city looking for a lead, he eventually found a man who said he was third from the top in a trafficking cartel that could help him. The price: $50,000. the rest of the article here along with a good Erislandy Lara article. http://espn.go.com/boxing/story/_/id/8016473/guillermo-rigondeaux-lonely-success-story http://www.thesweetscience.com/news/articles-frontpage/15546-erislandy-lara-was-born-to-fight