The Greatest Boxer Alive Is Too Good For His Sport
Guillermo Rigondeaux—El Chacal, or The Jackal—is by far the greatest fighter in the world today. He may be the greatest fighter of the last 20 years. Unfortunately, he will soon lose for the first time, surely by knockout, and with his defeat will come sighs of relief and a lot of people saying, “I told you so.”
Rigondeaux won’t lose to a better fighter, because there are none around. He’ll lose soon because he’ll be forced, through a lack of options both economic and fistic, to overcome obstacles too great for a man of his size and age to handle. Whoever beats Rigondeaux will be much bigger and much younger than he.
Age is the less important issue; Rigondeaux fights in a style that treasures economy, allowing him in, I’d estimate, his early 40s—yes, I know what the record book says—to have lost little efficacy from his physical prime. His genius for the sport has even allowed him to pick up some new tricks during his short paid career.
Size is another thing. Rigondeaux would ideally be fighting at bantamweight: He is a very small man. Move up and move up and eventually there’ll be someone who’ll simply crush you. The smaller you are, the more each pound means.
Rigondeaux’s most recent fight, against Hisashi Amagasa of Japan, was illustrative, both a masterpiece and a disaster. The challenger, competent-plus but unexceptional in most ways, was an unsettlingly big super bantamweight, somehow managing to whittle himself down to 121 3/4 despite having a 5’10 1/2” frame meant to carry at least 20 more pounds. It also turned out that Amagasa and his cornermen were brave—almost messianically so.
Over the course of the 11 rounds he was allowed to stay in the ring, Amagasa undoubtedly underwent a transformative experience—enough of one to cause me to involuntarily conjure memories of two similarly messianic fighters: Duk-koo Kim (Kim Duk-koo) and Johnny Owen.
I’m not an alarmist when watching boxing; I’ve seen countless brutal fights during the 60 years I’ve followed the sport, frequently watching from a fighter’s corner. Although of the “better to stop it one punch too soon” persuasion, I regard myself as a relatively unflappable observer of whatever takes place inside the ropes.
But, while watching Rigondeaux artfully beat Hisashi Amagasa swollen and nearly shapeless, I couldn’t escape the conclusion that I might once again be witnessing a man being slowly beaten to death.
But.
The Amateurs Are Not The Pros
Being a great amateur boxer these days doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be anything special as a pro. There are different scoring systems, with the amateurs rewarding a technique of pecking disengagement, where quick jabs to the head, followed by retreat, will get you wins. Try that in the pros and two things will happen: the crowd will begin booing before the end of the first round, and someone will grab you, rough you up, and hand you your first loss.
It goes without saying that, to protect their promoters’ investments, most Olympic medalists are babied along during the start of their pro careers.
This wasn’t the case with the two most highly acclaimed amateurs of recent years: both Rigondeaux (374-12) and Ukrainian gold medalist Vasyl Lomachenko (396-1) were matched tough nearly from the get-go.
Here’s the difference between them:
In this third pro fight, Rigondeaux won the WBA-NABA super bantamweight title by knocking out Giovanni Andrade, a veteran of 70 professional fights. Andrade lasted three rounds, having been dropped in the second and third.
The Greatest Boxer Alive Is Too Good For His Sport
Guillermo Rigondeaux boxes Worapoj Petchkoom at the Athens Olympics, 2004
Lomachenko was even more ambitious than Rigondeaux, going for the vacant WBO featherweight title against the battle-hardened Orlando Salido (40-12-2), who came in cynically overweight, happily accepted his fine, and then used his size advantage—and a lot of illegal tactics—to knock Lomachenko all around the ring. The amateur star with the 396-1 record was now 1-1 as a pro.
This says nothing bad about Lomachenko, who got a lifetime of on-the-job training from his loss. He fought his ass off under tough conditions. Someone was continuing to look out for him, too: the scorecards somehow made him only a split decision loser in a bout where he had clearly been defeated. It was child’s play for his promoter, Bob Arum, to come up with a ready-made narrative that turned the negative of the defeat in his second fight into a rousing positive. Lomachenko was given, and won, another title shot in his next fight, turning him into a world champion with a record of 2-1.
To date, no one similarly powerful seems to be looking out for Rigondeaux.
No small part of Rigondeaux’s problem is that influential boxing writers like Dan Rafael and Kevin Iole can look at the single most impressive boxing performance of the last decade—Rigondeaux’s virtuosic shutdown of Nonito Donaire—and come up with headlines like “Rigondeaux Bores, but Bests Donaire” or “The loss column: Beating Nonito Donaire won’t do much for Guillermo Rigondeaux’s popularity.” I can see how someone raised on video games, toughman contests, demolition derbies, or bull baiting might find Rigondeaux’s performance boring. But boxing writers are supposed to know at least a little bit about boxing.
Even Rigondeaux’s own promoter, made grumpy by the defeat and corresponding pound-for-pound rankings demotion of one of his near-superstar clients, voiced his two cents. From the Rafael article:
“It was not a very engaging fight,” Top Rank promoter Bob Arum said. “If Rigondeaux would stand and fight, (he) has a lot of power and a lot of skills, but running the way he does really makes it not a watchable fight.”
Arum is also quoted elsewhere as telling Rafael, in reference to the question of whether HBO would continue to televise Rigondeaux, “Every time I mention him, they throw up.” Arum, as some may recall, is the boxing genius who opined that another of Top Rank’s stars, Kelly Pavlik—remember him?—was a greater fighter than Marvin Hagler.
The Runner Who Doesn’t Run
The thing is, Guillermo Rigondeaux does stand and fight. He stays right in the pocket, always within easy range of landing his punches. And within range of being hit. He backpedals to draw fire, but by no coherent definition is he a runner. Still, in the contemporary parlance of boxing, almost every fighter who is hard to hit and is unwilling to trade punch for punch risks that defamatory label “runner.” He’s a runner. He won’t make a fight. Guys who lose embarrassing decisions, flailing after thin air all night, can say, “All he did was run. He wouldn’t stand and fight with me.” The most recent example of this narrative line came from Manny Pacquiao, who invoked it after his one-sided loss to Floyd Mayweather—manifestly, whatever his many flaws, not a runner.
In the popularly held conception of boxing, a runner is a coward, thus not a real man. Label a fighter a runner, and you can dismiss him as a box office draw. You then don’t have to fight him, citing economic concerns. Everyone can understand risk/reward issues.
The Greatest Boxer Alive Is Too Good For His Sport
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