American - Journalist | 1979 -
He's the best practitioner I've ever seen of the Cuban style. But I think that what Rigondeaux sees as an immaculate performance has no corollary to what fans see as a perfect performance. In his mind, to make an opponent look terrible who has been lauded as exciting or favored against him gives him satisfaction.
Brin-Jonathan Butler
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You can't learn to take a punch. Whether you have a glass chin or you don't, the only way of finding out is having it land.
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I have a dirty little habit of distilling every city I've ever visited into the historical person I'd have most wanted to meet and share a cigarette with.
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Exploring Castro's pawns in Cuba and exposing anything negative also makes you a pawn to all his enemies 90 miles away. Both sides don't have much of a track record for nuance of opinion.
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Galileo wasn't put in prison because he was wrong about anything he discovered looking through his telescope; rather, he was incarcerated simply because he saw what others didn't wish to see.
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In film or on stage, in reflecting life through art, an actor has a second take or another day with his or her performance if something goes wrong. Bullfighters are spies crossing into enemy lines. Any mistake, no matter how minor or trivial, is potentially fatal.
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I have no arguments to defend how brutal and disturbing a ritual the corrida is. Like all tragedies, no matter the beauty created, there are no happy endings. If it is indeed an art form, bullfighting is the most disturbing I have ever witnessed.
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With all of the people in Cuba who I met - many of them hugely heroic figures - I found learning about their complexity and richness and contradictions just really fascinating, and it was fulfilling to be able to offer a different side to them, to be able to have some kind of unique takeaway from the official narrative.
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I think the beauty and mystery of boxing is just the immediacy of how it reveals people unlike anything else.
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In the United States in the 20th century, every major event that America was going through, there was a boxer who seemed to symbolically represent it, from slavery to the Vietnam War to the Depression - all the way along, you just seemed to have boxers that carried the narrative.
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Castro was always using his athletes as a way of symbolically defeating the United States in the ring, and after these Cubans defeated Americans in the ring, they were turning down exorbitant sums to leave the island.
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We're a long way away from someone like Willie Pep winning a round without throwing a punch.
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