DANCING, defection, gold medals, gold teeth, a GAA club, Mexican cartels, a Cork-Cuba connection and a career that didn’t quite hit the heights it should have.
Welcome to the green-tinted chapter of Guillermo Rigondeaux’s story, a colourful tale straight from a scriptwriter’s pen - and one that started right here when the World Amateur Boxing Championships took place in Belfast 20 years ago.
Future super-middleweight world champion Carl Froch and heavyweight king David Haye were among those to make their name inside the brand new Odyssey Arena in early June 2001, but it was the Cubans to whom boxing aficionados were drawn like moths to a flame.
In keeping with their legendary status, they swept the boards with seven golds and two bronze.
Mario Kindelan was the experienced star – but it was the skinny kid sweeping all before him in the bantamweight class who stole the show.
Southpaw Rigondeaux was just 20 then, and the previous summer he had announced himself on the world stage by topping the podium at the Sydney Olympics. A blinding mix of devastating speed, razor sharp reflexes and blessed with a defensive sixth sense, he was all but unbeatable in the famous red vest.
Guys like this were never short of suitors from the professional ranks, but luring them out of communist Cuba and away from Castro’s clutches often had a detrimental effect on the risk-reward axis.
In years to come he would form an unlikely alliance with promoter Gary Hyde, and it was in Belfast that the Cork man first laid eyes on the little maestro; at weigh-ins - where the Cuban team would sell cigars on the side - in the ring, and on the dancefloor.
Tony Dunlop remembers every detail, despite the decades that have passed. One of the biggest characters on the local boxing scene, he was ringside at the Odyssey every day, while fighters from different competing countries trained at his north Belfast gym in the lead up.
He got to know the Cubans, and Rigondeaux. When they wanted to see the sights, Tony was their man. That they spoke no English, while he had no Spanish, didn’t matter.
“Sometimes people get on better when they don’t understand each other,” smiles Dunlop, who went delving through his shoe boxes for old photos yesterday morning.
And so they found themselves in the Gort na Mona GAA club near Turf Lodge on the Sunday night of June 10, just hours after the tournament had been officially wrapped up. Rigondeaux arrived in his team tracksuit, freshly procured gold medal around his neck.
“I told him he might be better keeping that in his pocket.
“I actually had him and Maikro Romero, another brilliant boxer, in my house. Another Cuban, Damián Austín, was there too… I know a Damien Austin from the New Lodge, but this guy won gold in Belfast as well.
“It’s an Irish-sounding name, but then I remember reading in a book called ‘In the Red Corner’ about the Irish mannerisms a lot of Cubans have, and you can see it – the hands in the pockets, talking out of the side of their mouth. Maybe that’s why we got on so well.
“That night in the Gort na Mona, all they wanted was a big dancefloor. ‘Rigo’ liked a whiskey, there was two or three other ones with him and they danced away all night. He’s a serious dancer.
“You couldn’t keep the women away from them.”
Hyde, meanwhile, had made himself known to Rigondeaux, laying the first foundations of a relationship that would bear fruit down the track.
“I knew hola, that was it - Belfast 2001, that was all he knew,” said Hyde in a 2015 RTE podcast on ‘El Chacal’.
“But we got on brilliant. He was just a character, he was having his own jokes, all the lads were laughing… he thought he was brilliant but sure no one could understand anyone. He just has a fantastic aura off him.
“He’s 5’4, a slight guy, I’m 6’3, but if I come into the room and he’s with me, people would get out of his way...”
After returning home a hero, Rigondeaux went on to win a second successive Olympic gold at Athens 2004. His aim was to become the first man to complete the quadruple at Beijing and then London 2012. Hyde, though, had other plans.
Risking the wrath of Cuban leader Fidel Castro and running the risk of incarceration, he travelled out to the Caribbean island in 2007, pretending to be a boxing journalist but determined to sign up Rigondeaux and a couple of the country’s other top prospects.
Following a secret meeting in downtown Havana, ‘Rigo’ agreed a deal. So did Mike Perez, a light-heavyweight who had beaten Ireland’s Kenny Egan a couple of years earlier. The contracts were posted home and tracked to avoid detection at the airport.
But while Rigondeaux wanted to bide his time before defecting, Perez was ready to go there and then. Later that year, under the cover of darkness, he swam offshore to a boat manned by a Mexican cartel.
After transferring through two other boats, enduring storms and depleted food and water supplies, he eventually arrived in Cancun nine days later. He remains in Cork to this day.
Rigondeaux’s road had hit a major bump though. After attempting to elope during the 2007 Pan American Games in Brazil, he was brought home in disgrace. Funding revoked, prized Mitsubishi Lancer taken away, he was removed from the 2008 team bound for Beijing.
Eventually he would follow Perez’s path, boarding a smuggler boat and crossing the Straits of Florida in 2009. By now the two Olympic gold medals had been melted down and made into teeth, those glorious amateur days firmly in the rearview mirror.
Don King was waiting to welcome him to America with open arms but Hyde was already heading Stateside with the paperwork posted back to Ireland two years earlier. A deal is a deal, after all, the odd couple reunited in the most unlikely of circumstances – and there were unforgettable parts of the journey.
Few will forget the brilliant ease with which Rigondeaux outclassed Limerick’s Willie Casey on his sole appearance on these shores, at Dublin’s Citywest Hotel in March 2011. And then there was the one-sided world title unification win over future Hall of Famer Nonito Donaire in 2013.
Yet, while the defensive genius of Floyd Mayweather jr continued to rake in the dollar bills, Rigondeaux’s style failed to capture the public imagination in the manner that his God-given talent deserved.
A potential showdown with Carl Frampton was one of too many that didn’t quite come off as he found himself avoided rather than embraced, the pro career of one of the greatest amateurs ever seen fizzling out with a whimper.
It could, maybe should, have been so different. But Tony Dunlop will never forget the genius that stood before him, or that boozy night in Belfast 20 years ago.
“Honestly, that kid should have been Muhammad Ali. He should have been Sugar ‘Ray’ Leonard.
"That’s how good he is… special. Just special.”
