Our man in Havana finds the heirs of Teofilo Stevenson keeping up a noble tradition
BOXING:John Duncan
THERE is no laser show or dry ice at Cuba’s national boxing championships in the Ateneo Fernando del Dios Bunuel, an ugly concrete arena in the eastern sugar-and-beer province of Holguin. And the only people who are getting pay-per-view are sitting in the arena, where two pesos buy a ringside seat or a bench in the gods, depending on how long you queued.
No money, no hype – but the Cubans have the most precious commodity in the sport: boxers, good ones and lots of them. It has been this way, more or less, since 1961, when, in the first flushes of revolutionary zeal, professional boxing was banned, designated “an activity utterly injurious to and contrary to the development of the health of the athletes who practise the sport”.
But a country which bore three great Kids – Kid Chocolate, the junior lightweight king of 1931, Kid Gavilan, the welterweight great of the Fifties, and Kid Charol, the middleweight of the Twenties, whom many Cubans rate as their best of all time – could never be expected to take off the gloves entirely. A national amateur boxing academy was formed and, after two Olympic silvers in 1968 came three golds in 1972, including the first of three successive super-heavyweight titles for Teofilo Stevenson. The bandwagon has not stopped rolling since.
For eight days every spring the Cubans hold their national boxing championships. It is tougher here, they say, than at the Olympics, where, in Atlanta, Cuba’s haul of four golds and three silvers was considered disappointing. Standards are so high that the 1989 world championships (four gold, four silver, one bronze) are still referred to as La Tragedia.
Accidents will happen, however. In Holguin, Felix Savon, twice Olympic heavyweight champion, five times world champion, and a national champion 12 times in a row, was felled in the quarter-final by a swinging right and spent three minutes unconscious. Of his five defeats in a 12-year career, only one has come at the hands of a foreigner. Maikro Romero, a comfortable Olympic champion at flyweight, had to scrap his way past three tough opponents, one of whom should have won on points and another who put him on the canvas, to become national champion.
Talented prospects such as world junior champions Exer Rodriguez (featherweight), Yulkis Sterling (light-heavy) and Stalin Lopez (bantam) were suitably educated by their defeats.
To rise above one’s fellow Cubans takes something special. In Holguin only two fighters managed it. Welterweight champion Juan Hernandez Sierra had a mere single blow recorded against him in three bouts, and middleweight Ariel Hernandez just three.
“The competition here is so intense that even great champions have to maintain exceptional standards or they are finished,” said Julio Gonzalez, a former world lightweight champion. “That’s how the quality is maintained.”
The man responsible is Alcides Sagarra, the national coach for as long as anyone can remember. The greying, 61-year-old black man spends most of the tournament making notes at a plain, plastic table 3m from ringside, an island of detached interest in a vociferous 3 000 crowd. The boxers call him Papi and great champions queue for an audience.
“I loved boxing ever since I was a boy and I was raised beside a gym in Santiago de Cuba,” he said. “But, because of my breathing problems, I thought I could not take up the sport. So I worked as a mechanic and did other physical exercise to help my asthma until someone told me boxing would be good for it because the lungs have to develop greatly. So that was it … “
But why are Cubans such good boxers? “Cuba is a mixture of cultures: African, Hispanic and indigenous. And we have always had a dance culture adopted and adapted from all those cultures. What is certain is that a sense of dance and rhythm is now part of our national characteristic, and that explains a lot about why Cubans can adapt to boxing so well. You need rhythm and coordination of feet, arms and body to dance and also to box. Cubans develop that from an early age.
“For Kid Charol, Kid Chocolate and nowadays for the best graduates of our boxing academy, the whole boxing arsenal starts with coordination. Others factors that have helped us include our national character as rebels and fighters, but you would need a whole book to explain that.”
The boxers say Sagarra is being too modest. “Without Alcides, Cuban boxing simply would not be what it is today,” said Angel Espinosa, light-middleweight world champion in Reno 1986, and who is now a trainer. “His personality, his ability, his ideas dominate everything, and his experience is vast. He knows everything that is going on and is planning so far ahead that you would hardly believe it.”
You had better believe it. “At the moment we have an enlarged squad of about 120 boxers, more or less,” said Sagarra. “All of different ages. We are planning now for how our boxers will have developed by 2008, not just 2000, long-range work that gives up positive results.”
And professionalism? Has the moral revulsion at the pro game diminished? Sagarra is cautious, non-committal, but does not denounce pro boxing in the way that was once the Cuban norm. “We had pro boxing in Cuba until 1961, and amateur boxing too. I believe that, at this time, as everything in life, professional boxing has advanced. Boxing is on the rise, it is shown on TV, it is very popular and all those things, but I really have no great knowledge of all aspects of pro boxing because we don’t work with that type of sport.”
If he ever does, then no embargo in the world is strong enough to stop world titles being exported to his island in the Caribbean.