ANGEL ESPINOSA, Cuban Great

[williefromrichmond]

SPORTS CORRESPONDENT JOHN DUNCAN’S INTERVIEW WITH ANGEL ESPINOSA

Angel Espinosa, “one of the best boxers Cuba has ever produced, a middleweight and light-middleweight with a reputation as a trifle undisciplined, overfond of women and drink. He ... retired early, in his late twenties, because he was burnt out, didn’t feel like training any more, and couldn’t be bothered....

JD: “How did you start in boxing?

AE: “I started at ten years old, almost eleven.... We started training and [the trainer, Orestes Salazar] wanted to see all our starting positions.... Because I had no idea what I was doing I kept switching my stance from right to left-handed. I was totally confused. [Orestes] had to call me over and say, ‘Look, son, are you southpaw or not?’.... ‘I’m not either, I’m both,’ I told him. ‘I’m ambidextrous’.... ‘Not any more you aren’t,’ he said. ‘That last move was southpaw; stay that way and don’t change again. You got that?’ .... From then on I learned everything in boxing as a southpaw. As I went further in the sport I tried to change back, but it was too late.... So I stayed lefty and it was as a lefty that I won all my schoolboy prizes....

“It was there that it all started and about seven or eight days later I had my first fight.... I weighed 34 kg. [75 lbs].... I got in the ring for my first fight and I won.... I got to my forty-seventh fight before I lost. The forty-eighth was a fight I had in Cienfuegos and I’m telling you I was robbed blind.... At thirteen and fourteen I was beating kids who were in the national junior team. At fifteen I was fighting men from the full team. But they wouldn’t send me abroad....

“I went to the national championships at Playa Giron in 1981 and I lost at 51 kg [112 pounds] to this guy called Leyva from Santiago de Cuba. Another robbery. Anyway, after that I carried on winning tournaments: TV Cubana, team tournaments, the 5 September, the Paquito Espinosa. In 1982 I beat everyone in the 57 kg [125 pounds] apart from Adolfo Horta ... and Jesus Sollet....

“When next January [1983] came around ... I had to move up to 60 kg [132 pounds]. Anyway, I had a couple of fights there and won them both, though I got a bad injury in the second one. In the third I came up against Angel Herrera, ... a double Olympic champion, thirty-two years old, and I’m still only sixteen. I hit him hard in the first round and I had him.... He won on points, 4-1, in the end, but it was a pretty close fight....

“I got a call from Havana about a month later telling me to get to the capital because I had been called up to replace Jose Miranda, who had been down to go to Czechoslovakia for a tournament called the [Grand Prix] Usti Nad Laben. I won the best young fighter award as a sixteen-year-old and the gold medal [he also won gold medals again in the 1985, 1986 and 1987 tournaments]. After Czechoslovakia we went to Romania for a tournament called the Centuron de Oro [The Gold Belt] ... [where he received an alarming injury]. I hardly ever got hurt in the ring except this once. I was fighting this Venezuelan and he took points off me on the inside and from a distance. Anyway, when I got out of the ring and into the dressing room there was this big mirror and when I looked in it I nearly fainted. I was cut from my eye to my ear and if I rolled my eyes I could actually see my ear hanging off....

“I went to the world youth championships [in 1983] even though I had never really trained with the youth team at all. I went to a youth tournament in Romania and got silver and when I got back I was selected for a tournament in Mexico which never actually happened. At this point I was a 63 kg [139.5 pounds] fighter. When I went to the junior world championships in the Dominican Republic I won the gold medal and the prize for best boxer.

“In 1984 I was entered in the Cuban national championships as a light-welterweight which I won. In the semi I remember I had to fight Carlos Garcia, ... who was the senior world champion at the time.... A lot of people came to see the bout, which I won by a knockout.

“When we got back back from that I was put in an awkward spot [the coach of the Cuban national team needed a boxer to fill the light-middleweight [71 kg/156 pounds] spot on the team and decided that Espinosa was the man for the job: “we have a problem ... and we think you are the man who can solve it”]....

“I had to train twice as hard and eat twice as much to make the weight. My first fight at that level was against Armandito Martinez, who had been the Olympic champion in 1980 at light-middleweight, and he beat me. And the next trip was to West Germany, [where] I won the gold medal and the prize for best young fighter. When I got back it was the Cordova Cardin, where I got a bronze.

“But the really big thing was the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles.... When they told me that we weren’t going to the Games because of the boycott it was probably not as sad for me as for other people. I was still a kid and for me the Goodwill Games, which replaced the Olympics in Cuba that year, were a big deal, too. In the Goodwill Games, I had a few problems. I picked up a bad cut boxing against a Russian and had to carry on competing against a German in the next round. I can’t remember the guy’s name now, but it was a really hard fight and I had to be given a standing count at one point and he knocked me down once as well. I knocked him down, too. All that was in the first round. In the second, I got to grips with him, controlled the rest of the fight, and won.

“I don’t remember much about 1985, but I won everything I touched in 1986. I got gold in Czechoslovakia [and] in Halle at the Copa Quimica. I think I beat Enrique Richter in the final. [The coach of the Cuban national team then] asked me to fight at middleweight at a team competition in Cuba and my weight went up again. I was having real problems with my weight and when I arrived back at training camp I weighed 87 kg [191 pounds], which is a heavyweight. They got me down to 72 kg [158 pounds], but I looked really thin, so they decided that from then on I was a middleweight [75 kg, 165 pounds]. It was an important time because we were preparing for the Pan-American Games in Indianapolis. I beat Dari Allen there in what everyone said was the best bout of the tournament. He was the middleweight world champion and I was the light-middleweight [world champion] and a lot of people had been looking forward to it. It was a good fight.

“I won in Yugoslavia in the [1987] World Cup in the final against Henry Maske. I won the best pound-for-pound boxer’s trophy.... I beat Maske three times around ‘87 and ‘88, in Halle, in Yugoslavia, and a few months before the Seoul Olympics, which we didn’t go to. It still hurts to think that I didn’t get to go to the Seoul Olympics because I know I would have won. We spent the whole of 1988 training for it and then in the end they told us we weren’t going. I felt really hurt by that and things started to go wrong for me.

“In fact, 1989 was the worst time of my life [personal problems: he had started drinking heavily, had married again, and was having problems with her family].... All this was going on and I stopped training properly.... Despite all that was going on in 1989 I still won the Playa Giron that year and the Copa Cardin and was in the team that went to Germany to prepare for the World Championships in Russia. I was really out of condition and everything, but I still got into the team. The first few fights there were easy, absolutely fornicating simple, but then I got in the ring for the final against this Russian, Kurniavka, and there was nothing in the tank at all. I tried to impose myself and I just couldn’t. And that is what it is like when you haven’t trained. I got home from Moscow and went straight to Holguin to see the family and once again things had got even worse while I was away. So, at the end of 1989, I just decided to get out of boxing for a year and sort it all out [he was 23 at this point]....

“After some time away I went to the Copa Cardin of 1991 and [made it known that] I was ready to come back to the team [and two Cuban boxing authorities] got me back in training again. I had nine comeback fights, won them all, won the Playa Giron, went to Spain and won there, went to France and won there....

“When I got back to Cuba I won the Cardin again and beat [Orestes] Solano and was looking forward to competing in the Cuba versus United States match later that year, but they went and picked Solano.... It wasn’t such a big deal, though, and I just got into training for the [1991] Pan-American Games, which I thought would give me a good chance of being selected for the 1992 Olympics. But one day I was out training and I suppose I didn’t warm up properly and, bang, the ligament in my right leg just goes.... I carried on training as best I could, ... but with fourteen days to the Pan-Americans and unable to put any weight on my leg I didn’t reckon I had a chance, so I went off to Holguin to see the family. I was there about three days, but when I got back they slapped a fine on me for indiscipline and wanted to punish me. That just made me mad ... and I quit boxing again. [The Olympics were only a year away].

“I spoke to [the coach of the Cuban national team] before I left and he said that if ... I wanted to return to boxing once again the only way he would let me back in was if I won the 1992 Playa Giron. I didn’t think anything of it until a week before the tournament and then I thought I might as well give it a go and with a week’s training I won a silver medal [losing to Solano].... I kept going and went to the Copa Cardin, where once again I got beaten by Solano.

“I thought that was that as far as any Olympic chances went. I had a couple of fights in Moa, but I reckoned that they would pick Solano for Barcelona in the light-heavyweights because he had beaten me twice. But they had a tournament to make the final selection for the Olympic team and I was invited. Solano’s first bout was against Yosvani Vega and he lost.... I beat my first opponent, Guerra from Pinar del Rio, and then beat Vega in the final and I was right back in the Olympic frame....

“We really trained hard for those Olympics. But [the coach of the Cuban team] took me aside and said he thought I looked slow at the weight - 81 kg [178 pounds] and that he wanted me to get down to 76 or 76.5 kg. But I was training so hard in Spain with the team that my weight actually dropped to 75 kg [165 pounds] which is a whole division below the one I was entering in Barcelona. When it came to it, if I was fighting someone in the afternoon and they weighed in at 81 kg in the morning, they probably weighed 83 or 84 kg by the time we got to fight in the evening, whereas I was 76 kg maximum the whole time I was there. In my first fight I realized that even though I was catching my opponent flush on the face I couldn’t actually knock him down. Although I had gained some speed by losing the weight, I didn’t have the strength in my punch. I was never noted for fast punching anyhow. I boxed more like a spider, tricky, unpredictable, all over you, so I wasn’t getting any advantage out of this speed.... I lost the quarter-final in the Olympics against a guy who, to be honest, ought to have been easy meat for me. I was losing it as a boxer. And that ... is my career pretty much over.”

Source: John Duncan, In the Red Corner, A Journey Into Cuban Boxing (Yellow Jersey Press, London, 2000), pp. 101-102, 108-129.