THE BRUTAL REALITY OF BOXING

Puerto Rico was stunned. The big July 27th newspaper headline was one word: “Destroyed.” The full-page photo of the boxer on his left knee, his face battered and bloodied, his puffed eyes closed, his puffed lips open. His arm, gloves, boxing shorts splattered with blood.

This could not be Miguel Cotto. Not the invincible Miguel Cotto. His face so bloated, battered and bloodied that it didn’t even look like him.

It was. But it wasn’t only that he was no longer champ, no longer unbeaten. It was that he was “destroyed” by Antonio Margarito. That the Mexican, in the graphic words of the AP report, sent “Cotto to a hospital for enough stitches to make a quilt.”

And this is the thing about boxing. You pick up the paper in the morning, turn to the sport pages, and when you see that your baseball, or basketball, or football team lost, you feel disappointment. But this huge headline and photo provoked an emotion far beyond disappointment. This is a human being. These are real wounds on his face, real blood throughout his body. But what about the damage to what you don’t see? Just how bad, how seriously, has this man been “destroyed?”

Now, talking about heartbreak in boxing, take a newspaper story published a few months ago on another Puerto Rican boxer that was as idolized as Miguel Cotto. Wilfredo Benitez was born in New York City in 1958 from a Puerto Rican boxing family. At the age of 15 he was already world-ranked. At 17, he made boxing history as the youngest ever world champion. By 1981 he made boxing history again becoming the youngest champion in three divisions.

Like Cotto, he had mega fights in Las Vegas against boxing legends, losing to Sugar Ray Lenard but beating Roberto Duran. Still in his 20’s, however, after losing a brutal 15-round fight to Thomas Hearns in 1982, his lifetime of boxing began taking its toll. It is evident and inevitable: you can’t take hundreds, thousands of blows to the head without some sort of brain damage. In 1987, something bizarre happened to Benitez after losing a fight in Buenos Aires. He accused his fight promoter of stealing his money and passport. It took a year to get the Argentine government to allow him to leave the country.


Benítez, by now having fought 62 times as a professional and many more as an amateur, with each new fight was suffering bad beatings. The newspaper story on Benitez described a fight in Quebec: “For eight rounds, the Canadian Mathew Hilton gave Benítez a terrible beating. Finally, in the ninth round, Hilton cornered him against the ropes and plummeted him with combinations to the head. Just before the round ended, a devastating left hook yanked Benítez’s head to the back. As he sank to the canvas his head moved from side to side like the ‘doll bobblehead’.”

Now virtually destitute, living in the Saint Just barrio in Trujillo Alto, Benitez gets a $200 a month pension from the World Boxing Council. The newspaper story describes the skeleton of what was once a gym: the rusty frame of what was once the boxing ring, a punching bag lying dead on the floor. When Benítez tried to walk, he lost his balance, reminiscent of that “dance of death” in that terrible knockout in Quebec.

It was useless to try to interview Benítez. He kept asking “how old am I?” Next to him was his 81-year-old mother, Clara. Some 15 times in less than an hour, staring at his mother, Benitez asked: “Are you my mother?”

Some professional boxers survive without terrible brain damage. According to scientific reports, some 20 percent don’t. According to the American Medical Association, four out of five boxers suffer some degree of noticeable brain damage, like dementia, loss of memory, or worse.

As the heartbreaking attempt to interview Benitez shows, he is one that didn’t survive. As other great champions like Muhammad Ali. Is there anything sadder than to see him today, his once great hands shaking uncontrollably, this once great communicator now trying desperately to mumble words?

Now, also heartbreaking was the newspaper story after the Cotto fight describing the crying of his three children, at ringside, as they witnessed the pounding of their father’s profusely bleeding face. Cotto’s wife, Melissa, confessed that, as all Puerto Rico, she never dreamed this could happen.

There is a reason why Puerto Rico loves boxing perhaps more than any other sport. From Sixto Escobar in 1934 to Miguel Cotto, Puerto Rico has had no less than 55 world champions. This small island ranks third in the world in producing champions.

But as hard as it is today to believe, some day Puerto Rico will follow other parts of the world that see professional boxing for what it is, a form of entertainment too brutal, too destructive, to have a place in a civilized, humane society. Some day it will be banned, and one hopes before it does to other young men what it did to Wilfredo Benítez.

And to what it did to another boxer a week before the Cotto-Margarito fight. In San Antonio, for ten rounds, Mexican welterweight Oscar Diaz was also destroyed. He collapsed. Unconscious and unresponsive, he was rushed to a hospital for surgery for bleeding on the brain. As of this writing, he was in a coma.

Loving the sport and loving the champions as much as Puerto Ricans do, does not erase the reality of professional boxing. It is a brutal, inexcusably inhumane sport.