Four A.M., the phone rang.
“I have a sticky offer for you, lad,” Gary Hyde said on the other end of the line, just before stepping onto a plane in Dublin bound for the United States. “Very sticky.”
Hyde told me he had taken out a life insurance on himself for €3.5 million that afternoon. He had just left his family in tears, begging him not to get on a plane for Rigondeaux’s next fight in Tijuana. After the failed Los Angeles trip, Hyde had set up an injunction barring Rigondeaux from going ahead with his next fight. In return, Rigondeaux and his backers in Miami had sued Hyde to get out of Hyde’s signed contract and sent a first-class ticket to collect Freddie Roach so that he could work Rigondeaux’s corner. Roach had turned them down flat, reiterating he would never work an unprepared fighter’s corner. Then Hyde won the latest lawsuit against him and retained control as Rigondeaux’s manager. Once the court issues were resolved, Hyde quickly negotiated a multiyear promotional deal between Rigondeaux and Top Rank, the biggest promoter in boxing, which assured a title fight if Rigondeaux could get past his next opponent. The title fight was also promised on a Manny Pacquiao undercard scheduled for Cowboys Stadium in Dallas, Texas, which meant massive international exposure for Rigondeaux and a guaranteed six-figure purse—more money than he’d ever seen in his life.
“Well, lad, while my legal mess with Rigondeaux and Miami is, for the moment, behind me, there are certain threats that have been floated my way going into Rigondeaux’s next fight in Tijuana. To begin with, Tijuana looks roughly about as safe as Iraq right now. I Googled it this morning. Seventy thousand fuckin’ people dead from the drug trade alone. Part of that drug trade’s portfolio is the human-smuggling trade that I messed around with. There are some angry Cuban Americans who would like to see harm come my way. Do you see where this is going?”
“Threats?” I asked.
The real trouble, Hyde explained, wasn’t anything to do with the general danger in Tijuana. The real risk for Hyde, now that his managerial contract with Rigondeaux had been upheld in U.S. courts, was gangsters in Miami finding their own court of appeal in Mexico. Hyde pointed out that “anyone could hire someone for peanuts and blow my head off. Or they could hire the police to frame me with drugs and let me rot away in a Mexican prison. Or they could kidnap me. Life isn’t worth nothin’ down there.” Hyde added that some of the people he was “playing with” in Miami had “serious connections” to the underworld. Hyde’s own security detail refused to accompany him across the U.S.-Mexican border, given the risks. “That’s why an hour ago my entire family was in tears, begging me not to leave when I left home for the airport.”
I asked him why, given the risks he’d laid out, anyone would bother going ahead with it.
“I haven’t lived my life letting people push me around.” Hyde laughed. “So, I still owe you that interview I promised. I’m a man of my word. My question is this—if you really want to get it—does all of this sound worth it?”
“Your security detail said no?”
“My security lads said no way. I’ve taken chances before flying to Cuba, and my family knew those chances, but this is the first time they had tears in their eyes, asking me not to—”
“This is an incredibly stupid move,” I said, pondering my own incredibly stupid participation.
“We’re one fight from a title, lad. This is my fighter’s dream. This is my dream. A few months from now he’ll be in front of sixty thousand screaming people fighting for a world title in Dallas! They’ll all be screaming without knowing half of what we know about how he got there. Everything we been through to get here and we just have to get through this. I can’t not be there, lad. You met him in Cuba. You know what he and I have been through to get to this. You know why it’s worth it.”
I wondered whether some of what they’d “been through” together had motivated Rigondeaux to repeatedly sue Hyde for his freedom. Or perhaps Rigondeaux took orders strictly from his people in Miami. Hyde certainly had protected an unprepared Rigondeaux, whereas his people in Miami were content to run the risk of letting him fight, despite the fact that a loss would bury his professional career. Maybe pressures outside the ring were getting to Rigondeaux, too. His family was still back in Cuba. His mother had just died, and he’d told Freddie Roach that imprisonment awaited him if he dared set foot back on the island to attend her funeral.
“If you wanna throw caution to the wind and come down there with me, I’ll guarantee you that interview that got botched in Los Angeles and I’ll also give you an interview myself. I’ll tell you how I got all these lads out. If neither of us is killed or kidnapped, you’ll have total access with him in Tijuana. You can have access to him as long as I’m his manager. Wherever in the world he fights, you’ll be right there. Hell, you can be in our dressing room with him, and when he goes out to that ring, you can join us and come on in with him.”
“Where you’re saying you’ll be assassinated during the opening bars of the fucking Mexican national anthem.”
“That’s optimistic, lad. Rigondeaux’s the visitor in Tijuana, so the Cuban anthem would be up first. I reckon whatever Mexican Lee Harvey Oswald equivalent wouldn’t wait around that long.”
I tried to put the situation in perspective. Here was a wealthy man with a staff of thirty people who worked under him that he could have sent to do this, and yet he was willing to be murdered and risk never seeing his family again to personally attend a boxing match. He was offering me the chance to take a bullet, be kidnapped, or be framed with drugs and therefore never see my wife or family again, so that both of us could get up close to the fucking patron saint of family-lessness, Guillermo Rigondeaux. And Rigondeaux, for all we knew, hadn’t improved since the last time we’d seen him, just after getting his ass kicked by a fifteen-year-old back at Wild Card.
But what if he won? A title shot in a seventh professional fight was unheard of. No other sport would allow you to get up close with your career’s high-water mark that early on. More than anything, I wanted to know if that championship payoff would make everything he’d sacrificed worth it.
Even better, what if Gary and I didn’t get kidnapped, or framed with drugs, or murdered, or spend the rest of our lives rotting in Mexican prison and Rigo won?
“Don’t get on the plane,” I said.
“Ah, lad,” he laughed. “Not you, too.”
“Don’t do it.”
“It’ll make it that much sweeter, won’t it?” Gary suggested. “Who gives a fuck if it’s more dangerous than Baghdad before you even consider my circumstances down there. How long have I been fighting Miami over this? Castro was easier, for fuck’s sake.”
“Don’t do it.”
“Imagine it down there! You wanted your story, here it is! Do or die. For all of us. He has Tyson’s old trainer working with him now. Ronnie Shields. Brilliant trainer. Everything’s in place. Meet me in Los Angeles. I’ll pick you up. We go down to TJ through San Diego for the weigh-in, shoot back, next day’s the fight. Piece of cake. Where’s your spirit of adventure, lad?”
“Let me understand something, Gary,” I began. “The best-case scenario if someone goes after you is that we’ll be sharing a cell in a Mexican jail for the rest of our lives.”
“Fuck ’em!” Hyde roared. “I didn’t come this far to be pushed around. So you in or out?”