One of the best national
rivalries in boxing, of course, is Mexico versus Puerto Rico. Many trace the
birth of the rivalry to a 1934 bantamweight championship bout in which Puerto
Rico’s Sixto Escobar became the first world champion from the Caribbean island
when he knocked out Mexico’s Rodolfo Casanova. Since then, there have been
numerous memorable clashes between fighters from each country.
Among the most memorable are
these epic battles: Puerto Rican Wilfredo Gomez’s fifth-round TKO of Carlos
Zarate to defend the junior featherweight title (1978); Mexican Salvador
Sanchez’s eighth-round knockout of Gomez to retain the featherweight title
(1981); Gomez stopping Lupe Pintor in the 14th round in defense of
the junior featherweight title (1982); and Mexican legend Julio Cesar Chavez’s
11th-round TKO of Edwin “Chapo” Rosario to win the lightweight title
(1987), then a defense against Hector Camacho (1992).
If you add Mexican-Americans
to the equation, you can’t leave out Puerto Rican Felix Trinidad outpointing
Oscar De La Hoya in their controversial welterweight unification fight (1999)
and Trinidad’s 12th-round knockout of Fernando Vargas to unify
junior middleweight belts (2000).
Although I covered
Trinidad-Vargas, the most significant fights in the rivalry in my time on the
boxing beat are the memorable bouts between Puerto Rico’s Miguel Cotto and
Mexico’s Antonio Margarito.
“It’s one of the best
rivalries, and it’s great to be part of the rivalry,” Cotto said before the
first fight. “This is another chapter, and it’s good for us. We want to make
this fight at the level of those in the past. Everybody knows about the
rivalry. Now it is me against Margarito. This fight will add another shot to
the rivalry.”
Boy, did they.
The Cotto-Margarito fights had
an intensity like no others, and that was even before anybody suspected that
Margarito may have cheated by wearing loaded hand wraps in their first violent
fight, an 11th-round knockout win for Margarito in 2008 in which he
won a welterweight title in Las Vegas.
“If you put a Puerto Rican
boxer in with a Mexican boxer, you will have a good fight,” Cotto said before
meeting Margarito for the first time.
Usually, that’s exactly the
case, and Cotto and Margarito waged a thrilling fight, which had appropriately
been titled “The Battle” in the buildup to the pay-per-view.
Much of the discussion in the
prefight hype was centered on the great Puerto Rico-Mexico rivalry—a Mexican
and Puerto Rican have fought for a world title more than 60 times—and the fight
more than lived up to it.
“I have people coming up to me
all the time to talk about it,” said Margarito, speaking about the rivalry
before the first fight. “It’s a thing of pride, which I feel myself. But the
important thing is the fight between us. We’ll be up in the ring and, yes, we
carry our countries behind us and, yes, people come up to me and say, ‘Hey, do
this for the country.’ I feel it. I say I will take this belt back to my
country.”
It was only well after the
fact that Cotto and many others suspected that Margarito had worn loaded wraps
in the fight because it was before his next bout, against Shane Mosley, that he
was caught trying to enter the ring wearing illegal wraps coated in a
plaster-like substance.
The stage was set, obviously,
for an eventual Cotto-Margarito rematch. After Margarito had his license
revoked and didn’t fight for 16 months, he came back for a tune-up fight and
then got destroyed by Manny Pacquiao, but the lure of a second fight with Cotto
was still there.
The second meeting, in
December 2011, only deepened the rivalry between the fighters and the
countries, given the overwhelming bad blood between Cotto and Margarito. This
time they fought on Cotto’s turf—New York’s Madison Square Garden—where his
fans were out in force. And in one of the most bitter revenge fights in
history, Cotto hammered Margarito’s surgically repaired right eye and stopped
him in the 10th round for a deeply satisfying victory.
The passion that Cotto,
Margarito and their fans brought to the two fights—built largely on
nationalism, which has always been important in boxing—was as good as it gets. (Source)
