The Beltline: Two years after a pressure cooker almost blinded him, Guillermo Rigondeaux sees a future in boxing at 44

If ever you needed proof of boxing’s stranglehold, look beyond Mike Tyson prostituting his ran-through body and brain for a mammoth payday against Jake Paul and focus instead on Guillermo Rigondeaux, the great Cuban who competed in his 26th professional fight on Tuesday (November 12) in Miami. 

Rigondeaux, to little or no fanfare, boxed Dannis Aguero Arias in a 10-round fight for the vacant WBC international junior featherweight title and ended the fight inside a round. Without any sort of context, a result like this would suggest two things: one, that Rigondeaux is still a threat as we head into 2025; and two, that he is perhaps hitting harder than ever, with two fights last year also settled inside the distance. 

However, the big story here is not the result or even that Rigondeaux is back winning belts as a junior featherweight. It instead has more to do with the fact that Rigondeaux continues to compete at the age of 44; an age deemed old for a heavyweight, much less a junior featherweight asked to make the same weight they made in their thirties. Not only that, it was only two and a half years ago that Rigondeaux suffered serious eye injuries when a pressure cooker exploded in his face while cooking Cuban black beans. 

Back then, anyone who witnessed the shocking images from this incident would have assumed Rigondeaux’s fighting days were over and that his only concern now was his face and his badly damaged eyes. According to reports, he lost 80 per cent of his vision at the time of the incident. “They make bombs out of pressure cookers,” Alex Boronte, Rigondeaux’s manager, told ESPN. “If one of those beans clogs up where the steam is going to go out, it’s like a bomb. It could have killed him.”

Rigondeaux, an avid cook, was immediately rushed to Kendall Regional Medical Center, where he was treated for two severely burned corneas. He was mollified somewhat to learn that corneas can regenerate, but still any notion of Rigondeaux ever boxing again would have been a far-fetched fantasy at that stage. “The next week to 10 days is really going to define his fighting career and his future because that’s when the cornea needs to regenerate itself and he can see or not,” Boronte said. “But gathering from the last 24 hours, he’s doing really good.”

Initially, Rigondeaux could see sunlight and shadows and not a lot else. He wouldn’t, for instance, have been able to see opponents and punches coming his way, nor for that matter a future in a sport as second nature to the southpaw as breathing, hearing, or indeed seeing. 

Two and a half years on, however, Rigondeaux is again winning belts in the boxing ring and using his vision – for so long one of his key attributes – to spot flaws in an opponent’s style before exploiting these flaws with pinpoint accuracy. He is, in other words, back to doing what he does best. 

To some extent this should be viewed as a stirring redemption story; one of boxing’s more impressive comebacks. Yet there has forever been a sadness in the expression of Guillermo Rigondeaux, always in the eyes, and this sadness does not alleviate by virtue of his sight returning, nor is ours alleviated by the sight of him returning to a sport responsible for as much of his pain as his pleasure. 

In fact, if anything, it runs deeper now, this sadness. Now Rigondeaux is not just a boxer unappreciated in his prime, he is one ignored, consigned to small venues in Miami, boxing only to have something to do in his forties. 

It is hard, as we enter 2025, to figure out the end goal for the Cuban master, but we know what it should have been and we know, too, that much of the sadness, on both his part and ours, invariably stems from him never getting the recognition for his otherworldly talent. True, he got some in the amateurs, where he won Olympic gold twice (in 2000 and 2004), but as a pro, despite winning world titles at two weights, the language in which Rigondeaux communicates was never properly translated. They always wanted more, you see. More clarity. More personality. Better enunciation. Yet the sad thing is, nobody in boxing was ever really prepared to take the time to listen to what he was actually saying, nor give Rigondeaux more than what he apparently deserved. Which is why, at 44, he continues in search of it, seeing the sport today through different eyes; eyes somehow both narrower and wider than ever before. 

Now the cooking incident of March 2022 almost functions as a kind of metaphor. After all, if you break it down, Rigondeaux was in the end wounded in the process of doing something he had done countless times before, mostly without thinking, and certainly without fear. He was cooking Cuban black beans, that’s all, and for a Cuban, particularly one interested in cooking, this is nothing out of ordinary, nor tempting fate in any way. 

And yet, such is life, the cooking of Cuban black beans, or indeed any rehearsed act, can suddenly become as dangerous as it is familiar if the person doing it suffers either a lapse of concentration or, quite simply, bad luck. 

In boxing, where luck tends to be a bigger factor than it is in the kitchen, Rigondeaux stands before the pressure cooker each time he sets foot inside the ring. He also chooses to take this risk not because it pays vast amounts of money, as is the case with Mike Tyson, but because it pays something, anything; enough to allow him to cook and then eat. He does it, in the end, because boxing remains his signature dish and because, in many respects, the ring is still the safest place for him.