Brin-Jonathan Butler Zitate auf Englisch

Is Duran's 'No Mas' a more defining moment in his career than his victory over Sugar Ray Leonard in their first fight? For many, it is.

Brin-Jonathan Butler

My documentary 'Split Decision' examines Cuban-American relations, and the economic and cultural paradoxes that have shaped them since Castro's revolution, through the lens of elite Cuban boxers forced to choose between remaining in Cuba or defecting to America.

Brin-Jonathan Butler

Castro branded Rigondeaux a 'traitor' and 'Judas' to the Cuban people.

Brin-Jonathan Butler

Trejo is one of the oldest boxing gyms in Cuba; it's outdoor, and every great champion the country has produced has passed through and was forged in the open air.

Brin-Jonathan Butler

I think the beauty and mystery of boxing is just the immediacy of how it reveals people unlike anything else.

Brin-Jonathan Butler

We're a long way away from someone like Willie Pep winning a round without throwing a punch.

Brin-Jonathan Butler

Punching your weight is one of boxing's most sensible rules. It's a handy one to abide by whether your battles lie in or out of a ring.

Brin-Jonathan Butler

I have no arguments to defend how brutal and disturbing a ritual the corrida is. Like all tragedies, no matter the beauty created, there are no happy endings. If it is indeed an art form, bullfighting is the most disturbing I have ever witnessed.

Brin-Jonathan Butler

Maybe the real subject of every interview is how you really can't learn much of anything about anyone from an interview.

Brin-Jonathan Butler

Ali vs. Stevenson would have served as a symbolic battle between the United States and Cuba, capitalism and communism: Castro's values instilled in his boxers pitted against the values of 'merchandise' boxers from the rest of the world.

Brin-Jonathan Butler

I'd never seen Rigondeaux's face without it being obscured by headgear or a photograph of Fidel he was holding up after winning a tournament. Finally I saw him, only to recognize the saddest face I'd ever seen in Cuba.

Brin-Jonathan Butler

Rigondeaux was Cuba's answer to Bobby Fischer who transformed into a kind of Lee Harvey Oswald traitorous creature in that society. He escaped on a smuggler's boat and toppled one of the best fighters in the world in 2013 with his obliteration of Nonito Donaire at Radio City Music Hall. He made it look so easy, his career has never recovered.

Brin-Jonathan Butler

In the United States in the 20th century, every major event that America was going through, there was a boxer who seemed to symbolically represent it, from slavery to the Vietnam War to the Depression - all the way along, you just seemed to have boxers that carried the narrative.

Brin-Jonathan Butler

When I first asked my boxing coach, two-time Olympic champion Hector Vinent, what made the Cuban style of fighting distinct from the rest of the world, he smiled and told me to sit on a bench in Prado and watch the Cuban women walk.

Brin-Jonathan Butler

I traveled to Cuba with the intention of speaking with boxers who had turned down enormous offers to leave. When explaining my project to people, again and again I was met with amusement and skepticism.

Brin-Jonathan Butler

With all of the people in Cuba who I met - many of them hugely heroic figures - I found learning about their complexity and richness and contradictions just really fascinating, and it was fulfilling to be able to offer a different side to them, to be able to have some kind of unique takeaway from the official narrative.

Brin-Jonathan Butler

In film or on stage, in reflecting life through art, an actor has a second take or another day with his or her performance if something goes wrong. Bullfighters are spies crossing into enemy lines. Any mistake, no matter how minor or trivial, is potentially fatal.

Brin-Jonathan Butler

In Old Havana, the names of the streets before the revolution provided a glimpse into the city's state of mind. You might have known someone who lived on the corner of Soul and Bitterness, Solitude and Hope, or Light and Avocado.

Brin-Jonathan Butler

Where the 'Bay of Pigs' invasion failed, undoubtedly the tourist invasion will succeed in forever changing the landscape of island. What comes next in Cuba? The answer is that many Cubans aren't waiting around to find out.

Brin-Jonathan Butler

Love is junk.

Brin-Jonathan Butler

When Mike Tyson was only 18, his managers used to market him on posters, reminding you that if your grandfather had missed Joe Louis, or your father Muhammad Ali, don't you miss Tyson.

Brin-Jonathan Butler

A profoundly disturbing thing you discover very quickly traveling in Cuba is that the most dangerous person for Cubans isn't the police or even the secret police; it's their neighbor. Anyone can report you for anything 'outside' the revolution - even if you haven't done it yet.

Brin-Jonathan Butler

Hundreds of years ago, the most beautiful women of Havana were only glimpsed stepping in or out of carriages on this street. The first foreign writers who arrived and saw this could never get past just how incredibly beautiful their feet were.

Brin-Jonathan Butler

He's the best practitioner I've ever seen of the Cuban style. But I think that what Rigondeaux sees as an immaculate performance has no corollary to what fans see as a perfect performance. In his mind, to make an opponent look terrible who has been lauded as exciting or favored against him gives him satisfaction.

Brin-Jonathan Butler

How much abuse is a fighter expected to endure before he can be allowed to show some concern for his own welfare? Anyone who has been around fighters knows they all share the same secret: They are more afraid of embarrassment and humiliation than injury. Do fans and writers use this fact against them in what we celebrate or criticize?

Brin-Jonathan Butler