Rigondeaux vs. Casimero: a Drifting Legacy
Photo by Michael Owens/Getty Images
‘This was the number of punches needed to win this fight’
— Rigondeaux, on learning he’s only landed fourty-four punches on his opponent, John Riel Casimero, over twelve rounds in Carson, California on Saturday.
Guillermo Rigondeaux fights often provoke a lot of debate, usually centered around the idea of whether he is 'boring' or not.
He is famous for not really giving much of a shit about being crowd-pleasing; to him, boxing is to be the purest distillation of the ‘hit and not get hit’ philosophy.
In a basic sort of sense, Rigo is a boxing bureaucrat, seeing boxing as a transaction to be made, not as entertainment.
It is a simple sequence to him, one with definable metrics and repeatable results. Hit more or more cleanly, get hit less, equals one win.
And for the most part, this works, especially for Rigo. Put him up against the right dance partner and we get bureaucracy as art, as a dance.
But set against a fighter who is not able to rebel and write outside of the boxes, and it’s very possible that we get boxing as a bit of a drudge; a performance by filling out a minimum set of requirements on a form.
Unfortunately, against John Riel Casimero, the WBO’s Philipino bantamweight champion, we got that latter sort of fight.
Rigo, ever in pursuit of a title and therefore leverage for bigger fights, faced off against Casimero in Carson hoping to be able to fold a win into a rematch with Nonito Donaire and ultimately a fight against, maybe, Naoya Inoue in a late-late-career bloom, a run that would proudly cap any boxing tenure.
In his very best performances, such as against Agbeko and his first destruction of Donaire in 2013 — a then nigh-unbeatable Donaire, let’s not forget — he showed an absolute mastery of distance, timing, footwork and allround defensive acumen.
The man is a genuine defensive maestro, and when he pairs it with his pin-sharp and powerful counterpunching, he’s a genuine, genuine artist at work.
Well, against a plodding and rather hapless Casimero, he had the defensive acumen down but he almost totally, utterly forgot about the punching bit of boxing. His core tenet became just ‘don’t get hit’.
OK, this is somewhat unfair.
The fight is now infamous for a good reason. Under Compubox’s tenure, it now holds the record for the FEWEST punches landed in a completed twelve round fight. The stats make for genuinely grim reading.
Rigo landed that supposedly sufficient 44 punches, while Casimero landed a tiny bit more, at 47, albeit he was rather less accurate, his 16% trailing Rigo’s 20%.
Now while it’s true that stats don’t tell the whole story, here they’re grim, but they also don’t represent quite how the fight went.
First, let’s broach the result. Rigo lost. It was a split decision, and while I think it was the wrong result, it’s hard to really be mad with it as a result, for reasons I’ll get into.
There was no ebb-and-flow to this fight, no momentum shifts. Rigo, as mentioned, is a master of distance. What may have changed, possibly as a natural consequence of Rigo’s age and lack of activity, is his timing.
The fight doesn’t need a great deal of technical analysis; a simple description of a sequence will give a good approximation of the contest.
From the very beginnings of round one, Casimero was pressuring Rigondeaux. However, he rarely got close; he seldom managed to catch up with Rigondeaux, let alone corral him or trap him.
Casimero moves forward, maybe with a jab, maybe with a lead left hook, only to have telegraphed his move to Rigondeaux, who has long ducked out of the way and shifted to Casimero’s left in a split second, while Casimero’s fist sails through fresh air and he’s left kissing the ropes in a rather undignified manner.
This is not a dig at Casimero. Rigondeaux has made fools of several excellent pros in his time.
What is a criticism of Casimero is that he never made the necessary adjustments to ever curtail Rigo’s defensive tendencies.
He didn’t understand how to cut the ring off, at all, and neither did he ever really try to trick Rigo into exchanges.
Of course, that’s easier said than done, especially against someone of Rigo’s nous, and on occasion, approximately fourty-four of them, Rigo would stand his ground and smash an uppercut or left straight into Casimero’s solar plexus.
These were pretty much the only meaningful punches landed in the entire fight — Casimero landed almost nothing of note save one or two cuffing lefts early on.
Whenever Casimero tried to bully Rigo, he found a small wiry guy who is quite clearly surprisingly strong for his size, since he couldn’t control him there either, and clinches would end with a ref’s intervention or with Rigo shucking Casimero off with little trouble.
Casimero ended up retching and dry-heaving in the corner between rounds; whether as a result of Rigondeaux smashing his diaphragm or the unexpected cardio workout, is unclear.
Now, let’s get into what we can criticise about Rigo’s performance, and why, maybe, it’s time to accept that despite his absurd defying of the natural processes of time up until this point, it might be time to begin acknowledging that Rigondeaux’s time at or near the top of boxing’s lighter weights might be nearing an end.
Unlike many aging fighter’s careers, it’s not because he’s slowed, got weak, got fragile, got beaten up.
What was a little worrying and not a little frustrating, is that Rigo at times appeared somewhat gunshy.
In his best, slickest performances, his counterpunching and trap-laying was a sight to behold.
We will forever have the sequence wherein he baits Esteban Marroquin into throwing a jab only to straight-cross his chin off before Marroquin has even managed to extend his arm fully.
Or that time he ducked under another jab and threw maybe the fastest four punches to the body it’s possible to throw.
We will always have his almost playful guard manipulation versus Agbeko.
Not to mention his constant messing around with timing and distance versus Donaire, dropping back, making Donaire miss then consistently punishing him for doing so.
There were several occasions in this fight with Casimero where it looked like he may do the same; he feinted, and feinted, and feinted — Casimero had clearly been warned off diving in by the counters that Rigo HAD thrown and landed, and froze.
But, where in the previous fights Rigo then gleefully took the initiative, he more often than not just moved off again against Casimero.
He looked perhaps insecure in whether he might land rather than actually scared to throw, but they amounted to the same thing.
Sport is unsentimental, especially when it comes to boxing, and fighters who may have built a rep as being un-entertaining — the end result seemed to be the judges awarding Casimero the win on ‘aggression’, despite never being in control of the fight, or ever really landing any meaningful blows.
Credit must be given to him for trying to make exchanges happen, again and again and again, but, he just wasn’t very effective at it. Rigo’s obstinate adherence to boxing purity is likely to have cost him this fight, not Casimero having won it.
And now it seems unlikely that Rigondeaux, who’s boxing potential is like a lower-weight will-o’-the-wisp, fleeting, ever on the edge of being captured and distilled, will ever manage to move himself into a genuine legacy-defining fight with one of the sub-130lb superstars.
This to me is something of a tragedy, but for Rigo fans, part of his mystique now is just how nebulous his talent has always been — clearly defined when seen, but so rarely brought out for the world to peruse. Sometimes this has been through Rigo’s own fault but often, he simply hasn’t had the rub of the green when it comes to career advancement.
It’s a risky business writing Rigondeaux’s career off, since he’s persisted for so long despite quite clearly approaching the upper limits of what a human body can do age-wise.
But as good as Rigo’s footwork is, the one ring general who has never been out-manouevred is Father Time, and maybe, just maybe, we saw him begin to corral Rigo this last Saturday.