Following this past weekend’s Boxing After Dark card on HBO, I’ve had a lot of conversations and email exchanges about the Cuban junior lightweight phenom Yuriorkis Gamboa, who won a unanimous decision over Yonkers-born Golden Gloves champ Darling Jimenez. Gamboa is a fiery and charismatic 130 in the ring who draws comparisons to Tyson, many comparisons to Meldrick Taylor, and the esteemed Unsilent even wrote me to compare Gamboa to a young Buddy McGirt.

Pick your poison on that score. There’s one thing that’s not up for debate about this kid, however, and that’s the fact that he inspires great interest and excitement in just about everyone who sees him, the type of excitement that no hype machine can generate, the type that only comes from the sheer impact of witnessing a remarkable talent in action. Twice now I’ve watched Gamboa fight and twice I’ve been overwhelmed by his bravado and hand speed and the seemingly impossible elasticity of his upper body (add Pernell to the list of superlative comparisons). Twice I’ve also seen him get unceremoniously dropped due to his carelessly daring style, knockdowns that have prompted the announcers to say in their knowing voices that while Gamboa’s preening pyrotechnics may have worked in the amateurs (he won a gold medal in Athens), he’ll have to learn to keep his hands up in the pros or he’ll be headed for queer street before he ever glimpses easy street.

Which is undoubtedly true. Darling Jimenez is a better fighter that people give him credit for, tough as tough can be with an impeccable amateur pedigree. But given the way that Gamboa dominated him in the early rounds of their fight, Jimenez probably shouldn’t have gone the distance and definitely shouldn’t have landed Gamboa on the canvas as he did in the fourth round (at about :55 seconds in the video below).

Even after he got dropped, however, Gamboa kept his hands slung low and dared Jimenez to hit him, a dare that Jimenez frequently obliged. You can call it youthful arrogance if you want, or stupidity even, but myself I can’t help but see it as a conscious choice borne of Gamboa’s idea of what constitutes success as a fighter. One has to imagine that it’s occurred to him before that keeping his hands up would be a much less risky proposition in there, but he nevertheless insists on leaving them down and dodging punches with his kinetic head-movement and effortless shoulder-rolling, dodging punches by centimeters that it seems he could evade by feet or block with ease if he so chose.

I’m reminded of a baseball game I once played in Cuba. I was down there with a large posse for the millennial new year’s celebration – I-Berg and Morty Bravo were with me and it was I-Berg actually who arranged for this game, the fantasy of which was that we Americanos would face off in a showdown with the local Cubanos for hemispheric sandlot supremacy.

As long as I live, I’ll never forget that day, never forget walking through the quiet streets of this bombed-out Cuban town with a huge group of Cubans toward the field with I-Berg, who was ever so slightly over-stimulated, yelling out to no one in particular in his impressive Spanglish that everybody should come out to watch a great baseball showdown between Cubans and Americans. These calls of his, I recall, brought many querulous faces to windows looking down at us as we passed with expressions that decidedly said, ‘those crazyass gringos are going to get whupped.”

We fared better than might have been expected, although the numbers were such that a strict U.S. vs. Cuba game was impossible. In a double-header, the Cuban-dominated side won a game as did the American-dominated side, which was very much in keeping with the spirit of the whole thing.

I could go on for a long time about the details of the games, my own individual heroics in particular. It’s a long-standing joke among I-berg, Morty and myself that as time passes our memories of our own greatness that day have grown to Ruthian proportions. I do vivdly remember at a crucial point in the second game ill-advisedly trying to stretch a double into a triple and getting called out at third in a play that got everybody riled up (and with complete objectivity, I want to tell you something – I was safe). When I came off the field, a Cuban spectator came up to me and said in broken English, “you are a true pelotera,” which I still count among the greatest things anyone has ever said to me anywhere about anything.

I bring up that anecdote first to celebrate myself (oh I did have a hell of an afternoon people) but also because it gets to the spirit of what I remember about that game and how it links in my mind to Gamboa’s fighting style. It was the fact that I tried to get to third, that it was a such a bad decision and that I went for it anyway and almost made it, that brought the cheers. That entire day I noticed that theme in the way the Cubans played the game and the way the fans cheered their players. The fact of success was not what brought the real accolades. There was a definite attitude of, “hey, anyone can hit a double man, anyone can catch a fly ball.” Doing it with style, with daring, doing it in a way that was surprising or ridiculous – this was what it meant to really play the game.

I remember a shtick that the outfielders would do that was a hell of a sight. A fly ball would get lofted and the outfielder in the nearest vicinity would wait to break for it and make a real show of this waiting, put his hand on his chin and feign a yawn, wait till the last possible moment and then break for the ball like a streak of lightning and try to catch it. This maneuver was a real fan favorite, whether he caught it or not.

Now this was a fun game on a fun day and absolutely nothing was at stake, no matter what I-berg or me or Morty Bravo might have been pretending in our minds. I don’t mean to imply in any way that based on this one experience I had many years ago that I think Cubans aren’t competitive, nor am I really drawing a “man we Americans are uptight and them Latinos sure know how to have fun” distinction. But there was an inarguable cultural difference from my own experience in the way I felt the game being approached that day that was striking to me. Like most of my peers, I imagine, I was intensely schooled in the environment of “winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing” from an early age, and taught that anything done for mere style’s sake on the field was “hot-dogging”, a cardinal sin against the holy spirit of the pursuit of victory.

The Cubans seemed to view every play as an opportunity to do something astonishing. There was a baseball for art’s sake feeling in the air that was contagious, and I’m reminded of that when I watch Gamboa fight. With every flurry, with every feint, he looks to be trying to do something memorable, almost impossible, and that pursuit often seems more interesting to him than anything else, certainly than merely winning in some workmanlike fashion. Yes, yes, as his competition stiffens, this is a pursuit that will become an increasingly dangerous game. But in the meantime, let me just understate the case tremendously and say that, man, it is something to see.