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

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.

From Brin-Jonathan Butler

My mother left Hungary as a refugee, and she is not nostalgic for the life that she had back in Hungary, and yet Cubans certainly want the economic opportunity in the United States, but they're desperately homesick for the culture that they left behind.

From Brin-Jonathan Butler

Castro was always using his athletes as a way of symbolically defeating the United States in the ring, and after these Cubans defeated Americans in the ring, they were turning down exorbitant sums to leave the island.

From Brin-Jonathan Butler

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

From 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.

From 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.

From Brin-Jonathan Butler

I was told before my first trip that no city in the world offered the dreams you could have sleeping in Havana. But nobody warned me that Havana also always feels like an exhausting nightmare that never quite fulfills the promise of what it's threatening you with.

From 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.

From Brin-Jonathan Butler

At a certain point, Mike Tyson and I reacted to violence a little differently. I was afraid to leave my house for three years while he became the heavyweight champion of the world. The thing was, at first, we reacted to it the same way, and our cowardice and trauma defined us.

From Brin-Jonathan Butler

Brin-Jonathan Butler

Notable Quotes

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