Best quotes by Brin-Jonathan Butler on World

Checkout quotes by Brin-Jonathan Butler on World

• ‟ 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
  

• ‟ Teofilo Stevenson won his first Olympic gold medal in 1972 and his last world amateur championship in 1986. He won 302 fights and once went an unbelievable 11 years without a loss. Had Cuba not boycotted the 1984 Summer Olympics, many think Stevenson would have won an unmatched four gold medals in boxing.

  - Brin-Jonathan Butler
  

• ‟ An offer to fight Muhammad Ali came after Stevenson won his second Olympic gold in Montreal in 1976. Stevenson was at his peak. The world had never seen a heavyweight with the tools Stevenson brought into the ring.

  - Brin-Jonathan Butler
  

• ‟ Anyone can see why an elite athlete would want to leave a small, impoverished country where their skills were effectively uncashed winning lottery tickets. All they had to do was wash ashore almost anywhere else in the world and cash in. Yet the vast majority of Cuban boxers - and Cuban athletes in general - despite that incentive, stayed.

  - Brin-Jonathan Butler
  

• ‟ Cuban athletes represent the most expensive human cargo on earth. They are sitting on over a billion dollars of human capital if these boxers and baseball players would come over to any other field or ring in the world and begin to ply their trade.

  - 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 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.

  - 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.

  - Brin-Jonathan Butler
  

• ‟ Trusting the world is a risk, while not trusting it is a guarantee you'll be left with nothing.

  - Brin-Jonathan Butler