Benito Eufemia, turning 50, still today there are those who want to kill him for something stupid, like when he was 19 years old when a dealer dressed as Corruption in Miami was the first of many to point a gun at him because he wouldn’t let him enter a after Castelldefels. A few months ago, the same situation, another after, Barcelona. No one pulled the trigger. The eternal story of his life,
–At night all the vermin come out. And some are blind.
Benito Eufemia says goodbye to boxing around midnight, his redeeming passion. Today he measures himself against Fredy El Gigante, a Cuban-American, who surpasses him in wingspan – 1.99 meters compared to 1.73 – and kilos, at the Hyatt Tower hotel (ex-Hesperia), in Bellvitge.
The evening is a tribute to Alfonso Goya – his second father, the last great Catalan manager, to whom the way a boxer entered the ring was enough to know if he was good or a package –, the same one who advised him against this fight. .
-I’m like this. In fact, they have almost killed me so many times.
Eufemia is not of the lantern genre. Months ago, at the after-hours party at a hotel that asks not to be mentioned, four individuals arrived at five in the morning.
–I have a very good clinical eye with clients. If I warn “this one is going to create problems”, I never fail. There were four of them and I knew from their tattoos which band they were from.
These things and others are learned in prison. In twelve years of grief, she knew four.
–La Modelo was old-fashioned, but there was a good atmosphere.
They threatened him after he refused. “Either you let us in or we kill you.” Cocaine up to the eyebrows. One took out a knife and tried to look for his liver. He neutralized him. Then the pipe appeared, symbol of the group’s rooster. The leader of a gang and not Latina. A nostrada band.
The arrival of a fellow security guard dissuaded the gunman. “They always tell you that they have kept your face.” Benito Eufemia let him go. He did not warn him, like the one from Castelldefels:
–If you don’t take my life, I’ll kill you.
He was exaggerating: he only beat him to death.
There is no shadow left of that bad life. Two years in the CAR as preselected in boxing for the Olympic Games. from Barcelona 92, but on weekends he worked in clubs as a goalkeeper. He made the doors: Style of Santa Coloma, Cómplices en L’Hospitalet, Vértigo y Chasis de Mataró, Tron, Psicosis, Trauma and a lot of after. Some nights, he would go out to five fights. “I have had 180 misdemeanor trials.”
He was predestined for “that thing” to happen, that which cut short his career (amateur runner-up in Spain). He would no longer be a great boxer, like the professionals he saw training at the Sports Palace on Lleida Street, guys who in the shower scratched their eyebrows with a pumice stone to harden them so they wouldn’t jump at the first slap. Benito’s older brother was never a good influence. And he collected debts from brothels. With another “partner” they left two seriously injured. That partner was not Benito Eufemia, but a witness pointed him out.
–I got 28 years in prison (I turned thirteen). I entered innocent and left innocent.
He knew who his brother’s second companion was. A box fighter. He didn’t tell. “I paid to protect my people.”
Alfonso Goya never abandoned him and guided him to train in prison. In the first combats, the officials and police did not even let him shower before returning to the bag. The day he obtained his freedom he debuted in La Paloma as a professional. Back in 2004.
After Goya passed away, his friend and former boxer Xavi Moya offered to be in his corner tonight. Others had failed him. Not everyone knows how to bandage their hands well or stop bleeding in the corner. But Moya died in a motorcycle accident on Aragón Street on October 7. According to a report from the Urban Police, the fatal fall was due to a poorly located pylon.
A few days ago, some kids stole Benito’s only son’s cell phone when leaving a train station. He is 17 years old and will be in the corner, putting on the dental guard. In other times, he would have recovered his son’s cell phone quickly from him. To hell. He went to the police station. When the agent in charge of taking the report saw Benito Eufemia’s history, she called a colleague, who remained behind her back the entire time.
Eufemia understands and smiles.
–I don’t want my son to do things the way I did them at his age.
