Tequila helped fuel boxer Joel Casamayor's defection to U.S.

Casamayor is 37 now, 12 years removed from the international intrigue that surrounded his defection two weeks before he was to box for his second gold medal in the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta.

He has been a good pro, especially effective at 135 pounds. He has lived in Miami since his escape from Cuba, has won a couple of titles in the alphabet-soup world of prize fighting, and will carry a 36-3-1 record into tonight's matchup with popular Mexican Juan Manual Marquez, who is 48-4-1. Since Marquez is 34, this is probably a boxing finale -- grand or otherwise -- for one or both.

So that makes the retelling of Casamayor's defection story somewhat more fitting.

It was two weeks before the start of the Atlanta Olympics. The Cuban boxing team, which had dominated the tournament in 1992 in Barcelona and had gotten a gold medal from Casamayor at 118 pounds, was training in Guadalajara.

By his own account, Casamayor was not a happy camper. For his gold in Barcelona, the Cuban government had given him a bicycle. He had been exposed enough to the rest of the world to know that Soviet gold medalists got cars and apartments and Americans filled the pocketbooks of their golden people and put them on Wheaties boxes and TV.

Casamayor sold his bicycle to buy a pig for his family.

So when things went badly at the Mexican training camp, the Cubans insisting he fight at 118 again, even though he was nowhere near that weight with two weeks to go, he feared being sent back to Cuba, his career over.

"I would be cleaning backyards," he says.

With no clue what to do, he went to the house of a friend, watched a telecast of the first fight between Macho Camacho and Roberto Duran and drank lots of tequila. That, of course, furthered his weight problem.

He returned late that night to Cuban camp and was met at the door by the head trainer, Alcides Saragusa, who marched him directly to the scale. He weighed 135 pounds and was, for all intents, a dead man in the eyes of Cuban sports officials.

"I laid in bed wide awake," Casamayor says. "I waited until everybody was asleep. I knew I couldn't go back to Cuba. Then I snuck out."

He was hidden by his friend from Guadalajara, and moved from home to home, deeper and deeper into the city, as Mexican police, not wanting this high-profile mess to attract big headlines in their country, pledged full cooperation with Cuba.