Roiman Villa is a professional boxer, a rising welterweight contender. The most important boxing match of his life is only one day away.
Villa is also from Venezuela, which has complicated his career in ways he never saw coming. The most important fight of his life is there, and it’s ongoing.
Villa faces an impossible calculus—impossible, that is, to everyone but him. He believes boxing is his only way out, his one path forward, and not just for himself but for his entire family. He is a skilled boxer, with 26 wins and only one loss and a near-perfect knockout percentage (92.3). He is his country’s most-skilled boxer since Edwin Valero, a two-division world champion who never lost and knocked out all 27 of his opponents but died by suicide in 2010. But the very skill that Villa chose for his escape route also made him a target and put his family in serious danger. The better he fights, the more danger they’re in.
He hasn’t spoken publicly about what happened—what’s happening—until this week. But just before his second-to-last bout, against Janelson Figueroa Bocachica, held last September, Villa received terrifying news. His parents and siblings (seven brothers, three sisters) were being threatened by an organized crime syndicate, members of which moved across the street from the family’s residence in Rosario. Once there, they held up grenades to announce their nefarious intentions and fired gunshots at all hours of the night.
Villa cannot provide many details, like the group’s name, for fear of retribution. He can say members attempted to extort him several times for “large” sums of cash. That they sent relatives threatening video messages, promising harm, if Villa, who had moved to Dallas, didn’t pay. And he can share some good news, the reason he can share anything at all: The vast majority of his brood escaped to a neighboring country he cannot name.
He will dedicate his next bout, against undefeated superstar Jaron “Boots” Ennis, scheduled for Saturday on Showtime Championship Boxing, to the family members who managed to flee the imminent danger in Venezuela – and to those who still remain. So when Villa describes the stakes as life-changing, he means that in more than one sense. Life-changing for his career, sure. But also for his family, their safety and their future. “This,” he says, “is the biggest moment of my life.”
Amanda Westcott/SHOWTIME
The choice of escape vs. safety, Villa says, was never much of a choice at all. His family didn’t have another option. He had an opportunity, then opportunities. Eventually, what he did with those changed even his family dynamic. He’s their center now, the broad-shouldered boxer upon whom 12 other futures rest. “And this is the moment we can be saved,” he says late Thursday, through an interpreter, over the phone. “We can have economic stability, and, being from my background, that is the biggest goal I can achieve.”
Villa is not exaggerating. Where he grew up, tough circumstances shaped tough lives, and those, in turn, made tough people. Disputes, Villa says, were settled the old-fashioned way. Don gloves and … fight.
“Bravery is in our blood,” he says. But he doesn’t describe himself as brave or courageous. What he survived and encountered is simpler to Villa. He just calls it life.
The respected boxing promoter Sampson Lewkowicz can still recall the first time he met the kid. In the 2000s, he traveled to Venezuela to see a client – Valero – and happened upon a young amateur who flashed Valero-like promise. “I knew when he became a professional, he would become something special,” Lewkowicz says.
Lewkowicz was so certain that he later flew back down with the intention of signing Villa. But then he ran into Brad Goodman, a longtime matchmaker at Top Rank. Goodman delivered the bad news. “Too late,” he told Lewkowicz. “We signed him.”
As the years passed, Lewkowicz followed Villa anyway. He was drawn to the kid who KO’d nearly every opponent put in front of him. But the power didn’t capture Villa’s full appeal. “This guy is not a normal person,” Lewkowicz says. “He respects my wife, he respects women, and he’s a spiritual person. He wasn’t nasty with anyone. But he wasn’t afraid of anything.”
Starving will force someone to fight with everything they have. Villa’s father was a fisherman, and whenever he failed to catch fish, his family didn’t eat that day. Villa the boxer found jobs to help buy food. Eventually, he quit school, then went to the beach each morning. Food – and survival – marked his only goals.
“Look, my life depends on winning,” he says. “I’m used to this kind of pressure. That’s why I came here (to America). Today, it’s the threat situation. Five years ago, it was a hunger situation. I’ve been in survival mode my entire life. That’s why losing is not an option.”
Amanda Westcott/SHOWTIME
Things changed. Villa became available again and Lewkowicz pounced a few years back. But Venezuela had changed, too, as the 2000s gave way to the 2010s. This beautiful country that Lewkowicz so loved visiting was speeding toward a full-blown human rights crisis. One that the organization Human Rights Watch describes as three intertwined crises: brutal crackdowns on dissent, no truly independent judiciary to hold bad actors accountable and a “humanitarian emergency” so severe that an estimated seven million Venezuelans need assistance. Many, like the Villa, have fled, as part of a migration crisis that ranks among the world’s largest.
Lewkowicz began Tweeting at Hugo Chavez, who ruled Venezuela with an iron fist that hit harder than all boxers in history combined. Chavez was the country’s president until the day he died in March of 2013. Lewkowicz railed against Chavez and his dictator-like regime until Villa pulled him aside and asked him to stop. Those missives could have grave consequences, the kind only people from where he came from could understand. Lewkowicz stopped posting. He believes he landed in some sort of “Black Book,” and that, if he ever steps foot in Venezuela again, he’s headed straight to jail.
As conditions worsened back home, every fight for Villa assumed greater importance. This included his first and only defeat, a controversial split-decision down in Mexico in 2019. Villa says he struggled to make weight before that bout and was maybe “50 percent” of his best self.
He moved up in weight and won his next five bouts, all of which he ended early. By that point, Villa had logged 12 first-round knockouts. He had fought back home, in Venezuela; in his adopted home, the United States; and in Mexico, Uruguay, Colombia and Argentina. Next up: Bocachica, in Atlantic City, in Sept. 2022.
That’s when the death threats started, and Villa internalized the pressure, desperation growing. He was willing to do anything to get his family out. His management team hatched a plan. They would smuggle out his relatives in the middle of the night, like something out of a movie. Which is exactly what took place, that August, just weeks before the bout.
Villa beat Bocachica, by decision, marking his first victory in a fight that went the full distance. He still knocked Bocachica down, in Round 2, and dislodged Bocachica’s mouthpiece five times.
In January of this year, Villa fought Rashidi Ellis, a promising and undefeated welterweight contender, on the undercard of a Gervonta “Tank” Davis fight. Not that anyone should be surprised by his resilience, but Villa dropped Ennis twice in the 12th round to clinch another triumph. Villa himself has never been down, never even been cut, he says.
The threats, though, continue. Villa says he tries to ignore them, blocking phone numbers and ignoring venomous messages on social media, while leaning into his faith.
Lewkowicz gave Villa options. He knew the boxer wanted Ennis, but Villa didn’t need to encourage that high of a risk right away. He could take a tune-up fight and target Ennis for the end of this year or the beginning of 2024. Winning the tune-up would likely have made him the mandatory challenger for Ennis.
“You promised,” Villa told his promoter. “Give me the same amount of money, and I will fight him, anyway. If you don’t, I will retire.”
So Villa spent the last five months training specifically for the boxer known as Boots. No breaks. No vacations. No rest. Two brothers and one sister remain in their home country, and they’re his motivation now, his reason to risk everything again. And his reason, Lewkowicz says, to win, whatever it takes.
“He’s going to knock the s—t out of Ennis,” Lewkowicz says late Thursday. “I have faith in him. He will be victorious. It simply means too much.”
