Minutes after Rafael Espinoza made the fourth defense of his WBO featherweight title with a knockout win over Arnold Khegai, he took to the stage atop the entrance ramp alongside the house mariachi band for the evening. As Khegai was receiving medical attention that perhaps he should have received much earlier, Espinoza was still in his fight gear, complete with his resplendent robe, belting out “El Rey” to the audience at Arena Coliseo in San Luis Potosi, Mexico.

It's unfair that Espinoza can have both world-class fighting abilities and a powerhouse singing voice, a combination of cool attributes everyone would love to have, but a lot of things about “El Divino” are unfair. Namely, being 6’1” with a 74” reach and still being able to make 126 pounds.

Espinoza’s beatdown of Khegai looked quite similar to all of his world title defenses to this point, except a little bloodier and a little more drawn out. Khegai encountered all of the same issues that Robeisy Ramirez, Sergio Chirino, and Edward Vazquez ran into. How do you find a way to deal with a fighter with the dimensions of a cruiserweight and the punch output of a minimumweight? On Saturday night, Espinoza landed 223 of his 875 punches in ten rounds according to CompuBox. In seven of the ten rounds fought, before Khegai’s corner mercifully saved him from his own bravery, Espinoza landed twenty punches or more. On a normal night, Khegai’s numbers of landing 85 of 275, a clip of 31.1%, would be a respectable outing that might even win you a fight. But Espinoza, and what will be required to beat him, are both anything but normal.

Khegai’s effort and ensuring punch stats illustrate the recurring pattern in Espinoza bouts. Khegai was able to land quite a few massive hooks on Espinoza, full torque and extension shots, that had no negative effect on Espinoza whatsoever. In fact, when Espinoza is hit hard, his instincts are to respond by throwing combinations, creating what must be a demoralizing scenario for his opponents over and over. Hit him with your best shot, and not only does it not impact him, but you don’t even get to bask in the enjoyment of landing the punch you’d hoped to land, but suddenly you’re looking at ten punches coming your way, and absorbing, statistically, one out of every four.

Which isn’t to say that Espinoza is utterly impervious to punches. We have, of course, seen him dropped hard by Robeisy Ramirez in their first bout, so hard that it broke his ankle. All he did was fight for seven more rounds on one leg, and rally to win the fight and the world title he’s still defending.

In this sense, there is a certain final boss in a video game quality to Espinoza. The character you have to beat at the end of the game who has an absurd set of attributes, but one hyper-specific flaw. Espinoza’s, like many fighters who are extremely tall for their weight class, is that he can be hurt, with extreme emphasis on those italics. But if you can’t hurt him, your options are extremely limited. Can you keep up with a 1000-punch per fight output? If not, can you find a way to neutralize that output, especially when it’s coming from a colossus who can hit you at a range from which you cannot touch him?

Let’s put Espinoza’s size into perspective using some big tent examples. Most people’s reference point for a tall boxer relative to his weight class is Thomas Hearns, who was a frightening specimen at 147 pounds in particular, but still towering at super welterweight and even middleweight before fighting all the way up at cruiserweight. Espinoza is the same height as Hearns. Or, let’s use the ill-fated exhibition bout between Jake Paul and Gervonta Davis as another example. Paul is 6’1” with a 76” reach, while Davis is 5’5 ½” with a 67 ½” reach, and this size differential—while obviously taking into account body mass—was deemed a major point of discussion. Espinoza would look eye-to-eye with Paul, and is only two inches shorter reach-wise. Khegai is 5’5” with a 66” reach, nearly identical to Tank, except he was in a fight with the same disadvantages against a man who weighed the same.

Though Espinoza is nightmarish matchup for anyone in his division, attaching the term “bogeyman” to him may not be entirely accurate. That suggests that he’s a fighter that his peers are actively looking to avoid, which doesn’t seem to be the case. Within minutes of his victory over Khegai, Bruce “Shu Shu” Carrington was calling for a bout against his Top Rank stablemate. Luis Alberto Lopez has done the same, and both Junto Nakatani and Naoya Inoue have floated the idea of facing him as well.

Part of that is simply that high level fighters necessarily believe they can beat their peers. However, another could be that there is a general hesitance about fighters who have unusual height for their weight class. Fighters with huge, gangly proportions tend not to be as nimble or athletic as their shorter peers. As anomalous as Espinoza is structurally, he is even more rare as a fighter with his dimensions who can use movement and angles, and has actually thrived at the highest level. There are far more examples through the years of towering fighters who fell short of world caliber and were generally beaten in sensational fashion than there are ones who thrived. For every Paul Williams, Sebastian Fundora or Tyson Fury, there are many more Aaron Pryor Jr., Spider Kelly and Julius Longs. And even in the case of the giants who have thrived amongst their diminutive opposition, everyone remembers the clips of Williams, Fundora and Fury being sensationally knocked down, or out.

Espinoza is already The Ring's No. 1-rated featherweight, but the bigger challenges, physically and metaphorically, are still to come in the form of the aforementioned eager foes. He already stands atop the division, but by how much does he tower over them, and how far down the road can he see?