On Sunday morning in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Mexico and Cuba will take center stage in the boxing theatre as Canelo Alvarez and William Scull battle for the undisputed super middleweight title. It’s a monumental moment as boxing’s biggest star fights outside of his homeland or the United States for the first time in his career, the first in a four-fight agreement with Turki Alalshikh and Riyadh Season.

Alvarez was last in action defeating Edgar Berlanga in September in what would generally be considered a more historic national rivalry fight, Mexico vs. Puerto Rico, but with Mexico and Cuba the competition and interlacing of the boxing cultures has been extremely important to the sport historically.

Though the debate on this topic will continue on barstools and duelling keyboards across the world, many consider Alvarez to be the current face of boxing. Who the answer to that query is, of course, depends on how you define that. It’s hard to argue that any current fighter has had more impact on the sport’s landscape than Canelo, particularly when it comes to the sport’s broadcast.

Wherever Canelo goes, the tide tends to follow, as he’s led surges for HBO, Showtime, PBC and most commonly (and presently) for the last eight years, DAZN. In terms of North American boxing broadcasts, this era belongs to Canelo.

Fittingly, if one is to tell the story of televised boxing overall, it cannot be done without a significant chapter on the late 1950s and '60s, which prominently featured one Mexican fighter in particular, and a number of Cubans as his foil. No fighter graced the television sets of fight fans more often during what many consider to be the golden age of televised boxing than Gaspar Ortega, the scintillating welterweight who ended his career with a whopping 176 fights.

Many of them were aired as part of boxing’s two first longstanding television series, Pabst Blue Ribbon fights on Wednesdays and the Gillette Cavalcade of Sports on Fridays, both airing on national TV in the United States and in areas that could acquire the signal. If you were of a certain age, you might have had your first shave or your first beer in part thanks to Ortega.

Ortega’s very first televised fight, a landmark moment for a figure that had a huge hand in establishing the sport’s enduring popularity as a TV property, was against Cuba’s Isaac Logart, who at the time was Ring Magazine’s No. 4-ranked welterweight. According to Ortega’s biographer Tony Rondinone in his book Friday Night Fighter, the origins of the clash actually stemmed from a sparring session.

Ortega gave Logart fits during spirited sparring sessions between his wins over Vergil Akins and Ronald Fuentes. Rather than what would likely happen today, which is that the dangerous sparring partner would be scooped up to be a part of the hiring fighter’s team, or avoided forever based on the difficulty of the sessions, a promoter who saw the sparring decided it would make for a perfect television bout.

Logart was part of a wave of Cuban fighters that graced television sets from the '40s through '60s, along with Kid Gavilan, Florentino Fernandez and Benny Paret — all of whom Ortega fought. Professional boxing had been reinstituted in Cuba, unleashing a wave of talent onto television sets as of 1951. It reached Cuba before any other nation in Latin America.

What is colloquially known as “the Cuban boxing style” today, the economical and defensive-minded approach, was not the style of these fighters. Logart, Fernandez and Paret produced some of the most bruising battles of the decade, and one heartbreakingly tragic one in Paret’s case. Gavilan, while spectacularly skilled, was not immune to a slugfest either, making for such compelling viewing that his bout against Chuck Davey drew a 67.9 share of the US national television audience.

The first Ortega-Logart bout on March 16, 1956 was a terrific one, the perfect example of a competitive one-sided bout. Logart unleashed a hellacious beating on Ortega, who kept firing back. When the unanimous decision was read in favor of Logart, the crowd booed, not because they disagreed with the rightful winner but because they and the TV audience had fallen in love with the man called “Indio” who walked to the ring in a headdress in honor of his Indigenous mother who was watching at home in Tijuana.

The two would fight three more times in less than two years, each man winning twice, with Ortega ending '56 at No. 2 in The Ring rankings and Logart remaining at No. 4. Two years later, Orteha would be the subject of a New York Times piece titled “A Punch Is Not Enough, Today’s Boxer Must Be A Character.”

The concept of theatrics was undoubtedly nothing new in boxing, but the consistent medium of television was, and photos of Ortega in his Indigenous regalia and a charro holding a guitar were used as the blueprint for the level of effort the modern boxer was expected to put in on the marketing side. As we saw Teofimo Lopez stroll onto the stage in Times Square in an El Santo mark, or Canelo in his branded Amiri attire, we can trace the influences and compulsions to add theatrics to one’s presentation in the sport through Ortega and his Cuban foes.

Not long after this period, professional boxing was banned in Cuba once again after Fidel Castro put an end to professionalism in 1962. On the professional side, the Mexico-Cuba story turned into more of a partnership. Two all-time greats, Sugar Ramos and Jose Napoles, for example, found refuge in Mexico and continued their careers based in their new home.

It’s a trend that’s carrier over into the modern era, leading to a brand new one for Cuban boxing overall. In 2022, Cuban boxers still living in Cuba were permitted to have professional boxing bouts for the first time on an event staged in Aguascalientes, Mexico, where the Cuban Boxing Federation reportedly allowed the fighters to keep 80% of their purse, finally lifting the ban on professionalism.

That event set the stage for several of the same fighters from that event to take part in an even more historic one a few weeks back in Varadero, where the first pro boxing event in Cuba since 1961 was held. Olympic medalists Julio La Cruz, Arlen Lopez, Erislandy Alvarez and Lazaro Alvarez picked up pro wins on home soil.

The promoter of that event? AGON Sports, the German-based promoter which also backs William Scull.

The Mexican and Cuban flavor won’t just be in the main event on Sunday morning, either. We'll also get another look at Brayon Leon, the two-time Cuban youth amateur champion who is now a part of the Eddy Reynoso stable. Leon served as a main sparring partner for Canelo in preparing for Scull, as well as for Berlanga, and will blend his classical Cuban schooling with the Reynoso rubric to try to fast track through the light heavyweight division, starting with Mexican opponent Aaron Guerrero this week.

The history of boxing on your screen can’t be told without the telling of this national rivalry, but also relationship, and that lineage will continue as a new undisputed champion from one of the two nations is crowned.