This ornery piece of boiled leather is still at it, scheduled to compete in an eight rounder this Friday in Tijuana versus Kazakh light middleweight prospect Sagadat Rakhmankul, who is 5-1 professionally and eighteen years Rivera's junior. Trained by Jimmy Montoya (perhaps most famous for his work with Salvador Sánchez and Alexis Argüello, and most recently remembered as Mikkel Kessler's latter career coach) since his pro debut - a draw in his mid-teens against Cachorrón Díaz which occurred in the waning days of the George Herbert Walker Bush administration (!!) - Cosme has been holding it down in the light to welter range for nearly three decades now. Most often he is either victorious by way of knockout, else he loses a decision. Only suffering ten stoppage losses in 74 bouts - of which four were corner retirements and one came late on a cut, while another (to prime Zab Judah**) was a questionable piece of Joe Cortez officiating, despite Cosme having eaten a gigantic left uppercut before answering the count - he is the living embodiment of the hardy & resilient spirit of his native municipality, Huatabampo, which is the unofficial capital of garbanzo (chickpea) agricultural production in the Western hemisphere. It has been eight years since Chino held any hardware in the sport, but he wore at least some belt or another for a near-contiguous period of 15 years before that: WBC Latino Light Welterweight Title (2011) interim Mexico Welterweight Title (2010) WBO Latino Welterweight Title (2006) WBA Fedecentro Welterweight Title (2006) WBF Welterweight Title (2003) WBC Continental Americas Light Welterweight Title (2002) IBA Americas Welterweight Title (2002) Universal Boxing Federation (UBF) Light Welterweight Title (2000) Universal Boxing Federation (UBF) International Light Welterweight Title (1999) NABO Light Welterweight Title (1999) Baja California State Light Welterweight Title (1996-97) He is on a four loss skid, and his last notable upset came against Óscar "Estudiante" Meza in 2015, but he will have the crowd behind him at least as he swaps leather with Rakhmankul and shows him what an old perro can do when defending its turf under the red, white & green banner. ** for anybody that has never seen that, by the way - check out Rivera's first ever time being dropped, by a peach of an explosive left cross that would probably short-circuit about 99.99% of light welters in history: This content is protected (three minutes in) Amazing that he got up from that, let alone hung around for a couple more rounds...
