A month removed from its musical pride Bad Bunny cleaning up at the Grammys and performing at the Super Bowl, the island is now hosting the World Baseball Classic and drawing rave reviews for its phenomenally joyous atmosphere inside the stadium. “Benito” has been central to that story too, offering to cover the insurance costs for Puerto Rican players, and even making the trip to Tokyo to watch Shohei Ohtani in action in the opening round. The superstar singer also has more than one client of his in the tournament, those he’s signed to Rimas Sports.

Among that stable is, of course, fellow unified world champion Xander Zayas, who appeared at the Super Bowl alongside Emiliano Vargas during the record-breaking performance. But before they hit the field with Benito, it was The Ring's strawweight champion Oscar Collazo on stage with him during his San Juan residency last summer. During an August date of the 31-show stay, Collazo was on stage with his WBO and WBA titles slung over each shoulder, reciting every word. A few months later, it would be announced that Collazo was a member of the Rimas family as well.

For a man in Collazo who spent so long paddling solo in uncharted waters, trying through brute force to make the broader boxing world pay more attention to him and the sport’s lower weight classes more generally, the rising tide of Bad Bunny’s influence couldn’t have come at a better time.

Collazo recently entered The Ring's pound-for-pound rankings, sitting at No. 10, and is heading into another title defense of his belts—including The Ring title—this weekend on DAZN against Jesus Haro. The bout will serve as the co-feature to Arnold Barboza and Kenneth Sims, which headlines the Golden Boy Promotions card. The bout against Haro is not the one he’d originally thought he’d be preparing for. Collazo was rumored to be heading towards a rematch with Melvin Jerusalem, perhaps to be staged in Puerto Rico, but those talks are temporarily on hold. But as he’s done throughout his time as champion, Collazo has taken a decidedly old school approach, and is remaining busy in a very respectable fight nonetheless.

Throughout his reign, Collazo has resisted both the suggestion that he’s in a weak or less meaningful division, and the subsequent calls to move up in weight. It’s a Catch-22 fighters in lower weight classes often find themselves within with the boxing public. Some will implore fighters of Collazo’s ilk “should” move up to chase more recognizable names, suggesting that this will boost their level of achievement and overall popularity. In Collazo’s case, he’d likely have to get all the way up to 115—the maximum Collazo feels he could ever fight at, “for the right fight”--until he found someone that met the threshold of broader popularity, Jesse “Bam” Rodriguez. But there is always the trap that public pressure can make a fighter move to a weight they’re uncomfortable in, or, less devastatingly, they move up and are accused of simply cherry picking.

“I read that stuff too, you know. They’ll be like, yo, you only, you only fight 105 pounds. Then what happens to other two champions? Just a while ago, you were talking about Knockout CP Freshmart, now, nobody's saying nothing. Now, Freshmart’s a champion at 108 pounds. Nobody says nothing about him. When I fought him, I was like, 'oh, no, he can fight,'” said Collazo, joking that people sometimes think he’s the only fighter in the division. “But that's people that don't do nothing. Just sit around and don't do nothing. Just opinion, opinion, opinion. I just do my thing and hopefully everybody's going to see what I'm talking about.”

In an era of weight-jumping and title collecting, it’s an act of resistance of sorts to dig your heels in like Collazo. While the modern trend is to collect titles in as many weight classes as possible and be praised for it, there is an equally impressive, but less flashy approach: Stay where you are and dominate.

“I'm doing great, 105. I'm doing great things at 105 pounds. I'm going into my seventh title defense, looking for the undisputed this year, you know. I'm doing stuff. Why do I gotta go up to 112?,” said Collazo. “That's what the mentality I'm trying to push people on the world of boxing so they could respect that, you know. But little by little, I'm making people notice it.”

In his master plan to bring greater appreciation to the lower weight classes, Collazo targeted the analytical tool meant to be the great equalizer: The Ring's pound-for-pound list. While everyone has their own definition of how the list is and should be put together, it is some formula of achievement + the eye test + “how would the fighter’s skills play if everyone were the same size?” How one weighs each of those things vary, but in this prism it becomes easier for the casual fan to appreciate Collazo. A fighter with Collazo’s array of skills and knockout power superimposed into any weight class would be a menace, but in the one he’s within, he’s already putting up numbers on par with some of the greatest strawweights in history.

He has a ways to go to reach Ivan Calderon’s 18, or Ricardo Lopez’s 20 world title defenses, but if all goes to plan this year, he could be at 9 or 10. Calderon and Lopez were also two of the few to have cracked this publication’s pound-for-pound list as 105-pounders. It also just so happens that Calderon himself still calls him regularly to lend advice on boxing, finances and life in general.

The only thing advice he doesn’t field from the Iron Boy is cooking tips from the Hall of Famer who’s also a devout cook and competition cooking star in Puerto Rico. Collazo admits that he can’t cook, but a glance at his plate filled with salmon, salad, bread and plantains just days out from the fight illustrates that he can eat, even while making 105. That morning leaving the gym, he weighed 108.

“The main thing I wanted to do is enter in the pound-for-pound list and we got it because that's the thing everybody that don't know about boxing, they know who is in the top pound for pound list. So achieving that, it's got me little by little where I want to go and I know this year I'm going to be top five pound-for-pound. If everything goes right and all the negotiations with the fighters go well, I’ll be future undisputed at 105 pounds and be up there in the pound-for-pound rankings.”

In order to get ready for his next title defense, Collazo linked up with another unified champ from Puerto Rico, Rene Santiago. Santiago has a unified title defense coming up in April against Masataka Taniguchi, so the timing was such that both men were nearly at an identical point in their preparation. Collazo and Santiago are good friends and help one another in camp regularly, and yes, they’ve heard the calls for them to fight for real.

“It’s a business,” Collazo says with a smile. “If the money is right!”

Before he can worry about temporarily severing any friendships to collect more world titles like his other pal Xander Zayas did against Abass Baraou, he has his eyes on IBF champion Pedro Taduran, and the Jerusalem fight, which in part was pushed down the road due to the World Baseball Classic being in San Juan during the time the fight was earmarked for.

Before all of that however, he plans on defending his title and then travelling to wherever Team Puerto Rico plays next, alluding to one of the perks of being affiliated with the biggest musical act in the world.

“We’ve got the sources for tickets,” he said.