Zayas was putting his WBO junior middleweight title on the line and vying for Baraou’s WBA belt at the same time, but there was even more on the line than the possibility of becoming boxing’s youngest current unified champion.

Zayas and a small handful of people knew that, provided everything went to plan in the fight, he would be appearing during Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show. Zayas inked a marketing deal in September with the global superstar’s company, Rimas Sports, joining Major League Baseball superstars Fernando Tatis and Ronald Acuña. Those initial meetings last summer with Rimas Sports representatives, Zayas and his boxing manager, Peter Kahn, first presented the possibility of him appearing at Super Bowl LX on Sunday night in Santa Clara, California, with planning for the performance already months underway.

Roughly two weeks before Zayas was to fight Baraou, the plan was formalized, for him to appear alongside Emiliano Vargas, The Ring’s reigning Prospect of the Year. Luckily for Zayas, Bad Bunny is a fan and appreciator of the fight game, and understood that any additional planning would have to be done after he battled Baraou.

“The first mission, the main thing, was January 31st, and after that, I told them we could go to the moon if you wanted me to go there,” Zayas said. “So that was the main focus, everybody went on silent, didn't bother me at all. They understood that I needed to accomplish this first.”

The 23-year old San Juan native held up his end of the bargain, scoring a historic win over Baraou in front of nearly 11,000 fans at Coliseo De Puerto Rico. The celebration spilled out into the convention center district and down the cobblestone roads into Old San Juan, as Zayas (23-0, 13 KOs) became the island’s fourth current unified world champion.

Naturally, the questions he fielded in the post-fight press conference were centered around what would be next for him. Though he answered truthfully regarding the fights he wants next — against fellow titleholders Josh Kelly and Sebastian Fundora, and interim champs Jaron Ennis and Vergil Ortiz — he couldn’t tell the full truth about what was actually next, or even where he was headed that night.

“I’m still daydreaming,” Zayas said. “I’m still trying to wake up from it. I went from winning my unified world titles to jumping in a plane, where normally I would spend some time with the family and do some media right afterwards. I literally went MIA for a whole week, posting that I was in Tokyo and stuff, it was fun. And then we kept the big secret for Sunday.”

While the party began in San Juan, Zayas celebrated privately backstage with his family, downloaded his plane tickets onto his phone, headed directly to the airport to fly to San Francisco while posting misdirection photos online of him in Japan. A little acting warmup, if you will, before his true acting debut in front of 135.4 million viewers.

Although Zayas felt like a little fish heading to the biggest pond imaginable, he nonetheless encountered some fanfare amongst his fellow performers, many of whom were Puerto Rican themselves. Those who didn’t know him figured it out rather quickly thanks to the lumps on his face from his fight days prior.

“The first couple of days, everybody was like, 'You’re the fighter, right?'” Zayas said. “And I'm like, 'Oh, can you tell? ”

Statistically, though, if they were Puerto Rican, there was a good chance that they saw his fight. According to viewership numbers released by Zayas’ promoter, Top Rank, 393,509 tuned in on Puerto Rican cable channel WAPA alone.

Those numbers don’t include viewers such as Bad Bunny himself, who was reportedly tuning in from Los Angeles, and others who watched across the promotion’s social media channels and streaming outlets Tubi and PlutoTV. But based on the cable viewership and live attendance alone, roughly an eighth of the population of Puerto Rico watched Zayas’ win over Baraou.

That included another famous Boricua who would be performing alongside Benito as well.

“I told one of the producers that I knew that I wanted to meet Ricky Martin, and he took me there,” Zayas said. “And man, when Ricky comes up to me and he said, 'Oh, you're Xander Zayas,' I’m like, 'There’s no way you know who I am. You’re a legend. How do you know who I am?’

“It was insane. Like that first moment when I saw Lady Gaga, I’m walking out of my camper and she’s literally on the camper right next to me and she’s coming down. I literally stopped like I saw like a ghost or something.”

While Martin and Gaga were the splashy guests, it was the lesser-known inclusions in the 13-minute set such as Zayas, Vargas, Victor Villas of LA’s Villa’s Tacos and Toñita, the 85-year old owner of Caribbean Social Club in Brooklyn that created the grassroots authenticity that is being celebrated across Latino culture.

For existing fans of Bad Bunny, of which there are many given that he’s the most streamed artist in the world, the inclusion of boxing references wouldn’t have come as a surprise. In fact, his Grammy Award-winning album, “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS,” is bookended by boxiana. The album opener, “NUEVAYol,” features a clip from Felix Trinidad following his 1999 victory over Oscar De La Hoya, and in the final verse of “LA MuDANZA,” he raps, “A mi me quieren como a Tito, Y soy serio como Cotto.”

But for Xayas, the most meaningful Easter Eggs in the performance weren’t even related to his childhood hero Cotto, or Trinidad, who attended his very first amateur boxing match when he was 6 years old. They were the ones about the everyday life of his people, on his island, their joys and their struggles.

“That first part with the sugar canes and he added the coconut, the nail techs, the dominoes, the construction, the Piraguas, it was all of it,” Zayas said. “That’s Latino culture right there. That’s Puerto Rican culture right there. Even with the light posts in Puerto Rico, we have an issue with that and just being able to put that out there it’s amazing because it gives you a little bit of perspective of what us Latinos go through on a day-to-day basis.”

Videos have surfaced online of halftime performers overcome with emotion and excitement as they exited the playing field, perhaps acknowledging the importance and gravity of what they’d just participated in for the first time. Zayas says he was not immune to this kind of reaction, and that he was “literally screaming” along with Vargas and many new friends he made on set after the show gave way to the third quarter of the football game.

The boost for Zayas has been nearly incalculable, though if you wanted to try, the metrics would be quite staggering. The industry of boxing, of course, seeks out waves of attention from mainstream media, as it rises all tides across the sport. When Premier Boxing Champions aired a commercial for Tyson Fury-Deontay Wilder II during the 2020 Super Bowl, fight fans collectively pointed at their screens like the Leonardo DiCaprio meme.

However, two fighters appearing on the field itself, one of whom being managed in a marketing capacity by the biggest musical act in the world who happened to be performing that night, feels like a new breakthrough.

A-list Celebrities have, over the years, dipped their toes into the waters of fight management and promotion with varying degrees of fidelity and success. A peak-of-his-fame Sylvester Stallone briefly promoted Aaron Pryor and Sean O’Grady and 50 Cent ran a promotional company that housed Yuriorkis Gamboa and Andre Dirrell.

In Benito’s case, his involvement with Zayas is related to outside-the-ring ventures, much like his deal with Acuna is for non-MLB contract matters. But as Kahn, who helped broker the marketing deal as well, points out, the partnership is already a knockout.

“Because of Bad Bunny’s international stardom and his platform, he has the ability to help raise Xander’s profile," Kahn said. “And the Super Bowl was a perfect example of an opportunity that you just can’t put a price on. Aside from selling sponsorship for his fight against Abass Baraou, Rimas Sports presented this opportunity for Xander. If you just want to do the math alone, and you break down the average cost of a Super Bowl commercial, and then break it down to the minute and beyond, it’s about $266,000 a second.

“And if you take that and you multiply it by the 10 seconds he was on air, you’re talking about almost $3 million worth of worldwide media exposure that was further reinforced and illustrated by the amount of social media frenzy in the boxing world. Not only the boxing world, but then it transcended boxing and then it got into pop culture. Then you started seeing the photos of him behind the scenes, the photos of him and Lady Gaga. Then you saw the video of Benito signing his trunks. That transcended boxing.”

Zayas’ relationship with Bad Bunny also transcends their business partnership. He still finds it surreal that he can call one of the biggest celebrities in the world a friend, because independent of everything, Benito is an inspiration to him. The man who brought the whole world to his casita on the island for a cup of coffee paired with a game of dominoes and the fight on the TV.

“What Benito is doing, not just for the Puerto Rican culture, but for Latinos in general, is special,” Zayas said. “He’s putting at the end there when he said America and he starts naming every country in the whole continent, it’s insane. It’s amazing. It’s something that you see it and it inspires you. It pushes you to keep dreaming, to keep trying to accomplish everything you want. Benito is a very special person.

“A lot of people don’t give him credit and a lot of people hate on him. He’s just a human being just like us, and that’s how he wants to be treated. And again, he’s just so, so, so humble and so respectful,” Zayas said. “These are the people that I want to be around with because they inspire, they want to push, they want to elevate, and that’s something that I’m looking forward to continue doing.”

He can find parallels in their ascents, too. As many have pointed out, just 10 years ago, Bad Bunny was working at a grocery store. Just eight years ago, Zayas was a fresh-faced teenager, signing his first pro contract. In some ways his rise is unimaginable, in others it’s following a pattern of rapid ascension.

“It's very interesting, right?,” Kahn said. "At 16 years old, the youngest to ever sign in the history of Top Rank, which stands to this day. At 22, when he won the title, he was, at that time, youngest world champion in all of boxing. At 23, as we talk today, he is the youngest unified champion in all of boxing. So it's all very consistent.”

In a 10-day span, the hundreds of people watching Zayas weigh in on the stage at the DISTRITO T-Mobile were replaced with thousands of people who gathered to watch the big screen in the concourse. With the world that Benito built at the 50-yard line, it still felt like Zayas was in the middle of San Juan, except this time on the biggest stage in the world.