When featherweight contender Orlando Cruz steps into the ring on Saturday night at the Thomas & Mack Centre in Las Vegas to do battle for the vacant WBO featherweight title against Orlando Salido, he will so as an openly gay man in a sport in which the warrior heart and masculine virtues necessary to be a fighter are still widely considered the antithesis of any sexual orientation other than heterosexual.

When he originally came out, the Puerto Rican said: “I have and will always be a proud Puerto Rican. I have always been and always will be a proud gay man.”

A simple statement yet one that has ensured him a place in the history of the sport, one that will undoubtedly outlast anything he will achieve in the ring.

The significance of his decision to come out is amplified by the fact he hails from a Puerto Rican culture in which machismo remains an unwritten but rigid condition of respect and acceptance by young men, a culture in which boxing, this most macho of sports, occupies a status it can only dream of anywhere else.

It remains a cultural enigma that sports such as boxing and football have remained impervious to changing social mores and progress when it comes to the normalisation of a gay sexual orientation and identity.

That in the second decade of the 21st century a world title fight should generate more publicity and attention than it normally would over the fact that one of the fighters involved happens to be gay should be the real story.

The fear of being openly so in these last redoubts of male stereotype has ensured that men like Cruz have to summon up near indescribable personal courage to be who they truly are.

Just as when the former Welsh rugby international Gareth Thomas came out in 2009, Cruz has forced his fans and fans of boxing in general to confront their own prejudices and undoubtedly in many cases fears of being open when it comes to their own sexuality.

These fears are entirely understandable. Boxing gyms are not establishments where political correctness prevails. The primitive nature of the sport all too often produces a primitive mindset.

Attend a professional boxing event and you enter a world seemingly untouched by evolution in which raw aggression and a lust for violence reigns, typically fuelled by the over-consumption of alcohol.

It offers a vision of man’s most base instincts let loose — instincts that stand in contradiction to the courage and skill on display in the squared circle.

A fighter entering such an arena walks into a cauldron of ritualistic hate or devotion. To risk adding to the former and detracting from the latter by openly confounding a masculine stereotype of rigid heterosexuality is why the decision by Cruz to come out carries such resonance.

Decades earlier, in the mid 1950s to early ’60s, another boxer Emile Griffith was subjected to abuse for his sexuality, though it wasn’t until later life that he openly discussed his sexual orientation.

A world champion in two weight classes — welterweight and middleweight — Griffith was involved in a tragic ring fatality in his third fight against Benny Paret for the welterweight title in 1962.

In the lead-up, Paret had directed homophobic remarks at Griffith, calling him a “maricon” — the Spanish word for faggot — while patting him on the buttocks.

What followed was a brutal encounter which culminated in Griffith stopping his opponent in the 12th round. Paret never recovered consciousness and died 10 days later.

Contemplating the tragic event years after, Griffith said: “I keep thinking how strange it is ... I kill a man and most people understand and forgive me. However I love a man and to so many people this is an unforgivable sin; this makes me an evil person.”