LOS ANGELES – To live in this city one must be pathologically optimistic. It is a machine designed to do wondrous things but comprising 10 million self-interested parts. Every day two or more of these competing parts collide, and the machine seizes up. The trick to residing here is to identify the culpable pieces and assume that tomorrow, finally, the machine will run as planned.
It won’t. It doesn’t. That’s where the pathology comes in.
Not altogether unlike being a boxing fan. On Tuesday, Joseph Agbeko acquired a nerve condition called sciatica and cancelled his championship fight with Abner Mares – the concluding event of Showtime’s Bantamweight Tournament. That meant a fight-week upgrade, from consolation match to main event, for Vic Darchinyan and Yonnhy Perez, two men who’d fought hard but unsuccessfully in December’s semifinals.
Darchinyan was ready for primetime billing. Perez was not.
Neither was I, frankly. But on Wednesday morning, it was too late to cancel my flight. I traveled here, then, to see what else besides boxing the city had to offer.
The unique cause of each day’s traffic mess is ever in the air round here. Sometimes it’s a tanker-truck sprawled across four lanes. Other times it’s a bicycle race down the middle of the busiest surface streets in the West. Thursday afternoon it was the arrival of President Obama in pursuit of diners affording $13,000-per-plate comestibles.
Before you’re even to your rental car, then, someone’s explaining how today’s traffic event reflects nothing systemic about the city. It’s an isolated incident, and tomorrow will be different.
What actually was different was Thursday’s entertainment. After staging one of the better post-lockout NHL playoff games, on Tuesday, the Los Angeles Kings and San Jose Sharks were at it again two nights later in Staples Center. A few single-seating tickets were still available.
And the players are twice as big and thrice as fast as I remembered them from my days as a Massachusetts schoolboy hockey player in the early 1990s. The game has changed.
So has boxing – or at least the promotion thereof. Friday’s weigh-in for Darchinyan-Perez happened at the JW Marriott, part of a sprawling downtown idea called “L.A. Live.” It was two escalators and three hallways from the entrance and fit comfortably in a small conference room. There were no t-shirts for sale, no fight posters, no keychains for fans. There was, really, no reason at all to be there, which is why most of the media was not.
Did Joseph Agbeko’s sudden misfortune affect the Bantamweight Tournament’s promotion? Of course. You never want to cancel a main event, and Abner Mares is a Mexican prizefighter managed by Californians. He would have sold tickets.
Which is more than could be said for the event’s co-promoters. It was a three-way effort made by Oscar De La Hoya (absent all week), Don King (absent all week), and Gary Shaw. You might recognize two of those names, King and Shaw, from January’s “Silence at Silverdome” debacle in Pontiac, Mich.
At some level King gets a pass because he is four months from being an octogenarian and was a ticket-selling dervish in his prime. Shaw is a different story. This year his shows have come under increased scrutiny for their inability to draw fans. Shaw has a remarkable eye for talent, but he is not a promoter in the traditional sense of the word.
It has reached shameless proportions. On Saturday, about 10 minutes before Showtime went on the air, a ring announcer took the microphone and beseeched those gathered at Nokia Theatre to move into the three panels captured on television.
Three minutes after that, a venue security guard confirmed the ticket count at “about 2,000.” Even without imagining how many of those tickets were given away, the numbers are discouraging. Nokia Theatre, without seating people on its stage as it does for boxing events, holds 7,000. That is, 2/3 of Saturday’s available seats were empty.
If promoters still tried to feed their families by attracting crowds, such a turnout would be disastrous. But today, so long as a check from HBO or Showtime clears, all is well. It is not an original commentary but still a poignant one: Boxing has cultivated the seeds of its demise.
Alas, there’s always the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. That is where I spent Saturday afternoon. It is a splendid place with an exhaustive contemporary-art selection. Too, if you like the work of Pablo Picasso, and it seems Americans certainly do, “LACMA” is a good place to spend an afternoon.
A lesser place to spend an evening was waiting for Darchinyan-Perez, though the undercard was passable, and the usual delay before the televised part of the card was not more than 15 minutes.
But the main event was a dud. Even before an accidental bump of heads made blood to shoot from a spot between Jonnhy Perez’s eyebrows, causing ringside doctor Paul Wallace to stop the fight a minute into round 5, it was obvious Perez was overmatched.
Vic Darchinyan rushed out his corner to assault Perez from the opening bell; no feeling-out, no establishing the jab. Darchinyan landed that left uppercut he throws so well from his southpaw stance then brought a barrage of seeing-eye overhand lefts to Perez’s jaw, dropping the Colombian in round 2.
The match wasn’t close. All three judges had Darchinyan by the wide score of 50-44 at the fight’s conclusion.
Darchinyan is more than a bully. He is savage. He is arrogant. But he finds accomplished boxers with power punches in early rounds, and that is no mean feat. And he also fights whomever he is asked to fight.
This city, meanwhile, is a bit different than promised. But its temperate climate and friendly people make you like it more each time you visit. There are lots of reasons to come to Los Angeles, then. Sadly, boxing is not among them.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry.