The opening minute of Saturday’s main event on Showtime, Argentine junior welterweight titlist Lucas Matthysse versus American Mike Dallas, showed such a disparity of speed, the Argentine in black so much slower than the American in silver, one could be forgiven sliding from the edge of his chair to its back – the better for observing 12 rounds of violence. But 86 seconds later Matthysse knocked Dallas inanimate with a right hand, and whatever other thoughts traffic in a cluttered mind got canceled as if they were Dallas’ own cache.
Surely none were what thoughts filled Dallas’ mind immediately before the blue glove on Matthysse’s right fist did, but in case any doubts persist, here is onesuch that happened during Matthysse’s ringwalk: Can the works of South American artist Fernando Botero improve our understanding of South American prizefighter Lucas Mathysse?
In the tears he wept immediately after knocking-out Mike Dallas at 2:26 of round 1, Matthysse betrayed a set of emotions more complicated than what American sports fans usually must decipher. They were not anything like the clichéd tears-of-joy from which millions of Americans will drink Sunday, immediately following the Super Bowl, when any one of 20 or 30 cameras will keep chasing athletes’ countenances till someone on the winning team is found to emote for America, and “put in perspective” for us how profoundly meaningful these 21 weeks of games and thousands of hours of commercials have been.
In Matthysse’s tears was something nearer ambivalence; the act of rendering another man unconscious is cathartic, but if catharses comprised joy alone, we’d call them joyful outbursts and not catharses. Matthysse’s authenticity was particularly telling when set against his interviewer’s callousness and cynicism. Matthysse ingested an amino-acid pill of some kind before his round of work with Dallas, and admitted to washing it down with (yerba) mate – a South American tea made from dried leaves and considered the national drink of Argentina – assuring his interviewer it was the same concoction he took before every fight, failing nary a drug test along the way.
Matthysse’s answer, and the way it disarmed the requisite postfight controversy on which this interviewer now bases his career, such as it is, brought a palpable deflation to what followed, even as what followed was an examination of the human condition that is the very reason a sport brutal and grotesque as ours shows the endurance it does. Imagine what might have come of an inquiry simple as: “What other than victory is making you cry, Lucas?” Or would the minute-long detour such complexity might bring hinder too overtly Showtime’s next promotional skit?
When he is considered at all by American museum-goers, Colombian artist Fernando Botero is treated as a descendent of 20th-century Mexicans – Rivera’s shapes, Kahlo’s colors – with a flair for Warhol’s poster-making digestibility, and a bent for depicting obesity. It is a facile analysis, of course, but it does the trick for persons generally less interested in looking at art than being seen looking at art. Botero, conversely, began by doing something that almost could be called a caricature of what Pablo Picasso saw while standing before Diego Velazquez: “The purpose of my style is to exalt the volumes, not only because that enlarges the area in which I can apply more color, but also because it conveys the sensuality, the exuberance, the profusion of the form I am searching for.”
Botero did it, though, without Picasso’s willingness to exploit others’ gifts for irony – for saying “oh yes, I see so many bulls’ faces hidden in ‘Guernica’!” while meaning something quite the opposite. In his own words, Botero is after sensuality and exuberance, of colored voluptuousness before sexuality, and he discovered that compressing his subjects, making them squatter – though rarely fatter – allowed him to make what Nobel Laureate Mario Vargas Llosa calls Botero’s “sumptuous abundance.”
A South American compressing forms and making exuberance is exactly what happened Saturday. What Matthysse threw at Dallas was a standard enough counter – catch the jab, release the right hand over it – but Matthysse’s power compressed the form and made it something else entirely. There was composition there, as well; it was a more educated move than Matthysse’s detractors, who see wild swings and little head movement, credit him with. A moment after being hit by Dallas’ first double jab, which arrived almost too quickly, Matthysse posited Dallas was not returning his left fist to his chin before throwing the second punch. Matthysse, then, considerably slower of hand than Dallas, did not need to punch with Dallas so much as place his right hand in the space between Dallas’ two jabs. He did that, and Dallas went stiff and landed on his face and stayed there.
In his essay “A Painter of Lost and Angry Pictures” curator David Elliott writes: “If Botero has often been intent on emphasizing the aesthetic attributes of his works, these cannot be isolated from their content which, while avoiding sentimentality or nostalgia, is often intensely emotional.”
And so it is for Matthysse as well. As he showed after rendering Mike Dallas unconscious, Matthysse is not machine-like as his supporters believe. He is, in his way, sumptuous; there is a vulnerability to him, be it in his body art or absence of postfight machismo, that reaches women before it reaches men – or didn’t you hear the pitch of cheers for Matthysse as he made his way to the ring? Matthysse, like his countryman and occasional sparring partner Sergio Martinez, is an entirely more complicated animal than the profitably cardboard figures of obliging American athletes. The difference between a South American like Matthysse and an American like, say, Adrien Broner is the difference between a Botero and a Warhol.
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Author’s note: Special thanks to Art Services International, whose excellent collection of essays in its catalog “The Baroque World of Fernando Botero” proved helpful.
Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com