By Bart Barry–
Saturday at MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas, not Macao, undefeated American welterweight Timothy Bradley will make a rematch of his 2012 fight with Filipino Manny Pacquiao, one sure to provide scoring quandaries, and what bad-faith and acrimony our beloved sport attaches to such. A shame, that, since Bradley and Pacquiao are generally good-faith guys.
Whatever his faith, Bradley, a former champion at 140 pounds, has yet to fight his best at welterweight. He made the best match seen in quite a long time at welterweight about 13 months ago, against the ruinous “Siberian Rocky” Ruslan Provodnikov, a grotesquerie of volition from which Bradley is unlikely ever to recover fully, followed by a busier-is-better decision victory over Mexican master Juan Manuel Marquez in October. Not yet has Bradley shown anything like the identity-snatching form he employed against Joel Casamayor, Lamont Peterson, Nate Campbell, Kendall Holt or Junior Witter – the British junior welterweight titlist Bradley dropped and decisioned in Nottinghamshire in 2008, launching “Desert Storm’s” unanticipated championship reign.
With few exceptions, every man at the elite level of sport is an overachiever – certainly Pacquiao and Marquez are – but Bradley appears to have done more with his talents than nearly anyone has. What is his signature fighting style? The man who at 140 pounds flashed righthand leads to corral opponents towards the ropes, and then, in a nod to Joe Frazier, another undersized overachiever, smoked where those men lived, has done nothing of the sort in his move to welterweight, a move whose stylistic understatement was anticipated by a lackluster 2010 welterweight debut against Argentine Luis Carlos Abregu. Bradley’s identity at welterweight is that he finds a way to win, but if you took even a Bradley partisan and told him to teach a youngster the Bradley Style, he’d lack the clarity of objective a request for the Pacquiao Style or Marquez Style would surely summon.
Bradley does not naturally place his head in an auspicious place for avoiding other men’s punches; with no opponent was this more obvious than Provodnikov, a puncher who, for all his primitive merits, consistently placed his head out of the sights of Bradley’s gloves while throwing much better leveraged punches. Bradley was, that evening, the better athlete, and a miracle of conditioning and resolve too, but he was not the better fighter – not even close. He was not the better fighter, either, against Marquez in October, though little shame might be extracted of that.
Ringside for both, I saw Marquez decision Bradley, 116-114, similarly to the way I saw Bradley decision Pacquiao, 116-115. We return to the scene of the robbery, then. I was one of three credentialed media ringside for Bradley-Pacquiao who scored the match the way the official judges did. I was uncertain of my scorecard as the judges’ collective verdict was; I marked five rounds as either/or affairs, and the judges were unanimous about fewer than half the rounds. My scorecard was, as ever, fallible, and it is important to impart, once more, the reason: A writer honored with a ringside credential should honor that honor by scoring truthfully, not “correctly” – seeking to record what he senses, not what he predicts others will sense.
It was and remains memorable to me how little import persons assigned my immediate admission of fallibility; saying my scorecard was a truthful if imperfect representation of what I saw from row H was wholly inadequate, since anything but capitulation was intolerable to those who knew what they saw on television; somehow, to a surprisingly large but unsurprisingly unseemly mass, unless I joined the other 100 guys in the Pacquiao column, the browbeating shouldn’t cease. Among other mildly amusing pastimes, the experience of others’ reactions to my Bradley-Pacquiao scorecard launched me on a hobbyist’s investigation of the science of optics, one that quickly led away from high-definition television and towards camera obscuras, camera lucidas and fiber optics though not before uncovering this: A boxing broadcast’s most powerful filter is not its audio commentary or unofficial scorecard but what 30-second replays it shows between rounds.
Less than a 10th of the round is repeated for a viewing audience programmed by the medium to believe whatever is repeated is what is priority. The punch you thought you saw the other guy land at the 47-second mark of the round apparently wasn’t essential as the punch landed by the A-side guy in the final 19 seconds, else why isn’t it being repeated? And the antidote to an awareness of such influence is no antidote at all: Assuming nefarious intent and scoring against it makes a tally no more objective than otherwise.
Saturday’s match will likely be another hard-scoring affair. The erosion of Pacquiao’s reflexes continues apace, yes, but Bradley’s recent stylistic conversion, and his newfound expectation that he’ll receive the benefit of every scoring doubt, at least from official judges, tend to diminish Bradley’s activity at the exact moment it should increase, and this is bound eventually to be a problem for him – and quite possibly a problem, come Saturday, when official judges look to score close rounds for Pacquiao because, well, who wants to be part of another investigation?
Wait a tick, way back at the beginning of that ran-on monstrosity, didn’t you mention an erosion in Pacquiao’s reflexes, which would seem to indicate you missed Mastery in Macao when Pacquiao proved to himself and trainer of the year Freddie Roach he was all the way back? For a championship-caliber prizefighter, finding Brandon Rios with a combination rates in difficulty between a heavybag and the red-brick façade of what boxing gym houses it; nothing Pacquiao did in Macao indicated he was better than the man decisioned by Bradley 22 months ago in Las Vegas – and no matter what one opines of that decision, he must concede this: Pacquiao was outhustled and outhit in the 12th round by a man who was immobile enough to require wheelchair assistance a half hour later. And since then, Pacquiao was the B-side of what HBO analyst Max Kellerman, in a nod to his medium’s penchant for understatement, called “arguably the greatest one-punch knockout in the history of boxing!” And yet.
I’ll take Pacquiao, MD-12, in a fight Bradley wins, and judge Glenn Trowbridge nevertheless scores 119-109 for the Filipino.
Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com