By Bart Barry–
HOUSTON – Saturday at Carson, Calif.’s StubHub Center, a great fight venue with a moronic name, Jamaican featherweight Nicholas “Axe Man” Walters hacked former world champion Nonito “Filipino Flash” Donaire to a stump, in the co-main, and stopped him at the end of round 6. It was a case of dessert served before dinner, increasingly common in boxing’s kitchen, as HBO’s main event offered all the competitiveness its 60-to-1 odds promised.
I forewent the trip to California – no fight in which a man hasn’t a chance, not even one that features Gennady “GGG” Golovkin, warrants a flight – and instead sat beside the stage at Houston Improv, where Chicago comedian Corey Holcomb played to a full house.
No regrets here.
“One of the significant fighters, of the last several years, in the lighter weight classes, Nonito Donaire.” That is how HBO commentator Max Kellerman described Donaire a few minutes after the Axe Man felled him without even a “Timber!” Kellerman, straining at his harness not to employ HBO’s stock quotient of hyperbole – Walters, as a Spanish-speaking Jamaican featherweight, is not, after all, nearly so marketable as a middleweight from Kazakhstan – might near as easily been describing his network: “One of the significant broadcasters, of the last few decades, within pay-cable’s limited reach” or prizefighting: “One of the significant sports, of the last 25 years, among Americans’ third-tier diversions.”
It’s instructive how a fighter HBO nearly made its flagship guy just two years ago was now merely significant for a short time among smaller men. It’s an accurate appraisal by Kellerman, exactly right for once; it is both a proper read of what Donaire is and was and, retroactively at least, a proper read of the import HBO’s blessing now carries.
Fortunately for Nicholas Walters, he is not an HBO-blessed fighter. He is a man who chopped his way from Arena Roberto Duran in Panama City, in 2012, to brutal knockout wins over two very good veteran sluggers, Donaire and Vic Darchinyan. What makes Walters’ story special is not that he arrived on American cable fully formed, Gennady Golovkin did that as well, but rather that his full form was tested decisively and immediately: Darchinyan and Donaire represent a quality-of-opponent, in Walters’ two HBO appearances, Golovkin has not approached in thrice that many.
Walters is the son of a prizefighter, and that pedigree tells. Saturday he got overconfident, emboldened so much by his own power he forgot Donaire once separated effortlessly very brave men from their consciousnesses, and he got clipped in round 2 by Donaire’s deservedly celebrated left hook. It hurt Walters and spun him, and had there been another 30 seconds to go in the second, there’s no telling how things might have gone. But given a minute to recuperate, Walters’ incredible conditioning – born of an island, like the Dominican Republic, whose residents’ miraculous feats of athleticism are becoming, ahem, commonplace – Walters resembled no one so much as Floyd Mayweather against Shane Mosely: Hands up, prudence restored, forward marching behind a textbook jab.
Walters’ jab is extraordinarily long, fast, accurate and concussing. Donaire, whose own reflexes are enviable, saw Walters’ jab happening and countered over it successfully in the earliest rounds. By the fourth, though, after he got dropped by the same rear-hand uppercut Walters also dropped Darchinyan with, Donaire couldn’t counter Walters’ jab – because Walters’ jab disrupted Donaire’s equilibrium in a way that obviated reflex. Without a jab or reliable right, Donaire was reduced to his old digs in Left Hook City. Walters anchored his right guard to his cheek, waited for Donaire to put his life behind a left hook, pulled away from that hook, and then dropped an axe blade on Donaire’s left temple. And that was that.
Donaire, now a featherweight, admitted quite frankly afterwards he wanted no part of Walters’ offering, and since he neither wants to be denuded a second time at super bantamweight by Guillermo Rigondeaux, Nonito is effectively retired, even while he sharpens his pencil, arranges his T-square and readies a protractor for his return to boxing’s ubiquitous drawing board. More interesting, though, was a prefight description of Nonito’s reconciliation with Dad, when both men, according to Nonito, were being “alphas,” and Nonito implored himself to be a man, be strong, be a man, before sobbing uncontrollably once his dad departed.
It was a reminder of a certain debility of spirit about Donaire that long made others a little uncomfortable around him: He was a very good athlete who learned to be a fighter, which of course is different from a man who knows only one way. Or perhaps the point is better made as a question: Do you think Sergey Kovalev gives himself silent peptalks about being a man?
There’s a certain harmony a man has when he enjoys being who he is, and it’s a harmony often more noticeable in its absence, in the dissonance, for example, one senses from Donaire. I was reminded of this Saturday as I watched comedian Corey Holcomb ply his craft. There he sat on Houston Improv’s small stage, in an admittedly ridiculous and sparkly outfit he called “when an old (man) tries to dress young,” entirely relaxed, under the spell of himself, being wildly offensive before an evenly mixed crowd of men and women. Holcomb began with jokes about abortion clinics and moved to jokes about other women – “side pieces,” in the vernacular the comic shares with Paulie Malignaggi – and the illegitimate children that often result, whom Holcomb called “side babies.” It was a routine designed to offend, and performed to appear theatrically oblivious of what offense it caused.
As each of Holcomb’s jokes met with equal parts ribald laughter and hateful silence, Holcomb, with wide eyes and an angelic face, mockingly imitated a man who realized he’d just gone too far – and then went much farther still. An hour of watching Holcomb from ringside, as it were, convinces one of nothing so much as the power a man possesses when he withstands the derision of others, when he is intoxicated enough by himself to alter others’ rejections of him.
It is a different sort of fortitude than what Nicholas Walters showed Saturday, but it is of a piece, a harmony, the way Walters and Holcomb’s type of self-belief forces others to harmonize with them.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
Photo by Chris Farina / Top Rank