By Bart Barry–
BARCELONA – At the metaphorical center of this autonomous place on the Mediterranean Sea, an ostensibly Spanish city much nearer France than Madrid, stands La Sagrada Familia basilica, masterwork of its city’s greatest architect, Antoni Gaudí i Cornet, known the world over as Gaudí, a man whose patronymic bears a curious resemblance to the derisive modifier “gaudy.” His edifice has been under continual construction for 132 years, and today cranes fly hundreds of feet in the air all round its untouchable spires, attesting to a full hardhat crew whose business-hours labor ceases but once monthly, for the sole Catholic mass the basilica hosts.
There appears no coherent plan for the cathedral though construction is slated to complete, supposedly, in 15 years; La Sagrada Familia simply grows higher and more unique and more astounding with each passing generation of Catalans set to work on it – unified by one theme: a pursuit of beauty. If it has proved a wondrous, unpredictable approach to the church’s many columns, it shall prove itself as an idea, here, too, in this single and singular column.
So begins Column without end, a series that shall continue until it doesn’t and shall happen whenever boxing supplies inadequate material or ample material inadequate for sagacious commentary or, frankly, any commentary whatever. There were five or more boxing matches Saturday on two cards in the United States, televised simultaneously once more by America’s two premium cable networks, both cards came from Las Vegas, Twitter reported, and excepting only Timothy Bradley’s characteristically fine effort, none warrants the commentary its network might insist it does.
It never should have entered the charters of HBO or Showtime to develop talent on their airwaves – if promoters are good for anything, and but for Top Rank, they probably are not – it might be the development of fighters, the making of them ready, that is, for a chance on HBO or Showtime. That makes me sound old fashioned, I know, a fossil clinging to some sentimental sediment, some sediment of sentiment, about the the very word “premium” – one that in its adjectival case remains, in dictionaries if not as a modifier for cable networks, denotative of exceptional quality or greater value, but tiresomely often is left by our premium boxing providers as a noun that denotes a prize, bonus, or award given them in the form of an absurdly large monthly bill. Instead, HBO has put itself deeply in the talent-development business, calling its picks for future stars and then making them so, or anyway insisting it has, while Showtime has lost its way altogether.
It is neither channel’s fault boxing gyms are shuttered or shuttering in American cities where they long thrived, but it is both networks’ faults a fraction of one percent of prizefighters have been so grossly enriched by network money they devastated boxing’s ecosystem in a way a generation’s repairs will, or would, not remedy. Ever and again and however often it must be repeated: The consumer’s role is not to justify vendors’ misdeeds, and a boxing aficionado neither should endeavor to justify the era’s two best men not-fighting each other nor waste a moment’s energy absorbing any press release, either by the press or its owners, seeking to explain what boxing historians will rightly conclude was unpardonable, blemishing into perpetuity the legacies of Floyd Mayweather, Bob Arum, Manny Pacquiao, HBO Sports and Showtime. In that order.
If Saturday Amir Khan made himself Mayweather’s likely May opponent, a fight Saul “Canelo” Alvarez would be well-advised to join Miguel Cotto in confronting headon, it excites no one’s soul but Kahn’s, and yet, a select bunch of knowledgeable folks has long asserted Kahn’s style should trouble Mayweather’s more than anyone else’s, including Pacquiao’s. Kahn has no chin, true, but he is deep enough in his career, now, to know that and skir anyone who would test it, as Mayweather’s accuracy could not help but do, and when was the last time an opponent strategized to fight Floyd in flight from the power of “Money”? Kahn’s footwork is skittish, amateurish in a way proportionate to the peril he senses, but Mayweather is well past his physical prime, and if he somehow convinces manager Al Haymon to allow him a fight away from MGM Grand, in London, say, where someone other than Haymon controls the ticket-spraying nozzle on the secondary market, a profoundly unlikely event, Mayweather might not receive by default the scoring of any round in which he is not felled outright, and that could conceivably make for an intriguing three or four rounds relative to contemporary prizefighting’s eroded baseline.
None of this will happen, of course – did Amir Khan just fill Wembley Stadium to decision Devon Alexander? would Mayweather consider making a fight outside the compliant jurisdiction of his handpicked athletic commission? is Justin Bieber enough of a royalist to return to his pal’s side as a pawn on the other side of the pond? – but it cannot be wrong to make a lunge for 15 seconds of SEO celebrity by driving traffic to this column via “Wembley” and “Bieber”, can it?
Oh, enough – this city is too marvelous, funky, offset and unique to burden its dateline with another syllable about any of the prizefighters whose names appear above (except maybe Bradley’s).
La Sagrada Familia basilica, during the sun’s 90-minute descent to the horizon, when its light hits the enormous and numerous expanses of stained glass that adorn the basilica’s facade, and its tons of stone columns suddenly become skybound popsicles, limegreen and watermelonred and orangeorange, is unlike any other place one might experience and the very thing for which a word like “sublime” was coined. When one sees its nearly endless spires from inside, its glorious and absurd crucificial adornment that makes the slain Christ appear in parachute to the altar, and how its glass transforms the metal of its organs’ pipes to iridescence, one experiences gratitude more than another emotion. One becomes thankful he is experiencing it, thankful for what optimism it induces: There may be more experiences like this to come, and I can find them . . .
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Editor’s note: Part 2 can be found here.
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Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry