By Bart Barry–
Saturday brings a cleansing of the palate, doesn’t it, a reminder of a painfully missed time when you watched boxing because you couldn’t imagine a better use of your energy – not because you felt obligated, as a longtime fan, to support your sport’s return to public airwaves because, apparently, leaving public airwaves was what doomed our sport, even while its return to public airwaves appears far more damning now than its absence did even five years ago.
The word is relief. That is what this weekend brings, a chance to return to the dated ideal of a promoter making real fights because he is accountable to scribe critics. There’s redundancy there, yes, redundancy worth visiting for a spell. Criticism does not exist on television, only in print. The ephemeral, emotional, silly nature of television lends itself directly to promotion, to publicity, to fads, to effects that draw the eye, distract the eye, capitalize on the plague of man’s anxiety: television’s energy, like a teenage girl’s, derives its potency from a fear something better is happening in her absence. Television attracts its audience with a promise that its absence assures regret, and then, its audience drawn, television busies itself with imparting the essential nature of the spectacle, this very moment, the most or greatest of its kind, however absurd the statistics it needs cite, until the apogee of its program’s arc passes, and then it returns to promising the next spectacle cannot stand to be missed by anyone who does not want the crunching anxiety of its absence, and so on.
Elders called it the “boob tube” and did not miss. What now happens to our sport on network television is both potent and inevitable, and every print journalist that covers it cannibalizes what remains of our craft – in a bent more concessionary than saboteur.
Saturday, blessedly, brings no more slickly produced mediocrity from the imagination of an otherworldly figure, a manager advisor who, it may well turn out, hates the sport of boxing to his very marrow, like we’ve grown accustomed to treating in what serious tones we once reserved for actual championship contests conducted by actual champions, and that is not a criticism of Danny Garcia who, for all the middlingness that has attended his last 13 months in the game, a series of spectacles gaudy as his trunks, did things the right, hard way, way back when his promoter wanted him to lose every time he laced up gloves to stretch a fat old legend and a virginal amateur prodigy representing some coveted demographic or other.
Saturday’s co-main event from Arlington, Texas, may not be much of a fight, ultimately, but it will feature 2014’s best fighter plying his wares away from his beloved Nebraska. It is a return of sorts for Terence Crawford to the place he first asserted himself on the undercard of an ill-conceived crowning ceremony for Mikey Garcia, if you remember him, a 2013 Dallas spectacle for which Garcia did not bother acknowledging the weight limit, iced Juan Manuel Lopez, and looked decidedly second-rate when set against the warmup act: Crawford doing everything right. Saturday’s telecast will follow Crawford, the world’s best lightweight, with the world’s most entertaining junior welterweights, Argentine Lucas Matthysse and Russian Ruslan Provodnikov, in the sort of fight that will meet even exalted expectations for violence while being shorter than anticipated, very much the way Brandon Rios’ first tilt with Mike Alvarado did.
Good as Matthysse is, there is a real likelihood he’s not sturdy as Provodnikov; Matthysse has shown greater fragility in his best fights than Provodnikov has. The Russian will go directly at Matthysse, who will return fists with what rage and resentment he can still muster, and each man will endeavor to break his opponent’s spirit without a consideration for his own well-being, exactly the sort of contest the word “fight” still connotes to anyone not associated with the business of shiny-packaged prizefighting, nothing sanitized or Premier about it, serving the primal purpose boxing fulfills if it is worth considering, and no, generally it is not worth considering anymore, not with fractionally the frequency its consideration merited even a few years back, whatever television tells you.
The contemporary sportsfan, hoodwinked by men with MBAs and laptops, believes he should play manager, himself, to express best his affection for what athletes please him best: It’s OK my favorite athlete is not very good at his chosen profession, see, because he’s the best today, and television tells me the best today is the best of all time, and never mind that, cretin, because my athlete is much richer than yesterday’s best athlete who, regardless of what readily available video may suggest, could never beat my favorite athlete because he didn’t have swagger. This is a welcomed infantilization of American sportsfans, or perhaps it’s an international trend – heaven knows soccer fans are no beacons of adulthood – to distract potential customers with what’s sparkly, and it’s enjoying an excellent run.
Terence Crawford should be watched and enjoyed Saturday because he is legitimate talent properly cultivated by promoter Top Rank who builds fighters very much better than anyone else, and Provodnikov and Matthysse should be watched because of the honesty they represent and the perspective such honesty lends the poverty of its peers’ performances. From Siberia and Patagonia, respectively, Provodnikov and Matthysse exhibit a sort of strength that must be bred in men over millennia of sober struggle against a vicious and arbitrary world that endeavors at every turn to eliminate them. Neither man expects another man can hurt him – not uncommon among males in their physical primes. That neither Provodnikov nor Matthysse cares for the probability another man can hurt him, though, that neither man – even unto unconsciousness – has an algorithm for processing instant evidence to the contrary, that, is what makes them special.
Their match, too, will be special. I’ll take Provodnikov, KO-9.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
