By Bart Barry-
FORT WORTH, Texas – This is not the city where Terence Crawford fought Saturday. But it is part of an enormous thing called Metroplex, a collection of cities that comprises Dallas and Arlington, where Crawford did fight, a 50-mile expanse whose population, if counted as one, would tally 6.5 million souls, sitting just behind New York City and well ahead of Los Angeles among the nation’s largest. I stay at the western end whenever I visit Metroplex because it affords more culture-per-square foot than anywhere I’ve found.
There is a symbiotic relationship shared by truth and beauty; beautiful lies are gaudy by comparison, and an ugly truth is at best tolerated, not celebrated, by a person of any aesthetic taste. Terence Crawford has a beautiful way for being truthful, and Lucas Matthysse and Ruslan Provodnikov have truthful ways for being beautiful, and The Kimbell Art Museum, located 17 miles west of Arlington, the city on whose University of Texas campus Crawford untied Puerto Rican Thomas Dulorme on Saturday before Matthysse decisioned Provodnikov on HBO, has such truth and beauty in its architecture and collection one quickly forgives himself for stretching a metaphor that mayn’t even exist.
For years the front of architect Louis I. Kahn’s masterwork went unseen, as construction equipment obscured everything in pursuit of contemporary Italian master Renzo Piano’s pursuit of a Kahn tribute – the second time Piano has made such a thing, and as the first time, Houston’s Menil Collection, succeeded so completely it established Piano as a modern master, the Italian did it again – but with last year’s opening of the Piano Pavilion, across a plaza from The Kimbell, the lovely waterfalls and marble-lined treeways of Kahn’s entrance are available now to the public at every moment of every day, and the nearly priceless collection that resides beneath The Kimbell’s signature half-circles, topping concrete tops that treat water as light, spilling it from narrow grooves, are available to the public during business hours without a penny’s charge.
In all the great state of Texas, The Kimbell comes closest to duplicating Europe’s genius for gorgeous public spaces. That word above, priceless, is pricey anymore – overused as it is by salesmen on every used-up lot. But it is nearer to fitting than cliche when it modifies what The Kimbell comprises; works by Leonardo and Michelangelo and Caravaggio and most every Renaissance master whose name you begrudgingly memorized for that enormous art-history class in the assembly hall where the dullard professor dimmed the lights for her terrible cave-paintings slideshow that dimmed your lights instants later.
Cut the lights, indeed, Terence.
The only word that bubbles to the top for a careful observer of Crawford is composure. Crawford gives entire rounds to his studious ideal. He sees no occasion for studying tape of his opponents, one assumes, because he reads them and calibrates so well in the moment. Crawford has now fought top professionals and found no scenario among them for which he cannot improvise. He is much more like a prime Andre Ward, lately, than Andre Ward is.
Crawford does everything well, and he does everything well in an assured way any opponent must find sapping if not spiritually crippling. Crawford missed Dulorme wide in the opening rounds with his hard punches and found him only with touches, even when spanking the impetuous Puerto Rican with a righthand lead. A left hook to Dulorme’s body towards the end of round 3 changed the match, and Crawford and Dulorme each sensed it, and especially Crawford did.
Crawford, like Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao before him, is a natural jewel excavated and polished by promoter Top Rank and its singular capacity for cultivating prizefighters as attractions and achievers. (If you doubt that, ask the lads at Premier Boxing Champions how their Son of the Legend investment looks right now.)
Crawford waited till Dulorme, whose chin is much more reliable when wagging than absorbing – “Sugar Chin” as Crawford’s most colorful trainer, Brian McIntyre, called the Puerto Rican – got too close or too confident or simply forgetful, and Crawford jab-feinted Dulorme’s guard out of position then snapped his head leftwards with a hook and rightwards with a cross, the same elegant 3-2 combo with which Carl Froch cut the lights at Wembley last year, and everything after that was but a chance to inspect Crawford’s poise like he inspected Dulorme’s vulnerabilities, until KO-6.
Nobody who was ringside in this city got to watch what followed in New York on the HBO broadcast, though trust every one of us found the replay on our hotels’ dials Sunday morning. Such sanity in the violence Matthysse and Provodnikov subjected one another to; despite the real damage they did to one another’s bodies and brains in 36 minutes of combat, they embraced like once-separated brothers before the 12th round, and if it were a 15-round fight, there’s plenty of chance the victor would have been the Russian rather than the Argentine. But Matthysse has more class than Provodnikov, if just a wee bit less relentlessness, and Matthysse won Saturday’s tilt the way a prizefighter, a professional combatant, should do it.
If Crawford and Matthysse should fight next, and of course they should, HBO’s junior welterweight champion will be a much better one than PBC’s.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry