The disappointment of BJ Flores

By Bart Barry-

“Potential remains potent if unused.” – James Wood, “Late Bloom”

Saturday in a small theater at Palms Casino in Las Vegas, in a PBC main event televised by NBCSN, 31-year-old Kazakh cruiserweight Beibut Shumenov decisioned 36-year-old American BJ Flores by three scores of 116-112. The match was made under a single expectation: Flores will decimate Shumenov, persuading the PBC’s naive viewership he is a power-punching terror we can soon anoint PBC cruiserweight champion. That expectation was disappointed.

The fight was not a fun one to watch, though no frequent purveyor of PBC events will derive any more insight from that statement than he derived joy from Saturday’s broadcast. The telecast was poor, the commentary banal, the interviews borrowed from the pages of American Cheerleader, and the violence slight. The hardest punches by far missed by far, as the preanointed winner found a prey nothing like what he’d been promised, and the fleetfooted prey found exactly the complacent predator of his quiet preparations.

Beibut Shumenov also found the best way for an underdog to win a PBC main event: Move up so far in weight – 25 pounds in this case – you are promised to be knocked cold, and then don’t get knocked cold.

Did Shumenov get the benefit of most doubts from Saturday’s judges? Sure did. Confident as the outfit was in a Flores knockout, the PBC neither bothered flying its fighters to business-friendly locales nor imported sympathetic judges to Las Vegas. Hell, they didn’t even script their commentators’ post-introduction thoughts, resulting in Sugar Ray Leonard waving the wrong pom-poms and ratifying Steve Farhood’s unofficial scorecard, one that concurred with the official cards.

After the match, Flores rightly insisted his countenance was incredibly unmarked for a man who’d been beaten for the majority of a 36-minute confrontation. That insistence betrayed the entirety of Flores’ strategy for Shumenov: We will both stand more or less still and slug one another, and since I’ve fought as high as 218 pounds, and you’ve fought as low as 174, physics will be our judge long before those three folks at ringside. Though Flores is much more of a boxer-puncher than a purebred slugger – a major reason for his youthful conversion from heavyweight to cruiserweight – he expected to stand immediately across from a much smaller man and blast him to unconsciousness.

Flores expected to undo Shumenov very much the way Shumenov undid Tamas Kovacs in 2013, a Shumenov performance at Alamodome that was simply belligerent, one in which Shumenov’s punches were spiteful as they were fast or accurate. Bernard Hopkins, who was ringside that night in San Antonio, saw an immobile man with disproportionate confidence in his power, and wagered instantly the man’s psyche was fragile: sluggers, as men who believe deeply in their natural abilities to bring instant order to a boxing ring, no flirtation, no foreplay, no reciprocity, are boxing’s least-secure souls; their universes unravel with an acceleration unknown to the universes of volume punchers or boxers. Hopkins razed Shumenov’s identity quickly in their 2014 match, disarming him then practicing on him, and sent Shumenov right out of sluggership and the light heavyweight division.

Shumenov deserves immense credit for making that relocation; the move from flyweight to bantamweight can be done by having dessert with dinner next week, while the distance from light heavyweight to cruiserweight is vast. Though it is obviously unfair for a 201-pound man to toe the line against a Klitschko, it is nearly as hopeless for a light heavyweight to move to cruiser. Today’s heavyweights are generally gargantuan and plodding; you’d hate to be hit by one and probably shouldn’t be. Cruiserweight, though, is where the fantastic athletes who wash-out of other contact sports tend to gather. At heavyweight, you meet the former collegiate linebacker who’d rather eat his way to 250 than starve his way to 199; at cruiserweight, you meet that guy’s more-disciplined teammate – just as strong, just as athletic, and a lot faster.

That was, is, BJ Flores. But things haven’t gone according to plan.

However much I prefer other fighters’ styles, BJ is my favorite person I’ve met in 11 years of covering our beloved sport (Israel Vazquez is a close second). There is a self-deprecating streak in BJ that does not translate to television, where he appears too assured, too fidgety, and sometimes too glib. He has it all figured out and is not reticent about saying so. When that sort of self-assurance pits itself against the best prizefighters in the world and wins more often than it loses, you get Carl Froch. When it goes 31-1 without once challenging for a world title, you get more resentment from fans and pundits than you deserve.

Whatever his fighting spirit, BJ is too smart to be a great prizefighter, too filled with the sort of curiosity that seeks sympathetic angles, elegant solutions to the ugly problem of swapping blows for income; if he can get things organized properly, BJ seems to believe, he’ll be recognized as a world champion without having to beat any world champions. This mentality manifests itself in various ways and did so, Saturday: so long as he was way out of Shumenov’s range, Flores hurled rights with abandon, but a single counter from Shumenov set BJ’s quick mind to calculating risks and probabilities, in an untimely search for an elegant solution to the problem of rendering Shumenov unconscious without a proportionate amount of peril.

Flores has every tangible quality needed to be a great prizefighter. The fact he will come to his 37th birthday without once challenging a world champion, though, subverts most of it. That was not a fun sentence to write.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry