By Bart Barry-
Saturday in Brooklyn in what remains of an anticipated title match for an expiring sport Ohio welterweight “Showtime” Shawn Porter will square up with Florida’s Keith “One Time” Thurman in a match that figures to disappoint what exaggerated expectations desperate aficionados have affixed to it. This will be yet another chance and in all probability one of the last for PBC to captivate a nationwide audience and win new fans to its brand of boxing.
Thurman and Porter have nearly identical records and nearly identical stretches of inactivity, and while that sort of thing once may have marinated things richly today it does little more than serve as a reminder of the incompetence with which they’ve been handled. Their manager/promoter group, once the brainchild of a visionary and rapidly becoming what kids these days call a cautionary tale, has taken whatever whitehot enthusiasm ever existed for either of these fighters and doused it to soggy.
Thurman, a charismatic action fighter whom an accomplished promoter like Bob Arum might’ve made an international heartthrob, is now a joke of sorts. He has steadily lost others’ esteem even while not losing a match. Wait, when did I last see him fighting? – you probably wonder. In a July homecoming fiasco that saw Luis Collazo wave off his own bout to ensure the PBC darling got another w and Collazo got his name engraved on the PBC Employee of the Month plaque hanging above a headquarters restroom with what majesty GoPros hang off PBC-referee headbands.
Is that too irreverent? Then let us acknowledge the irreverence as a reflective surface off which bounces former aficionados’ disgust with what has become of their, our, oncebeloved sport.
Nothing holds constant in this game. That is the lesson of what has happened to a sport that was passably popular if not thriving just five years ago. No, folks round the proverbial watercooler were not fluttering their tongues about prizefighting but those who cared about the sport had four or five annual events worth traveling to, incredible happenings in no way tarnished by others’ absent interest. That is gone now. Quickly as the quality of combat deteriorated the reverence for sanctioned combat accelerated directly past it. Boxing attracts misanthropes and was long vulnerable to its supporters’ routine sneers. What it collects now is fulltime indifference occasionally interrupted by derision. People, often former readers, now ask boxing writers what sort of writing we’re doing these days, convinced it couldn’t be boxing and too uninterested to find our URLs in the forgotten Boxing folder of their Favorites bar.
Do Porter and Thurman deserve the blame for all that? Of course not, but their manager and promotional network deserves a halfshare.
Thurman postponed the match, too, helping folks to assume someway it would not happen. But that postponement should not undo our memories; if this fight had happened when it was scheduled to go off, the gap in both men’s careers still would’ve been unacceptable: Sugar Ray Leonard and Thomas Hearns, two fighters whose first match in 1981 remains the standard against which all welterweight tilts are measured 35 years later, each fought less than three months before their championship match – a true superfight.
This is what that has come to: Both Thurman and Porter went in tough about a year ago, Porter barely surviving Adrien Broner and Thurman needing Collazo’s selfejection to remain undefeated. Neither Leonard nor Hearns would’ve needed more than five rounds to obliterate either Collazo or Broner (or Thurman or Porter), and both men would’ve fought again round Labor Day having done so. With the collective departure of Mayweather and Pacquiao, Thurman and Porter are two of the world’s three best welterweights and considered the benevolent PBC god’s reply to years of aficionados’ futile prayers.
The worst part is the fight won’t be great and likely not entertaining either. Porter, for all his ferocity, just isn’t very good. He’s a boxing-is-bodybuilding sort whose physique anticipates a concusiveness well subverted by his technique. But what musculature!
Whatever we thought Thurman was three or four years ago he hasn’t been very much of it in recent fights. If your talent or tactics see you grinding out a lame decision against a 40-year-old Leonard Bundu, you’re probably not going to go HAM on someone with 16 career knockouts. Expect a keepaway effort from Thurman, while the announcing team drills and exercises about courage and nonstop whatever.
It will be sanitized, too, whatever else it is. PBC boxing feels far too safe to keep serious fans or attract casual ones. It is Mayweather’s brand of violence without Mayweather’s brand of promotion. It is men behaving like gentlemen in press conferences and amateur boxers in the ring, concerned with points and safety and so forth more than violence or pain or willfulness.
I’ll take Thurman by dull decision, in a match social media, queued by PBC commentary, initially mistakes for a historic war.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry