By Bart Barry-
Sometime soon – or conceivably as you read this – light heavyweight champion Sergey “Krusher” Kovalev will beat up a South African named Isaac Chilemba in a Russian city called Yekaterinburg. HBO will air the mess sometime this evening as part of a yearlong promotional attempt to have Kovalev fight Andre Ward in the network’s one anticipated fight of 2016.
Since now everyone is a promoter anyway . . .
This afternoon the man who calls himself “The Golden Boy” but others know as the Joburg Jo and the Malawi Malcontent, the Gauteng Gatlin Boy and the Terror of Turning Stone, Miguel Isaac Chilemba Zuze, brings his broadfists and rage in a Russian ring with the express purpose of mauling Sergey Kovalev not far from the Soviet Union’s best-known nuclear-waste dump. Frankly the broadcast in broad daylight should be rated R and the reason HBO will not do its tapedelay till after dark. That a network specializing in naked violence and graphical gore like “Game of Thrones” would ultimately flinch at a live broadcast of a boxing match reports to its viewers the unalloyed peril that accompanies Chilemba whenever gauze mounts his knuckles and leather rides his flying fists.
Actually Chilemba is the right man for the job of launching HBO’s one-off MNB series as men returning from second shifts at work will conduct an informal race with Krusher to determine if Kovalev can put Chilemba to sleep before Chilemba snatches the consciousness from HBO’s viewing audience. Such suspense now heralds the Monday arrival of the manly art of self-defense.
The case of Chilemba raises what has become a common question for main events in a way it once was a common question only in undercards and walkouts: Does Chilemba know he is going to lose or will awakening from unconsciousness bring him more than the standard surprise? And if he does know he’s going in the ring as a sacrifice, did he know it before signing the contract or while boarding his flight to Russia or during the weighin that probably happened while this got written?
There was a time so many Mexican taxistas and albañiles staffed the nohoper side of undercards one brought his opera glasses to spot Alfonso Zayas at welterweight or Tun Tun at straw, a time competent matchmakers allowed nary a victor to shuffle from the red corner across a 12-match marquee. After showing valor and a certain whimsical willfulness for a quarter hour this hopeless opponent of the prospect being developed would catch a left hook or right cross flush and drop as if shot then rise to his right knee before the seven count and retain his crouch till the fabled 10 1/2-count at which time he would spring upright and spread his gloves to plead the ref allow his continuance. The referee would make some avuncular gesture or other embracing the lad to tell him neither could conscience his absorbing one more blow. Then the nohoper would do a shameless lap of posture and disbelief before conceding it was not the prospect’s fault and in a show of abiding sportsmanship raise the victor’s taped fist high above both heads.
After a short medical suspension this taxista or albañil would be back on the circuit making enough money to bid zealously on a used pickup truck postfight (my favorite such character was the supremely courteous Genaro “Trancazos” Trazancos who after beginning his career 1-1-1 managed to get himself on television a number of times and fight Miguel Cotto’s older brother and Steven Luevano and Edwin Valero in a three-loss streak that became a curtain-calling 1-11 [10 KOs] close to his career). Such men had no believable chance of prevailing but truly believed they might ring one up and slice the other man just once – since it takes only a punch – and gave honest fighting efforts in a way few of us circumstanced similarly would do. Their job was to ensure a knockout. They were stuntmen who expected to complete the jump but didn’t mind a net stretched just below.
With the advent of the PBC and its quality bending effect there’s no longer any banking on an opponent’s honest effort. Most of the a-siders have adjusted to this and found solace in admonitions to win tonight and look good next time and while that next time never comes it’s not a thing PBC handlers think a biographical video cannot fix. Writing of biographical videos, the only reasonable explanation for HBO’s signing a contract that binds the network to air this farce is a chance to roll viewers towards a Terence Crawford infomercial for a pay-per-view match that mayn’t find its 100,000th viewer in a couple weeks.
Kovalev is a problem for the contemporary nohoper arrangement. He’s a bully-cum-sociopath who derives open joy from torturing lesser men. One might hope performing before a crowd of fellow Russians would leash his psychopathy a teensy-weensy bit until one recalls Kovalev killed Roman Simakov in the very same city five years ago. Kovalev is a loving father now, we’re told, and probably appreciates human life fractionally more than he did then and so Chilemba may well be safe this afternoon.
Therein lies another explanation for boxing’s moribund fanbase: Another main event, an HBO main event no less, finds aficionados fixated on the health and safety of its network-sanctioned opponent.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
