By Bart Barry-
Saturday at the Bartow Arena in Birmingham the reigning Alabama and PBC heavyweight champion Deontay “Bronze Bomber” Wilder discouraged California’s Chris Arreola to a referee or corner stoppage after the eighth round of a match Arreola took on short notice because he was going to lose anyway after Wilder’s intended opponent anticipated his country’s ban from the Summer Olympics by failing a drug-related IQ test. The PBC on Fox in conjunction with Showtime but not CBS and NBC as part of a synergistic agreement with ESPN, Spike and Fox Sports 1 (though not Fox Now’s buggy app) had the call in the U.S. and apparently much of the broadcast was ad-free.
Though Wilder’s confidence grows with each title defense his precision diminishes more quickly.
Somewhere in the last month or so I read about the virtues of watching television programming at increased speeds. The article grew from an unrelatable foundation like: There’s so much television one simply must watch today and so little time when one considers other necessities like, I suppose, Facebook updates and Snapchats th’t one must utilize technologies to gulp what one’s parents sipped. I neither sip nor gulp from television and so I filed the article under curios and downloaded the Chrome plugin to procrastinate from doing something strenuous as yoga – and if you don’t know what a Chrome plugin is you probably paid three times too much for your laptop. Since then I’ve deactivated my Flash player and casted about for a chance to be amazed by this amazing new technology and none presented itself till Sunday morning.
There’s always something better to do on a Friday or Saturday night than watch PBC matches live because the main reason to watch live sports is to prevent others’ robbing you of the suspense and drama of outcome (unless you’re one of those few honest folks who entertains the collective delusion one’s witness to an event from distance changes the event, which remains probable as it is impossible to prove) and PBC matchmaking delivers both suspense and drama at ratios low enough to be historic. Anyone interested in our sport enough to read this column could run his index finger down the next two years of PBC main events and mark the winner with 95-percent accuracy and Saturday’s mismatch was more mismatched than usual. Where the pessimist drops his head in his hands and gnashes teeth at what’s become of boxing, though, the optimist sees an opportunity to test a wonderful new technology he downloaded sometime in the last month, with a YouTube video of Saturday’s main event.
Pay close attention because a bit of technological dexterity may be needed to decipher the riddle of the next few sentences.
You should not watch a PBC heavyweight match on YouTube at 2x speed because you’ll miss a few of the punches and the Scottish guy on the commentary team sounds muddy more than muddled and while his insights are reliably nil his garbled consonants distract from the action before you at speed. You should try 1.5x; anything less is not worth the trouble of a plugin download and if you’ve not been watching much faster and better prizefighting in lower weightclasses for the past two decades you may find heavyweights moving 50-percent faster than usual a touch too suspenseful. Goldilocks says 1.7x is the perfect rate.
It’s so right and Sunday morning’s 20 minutes were so proper I’ve decided to put the perfect viewing rate of a PBC heavyweight match right in the name of the PBC’s flagship commodity: Deontay “1.7x” Wilder. At the 1.7x rate his Saturday opponent moved like a cruiserweight and even appeared at various intervals to want to fight the man across from him.
There are two reasons Wilder did not stop Arreola in Alabama. The first is Arreola’s sense of pride that trends inversely with his conditioning in a ratio that allowed Arreola to lumber from a fat guy who could box to a trimmer guy who bleeds on cue and absorbs like a paper towel. The second reason is Deontay Wilder is awful at boxing.
According to breathless ringside reports Saturday night Wilder tore his right bicep while punching. Do you have any idea how difficult that is from an orthodox stance? To turn the trick one cannot merely throw a straight punch wildly crooked but also must touch no part of his knuckles to the target at impact. It’s a feat of both technical incompetence and faulty depth perception; if you throw the right hand correctly while being blind in one eye or throw the right hand incorrectly while trusting a third dimension exists, either one, you cannot tear your right bicep while punching and that means you fail in a way Wilder succeeded Saturday.
He succeeded for the right reason at least and that was rage. When Wilder gets another man hurt in front of him he verily loses his mind and while his finishing moves resemble an infant in tantrum more than a predator in the wild he looks dangerous to inexperienced eyes, 9,000 of which showed a patriot’s zeal in Birmingham.
Wilder is a great regional champion, the best heavyweight in Alabama and perhaps the entirety of America’s South, but in a meritocratic world he’s a scalp. Even at age 50 Vitali Klitschko would wear Wilder’s silly bronze mask like a codpiece.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
