By Bart Barry–
SAN ANTONIO – This city is named after a river.
Too, it’s nicknamed after a mission where a battle happened and Davy Crockett fought. Saturday the domed venue named after the mission where that battle happened and Davy Crockett fought, Alamodome, will play host to Mexican WBC Silver Caneloweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez’s decimation of British welter/middleweight Kell “Special K” Brook in a Cinco De Mayo HBO PPV extravaganza, “GolovKanelo,” that will also see HBO Middleweight Champion Gennady “GGG” Golovkin make a homecoming hospitalization of British super welterweight Liam “Beefy” Smith in Kazakhstan.
“Kell Brook reminds me a lot of myself,” said an enthusiastic Oscar De La Hoya at GolovKanelo’s kickoff presser in April. “And Canelo Alvarez, obviously, reminds me a lot of myself. It’s like Oscar versus De La Hoya. Expect fireworks. Two champions. Both were undefeated before their primes.”
The Texas Commission of Licensing and Regulation is on high-alert for Saturday’s premeditated assault. Despite reserving ringside seats for more than two dozen “medical officials” Commissioners expect to be powerless to stop the battery when Canelo brings more than two centuries of his countrymen’s grief, first with Spain and later with corrupt locally grown leaders, to the chin and ribs of hapless Kell Brook, a once-undefeated welterweight who ate himself to a handsome payday and vicious beating from Gennady Golovkin in September, a London match that went off lopsidedly even in the drunken betting shops of Brook’s hometown.
One of the Brothers Smith, apparently the one Canelo made a brutal “lesson in the obligations of independence” out of on Mexican Independence Day Weekend 2016, will make the second part of HBO’s split-venue / split-continents pay-per-view fiesta when he serves himself warm to GGG and 20,000 rabid Kazakhs in their country’s third-largest sports venue, Kazhymukan Munaitpasov Stadium, in a contest expected to satisfy any outstanding criteria for naming Golovkin the HBO Middleweight Champion of the Decade – an honorarium that precludes GGG from ever moving to 168 pounds, unless he wants to.
According to an unnamed source in the otherwise unreadable “Official GolovKanelo Blog” the enmity betwixt Alvarez and Golovkin was too much for one continent to sustain after what insiders now call The Incident. As reporters have hashed and rehashed since September: Budgetary restrictions precluded Golovkin’s handlers from booking a direct London-to-Dallas flight after Golovkin’s near decapitation of Brook, which caused Golovkin to land in his adopted hometown of Los Angeles and drive to Texas where he arrived 37 minutes too late to see Canelo break the stream of electricity to Smith’s brain in the fifth round of their woeful mismatch.
According to De La Hoya, Canelo’s earnest promoter, Canelo might’ve stopped Smith in round 3 if he’d had a proper warmup but instead spent the final private moments of his prefight routine before a restroom mirror practicing a new speech and glower he intended to deliver to Golovkin immediately after another successful defense of the WBC Caneloweight Silver title (Alvarez also holds the International title, the Gold title and the Americas title in this division).
“The only thing that held Canelo back from scoring the fastest knockout of a British fighter in Mexican history,” De La Hoya explained in Part 4 of a riveting blog, “was me telling him to rehearse his lines for after the fight. He won’t do that again.
“Now he’s going straight to the top.”
When Golovkin was not yet in the city limits of Arlington, Texas, at the time of Canelo’s important announcement, the fiercely proud Firehaired Horseman of Jalisco stated flatly:
“Mexicans do not tolerate the disrespect. We do not fight a man who disrespects us, because that means respecting a disrespectful man and that is not how he learns to respect. Wherever he is, tell that guy he will not share a ring with me until he learns respect, and since these things take a year to learn, at the very least . . .”
Whatever applause then burst from the partisan-Mexican crowd at AT&T Stadium in September – a crowd De La Hoya estimated “between 20,000 and 100 million but definitely more than 10,000” – a terrible rift opened between the two champions’ promoters, HBOGBP and HBOK2, time alone may heal but may not – not as proud as these two men are, not as proud as they are of their respective fighting traditions.
Further complicating matters was Canelo’s refusal to pay Golovkin step-aside money for Canelo’s expected match with David Lemieux, whom Golovkin blasted apart some years ago, and about whom Canelo later said, “For what would I beat a guy Golovkin beat after many years when I can broil (asar) more English beef the other guy tenderized Saturday?”
Tweeting from the bed to which doctors consigned him after his match with Golovkin, Special K eagerly accepted Canelo’s challenge, promising to bulk up to 190 pounds by March in the hopes of cutting a pound a day in April.
“With no chance of Canelo and Golovkin now fighting one another in 2017,” an HBO representative said, “we decided to give fans a truly innovative experience. We call it the HBO Virtual Scorecard. This way our subscribers can watch Canelo against Golovkin’s most recent victim and Gennady against Alvarez’s most recent opponent, and score who would win each round if Canelo and Gennady were fighting each other.
“Max has been doing this for years!”
