Oopsie doopsie

By Bart Barry-

Saturday in Las Vegas the runnerup for 2016’s most-anticipated fight featured undefeated Jamaican Nicholas “Axe Man” Walters getting stripped bare in a super featherweight title match by once-defeated Ukrainian Vasyl Lomachenko. Walters decided quitting after seven rounds of being felled not once somehow blazed a nobler trail than absorbing a beating certain to multiply and deepen. Well. Unpleasant as things must’ve been for Walters he made the wrong decision and should expect in the future white feathers in lieu of television contracts.

Styles break fights, and if one compares the reality of Lomachenko-Walters to the fantasy so many aficionados entertained about it Saturday’s fare fairly well serves as the largest disappointment of 2016 – which, as disappointments go, is like being the captain of an all-star team. The boxer-slugger matchup, as Joe Frazier teaches us in “Boxing with the Pros”, ever favors the boxer, but even so, that was a bit much.

Anyone who’s not been ringside at a Walters fight before Saturday no doubt now entertains suspicions Walters was a Top Rank invention of (typically brilliant) matchmaking, a properly manufactured frame with which to hang the promoter’s latest masterpiece, but that’s inaccurate for once; Walters was special in an especially concussive way when he arrived in 2013. I was ringside for Walters’ American debut, a 3 1/2-round hatcheting of Mexican Alberto Garza in Corpus Christi, Texas, and it left a mark. I recall clearly but three emotions from the fights that night: Thankfulness San Antonio’s Steve Hall did not perish in his encounter with Alex Saucedo, amusement Vic Darchinyan outboxed Nonito Donaire for eight rounds, and holy mackerel that guy with the wooden axe can crack! Very few fighters at the championship level have gamechanging power not because very few guys at the championship level hit hard but because everyone at the championship level hits hard, and subsequently fighters don’t make it to the championship level without they can absorb stiff shots. Walters didn’t just hit his opponent with a stroke that shocked Garza but observed Garza’s fright with no shock of his own – Walters waded into what panic emanated from Garza without malevolence: “I’m supposed to cause that.”

Four months later I was ringside when Lomachenko’s debut in a championship fight did not go nearly so impressively against Mexican Orlando Salido in San Antonio’s Alamodome. Salido missed weight by a couple or three weightclasses, if memory serves, and fouled Lomachenko compulsively but as we’d been promised by Lomachenko’s promoters some combination of the greatest amateur in boxing history and the greatest professional to come in boxing history most of us succumbed to schadenfreude and were at least amused by the spectacle of a 12-loss grinder decisioning the future of boxing – not amused as we’d been 90 days before when Chino ravished About Billions, but still.

First impressions and all that: I fully expected Lomachenko-Walters to be intense and intensely memorable and wanted very much to see what the future of boxing did with his introduction to the Axe Man’s blade. We’ll never know, will we, as Lomachenko so wildly outclassed the Axe Man the few punches Walters nearly landed were thrown with so little resolve as to be pittypats had they landed and whiteflags otherwise.

Does that make Lomachenko the most skilled fighter in the world? Hell no, actually, it doesn’t; give the minimumweight equivalent of Siri Salido 10 extralegal pounds and all the fouls he can muster and he’d still not win three rounds against Roman Gonzalez in 100 minutes of trying, much less decision him on scorecards that are just. Lomachenko is an innovator and a supremely talented fighter, yes, but Chocolatito is perfect – and they’re not quite the same thing.

Watching Lomachenko dance and pepper, shake and grind Saturday recalled no one to mind so much as Sergio Martinez, another southpaw innovator who got beaten early in his career by a Mexican grinder. Lomachenko circles tighter and does everything a bit tighter than Maravilla did but he doesn’t hit so hard or he’d have copterforked the Jamaican long before Walters quit since there’s no confusing the Axe Man for the Punisher. While we’re on the subject of Walter’s stooljob, a couple lessons learned: First, when a guy attends a weighin with a marijuana leaf on his getup, no matter his nationality, don’t be shocked if he mills like a pothead; and second, remember always what makes sluggers vulnerable to boxers is the fragility of sluggers’ psyches – they get discouraged much quicker and more deeply than boxers or volume punchers do.

For all his abundance of showcased skill Lomachenko’s not too exciting, alas, no matter how much one interrogates instant replays and immerses himself in the audio of whatever promotional lunacy Lomachenko’s American cable network now amplifies about any prizefighter from the former Soviet Union. Unlike the rest of the Eastern Bloc fighters HBO has peddled aggressively at us seemingly since the Berlin Wall fell, though, Lomachenko is promoted by an outfit that knows how and occasionally asks its charges to take risks commensurate with the fortunes HBO is wont to invest in marketable personalities.

Saturday Lomachenko looked enormous at 130 pounds and shouldn’t have any trouble rising in weight to much bigger fights with Top Rank’s much bigger fighters, or they can give us a rematch with Salido on pay-per-view and see if that goes.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry