By Bart Barry
SAN ANTONIO – There’s a perfect park not far from the downtown area here, in fact it may well be considered the downtown area, and it’s called Walker Ranch Historic Landmark because something historic happened or was anyway commemorated here but it’s not entirely important this history – as we learn via immersion daily and will soon learn at an accelerating rate history is barely more factual than fiction and converges upon it for its first, say, 100 years and then the two become interchangeable in a euphemism like “legend” – not important, certainly, as the convergence in this park of a colorful new playground and airplanes passing overhead almost continually. There’s an urgency to the sound as these planes pass, and both adults and their children invariably toss their eyes upwards with each arrival, the children with wonder and the adults with longing and both with awe at the crafts’ immensity. No persuasion required.
What this has to do with boxing in 2016 as this year concludes is nothing in particular but perhaps something in general: The casualty of persuasiveness. It may never have existed and it may well be I just noticed it this year, eyes drawn to aircrafts floating noisily over a park, but the old rhetorical methods we learned in school’ve gone wanting officially. Perhaps none of us was ever persuasive and perhaps none of us was ever persuaded, perhaps most of us simply believed what our parents believed or its exact opposite, rarely anything in between, then went egghunting for corroborating events we converted from coincidences to facts through repetition and some loose consensus loosely perceived, but it became more obvious this year as publications and broadcasts played their congregations’ greatest hits for their congregations and those few who did try to persuade were so bad at it.
Fact-checkers became quite nearly annoying to me in 2016 as the liars they refuted, as the liars were sometimes creative while their opponents were as often torpid bullies – doing the same work of God or Truth or Morality as every other halfwrought loon (though none, thankfully, in this park on a Christmas afternoon). Or perhaps an awakening introspection brought more of us to saying “I don’t believe that” – a wonderful mechanism for disarming both liars and fact-checkers alike by making the liar reveal his sources and the fact-checker declare you an idiot and go away – in lieu of saying “That’s not true,” a bullfighter’s red cape of a phrase that makes both liars and fact-checkers charge.
There is a diminishing feedback mechanism to great fights and great fighters that requires a witness to share his experience sincerely with others who may not have witnessed them, and that feedback is akin to a mirrored sincerity wherein an audience measures the witness’s honesty and returns it as an interest the witness is free to mistake for conversion, while a performer’s dishonesty reveals itself in a moment and if others humor him because they are polite or drunk they are no nearer convinced and only the performer is fooled. This is broadcasters’ metronomic use of words like “great” and “unbelievable” to tell halfinterested and quartersober viewers they live in historic times. Conversely your great aunt probably doesn’t care how suspensefully the Martinez-Chavez fight ended but she finds your enthusiasm sincere and therefore attractive enough to share with her Wednesday bookclub whatever details she remembers from her nephew’s account of a trip to Las Vegas sometime in 2012.
Not this year, or at least not nearly so much this year. Boxing is further outside the public consciousness as 2016 concludes than it was as 2015 concluded than it was as 2014 concluded than it was as 2013 . . . and boxing budgets now reflect it mercilessly, with HBO effectively putting promoters on ESPN’s old pay-to-play model (under the auspices of pay-per-view), Showtime husbanding its resources, and Premier Boxing Champions – well, does PBC even still exist? An essential fight happened in the final quarter of 2016, the sort of who’s-number-one fare for which aficionados claimed to clamor from 2009-2015, when Andre Ward controversially decisioned Sergey Kovalev, and nearly no one cared and still fewer care today no matter how much we reiterate there was controversy.
What was the best fight of 2016? None springs to mind. Who was the best fighter in 2016? No one springs to mind. That’s a large part of the point: Wherever my interest in our oncebeloved sport has gone I still have to find a weekly subject to fashion 900 words about, and yet when I look back at 2016 and ask myself to which fights I cared enough to travel, for the first time in 11 years my answer is none, and when I ask myself what fights I regret I didn’t travel to my answer is still none.
Oh, but you see, so-n-so versus so-n-so was epic. I don’t believe that. But if you study his record you’ll see so-n-so is actually becoming a great fighter. I don’t believe that. We’re lucky to have Abel Sanchez. I really don’t believe that.
A resolution for 2017: Don’t talk yourself into doing the job of promotion or legacy for others – if the greatness of a fight or fighter doesn’t hit you with the bolt of a jet passing overhead, simply say “I don’t believe that” and proceed merrily along.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
