By Bart Barry-
Apropos of an article about Western languages’ overuse of nouns when compared to Eastern languages’ preference for verbs I dove in the archives last week and happened on my younger, more-optimistic self (while undeciding the matter of nouns and verbs as inconclusive). Bubbling with sincerity and enthusiasm in 2007 I wrote this column about where I imagined we should be sometime between Sunday and Dec. 31.
I still like that guy. I like this guy better, but far as 10-years-past selves go, that Bart Barry wasn’t bad if a bit too eager to please. We’ll get round to what happened to him and all of us, but first a personal-finance riddle:
Q: What’s the quickest way to become a millionaire?
A: Start as a billionaire and invest in strip clubs.
Some Money May levity to kick-off 2017 because he’s still retired and, one hopes, will remain that way for another year – as each year of retirement increases substantially the probability of his remaining retired into perpetuity. He’s still one of the world’s two best fighters, too, which is a counterintuitively good thing: So long as Money May believes people like me believe he can beat anyone between 135 and 155 pounds he will remain retired because he is our beloved sport’s predominant hypothetical predator – the one prizefighter no man in history would wish to confront in imaginary combat. The great ones make it look easy and not only did Money May hypothetically beat prime versions of everyone from Sugar Ray Leonard to Muhammad Ali but he taught a generation of messageboard aficionados how to dominate vicariously Money May’s hypothetical matches:
Im the GOAT cuz Floyds GOAT cuz you dont now bout SRR but i KNOW bout Floyd, lol
All this is a meandering and surprisingly bitter – it should be noted – explanation for my 2007 prediction being so terrible, and looking back those radio bits were fun too because answering questions is very much easier than crafting them. What seemed to derail things catastrophically for our sport was the event that happened a couple months before I wrote that cursed column, and I might have guessed better. The advent of HBO’s “24/7” program as a promotional vehicle for Mayweather-De La Hoya marked a shift for premium cable from selfinterested broadcaster to promoter. It was shortsighted greed – the first and obvious answer any time someone asks “What happened to America?”; the novelty of what appeared to be unscripted happenings in the lives of Oscar and Floyd generated tens of millions of additional dollars in PPV revenue, and whenever windfalls like that happen rest assured the television industry will celebrate them with awards and critical acclaim, and it did.
As a buyer of content television is reliably more interested in outcomes than print media, which is why broadcasters’ friends and familiars get credentialed nearer ringside than writers do – HBO or Showtime may risk $1 million in licensing fees while a newspaper risks a reporter’s plane ticket and per diem. Television probably wasn’t destined for objectivity regardless but buying content ensures a conflict of interest television neverminds as it borrows print media’s sheen of objectivity and predominantly makes infomercials to show between commercials. Premium cable once was different for having subscribers and not having commercials, and while television was still an entertainment medium, not a journalistic one, premium cable felt more serious. Parking its cameras in the Big Boy Mansion for Money May’s many many takes of his many many renditions of his wholly wholly unoriginal speech about blood and sweat and hard work and young lions began premium cable down a cannibalizing eight-year path to Mayweather-Pacquiao and the end of interest in boxing for a generation.
It made sense because it made dollars, etcetera, but the gyms were emptying while sundry revenue records were decimated and smashed and obliterated and and and. If my imaginary 12-year-old American heavyweight did make his way in a gymnasium in 2007 his trainer was elsewhere by 2010 or 2011 because his gym was empty, and if it was too late for my prospect to learn football or basketball it was a good time to find a part-time job. Nobody at school talked about boxing anyway unless Mayweather or Pacquiao was on SportsCenter promoting placeholder shams while they threatened one another until they finally did fight one another, and who that wanted to become a prizefighter in 2007 found his interest rekindled by that spectacle?
Boxing got back on terrestrial airwaves a year later but ratings indicate my prospective American heavyweight was anywhere but in front of a PBC broadcast when that day happened. Broadcasters transformed themselves so successfully to promoters it was no wonder a promoter decided to become a broadcaster, and still the ruse goes on though alongside the squareroot of its previous enthusiasm and promise. Eventually the heavyweight division did give us its surprise champion a little ahead of schedule, of course, but an obese gypsy from England was hardly the “kid’s hidden grace and power” I prescribed.
As we begin the fabled year of 2017, then, there are two tacks to take – honesty or something else. Honesty says: Nothing went right in the second half of my 10-year prediction and boxing engendered more welldeserved pessimism in 2016 than any year of its predecessor decade.
Something else says: I was exactly right, and his name is Deontay “The Bronze Bomber” Wilder!
Stop laughing.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
