By Bart Barry
Saturday at Madison Square Garden on the undercard of HBO’s pay-per-view match for the unified middleweight championship of the world, the world’s best prizefighter, Nicaraguan Roman “Chocolatito” Gonzalez, will defend his super flyweight title against Wisaksil “Srisaket Sor Rungvisai” Wangek, a fighter whose recent reign of terror on Thailand’s amateur program Chocolatito should bring to a brisk and violent conclusion – and perhaps rekindle in so doing.
After the decade Chocolatito labored in obscurity it brings no joy to write a match of his does not belong on American television much less HBO PPV, but heavens to Murgatroyd, this one verily does not. Instead this represents the sort of back-wages wager Bernard Hopkins taught prizefighters to make with their managers and promoters and broadcasters, today marginally more one-in-the-same as they’ve ever been, once acclaim was had and serious observers were seriously interested in observing one fight. We shall hitherto call it the Morrade Hakkar Clause in homage to the silly Frenchman HBO approved for the second defense of a middleweight title Hopkins won from Felix Trinidad in the greatest moment of Hopkins’ career to that point. Before Hopkins’ negative fighting style and self-intoxication were considered alternately brilliant and charismatic they were considered properly unbearable but HBO was hot on the trail of a rematch between Hopkins and Roy Jones Jr. in 2002 and eager to agree to most any demands Hopkins made, and Hopkins’ demands, inspired by Jones’ demands, were wild for a man who couldn’t sell 8,000 tickets in his hometown but reasonable through a lens of his accomplishments and Time Warner’s annual corporate revenues. HBO acquiesced and Hopkins-Hakkar was atrocious.
And Trinidad put Hopkins through fractionally the suffering Chocolatito experienced against Carlos Cuadras in September, writing of back wages, which is part of the reason Chocolatito mentioned HBO by name in December:
“I’m 29 years-old, and one has to seize the moment we are in,” Chocolatito said. “I will give a rematch to Cuadras, but I need a good purse from HBO. I believe I deserve it.”
As a craftsman of course Chocolatito deserves it but as an entertainer he likely doesn’t and it’s no one’s fault he believes he does because, after all, America sells meritocracy to the rest of the world, and so why shouldn’t the prizefighter American aficionados consider the world’s best make 0.4-percent the purse the last guy Americans considered the world’s best made against Manny Pacquiao? Because we didn’t know what the hell we were doing a few years ago and we still don’t – that’s the honest answer, but what American businessman’s honest enough to say it, and what Nicaraguan’d be ingenuous enough to believe it?
Instead we’ll cite the dynamics of a free market, when convenient, while having the world’s best fighter defending a title in his fourth weightclass on the undercard of a middleweight-unification bout, HBO champion vs. PBC, between two men who’ve never chanced a moment outside the middleweight division, though the HBO champion is frequently reportedly willing to fight anyone between 154 and 168 pounds and hobbled only by junior middleweights who won’t come up to 160 and super middleweights who won’t come down to 160 but otherwise ready, willing and able. The main event is expected to be mismatched enough for last week’s prefight promotion to be about gossiping whether the HBO champion has time between Saturday’s inevitable defense and September’s better-paying inevitable defense to make another inevitable defense in June.
Not to be outdone Roman Gonzalez will fight Wisaksil “Srisaket Sor Rungvisai” Wangek, a man whose last two opponents sported a cumulative record of 0-0 before Sor Rungvisai, in his 45th and 46th prizefights respectively, welcomed them harshly to the professional ranks, in a match Gonzalez will win decisively no matter his opponent’s physical advantage. There’s no way to rehearse for someone gifted as Gonzalez, though if fighting men in their pro debuts properly prepares Sor Rungvisai for Chocolatito, one weeps for the futures of amateur heavyweight boxers with Deontay Wilder on the loose. Absurd as we rightly consider most athletic commissions in the U.S. how about that Thai commission(s) approving the WBC silver super flyweight champion for four 2016 matches against opponents with a cumulative record of 15-19! (Sor Rungvisai fought as many men making their pro debuts in his eighth year of professional fighting in Thailand as he did the year he made his own pro debut.)
There’s no occasion for not being snide on occasions such as these but enough of the griping: Any opportunity to see Chocolatito ply his wares must be embraced because Chocolatito is a rare talent, and as aficionados we owe HBO a debt of gratitude for bringing him more exposure, a debt all aficionados will argue is still much less than the cost of an HBO subscription and quarterly pay-per-view bills, but some gratitude’s due nevertheless. From Saturday’s victory things’ll go one of two ways for Chocolatito: After taking another 36 minutes of abuse from a career super flyweight he’ll double his demands for a rematch with Carlos Cuadras and price himself back to obscurity, or he’ll glide so easily through Sor Rungvisai and receive such disapprobation from the Nicaraguan media – “Stop talking about money like an American, Alexi never did; you’re better than that, you’re a Nicaraguan” – he’ll abandon his campaign to match compensation to achievement and return to beating fellow world champions for somewhat less than he deserves but way more than another 115-pound athlete makes in the world.
Making him what Floyd Mayweather would call a “dummy” and historians will call an “all-time great.”
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
