By Bart Barry-
Saturday in Las Vegas, in boxing’s must daring exploitation of Cinco De Mayo loyalties yet, Jalisco’s Saul “Canelo” Alvarez won every round, minute and second of his match with Sinaloa’s “Son of the Legend” Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. while clearing his throat for a scripted callout of Gennady “GGG” Golovkin, Canelo’s next opponent. Chavez, too, saved himself for postfight festivities, wherever they were.
What suspicions some Mexicans will harbor after Saturday’s postfight announcement, the postcharade charade – a $70 staredown, as it were – reduce to this statement: Chavez Jr. fought exactly like a guy who knew his opponent’s next contract was signed before the opening bell and got paid generously to participate in the promotion. Chavez, twitchy with embarrassment or concussion or the lingering effects of whatever copious stimulants he ingested to hollow himself for Friday’s weighin, stood in the ring after Saturday’s defeat and should’ve found it curious as the rest of us he was being interviewed first but appeared untroubled by it because, let’s be honest, as part of the promotion and broadcast he knew Canelo’d be calling out “Globekeen” and had a contractual need to don his sponsor’s headwear. Or did you think Chavez was otherwise hankering for a chance to explain the worst performance of his farcical career?
Some personal notes about that career, now that it’s unofficially through: Luck and geography put me ringside for a disproportionate number of Chavez matches while promoter Top Rank was inventing him, including Chavez’s dominations of Ireland’s John Duddy and “Irish” Andy Lee, and there was ever a wide chasm between the way Chavez expected to be treated in interviews and the way he prepared himself for fights. He was a haughty prick in his native language, un fresa, an unlikable combination of awkward and arrogant, ever casting impatient glares at his handlers to get things moving while he mixed cliches evasively and said absolutely nothing. You waste enough time on a subject, though, and some sense of selfpreservation or efficiency helps you begin to imagine admirable qualities, and when you can’t, you settle on redeeming qualities, and Chavez did have one in particular. He truly made others funnier.
Saturday I sat in a roomful of aficionados representing nearly every ethnicity on this green earth and each one was funnier in his expressions of disgust for Chavez than he was on any other subject. Sunday morning I scrolled through Twitter, too, and found myself manifesting an uncommonest form of mirth: Laughing aloud alone. This backhanded celebration of Chavez is not a gratuitous lunge at fulfilling wordcount, either; what I will miss about Chavez is a chance to write humorously about something in our beloved sport.
That almost never happens. Through his indifference to preparation and tacit acknowledgements a fortune was being made by charging persons for hoping to see him beaten to death Chavez gave writers a waiver of sorts to make fun of him in a playfully amoral way. Anyone who’s tried to do this with any other fighter has quickly found himself a target of moralists’ umbrage: “How dare you – he’s risking his life in there!” Which means what humor we’re allowed is either artless stock (“his chin is an insult to fine China everywhere”) or bitterly facetious: “I suppose if I were a recovering addict who wanted his legacy stolen out from under him and sold to a faceless charlatan, I probably couldn’t do better than hire Richard Schaefer, either.”
You could make fun of Son of the Legend while smiling, in other words, not scowling. I’ll miss that.
While we’re on the subject of selling talent, a quick thought about an occasionally overlooked detail of the Chavez legacy: How well he predicted PBC’s eye for talent. Recall that Al Haymon and friends got themselves sued by Top Rank three years ago when they poached Son of the Legend. As a Haymon-managed practitioner Junior went 2-2 (1 KO-by) in a disgraceful fourmatch march that fell somewhere between plain ingratitude and corporate sabotage. Bless Junior’s ungrateful heart for that.
And so we come to Canelo, the man Chavez now concedes is the best Mexican prizefighter of their generation, a selfmade marketeer, Jalisco horseman and entrepreneurial son of a Mexican icecream vendor, all that, and a redhead too. Canelo looked genuinely fantastic against Chavez but did not stop him. Or even hurt him. Which means there’s very little chance of his winning the 2017 Fight HBO Most Wants Seen. (As an aside, how richly absurd was that segue to Golovkin in the broadcast’s second match? Orbital bone, orbital bone, why, that reminds viewers of GGG’s September victory!)
Golovkin and Canelo are basically the same fighter, and Golovkin is bigger, and without squandering others’ chances at 100,000 words of handicapping, there’s no reason to think their match will be any more complicated than that. Fine, I take that back: Canelo is better defensively, and Golovkin hits harder, but Canelo hits pretty hard too, and Golovkin’s defense is actually underrated. There you go, peers, I left the last 99,980 words for y’all.
We end with a correction to a point above. There was one other fighter I’ve covered who was fun to make fun of as Junior, and he was another junior: Hector Camacho Jr. Difference being, Machito was a great storyteller and amusing conversationalist. But he did say to me one thing germane to Chavez’s situation today: “I’ve disrespected the sport of boxing so many times I’m surprised they let me put gloves on.”
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
