By Bart Barry-
Saturday the world’s best junior welterweight, Nebraska’s Terence Crawford, will fight on HBO at Madison Square Garden against a 33-year-old Dominican named Felix Diaz. Saturday the world’s second best featherweight, Maryland’s Gary Russell Jr., will fight on Showtime against a Colombian named Oscar Escandon. These are important fights, one supposes, featuring very good fighters, one of whom may even prove great.
And yet Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. is more fun to write about than both of them, and maybe that’s the point of his popularity, a magnetism everyone wishes attribute to Canelo in his assignment of credit for what appears a post-Mayweather-Pacquiao pay-per-view record, but Canelo just sold more with Chavez than he vended in a combination of Amir Khan and Liam Smith, which indicates his opponent’s ethnicity and charisma make more of a difference than his opponent’s resume and Gennady “160,000 buys” Golovkin may not actually make any more dollars for Canelo come September than he makes sense.
Canelo was marketed better than this weekend’s main event fighters and marketed to a better demographic, too, and luck is luck, but as a prizefighter he appears to’ve been developed somewhere between the two men, with Crawford obviously in the front and Russell behind. Russell’s handlers knew from the moment they signed him he was the future of boxing, which, it turns out, is a problem when those handlers don’t know what they’re looking at and have much less an idea how to develop it. Crawford’s promoter, meanwhile, treated Crawford’s talent with the same skepticism Top Rank and its ace matchmakers treat every prospect they sign:
Can he sell tickets in his hometown? However fast his hands or feet, does he hit hard enough to keep world-class competitors off him? How pesky are his parents and manager? Is his childhood trainer a benefactor or beneficiary? How are his whiskers in a shootout? And most importantly, how does he comport himself afterwards – or in Bob Arum’s actual words, “Does he dissipate between fights?”
Whatever criteria PBC uses it is not that criteria and probably comes closer to a criterion like: How many people say he reminds them of Floyd Mayweather, or at least Sugar Ray Leonard?
Russell and Crawford are about the same age and have about the same number of fights, and yet Crawford is multiples more accomplished than Russell, and it wasn’t that way six years ago when HBO, as Al Haymon’s pre-PBC affiliate, began to shine Russell highlights and matches at its viewers. The details of what happened to Russell after that aren’t important, though surely there were contract issues and a dearth of opponents for a man of such otherworldly handspeed, the usual “nobody will fight him” gambit used by cheap or incompetent managers and promoters everywhere. Then Russell met Vasyl Lomachenko three years ago and got conclusively outclassed, which was not shameful but an indictment of all things said about him before that match.
Too, it was an indictment of what development happened to Russell before his match with Lomachenko: Russell’s two preceding opponents shared 20 losses in their 60-fight collective. It was the usual Haymon-managed concern with building an attraction rather than a fighter, and it went the way things with Haymon-managed prospects usually do when a return-on-investment alarm rings somewhere and their competition gets improved by a few hundred percent overnight. His unblemished record now blemished, a mortal sin in the Haymon stable, Russell went back to whupping guys who, for one reason or another, hadn’t much chance against him. One suspects the same ideal’ll be in play Saturday against Escandon; PBC’d not risk another Russell loss on Showtime when CBS and HBO are willing to pay substantially more to broadcast PBC superstars being beaten.
Terence Crawford, while more accomplished than Russell, now risks being considered a box office dud outside Nebraska if he doesn’t sell a respectable number of tickets at Madison Square Garden against Felix Diaz the same way he didn’t sell a respectable number of pay-per-views against Viktor Postol in July. According to Madison Square Garden’s website Diaz (19-1, 9 KOs) is a “hard hitting southpaw” with an Olympic gold medal, but when one sees a gold medal round the neck of a fighter with less than a 50-percent knockout ratio as a pro, well . . .
Know what? This is dull. Watch the fights or don’t, but nothing historic will happen Saturday, so let’s go back to Chavez Jr.
A video leaked online last week that besmirched Chavez’s spotless character by depicting the fallen champ enjoying his loss a bit too much. Someone, it seems, believed a wedge might be driven between Chavez and his fans. But no. Chavez is a circus act no one can stop from plying his craft to a ripe older age. He doesn’t appeal to slackers and potheads the way his detractors insist he must. Rather he appeals to anyone who’s ever been told to do something he didn’t want to do and then done it well enough to be mistaken for someone capable of doing it before ecstatically sabotaging the whole damn thing in a flurry of shrugs. Chavez neither called in sick nor told his boss to go pound sand; Chavez continued showing up at a job for which he was illsuited, played videogames on the clock, took extended breaks and giggled his way through quarterly evaluations; Chavez didn’t shout “I quit” but sat in his cube wondering “When are they going to fire me?”
If there are Mexicans actually enraged by Chavez, I’ve not found them. Mostly my interviews have gone like this.
Bart: “Did you see the Chavez fight?”
Mexican aficionado: (Laughing) “Yes.”
Bart: (Laughing harder)
Mexican Aficionado: (Laughing harder still)
Bart: “Think he’ll retire?”
Mexican aficionado: “No.”
Bart: (Laughing)
Mexican aficionado: (Laughing harder)
Remember this when the hyperbole reaches a boil on HBO and Showtime this weekend: To date Chavez has sold about 1.5 million more pay-per-views than Crawford and Russell combined. It is kind of funny.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
