By Bart Barry-
Sundays like these you spend wondering if this will be it, the last Sunday, the one when the words or at least the impetus to type the words won’t come eventually. Last was scheduled for a thoroughly mediocre weekend of prizefighting and should’ve remained such but for the surprise effect of a Colombian-Canadian light heavyweight who finished what work Bernard Hopkins demonstrated as possible and Andre Ward made manifest.
There was never too much to recommend Sergey “Krusher” Kovalev but cruelty and his promoter, Kathy Duva, who is excellent at her craft and among the final and most-deserving beneficiaries of HBO’s collapsed empire. Kovalev himself was not particularly compelling unless he represented a chance at unification, which we learned last month be among the most-compelling products boxing can deliver, but once such a unification gambit went away with Adonis Stevenson’s departure for another network Kovalev became a frontrunner bully the totality of whose offseason outreach comprised punching a keyring speedbag when HBO cameras reliably panned to him during most every broadcast.
Kovalev won a boring decision over Bernard “The Fighting Quinquagenarian” Hopkins and got copious plaudits for so doing. Then Andre Ward showed the world what was what, and Kovalev rode down the usual rebranding conveyor, firing what cornermen built him and traumatizing overmatched challengers en route to a manufactured title or two. HBO ran out of money not so quickly as it ran out of talent, and so Kovalev benefited alongside his comrade at middleweight, and Danny Jacobs.
Saturday made future benefiting considerably more difficult when Alvarez fragiled Kovalev more clearly even than Ward did, dropping him thricely and yanking the bitch out him unforgettably as Ward did, which is another way of writing: There aren’t enough Vyacheslav Shabranskyys in Christendom to make Kovalev viable again unless he avenges what just happened, and he doesn’t have it in him to do that – Alvarez knowing what he now knows goes through Kovalev quicker next time, as did Ward – and so Krusher’s network is down to a couple middleweights, the super flyweight division and Andre the Giant.
This should be a celebration of Eleider Alvarez, I get that I do, but it’s too late to reverse course and was too late to do so even when a couple disbelieving texts arrived in what felt like the middle of Saturday night.
Since a weekend headlined by Kovalev, Andre Berto and Devon Alexander hasn’t quickened the pulse in a halfdecade, if ever, previous considerations for this column revolved round Lucas Matthysse’s retirement and the man who caused it and why that man continues to fight, and if there’s not 1,000 words of interest round those subjects there’s at least enthusiasm for them where there wasn’t for what preceded them.
Matthysse feels a bit like Kovalev, though it might be the calendar allowing such clumsiness of analogy; excellent in a firefight in which he’s sure he’s the outgunner but fragile in the clutch. Life’s not so symmetrical but if Krusher announces his retirement in a couple weeks the analogy matures to metaphor, and there’s another column written during the slog betwixt now and GolovCanelo 2, though I’ve a plan for just that (see author’s note below).
What’s more interesting are Manny Pacquiao’s reasons for continuing to fight. Before Pacquiao’s successful showing against Matthysse, newsletterman Rafe Bartholomew’s enjoyable “Respect Box” made insightful counterarguments against the Manny-is-broke refrain that was never convincing as its selfinterested proponents believed. Here’s a sample:
“We apply the ‘Joe Louis, casino-greeter’ narrative to Pacquiao, when it’s not a perfect fit, and we have no real way to know how rich or poor he is. The articles about Pacquiao’s finances tend to quote Freddie Roach, Bob Arum, and other Americans with some but not full insight into his situation.”
The first thing many of us noticed about Pacquiao many years ago was the joy he exuded during ringwalks – he was so delightfully eager to fight. Only Felix Trinidad springs to mind as a man so enchanted by the prospect of public combat and the injury and humiliation it might bring. While many of us can imagine the euphoria a victory might cause and imagine the humiliation a defeat might summon very few of us have the experience needed to calculate a quotient that makes one justify the other.
Probably none of us does, not even Manny or Tito. Their secret, then, is to revel in the entirety of the event, to derive euphoria from leaving the hotel room, driving to the arena and touching the toes, taping the hands and watching how nervous others around them are for them in the dressingroom, listening to their names called and punching another man in the face, being punched by him, too, and being nearly unconscious with exertion. That sort of autogenerated presence, addictive, is enough to keep a man sparring till 50 other men in empty gyms – much less thrilling a full and feral arena, a deafening collective of other men momentarily freed from their lives’ every worry. Much less making an entire country suddenly proud.
What replaces that feeling? Certainly not legislative matters or the campaign trail. Certainly not concerns about abstractions over future health. And most especially not watching the digits grow in one’s checking account.
If Manny does not fight on solely for the boundless thrill of it, that thrill, anyone can concede, is a part of why Manny fights on. Would that any man’s passion might make others so euphoric.
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Author’s note: This column will not appear next week, as its author will be in Ecuador to get krushed by a hike up Rucu Pichincha volcano.
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Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
