By Bart Barry-
Saturday in England undefeated Ukrainian southpaw Oleksandr Usyk defended his trove of cruiserweight world titles – Ring, WBA, IBF, WBC, WBO – from the challenge of England’s Tony Bellew, last seen doubleaxing heavyweight David Haye, by emphatic eighth-round knockout. In these United States the match happened before dark, aficionados’ hour, on DAZN, aficionados’ network, while American casual fightfans reliably watched college football.
What a wonderful secret is Usyk for the longsuffering American aficionado. He has fought but twice in our hemisphere, and once in Inglewood on the undercard of Bernard Hopkins’ unforgettable if entirely forgotten farewell to boxing (a lesson from the B-Hop archive: when a man tirelessly tells you you’ll miss him when he’s gone, you won’t). When last Usyk fought in our hemisphere it was 18 months ago and he won via lopsided decision on HBO, which is to write if anyone watched him and remembered him that person has since endured disappointments enough to’ve lost his memories of Usyk in the strogranoff of former Soviet fighters served by Comrade Pyotr during HBO Boxing’s pominki.
Since then Usyk has fought on afternoons, here in the States, on YouTube streams and apps; the nearest he’s come to slickly produced punchstats and pedantic commentators is when he stepped in the WBSS’ whitelight show before unmanning Murat Gassiev in July to hoist the bestlooking new trophy in sport.
It gets better. There’s nothing cool about Usyk in the way American influencers understand the term. He’s zany and awkward and devoutly religious. He’s more likely to kiss a felled challenger than taunt him. And since he doesn’t cherrypick opponents or fight on terms bent to prohibitive there’s no telling how good or bad he’ll look when the opening bell rings. Then there’s the way he fights. He’s none of countryman Lomachenko’s pizzazz, especially not to what untrained eyes have yet to try DAZN. He’s more obviously awkward than innovative, which means whenever the American laity eventually catches up with him they’ll unlikely sense the innovation of making every man across from him, even the most obdurately orthodox, awkward unto paralysis. Usyk is an acquired taste and American casuals haven’t the palate or patience to acquire tastes, accustomed as they are to forcefeedings.
Round 5:30 PM ET on Saturday Usyk began to study and pull apart Bellew in yet another packed English arena (it would be a surprise and mistake if semifinal rounds of WBSS Season 2 happened in many American venues, large and cultivated as the European fanbase is become, comparatively funereal and hollow as American venues now sound). Usyk did nothing outlandish to Bellew. He respected the Brit’s power from the open. He established the quirky beat ever playing between his temples and fought to it till Bellew made him stop. And Bellew did do that numerous times.
As it should be. Two judges in fact had Bellew ahead many rounds later, and whatever DAZN commentators said about it in English, the Spanish booth had Bellew ahead, too. If Usyk was winning on any honest card it wasn’t by much.
There’s not any way to argue Usyk won round 1. Perhaps Bellew didn’t either. That’s a 10-10 round, then, which is not a scorekeeping impossibility, by the way, no matter how anomalous. Usyk and Bellew fairly well split their first 12 minutes together, however that shook-out on the cards. By the midway point of the match the match was close enough not to care about the decision; if one man didn’t snatch the other’s consciousness he wouldn’t have a sympathetic ear among aficionados when his handlers whined about a robbery afterward, as they’re wont to do.
Usyk heard us thinking that, he did. He next invited Bellew to lefthand city, a place not quite inhospitable as Ray Mercer’s fabled righthand city, but a place in the vicinity nonetheless. On the way there Bellew realized he was fully spent.
That’s what will be lost on American casuals most frequently – the psychology of what Usyk does other cruiserweights. Because Usyk is not ferocious his physicality can be lost on careless eyes. Usyk’s combination of size and relentlessness, though, is unprecedented. Nobody his size moves continually for every minute of every round. There’s a tacit assumption harbored by any man who confronts a man big as Usyk: So long as I don’t get hit flush by this beast there’ll be respites aplenty. But there aren’t. Instead there’s a dancing madman with a belligerent jab that portends a lampswitch left. Standing armslength to that is exhausting for any 200-pounder the world over. It’s why Usyk’s attack evinces no urgency. So long as he’s on his rhythm and jabbing and you’ve ceded centermat, he’s swapping your energy for fatigue, and he knows it and you know it and now you know he knows it. And that is terrible depleting.
Bellew was so beaten so instantly Saturday th’t American casuals will mistake the finale for force, they’ll expect other men Usyk touches with his cross to backsplash like Tony, and when they don’t American casuals will accuse Usyk of deterioration and aficionados of exaggeration. So be it. Usyk doesn’t need the bigoted buffoons of the Mayweather faithful to surpass what expectations he’s set for himself, and if he immediately ascends to heavyweight and fights Anthony Joshua at Wembley Stadium it will be unwise but lucrative, and it will happen on a Saturday afternoon in the States, blessedly.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry