2018 Corpus cumbia, part 1

By Bart Barry-

2017’s end-of-year romp, a mosaicked effort about Chocolatito’s abrupt plunge from boxing’s apex, brought an examination of conscience that lauded what salutary effects result from travel to cover our beloved sport, a quiet promise, it now seems in retrospect, to travel much oftener for boxing in 2018, a promise quite exactly broken by its maker with two exceptions, exceptional trips to Corpus Christi – home of Selena – I now hope to explore like a cumbia: left foot and right foot neutral, right foot back, left foot neutral, right foot neutral, pause, left foot back, left foot neutral, and again.

I planned to travel thricely, at least, to locales farflung to cover boxing in the new year when I wrote about traveling to Santa Monica Pier but then life happened, and deaths, too, and the calendar never quite shaped up – the interestingest events being in Eurasia or saturated or not enticing enough in some other way.

Somewhere buried in quips about the size of Top Rank’s platform on ESPN+ for Mexican Gilberto “Zurdo” Ramirez and the champ’s awkward threats to other super middleweights and awkwarder threats to ascend to light heavyweight resides a conceit like: Zurdo might outwork WBC’s David Benavidez, a formerly pudgy kid PBC now fights but annually, but he can’t beat WBA’s Callum Smith, so let’s swerve tourneys like that.

I can’t pretend to enjoy the drive into Corpus or imagine anyone else does, but I still believe there’s no place like ringside, no place so honest, to remind you why you excavate these 900 or so words every Sunday, and I like Shell’s in Port Aransas, too, a 40-minute drive, offseason, and a short ferry ride away.

Pause.

The first week of February found Zurdo in American Bank Center to defend his WBO fraction of the championship against Habib Ahmed, an undefeated Ghanaian making his first boxing trip outside Ghana, while the world’s best 168 pounder, Callum Smith, readied for his WBSS semifinal a few weeks later in a tournament from which Zurdo was noticeably absent.

Now the WBSS schedule sits colorful empty after months of reports about missing bonuses and disintegrating investment, and the WBSS is such a good thing and DAZN such a proper platform, one hopes its organizers dust themselves off, draw a black line through any stateside venues and bring to fruition season 2 in Scotland and Japan and Russia and Poland, places where a proper gate helps purses get paid.

San Antonio doesn’t host big events these days, which is unjust, well as Canelo’s tilt in Alamodome went some years back, and the main reason cited is a dearth of local ticketsellers, which is unjust, well as Canelo’s tilt in Alamodome went some years back, but there’s also a certain relief that comes with such an absence: I can skip hours upon wasted hours of fightweek festivities, empty if hyperbolic tributes to sponsors, and get right to the broadcast itself, which is better earlier and much better with a twoperson booth or fewer.

I sat beside Don Smith in February at ringside – he was visiting Corpus from Phoenix to cover Jose Benavidez’s comeback – and he epitomized the essential eccentricity of the boxing writers you meet as a boxing writer, the guys who publish offline newsletters and set clippings from their bestknown works beside themselves on pressrow, guys fond of conspiracy but fonder of fighters, and a few months later matchmaker Bruce Trampler tweeted about Don Smith’s demise, killed by a motorist at a bus stop, and as I write this I believe more deeply than before Top Rank’s facility with and affinity for journalists separates it from other promoters; it’s the part of the job (along with don’t steal from your employer) Golden Boy Promotions’ Richard Schaefer just never got; it’s the part of the job PBC’s founder founded PBC on avoiding.

Boxing shows itself today nothing so much as adaptable, gliding forward from HBO Sport’s collapse, an event unthinkable to aficionados even five years ago, with barely a blink of acknowledgement, and that gliding happens even as 2019’s calendar looks weak so far.

I don’t find nearly so much discovery in boxing writing these days as I did, say, 10 or 12 years ago, and I don’t seek it, either, like I did that many years ago, and when I wonder why it returns me to a question Lee Samuels asked a few weeks ago at American Bank Center – “What sites do you read?” – and a realization I don’t visit boxing sites to read writers anymore but use my favorite writers on Twitter like portals to the sites that publish them, and if this is a good new bent, writers not publishers, I’m not sure it feels like one.

Pause.

Two undercard guys stood out February in Corpus, Jose Benavidez and Jesse Hart, and this too evinced the importance of matchmakers who know what they’re doing, matchmakers able to balance the oftcompeting priorities of entertaining in the moment while building another moment a halfyear away, so in October it wasn’t a surprise Benavidez got worn to torn by Bud Crawford and a couple months later Hart, so relentless in February, looked nigh relentful against Ramirez.

When dilettantes pontificate about boxing’s failures, assuring the miasma boxing will die or already did, they underestimate the simple inertia of a sport with a century or two of aficionados’ influencing other aficionados, they forget boxing moved on from irreplaceable men like Muhammad Ali to utterly replaceable men like Floyd Mayweather and just kept selling.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry