By Bart Barry-
Editor’s note: For part 1, please click here.
Local politicians say San Antonio is the fastest growing city in the country, which may be true or wildly false – who bothers knowing the truth of anything anymore? – but if one trusts his intuition he’s able to confirm a coarsening, at least, the sort of coarsening that happens when strangers get crowded together; I felt similar traffic patterns living in Silicon Valley in 2001, and since most of the country is a couple decades behind Silicon Valley, it feels about right South Texas should be arriving at San Jose-2001 in 2019.
I believed persons might change themselves through force of will then saw no one turning the feat in more than cosmetic ways, then I believed no one changes but becomes solely more deeply himself then saw folks years later unrecognizable, then I decided no one changes himself but does get changed by life.
Ringside for Ramirez-Hart 2 in Corpus Christi brought further evidence of a mysterious sort of thing like physical IQ, something Norman Mailer jabbed in his treatment of Ali-Foreman, “The Fight”, whereby one’s experiences in combat, or one’s ancestors’ experiences for that matter, make the non-thinking, or anyway non-selfconscious, parts of one’s body abler to respond in a boxing match via bypassing consciousness than pinging it for preapproval, and meandering deeply enough in this thought brings an intersection with one’s selfconcept, one’s identity, that might explain why professional athletes often sense the pain of failure just like the pain of injury.
I can’t envision any viable model whereby unbought boxing-writing pays a living wage for more than a handful of its practitioners, whereby more than a dozen writers work for publications independent from promoters and pay their rents that way, much less mortgages, and this doesn’t make boxing-writing an anomalous form of journalism so much as a predecessor form: when you don’t expect to get serious pay for something you don’t worry about capturing consensus or abiding by it, and that means you strain for objectivity very little, which is probably fine since the obvious bias of opinion be more palatable than what dishonesty can accrue when wellintentioned objectivity becomes your objective.
Pause.
Jesse Hart appeared uninspired during the opening half of his rematch with Zurdo, a rematch Hart demanded, almost begging, which made veteran observers wonder if Hart were unwell or if Ramirez were specialer, and it unraveled thoughts about failure in prizefighting – rarely unaccompanied by somethought like “I’m unable to do this” – which quickly reraveled into thoughts about the essence of relenting, that it isn’t so active as quitting but rather passive like nonresistance; far oftener does a man fail at prizefighting by shrugging than shaking his head.
There’s a hint of schadenfreude for aficionados as the richest prizefighter of our last generation now wears down mixed martial artists and walks down teenage kickboxers; it proves nothing about any of the three sports except economic circumstances disparate enough to drive a man and a boy to seek a payraise by imperiling themselves and failing painfully at someone else’s craft.
There’s nothing yet on the 2019 calendar that rivals Fury-Wilder at last year end; there are curios where old guys fight and little guys dare to be great by scaling classes, and such spectacles, like Kell Brook’s getting expunged by GGG or (again) Amir Khan getting knockout-of-the-yeared by Canelo, bring to mind a distinction strategist Carl von Clausewitz inspired when he defined courage as a trait a warrior uses to overcome doubt; we can invert this and imagine a doubtful outcome is a prerequisite for courage, which is to infer it is no braver to enter in a hopeless contest and lose than vanquish a hopeless opponent.
I wrote all that once before, more than 10 years ago, and now that I read it I realize how much more careful I was then – we were aligned with CBSSportsline.com at the time, and if one hoped to appear on those pages he had to write for a verily casualer fan – and my initial dismay at returning to rehash so easily an idea I explored a decade ago now changes in realtime to a consideration this idea, failure being more passive than active, is better when revisited, else why keep revisiting it?
Boxing keeps posing this question, after all.
(Feet got a bit tangled there.)
Apropos of HBO Sports’ demise, a month ago I wrote a harsh sentence-fragment eulogy for eulogizing, “To hell with all that”, and the words weren’t uninspired; both parents passed in 2018, and their passings afforded me chances to see how voluntary grieving might be, and in some circumstances, I discovered, it can be altogether voluntary, which asks assorted additional questions about both the deceased and their survivors.
Pause.
American Bank Center felt emptier in December than February, much quieter, which spoke in a declarative sentence about the trendline of Zurdo Ramirez’s drawing power, and since nobody’s ever read such a graph better than Bob Arum, one imagined Southpaw Ramirez will get put in hard in 2019: Who better to welcome Gennady Golovkin to the super middleweight division on ESPN?
If boxing is no more hopeful at the beginning of this year than usual it is more ubiquitous, which means something in the future even if it means precious little in the present – there are more American kids, potential NFL running backs and NBA point guards and Major League center fielders, now being exposed to our beloved sport, and at least a few may make their ways in local gyms and replenish our ecosystem – and we’re never more than a great American heavyweight away from being kings again.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
