By Bart Barry-
ZAPOPAN, Mexico – This is a place that looks like Guadalajara on a map but like Chapalita right next door holds itself apart from the city at whose airport you must first arrive to visit. Saturday began with a pool party in the hills, a familiar’s friend’s parents’ house, the sort of thing that made more sense when you were 25 years younger and relies on no one saying or even thinking something like that. In its Late Prosperity manner, it was an apt way to begin an afternoon that led to an evening that concluded with Terence “Bud” Crawford’s unmanning Amir Khan.
Thing about Late Prosperity is the spotlight it shines on bygone aspiration. Whereas a pair of Hush Puppies and a La-Z-Boy remain comfortable years and years after their original influencers have migrated to sneakers and IKEA, what modern sorts of architecture and design hallmark Late Prosperity were quite obviously chosen to make an important statement regardless of their dysfunction.
When the asymmetric fixtures basked in a fresh coat of Miami Vice pink or turquoise it mattered little the sharp edges and discomfort all round them, but it’s been 30 years and the green’s gone moldy and the pink grayish, cream-of-what-once-was, and now the first thought that happens, long before even the least-discerning mind processes it, is a word like “unkempt” – which marches the mind down a path of spent-fortunes and last-testaments ignored of economic necessity. The fiftysomething children or grandchildren, overeducated products of overpriced educations, retain all the cultivated tastes and enthusiastic weirdness of their eccentric forebearers but naught of the fortune; what’s desperately worse than weird rich people is their middleclass descendants.
That made Saturday’s poolparty fine foreplay for Saturday’s pay-per-view broadcast. What are some of the hallmarks of Late Prosperity in boxing? Words like “historic” uttered over and over. Words, for that matter, of any kind, uttered over and over. The motormouth striving for relevance, the venue worship, the tired namedropping:
“Madison Square Garden. What, you’ve never – how about Marciano, Robinson, Frazier, Duran, Ali? Surely you’ve heard of them, everyone has. We were surprised to get the invitation but thrilled to accept, but when you think about it, actually, it makes sense we would be here. My grandfather was from Holbrook, you know, which is very nearby Brockton, where Rocky Marciano grew up?”
Meanwhile, all round this production, the normal people with publicschool educations and jobs with salaries and bosses, folks who know who they are and don’t mind it, politely nod and silently wonder when the cake will be cut. Not for a hell of a while. Not till another halfdozen drinks get mixed and the same halfdozen dull stories get renovated and recounted, not till these normal folks get reminded in every imaginable way how lucky they are to be what bit actors compose the background scenery in the crowded courtyard where the historymaking event is due to unfold in the next hour or two.
It’s maddening enough to make you mad enough to ask how it all happened like this, and if you begin the search for a specific villain and go deep enough in it you realize there’s no villain but the system – everyone who thinks he’s a puppetmaster be entangled in the same string lattice as the paupers whose strings he thinks he pulls. Bud Crawford’s lowblow was a fitting end to such a spectacle, fitting as Amir Khan’s predictable and anemic submission to a better man’s fists.
To watch Khan is not to get surprised by his victimhood in meaningful fights but to get surprised by anyone else’s surprise, to wonder, essentially, who the hell decided we should take him seriously in the first place. There was no moment any aficionado doubted Saturday’s outcome; Khan was smaller and weaker and dumber and slower and less balanced and less prepared, and watching him beaten conclusively unto unconsciousness would satisfy solely our beloved sport’s worst impulses. That’s before we consider this was a pay-per-view event, th’t there was an additional charge to see this mess because a transnational media corporation and its wealthy promoter couldn’t possibly cover whatever purse the world’s best prizefighter wanted for a welterweight exhibition match.
Something only marginally worse happened on Fox Sports for free, Saturday, and if PBC still shows no empathy with aficionados’ plight, at least it gets the price right often as not. It’s exhibition matches far as the eye can see, there, too, though without (as much of) the pound-for-pound puffery ESPN now pounds its viewers with.
While we’re evidently stuck on the letter ‘p’ let’s get into this week’s palliative. DAZN will broadcast a wonderful rematch Friday and the continuation of a still-more-wonderful tournament Saturday – when Srisaket Sor Rungvisai and Juan Francisco Estrada swap blows in Inglewood, Calif., the night before World Boxing Super Series returns with two junior welterweight matches from Lafayette, La.
DAZN does not yet know what it is, but we already know it is not Late Prosperity. DAZN is making mistakes its peers do not, it is choosing events at least as much as personalities, it is aspiring to become a platform while its peers get remanded, yet again, to the role of copromoter.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
