By Bart Barry-
Saturday in Las Vegas Saul “Canelo” Alvarez further unified his undisputed status as world’s best middleweight by narrowly if unanimously decisioning IBF titlist Daniel Jacobs in DAZN’s second-best mainevent of the last two weekends. Canelo did what Canelo does, and if it isn’t worth the $300 million or so his new broadcaster pays him, it’s still worth more than whatever any of his peers makes.
No, the variable Saturday was not Canelo but Jacobs. And Jacobs was no variable at all, turning in another B+ effort – the average of A talent and C audacity – ensuring more generous paydays and flattering profiles to come.
Let’s see if we can mimic Jacobs’ fighting style for a few words.
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Seems like a good idea might be to start stepping forward and maybe committing a little more, maybe jabbing, or if you’re already jabbing, maybe, you know, start stepping into it and seeing if the other guy’s head mightn’t move back a little or else try seeing if his whole body might, kind of, start moving back or relenting, or maybe relenting isn’t exactly the right term, since boxers, by the way they usually are, don’t tend to be too relenting, however they sometimes seem at times to be, and so it’s probably right to try remembering it seems hitting the other guy is probably as good of an idea for bringing yourself closer to victory as it is for keeping him from, like, going after you too hard if you don’t want him to, but there are also counterpunches that favor his momentum, so, you know, either way?
(Editor’s note: This is indecisive and awful; you have the words, but for God’s sake, you’re afraid to use your vocabulary and, frankly, you write like a bitch.)
Any man who enters a prizefighting ring and doubts for a moment the malice of his opponent is doomed. When a sense of doom pervades any motion by any fighter, it is a spectacle weak as it is unfortunate, but it is tragic, in addition to weak and unfortunate, when the doomed man has more talent than the man dooming him.
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Most fighters box best when they are happy, not so much in the sense of euphoric as comfortable. They find rhythm, dare we say flow, and that familiar rhythm frees their hands and feet to respond so instantly to the commands from their central nervous systems as to appear mindless, as to fool both onlookers and fighters towards thinking the hands and feet do the processing for themselves.
Daniel Jacobs is an exception to this. He fights best when he is angry. Some of this might be attributable to the physical weakness and subsequent doubt he experienced when his body turned against itself in the form of cancer. More of it is likely attributable to what Dmitry Pirog did to him nine years ago.
In Jacobs’ case, for whatever reason, there is a deep fear of humiliation, and not until an opponent begins to humiliate Jacobs via his own inaction does Jacobs risk the humiliation of what open aggression might get him stretched. In those retaliatory moments, though, when Jacobs fights from a place of deep offense, when he returns fire in a way that says “how dare you!”, he is fine a middleweight as his generation can boast.
But no sooner does Jacobs restore order than he relents once more, satisfied to look good losing a narrow decision, one close enough to keep the money handle cranking for a rehab match then a rematch, rather than chance a humiliating knockout loss by going for another man’s unconsciousness. There were a few times Saturday Canelo knocked Jacobs backwards and used the resulting space to press his advantage. And Jacobs braked that immediately. Canelo stopped, chastened, collected himself, then looked nearly relieved Jacobs was back in his own head, overthinking what might happen if he went further.
These moments were so different from the moments Jacobs went on offense and shoeshined the pitapat till he got hard countered. Jacobs on his shinebox looked put-upon by the task, almost annoyed, joyless robotic: This is what I must do or my corner will lecture me when I get back home. Canelo bought none of it; he knew Jacobs couldn’t possibly decision him in Las Vegas, and so Jacobs’ shoeshining mattered only insofar as it taught Canelo the downbeat upon which Jacobs might best be sandblasted with a counter hook or uppercut.
If all that came through a DAZN stream to a thousand miles from ringside, do not doubt how obvious it was to both men Saturday.
Canelo is not an alltime great, but he is the best thing we’ve got right now. He challenges himself when he needn’t (imagine, for a moment, how many times GGG would lap the welterweight and super welterweight fields had he Canelo’s contractual guarantees as middleweight champion), and he makes reliably entertaining fights. Not great fights, no, not spectacles of such violence and willfulness spectators openly consider the human condition, but reliably entertaining fights. So it has been with him from the beginning, whether collecting a kneeknocker from the other Miguel Cotto in his American television debut, or knobpulling the Amir Khan slurpee machine, Canelo does just a spot more than his critics think he might – and curses them to endure pundits’ hyperbole till the next Mexican holiday weekend.
Canelo was just audacious enough Saturday to make the official scorecards fair. He fought the best prime middleweight he’d yet to fight, too. Our beloved sport has had better standardbearers than Canelo, but recently it also has had much, much worse.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
