By Bart Barry-
Saturday at MGM Grand in a light heavyweight title fight broadcasted by DAZN, Mexican Saul “Canelo” Alvarez discombobulated Russian Sergey “Krusher” Kovalev in the 11th round of a dull match staged sometime Sunday morning. It was an exclamation mark on the end of a sentence banal as this!
Something artificial pervaded the spectacle entire. Nothing untoward, quite. Nothing worth burning digital bridges about. But a weird sensation those who made the Vegas trip deserved much more than they got for being much more authentic than what they witnessed.
Krusher, the psychopath-cum-kitten, fought like a man worried he might offend his host, his benefactor, his employer. That would be Canelo. And Canelo put up with oh so much more from his new employer, DAZN, than our beloved sport’s flagship man should.
Since when does the a-side glove-up an hour before he walks? Canelo ate it in a way Money May would not have, and that is no compliment. To see Canelo’s face as a monitor showed him Krusher enjoying a prefight siesta about 10 minutes after their opening bell should have sounded was to see a professional processing how many promises his promoter made to get his promoter paid so much for delivering him as a fighter. What the hell else did that flake pledge in my name? Time will tell, Cinnamon, for only time knows.
The match hewed suspicious close to its script. But allay those suspicions. No one had to be anything at all other than exactly himself to end the match exactly when it did exactly as it did. Referee Russell Mora’s spastic no-count was a smidgen less than hoped, perhaps, but everyone else played his part perfectly, right down to a wonderful scorekeeper so nervous his maths might fail him at the decisive point he gave Canelo the first two rounds at the prefight buffet, figuring Kovalev’s struggles with weight would bring a slow start and since nothing much happens in the opening six minutes anyway if he launched his card at 20-18 he could score the rest straight and safely submit a tidy tally.
How about that spot in the middle rounds when Krusher got himself tangled in a Canelo headlock and began tapping his employer’s back pleadingly? It was so sweet and gentle and tender. Near an antonym for the word “fight” as anyone’s done with 10-ounce gloves in many a moon. An historic touch on an historic night.
Not since Julio Cesar Chavez has a Mexican won a title at 175 pounds, apparently, or else I misinterpreted some of DAZN’s 90 minutes of nonsequitur-filled filler, though not the part where B-Hop talked nonsensically about himself. I recall thinking it odd they’d put one of the promoters beside the broadcasters so close to the ringwalk.
Hah! Yup. I’m an idiot. It wasn’t till after the Metta World Peace interview I realized some programming something was so wrong there was no choice but to fold: I clicked the Roku to Amazon Prime, started a new episode of “Jack Ryan” and fell gently asleep about the same moment Canelo reclined into his own prefight torpor, symmetrically enough.
Here’s what happened when I awoke seven hours later (and I impart this for your future reference, friends, as goodfolk who might utilize DAZN’s replay): No sooner did I find the main-event selection on DAZN than I began some maths of my own, noticing the opening bell was fewer than 48 minutes from the video’s end, instantly rendering all of the match’s scoring drama an irrelevance. Which made me impatient.
Imagine, then, enduring those first two rounds en route to a knockout. Imagine listening to witling chatter about Kovalev’s establishing his pittypat jab while knowing someone would be stopped by real punches sometime before the closing bell. Imagine listening to that tedious crew argue with itself about the definition of a close round. Imagine watching Kovalev’s fears about his conditioning mount in the middle rounds while knowing he needn’t go all 12.
By the end of round 7 here was my greatest suspense as a DAZN subscriber: Should I continue to skip forward 30 seconds at a time, at the risk of being bored unto longterm acrimony towards the eventual winner, or should I pointer-skip ahead full minutes, at the risk of ruining the grand finale?
I fearlessly skipped forward and landed between rounds 10 and 11. Romance favors the bold.
Here’s where I should write a white lie about regretting my course, something like: Great as the ending was, how much better would it have been had I let the drama build properly through those 40 minutes! Nah. The ending redeemed the match regardless of one’s investment in it; I felt my 17 minutes well-spent the same way others felt their 117 minutes well-spent.
What I like best about Canelo is his treating this era as it deserves. After getting stripped naked by a 150-pound Floyd Mayweather in 2013, four years later Canelo knew after 12 rounds with GGG, world’s most-feared fighter, there was nothing historic about today’s middleweight division. So he fought 36 rounds with its two best men, went 2-0-1, signed an obscene contract, then decided to cherrypick from an equally weak light heavyweight division.
Canelo can fight any man he wishes at any catchweight he wishes, and no one will say no to him for the next few years because DAZN is an infinity-plus-one financier. Too, if he fights the cruiserweight winner of WBSS next year, none of us is going to doubt he could beat Callum Smith at super middleweight – even if he probably couldn’t.
In flashfreezing Kovalev to win a light heavyweight belt Canelo made history the way Manny Pacquiao did against Antonio Margarito. Canelo could be the next Pacquiao, in fact, if only he’d had a Barrera, a Morales and a Marquez.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry