By Bart Barry-
We were back at Cowboys Stadium in March to see two of the world’s best prizefighters scrap with one another in a captivating match if you overlooked weightclass disparity – if you did tequila shots then backflips on a trampoline, donned promoter goggles and saw Sugar Ray Leonard outclassing Marvelous Marvin Hagler on the thirtysomethingeth anniversary of that disappointment – but I was there only to see colleague, mentor and friend, Norm Frauenheim.
Errol Spence, a countryboy raised a halfhour southeast of Cowboys Stadium (or whatever they’re now calling it) and a halfhour southsoutheast of Texas Stadium, looked to be the goods, the one special fighter from Team USA’s none-too-special 2012 squad.
There is something immediately liberating about declaring yourself a dilletante among writers – all pressures be eased, all bylines be forgotten, any insights you make on craft be happy accidents; barriers needn’t be felled for being never erected.
Mikey Garcia had long since proved himself a special talent with a talent for selfsabotage, having lost 30 months from exactly his prime, skwabbing with promoter Top Rank, unknown for losing such tiffs, and was making battle with a much larger and dangerouser opponent than usual because the casement window of Garcia’s legacy cranked steadily shut.
There’s a wonderful trust-economy app called Turo, an Airbnb of cars as it were, that empowers you to rent cars from people, not faceless and gouging agencies, and it helped me discover a proper travelbudget algorithm – allocate 70-percent to car rental and 30-percent to accommodations – that arrivaled me at Dallas Love Field to retrieve my 2010 Jaguar XKR (510-hp / 5.0-liter supercharged V-8 / 21,000 miles on its odometer) and drive it to a Motel 6, where the Jag was, ahem, out of place.
Whatever else we opined of Spence we saw The Truth as a proper finisher, a southpaw who appreciated physicality and its effects and went through smaller men easily and would go through Garcia, quite probably, like he went through undefeated Carlos Ocampo nine months before, when Spence aced his tryout at The Star, Cowboys’ practice facility, en route to his League debut beneath the Jerrytron.
My first time at Cowboys Stadium, exactly nine years before, when Manny Pacquiao punched Joshua Clottey on the gloves for 36 minutes, I’d’ve called myself anything but a dilletante: I’d recently cowritten a book with another mentor and friend, Thomas Hauser, and moved to San Antonio and joined its esteemed San Fernando gym, and arranged my life mostly round producing words for a living: For a large bank I was a contract technical writer who was 250,000 words into his weekly column gig and about to begin work on his eighth novel.
Mikey was basic in the best sense of the term, heading into his pay-per-view match with Spence: He threw the sorts of combinations one learns his first week in a gym; he was in a way what you’d get if you took a great athlete at age seven and made him constantly throw 1-2-3s at increasingly larger men till he was 32 years-old.
Dallas is not enchanting, though it has fine a skyline as our country boasts, but Fort Worth, its neighbor to the west, supplies cultural highlights – like Tadao Ando’s Modern Art Museum, an architectural masterpiece that nearly always outshines its contents, and Louis I. Kahn’s Kimbell Art Museum, an architectural masterpiece that would outshine most any collection in the world but the one it comprises (its endowment 40 years ago was in oil stock, which is to write its budget effectively is infinite, and it acquires whatever it wishes) – that make quarterly trips northwards worthwhile in a way Dallas alone could not.
The Truth began “the main event of the first Premier Boxing Champions on FOX Sports Pay-Per-View event” slowly stalking his much smaller prey and then continued stalking his much smaller prey and then continued to continue stalking his much smaller prey.
Friday night I found Norm alone in the media center well before dark, and it portended institutional interest in Spence-Garcia, as the same sort of media center in Las Vegas for a Pacquiao fight, or in the same Metroplex for a Pacquiao fight nine years before, would be boisterous and filled with folks you only know from television, but in March was small and empty.
Mikey did what he must to keep Errol off him for the match’s first half, and eyes began to wander towards Mikey’s corner and his older brother, Robert, a man The Ring named 2011’s best trainer, and what adjustments Robert might make as a tactical mastermind or not-make as just another middling trainer mistaken for a mastermind during his lucky run.
Saturday I attended breakfast in Dallas with an old friend and confidante and then drove to Fort Worth in the Jag to sample The Modern’s forgettable collection, and when we walked from the forgettable collection to the unforgettable automobile, she remarked quite astutely: “This car is the greatest work of art on the property right now.”
The Truth made his professional debut in California, 130 miles east of Los Angeles, in November of the same year Team USA posted another 0-for in its medal count then made his way gradually eastwards till making his first professional fight in Texas at a collegiate gymnasium in San Antonio so small its university, Our Lady of the Lake, rents an eastside rodeo coliseum for graduations.
Friday night Norm and I collected Dylan Hernandez, a Los Angeles Times columnist who despite his penchant for penning boxing obituaries is wonderful company, and made our way to a Mexican restaurant in Arlington, where we sat at the bar and told enchanting stories about Michael Carbajal and Andre Ward and especially Manny Ramirez, and if there’s any lingering regret about the evening it’s that we took Norm’s dreary rental instead of the Jag.
What happened in Mikey’s corner was very little but a catalyst for considering the difference between Errol The Truth and Bud Crawford: Errol comported himself as a gentleman should, endangering no one in La Familia Garcia, when Bud would’ve looked Robert’s way at the end of every round and promised him: I am going to torture your little brother till you use that white towel, old man.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
