Mosaic of 2019’s most average pay-per-view event, part 1

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