By Bart Barry-
Editor’s note: For part 1, please click here.
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Cowboys Stadium be an immense edifice and not until you are suspended in its gravitational force, postevent, do you realize the immensity of what inconvenience sportsfans endure to see their teams play – an hourlong drive and wait to park, a 45-minute exit map, an hourlong drive and wait to depart – and if you pay yourself only minimum wage that adds $20 or so to the absurd price you pay for admission and the absurder-still sustenance-n-libations tariff levied upon you, and it serves mostly to help a nonfan experience etymology in realtime: “Fan” origin “fanatic”.
Errol won himself no new fans by slap-and-tickling Mikey in March; those who were his fans already stayed positive, and nigh everyone else exercised his own selfinterest in evaluating the man and his performance.
I didn’t drive to the mediacenter hotel Saturday afternoon and didn’t take the mediacenter bus to Cowboys Stadium (remembering what an abortive episode that brought during my second time in Cowboys Stadium, after Manny Pacquiao broke Antonio Margarito’s face, and the busdriver got lost in the stadium’s catacombs and added an hour to the aforementioned hour) and didn’t partake of what swill writers get fed – while television eats its a-list spread – and after collecting a credential I assumed was auxiliary I went for lunch and skipped much of the PBC undercard’s inevitably dull fare.
Everyone who gathered at Cowboys Stadium assumed Mikey would fight till unconsciousness if pressed and likewise assumed Errol was exactly the man to press anyone he faced to that choice, and all of us were wrong and disappointed.
Saturday afternoon I pressed the Jag’s 510 horses into action on a freeway onramp that had a seam of sorts, and the Jag hit that seam a little wrong, and “stepped out” as they say of rearwheel-drive automobiles, and in the 10 or so milliseconds it took for the car to fishtail and right itself, I frightened the bejesus out of myself: Kid, this is a luxury racecar, and you are not a racecar driver, luxury or otherwise.
We’d not read enough volition in The Truth’s resume before his Mikey match in March, we’d sort’ve figured Spence knew only forwardpressing destruction, and that lack of imagination told after Mikey landed some defensive, retreating counters, and Errol performed an obvious calculus (Value of taking Garcia’s consciousness = Reward for doing so – Personal cost) and relented quite obviously during the championship rounds.
Time was, were I ever to attain a credential to attend a prizefight and arrive later than the opening bell of the card’s very first match, no matter how many halfdays before its mainevent, I’d’ve banished myself from ringside a year or more, no joke, and yet, there I was in March, sauntering in the arena four or so hours after my mediabus peers, wearing what I assumed be a credential to sit in the attic of Cowboys Stadium (for Pacquiao-Bradley 2, my back was to the wall; a few years after sitting near scorers’ tables round the land, I was remanded to the geometric end of MGM Grand Garden Arena, a place so far from the action its participants danced below like electrons in a microscope), and I was rather wrong.
Mikey was what we expected him to be, ultimately.
Nothing about Cowboys Stadium felt electric during the mainevent, though in the comain David Benavidez stole the show, waltzing through J’Leon Love way quicker than expected, and it made you wonder how good Benavidez might be if he were under the same promotional banner as his older brother, if he were being developed by matchmaking experts in lieu of publicity ones, but then you thought about how Bud Crawford’s career stalled for want of available competition and you thought about where Jose Benavidez’s career went after an incredibly promising open, and you decided, as boxing writers are not wont to do, you don’t know any better than anybody else where the hell anyone’s career will go.
After treating his first pay-per-viewers a bit like rubes Errol turned from charming countryboy to rube himself by the end of the year, rolling his own luxury racecar several times and being arrested for DWI in an episode that implied nothing so much as an athlete whose body had outpaced its mind.
The credential wasn’t auxiliary after all, and when I was through Cowboys Stadium’s layers of security and riding an elevator downwards to the floor, the vestigial remnants of professionalism still swimming in my dilletante’s cells began to fire with horror: I’d not bothered even to bring a stageprop chromebook to ringside with me, and so there was nothing to be done but lend Norm unneeded moral support and tweet.
Mikey has done absolutely nothing since Keep Away with Errol, though he’s scheduled to decision narrowly Jessie Rodriguez at the Cowboys’ practice facility next month.
Jerry Jones is no rube, so if he keeps hosting one-off prizefights in his stadiums there must be a larger strategy at work, or more likely he’s just a gambler with resources to burn.
The Truth won’t fight Bud anytime soon, and it’ll be a bigger shame than past-their-primes Money and Manny not fighting in 2010 (or 11 or 12 or 13 or 14), but it won’t receive fractionally so much coverage because:
I know we’re supposed to multiply the number of boxing’s 2019 platforms by the purses fighters now win and declare how healthy our sport is, but it ain’t so: Boxing’s disinterested media is worse than decimated by an absence of access and remuneration, it no longer has even 2010’s infrastructure for attracting and uncovering young talent, and that means its ecosystem is unhealthy – not an obituary but a warning.
Scorecards be already filled for Garcia-Vargas in Frisco; unless Jessie shows more mettle than Errol, we’ll get a similar fight with an opposite result and be told it’s all quite a statement.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
