By Norm Frauenehim-
Big fight weeks are little bit like the seasons. They are on the calendar, a date to anticipate, celebrate and debate. Next week was supposed to be Canelo Alvarez-Billy Joe Saunders. Maybe, the May 2nd bout in Las Vegas would have been a good one. Maybe, it would have been a colossal dud.
But at least it would have been there, a reliable moment for the week-long routine before any opening bell. The give-and-take can be funny, then compelling, sometimes bloody, always edgy and often outrageous. It’s a crazy mix, but the chaos is imminent.
You can plan for it.
Not much to plan for now.
That calendar is as empty as the Vegas Strip. The emptiness is unnerving. It’s impossible to plan for what can’t be seen.
No neon, no nothing.
There’s no telling when the lights will come back on for boxing, or much of anything else these days in a world gripped by a crippling pandemic. We stay at home. We stay a so-called safe distance away from friends and neighbors. We stand in line outside of grocery stories, hoping to score a roll of toilet paper and looking for shelter at the first sound of a dry cough.
We watch bikers stare down nurses wearing masks in front of state capitols in protests that include people wearing AK-47s. I like the nurses’ chances at shooting down coronavirus a lot better than any of the thugs with weapons. The nurses are lot smarter. A lot tougher too.
I’d also prefer to see a Canelo-Saunders stare-down, too. It’s a lot safer.
There was a time when it looked as if Canelo-Saunders might mark the beginning of a boxing comeback from the pandemic. But that was before the Strip went dark, before the crowds moved out and the coyotes moved in. That was a couple of months ago. Seems like a different era now, and it was in ominous ways that continue to emerge.
There’s no telling how long the virus will hang around. There’s no idea whether it will vanish during summer heat and then make a vicious comeback in the fall. There’s just that emptiness.
Canelo, himself, hopes to be back in the ring in September, perhaps for a third middleweight-title fight against Gennadiy Golovkin.
“In my mind, I’ll be fighting in September, so hopefully this whole issue will pass and we can follow through with that possible date,’’ Canelo told Box Azteca. “I do not know what is coming next, because everything is off. There were very good plans for this 2020, so hopefully in a month we will see positive results.”
If there was anywhere to place a bet on that in Vegas right now, you probably wouldn’t get very good odds. Increasingly, sports look as though they won’t be back as we know them until there’s a vaccine. That probably means next year.
Big crowds are where the virus gets transmitted the most. The beginning of the pandemic in northern Italy has been blamed on a soccer game in Milan. The pandemic took root in Louisiana because of the Mardi Gras party up-and-down Bourbon Street in New Orleans. If the virus has a chance to come back after a summer departure, it’ll happen while tailgating before a college football game or in the beer line before opening bell to a big fight in Vegas.
Germany just announced it has cancelled Octoberfest, Mardi Gras with a German accent. It’s a sure sign that the virus is expected to be around in some way through the end of this year, or at least until there’s a vaccine.
Boxing already has modest plans for its initial return. Top Rank’s Bob Arum is exploring ways to put together cards that will provide some live content for ESPN, perhaps as early as this summer. But the big bouts – a Canelo-Saunders kind of bout – will have to wait.
“There’s a limit to what we can do,” Arum told Top Rank’s Crystina Poncher in a two-part interview in the Catching Up With Crystina series. “It’s not going to be easy. Everybody has to be patient.’’
The cards would essentially be studio events, featuring fighters who would ordinarily appear on undercards for major bouts. There would be no fans. No live crowds mean no known stars. Promoters need the big gate to pay the big purses.
“Where the gate money is so much a big percentage of the revenue, I don’t see how you can do it without spectators,” Arum said.
That raises another question. When the pandemic ends, will anybody have enough money to buy a ticket at pre-coronavirus prices? Will the game’s richest fighters be willing to accept a fraction of the money they earned before the pandemic? Unemployment is projected to be at Depression-like levels.
Pockets figure to be empty.
Hard to plan for that, too.