By Bart Barry-
Saturday on ESPN+ in Las Vegas undefeated American junior welterweight titlist Jose Ramirez went 12 successful rounds with Ukrainian technician Viktor Postol in Ramirez’s tryout to become champion Josh Taylor’s next mandatory challenger. The scores were split. One judge saw the match a 6-6 affair, another saw it 7-5 and a third saw it 8-4. Ramirez did enough to win, and Postol did enough to have others complain on his behalf.
I tried to remember if I cared about Postol during his ringwalk. It’s an important inventory, I find, now that a pandemic has turned everything upsidedown. Promoters, after all, lie to us constantly, boldly and badly.
This gimmick about wanting to crown the first-ever unified champion, of Latin descent, in the four-belt era – the dream of every immigrant’s son in California’s Central Valley – is threadnaked, even by boxing standards, even in a pandemic. Suffering through it began my Postol inventory. I made no progress. I was excited by Ramirez’s beating Maurice Hooker last year, I recalled when the highlights rolled, and promoter Top Rank is the best at making competitive matches when it wishes to be, and I’ll watch most anyone who might make a future match with a WBSS winner – so complete is my fealty to DAZN’s roundrobin concept. I was engrossed enough in the fight a few rounds later to cease my inventory; I recalled Postol making a yawner with Bud Crawford, the first time Top Rank tried to market Bud like a pay-per-view attraction, and reminded often Postol lost a decision to WBSS winner and division champion Josh Taylor. That was enough.
The next morning I discovered Lucas Matthysse was the reason I cared about Postol. Six months after Matthysse executed his MAD-pact with Ruslan Provodnikov he got himself dissuaded emphatically by Postol, who just isn’t my kind of fighter. Postol has natural gifts of size and skill and uses them to lose narrowly to his division’s best men. He’s a light favorite of our beloved sport’s malcontents, though Saturday, blessedly enough, those guys were busy on the other end of the dial, where their patron saint, Erislandy Lara, played keepaway with a 15-1 underdog from Wakefield, Mass., where there’s plenty of fighting and very little of it good.
Top Rank has done a fine job with Ramirez. Spotting his limitations early Top Rank made Ramirez about biography and the genuine need his neighbors feel for a champion, fighting Ramirez in Fresno over and over and showing the promotional outfit’s adaptability. Ramirez has done his part, too, tying himself to his community and offering the sort of autobiographical vulnerability ESPN types adore.
Obviously the network has a rooting interest in Ramirez it doesn’t have in Postol, though I caught myself wondering why there wasn’t something that might be done with Postol’s life in Ukraine, something headier than glib graphics about how many miles Postol’s flown for cancelled matches. Disclaimer: Maybe there was a 45-minute segment on Postol’s grandfather running potato-mash moonshine out Kiev in a lowered Tatra 603 and how his scofflaw bearing subverted the relationship his grandson, Viktor, would someday have with his father, the moonshine runner’s son, before the Ramirez biopic aired on ESPN+, which apparently the poshest among us now call The Plus, but if it happened while Alfredo “Perro” Angulo made his match down the dial, I missed it.
I thought of Angulo halfway through The Plus’ mainevent, wondering how much different Ramirez was from Angulo, really, as a fighter (all indications are that, far as character goes, they’re quite different, though I spent an hour on the phone with Angulo once and found him a fragile sort with a highpitched giggle and not the psychopath American immigration officials claimed he be); both were Olympians, both are heavyhanded pressure guys, both believe in their chins’ durability much more than their opponents’. How likely is it I’d’ve made this association were Angulo and Ramirez not fighting a few minutes apart? Way unlikely. This is a pandemic, though, and everyone is upsidedown right now, especially those trying hardest to pretend nothing is changed, which might be read as further cover for what a dull mainevent Saturday’s much-anticipated tilt was.
I didn’t anticipate it at all. I included much-anticipated because Tess and Dre told me to, being, as it was, part of the road to a unification ESPN and Top Rank and Ramirez need far more than Josh Taylor does. Taylor’s the unified champion, after all, for having unbuttoned the undefeated Russian Ivan Baranchyk in May 2019 and then unstrapped the undefeated American Regis Prograis five months later.
Taylor is the world’s best 140-pound prizefighter until someone proves otherwise. There’s no controversy. Would Ramirez be the world’s best 140-pound prizefighter had his handlers allowed him participate in WBSS? Maybe. Probably not. Nothing Ramirez showed Saturday indicated he’d have undone Prograis, much less Taylor, and Top Rank’s evident concern about losing a ticketseller to a roundrobin format, last year, speaks to the promoter’s handicapping savvy. The risk did not justify the reward. At least not when there were tickets to sell, eh guys?
I don’t think I know much more about Josh Taylor than: He is from Scotland, and he won his championship the right way. That’s plenty.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
