By Bart Barry-
SAN ANTONIO – We’ve got COVID under control round here in a way many of our countrymen haven’t. It affords this friendly city a chance to be a friend to other Texas cities. For a couple weeks we’ve been shouldering part of El Paso’s burden by treating its patients. If our new President’s promise of an empathy renaissance comes, it will be cities like this one, cities that kept their decency in an indecent time, to which the country shall look for guidance.
A couple Saturdays ago boxing’s eyes looked this way, I know, and were two of my three favorite fighters not in action on apps I’d’ve made some effort to cover junior lightweight Gervonta “Tank” Davis’ icing of Leo Santa Cruz. But with Oleksandr Usyk on DAZN and Naoya Inoue on ESPN+ there was no justifying a pay-per-view purchase and still much less justification for a trip to Alamodome. Not in a pandemic, no.
What I missed was an entertaining scrap contested at a worldclass level by two guys who know how. It wasn’t complete a coronation as social-media feeds indicated. In insolation Davis’ left uppercut counter looked historic. But Davis threw the punch a dozen times before he landed it, which speaks to his opponent’s negligible pattern recognition much as Davis’ ring IQ.
Santa Cruz has never been a crafty fighter. He’s ever been best when swimming frantically at smaller men. He was best when swimming frantically at Davis, too, who didn’t have much better of a response than shell-and-tackle. The rest of the time Santa Cruz retreated in a concession to how much thicker Davis was than he. Santa Cruz made his professional debut 10 pounds lighter than Davis did. That sort of difference matters when one man relies on constant activity and the larger man relies on concussive effect.
Davis had the perfect strategy for a man who didn’t have the balance or power to unman him. He executed it. Davis must be kept active, as his handlers know, but that brings issues. He is in the wrong division to make meaningful matches with fellow PBC talent, and he doesn’t really want to go to lightweight and get threshed by Teofimo Lopez, anyway, a fight PBC would never allow.
If numbers can be believed Davis draws. So long as he stays at 130 pounds he looks likely as anyone to scrub the division. Those looks allow him to claim avoidance by promoter Top Rank’s junior lightweights, a grift less-talented and less-charismatic men than Davis have run a long, long time. Davis should make plenty of money in the next few years. That’s neither a great legacy nor a bad one.
More than can be said for lightweight Devin “The Dream” Haney who looked flat mediocre on DAZN against Yuriorkis “El Viejito” Gamboa on Saturday. Gamboa fought with what joylessness marks every Cuban prizefighter, supremely competent boxers who go through the dull motions of points compiling whilst saving their few enthusiastic moments for aggressive fouling. Gamboa’s best moments came after the ref yelled “Break!”
Haney’s best moments were marginally better than his worst moments, a mark of professionalism, yes, but nothing any aficionado had to watch to believe. Whatever images get conjured by reading Haney UD Gamboa are exactly what happened.
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Now a detour here, as it’s difficult, apparently impossible, to concentrate for long on anything but Four Seasons Total Landscaping, the one political story of my adult life about which I’ve laughed, heartily, zanily, for an entire day. We’ll likely never know the truth of how it came to pass, our President tweeting about an upscale downtown Philadelphia hotel he thought his team’d booked, getting informed the event was actually happening at a landscaping company a halfhour away, and staying in the bit. But to see his legal team leveling the most-serious allegation against democracy in American history, beside a canary-yellow garden hose, was surreal and fitting a spectacle as television has offered.
I haven’t the comedic expertise to say what made this so absurdly funny, but I’m glad to have lived it. Ron White, Bill Burr, Doug Stanhope, Bert Kreischer, Adam Carolla; I’ve attended shows by each of these men, and I’ve laughed at each show and plenty, but never has any professional comic made me laugh like Four Seasons Total Landscaping. It’s somewhere in its mix of hubris, irony, sycophancy, layers, possibilities, and most of all professional newsmakers’ incredulous reactions.
Did the legal team intentionally book a landscaping company, leading their striving philistine boss to reasonably assume a public subversion of America should happen in the finest of trappings? did the striving philistine boss assume a reservation, subsequently declined, and force his flunkies to scramble for any venue with the same name? did the first and most obvious explanation happen – wherein a staffer, from the most dilapidated staff ever to staff the White House, google the wrong venue and not get corrected by whoever answered the phone? That the official explanation might be true, a day later, is even funnier than were it one more lie.
Not since fat little Andy Ruiz sent the giant and invincible Anthony Joshua stumbling everywhere has something so unlikely and delightful come to pass. Ruiz-Joshua 1 was an unexpected twist in a niche story written in the darkest corner of sports. Four Seasons Total Landscaping was an attempt to subvert democracy by the President of the United States, a self-coup, un autogolpe, auto-sabotaged by its own morons standing in a dirt lot across from Fantasy Island Adult Bookstore.
It’s simply too rich. This couldn’t have ended any other way.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
