By Bart Barry-
Saturday on ESPN in an entertaining and honest title fight at an Oklahoma casino New York light heavyweight Joe Smith Jr. majority-decisioned Russia’s Maxim Vlasov by fair scores that would have been just as fair and exactly opposite had they happened in Russia. Neither man claimed the other’s consciousness, which means no crying for the loser, and announcement of the official cards got called correctly, comically and tragically “the big reveal”. Smith got what he long desired and got it by winning the championship rounds.
There was a relative dissipation, though, by Smith in the pre-championship rounds, relative and relatable. A deflation of sorts, when the taut covering, be it tattooed skin or shiny plastic (I’m thinking of the inflatable bop bags kids punch), has less air protruding it and goes some slack.
That’s what the corner of an attrition guy like Smith fears most. Not that he’ll lose energy and get frustrated and make that frustration new energy; that he’ll lose energy and make a treaty with it, lose his defiance, find a resignation, and revel silent counterintuitively in his own helplessness. Like Oscar De La Hoya pleading with Manny Pacquiao to throw a punch to cut the lights and spare him conscious humiliation.
There’s some wallowing in the Smith biography, doubt not, lest his trainer’d not’ve been so emphatic round the time Andre Ward made note of Smith’s body language. Lunchpail, hardhat, selfindulgence – they are of a piece, or so say their dinercounters and bartops. There’s nothing particularly heroic about rising at the same time each day and going to work. The impediments, the sore back and sprained ankle and tendinitis in the elbow, dash in heroic seasonings. It makes the next generation of men consciouser of these obstacles, seeing them celebrated in their dads’ overcomings. The weight of the world and the system and all that. Balance it just right, take on so much weight – and ensure some poet sings on it – and prevail, that is heroic. Take on a bit too much, get forward bowed, and you make the infinite rolls of broken men.
For Joe Smith’s good from here till the end he needed to be able to be a titlist. It’s why the judges’ decision took on outsized import to his corner. Smith had done enough to win and little enough to lose, but being able to be called champ in a meaningful way, not in the cliched ways promoters and handlers and superfans address everyone who’s worn gloves, that was in the offing after 36 minutes of punching Saturday. Smith got what he wanted – a well deserved new identity, something our beloved sport owed him for curtaining the B-Hop show years after its curdling.
Smith is absolutely the best light heavyweight in his country and just as absolutely not the world’s best light heavyweight. There’s a chance a good fight might be made between Smith and The Ring’s number-3 175-pounder, Sergey Kovalev, another man whose deflation has been public and obvious, but no chance Smith’s handlers should want for him to make any unification efforts with the division’s currently belted Russians.
Smith is in the glow of his greatest night as a prizefighter, his longsought triumph, the apogee of a bluecollar epic, a win for every everyman, so there’ll be no talking him into retirement, even if the time might be ironically right. He knows he physically doesn’t have everything he did a few years ago. But he has experience, now, and adulation, especially from strangers, and those things convince a man he’s better than ever, 20-percent at least for his new hardware, and capable of blinding others with status. But Russians can be brutally oblivious of American status.
When your talent is what you are and the energy that manifests it begins to dissipate there are so very many reasons to say it is not what happens. Do not discount resentment in those reasons, a general sense others have gotten more with less than you, that even though your product isn’t what it was in your obscure years there are backwages owed, and all those who ignored what you did when you were young and energetic owe you a retirement. There’s a sweetness in obscurity, though, a private joy in being unappreciated for the right reasons that often proves more durable than an acclaim that comes for the wrong.
To jumble metaphors more than a little, that sweetness is the siren song for a fighter that his handlers lash him to a mast, any mast – be it sparring or roadwork or larger purses – to prevent his tasting. You owe it to the less-fortunate to make the most of your talent, they say, and that most is a thing insatiable till you’re knocked the fuck out the ring by a younger, stronger man.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
