NEW ORLEANS – If this town is not a traditional place for giving thanks, an American ideal rendered ever more vestigial with each year’s business-hours alterations and doorbusting sins, its greed consuming what greed wrought even on the single day generations of Americans once marked with a cessation of their profit motive, it is nevertheless a place where circumstances placed me on Thanksgiving 2013, and so. But expect no turkey leg this or pilgrim that or cranberrying of the other; if this column is stuffed with anything, it will be art and Sergey Kovalev.
For he is the man who stole another HBO show Saturday, in a co-main event match with Ismayl Sillakh that went off in main-event-champion Adonis Stevenson’s adopted and adapted hometown of Quebec, a co-main event match Kovalev made a stage of, ruining a multicultural Ukrainian standard bearer with a conqueror’s zeal and without four minutes of trying.
If you are a person who writes about our beloved sport weekly and needs to hit a word count before filing, you might want to have a backup plan for those three or so weeks every year you write about Sergey “Krusher” Kovalev, because he cares not a whit for carrying an opponent long enough to give you adequate action from which to fashion meaningful commentary. And from what we know of him from what we’ve seen in 2013, he probably would taunt you for missing that word count, given his druthers, or more probably taunt you for fearing you might miss it, and taunt you in a crooked stream of Russlish or Englian utterances till he had you a blubbering, wordless mess.
But if you are better at this craft than most of Kovalev’s recent opponents have been at theirs, you should have a secondary or tertiary tack, a subject to treat like the lineal champion of Kovalev’s light heavyweight division, a man, Adonis “Superman” Stevens, who despite seeming uniquely crazy before any overmatched opponent in a staredown, proves remarkably lucid, sober even, when offered a chance to offer to throw hands with Kovalev – or barring that, at least you should have spent your Thanksgiving in a city dark and conflicted and mysterious as this one.
Some words about the darkness round here: Away from the pissing places for which this city’s Bourbon Street is equal parts famous and notorious is a culturally rich metropolis, quite dark after sunset as if still recovering electricity from Katrina, and layered with a deeply held resentment concealed by a substantial glaze of Southern gentility and grace. The Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden, on the grounds of the wholly underrated New Orleans Museum of Art, is a recovered and teeming and lovely place to spend an afternoon or two, filled as it is with water and works by an international roster of sculptors who recovered contemporary art from wherever American painters like Warhol and Pollack dumped it decades ago.
Sergey Kovalev, meanwhile, dashed through Ismayl Sillakh in round 2 of their Saturday fight like Sillakh, for whose wares we were given the hard sell by Max Kellerman because Roy Jones believed in them enough to promote Sillakh and get himself temporarily recused from the broadcast, was so much wet tissue paper. Kovalev did not appear to hurt Sillakh with any right crosses in the first, but he did appear to think he had, and so, when he threw the same in the second and connected with Sillakh only partially, he then stood in a neutral corner and dictated to the Ukrainian, in Russian, surely not Sillakh’s first language but one that should burst his ears with imperial implication, he would knock him out were the Ukrainian masochistic enough to rise.
And Sillakh did, too, and Kovalev did, too too, fooled by his own power into taking Sillakh’s stability and consciousness with a right cross and crossed over left cross before Sillakh’s crossed eyes, beneath his own crossed feet, before Kovalev could make a suitably sadistic show of it – which one genuinely senses Kovalev genuinely trains to do, nursing not so much hatred of an opponent but appreciation for his own cruelty: I do not be mad at opponent because that making him human. Argentine Lucas Matthysse was celebrated as “The Machine” because of the impersonal way he ruined opponents with a placid mask on his handsome Welsh face. Kovalev is very much more a Krusher, because that cognomen requires a direct object, machines do not, and leads with letters that recall nothing so much as the Kremlin, the architecturally daring capital of the former Soviet Union, an imperial behemoth that krushed resistance from Kyrgyzstan to Ukraine.
Adonis “Superman” Stevenson, the Haitian-born Quebecer who marches to the ring in a Kronk-yellow bellyshirt cape accompanied by the euphonious waves of a John Williams score, stalked, sustained and sapped Tony Bellew in Saturday’s main event, stopping the overmatched Brit with left hands as well-placed, if not -timed, as Kovalev’s right hands in the co-main. But as trainer and writer Joel Stern aptly foretold on Twitter last week: “Kovalev and Stevenson this weekend in a double header that will set up a future Kovalev and Stevenson double header.”
One feels this matchup already headed the way Juanma vs. Gamboa went some moons ago, though without a prickly single-promoter issue to cite; if Stevenson and Kovalev do not fight it will be HBO’s fault for offering Stevenson either too much money to fight others or not enough to fight Kovalev, and one is hard pressed to see how the network should stumble badly enough to land in either those scenarios. If Superman and Krusher do fight, it should create a short classic, one that sees Kovalev stunned almost instantly by a Stevenson left cross and Stevenson beaten unconscious before the fourth round concludes. It is a fight that must be made before the new regime at HBO Sports becomes another old regime at HBO Sports.
Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com
