By Bart Barry–
FORT WORTH, Texas – There was a fight card in my hometown Saturday night, and I didn’t hesitate for a tick to forego it and make holiday plans to spend the weekend hundreds of miles away looking at buildings, yes buildings. In fact, hesitate is the wrong verb altogether because it implies choice, a pause over two competing courses of action before pursuing the victor’s. That is not what happened.
Early last week, in the throes of architecture critic Martin Filler’s gorgeous prose – and one cannot appreciate the written word without marveling at passages in Filler’s “Makers of Modern Architecture,” regardless of a literary appreciator’s appreciation for edifices – it struck me I’d not visited the Renzo Piano Pavilion at the properly acclaimed Kimbell Art Museum, and like that I contacted an art-appreciating friend, arranged accommodations at her place and decided the four-hour drive was better made early Saturday morning than late Friday night, the better to avoid a stretch of I-35 that Austin makes a parking lot during daylight hours. Not till two mornings later when a press release arrived from the publicist for the event whose press conference I attended the previous Saturday was my memory agitated sufficiently to make a choice of the weekend’s itinerary, and by then the made-choice was 50 hours old.
As I write this, I haven’t an inkling the results of Saturday’s local card because the local daily did not cover it either, remanding its senior columnist, a ringside veteran of thousands of matches during twentysomeodd years of covering boxing, to a college football game or Champions Tour qualifier or somesuch. If he didn’t argue his case with an unsympathetic editor it is either because he’s lost so many like arguments in the withering years since Cowboys Stadium was becoming/unbecoming prizefighting’s new home, or because, more likely yet, the local daily no longer has an editor with whom to argue.
The local card brought little interest because, whatever the sincerity its participants and supporters, my hometown has connoisseurship enough to know what’s what. Since health concerns removed the late Joe Souza from San Fernando gym, downtown, no talent finds proper development there: Kids who even a decade earlier might have learned to move forward behind a jab now throw an impotent, skittish left hook from weight improperly set on the front foot, and the one local man whose name is synonymous with the sport expends more of his time with promoting and whitecollar aerobics, pursuits with a chance of profitability, than developing our limited talent pool. In fact, his outfit returned Saul “Canelo” Alvarez to the city proper, Sunday, for a snapchat about being famous for a festival called People En Español – or so my inbox reported while I composed this.
The same inbox last week reported our sport’s next savior, Kazakhstani middleweight titlist Gennady “GGG” Golovkin, will invade Carson, Calif.’s StubHub Center to survive what promises to be a dauntless test from the journeyman Mexican a fully drained and barely trained Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. spitefully battered 31 months ago, in my hometown, and that press release got dutifully succeeded by news Golovkin mania has grown feral enough for an unconfirmed, but voluptuous, thousand tickets to be gobbled up by the most voracious of California’s 38 million residents. A “record” apparently.
More and more I find myself appreciating Bernard Hopkins, a fighter I stopped liking about 13 years ago, and the manly way he is about to put life and limb at risk with a Russian-speaker who finds what tests ever evade Comrade Golovkin, and I like myself for adoring Hopkins once more, and I know my flagging interest in prizefighting is but a symptom of what ailment may seat a 50-year-old atop our sport’s pinnacle.
So it was away to this steer town, underrated a place of aesthetic greatness as I know, and a visit to the limitless grandeur of this masterpiece by Louis Kahn – second only to Frank Lloyd Wright among American architects of the 20th century – known as the Kimbell. Great events are great writing’s uniquely reliable origin, and so, from Martin Filler:
“The interiors of the Kimbell, washed with a pearlescent natural light that gives its arching vaults an ethereal presence, is as close as we are likely to come in modern times to an architecture of the infinite.”
This free-admission museum, Michelangelo here, Caravaggio there, in November got complemented by contemporary architecture’s great Italian innovator, Renzo Piano, with a pavilion that honors Kahn’s brutalist vision, exposed concrete softened by light, and a large number of translucent panels that bathe its auditorium and galleries in a light not quite Kahnian but better than most. At a robustly charming talk he gave in my hometown a year ago, Filler lamented what photos he’d seen of Piano’s latest work – “they say the camera does not lie, and in this case it does not lie nearly enough” – before completing his Texas tour in Fort Worth and later recanting in a review of the pavilion that called it, at least, “far from the disaster feared.”
Because art inevitably meanders moneywards, Texas, with its oceanlike expanse of frackable dinosaur remains, hosts much much more than a fiftieth this country’s greatest art and architecture, a place where even Dallas, a stereotype-monger’s fantasy of luxury cars and gaudily dressed women and hermaphroditic boys, redeems itself with a museum by Algur Meadows and a bridge by Santiago Calatrava and a masterwork, Nasher Sculpture Center, by Piano (whose other masterwork, The Menil Collection, stands in Houston). My hometown slouches not, either, and the closing of its museum’s wonderful Henri Matisse exhibition, Saturday, will find me there and not in Laredo to see Juan “Baby Bull” Diaz continue an increasingly uninspired comeback.
When boxing historian’s apply their finish to this era, they must note: We did not leave prizefighting, my friends, before prizefighting left us.
Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com
