By Bart Barry-
Saturday at Gila River Arena in the greater Phoenix area Ghanaian super bantamweight titlist Isaac Dogboe raced through Japan’s Hidenori Otake in about two minutes of their comain tilt. Those two minutes got so filled so well with courage and technique and menace as to make any who saw them suddenly more interested in querying the Dogboe videovault than staying awake till Sunday morning for ESPN’s mainevent.
Just as baseball scouts celebrate Dominican batters’ promiscuous strikezones by saying “no one walks off the island” so should aficionados acknowledge African prizefighters’ chins by saying “no one runs off the continent” – before you saw Dogboe tested, then, you already knew by virtue of his Ghanaian birthplace he had a chin. But then so did countryman Joshua Clottey.
No, what makes Dogboe special is his audacity. Isaac Dogboe is a bad man. How good it feels to write that without irony or hyperbole or satirical smirk.
It feels like when this column began it needn’t be written often because it was assumed often; Pacquiao, Barrera, Morales, Marquez – none of them was mysterious about his intention in a prizefighting ring. His role was to hurt the other man unto unconscious or the closing bell, whichever came first, but he wasn’t to relent trying to hurt the other man unto unconsciousness till the closing bell clanged. That was his brand. That was his legacy.
For reasons of culture or simple good wiring those men doubted the next morning’s risen sun more than a belief like this: If I fight every man unto unconsciousness, his preferably but mine otherwise, I’ll have done my job and should be beloved. If these men feared pain and mortality much as the next they did not fear humiliation; their professional code of conduct drew for them a straight line. They stood apart from the twitchy brand-obsessed Americans who followed, the men who for reasons of culture or simple poor wiring feared nothing so much as public humiliation and fought like it.
Things are getting better by dint of volume – the more airwaves contracted to provide prizefighting the more committed the search for fighters who follow a code in lieu of building a brand. For this, too, we probably ought thank the PBC, for believing so completely in the power of branding above every other consideration as to show our beloved sport the logical ends of the gambit, for not pausing to glance at a Ghanaian bantamweight like Dogboe during the outfit’s Olympic courtship of an American flyweight like Rau’Shee Warren.
Dogboe might’ve succeeded regardless, Errol Spence has somehow, but Dogboe’s chances of succeeding as a fighter if not a brand were improved by his alliance with Top Rank, an outfit that develops prizefighters best. Everything else belongs to Dogboe. His commitment to punches, so full, is uncommon for a man who places them well as Dogboe does. Saturday’s left hook sent every man jack with internet access to YouTube to see what he missed by way of a bullshit filter that kept him offline in April when Dogboe first entered the collective consciousness of American aficionados. Far too many champions and contenders and prodigies and prospects, even, have been prematurely blazoned these last 10 years for any reasonable man to attribute to anything more reliable than Stockholm syndrome most sudden socialmedia enthusiasms. Too hungry are we for something credible to doubt reflexively (as we should) the publicist-readied origin stories that reach us well before our fighters’ first meaningful tests.
Oh, I know, I know, it’s not careful matchmaking that keeps a fighter from being tested his first halfdecade but rather his otherworldly talent, and that’s why I should care about his stepdad or immigration status years before I know if he’s the whiskers to be entertaining or elite.
If that reads like an indictment of Saturday’s mainevent it is one, if only partially. After what Dogboe showed, after the obviousness of Dogboe’s presentation, it was ugly hard to appreciate the subtlety of whatever Jose Pedraza and Raymundo Beltran did one another in their sweepstakes drawing for a December cashout against Vasyl Lomachenko. Saturday’s mainevent was, in a word, mediocre. That’s not to besmirch Beltran’s I-485 application to register permanent residence or audit what paternal love got showered on young Pedraza but more to report yet again none of that matters a whit if what happens in the combat itself is dull, and it was.
Aficionados are a generally shameless lot, but just in case, let’s reiterate: Be not ashamed to call a halfhour of grappling punctuated by an uppercut what it is.
For it cheapens what Dogboe did to call what followed it more than that. Perhaps Dogboe’s mother is a real taskmaster, maybe his dad strapped him with the leathery rinds of a studded soursop, or maybe Dogboe fights for his people – you know not of it matters truly because you didn’t need to know any of it to appreciate the hook he pronated on Otake’s chin in round 1, the same hook he pronated on Cesar Juarez’s chin in January. What’s wonderful about that hook is when it’s thrown – against Otake, before Dogboe knew if Otake could cut his lights, and against Juarez after Dogboe knew the Mexican could pepper him if Dogboe snapped his chin on Juarez’s left knuckles.
Which is most of Dogboe’s charm – he imperils himself for our amusement. Is he open for a counter when he launch-land-plants himself for the lead hook? Why, certainly. But Dogboe wagers his consciousness no opponent’ll combine precision and commitment at that same instant fully as he does. More of that, please.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
