By Bart Barry-
Sunday morning on DAZN Japan’s Naoya “The Monster” Inoue performed the feats of scoring his second knockout as a bantamweight and completing his first round as a bantamweight, in a two-second span. He snatched Dominican Juan Carlos Payano’s consciousness with the first combination he threw in the second season of the World Boxing Super Series. Since arriving at 118 pounds in 2018 Inoue has needed but three minutes and two seconds to go 2-0 (2 KOs).
Actually, that report is unjust to Inoue. To measure properly Inoue’s knockouts by rounds or minutes is to overgeneralize. There’s a more granular method. Punches landed. His knockouts increasingly come in opening rounds, but incredibly the term “first-round knockout” understates what Inoue is up to. “Seventy-second knockout” brings us closer but not even halfway, since Inoue generally does not throw a punch for a match’s opening minute. What he did Sunday with a former world titlist who made his pro debut 13 pounds (and four weightclasses) heavier than Inoue did, needs be measured in punches landed.
Two. Naoya Inoue landed two punches, and Payano was headbanged to boardstiff.
Whatever one opines of Payano as a person or puncher, fact is, a man does not slumber in the gym where he trains then travel across the globe to get atomized by a twopunch. Even in a match betwixt a man who knows how to punch and a man who doesn’t, more than two punches be near always the rule. You could pay your children’s college tuitions by wagering the largest man in every city $100 he cannot take your consciousness with two punches – no matter how great he and meager you.
It’s very difficult to take an unsuspecting man’s consciousness that quickly and nigh impossible to do it a man whose fists are raised. But a twotime Olympian like Payano? A man for whom the gym is both workplace and habitat, with a twodecade dossier of dissuading boxing’s most basic combination? Impossible such a man’s lights might be cut, jab cross, and yet. Inoue so surprised and unbalanced Payano with a jab, the 1, a punch you learn within two minutes of your first handwrapping, Payano somehow had no expectation Inoue’s cross was next.
A halfdecade of squandering the word “devastating” on a Kazakhstani attrition fighter leaves some of us now entirely beneath the task of describing what Inoue’s gloves conceal. It sure ain’t sixth-round-corner-stoppage power or controversial-decision-loss-to-a-smaller-man power, and so let us be chastened by the misdeed of our past embellishments. If we can’t pledge to abstain from exaggeration in the future we might at least pause to concede some of us unduly weakened the language all of us use by pandering to the invention of a disintegrating network reduced to pandering to our beloved sport’s casualest fans.
A pox on such pandering henceforth!
There are sundry lessons for broadcasters to glean from the pending extinction of HBO Boxing, but an accessible one is this: The easiest way to attain 500,000 viewers is to begin with 2 million and replace matchmakers with storytellers.
Since when does boxing need postmodernist cant about contextual empathy in lieu of evenly matched combat? Not only needn’t one be savvy with a textbook to make great matches, but as it turns out, too much textbooking be a liability.
If DAZN doesn’t know this, thus far in its American incarnation it’s doing a workable imitation of a network that does. In 15 days DAZN has broadcast to Americans a heavyweight championship fight attended by 80,000 Brits, the conclusion of a super middleweight tournament in Saudi Arabia, an entertaining many-fight card from Chicago and the opening of two new tournaments in Japan. An aficionado’s total adjusted cost for all this is $5.
That comes with no Gatti List and no pettifogging commentary team. Blessedly. No Game of Thrones, either, which ought be acceptable to adults.
If there’s a criticism for DAZN it lies in the contrast of commentary crews the network trots out for its American cards. Brian Kenny’s mining every act by an official for controversy is tiresome already, Sergio Mora’s too salesy, and why is Sugar Ray Leonard involved? To lend his immortal name. That’s fair, Leonard is genuinely among our sport’s greatest living practitioners, and he’s gracious, too, but there’s no need for him to have a microphone since nothing is lost when he’s quiet.
More to the point, enough with the threeman commentary crews – for if you pay a man to talk, talk he will. Disagree? Check out DAZN’s singleman broadcasts. Whoever that man is, he’s excellent and unintrusive (and naming him would miss the point widely).
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But if we don’t narrate for the casual fans, why, they’ll go elsewhere to cross-pollinate cultural issues for their lens humanizing mission.
So be it, really, since evidently they are not empathetic enough to be contextualized.
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The second half of Sunday’s WBSS kickoff, a super lightweight tilt between Belarusian Kiryl Relikh and Russian Eduard Troyanovsky, a match Relikh won by close and unanimous scores, was competitive and entertaining if partly shaded by its predecessor match. There’s simply no following Inoue right now.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
