By Bart Barry-
Saturday on Showtime Pay-Per-View Filipino senator Manny Pacquiao looks to avenge his 2015 loss to Floyd Mayweather by shoving his left fist through the face and out the other side of American welterweight Adrien Broner. This match belongs on pay-per-view only in the sense no network would offer what purse guarantees either man expects, and therefore distributing its financial risk across what remains of the gullible public is the rationalest way to make it happen.
Pacquiao should win well enough to spark six months of rumors about his next opponent, and Broner should collect savage enough of a beating to sate pay-per-viewers’ bloodlust at least until Error Spence does wicked things to Mikey Garcia in March. That’s the assumption, anyway: Those with the means to purchase the fight either revere Pacquiao or hate Broner because nobody hates Pacquiao and nobody who reveres Broner has the means to purchase the fight.
Socioeconomic realities being what they are, and their hatching what priorities they do, the prose excoriating Broner over the years has been exponents better than what writing celebrates him. When he was calling himself Mr. HBO a halflife ago, the usual suspects copy+pasted press releases about him and wrote round them, barely, and a writer or two, too, wrote well about him, one even visited a Colorado trainingcamp, if memory serves, but there was no bottom there to plumb; AB was a caricature of Floyd Mayweather’s caricature of a darkskinned man for lightskinned men to hate.
In that doublenegative of sorts Broner made something positively charged – in the electrical sense if not the ethical one – something Broner was for, where Floyd was mostly against things. How much of television happens in writing and editing, we don’t know necessarily, how much of what we are told to feel about fighters is manufactured by producers who know how, but one gives everyone the benefit of the doubt by writing some nugget of unlikability glowed from Floyd early on and got produced for maximum effect. Floyd was presented as invulnerable even when he looked like he was about to cry.
At root, though, Floyd is a deeply unlikable person – read: on a personal level, nobody likes him – whose fights were for the most part tired and tiring repetitions of one another. It’s worth repeating, the more we got to know Floyd, the more cameras were trained on his personal life, the more we saw someone asleep in most every frame. Floyd wasn’t unlikable because of the caricature he played or because of how gleefully fraudulent the 12th rounds of his fights felt, but because no matter what he did or spent he was a dullard.
To be in any room with Floyd for more than an hour is to be bored.
Broner feels different from that. There’s a vulnerability to Broner. Sure, most of that is born of the losses on his ledger, the salesman’s instinct with an inferior product, but that might be the wrong way to see it. Floyd talked about his undefeated record as a means of comparing himself to whatever fighter aficionados held dear; he wasn’t TBE because he cared about being the best ever – he’s learnèd enough to know no historian could look at the men he fought, and when he fought them, and what they weighed when he fought them, and put Floyd in any top 20 list – but rather because he knew it would drive you nuts enough to buy his next fight no matter how silly its premise or demonstrative it oddsmakers’ eyes-rolling.
Floyd didn’t promise he wouldn’t be hit by his opponent, though in retrospect it would have made his fights more interesting if he had, but rather that he’d make an entertaining fight. That he never did do that accumulated resentment enough among aficionados for nobody to miss him.
Broner, on the other hand, makes an entertaining fight every time he puts gloves on. Broner’s defense is porous, his footwork often a tangled mess. He’s quick enough and strong enough to hit any man and flawed enough to be hit right back. He doesn’t sell his fights like: Come see AB the technician perform flawlessly again. He says: Come see this obnoxious clown get his clock cleaned.
Anyone who was in Alamodome for the signature beating of Broner’s career – Chino Maidana’s 2013 assault – knows there was tension in the championship rounds when, after absorbing everything Maidana could throw, Broner looked the fresher man, the abler combatant. (Another feature of that match that speaks to Broner’s otherwise inexplicable staying power: Never in 14 years of covering fights have I seen a more unambiguously joyful crowd than the one that spilled out the stadium in San Antonio.) And who among Broner’s eloquent undertakers didn’t shudder a bit when AB clipped Shawn Porter in the final round of Broner’s second career loss?
Had Broner an iota of discipline he might’ve proved himself an elite lightweight before eating his way two divisions up; if there’s little doubt prime Pacquiao would’ve beat Broner at 135 pounds there’s much more doubt than what greeted Pacquiao’s fight with David Diaz at that weight.
Which brings us, feet tangled and retreating with gloves overhead, to Saturday’s match. Here’s one way to look at it: Since 2017 Pacquiao is 1-1 and Broner is 1-1-1, making neither guy the rational a-side, and since when do you put a match on pay-per-view without an a-side?
Another way to look at it is . . . well . . . maybe there’s not another way to look at it.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
