By Bart Barry–

Saturday at London’s Wembley Stadium British super middleweight titlist Carl “The Cobra” Froch stood before 80,000 of his countrymen, and across from a particularly obstinate one named George Groves, and told them to set aside the ample achievements of a career he casually calls “unbelievable” and judge his legacy on one criterion: How he acquitted himself in what 36 minutes followed. And then in the final 20 seconds of round 9, roughly 27 minutes into a pitched rematch, Froch struck Groves with a right cross so pure that in a flash it made Froch the historic sports figure he desperately wishes to be.

Whatever aficionados opined of him Saturday morning or opine of him today, Carl Froch knows what he is about. That attribute distinguishes him much as another. It is what allowed him to take his talent to a place his athleticism did not anticipate, an athleticism that suffered no loneliness, there: Who seeing Froch for the first time across from Andre Dirrell, in their memorably awful 2009 fight, anticipated the run Froch concluded Saturday?

Froch has been for the most part unabashed about conceding his use of a sports psychologist, which is likely not his first psychologist nor his last, and that sort of disinterested observation, reportage and maintenance from another can be quite a boon for an athlete who seeks an advantage of any kind over an athletically superior opponent – especially since many if not most of the men Froch has vanquished since 2008 have been, on paper, or in a gym, or on a track, or anywhere other than a prizefighting ring, superior to him. If Froch’s self-belief is by definition absurd it is nevertheless held deeply enough to be unreachable by any punch or word.

When Froch’s identity, not his shtick but his identity, is challenged – and unlike many an American athlete, Froch is exact in his separation of identity and shtick, knowing where they overlap and where one is devoid of the other, as evidenced by his self-deprecation about using the autobiographical title “international superstar” before his November match with Groves, a touch of self-awareness Floyd Mayweather couldn’t find on Freud’s couch itself – Froch looks upon his inquisitor not with contempt so much as incredulity: If you told Carl Froch his comportment is not the finest example of such in contemporary prizefighting, he’d not give you a look reserved for the enemy so much as a three-headed extraterrestrial.

Because Froch knows what he is about he can be vulnerable in moments that strike unpredictably as his jab, he can kneel before Rachael Cordingley, the model and mother of his children, minutes after the greatest moment in his storied career and sheepishly ask her hand in marriage, and then, sitting mashed on the apron against a man he put in an oxygen mask not a half-hour before, confess even more sheepishly he’d gone and asked his “sneaky question” and that she’d said yes. That vulnerability is what makes his courage and confidence and arrogance still more fascinating, especially when presented to American ears not accustomed to the mother tongue spoken well by athletes.

That fascination came through in Paulie Malignaggi’s voice, Saturday. The man voted by the Boxing Writers Association of America 2013’s best broadcast journalist was part of a three-man Sky Sport’s telecast that offered more insight between rounds than HBO’s four-man crew offered in the month of April, and he was not timid in his praise of Froch, saying Froch had done something exceptional – an observation no doubt aided by Malignaggi’s presence in Wembley Stadium, where, coincidentally, the biggest prizefight of 2014 happened approximately a continent and an ocean away from HBO’s nearest production truck. Malignaggi is a real dude, oftentimes too real, a man whose struggles for an unshakeable identity have happened publicly – who does not remember what befell his coiffure when last Malignaggi graced a British boxing ring? – but a man whose self-belief, too, is more settled than most, and a man who captured with his words and voice what every man who watched Saturday felt: Right now, I wish I was Carl Froch.

It strains one’s imagination to think the man who fought Albert Rybacki in 2008 would be fighting before 80,000 of his countrymen six years later, and it is exactly impossible to imagine that same man in that same situation would land the punch Froch did to take his rematch with Groves, instantly, from competitive scrap to sympathetic spectacle. Who that saw Groves reduced from a man to an accordion in round 9 by Froch’s perfectly leveraged right cross did not for a second or two feel remorse for the cruelty that felled Groves, the unrelenting self-promoter?

It was not Froch’s 3-2 combo, left hook-right cross, that ended Britain’s largest post-war prizefight so perfectly, or at least not just Froch’s combo. No, it was the feint that did it, too, the threatened malice, fortified by what 3-2 combos Froch landed imprecisely in rounds 5 and 6 and 8, that froze all but Groves’ rear guard, allowing Froch to step deeply into Groves’ space and connect flush with the hardest righthand thrown by a Brit since heavyweight Lennox Lewis nearly decapitated Hasim Rahman with the same combination in 2001.

Froch should retire on that perfect punch, and he acknowledged such on Sky Sports’ telecast, conceding nothing he does for the rest of his life will surpass what he did Saturday, but he’s a fighter, all fighter, and that means his retirement timing is necessarily poor as his courage is long, and he’ll come to the late-arriving artificiality of a Las Vegas prizefighting crowd sometime before he’s done and “see my name in lights” – whatever exactly he means by that. If his options comprise a beating of Mexican Julio Cesar Chavez Jr., a rematch with American Andre Ward, or a tilt with unproven Kazakhstani middleweight Gennady Golovkin, Froch ought choose Chavez – allowing Ward the ongoing joy of semiretirement and telling Golovkin first to prove himself at least George Groves’ equal.

It matters little, ultimately, as this truism will persist: If every prizefighter were like Carl Froch, ours would be the world’s most popular sport.

Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com

By Bart Barry-

In a “Gloves Are Off” prefight conversation more entertaining than a highlight reel of every eerily scored “Face Off with Max Kellerman” episode HBO has aired, British super middleweight George Groves, dangling awkwardly in a frame hung by his opponent as a man who makes mysterious predictions profound to him alone, assured Sky Sports host Johnny Nelson of victory this Saturday in his rematch with Carl “The Cobra” Froch:

“I will knock Carl Froch out on May 31st,” said Groves, diverting briefly his eyes from staring in disbelief at Froch. “And I’ll tell you which punch I’m going to do it with – on fight week.”

“Let me guess,” said Froch in a belittling deadpan. “It’s going to be a left or a right.”

It was fine an example as any of Froch’s singularly unflappable comportment in the face of other men’s threatened aggression. Froch’s approach to insulting opponents, prefight, is more devastating for its calm and often eloquent expressions of contempt so deeply set that his heart rate doesn’t quicken even in self-amusement. Like the wrastlers of bygone years, Froch’s self-belief hails from parts unknown. It is the most essential element of what will almost assuredly be our sport’s largest event in 2014 – one made between British fighters by a British promoter in a British stadium by a British cable network, evidence, perhaps, of how much healthier our sport is when kept out American hands – an event that will sell more tickets than the aggregate of Mayweather-Maidana, Mayweather-Alvarez, Mayweather-Guerrero and Mayweather-Cotto.

Froch’s self-belief, an entity that ranges liberally in the large field between confidence and arrogance, was once merely amusing to American aficionados. In his first trip to our continent, Froch came within 14 seconds of losing to a diminished Jermain Taylor. Six months later, in a dreadful start to a wonderful concept, Froch decisioned American Andre Dirrell in the inaugural match of Showtime’s “Super Six” tournament, a snakebitten arrangement that nevertheless got both its creator, Ken Hershman, and its winner, Andre Ward, promoted to HBO, and made an international star of Froch, the colorful runner-up. Froch won a hometown decision of sorts over Dirrell by revealing the American was an athlete, not a fighter, while warming to the idea of a fight even if not knowing how properly to perform one. Froch then lost a close decision to Mikkel Kessler in Denmark, before defeating Arthur Abraham and Glen Johnson – when both were more highly considered than we may remember.

Froch’s stature and confidence grew disproportionately, making him quite likable to strong-character types: For once a man claiming to be more than appearances indicated was more than appearances indicated. Froch has proved many times more than a sum of his parts in a prizefighting ring; his reflexes are good, as is his chin, and he has power enough that no one engages him straight away or else gets iced, but his defense is porous and his footwork is ungainly and his punches’ effect appears to derive more from his belief in their effect than anything resembling effective technique.

He was outfought and given his first defeat in 2011 by Andre Ward, a transcendentally good fighter before his semiretirement as an HBO commentator, but even in that fight it was Froch, not Ward, who appeared stronger in the latter 18 minutes. Then in a twist only American cable television could devise, the winner of Showtime’s super-middleweight tournament, Ward, was unable to fight Showtime’s super-middleweight house fighter, Lucian Bute – for whom crowning a suitable opponent appeared to be the entire point of the tournament. Froch signed-up to fight Bute instead. Froch went through Bute like a roller-coaster train through a pile of shaving cream, stopping the undefeated Romanian in round 5 and denying boxing’s legion of malcontent fans one more match, Ward-Bute, they were never going to get anyway. Six months later, Froch made a homecoming to Nottinghamshire and flattened Yusaf Mack in three rounds. Then he decisioned Mikkel Kessler a year ago in their rematch in London.

Six months after that, Froch took on an undefeated Londoner who’d once acted as his sparring partner, George Groves, in a match so lightly considered in the United States it didn’t land on a network called AWE till a month before opening bell – with neither Showtime, who introduced Froch to American audiences, nor HBO, who finances Andre Ward’s semi-retirement with commentating gigs, bothering to carry it. Had more than a handful of Americans been able to see the match, they’d have seen Froch conclusively outclassed for nearly every minute of the match, getting drilled with righthands, and getting made to look fragile by righthands, in a way few would believe.

Worse yet were Froch’s punches. They appeared, in the opening two or three rounds, like open-handed cuffs. The Cobra looked like nothing so much as a man alternately slapping either end of a large watermelon while staggering drunkenly forward in a head-lowered rage. And that was before Groves put the stopwatch to Froch’s every hung jab, blasting the titlist with even more righthands, blasting him enough not only to drop and wobble him in round 1, to hurt him in a way no one had before, but also to make Froch throw the sort of push-off jab that invites an opponent’s fury and incites aficionados’ contempt. There was contempt everywhere in that ring, and finally it was contempt – that which Froch felt for the usurper Groves – that caused Froch to surge obdurately forward in round 9, catching Groves with clean shots enough to make referee Howard Foster interfere with the match and call-out a TKO victory for Froch.

The fans were displeased as Groves was, though Foster’s comportment was not dishonorable, however the honorable International Boxing Federation ruled shortly after considering what sanctioning fees it might collect for a mandatory rematch. And so we have one, a fight expected to sell 80,000 tickets and fill London’s Wembley Arena for what knowledgeable British commentators are openly calling one of the largest prizefights in the history of their island.

It appears Groves may have Froch’s number in a way reminiscent of Antonio Tarver having Roy Jones’, or in keeping with the sparring partner tradition, in the way Paul Williams had Antonio Margarito’s. Froch has even gone so far as to hint it may be his final prizefight. It won’t be, of course, but it is noteworthy nevertheless as a reminder: Sporting characters original as Froch appear so rarely on American television screens it behooves us to watch and appreciate them whenever we’re granted the access.

Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com

By Bart Barry–

Saturday at the newly reopened Forum in Inglewood, Calif., Mexican “Dinamita” Juan Manuel Marquez and Colorado’s “Mile High” Mike Alvarado engaged in a fight entertaining as any that ends with one guy besting the other by wide, unanimous scores, the way Marquez bested Alvarado. It was an engrossing if ultimately inconsequential tilt that approached today’s premium-cable-prizefight definition of transcendent: The favorite was knocked-down, and genuinely tested, if only for a round or two.

These days, even the threat of such belligerent happenings usually lands a fight on pay-per-view, and an annual calendar of five or six pay-per-view events says all that needs saying about how often competitive, elite-level fights even get threatened.

If you do not love to watch Juan Manual Marquez fight, you do not love boxing. You may have favorites whom you prefer to watch, but if boxing is what you derive your joy from, if boxing is the entity that takes your life into the present tense, that cleansing place, you love watching Marquez in a prizefight. If ethnic considerations or rivalries or the like preclude you from being enchanted by the spectacle of Marquez plying his craft, it evinces no fault of character – boxing just isn’t what you love.

Every punch with Marquez is a personal event, a thing in which he personally invests, whether landing or being landed upon. He is predatory in a way few other men are predatory; he is predatory even by a standard set by those who make their livings hurting other men in sport’s most intimate way. He is a meanspirited perfectionist, a man, one gathers, who has acquaintances more than friends and loves what few others he loves in the perfunctory way Mexican culture demands he love them. In his treatment of opponents, he has an offensive brilliance exceeded only by Mayweather’s defensive mastery, among contemporaries, and in the public personality that boxing has given him, he is Bernard Hopkins sans charisma and verbosity.

He is not surly, quite, but that is a calculation; his surliness and trainer Nacho Beristain’s tutorial surliness once landed them in Tenggarong, Kutai Kartanegara, Indonesia, eight years ago, across from Chris John, for a purse that wouldn’t cover Floyd Mayweather’s weekend earbuds budget. Marquez is now something of a Spanish-television personality, and while he cannot help but be honest when treating matters of his own fights, he otherwise does a passable impersonation of every other ESPN flummery boiler, never anticipating an upcoming fight’s inevitable dullness.

Mike Alvarado understood the stakes Saturday: If he got stretched, he was off premium cable for life; if he could stay conscious for all 36 minutes, regardless of the assault visited upon him by a master pugilist, he had a decent shot of economic realities prompting his promoter to propose him for a last profitable purpling on HBO. But Alvarado did not catch Marquez repeatedly with a jab merely because Marquez, three months from his 41st birthday, has reflexes eroded slowly by time and combat but also because Alvarado is an excellent athlete who’s never had trouble jabbing an opponent effectively.

If Alvarado’s ability to touch Marquez with nearly every jab the Coloradoan tossed Dinamita’s way was not surprising as Marcos Maidana’s recent outjabbing of Floyd Mayweather, it was nevertheless at least as surprising as a training camp strategy that treated Alvarado’s jabbing and Alvarado’s winging right crosses but evidently not Alvarado’s ever mixing those traditionally harmonious elements together. Being generous, one might assume Alvarado’s corner knew their guy would get countered savagely by Marquez if Alvarado threw more than one punch at a time, but irony happened to dictate thusly: Alvarado’s best moments were in the frantic exchanges – as they ever compose Pacquiao’s best moments with Marquez – when Marquez’s pathological need to land an exchange’s final punch left him open in a way no lead punch of any kind from any one ever would find him.

Alvarado dropped Marquez in round 9 and buckled him a few minutes later with counterpunches. Their other, earlier exchanges, though, were a bit more telling: For once, Marquez voluntarily disengaged from sustained volleys, pivoting away and ducking Alvarado’s right hands, in a way he’d not done even against the much larger Mayweather in 2009 or the much faster Pacquiao in 2004, 2008, 2011 or 2012 (or the end of 2014).

No one in boxing, perhaps no other athlete in any sport, discovers better the fissures in another man’s façade than Marquez, or calibrates the circumstances most likely to convert them to suppurating crevices. Whatever permanent damage Ruslan Provodnikov visited on Alvarado’s spirit and brain in October, this remains true: But for the instant at the end of round 8, after Alvarado pulled himself back through the ropes and onto the canvas, rose uncertainly and trudged resignedly forward, an instant that followed a gorgeous right cross from Marquez, an instant that – were it merely 14 instants larger – would have seen Alvarado’s consciousness snatched from him by prizefighting’s greatest closer, Marquez saw a resilience in Alvarado he did not expect to see, a resilience that surely left Marquez’s fists painfully tender on Sunday morning. That the man who, with a single punch, temporarily suspended Pacquiao between the living and the dead could strike Alvarado crisply and precisely and sustainedly for 12 rounds, while leaving him fit to continue in a way he was not against Provodnikov, surely was not lost on promoter Top Rank’s matchmakers.

Provodnikov will see a five-division-catchweight match with Guillermo Rigondeaux before he’ll ever be allowed near Pacquiao.

Which is fine, frankly, because the makeable match that is most desirable today is a fifth Marquez-Pacquiao fight, one that will see the men’s diminished reflexes and enhanced familiarity – and all the contempt that engenders – provide a violent and vengeful spectacle that ends with one of them unconscious, and the other vindicated evermore.

Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com

By Bart Barry–

AUSTIN, Texas – Somewhere round here, likely on currently gentrified streets once mean, James “Mandingo Warrior” Kirkland roamed and terrorized sparring partners en route to network-darling status, a falling-out or five with trainer Ann Wolfe, a prison stay, a brutal victory over Alfredo Angulo in 2011, and a brutaler victory over Glen Tapia in December. Where he is right now is a source of speculation, as usual, but this is not: Had he been present in San Antonio last week to announce a fight with Mexican Saul “Canelo” Alvarez at Alamodome, many more San Antonians would have been there as well.

One such San Antonian spent the weekend with Austin locals, instead, in the hopes of finding some evidence of cultural offerings greater than University of Texas’ Blanton Museum of Art and sanitized bars on West 6th Street. He found some, too, good contemporary- and folk-art offerings, and also a reason to reflect on what appears to be one of our sport’s greater missed-ticket-selling opportunities.

This city is not weird so much as haphazard and disorganized, a hippie enclave in a state that, since making a fortuitous discovery dinosaurs once died within its borders, has trended ever more conservative, free-market and likely to conflate luck with merit – convincing its citizenry one’s birth in a resource-rich state is evidence, somehow, of exemplary character or virtue. For every action a reaction: Austin, now enjoying a real-estate boom financed by those scrofulous knaves who brought ruin to sandy states from Florida to California, makes a fetish of embracing its eccentricities, not uncommon to college towns, and planting on its automobiles’ bumpers and townfolk’s t-shirts declarations about keeping itself weird and loving live music.

Ask most who embellish Austin’s merits to catalog this city’s cultural offerings, aside from live music, and they’ll tell you, “Live music!” It’s the sort of exhausting, end-of-boom chatter one encountered in Silicon Valley round 2001, when everyone intended to be a billionaire but no one knew how clicks-from-coffeeshops could be monetized. It’s marginally less cynical here, though, because it is a celebration of culture, such as it is, not capitalism.

To this city’s ever more gentrified climes comes West Austin Studio Tour 2014, a sprawling collection of 241 art galleries and exhibitions, for two weekends, this one and last, and it is, in its seeming disinterest, nearly an opposite of the South by Southwest festival that now makes Austin a destination for the coolest folks from all about our fruited plain. Disinterested because most artists are borrowing corners of their friends’ gallery spaces, have yet to name much less sign their works, and rarely take anything but cash or check. As one local put it: “That’s Austin. We don’t really plan things all the way through. We just sort of get them started and see what happens, you know?”

And there-across spans a bridge from one unplanning gaggle of artists to another: Wednesday afternoon, Oscar De La Hoya, whom business circumstances appear to be pushing from figurehead to manager, visited San Antonio’s historic Mercado district, about 70 miles southwest of here, to announce that the one prizefighter insiders are reasonably certain remains tied to him by promotional contract, Mexican Saul “Canelo” Alvarez, will be fighting Cuban Erislandy Lara in Las Vegas in a couple months, in an event called “Honor and Glory.” De La Hoya, freshly enthusiastic if not yet sincere, announced, in Spanish, the card was about “honor y gloria” before switching to English and explaining that honor is what men fight for, and glory.

It was vacuous and scripted, the way these things ever are – or perhaps it was the South Texas sun breaking unexpectedly through what Weather Channel’s app promised would be a cloudy day – but it sapped one’s humor and acted as a reminder of a question Alamo City insiders often ask ourselves when asked to cheerlead for Canelo: Why not James Kirkland at Alamodome? Surely Mike Battah of Leija-Battah Promotions, the man who risked a large sum of his own capital to bring Alvarez, on short notice, to San Antonio to fight an otherwise unknown New Mexican named Austin Trout 13 months ago, and then made of his opportunity one of the more groundbreakingly excellent promotions of the last decade, putting more than 40,000 people in Alamodome, expected such a debut effort would reap rewards many times greater than schlock like Fidel Maldonado against John Nater on a Monday night in February.

Battah once openly imagined 70,000-person gates for Canelo at Alamodome, regardless of opponent, and must now content himself with renting restaurant plazas on Wednesday afternoons to have the firehaired horseman of Jalisco, diminished in everyone’s eyes, make a few serious poses, promise redemption for all Mexicans from a Cuban, and tell the people of, let’s see, San Antonio, how very much he appreciates their support.

To resume his ascent after the Mayweather debacle in September, Canelo needed to do more than score a referee stoppage over a ruined countryman like Alfredo Angulo, on pay-per-view in March; and if we’re being honest, even if he’d put “El Perro” to sleep in 90 seconds, Canelo would have suffered mightily from an Argentine doing to Floyd Mayweather two months later what Mexicans verily expected Canelo would do. One shudders to think what comes of Oscar De La Hoya’s company if Lara undresses Canelo the way that, say, Winky Wright undressed Felix Trinidad in 2005.

Since, like their statesmen, American boxing promoters cannot be counted on to do the right thing till they’ve tried everything else, one might as well hope, too, that such an outcome would make the fight that makes much more ticket-selling sense than Canelo’s tilt in July will: A match with Austin’s James Kirkland at Alamodome.

Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com

By Bart Barry–

After their Saturday welterweight match at MGM Grand, American Floyd “Money” Mayweather and Argentine Marcos “El Chino” Maidana proffered a study in contrasts as they made their ways back to their respective dressing rooms beneath the Grand Garden Arena. One man, shiny-faced and unmarked, greeted a swarming mass of exuberant countrymen. The other, shuffling slightly with face partially misshapen and flanked by enormous body guards, smiled perfunctorily at those who wished him well.

Despite prevailing by majority-decision scores, Floyd Mayweather was not the shiny-faced lad with the exuberant fans.

The idea that Mayweather would not win more than five unanimous rounds against Marcos Maidana on Saturday was one that traversed few minds. The large number of folks who attended the fight or purchased it on pay-per-view did so to support a TMT franchise we’ve been told is historic. A much smaller number of buyers invested their entertainment funds in the hopes El Chino would catch Money cold, somehow, and score a Hasim Rahman-like upset. Nobody who spent money on a ticket or telecast envisioned Maidana decisioning, in Las Vegas, the guy whose head is now more ubiquitous at MGM Grand than that golden lion’s. And yet, there were rounds not even a partial observer like judge Burt Clements could find a way to give Mayweather.

The first round is the first that comes to mind; perhaps Maidana did not sprint from his corner recklessly as he bumrushed Adrien Broner in December – and if Saturday’s main event did not restore much glimmer to “About Billions,” it did embolden those critics who quietly wonder if Mexican Saul Alvarez isn’t something of a frecklefaced fraud – but once he found Mayweather was overconfident enough in the shoulder-roll defense to let the ropes stop his backwards lean, Maidana brought the contact to Mayweather in a way no one before him has.

Part of that could be diminished reflex on Mayweather’s part, though only a tiny part of it, while much of it ought be attributed to the Charmin-soft competition Mayweather has served himself since about the time he slipped past Jose Luis Castillo in 2002; those who hit hard enough to imperil Mayweather generally have not been fast enough, and those who are fast enough generally have not hit with sufficient force. Unflappable as he is, and an unaffected demeanor during physical confrontations is Mayweather’s greatest pugilistic asset, Mayweather did not expect to be hit hard on as many different spots of his head for the rest of his career as Maidana delivered him in their second 90 seconds together.

What became suddenly apparent: Nobody in a sparring session with Floyd Mayweather since Money was about 12 years-old has attempted the clockwise-bolo thing Maidana hurled his way; were it not for Maidana’s startlingly effective jab, Mayweather would not have been speaking out of turn about Maidana had he paraphrased what Evander Holyfield once said of John Ruiz – that he was the most technically incompetent opponent he faced as a pro. Maidana solved the shoulder roll not through expertise but by overthrowing his right hand like a circus-strongman hammer; it was a physical impossibility for Mayweather to get his lead shoulder high enough and his torso tilted rightwards far enough to evade a punch that, at its apex, resembled nothing so much as Kareem’s skyhook.

Trainer Robert Garcia deserves all the credit heaped on him for Maidana’s fantastic jab, well-timed and stiff and accurate as it is, but when it comes to Maidana’s sledgefisted right, Garcia has mentored the Argentine no more than a handler who unclips the leash from an attack dog already in full froth. A camera on Garcia’s face in the opening round likely would have revealed a man both surprised and delighted by what surprise in Mayweather’s demeanor and delight in Maidana’s rabidity the landing of that first righthand brought. Mayweather’s surprise was quickly compounded when, soon after Maidana began crashing into him, Money’s go-to defensive ploy, the lead-elbow-to-opponent’s-neck shimmy, received a warning from referee Tony Weeks, whom Mayweather afterwards banished unhesitatingly from ever again officiating the otherwise high-paying exhibition matches Mayweather thought Showtime signed him up for.

There was one other surprise, too, for both Mayweather and aficionados who have followed his career often begrudgingly: The left-hook lead did not work till the championship rounds. There is not an orthodox fighter in memory, and certainly not a Latino one, whom Mayweather has been unable to tag and tag early with his springing left-hook lead; even master Juan Manuel Marquez got flattened by the punch. Maidana’s guard, though, was high and tight to his cheek, and Mayweather got nothing but right glove, when he didn’t miss both wildly and uncharacteristically.

Worse yet for Mayweather’s plans of a painfree evening was how little his potshot right dissuaded Maidana, who viewed it as a hard tariff, but not a barrier to entry like other Mayweather opponents have. Maidana expected to be hit repeatedly. It was in his contract. He hoped, but likely did not expect, to hit Mayweather repeatedly. When he found Mayweather was willing to sell him a stationary target on the ropes for the price of a flush righthand or two, Maidana became an animated buyer.

Mayweather’s best adjustment was the very return-to-fundamentals Paulie Malignaggi counseled any future Maidana opponent to employ, in the April issue of The Ring magazine. Mayweather, gloves high in the fight’s final third, preceded most of his righthands with jabs; in lieu of reinventing boxing, Money May threw straight 1-2s the exact way he learned to do as a seven-year-old in Grand Rapids, Mich., and it worked exactly as his father knew it would. Floyd Mayweather proved Saturday, as he did against Miguel Cotto in 2012, that, at his core, he is all fighter. Even his Friday protest of Maidana’s gloves was, at its inception at least, a legitimate nod to boxing’s history of illegitimate glove-tampering; what alarmed Mayweather first of all was how “broken-in” Maidana’s custom-made gloves felt.

And Sunday morning, undoubtedly, Floyd Mayweather awoke to a feeling of body-wide trauma that has led other accomplished prizefighters to pursue business ventures elsewhere.

Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com

By Bart Barry–

Saturday American Floyd “Money” Mayweather will fight once more at MGM Grand, this time with Argentine Marcos “El Chino” Maidana, in a welterweight title match the prestigious WBA has honored with “Super World” status, defying courageously those haters who argued for its belt to bear an “Average World” or “Lopsided World” appellation. Mayweather, who doesn’t care what anyone thinks, probably wouldn’t have paid their fees for anything less than a shot at “Super World” supremacy. How serendipitous.

If a Buddhist monk who spends his days meditating in a burlap coverall tells you he doesn’t care what others think, you might believe him. But if ever a man who spends tens of millions of dollars on conspicuous displays of his wealth tells you he doesn’t, check your wallet. Recently Robin Leach came out of retirement – surely he doesn’t need the money, because everyone who comes out of retirement never needs the money, just a rekindled love of the game – to walk us through the Big Boy Mansion in the 15th or so vacuous homage to Floyd Mayweather’s residence, showing us the million-dollar automobiles Mayweather drives alternately to a boxing gym and fastfood eatery, and the bedizened jewels Mayweather wears over white t-shirts.

It was another tired move from a tired franchise in a tired sport. Most of the off-television coverage of Saturday’s match has treated the prohibitive ratio oddsmakers assign the fight, declaring in a short declarative sentence not unlike that last one that Marcos Maidana hasn’t a jot of a chance of beating Floyd Mayweather. Those guys know their craft, and they understand probability better than Mayweather’s companions do, and they see no reason Maidana should beat Mayweather, and they are correct, there really isn’t a reason to expect anything that resembles a competitive main event Saturday. If you’re reading this, though, you’re part of the reliable half-million or so Americans our industry needs to buy every fight, and for your loyalty you deserve some reason to watch better than what pap Showtime infomercials offer.

Floyd Mayweather has to be in control of everything to be comfortable. Raised in what might euphemistically be called an unstable household, Mayweather imposes order wherever he can and does not relinquish it. He is perhaps the greatest handicapper of opponents boxing has ever seen, never endangering himself in a real fight against a real opponent when it can possibly be avoided. If Mayweather did not know about Antonio Margarito’s propensity for liberal hand-wrapping techniques in 2006, Mayweather absolutely knew something was off about him and wanted no part of a guy who was that big, somehow made 147 pounds for a few minutes of every year, and was incapable of discouragement.

Mayweather got the hell out of his contract with promoter Top Rank, in retrospect the best business decision made by a boxer in a generation, and fought Margarito’s wornout sparring partner Carlos Baldomir instead, because the Argentine surprised everyone and beat Zab Judah, three months before Mayweather did (don’t ask), and then changed his name to “Money” from “Pretty Boy” – a somewhat lamentable choice, as Mayweather has more beauty in person than cameras credit him, and money is, well, an idea so mundane it’s what every American dad spends 40 weekly hours making.

When he’s on, “Chino” Maidana does an excellent imitation of a fighter who is not in control. His footwork is a jumbled mess, his right hand is more like a club than a piston, his left hand is thrown with many times more commitment than technique, and his defense is poor enough that, after 38 prizefights and many more amateur bouts, his dad felt compelled to interrupt a televised barbecue and tell Chino to employ head movement. Odds are, that’s not the way to beat Mayweather – odds are, once more, pronouncedly that way. But in about the only reasonably unfiltered answer Mayweather gave his conference-call audience last week, “Money” did mention Emanuel Burton-Augustus as his toughest opponent, and Burton/Augustus was an old-time opponent who understood the value of dropping a competitive fight to a hometown favorite, quite often a more lucrative way to make a living than Maidana’s approach of whupping someone like Victor Ortiz in Staples Center, and imagine for a second the skill it takes to travel the country losing competitive fights without imperiling yourself unnecessarily. It also takes a lad who’s a bit off-kilter, and Burton-Augustus was surely that.

Maidana’s style was not built to solve the Mayweather style – Maidana’s style was built only to pulverize whatever object, animate or otherwise, came in its way – but it might have the ancillary effect of discomfiting Mayweather enough to make him entertain us for a brief respite, at least entertain us more than the aggregate of Mayweather’s last two opponents, Ghostly Canelo, managed to do. When I asked Paulie Malignaggi a few months ago how you fight a guy like Maidana, Malignaggi said you do nothing you didn’t learn in your first six months in a boxing gym. You go back to basics till you’re boring yourself.

Mayweather knows to do this; unlike the impostor buffoon Maidana traumatized in December, Mayweather comes right out of his cutiepie defense the second he’s touched for real. In their 2010 match, Shane Mosley dropped a right hand on Mayweather that made Money’s knees clap, and what did Mayweather do next? He set his hands high, went forward behind his jab, and applied pressure, like they teach on your first day in a gym.

Mayweather has much better footwork than the men whom Maidana has beaten up, and he’s physically stronger, too. He knows Maidana can be discouraged, and he will locate, before the bell sounds for round 4, the guy who dropped every minute to a 147-pound Devon Alexander and barely outboxed at 140 an unretired version of Erik Morales knocked-out twice by Manny Pacquiao five years earlier at super featherweight.

As ever, if this fight goes nine minutes without Mayweather being hurt badly, it will not be competitive. I’ll take Mayweather, UD-12, then, and hope for the sake of this increasingly moribund sport and its committed fans to be entirely wrong.

Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com

By Bart Barry–

What if Michael Jordan came back tomorrow, at age 51, and won an NBA championship with, say, the Washington Wizards for whom he last played in 2003? It would be a massive event, an orgy of media celebration as one of the world’s most famous athletes, nay, men, returned to a field of glory and dominated at an age that was absurd. But once the orgy got tired and broke up and media folk went their separate ways, showing the promiscuity of spirit for which they are notorious, what would it say about professional basketball that a man in his sixth decade was able to dominate the best professionals in their 20s?

Now imagine for a second that Jordan never did retire in 2003 but rather finagled from that lousy Wizards team a four-corners offense, and as part of an ownership group selected referees prone to ignoring the shot clock, and won his 2014 championship in five games by an average score of 38-36. Would kids still wish to “Be like Mike” or would they perhaps decide football players were cooler, and spend a generation in cleats instead of Jordans?

Saturday in Washington D.C., 49-year-old American Bernard “The Alien” Hopkins decisioned 30-year-old Kazakhstani light heavyweight titlist Beibut Shumenov in a match uncompetitive enough to bring heaps of dudgeon upon the lone judge who narrowly scored the match for Shumenov – in a nod to this fact much as another: Boxing aficionados are a cantankerous lot, and they like writers who tickle their lesser impulses, and also because tributes to agelessness are, almost invariably, insipid.

Through three rounds Saturday’s match was unwatchable as any Hopkins fight. Whatever else Shumenov was in his title-winning San Antonio match in December, and he was not particularly active, he was fearless. He had a willingness to stand wherever his opponent’s punches were bound to land, arms spread, chest bared in willing reception, and blast his way through them. Shumenov was not a picture of athleticism or class, perhaps, but he was verily a picture of self-belief. Hopkins removed that from him almost instantly and instead of seeing the dangerous puncher Texans watched flatten Tamas Kovacs, a man whose 23-0 dossier was, in retrospect, filled with hot air enough to fuel at least two questions of a Hopkins interview, fans in Washington D.C. got treated to an entirely untested man who did not belong near even a WBA light heavyweight title of the Eastern Bloc, much less the world.

Hopkins’ style remains defensively flawless – he has righted what balance issues sprung up years back against men of faster reflex and activity, and his skills as a handicapper, too, have kept pace, ensuring nobody busy or quick need apply for the privilege of standing across from him. Hopkins still flashes a silent dissent that takes men’s fingers off their triggers, and make no mistake about this either: Hopkins still punches hard and accurately enough to dissuade even men previously mistaken for portraits of fearlessness.

Boxing is not a dying sport in the sense of an entity that has a terminal condition – as anyone who reads about our sport knows already. Most arguments for boxing’s health treat either this certainty, that the spectacle of men swapping blows in a primal reenactment of what was done for finite resources millennia ago will not cease in our lifetimes and draw always paying spectators, or else fetishize the iota of one percent of licensed prizefighters still making massive fortunes from duping the public semiannually with large promotional budgets, special effects, roadtours, conference calls and a medium, television, ever compelled by itself to sell its customers reheated products they’ve already purchased.

It’s all missing widely a point quieter debate fails rarely to unearth: Ours is a sport fantastically diminished. Every number, from subscribers to media-day galas to earnings to punch stats, is open to wildeyed interpretation or misunderstanding in the name of profit, in the short-term or long-. What cannot be faked but easily confirmed in the urban area of any city in the United States, though, is this: There is a fraction the interest in boxing among kids today as there was even a generation ago. The gyms are not filling the way they always did before, and if your city is blessed with a full gym here or there, you can be assured your city once hosted five more than it does right now. Every local initiative to get kids in boxing begins with a wealthy donor and an employed politician and so much hope, and every local initiative quietly loses its impetus for one reason or another and is forgotten.

There is a desire among many to conflate probability and possibility, and so now is the time we excavate a gym here or there in an urban area that hasn’t hosted a fight and hasn’t a commission to confirm it, hold that concept aloft and give fullthroat to it as if its unverified existence disproves the very thing we all know already. And those that stick around to hear this conflation get convinced anew, inevitably, but their number dwindles each time.

Bernard Hopkins’ longevity and wondrous agelessness is good a monument as any to this. Were Michael Jordan still able to ply his Washington Wizards craftsmanship and win titles, outclassing LeBron James and friends in championship games, the NBA would know there was something dreadfully wrong with its product, would know how embarrassingly it appeared to those just discovering the physics of its nature, cylinders and shots and nets and reflexes and vertical leaps and the like, and would know better than to project images of half-filled arenas on the public’s consciousness as if all were just wonderful.

No, there will never be another Bernard Hopkins.

Bart Barry can be reached via bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com

By Bart Barry-

LAS VEGAS – Having scored the first match between American Timothy Bradley and Filipino Manny Pacquiao the wrong way from ringside, I found myself situated in a spot from which scoring was impossible at the rematch. With the back wall as my headrest, peering at the ring from a seat meters above the ceiling camera and a full level above a concourse kiosk advertising binocular rentals, I saw Pacquiao and Bradley approximate the choreography of modern dance, which approximates the behavior of molecules in an excited state: colliding, racing apart, reversing course, colliding again, racing apart.

Pacquiao won a fair and unanimous decision at MGM Grand Garden Arena, Saturday, in a match more competitive than great, a balletic sort of confrontation that required a 12th round headbutt to make either guy’s face look as a prizefighter’s should. Neither guy landed cleanly a fraction his power punches, and the match was marked more by hollowed-out suspense than building drama.

Manny Pacquiao and Timothy Bradley fought like grade-A natural athletes, tested and stamped Certified. For the first time in years, a spectator could watch a championship prizefight and assume from the data his eyes sent him, instead of what haranguing an agency or promoter or reporter did him, the two men making combat were not using performance-enhancing drugs. They appeared slow, inaccurate and generally winded much of the night. Gone was the Filipino wildcat who haunted trainer Nacho Beristain’s preparatory ruminations, and likely still haunts Erik Morales’ conscious thoughts. In his stead was a comparatively docile veteran who didn’t miss openings presented him when he went for them, and generally did not go for them.

Round 2 was the best Pacquiao and Bradley had made in their first 42 minutes of trying and better than anything they made in their next half hour. It was final evidence Pacquiao no longer has a three-minute round in him and evidence, too, that for whatever reason – and overtraining cannot be ruled out – Timothy Bradley cannot go a hard 36 minutes either; Bradley’s strategy was about conditioning, all about making Pacquiao fight more frantically than he wanted to, tossing punches at a pace unfamiliar to any version of Pacquiao over 130 pounds. It was the very thing, too, and Bradley sensed it and went for it, bringing what he once called “the dog” out, snarling and nipping, never imperiling exactly, but leveraging punches with his all body to make the other guy wilt.

If Pacquiao did not wilt, in rounds 3 and 4 he did wonder why the hell he had to keep doing this violent thing, and why he’ll have to do it for the foreseeable future, and where his fortune went. That happened after Pacquiao finally found Bradley in round 2 with his signature jab-feint-jab-cross combination, the one with which he felled everyone from Marco Antonio Barrera to Juan Manuel Marquez, and multiple times each, too, and Bradley did what everyone will now do in retaliation: Set his weight on his back foot and wing his right hand in a baseball pitcher’s homage to Marquez. The punch didn’t land, not till the fourth, but it made Pacquiao stop and ponder things in a way he never did in his prime.

The gambit worked too well for Bradley, and for the next seven or so minutes he threw his right hand with an enthusiasm so reckless it surely was a missed right in round 4, or early in round 5, that caused his calf muscle to sever and lump beneath him. Afterwards Bradley insisted his plunged activity level was not a matter of conditioning, and that is at least partially believable – although one must imagine how it saps a man’s stamina and fighting spirit to have to stop punches that hit only air. Stopping one’s own punches, after all, is a contingency for which no man trains; to replicate its effect, a trainer would have to yank a heavy bag entirely out his charge’s way on the final punch of each combination.

It took Pacquiao about six minutes – or 5:30 longer than it once might have – to realize Bradley was diminished. Pacquiao may not have thrown a punch in the opening minute of round 6. Round 11 brought justifiable boos from a slightly exasperated MGM Grand crowd, an acknowledgement Bradley no longer had the wherewithal to make a fight with Pacquiao, and Pacquiao was evidently scoring rounds in his head, locking in early leads and protecting them from a guy uninterested in taking them away.

The 12th was a competitive stanza between two good guys who like one another and like competing and really like the paychecks pay-per-view matches bring them but do not see any particular reason to endanger others unnecessarily. Each threw hard punches and hoped for a knockout, but finally it was a relenting sort of Timothy Bradley that Devon Alexander would have appreciated greatly, and a kindhearted sort of Manny Pacquiao that Erik Morales would have treated terribly. That brought a postfight scene long on words like “competitive” and short on words like “great” because, frankly, nobody believed Saturday’s match determined the world’s best welterweight.

As everyone at MGM Grand got reminded constantly all week, the world’s best welterweight is Floyd Mayweather, and he has a shrine window in the front entrance of MGM Grand to prove it. Mayweather’s countenance was ubiquitous during Pacquiao fight week – as promoter Bob Arum reminded everyone, in a show of indefatigability his main-event fighters could not emulate – and that is more than partially attributable to the casino’s sorrowful financial state; walking round and looking for postfight dining, one suspected that for a nominal fee the casino would have hung “Steve Wynn Wants You” posters with the hometown entrepreneur, and MGM competitor, pointing his finger in top-hat and tails.

Mayweather’s group took advantage of MGM’s finances in a move that was tacky, sure. But then, what in Vegas isn’t?

*

Editor’s note: The photo above is part of an extraordinary tapestry sewn by the Canadian artist Sola Fiedler and exhibited at Trifecta Gallery in the 18b Las Vegas Arts District.

*

Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com

By Bart Barry–

Saturday at MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas, not Macao, undefeated American welterweight Timothy Bradley will make a rematch of his 2012 fight with Filipino Manny Pacquiao, one sure to provide scoring quandaries, and what bad-faith and acrimony our beloved sport attaches to such. A shame, that, since Bradley and Pacquiao are generally good-faith guys.

Whatever his faith, Bradley, a former champion at 140 pounds, has yet to fight his best at welterweight. He made the best match seen in quite a long time at welterweight about 13 months ago, against the ruinous “Siberian Rocky” Ruslan Provodnikov, a grotesquerie of volition from which Bradley is unlikely ever to recover fully, followed by a busier-is-better decision victory over Mexican master Juan Manuel Marquez in October. Not yet has Bradley shown anything like the identity-snatching form he employed against Joel Casamayor, Lamont Peterson, Nate Campbell, Kendall Holt or Junior Witter – the British junior welterweight titlist Bradley dropped and decisioned in Nottinghamshire in 2008, launching “Desert Storm’s” unanticipated championship reign.

With few exceptions, every man at the elite level of sport is an overachiever – certainly Pacquiao and Marquez are – but Bradley appears to have done more with his talents than nearly anyone has. What is his signature fighting style? The man who at 140 pounds flashed righthand leads to corral opponents towards the ropes, and then, in a nod to Joe Frazier, another undersized overachiever, smoked where those men lived, has done nothing of the sort in his move to welterweight, a move whose stylistic understatement was anticipated by a lackluster 2010 welterweight debut against Argentine Luis Carlos Abregu. Bradley’s identity at welterweight is that he finds a way to win, but if you took even a Bradley partisan and told him to teach a youngster the Bradley Style, he’d lack the clarity of objective a request for the Pacquiao Style or Marquez Style would surely summon.

Bradley does not naturally place his head in an auspicious place for avoiding other men’s punches; with no opponent was this more obvious than Provodnikov, a puncher who, for all his primitive merits, consistently placed his head out of the sights of Bradley’s gloves while throwing much better leveraged punches. Bradley was, that evening, the better athlete, and a miracle of conditioning and resolve too, but he was not the better fighter – not even close. He was not the better fighter, either, against Marquez in October, though little shame might be extracted of that.

Ringside for both, I saw Marquez decision Bradley, 116-114, similarly to the way I saw Bradley decision Pacquiao, 116-115. We return to the scene of the robbery, then. I was one of three credentialed media ringside for Bradley-Pacquiao who scored the match the way the official judges did. I was uncertain of my scorecard as the judges’ collective verdict was; I marked five rounds as either/or affairs, and the judges were unanimous about fewer than half the rounds. My scorecard was, as ever, fallible, and it is important to impart, once more, the reason: A writer honored with a ringside credential should honor that honor by scoring truthfully, not “correctly” – seeking to record what he senses, not what he predicts others will sense.

It was and remains memorable to me how little import persons assigned my immediate admission of fallibility; saying my scorecard was a truthful if imperfect representation of what I saw from row H was wholly inadequate, since anything but capitulation was intolerable to those who knew what they saw on television; somehow, to a surprisingly large but unsurprisingly unseemly mass, unless I joined the other 100 guys in the Pacquiao column, the browbeating shouldn’t cease. Among other mildly amusing pastimes, the experience of others’ reactions to my Bradley-Pacquiao scorecard launched me on a hobbyist’s investigation of the science of optics, one that quickly led away from high-definition television and towards camera obscuras, camera lucidas and fiber optics though not before uncovering this: A boxing broadcast’s most powerful filter is not its audio commentary or unofficial scorecard but what 30-second replays it shows between rounds.

Less than a 10th of the round is repeated for a viewing audience programmed by the medium to believe whatever is repeated is what is priority. The punch you thought you saw the other guy land at the 47-second mark of the round apparently wasn’t essential as the punch landed by the A-side guy in the final 19 seconds, else why isn’t it being repeated? And the antidote to an awareness of such influence is no antidote at all: Assuming nefarious intent and scoring against it makes a tally no more objective than otherwise.

Saturday’s match will likely be another hard-scoring affair. The erosion of Pacquiao’s reflexes continues apace, yes, but Bradley’s recent stylistic conversion, and his newfound expectation that he’ll receive the benefit of every scoring doubt, at least from official judges, tend to diminish Bradley’s activity at the exact moment it should increase, and this is bound eventually to be a problem for him – and quite possibly a problem, come Saturday, when official judges look to score close rounds for Pacquiao because, well, who wants to be part of another investigation?

Wait a tick, way back at the beginning of that ran-on monstrosity, didn’t you mention an erosion in Pacquiao’s reflexes, which would seem to indicate you missed Mastery in Macao when Pacquiao proved to himself and trainer of the year Freddie Roach he was all the way back? For a championship-caliber prizefighter, finding Brandon Rios with a combination rates in difficulty between a heavybag and the red-brick façade of what boxing gym houses it; nothing Pacquiao did in Macao indicated he was better than the man decisioned by Bradley 22 months ago in Las Vegas – and no matter what one opines of that decision, he must concede this: Pacquiao was outhustled and outhit in the 12th round by a man who was immobile enough to require wheelchair assistance a half hour later. And since then, Pacquiao was the B-side of what HBO analyst Max Kellerman, in a nod to his medium’s penchant for understatement, called “arguably the greatest one-punch knockout in the history of boxing!” And yet.

I’ll take Pacquiao, MD-12, in a fight Bradley wins, and judge Glenn Trowbridge nevertheless scores 119-109 for the Filipino.

Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com

By Bart Barry

Quick, off the top of your head, name the contracted terms of Sugar Ray Robinson’s rematch with Jake LaMotta in 1943. No? OK, how about the purse split between Marvelous Marvin Hagler and Thomas Hearns for “The War” in 1985? Not springing to mind. What about the name of Israel Vazquez’s advisor during cable-network negotiations for his second fight with Rafael Marquez?

It’s hard to recall such trivia because, contrary to today’s coverage of our beloved sport, history rightly consigns these details to its dustbin, recalling only the swapping of punches. And it does not remember at all fights that were never made – hell, not even a YouTube search can find Floyd Mayweather’s matches with Kostya Tszyu or Antonio Margarito.

Saturday, Russian light heavyweight titlist Sergey “Krusher” Kovalev stopped someone named Cedric Agnew in forgettable fashion to set-up a long-longed-for fight with fellow titlist Adonis Stevenson, one Kovalev and Stevenson’s network, HBO, dedicated quite a lot of its subscribers’ time to setting-up – except that shortly before Kovalev’s match, subscribers learned Stevenson was no longer with HBO, rendering them suckers for caring a whit about Kovalev’s meaningless tilts with Agnew and someone else named Ismayl Sillah, or Stevenson’s 13 forgettable rounds with, let’s see, Tony Bellew and Tavoris Cloud.

As 2014 continues along, matters become incrementally more futile. If an aficionado took every fight worth seeing this year and added them together, he would have trouble paying for a month’s subscription to HBO or Showtime, and no chance of justifying both, much less both and a gaggle of overpriced pay-per-view offerings. Everything is marketed to him like it is portentous; nothing is meaningful in and of itself, but each thing might be consequential someday in a where-were-you-when sort of way.

HBO has taken two Russian-speaking prizefighters, Sergey Kovalev and Gennady Golovkin, and promised its subscribers historic things from them, creating hours of highlight reels in lieu of paying meaningful opposition to fight them. After losing Floyd Mayweather, the network locked-in Andre Ward as its pound-for-pound superstar, giving him a microphone without requiring that he fight. It marketed Nonito Donaire in all his portentous finery only to see him lose the first meaningful fight of his HBO tenure, only to have no apparent opposition for Donaire’s vanquisher, only to transition to Mikey Garcia – as settled along a path as the network’s Next Nonito as any fighter currently plying his wares.

Maybe Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. is not serious about his craft as Ward or Donaire, but he does a lot more fighting than they do, and he does it in matches that sell tickets and happen on HBO. That’s scheduled to change, though, as it appears Chavez may fight Golovkin on pay-per-view in the summertime, in a fight with no right whatever to an additional tariff: Chavez is 0-1 against world class opposition, and Golovkin has yet to face any. In a serious era, Chavez-Golovkin would make a fantastic Boxing After Dark main event and a passable World Championship Boxing offering, and so it takes tremendous chutzpah to threaten beleaguered subscribers, the long-suffering fools who’ve sat through meaningless Golovkin match after meaningless Chavez match, seasoned in Golovkin’s case with hysterical allusions to all-time greats before Golovkin has proved himself even an all-time good, with tollgated access to their match.

Last week’s machinations with Adonis Stevenson’s migration to Showtime, after a pair of preparatory Stevenson fights on HBO to prepare us for more preparatory fights on HBO, since HBO hadn’t the budget to cajole Stevenson’s signature onto a contract with Sergey Kovalev – a possibility too absurd to consider – are relevant to Golovkin and Chavez, and Mikey Garcia and Andre Ward and Guillermo Rigondeaux and a roster of hitherto anonymous lads whose greatest collective attribute is being unmarketable enough not to interest Al Haymon, for this reason: HBO’s want of credibility now subverts its marketing of every fight and fighter.

Kovalev appears to be an excellent puncher whose offense may be susceptible to a touch on his chin, but he’s fighting in a division Roy Jones Jr. dominated in bygone days, and even Krusher’s kinfolk might have a konniption at komparisons between Kovalev and Jones. When Jones fought meaningless matches, that is, at least subscribers knew they were seeing a once-in-a-generation talent icing unknowns, instead of a man who may or may not be better than a hard-punching Haitian journeyman unhinged when unhooked from his canary-yellow bra-cape.

Kovalev-Stevenson was the fight aficionados most wished to see in 2014, and it was wholly makeable, and HBO deserves all the blame for not making it; it shall be remembered as the greatest failure of the current regime and possibly its last. So much of the promotion of Kovalev’s fight with Agnew focused on Kovalev’s fight with Stevenson that not-overlooking Agnew was the advice served to what journalists attended Kocktails with the Krusher in San Antonio a month ago, when Kovalev was in town for Chavez-Vera II and answering questions, sort of, in his rich Russian brogue.

Kovalev is a large man, an alpha male, who should have no trouble being moved to cruiserweight, if Andre Ward cannot be enticed out of semi-retirement to fight him, but Kovalev probably will not go anywhere, or fight Ward, because, you know, promotional issues and purses and all the complications of making a prizefight, ideas so legally entangled and algorithmically indecipherable no member of the laity should expect to understand them. No member of the laity should be expected to understand them, regardless of complexity, because they make not a whit of difference to the experience for which any audience member at any spectacle pays.

There is nothing Adonis Stevenson will do on Showtime that will have him remembered long enough to show up on a Canastota ballot after he retires – he chose currency over legacy, and his accountant will have to render ultimate judgment on him because boxing historians shan’t be bothered. By agreeing to fight the Ismayl Sillahs and Cedric Agnews of the world, Kovalev now unwittingly ambles a similar path to well-paid obscurity, or however one says “if it makes dollars it makes sense” in Russian. If Krusher hopes to be remembered at all, he’ll have to do something far more audacious than Saturday’s offering.

Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com

By Bart Barry

Tuesday the WBC’s official Twitter account posted a picture of Roberto Duran embracing the late Esteban De Jesus, a picture I retweeted excitedly. Saturday, May’s edition of The Ring magazine arrived, and while it bore a cover photo of Timothy Bradley and Manny Pacquiao beneath a title that read “The Rematch Issue,” it might well have included a subtitle like “The Roberto Duran Appreciation Issue.” On page 20, Anson Wainwright captured Marvelous Marvin Hagler thrice citing Duran in his “Best I Faced” feature, declaring Duran the best Hagler faced in three of 10 categories, including its most important. On page 80, Thomas Hauser published the results of a 26-expert poll that, when asked to determine the greatest modern lightweight, found definitively in favor of “Las Manos de Piedra.”

The photo of Duran hugging De Jesus has a spontaneous sheen to it belied today by a realization nobody might have had, in April 1989, a smartphone with which to snap it. A camera was present when Panama’s greatest celebrity, some months after decisioning Iran Barkley to become the WBC’s middleweight champion, visited the bed of Puerto Rican Esteban De Jesus – the man who gave Duran his career’s first loss, in Madison Square Garden in 1972, and dropped Duran on the canvas for the first time in Duran’s professional career too, in round 1, a feat De Jesus repeated 2 1/2 years later in their rematch, a fight Duran won by 11th round knockout.

Four years later, Duran and De Jesus fought a third time, and Duran, concluding his reign of terror over the lightweight division – his record was 62-1 (51 KOs) when he vacated the WBC and WBA titles and moved to welterweight – stopped De Jesus in round 12. Before the fight Duran said he did not like De Jesus “for a lot of reasons” but then, once pressed, conceded to Sports Illustrated’s Pat Putnam, “mostly because he is the only man ever to beat me.” De Jesus, a bad man by any workable definition, got the better of Duran in prefight quotes, imparting gratitude for what he declared evidence of Duran’s squeamishness:

“I tell him that I will fight him in the street anytime for nothing,” De Jesus said. “He ignored me. For this I am glad, because I need the money.”

De Jesus murdered a man named Roberto Cintron Gonzalez 3 1/2 years later, 16 months after retiring from boxing, and was still in a Puerto Rican prison when symptoms of the AIDS virus led to a gubernatorial pardon allowing him to return to his family to die from a disease it is believed he acquired from sharing needles with a brother who also died of the AIDS virus. It is important, for context’s sake, to revisit for a moment the pre-Magic Johnson era in which Duran comforted De Jesus. It is not nearly enough to say little was known about how the disease was spreading; I recall distinctly my parents, educated and openminded folks in a suburb of Boston, deciding to forego anniversary meals at their favorite restaurant, cancelling a 10-year tradition, because the restaurant was gay-owned, and well, what if one of them inadvertently came in contact with the food?

It is impossible Duran knew any better how the HIV virus was spread, and yet there he is in as aggressive a display of humanity as one might find in a decade of searching. There is no politician’s curled lower lip or straight-armed show of hand-holding compassion. It is Manos de Piedra, instead, his arm thrust beneath his former opponent’s withered body to wrap him in a lover’s desperate embrace and ensure Esteban wherever death took him, he would go swaddled in his friend Roberto’s arms.

The photo, and the text of my retweet of it – “¡Puro Duran (Pure Duran)!” – sent me spiraling back in the 15rounds archives for Roberto Duran’s Magical Realism, a column I wrote nearly eight years ago when Duran’s shortlived tenure as a promoter, the ‘R’ in DRL Promotions, brought the Panamanian to Phoenix for an inaugural press conference that comprised more fighters than media in a fortuitous twist that allowed The Arizona Republic’s irreplaceable Norm Frauenheim and me an opportunity to converse with Duran, nearly as good a raconteur as a fighter, through more than 40 minutes of absurd and absurdly engrossing stories. Norm was through his third decade at the craft by then and didn’t hesitate to call the encounter with Duran a highlight of his time covering boxing. I was not yet in my 15th month of boxing writing but suspected something time has confirmed: The conclusion of those 40 minutes, at which I wore the scent of Duran’s cologne for the number of times he embraced me, held euphoric a moment as boxing writing would provide.

It is Duran’s enormous humanity that makes one feel ownership of his career even at a distance from it as large as mine. When I opened the plastic wrapper of The Ring on Saturday afternoon, anxious to see whom Marvelous Marvin Hagler, my all-time favorite fighter, told Anson Wainwright was the “Best I Faced,” I did not even remember Hagler and Duran had fought and expected various allusions to Thomas Hearns and Sugar Ray Leonard. To see Hagler call Duran – whom Hagler faced very near the top of Marvelous’ powers as middleweight champion, in Duran’s 82nd prizefight, one that happened 25 pounds above Duran’s prime weight and came after a 5-3 stretch that saw Duran decisioned by someone named Kirkland Laing – the “Best Overall” Hagler faced induced in me a brief and totally unexpected spike of euphoria, one whose height exceeded its brevity.

Sixty pages later, Thomas Hauser’s “Greatest Modern Lightweight” poll found Duran running away with the prize, scoring 23-percent better than runner-up Pernell Whitaker, 34-percent better than Floyd Mayweather and more than 100-percent better than Manny Pacquiao and Juan Manuel Marquez. Combined.

Or as the legend likes to put it: “¡Roberto Duran es extraordinario!”

Bart Barry can be reached via bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com

By Bart Barry
A few weeks back I did something I rarely do: I made plans to attend a Las Vegas fight, Timothy Bradley versus Manny Pacquiao on April 12, without having much of an idea why. What follows, then, is an effort to understand better my interest in this event.

If there was a hint of the overrated about Pacquiao going into his first match with Bradley in June 2012 at MGM Grand, a hint that became still more than a clue six months later as Pacquiao laid on the same blue mat, facedown and motionless, there is a similar if somewhat more subtle hint of the overrated about Bradley as we head to April 2014. I believed in his third match with Juan Manuel Marquez, Pacquiao was credited with punches that didn’t land, footwork that didn’t exist, and power that didn’t remain. Is that why I scored close rounds for Bradley in June 2012? Sure, yes, guilty.

In retrospect, that match might have gone either way but should have gone to no man widely. And yet. Spurred by an irresponsibly lopsided broadcast, complete with an unofficial scorecard that told few truths, a large number of persons to this day think the decision for Bradley was farcical. It was not.

While Manny Pacquiao looked considerably better in his final conscious rounds with Marquez six months later, able to land punches more cleanly, certainly, than he’d been able to land them on Bradley in June or Marquez in any of the 35 rounds that followed his three-knockdown blitz of the Mexican master way back in 2004, the probability is that Marquez was more open to be punched because Marquez – perceiving with a preternatural predatory precision – took note of Pacquiao’s eroded reflexes, married those to a powerfully newfound belief in his illgotten new physique, and looked to make offensive ploys he’d not have dared pursue in their 2008 rematch. It’s not that Pacquiao was suddenly a much better fighter for a few rounds in December 2012 than he’d been in June or the previous December – his defense hadn’t improved a jot, as evidenced by gloves unnaturally folded beneath his body in perfect serenity at the end of round 6 – just that Marquez was emboldened by how much less Pacquiao was then than the guy he’d spend 108 minutes being punched by in bygone fights.

There is an argument to be made Pacquiao’s reflexes dulled sometime during his Silly Season, the two-year stretch, 2009-2011, between his match with Miguel Cotto and his third fight with Marquez. The reduced competition did this, yes, along with an improved risk-to-reward ratio and the decadence that wrought, but there may have been, too, the sockdolagers Margarito put on his body and, perhaps most to the point, the brutality of Pacquiao’s sparring with campmate Ruslan Provodnikov.

“Siberian Rocky” is in a different class; veteran writers will describe the way a world champion sounds on handpads as opposed to a career challenger, but much of that is show, and none tells of a chin. The sound of Provodnikov’s fists on Mike Alvarado’s body in October, though, was in a different class and far more telling than handpad tricks because, well, Provodnikov had to throw those punches under the rational assumption a world titlist might endeavor to punch him at the exact same moment, and assumptions like that scumble one’s commitment.

Provodnikov is relevant, here, because he is the one man, apart from Marquez, whom Pacquiao and Bradley have in common, and while Marquez iced Pacquiao in a special sort of way, one would almost prefer the cutting of the lights to what excruciating happenings must compose rounds opposite Provodnikov on a blue mat. Almost always the term “most feared” is a marketing slogan applied by someone who has never fought to a client who never makes big fights, but Provodnikov should be called most feared by any and all; he is the man who shortens careers and changes men, compromising the very fabric of their identities, and if Timothy Bradley never again sells it out to fight like a noble fool, Provodnikov will be the reason why.

To beat Pacquiao again, Bradley will not need to engage at nearly the maniacal level he engaged Provodnikov. Las Vegas judges are already sympathetic to Bradley, as evidenced by his winning more October rounds against Marquez in Las Vegas than he deserved, and they will look thrice as closely at how many of Pacquiao’s actual punches actually land in an actually effective way this time, thrice as closely as HBO’s broadcast crew did the first time the two men fought.

Another note about that, and the effect it takes: I was a member of boxing’s laity in 1999 when Felix Trinidad decisioned Oscar De La Hoya in what I remembered from that time to be perhaps the most egregious superfight robbery since Julio Cesar Chavez’s 1993 draw with Pernell Whitaker. Apropos of a retrospective I worked on last week for a magazine piece timed to coincide with Trinidad’s June induction in the IBHOF, I reviewed the fight and was flabbergasted by the bias of its commentary – a piece of work that comprised one veteran broadcaster calling every Trinidad right cross “another left hook by Oscar!”, and a former heavyweight world champion finding himself so enamored of De La Hoya’s jab that he eschewed speaking Trinidad’s name altogether in the match’s opening half. One’s sense of the match 15 years later is that a draw was fair, but if not a draw then tie-goes-to-the-puncher, and De La Hoya’s skittering flight from Trinidad in the final six minutes subverted his claims on any lasting dissent. So different was the tone of that match in Puerto Ricans’ eyes that in December, at the press conference announcing Tito’s selection to the Hall, Trinidad was asked sincerely if he thought De La Hoya even belonged there (Trinidad stated empathically that he did).

The cost to attend superfights anymore is prohibitive, I know – even for credentialed media – so do not consider this a remedy for bias’ woes, but I will be at MGM Grand on April 12 because I’m interested in the descent of Pacquiao’s career and the prime of Bradley’s, and frankly, I do not trust what I see on pay-per-view broadcasts.

Bart Barry can be reached via bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com

By Bart Barry

Saturday in Las Vegas the redhead anointed by one very powerful Mexican television network as the man most likely to continue his country’s outstanding pugilistic tradition, mainly on the virtue of his unique hair color and pigmentation, victimized, via 10th round technical stoppage, a hopeless fellow Mexican in a dog collar. In preventing the man in the dog collar from fighting any further, the match’s outstanding referee did what a trainer and team of evaluating Nevada neurologists should have done long before. For this act of mercy, the outstanding referee was treated to bald derision from morons.

The redhead, of course, was Saul “Canelo” Alvarez – a prizefighter who, had he appeared on Shobox with a last name like O’Brien, Friday, instead of a Mexican-themed pay-per-view broadcast on Saturday, would not have caused more than an obligatory second glance. The man in the collar was Alfredo “El Perro” Angulo. The outstanding referee was Tony Weeks. And the morons were a myriad, though only one had a microphone.

The horse sense of the generally Mexican, generally intoxicated crowd congregated in the MGM Grand Garden Arena being what it was, the boos were misplaced, or perhaps misinterpreted, but they were an accurate reflection of what becomes increasingly plain about Cinnamon Alvarez: He is not that good. Canelo is an A-list guy in a B-list era, as was made plain by his inability to win convincingly a minute against Floyd Mayweather on Mexican Independence Day weekend, or fell a pre-ruined man like Angulo despite hundreds of clean shots to do so.

Saturday’s match was not competitive. Did Tony Weeks stop it too early? Only for sadists and those who pander them. For those interested in fair competition, Weeks might have stopped “Toe to Toe” after the second minute of its first round when, already, Angulo’s head was getting sent shoulderwards by Canelo’s hooks, and coming off his shoulder in a motion somewhat less elastic than a verb like “snap” should connote.

In the fight’s opening 30 seconds, Alvarez threw a left-hook lead Angulo did not know was coming and hadn’t an idea how to counter with any but the absorption method he and trainer Virgil Hunter apparently perfected in training camp, a method, acceptably nicknamed rope-till-a-dope, wherein a fighter allows himself to be punched hard as possible by an opponent, in the lunatic hopes striking a man repeatedly on the chin with one’s fist will be more taxing for the attacker than his victim. And the lighter the victim punches in the opening minutes, the better this method works, it appears, as Angulo moved his arms perfunctorily enough in round 1 to be salsa dancing, as if his hands were in motion to accessorize whatever his feet and hips did.

Not sure what folks said while y’all watched the fight, but round me were a trainer, a former amateur fighter, and a professional basketball player, and before 90 seconds were done in the main event, there was nothing but disbelief, expressed in phrases hopping about like “Are you kidding?” and “Really?” and “My God!” OK, the last was mine, and it came when I saw how uninhibited Alvarez was in his punching, how oblivious he was of Angulo’s volition, much less his power, as Alvarez stretched his arms wide as an eagle taking flight while throwing the hook and stepped into his cross like a pitcher delivering a full windup to the plate.

Then the second round came and Alvarez landed a right-uppercut lead, a punch that began near his right hipbone, traveled across his chest, traveled across Angulo’s chest, and struck “El Perro” flush on the inch of flesh just beneath his chin, all, before Angulo detected the punch and so much as blinked his consent. Should Tony Weeks have stopped the fight in the 10th? We’re not being serious. Boxing ought to incorporate a mercy rule like little league baseball: The moment one man is so overmatched his opponent has the chutzpah to throw, let alone land, a right-uppercut lead, the judges quietly rise from their stools and walk to the parking lot.

That a group of fans, deep in their cups, expressed displeasure with Weeks’ intervention is exactly no indictment of Weeks, and yet, there was Showtime’s postfight performer trying to get to the bottom of the malcontents’ discontent, and bless Weeks for giving Jim Gray the Major League Baseball treatment, whether it was for Pete’s sake or his own, leaving his new boss at NSAC to feign seriousness concerning Angulo’s incoherent protest afterwards. That’s not an English-as-second-language issue, either; Angulo speaks Spanish in a halting, laboring, frustrated way that argues convincingly his Saturday fight with Canelo should have been stopped in the fifth round of Angulo’s 2011 match with James Kirkland – a loss Angulo attributed to then-trainer Nacho Beristain’s distraction with training Juan Manuel Marquez.

The truth of what actually caused Angulo’s extended stay in a California immigration detention facility shortly after that Kirkland fight likely will never be known, though in our 20-minute conversation 15 months ago, he struck me as a person to whom life happens much more that what a violent criminal the detention facility was designed for. He has a nervous, high-pitched giggle, surprisingly effeminate, that disarms any inquisitor, and he’s quite good at sweet openers that lead quickly to acidic criticisms, as he did to Tony Weeks after Saturday’s match. Angulo might be punchy, but he’s far from stupid. There’s no way he or Virgil Hunter actually thinks he was on the precipice of anything but a terrible ending when Weeks’ mercy did what Hunter should have done rounds before, stopping the sort of winding-down vacuousness no fan pays to see, however much he enjoys the luxury of booing another’s consciousness afterward.

Mexico’s anointed star won by technical stoppage, Saturday, and nary a centile of Americans cared at all. Had Mexico’s anointed star put Angulo on a stretcher, in a coma, or in the ground, live from Las Vegas, today would feel considerably different for anyone reading this. Thank Tony Weeks for sparing us another such examination of conscience.

Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com

SAN ANTONIO – In this city’s Alamodome on Saturday, before Mexican Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. could whup Austin’s Bryan Vera and position himself for a match with undefeated Kazakhstani Gennady Golovkin, Mexican Orlando Salido took undefeated Ukrainian Vasyl Lomachenko to school and found him wanting, decisioning him by split scores of 113-115, 116-112, 115-113. Salido also forced upwards a number of tardily raised eyebrows about the propriety of his vacated title even being available to such an untested challenger.

What was lost on most, prefight, and understandably so, was the injury to Orlando Salido’s pride the Lomachenko match inflicted. There were other matters that needed consideration, of course: Vasyl Lomachenko was in pursuit of an ambiguous sort of history, one that came with editorial disclaimers galore of the sort that sparks proportionate debate among insiders as yawns among fans; the ongoing invasion of boxers from the former Soviet Union was set to continue; and Orlando Salido didn’t care enough to defend the WBO title, one he won from Orlando Cruz in 2013 after losing it to Mikey Garcia in 2013 after winning it from Juan Manuel “Juanma” Lopez in 2011, to come within 2 1/2 pounds of the featherweight limit.

For the second time in about as many months, one is put to remembering Mexican Marco Antonio Barrera’s 2001 victory over Englishman Naseem Hamed, or at least the disproportionate attention the business of boxing paid the sparkly object that was “Prince Naseem” at the expense of a former world champion and possessor of 52 professional victories. Lomachenko was polished to be another of our sport’s sparkly objects, a man of incomparable sparring prowess, one who emerged from behind an Iron Curtain that exists, anymore, solely in the collective imagination of what ageing generations still buck giddily round allusions to the Cold War.

Salido had earned his featherweight title, though, and if he was unable to retain it at Friday’s weighin that did not change what natural resentment he harbored for a rival and boxing infrastructure that allowed a man in only his second fight since turning “pro” the sort of title-challenging opportunity Salido was not afforded till his 34th prizefight. In some sense, it is not unlike what distrust and faint derision an autodidact feels for a degreed colleague, whichever their field. One man toiled in obscurity, often doing a number of coincidental other jobs in the hopes of someday having but one, learning his craft quietly and passionately, delaying indefinitely a wholly unguaranteed reward, while the other enjoyed an academy’s protection and comfort, longer in others’ expectations, yes, but much much shorter in risks.

If Salido and an army of other veteran fighters did not give voice to what resentment they surely felt for Lomachenko – going from headgear, spongy gloves and a cutiepie points system straight to a title challenge, via a 12-minute way station named Jose Ramirez in October, and getting a chance to wear a world championship belt without first navigating others’ elbows and heads and shoulders and skinned gloves and irregular calendars and hometown favoritisms – they surely felt the resentment in their collective marrow and cheered unsilently at home for Salido. Or as the Mexican journalist to my left said about the entire idea of the fight, after round 4, when it appeared Salido had a very real chance of beating Lomachenko: “¡Que insulto!”

That sense of insult was expressed best and most graciously by the aforementioned Juanma Lopez, a man twice vanquished by Salido, who nevertheless called Salido in his Alamodome dressing room before Saturday’s match.

“I’m with you 200-percent,” Juanma told his surprised former rival. “Go win the fight!”

And it was a fight for Salido, from the opening bell, in the sort of personal sense December’s match with American Adrien Broner was a fight for Argentine Marcos Maidana. Salido fouled Lomachenko continuously. He used a rangefinder hook to Lomachenko’s protective cup in the first round, and when that went undetected by referee Laurence Cole, he drove the knuckles of his right fist, bolo-style, at the front of Lomachenko’s left hipbone whenever Cole meandered over to break them. Salido’s awareness of Cole’s positioning was fantastic and very much better than Cole’s awareness of Salido’s positioning, which is a special sort of indictment when one considers Salido was extrapolating Cole’s position while calculating, at once, the acceleration and trajectory of another man’s onrushing fists.

Lomachenko had little idea what to do with Salido for much of the fight. The Ukrainian’s defense of Salido’s body blows, and later Salido’s mere feints, was a jackknifing sort of motion that involved throwing his abdomen backwards to where his spine had been and causing a forward-folding that anticipated no chance of retaliation. Salido might not have seen such amateurishness since he was a teenager in Sonora, if ever, but 54 previous fights told him one thing: This man is not in a position from which he can strike me. The American journalist to my right, happily enough my favorite Monday columnist, recognized early the surprising fact Lomachenko did not know how to use an uppercut to discourage Salido’s attack on his abdomen (and hips, and cup, and thighs, and right knee).

Lomachenko deserves plaudits, nevertheless, for comporting himself like a fighter, realizing in round 1 he was in a state where fights are often barely sanctioned things and reserving his complaints only for Salido’s most egregious infractions. After the fight, one that ended with Lomachenko very nearly stopping Salido, who made a four-limbed poncho of himself when hurt in the final 90 seconds, reveling in what lawlessness governed the small blue patch of Texas territory policed by Sheriff Cole, Lomachenko shrugged away questions of Salido’s tactics with an appeal to the profession both chose.

Sometime before Lomachenko’s 0 had to go, Saturday’s press section rippled with news that, mourning the recent death of his father, undefeated Kazakhstani middleweight titlist Gennady “GGG” Golovkin would be unable to make his unofficially scheduled next match, affording Julio Cesar Chavez Jr., in town primarily for Friday’s weighin, one chance at least to proctor for Golovkin the sort of stern test Salido gave Lomachenko. GGG’s legion of enthusiasts should welcome it.

Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com

SAN ANTONIO – Houston lightweight Juan “Baby Bull” Diaz, a former world champion, found across from him in Saturday’s sixth and final off-television match a motivated opponent with a workable gameplan and little respect for Diaz’s resume. It was no matter – Diaz dispatched of him with time anyway.

Diaz (39-4, 19 KOs) whacked and wore-down Mexican Gerardo Robles (18-13, 9 KOs), snatching his will and decisioning him easily if not quite easily as official scores indicated: 100-90, 99-91 and 99-91.

After a spirited first round from Robles, one in which the rambunctious Mexican alternately countered and led Diaz with surprising effect, Diaz came off his stool in the second and reestablished the proper order of things, lashing Robles with signature hooks and activity, and reducing Robles’ activity considerably. Once order was returned Diaz then went to work on Robles like so many once-strong men before him, breaking the Mexican’s spirit with constant activity and relentless violence.

Though Diaz never managed to imperil Robles – and though Diaz found his own legs stiffened in the seventh, in an exchange that sent the Houstonian to the canvas but was ruled a slip by referee Jon Schorle – Diaz closed space, controlled time, and generally took the fight away from his less-experienced opponent.

Diaz is not what he once was, no, and hasn’t been since his first fight with Juan Manuel Marquez, but he is still entertaining, and still acquitting himself honorably every time he steps in a prizefighting ring.

Saturday’s fifth match saw undefeated Mexican featherweight Oscar Valdez (9-0, 8 KOs) score a controversially concluded technical knockout victory over Dallas’ Samuel Sanchez (5-6-1, 1 KO), a limited opponent there for the beating, a beating that was concluded somewhat prematurely at 2:03 of round 3, much to Texas fans’ bemusement.

Local lightweight Ivan “Bam Bam” Najera acannot help himself, for there are two things in a prizefight he loves to do: Devour opponents’ right hands, and make an intense and intensely suspenseful match with every man he faces.

The fourth bout of Saturday’s eight-fight Alamodome card saw Najera (13-0, 9 KOs) win yet another firefight, this time with a fellow Texan, McAllen’s Angel Hernandez (8-2, 4 KOs), a man Najera dropped with a gorgeous counter left hook in round 1 and then got dropped by with a stiff right cross in round 2. And then after that, it was like every other Najera fight, with both men landing repetitively throughout, and Najera remaining undefeated by unanimous scores of 78-72, 77-73 and 77-73.

Tough and entertaining as he is, Najera continues down a path of making caveman-like spectacles that promise no longevity. He is aware of everything in and around a prizefighting ring, it seems – even taking time to blow a kiss to a ringside female journalist during Saturday’s fourth round – everything that is, except the glove an opponent wears on his right fist. Of right hands, Najera is seemingly oblivious, dropping his own left hand through every fight, and getting cracked continually by most every right thrown his way.

So long as he lasts, though, Najera is the stuff of which local attractions are made.

ALEX SAUCEDO VS. GILBERTO VENEGAS
Undefeated Oklahoma welterweight Alex Saucedo has stalled in his development. Once a darling of insiders, Saucedo has been moved perhaps too prudently and now finds himself getting hit far too hard by journeymen types who do not move backwards or go down when first struck.

Saturday’s second match saw Saucedo (13-0, 9 KOs) win most every minute of his six round match with Illinoisan Gilberto Venegas (12-13 4 KOs), and win a lopsided decision judges scored unanimously, 60-54, 60-54 and 59-55. But those scores tell nothing of the two or three flush Venegas left hands that snapped Saucedo’s head leftwards. This match was a step-up affair for Saucedo – and against a .500-fighter, that is something of an indictment.

UNDERCARD
Saturday’s third fight saw undefeated California welterweight Jose Zepeda (19-0, 17 KOs) go directly through overmatched South Carolinian Johnnie Edwards (15-7-1, 8 KOs), stopping him at 2:10 of round 2, in a fight that showed nothing but questionable merit.

The evening began with a competitive if light-hitting scrap between undefeated Houston featherweight Jerren Cochran (11-0, 4 KOs) and Mexican Aduato Gonzalez (11-10, 4 KOs), a match that saw Gonzalez dropped in round 5 and bleeding throughout though game to the end. Judges scored the match unanimously for Cochran: 59-54, 59-54 and 60-53.

Cochran, whose punches are accurate not hard, showed certain class but remained surprisingly susceptible to looping overhand rights thrown blindly by his limited opponent.

Opening bell rang on a cavernous Alamodome at 5:17 PM local time.

SAN ANTONIO – What may well prove to be the most suspenseful moment of Saturday’s Chavez Jr.-Vera II card happened a day early when, framed by a clever prop, Mexico’s former middleweight titlist “Son of the Legend” Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. made the super middleweight limit by a half pound. In so doing, Chavez demonstrated an often-absent professionalism, and returned the need to prove one’s professional merits to Austinite Bryan Vera’s corner.

Saturday’s fight, a rematch of Chavez’s controversial decision win in September, may well turn out to be a savage thrashing of a Texan in Texas. Unless Vera’s approach to defending has improved more than Chavez’s approach to weightloss, in the last five months, Vera is likely to need his corner’s help both early and late.

Early Friday afternoon at a makeshift stage outside the host venue Alamodome’s south entrance, an apparently motivated Chavez (47-1-1, 32 KOs) made weight easily, weighing 167 1/2 pounds and confirming, officially, an easy-make of the weight he foreshadowed hours earlier in a photo on his own Instagram page. Austin’s Bryan Vera (23-7, 14 KOs), who made an identical 167 1/2 and enjoyed a considerably larger organic following than Chavez – as opposed to a less-authentic contingent of Chavez fans waving overhead wooden noisemakers and cheering at a volume that belied their collective scarcity – looked on amusedly at a large placard the Chavez camp unveiled as Chavez took the scale.

“Voided” read the red stamp across the fake check that represented what $250,000 fine Chavez was contractually obligated to pay Vera in the event of Chavez’s missing weight, a thing he managed to do a few times before their first fight. “168 LBS. MAX” read the Memo portion in the bottom left corner of the fake check, and Chavez alternately smiled and grimaced ferociously as he enjoyed more of the good-natured banter that has marked the promotion of this rematch. If “Son of the Legend” and Vera share any feelings of mutual animosity, none was displayed Friday.

Less enthusiastic about his visit to the scale was co-main-event Mexican Orlando “Siri” Salido (40-12-2, 28 KOs), the WBO featherweight titlist whose main role Saturday was to provide undefeated Ukrainian Vasyl Lomachenko (1-0, 1 KO) a world title in only his career’s second match. Salido will not be able to serve that role, exactly, as after marking 128 1/4 pounds, more than two pounds over the featherweight limit, and looking dry and gray as a result of his having tried, Salido did not make any effort to lose any further weight, losing his title officially about 30 hours before he could have it beaten out of him by Lomachenko.

Other notables making weight Friday were Houston’s former lightweight world champion Juan “Baby Bull” Diaz (38-4, 19 KOs), who will fight Mexican Gerardo Robles (18-12, 9 KOs), and Oklahoma’s Alex “El Cholo” Saucedo (12-0, 9 KOs), who will in all probability decimate Illinois welterweight Gilberto Venegas (12-12, 4 KOs).

Finally, though, Saturday’s most probable decimation will come in its main event. While Chavez and Vera looked nearly comparable in size Friday afternoon, Chavez’s long frame is expected to add 15 or so pounds to it before opening bell rings on his rematch with Vera. Boxing is ever an unpredictable entity, but one hopes if Chavez is able to body Vera with his left shoulder early, cornering the Austinite and lashing him with overhand rights, Vera’s corner will not be stubborn or proud as its charge – and will stop the fight too early, rather than too late.

First bell is scheduled to ring at Alamodome at 5:00 PM CT. 15rounds.com will have full undercard coverage from ringside.

SAN ANTONIO – Mexican “Son of the Legend” Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. returns to this city sometime in the next few days, returns to a local scale sometime Friday afternoon, and returns to an Alamodome ring Saturday night against Austin’s Bryan Vera. The middle spectacle, Friday’s, should prove the week’s most suspenseful, and if Chavez somehow misses weight also its most tragic. If Chavez makes weight, evincing proper preparation for his rematch with the profoundly limited Vera, though, let us hope Saturday’s match does not end tragically.

But for that possibility, this is all a bit tired, isn’t it? The “Road to Chavez Jr. vs. Vera II” promotional piece felt obligatory as a husband’s trip to the mall. Gone are the mildly alluring touches of collaring whichever journalists were in town for whichever other event, to give aficionados a chance at least to see admired writers mention, in very short clips, why they think this fight may be compelling (with the flashed and handsome exception of our site’s intrepid editor at 1:21). Instead we get HBO’s commentary team rehashing what they said the night of the first fight with what they’ve digested since, in promotional spots that boast all the journalistic panache of actors from this season’s cast of “Dexter” holding their fists aloft while advising viewers they’ve been buzzed – and if that is a mashup, as the kids are calling it, of two different networks’ original programming concepts, it’s honestly arrived at because no enterprising mind should keep 2014’s thus-far-banal prizefighting offerings compartmentalized.

That promises to change, at least in spirit, Saturday, when this city opens its gracious arms to a rematch of a not particularly compelling 2013 match, one that finds Chavez once more collecting his father’s back wages from his promoter or his network or his Mexican fans, a collective that must be dwindling.

Into the curiousness of this arrangement meanders Junior, never hurried, marking promoter Top Rank’s return to a city whose venues it has not graced in the 23 months since Kelly Pavlik used the force to smash apart Aaron “Jedi” Jaco in the debut of Leija-Battah Promotions, an outfit that looked a temporary license-holding company for Las Vegas- and Los Angeles-based promoters, alike, before evolving, quickly and audaciously, into something more and better. What consequently drove the local promoter from Top Rank after one show is anyone’s guess, but it was a thing that did carry consequences, as Top Rank has since made medium-sized Texas shows in Houston, Dallas, Corpus Christi and Laredo but not Alamo City, a place where Son of the Legend began to become more than a mascot by decisioning John Duddy in 2010 at Alamodome, the venue where his father, The Legend, set an attendance record still standing.

There’s no telling how ticket sales might be going for Saturday’s show for a couple reasons: First, there isn’t an engaged local promoter endeavoring to recoup its large investment by blitzing inboxes with promotional tidbits, and second, with most of the money for this fight coming exclusively from HBO, there’s not nearly the same urgency there was round this time last year when, openly snubbing his proximate rival, Mexico’s Saul “Canelo” Alvarez declined to fight on Floyd Mayweather’s May undercard – firing the starter’s pistol on a frantic effort to find a venue, and accompanying local entrepreneur, to host Alvarez on short notice. What resulted, an April match between Alvarez and New Mexican Austin Trout, brought nearly 40,000 fans to Alamodome, an attendance figure that established in a bold stroke Alvarez’s coveted standing as Mexico’s most popular prizefighter. Alvarez then sprinkled cinnamon in his promoter’s gears in September, winning perhaps 90 seconds of his 36-minute match with Mayweather.

Displaying his father’s relentlessness and talent for smashing microscopic fissures into gaping wounds, then, Chavez Jr. snatched the corona right off Alvarez’s bowed redhead by icing his countrymen’s bruised national pride, 14 days later, with a victory over Bryan Vera that is remembered, still, for its preparation, savagery and workrate.

Oh, if ever a sentence were typed round derisive giggles.

Instead of doing something memorably good or even forgettably bad, Son of the Legend chose that inauspicious time to hold a pound-auction at the Friday weighin, having done the considerate thing, he explained for HBO’s “Road to” cameras, and informed the Vera camp ahead of time he would weigh, well, something higher than what 168 pounds he was legally obliged to make. Then Son of the Legend made a lionlike contender of Bryan Vera, a good guy of good work ethic and giver of a goodish impersonation of Colorado’s Mike Alvarado, were Alvarado not a once-great high school athlete.

Wait, Vera a “contender”? Yes, contender: As Son of the Legend reminded viewers, apropos of his figurative hunger – unmistakable in its modesty for Junior’s literal hunger – he was a “world champion” once, wearing proudly the garish, gold-and-whipped-pea strap the WBC stole from lineal middleweight champion Sergio Martinez in 2011, making Chavez technically a champion and making Vera technically a contender – cute a reminder as any that Vera outworked television’s original “Contender,” Sergio Mora, in August 2012 at the converted Alamodome venue called Illusions Theater, in a Leija-Battah-promoted rematch of Vera’s finest hour, a controversial 2011 decisioning of Mora in Fort Worth, an hour not nearly fine as Vera’s decisioning of Chavez Jr. in a September match official judges, alone, scored widely for Son of the Legend.

We circle back to Saturday, then, meandering round the subject like a pothead in peach underwear doing living-room laps for roadwork – so great is his hunger as world champion – to address briefly a match that should not be competitive, and, one prays, will not end tragically for Vera. Whatever long list of bad habits Vera’s trainer Ronnie Shields credits himself with red-penning from the Austinite’s dossier, he sure as hell did nothing for Vera’s plunging right hand, a hand Vera holsters at his waist before throwing either glove at opponents. That flaw portends nothing good for Vera.

I’ll take Chavez, then, KO-11, in a terribly lopsided spectacle even Junior’s legion of detractors will wish had been stopped after nine.

Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com

HOUSTON – Returned to Texas’ largest city and the fourth-largest city in our country, a day before a day we celebrate the father of our country’s birthday by acknowledging all the presidents’ birthdays in a single day because federal holidays, if mismanaged, might force the private sector to pay time-and-a-half, I looked across boxing’s landscape, barren yet again, and thought making a reciprocal tribute of sorts to a tribute of sorts was a workable idea. To wit:

This city’s Museum of Fine Arts’ “Age of Impressionism” is an exceptionally good exhibition that has little to do with boxing but may be instructive in its parallels to boxing writing, a discipline that requires a weekly entry even though nary a meaningful thing is yet to happen in prizefighting this year, as we enter 2014’s eighth week. And so, afforded a chance to celebrate Presidents Day, I made a Friday decision to spend Saturday and Sunday at Museum of Fine Arts’ outstanding exhibition, one I initially partook of in December and was prompted to revisit by a guest piece Kelsey McCarson wrote for us Tuesday.

In “Juan Diaz and the Age of Impressionism,” McCarson juxtaposes Juan Diaz and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, among others, in a way I’d not considered, or at least not quickly as I’d considered juxtaposing McCarson and other fine young boxing writers, Jimmy Tobin in particular, with mid-19th-century Paris’ Salon de Refusés, a groundbreaking show in 1863 that came about when works by Impressionism’s predecessors – Gustave Courbet, Édouard Manet and Camille Pissarro, most notably – got rejected by the Paris Salon, the French state’s annual recognition of its best painters, and held an exhibition of rejects that was successful enough to erect a bridge between an academic style Manet mastered and an entirely new movement whose greatest practitioner, Claude Monet, initially found himself accused by Manet of stealing the great man’s name. McCarson and others who write regularly and seriously about our beloved sport, and take the craft of writing seriously, have been denied entry in the Boxing Writers Association of America, our craft’s equivalent of the Salon, and might be well advised to form their own association of rejects – an idea McCarson toys with on Twitter.

This city’s Juan Diaz remains one of my most favorite fighters I’ve covered, though I cannot think of a painter or movement to whom I would readily liken his style. He’s not an Impressionist, he’s not experimental enough, and he’s not an academic or Renaissance type, either, as his use of offense as defense offends purists’ sensibilities. He might be a Modernist or Surrealist but for his never effecting stylistically radical devices; he’s not endeavoring to interpret anything so much as strike his opponent often as he can.

The worst part of visiting an art museum is its patrons. Most are not interested in seeing art so much as being seen seeing art – Kelsey McCarson and his wife, of course, being noble exceptions – and the audio tours and white-plate explanations museums proffer do not palliate this. Viewing others viewing “The Age of Impressionism” shows all too clearly what is wrong with fields like art history, where future curators expend many times more time memorizing biography than practicing technique.

What makes unique the Impressionist painters, Monet and Eugène Boudin, especially, but also Renoir when he is best, as he is in MFAH’s current exhibition, is not that they painted outside or quickly or with fewer layers than Renaissance masters but that they offered an original rebuttal to the invention of photography, not an effort to imitate it. Perhaps the best piece in MFAH’s exhibition is Monet’s “Spring in Giverny,” a landscape done in light pastels. It is best, and Monet is his movement’s best artist, because it improves proportionate to the time one spends before it.

Writing about Renoir’s “Sunset at Sea,” McCarson partially captures why: “Isn’t this completely unlike any picture even the most advanced camera could help you collect?” It is exactly that because it is binocular, using the requisite imperfection of images pieced together with data from two different points, à la human sight, and not monocular, as photography is. Impressionism captures a moment, and in any moment, a human eye is unable to see with its fovea, the part that perceives fine detail (the part of the eye with which you are able to read no more than two of these words at a time, regardless of font), more than a comparatively tiny percentage of what its eye perceives. All the rest is perceived in the periphery and necessarily coarse.

Human peripheral vision is marvelous and comprises what stimuli necessarily compose our senses of things. Peripheral vision, and the brain’s handling of its coarse data, are what the Impressionists were after, and for this reason, as one’s eyes fatigue, causing their neurons to misfire, the best of Monet and Renoir’s works begin to dance on the canvas, coming to life the same way, and for the same reason, Leonardo’s “Mona Lisa” smiles when you look her in the eyes but not the mouth.

The first work in MFAH’s “Age of Impressionism,” somewhat ironically, is a large portrait by William Adolphe Bouguereau, an academic painter whose later work “Admiration” received the highest award in the 1900 Paris Salon, 37 years after the first Salon de Refusés. And today, Claude Monet’s name is known even to philistines, while Bouguereau’s is lost to all but connoisseurs – something the BWAA’s membership committee might note.

Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrrys.email (at) gmail.com

SAN ANTONIO – Albuquerque welterweight Fidel Maldonado has the bling – sparkly purple trunks, gold trimmed, matching tights and safety-green boots – and occasional flashes of power, but ultimately a Monday Night Boxing main event in a Cowboys Dancehall bullring will likely mark the peak of his televised accomplishments.

If that is the case, Maldonado’s (18-2, 15 KOs) corner stoppage of Puerto Rican John Nater (13-5, 10 KOs), effectively a replacement for the man who replaced Maldonado’s original opponent, Steve “Two Pound” Forbes, should lead the highlight reel of Maldonado’s career, with Monday’s conclusion – referee Jon Schorle stopping the match before the fifth round of a Leija-Battah Promotions main event – being the most of what Maldonado can ask for.

After some foul-filled opening moments Monday, Maldonado clinched Nater then brought savagery his way in round 3, whupping the Puerto Rican in clinches and catching him with a surprisingly effective left-cross counter, thrown from the New Mexican’s southpaw stance, in the round’s final minute. The fourth saw more of the same, including a second trip to the blue mat for Nater, whose corner sagaciously concluded matters before any more damage might be done.

Maldonado appears three parts glittery special effects for every one part fighting prowess, but with his promoter needing to fill Monday night slots, there’s no reason to think he’ll not get a few more moments on Fox Sports 1.

ERROL SPENCE VS. PETER OLOUCH
While the rest of his 2012 Olympic teammates seemingly have stagnated in the professional ranks, Texas welterweight Errol Spence (11-0, 9 KOs) has continued to improve, throwing his punches with greater leverage, bettering his footwork and hitting to hurt, not merely score points. African Peter Olouch (12-7-2, 6 KOs) found out all about Spence’s capacity to hurt, in Monday’s co-main event, getting knocked cold at 1:39 of round 4.

Spence attacked Olouch from the match’s opening round, using well-leveraged punches thrown from his southpaw stance to concuss the lanky African with most each blow that landed. After sending Olouch to his knees in the first minute of the fourth, Spence finished the job with a left hybrid cross-uppercut, surprising as it was concussing for being so concussing. Olouch dropped, and no 10-count was needed, though assistance was needed for Olouch, about three minutes’ worth, before the African regained his feet and left the ring of his own power.

TERRELL GAUSHA VS. GEORGE SOSA
Cleveland middleweight and former U.S. Olympian Terrell Gausha (13-2, 6 KOs) fought in Monday’s first televised match and looked decisively mediocre while winning a one-sided decision over Pennsylvania journeyman boxer George Sosa (13-6, 13 KOs).

After an opening few rounds in which Gausha did not succeed at imposing or defending himself, in the fourth, after being buckled by Sosa’s aggression more than his accurate punching, Gausha landed a number of stout punches, too, taking advantage of a suddenly squeamish Sosa. The Pennsylvanian,-though, was squeamish for a reason: His left glove had slipped off his fist and had to be refitted and retaped.

Once the men returned to even terms, Gausha was more sound than fury, yelping as he threw power punches that affected Sosa only slowly, and the fight devolved into an attritional affair with Gausha hurling inaccurate punches that occasionally landed, and Sosa looking forward exclusively to the final bell.

Official scores all went to Gausha: 80-72, 80-72 and 79-73.

Gausha appears to have increased his muscle mass and perhaps improved his conditioning, but the fact remains he does not appear to have improved as a prizefighter. He has eschewed the activity he employed effectively in the amateurs to load-up on power punches as a pro. It is not an effective tack for him to have taken, as he lacks the speed and accuracy to deploy such power.

Undefeated since turning professional or otherwise, Terrell Gausha fights more amateurishly today than he did as an amateur.

TRAVELL MAZION VS. JUSTO VALLECILLO
Before that, Austin junior welterweight Travell “Black Magic” Mazion (7-0, 6 KOs), a student of noted trainer Ann Wolfe’s and a man who, standing over six feet tall and weighing round 140 pounds, looks like a young, inexperienced, and perhaps anorexic Thomas Hearns, made decisive work of local opponent Justo Vallecillo (6-16, 3 KOs), stopping the wholly overmatched Texan with a trio of righthands at 1:37 of round 3.

Immediately following Mazion’s victory, he and trainer Wolfe danced a series of celebratory verses in the center of the ring, choosing to celebrate Monday evening before setting to work on Mazion’s habit of floating his chin in retreat, one hopes, on Tuesday morning.

JOSEPH RODRIGUEZ VS. JESUS GARZA
Monday’s fifth match saw local undefeated junior lightweight Joseph “Texas Mongoose” Rodriguez (5-0, 2 KOs) beat in rugged style fellow Texan Jesus Garza (2-4-1), of Dallas, by official scores of 40-36, 40-36 and 40-35. Rodriguez may not punch with particular ferocity, but he brings physicality and activity enough, along with a nifty tendency to throw a pivoted right uppercut when inside, to make fellow San Antonians cheer him without fear of disappointment.

Attendance was stellar in Cowboys Dancehall bullring for a Monday night.

SAN ANTONIO – A small band of boxing media and bystanders gathered Sunday afternoon near an entrance of the Home Depot Center in Alamo Heights, an incorporated city in this city’s central-north quadrant, to see the weigh-in for Monday’s “Golden Boy Live!” show in the bullring of a local cowboy dance hall named, unerringly, Cowboys Dancehall. At least one of us was there because a Saturday blast email from Leija-Battah Promotions promised Paulie Malignaggi would host. Yet there was Jesse James Leija playing emcee.

Halfway through the roster for Monday, there was a slight rustling, and then, sporting a black sweatsuit of some crushed fabric or other, along strolled the 2013 winner of the Boxing Writers Association of America’s award for excellence in broadcast journalism, an award named after Sam Taub, a fellow New York commentator. Malignaggi’s eyes bulged in the nearest thing he has to a signature look, and his gestures, just as customarily, pushed through whatever it is that delimits energy and anxiety. Leija hurriedly handed boxing’s best broadcast journalist a microphone – whereupon Malignaggi announced he didn’t know anything about hosting the event, he’d just got off a plane, and he was exhausted.

It was a frank declaration with a staccatissimo delivery, and vulnerable. Just like Malignaggi’s best commentary.

The very thing that makes Malignaggi’s career knockout ratio slight is, in large part, what makes his insights on the air timely and exceptional. Malignaggi does not punch hard, and he did not punch particularly hard even before his chronically injured hands were so prone to injury. His smallish frame and surgically reconstructed right fist, both, contribute to his acclivity for icing opponents, especially at the championship level, but they also evince a courage that is easy, quite easy, too easy, to miss after a Malignaggi promotion comes to its end with an opening bell – after he finishes playing a caricaturist’s Yankee Fan, and sets about swapping blows, usually in a weirdly tassled trunk or eccentrically coifed do.

If journalistic compulsion has stayed me from ever exactly cheering against Malignaggi, I confess, it has hardly strained its binds in keeping me from cheering him on. Not until I prepared in January for a magazine piece that had nothing to do with Paulie Malignaggi did I pause long enough to realize how much my distaste for his pre/postfight persona had kept me from properly appreciating a fighting style every bit courageous, in its way, as any volume puncher’s.

Malignaggi needs more wiles than even that guy, really; he doesn’t move forward into opponents’ space and discomfit them. He courts their aggression even while knowing he hasn’t a punch, or reliable enough hands, necessarily, to keep-off him men who, first and foremost, endure human fists expertly hurled. Malignaggi must read other men’s bodies, and compile that data and send its resulting queries to his repository of foiling techniques, and incorporate whatever algorithm returns him, many times faster than a man possessed of a weighty punch. When he’s on the air watching what aggression he has watched for tens of thousands of rounds in gyms, he can’t help himself: He sees what happens many times faster than men who’ve never had their consciousnesses on the line in front of millions, and he says what he sees many times clearer than other pugilist-broadcasters.

Malignaggi is a talker, a social creature, a man who likes to be seen and talked to and challenged to explain himself; he is comfortable in a public role – he talks over an interviewer in a voracious desire to assert a new point or clarify an old one, in a way few prizefighters do – he wants to share himself and his mind. This is much of the rest of his talent for broadcasting; most fighters, whatever they tell themselves about their prescript and preheated shtick, know from experience in elementary schools they have little to contribute but autobiography, and untimely reticence recurs when their microphones greenlight.

Malignaggi, conversely, must be quieted – he has lots to share and a desire to share it – and in a very short amount of time, he has married this need to quiet himself with what proclivities for abnegation mark a man who makes weight to make money, and made himself, according to my peers in the BWAA, boxing’s very best broadcaster in 2013.

When I spoke to Malignaggi last month, the usable material of our interview didn’t exceed five minutes – still plenty – but we spoke for 47 in the sort of meandering way social creatures do, unscripted, vulnerable, free to differ in good faith, and it caused me to conclude our conversation by imparting an anecdote well-suited to close this column.

In 2008 I had the good fortune of exercising in the same L.A. Boxing gym in which cruiserweight contender B.J. Flores trained. Flores shares much of Malignaggi’s garrulousness, but where Malignaggi’s upbringing, New York, liberates him to disagree with a man even if he doesn’t dislike him, Flores’ Midwestern upbringing makes him more likely to be agreeable, and this makes his commentary, at times, vibrate with the low-growling hum of salesmanship. Both, though, are men who, unlike their peers, could have succeeded in fields where intellectual merit civilly delivered composed their essential parts. Apropos of a recent Malignaggi outburst – Texas judging maybe? – I told Flores in concise a way as I could muster I did not like anything about Paulie Malignaggi, and the following interaction resulted.

B.J.: Have you ever met Paulie?
Bart: No.
B.J.: You need to meet him.
Bart: Why would I need to do that?
B.J.: It’s impossible to meet Paulie and not like him. He’s a good man. Meet him.

It took seven years to prove, but I’m happy to say Flores was right. Congratulations to Paulie Malignaggi on winning the 2013 Sam Taub award for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism.

Bart Barry can be reached via bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com

The meaningful part of American welterweight “Vicious” Victor Ortiz’s odd career ended Thursday night in an off-Broadway show with an off-Broadway opponent, about seven miles off Broadway, when Ortiz’s vicious tendencies got him corkscrewed in the blue mat of Brooklyn’s Barclays Center by a second-round right hook from Brooklyn southpaw Luis Collazo, while Ortiz’s own late-arriving right hook was still arriving. It was an ending sad in its own goofy, unpredictable way.

It was not a symmetrical close to a career that has made little sense over the years, but it was a close just the same – for a welterweight titlist does not need a Fight of the Year to best Andre Berto, go winless for the next three years, get his mouth wired shut by a junior welterweight, and then get penanced by Luis Collazo, without his empire needs erecting outside the fight game.

Ortiz was once the brightest prospect in the brightest stable in boxing; he shared top billing with Juan Manuel Lopez seven years ago on a ShoBox card in Phoenix’s Dodge Theater, a card whose photos were accompanied by a caption that read “Top Rank’s New 1-2 Punch.” Lopez, a man later described as a “world class dissipater” by someone who’d know, had a comparatively fulfilling career, despite shortening it with hard living, while Ortiz got himself alternately remembered for telling Staples Center he did not deserve to get beat up, getting his lights vengefully cut by Floyd Mayweather, getting his jaw broken by Josesito Lopez, and getting his face lubed while dancing with the stars.

Ortiz inadvertently leaped, Julio Cesar Chavez Jr.-like, from a dear place in aficionados’ hearts to a ridiculous one. He should not have said what he did to HBO’s viewers after finagling his way out a 2009 match with Argentine Marcos Maidana, telling them that, comfortable as he was with prizefighting’s rewards, he did not approve of its risks, but he never recanted, remaining defiantly defiant about it with those whose ticket and pay-per-view purchases enriched him, saying recently as March: “Sorry I’m not sorry.”

He speared Floyd Mayweather a couple years after losing to Maidana then kept apologizing till Mayweather punched him to make him stop, scoring for “Money May” a second knockout since 2005, and leading to a historic conference call in which an as-yet-unrehabilitated Oscar De La Hoya endeavored to out-crazy Ortiz’s loony then-manager, Rolando Arellano, while Ortiz, a transplanted-Kansan surfer, played the dude-of-reason before a disbelieving press corps, a member of which would live-tweet the call was “the worst idea in the history of bad ideas.” Nine months after that debacle, Ortiz auditioned for a chance to make a superstar of Mexican Saul Alvarez, returning to Staples Center, where he never failed to draw, for a match with a four-loss 140-pounder named “Josesito.” Lopez broke Ortiz’s jaw and led him to a hospital-bed revelation about building the “Vicious” brand away from boxing, with a 1-2 combo of celebrity dancing and skincare endorsement.

That was the last time I spoke with Victor. It was a 27-minute phone interview for a 500-word magazine piece about his pending appearance on “Dancing with the Stars” – an interview noteworthy for several reasons, the most of which was its promptness and courteousness. Ortiz’s small management team scheduled an early morning phone call, replying to an initial inquiry almost immediately, and Ortiz not only answered the call on its first ring but did so after doing roadwork without a fight on his 2013 calendar. Ortiz was not merely honest in the sincere way we tell celebrities we want them – “real” being the catchall modifier so prized by kids these days – but lucid, friendly and eloquent.

I mentioned, by way of introduction, a weighin-day bus ride he and I shared to Alamodome in 2007, and he cheerily recalled our conversation and his opponent’s name, before imparting the 20-year-old kid I’d sat beside that afternoon in San Antonio would likely be “disappointed” in his career, though supportively so: “He’d probably be like, ‘Hey man, you’re doing all right for yourself.’”

He sure wasn’t doing all right for himself Thursday at Barclays Center across from Luis Collazo, a man able to stop Ortiz (29-4-2) quicker than any opponent since Collazo stopped Richard Heath (1-1) nine years ago. Perhaps that does not set the hands on the Collazo clock properly as this will: In September, fighting in a San Antonio dancehall bullring, Collazo won a 10-round decision over someone named Alan Sanchez that was so aesthetically displeasing a 20-year boxing columnist on press row not only called it “one of the five worst fights I’ve covered” but felt strongly enough about the matter to impart this very judgment to Collazo himself, who, despite being covered nearly to the centimeter with tattoos, still affected sheepishness in a reply treating his quality of opposition.

Both men in that exchange, as it happened, were right. Collazo proved quite capable of excitement against Ortiz, reminding viewers of the excellent spectacle he made with Andre Berto five years ago, round about the time Berto made his first metaphorical appearance on posters that read “Protected Child” – pinups on which the Haitian Olympian remained until Victor Ortiz unpinned him in 2011. Maybe it was symmetrical, in a b-level-irony sort of way, then, Collazo was the man to end his promoter’s hopes of making Ortiz once more Showtime-ready.

It is tempting to treat Ortiz’s career as a cautionary tale, with its initial precociousness, manufactured homeless-in-Kansas narrative, promoter hopping, loopy outbursts and spectacular losses. Such temptations should be foregone, though. Ortiz came in every fight a picture of fitness, gave his version of events publicly in unfiltered a way as possible, and never, not once, made a boring prizefight – or as his 2007 self might have said through his 2013 self: “Hey man, you did all right.”

Bart Barry can be reached via bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com

Saturday in the little room at Madison Square Garden, Oxnard’s Mikey Garcia made another admirably professional showing, this time in the super featherweight division, against another wholly outmatched opponent, this time in the form of Mexican Juan Carlos “Miniburgos” Burgos, on HBO – a network quite supportive of Garcia. This match readied the table for a war in the summertime between Garcia, a technically flawless counterpuncher, and the Cuban chloroform dispenser named Yuriorkis Gamboa.

We’ve been here before, haven’t we? HBO is aflutter with the possibility of matching an undefeated marquee name from the Top Rank stable with the fantastically flawed but still undefeated Gamboa, a prizefighter whom the network has been building for some while now with enthusiasm irregular as Gamboa’s chin. It was four years ago, nearly to the day, on Jan. 23, 2010, that HBO’s “Boxing After Dark” program featured Gamboa on the same card as undefeated Puerto Rican Juan Manuel Lopez. Gamboa laid waste to Rogers Mtagwa, who’d brought “Juanma” within a sip of drowning in the deep waters of their title match four months prior, Lopez retired Steven Luevano, and HBO aroused its viewership with overtures of Gamboa-Lopez in the very near future.

Bob Arum, head of Top Rank, promoter of both men, addressed HBO’s anxious viewership thusly: “I know what people want, and they can go f–k themselves.”

Lopez and Gamboa continued to circle one another, recycling opponents. Then in March 2011, Gamboa solicited from poor Jorge Solis a concession no one, certainly not Manny Pacquiao, hit hard as Gamboa. The moment was ripe for Lopez-Gamboa to not-happen for a second year. What suspenseful bleating the non-event was about to incite, though, got muted 21 days later when Lopez got flattened by Orlando Salido and all thoughts of what Arum anticipated would be “the biggest featherweight fight of all time” instead moved inexorably toward a day when, in an attempt to make Gamboa’s 2012 match with someone named Michael Farenas enticing, rapper-cum-promoter Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson would chant unevenly over background vocals while being lowered from Top Rank’s video apparatus above an MGM Grand ring erected for what became Juan Manuel Marquez’s razing of Manny Pacquiao and Top Rank’s 2013 top line.

Since a Lopez fight with Gamboa by then made no sense, especially not after Juanma again got stopped in his 2012 rematch with Salido, Top Rank seasoned Lopez for a feeding to Mikey Garcia – a young fighter already supplanting his temperamental stablemate, Nonito Donaire, as the future of Top Rank, even before the flashy Filipino got undressed by a Cuban named Guillermo Rigondeaux who is much, much better than his fellow islander Gamboa. This brought things limping to Dallas in June where Juanma took the scale on a makeshift dais in American Airlines Center’s concourse and looked a perfect 125 1/4-pound feast for Garcia.

Ah, but Mikey’d been doing some off-menu grazing and missed the match’s contracted weight by a clean two pounds. For once Arum was sincerely irate. He sat silently in the middle seat of the first row of chairs, shoulders hunched and so tight – as John Updike once put it – if you’d have tapped him he’d have rung like a gong. One of Top Rank TV’s microphoned models filmed Father’s Day greetings onstage while Garcia ostensibly tried to make weight, and when she misread Arum’s first refusal to say something mirthfully paternal to her network’s viewers and asked again, she got a reply whose words and temperature were akin to Arum’s January 2010 greetings to HBO viewers.

Garcia came back a couple hours later, dry as he’d left, signed a piece of paper and left again. Arum announced the main event cancelled, and like that, much sheen came off the Garcia bust. Mikey stretched Juanma in four the following night – the fight back on! – then stopped Roman Martinez in Corpus Christi five months later.

Garcia is no longer held in the esteem he was previously, which is neither unfair nor particularly tragic, as more than a few aficionados looked askance at the bizarre stoppage of his fight against Orlando Salido a year ago – when the fight was called-off and sent cardsward because Mikey’s nose was broken, an occurrence more common in prizefights than goals in soccer games. Saturday’s dull decision over “Miniburgos,” now 0-1-2 in his last 18 months, did little to restore Garcia’s luster.

Enter Gamboa. There probably could not be a better opponent for Top Rank’s Garcia-restoration purposes than “El Ciclon de Guantanamo” – a guy with no discernible defense, reflexes not quite quick as he thinks they are, and hours of titillating knockout-reel footage for HBO’s documentarians to mine. By the time “Countdown to ‘Gamboa’s Guantanamo: Extraordinary Rendition’” completes its fifth replay and opening bell rings, casual fans, glancing with anticipatory horror through partially covered eyes, will be both admiring and surprised Little Mikey was courageous enough even to toe the line for a second round. And when Garcia starches Gamboa in the later rounds – and likely not late as we think – when he finishes a job most of Gamboa’s recent opponents have started, we’ll have little choice but to admit Garcia is what we secretly hoped he was, and begin accusing Floyd Mayweather Jr. of ducking him.

The serious folks in the room, meanwhile, will bite our tongues, knowing contemporary boxing could still do much worse for its face than Mikey Garcia.

Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com

SAN ANTONIO – Thursday, Mexican “Son of the Legend” Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. strode across the Alamodome stage to a podium that would conceal, for once, a fairly lean version of Junior, a version of him that surprisingly looked within 20 pounds of his next match’s contracted fighting weight, six weeks out, a match that will be a rematch with Austin’s Bryan Vera, a man who likely deserved a better result than what he received in September and will more than likely deserve better than the savage beating he collects March 1.

“And thank you, Texas,” Chavez said in accented English, to close. “Because this my home too.”

Chavez appeared chastened. Years back, Argentine Sergio Martinez, incensed his WBC belt was unfastened from his waste and bestowed upon Chavez by the late Jose Sulaiman – a man ever more beloved in Mexico, for codifying the country’s importance in prizefighting, than in the United States – arrived at a postfight press conference in Houston after Chavez beat up and beat down Peter Manfredo who, personably enough, indulged bystanders’ curious requests to hear him say “fugettaboutit” after he was stopped and announced a stop to his career (a retirement that lasted, stereotypically enough, nary a twelvemonth), to challenge Chavez in his finest hour, and Martinez was uncharacteristically dismissive too. He asked rhetorically if he wouldn’t knock Chavez out easily. At the time it seemed quite probable.

Fewer than 10 months later, Chavez nearly ended Martinez’s reign as a world champion, coming preposterously close to becoming the linear middleweight champion, affixing himself to a bloodline of Marvelous Marvin Hagler and Carlos Monzon and Sugar Ray Robinson and Harry Greb, in a fight that changed both men, shortening Martinez’s career and the lucid years of Chavez’s life. Lost in the justifiable contempt aficionados reserve for Chavez is any consideration for the consequences of the sustained whupping he took from Martinez’s fists, and the incredible number of punches he took square and unmolested to his cranium – each punch nearly the force of what single blow put Paul Williams prostrate on a blue mat in Atlantic City.

Chavez wishes to be taken seriously, by himself and others, one hears from men who should know, and certainly should know better if it is not so – men who’ve seen, fallen victim to, or perpetrated, every hustle yet known in our beloved sport. Chavez does take boxing seriously, they say. If this is so, and again some suspension of disbelief is required, he may now be suffering from a combination of genetics and a damaged brain.

Boxing has rarely come upon a more naturally unsympathetic figure than Chavez; Adrien Broner and Floyd Mayweather, of course, have as large a percentage of attendees at their matches cheering their demise, yes, but those men worked hard to cultivate odious public personalities, and those men, too, remain for the most part popular within their own ethnicity. Chavez, conversely, now holds a unique place in boxing’s landscape as a man who, through no overt effort of his own – through no detectable effort of any kind, one might say – has transformed an entire ethnic enclave, Mexican-American, from a default sort of projected affection, the son of my hero is my friend, to another thing entirely. Chavez is aware of this even without his father reminds him, though Chavez Sr. appears the kind of dad who might be willing to grunt just such a suggestion to a filial epigone like Junior, privately.

Senior’s popularity has a variety of sources, but an occasionally overlooked one is historical: Mexico collapsed in an epic sort of way in 1994 – and such a collapse injured cruelly a proud and surprisingly innocent country, one whose residents, when called upon by their government to help La Patria recover its economic footing, sent gifts and sundries varied as live chickens to Mexico City – and for the next number of years, Chavez Sr. was, as one Mexican journalist put it at what became Chavez Sr.’s final fight, “the only thing that went right for us.” Junior was a part of that Mexico more than Americans, and most Mexicans, care to realize.

Watch the ringwalk that preceded Chavez Sr.’s worst professional moment to that point, his official draw in 1993 with Pernell “Sweat Pea” Whitaker, a singular boxer whom shot commentator Ferdie Pacheco continued to call “Peewee” through the pay-per-view broadcast. Who sits atop one of the entourage’s shoulders, looking down on his father while the legend sings along to the Mexican national anthem before a record-setting crowd in this city’s then-four-month-old Alamodome? It is Junior’s unmistakable chubby-cheeked visage one sees, a face portending a lifetime of weight struggles regardless of profession, spreading tentatively beneath a red headband like his dad’s.

“Son of the Legend” has been part of boxing his entire life, the number of those memories a fair auditor would call euphoric barely outnumbering those classifiable as euphoria’s opposite, and he understands, as Freddie Roach recognized in the first week as his trainer, “the geometry of the ring.” He probably believes he beat Bryan Vera in September, potshotting him the way Sergio Martinez amassed a lopsided lead on Chavez himself the year before, and knowing, as television didn’t show, Chavez’s punches were many times harder and flusher than Vera’s. He also knows how many people hold him in contempt and knows he now deserves it in a way he probably did not before. He is much better than Bryan Vera, and if he is motivated and conditioned – and again, he appeared reasonably trim Thursday – he may put a tragic type of beating on Vera, who for all his activity, is not nearly strong or elusive enough to dissuade Chavez in an emergency.

For once Texas should not worry about judges but ringside medical officials willing to intervene if Vera’s corner comports itself too courageously on March 1.

Bart Barry can be reached via bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com

SAN ANTONIO – This week I began painting glass jugs instead of writing. Reading, socializing, Twitter, documentaries, laundry – all of these, it turned out, were not effectively enough keeping me from writing, despite many years of service in the enterprise. A vigorous new distraction came to the fore. The perfect week for it, too; a 2,000-word cover feature due in a few days, novel 8 stalled at 92,000 words, and this column needing to be written, read, colored, shortened, lengthened, and read thrice more.

A local supermarket put its organic apple juice in exquisite glass bottles some months back, bottles so lovely I could not bring myself to refuse them, and so they accumulated on the counter till a visiting friend told me about a YouTube video of a bachelorette party – there’s your muse! – that had colorful acrylics poured and baked in mason jars. Now a lengthy process is hatched, a tidy sum is sunken, and bottles five and six sit drying as these words happen.

“If anything can stop you from writing, let it.” That is about the best advice I’ve yet come across concerning this craft. I read it somewhere and don’t recall who said it, so I’ll put it in quotes and attribute it away from myself. Then I’ll google it and find it was in a book that attributed the quote to “an editor named John Dodds.” It’s advice I occasionally impart and more often credit myself with imparting to younger writers.

It speaks to the compulsion required to do this thing, it speaks to the lack of affirmation, it speaks to how disproportionately longer it takes to write something than it does to read it, and quite often in an inverse sort of proportion to that disproportion; the worst writing, what often takes the longest to endure reading, gets written fastest, which is not nearly tragic, from a writer’s perspective, as that proportion’s inverse and what it says to writers who whale away at their prose, flensing it till nary a transition remains from one idea to the next, then go back over it thrice more, under the auspices of once more, before reading it aloud, sighing, shrugging and filing it – triumph free.

That is not the worst of it usually. The next morning is the worst of it, when the writer first sees his inadequate effort through the eyes of a reader and panics at how terrible it is. A few hours pass, an email or two comes in, if he’s lucky, and he’s able to decide it’s not quite awful as imagined. By midweek, in fact, he’s often forgiven himself, which is good because the idea for next week’s piece is already overdue and the next deadline is bearing down, as it will do. A few weeks later, or anyway at year’s end, the writer returns to that inadequate effort of his, and if he truly worked at it when he wrote it, he is surprised how good it was. That leads inevitably and instantly to a brand new horror: What happened to me? why can’t I write that well anymore? will I ever recover that guy’s vocabulary or insights?

It’s good a time as any to write this column because it’s the time of year members of the Boxing Writers Association of America try to determine what pieces of theirs to submit for the BWAA’s writing contest, and putting aside the legitimacy of any contest that judges art, those writers who do the craft right, those writers admired by their peers, should have to struggle with this choice because they wrote hard as they could every time and didn’t write a few pieces much better than others to target hypothetical judges for contest time.

The other night, haunted by calls I’d not made for that long feature and questions I’d procrastinated preparing for interviews because prepared questions were my trigger for making the calls whose making I dreaded – which, as an aside, is an amateurish mistake, and an idiocy, and thrice the idiocy from any writer who has commented often enough to remember: “I’m always glad I’ve made the call by the time I hang-up” – I closed the dark screen of my laptop, set it on the sofa and found “Deceptive Practice,” a documentary about prestidigitator Ricky Jay, and marveled at his ability and willingness to spend 14 daily hours shuffling a deck of cards. No sooner, though, does a craftsman marvel at another’s compulsion than he begins a spiral of self-loathing at his own comparative half-assery.

A month ago, during fightweek for Maidana-Broner, I had the pleasure of walking home from the Friday weighin with my favorite Monday columnist, and when conversation turned to the nature of column writing, somewhere right about Houston Street & Soledad, we began interrupting one another and completing the other guy’s sentences about the tariff a column like this exacts from its writer. The collapsed marketplace for good writing – how much did you pay to read this? – takes each day more of what remains of the dilettantes, leaving mostly the quixotic and compelled.

This craft is not about having “something to say”; that’s a cliché and simplification made by people who couldn’t do what we do. It’s about other, better things that include this: Euphoria at a process that places a certain chunk of one’s identity in a hermetically sealed compartment that, for its seeker, can be durable a refuge as exists. So let’s end here: I first came across the word “prestidigitator” while reading Henry Miller in 2000, and you’re damn right it felt good finally to use the word in print, and correctly, nearly 14 years later, up in graf 7.

Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com

Editor’s note: For part 1, please click here.

The seven-day stretch in mid October that began the Saturday Timothy “Desert Storm” Bradley decisioned Juan Manuel “Dinamita” Marquez found contrasting studies of how pain is treated, how humiliation is considered, and how vulnerability is concealed or exploited otherwise. Bradley, capable as any prizefighter of emoting when asked a fair question, showed no vulnerability to Marquez, striking instead an uncharacteristically arrogant mien, one intended to disarm boxing’s apex predator. And it worked insofar as Marquez found nary an opening, geometrical, physical or psychological – nary a fissure in Bradley’s expressive countenance, a dark and intense face on a head he self-deprecatingly calls too large (when not driving it in opponents’ chins or foreheads).

Ruslan Provodnikov and Mike Alvarado both admitted, in a wondrous for rare bit of prefight candor, they were afraid of being badly hurt or killed in a prizefight, the sort of concession Bradley might make privately but Marquez was and ever will be incapable of making – for reasons cultural, traditional and perhaps biological. After Provodnikov laid waste to Alvarado, though, one almost wondered if the Russian possessed actually a fraction the empathy of his prefight demeanor, if he didn’t, at least for a 48-minute stretch a couple times each year, cease seeing men set across from him as fellow sons/brothers/fathers/friends and merely sides of beef that, curiously enough, could be made to emit whimpering sounds when knuckled just right.

*

The seven-day stretch in mid October that began the Saturday Timothy “Desert Storm” Bradley decisioned Juan Manuel “Dinamita” Marquez showed that if one puts away his prejudices and looks often and close enough at art of any kind, from its finest manifestations in Rembrandt or Velazquez to its fallenest manifestations in pornography like Stagliano’s, he finds wonderment and originality, he finds better men than himself treating troubles like his own, and he finds, desperately and essentially, a form of solace.

If Andy Warhol and Fernando Botero had little in common, they had an uncommon sense of color, even for visual artists, to unite them along art’s rocky sort of continuum, and it was a sense of color Warhol quite possibly permitted Botero to use some years later, for as much as the Colombian credits his influences to Pablo Picasso it remains true that Picasso, intellectual always before beautiful and cynical always and always, appears less in the vibrancy of Botero’s paintings than does Pittsburgh’s father of fashion art.

If DAM’s shape was ostentatious, finally, its structure comprised none of the conspicuous consuming that is modern America’s specialty; it was Libeskind’s proper recognition that while largeness of scale assures no greatness, architectural greatness often does desire awesomeness.

*

The seven-day stretch in mid October that began the Saturday Timothy “Desert Storm” Bradley decisioned Juan Manuel “Dinamita” Marquez brought a celebratory air for Provodnikov and Bradley, men who made an incredible spectacle with one another seven months before, bringing them finally the victories both deserved, and with those victories a codification of their status in prizefighting’s impassioned, subjective, weird, hyperbolic ratings, an ongoing appeal to orderliness that proves man must have hierarchy even when he hasn’t an inkling why.

The clarity of Colorado’s air sets its vistas in a visual space that might better be called hyper-definition than high-definition, akin to the early HDTVs with whites that blitzed viewers and induced aching brains if not temporary blindness, and when one exits the western mouth of Eisenhower Tunnel, a blossoming of sun-reflected snowy whiteness after 1 1/2 miles of gray darkness, he wonders aloud if this mightn’t be the sole place in the world a visual experience of such arresting magnitude can happen.

Mike Alvarado, the Coloradoan who lost on his stool against Ruslan Provodnikov that Saturday night in an unlikely suburb north-northwest of Denver, wore open and suppurating facial lacerations to camp for his March rematch with Brandon Rios, lacerations courtesy of a mishap with his flesh and shards of a glass bottle and at least one other man’s rage, and reminded those who followed his career how unlikely a happy ending will be for “Mile High.” A reminder that came once more, two hours after the main event in Broomfield, when I returned to Ramada Denver Midtown, a recently re-acquired and -signaged property, luxurious 30 years and gaggles of property managers ago, where the frontdesk attendant, young, pretty, edgy, pierced – Denverstyle – told me: “Alvarado? I know Mike! My friends partied with him.”

*

The seven-day stretch in mid October that began the Saturday Timothy “Desert Storm” Bradley decisioned Juan Manuel “Dinamita” Marquez made Marquez once more threaten retirement, once more price his way out a lucrative rematch with Manny Pacquiao, once more remind his adorers genius is divisive, not unifying or transferable, and a force that renders a man like Marquez many more times admirable than likable, a man to observe and delight-in but never invite for a beer.

Timothy Bradley ended 2013 finally esteemed like a man with his resume should, regardless of what bigotry aficionados routinely show volume punchers. Ruslan Provodnikov appeared in a California ring across from Bradley in March a wholly unknown entity and finished October as the third piece of a triumvirate of former-Soviet fighters now used to scare disobedient young boxers before bedtime: “GGG”, “Krusher”, “Siberian Rocky”.

Mike Alvarado, finally, found what solace might be had from an adoring hometown, a prudent choice, and a vindicating fulfillment of what natural gifts oddsmakers long had him tragically wasting.

And I had the great good fortune of more time spent within our craft’s fraternity, both in Nevada and Colorado, a fraternity that, at its best, is a mutual-admiration society.

Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com

The seven-day stretch in mid October that began the Saturday Timothy “Desert Storm” Bradley decisioned Juan Manuel “Dinamita” Marquez in Thomas & Mack Center ended with a more brutal stoppage victory over “Mile High” Mike Alvarado at 1stBank Center in Broomfield, Colo., a GPS-defying suburb of Denver, than even sadists anticipated, and transformed Ruslan “Siberian Rocky” Provodnikov into prizefighting’s looniest bogeyman, the sound of whose punches still carry for those at ringside that night an especially unforgettable brand of acoustic menace.

The Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art in Las Vegas featured a display of American pop-star Andy Warhol’s finest Western-themed works, including a pair of Dolly Parton portraits excellent as they are obscure, and Denver Art Museum proved itself an architectural marvel more even than anticipated.

Desert Storm, Dinamita, Siberian Rocky, Mile High, BGFA and DAM – they made Oct. 12-Oct. 19 my favorite week of 2013.

Fightweek has changed for boxing writers, changed dramatically and with dramatic rapidity, from the celebratory sort of thing that began on Monday afternoons and included free room and board at the host casino, to a pay-it-yourself model. It is but one more unpleasant turn for a profession whose best days will not return, though with one ancillary benefit: When a writer is compensated only for what words he produces within an arena, his time is his own when he is without the arena.

Saturday in Las Vegas began with a long-awaited lunch at Wynn’s Botero – a restaurant named after Colombia’s foremost living artist – continued to Bellagio’s Warhol display, crescendoed with three judges’ deciding for Timothy Bradley and concluded with another wonderful postfight meal among mentors and friends.

Friday in Denver began among the confounding angles of Polish architect Daniel Libeskind’s masterwork, DAM’s Frederic C. Hamilton Building, and continued to an overcrowded downtown weighin, where Mike Alvarado’s scale struggles afforded an hour with boxing’s best matchmaker, Bruce Trampler, and matchmaking’s greatest character, Jim Smith, anticipating fantastically a Saturday morning drive westward and Provodnikov’s Saturday night triumph.

*

The seven-day stretch in mid October that began the Saturday Timothy “Desert Storm” Bradley decisioned Juan Manuel “Dinamita” Marquez provided a resilient sort of joy, a kind Bradley might appreciate, joy by way of resilience, followed by the shocking clarity of Colorado light, pristinely dry for being ever cold, and an overwhelming form of violence no prizefighter recognizes as his own till he becomes its prey.

Before Juan Manuel Marquez stormed to his dressing room yet again while boxing’s malcontent knowers filled online forums with certainty, there came an unusual occurrence to ringside in Las Vegas: Silence among writers between the closing bell and reading of scorecards. Some had opinions of who’d won the 12-round contest, but none had anything like television’s certainty.

As Saturday became Sunday, I sat in Zoozacrackers, Wynn’s deli, across from Thomas Hauser and beside Norm Frauenheim, and I gratefully marveled, as I try often to do, at what an unpredictable but absurdly wonderful – and absurd and wonderful – thing is life.

Promoter Bob Arum, too, was surprised by the way Nevada’s judges found for Bradley in a fight that saw more ineffective aggressiveness and inactivity than expected, but like many others he had a job to do between the overstuffed walls of Diego’s Mexican Food & Cantina the following Friday, promoting alongside Banner Promotions’ Art Pelullo at a weighin the fire marshal closed a half hour before Alvarado missed weight by a pound and Provodnikov struck his signature bellowing-most-muscular pose, and Arum’s job hardly comprised an expression of grief for the surly Mexican who flattened Top Rank’s 2013 revenue projections with a single right hand in Las Vegas 11 months before.

Saturday’s main event began with a look of acute squeamishness and pain, an actual wince, from Mike Alvarado, an aptly tatted and troubled representative of Denver’s rugged and weird interior, and ended with Alvarado, many times more intelligent and athletically gifted than his detractors or rap sheet know, broken on his stool and making an unexpected and prudent decision not to defend his 140-pound title from Provodnikov in their match’s championship rounds.

*

The seven-day stretch in mid October that began the Saturday Timothy “Desert Storm” Bradley decisioned Juan Manuel “Dinamita” Marquez marked a vindication for both Bradley and Provodnikov, the Russian who lost a fight-of-the-year decision to Bradley in March while likely reducing Bradley’s future lucidity and life expectancy and proving the Californian as spirited and well-conditioned an athlete as this era will know. Bradley, a man unfairly and ceaselessly maligned for collecting a decision win over Manny Pacquiao 16 months before, received the benefit of most every doubt against Marquez, immobilized by what upper-body musculature absurdly topped Marquez’s 144 1/2-pound physique, surprising Marquez with elusiveness and a counter left hook in their final 15 seconds of belligerence, once that sent Marquez stumbling backwards and Bradley’s gloves prematurely and unadvisedly high in the air.

Enamored as he was of a stalactite-like shape for his titanium-plated edifice at DAM, Daniel Libeskind, one fears, followed contemporary architecture’s tendency to see contemporary art as clutter, detritus detracting from what answers architecture provides light’s riddle – composed of particles or waves? – and made an exhibition hall too exhibitionist to exhibit anything but its own enchantingly crinkled cants.

One needn’t travel 50 miles west of Denver to see vistas unique in all the world, and these vistas begin with Idaho Springs, Colo., a spot placed first on a list of recommended Centennial State destinations by the matchmaker placed first on lists compiled by his peers, and so I went to behold the Rockies and their majestic clarity.

I had watched Mike Alvarado for 7 1/2 years by the time he got brutalized by Ruslan Provodnikov, first covering Alvarado’s own brutalization of Maximo Cuevas in the light of a searing Tucson sun as it set over the empty parking lot of Club Envy in 2006, but not until I saw Alvarado reduced to a frightened target did I realize how much affection I’d developed for him.

And how much I fear news will come of his tragic end before this decade is out.

***

Editor’s note: Part 2 will be posted next Monday.

***

Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com

My introduction to Adam Berlin’s writing came 4 1/2 years ago when he wrote for this site an account of Joshua Clottey’s preparations for a match with Miguel Cotto. I did not complete half Berlin’s piece before emailing our editor and asking him to throw whatever courtship we might at Berlin – a bio, an archive, a picture, whatever – beginning my plea with: “Adam’s a hell of a talented writer.”

After reading the final 18 pages of Berlin’s third novel, “Both Members of the Club” (Texas Review Press; $12.95), I set the book down, smiled and nodded: Told you so.

There’s a tendency in readers’ minds, even the minds of experienced readers, even what minds do the double duty of belonging to a reader and a writer, to treat first-person narrators as autobiographers; one takes the pronoun I, marries it to the author’s back-cover photo and swims along. Adam Berlin’s third novel feels more deeply autobiographical, though, than what tendencies a first-person narrator already encourages, especially when one reads its two predecessors – “Headlock” and “Belmondo Style” – before approaching “Both Members of the Club.”

All three of Berlin’s novels employ the first-person, more immediate than the third-, causing a reader to see Berlin, ageing with remarkable grace through his 14 years since “Headlock,” first as a bar-bouncing former collegiate wrestler named Odessa Rose, body-beautiful and heterosexual as he wishes to be, then as a late-adolescent track runner, nascently gay, named Ben Chiziver. Berlin’s narrator in his third novel, Gabriel, is, like so much in the book, a creation spun from the best elements of his first two works.

Gabriel is an aspiring actor who alludes several times to paid sexual acts performed on men, a model vain and attractive enough to pose nude for aspiring draftsmen in art classes while straight enough to allow jealousy over an evening’s tryst between his best friends, a female artist named Sam and a prospect-cum-journeyman prizefighter named Billy Carlyle, to undo an early lifelong loyalty oath formed by the three in a troublesome placed called Smythe House, a foster home of troubled youth – the reader is left to infer.

In a November interview with fellow boxing writer Lyle Fitzsimmons, Berlin states: “There was a call for short novels for a university-sponsored competition, so I took my 400-page manuscript and . . . I stripped the book down to the required page limit, 120 pages, and sent in the manuscript.” Berlin likens this effort to what stropping a prizefighter does to his body, but it is an analogy perhaps too facile; to remove 70-percent of his bodyweight, the way Berlin had to remove 70-percent of his manuscript, a middleweight would have to begin camp above 500 pounds and cleave entire chunks of flesh from his skeleton.

That is a workable analogy for what Berlin did – “Both Members of the Club” has entire chunks of plot cleaved from its pages – and its author’s cleaving makes Berlin’s third book his best by an appreciable margin. “Headlock” tells its reader too much, in the style of every first novel. “Belmondo Style” allows its reader to infer more and become a co-conspirator with its author. “Both Members of the Club” neither tells its reader more than a 1/3 what its narrator knows nor tells its reader it’s not telling him more.

If a writer can appraise another writer’s work by counting the number of passages he notes, and then setting that passage-count against its page-count, Berlin’s third novel is several times better than his first. There was a gratuitousness to the violence described in “Headlock” and to a lesser extent “Belmondo Style” that Berlin forgoes in “Both Members of the Club,” leading to, among other accomplishments, as good a first-person treatment of what it is like to be in a prizefight, a chopped salad of body parts and euphoria and familiarity and concussion, a reader can encounter.

Berlin showed a talent for excavating horror in his first novel and honed it in his second, with passages like: “I couldn’t move and I knew his hand was under my balls, holding the lighter, the flame going up and up and in. It felt like it was going in. The last thing I remembered was the cold pain. Then I drifted off, numb and spiraling, like I was leaving me behind, running away, but I wasn’t running.”

In Berlin’s third novel, the horror that often precedes a profession of hurting other men is explored, too, but subtly, deftly: “It’s his memory but mine too, mine from his telling, and I see it, see the men finally paying, not like money for me, not like money for Sam, but paying, his father first, the man from the foster home second, Billy giving, Billy beating, adult legs skidding against floor, trying to slide away, crawl away and Billy hitting, hitting, blood so dark, so slippery, so much of it.”

That’s writing, inviting empathy with a clarity achieved through grammatical roughness, which is different from “writing” – the sort of thing “writers” do when they use special effects to obfuscate, to keep secret the limited range of their mastery. Some of Berlin’s best prose in his third novel treats Billy Carlyle’s scars – “Sun through the window polishes the scar tissue above his eye” / “There’s no scar tissue above his eye, his face smooth as potential” – and it’s no wonder, as Billy Carlyle’s story feels more like Berlin’s, even, than his first-person narrator’s does.

The triumphant MFA golden boy of “Headlock” is gone – lost maybe to critical reviews, maybe to a dying industry, maybe to other experiences – and replaced by a guy who attracts you by not-caring if you’re interested, one who doesn’t have to tell you there are things he’s not telling you. Such are the layers and textures time and practice alone provide. Adam Berlin’s “Both Members of the Club” is an achievement.

Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com

SAN ANTONIO – In the weeks to come, it will likely be discovered Adrien Broner suffered from a fatal strain of the deadlywhatever virus in his training camp, did his ringwalk with a right hand broken on the pads in his dressing room, crushed all five of his left knuckles in the first round, suffered invisible lacerations over both eyes in the fourth, and talked through a jaw shattered during round 8. Believe little of it.

Adrien Broner proved merely that he was a fighter in losing to Marcos Maidana at Alamodome on Saturday, a fighter not quite special as Amir Khan – so adjust the seriousness of your reactions accordingly.

If you are reading this column the sensation you have right now, the one you’ve been enjoying for at least 30 hours, is schadenfreude, the pleasure one experiences at another’s misfortune, so perfectly captured in German that English lexicographers decided merely to employ the 19th century’s equivalent of copy+paste. The schadenfreude felt by so many about Broner’s misfortune is evidence not just of “The Problem’s” increasingly odious public persona, a sort of gallivanting idiot defined by the aggrandizement other idiots bestowed on him, but also the lingering suspicion, now confirmed, Broner was two parts media creation for each part talent.

He has reflexes, power, accuracy and considerable upper-body strength, which is another way of calling Broner a great athlete but not a great prizefighter for a number of reasons but chiefly this: He does not have a ring IQ like the great ones, and he is not able to make adjustments like them either. Broner is an imitator, not one who innovates, and not a particularly able one, either – as Broner’s inspiration, Floyd Mayweather Jr., and Mayweather Jr.’s mentor, Floyd Mayweather Sr., must have cringed each of the dozens of times plodding Marcos Maidana touched their self-anointed protégé with left-hook leads, a punch with which Maidana might fell Mayweather once every 10 years, starting in about 10 years.

The genuine misfortune experienced Saturday by Adrien “The Problem” Broner, field commander of “Band Camp,” self-vender “about billions,” brought genuine pleasure to a large number of South Texans, too, men who favor fighters of Mexican origin first, fighters of Latino origin second, and fighters who humble loudmouthed American upstarts always. “El Chino,” so named because of the shape of his eyes more than any genealogical rigor shown by fellow Argentines, was an adopted South Texan for every second of what 36 minutes he battered Broner, largely because he began battering Broner in the fight’s very first seconds and didn’t relent doing so.

Maidana fought Broner exactly the way folks hoped he would, exactly the way noncombatants imagine they would do it if given just 30 seconds with Broner, punching “The Problem” constantly, fouling him whenever he could get away with it, slugging with him like he hated him because he did hate him. The shtick Broner was taught to use in his relentless self-promotion is foreign to a man like Maidana in a way ethnic sensibilities cannot anticipate. The Argentine watched Broner’s crass presentation with about one third the humor Joe Frazier showed Muhammad Ali’s creation of the act, and like Frazier, Maidana proved himself a man possessed of a unique sort of fighting style that does not suffer if marinated in spite.

Maidana was a smarter fighter than Broner prepared for, too. So often when Broner began a rally of any kind, needing two seconds of Maidana inactivity to trigger an assault, Maidana jabbed his gut or head, or rushed him, arms flailing, and kept punching till either a telling blow landed or Broner pushed him off – and no, it was not lost on nearly anyone in Alamodome how much of Broner’s defense, and offense, relied on extending his forearms more than his fists, in one more awkward homage to Mayweather.

Maidana is not a true welterweight, his best days came at 140 pounds, but he is still the hardest-punching and strongest man Broner has faced, the first opponent Broner was unable to impose his physicality upon, though he did try. What few moments Broner succeeded against Maidana came when “The Problem” stomped forward and caused Maidana to move backwards. But there again, Maidana was wilier than scouting reports predicted; “El Chino” often took steps backwards voluntarily, and then followed them with jabs to Broner’s body or left-hook leads to his head, punches Maidana himself probably didn’t think would land, certainly not so flush, but threw more to coil and cock the clubbing overhand right with which he merrily continued to strike the back of Broner’s inanely placed head.

Then there was the well-placed and reciprocal 11th-round humping Maidana gave Broner’s backside, clowning the clown in a way reminiscent of Marco Antonio Barrera’s spiteful driving of a half-nelsoned Naseem Hamed’s face in a turnbuckle after undressing “The Prince” for 34 minutes in 2001. Difference was, much as Barrera disdained Hamed, the Mexican had to content himself with simply outclassing the media creation across from him; Maidana experienced no such lukewarmness of satisfaction, walloping Broner thoroughly as he did, thrusting the top of his head in Broner’s face like a spear in the eighth, hitting him on the break and watching Broner flop on the blue canvas like a third-rate thespian, or a Bernard Hopkins, in the hopes referee Laurence Cole would rescue him from having to fulfill the last four rounds of his contractual obligation. Cole is what he is, but he is also a Texan, and Texans don’t abide gamecocks that strut and plume better than they peck; if Broner expected Cole to disqualify Maidana for fighting dirty it was but one more miscalculation in a night of plenty.

Here is the place one traditionally walks back some inflammatory clause or other, hedging on a character too strong for the moment, but there will be none of that today. The schadenfreude Broner induced in others is now his to bear. The most charitable emotion his current plight inspires is indifference.

Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com

SAN ANTONIO – Friday afternoon in the western part of this city’s downtown area, Cincinnati welterweight Adrien “The Problem” Broner (27-0, 22 KOs) and Argentine Marcos “El Chino” Maidana (34-3, 31 KOs) each came in under the weight limit for their Saturday title match at Alamodome, with Broner marking 144.4 pounds and Maidana weighing 146.2.

Lingering rumors about Broner’s weight, of his being too heavy, were wrong. Rumors of his being a box-office heavy might prove to be as well.

Popular as he is on television and for as much presence as he shows in planned media events, Adrien Broner does not seem to be drawing much of a crowd in South Texas – certainly no crowds like those Saul “Canelo” Alvarez drew in April. While there were some who braved the raw temperatures to gather at Market Square and watch Broner make weight, Friday, there was more of a media presence than a presence of fans.

After being partially pushed out the way by a characteristically quiet and surly Maidana, Broner made his weight, jumped off the scale and gave interviewer Steve Farhood a prognostication.

“Easy money,” Broner said. “If he comes in with any dumb shit, I’m a flat-line him.”

While the “Danger Zone” card is stacked as its promoters say it is, a toys-for-tickets drive and $10 entrance fees to Alamodome on Saturday have insiders wondering how much of a draw an African American from Cincinnati and an Argentine are proving to be, especially this close to Christmas.

If the main event needs support, though, it is getting plenty of it, with a co-main between Florida welterweight Keith “One Time” Thurman (21-0, 19 KOs) and Mexican Jesus Soto-Karass (28-8-3, 18 KOs). Friday each fighter came in below the welterweight limit – Thurman at 145.8 pounds and Soto-Karass at 146.2 – and Thurman, probably the card’s most likable personality, shared what he told Soto-Karass during their staredown and then added an insight.

“He’s tough,” Thurman said of his Mexican opponent. “My grandma’s tough too.”

The Saturday fighter most likely to entice South Texas’ partisan-Mexican fanbase, California super bantamweight Leo Santa Cruz (25-0-1, 15 KOs), took the scale as well in preparation for his title match with Puerto Rican Cesar Seda (25-1, 17 KOs), in a match aficionados expect Santa Cruz, who weighed 121.4 pounds, to win by brutal stoppage over Seda, who weighed 121.6.

“It’s my personality,” Santa Cruz said, when asked why he is always grinning. “I’m always happy.”

Alamodome doors open early on Saturday at 3:00 PM local time. Opening bell for “Danger Zone” will ring at 3:30. 15rounds.com will have full ringside coverage.

Saturday Cuban world champion Guillermo “The Jackal” Rigondeaux reduced Ghanaian super bantamweight and former bantamweight titlist Joseph King Kong Agbeko, no quotes, to an inactive and pacifistic mess, decisioning the African by extraordinarily unanimous scores of 120-108 (12 rounds to 0), 120-108 (12 rounds to 0) and 120-108 (12 rounds to 0). Agbeko, once the very picture of a volume-punching craftsman adept at stealing others’ wills, got uppercutted by Rigondeaux often enough early enough to throw a metaphoric white towel on the match at its halfway point and leave it there.

It takes a special sort of audacity to deploy an uppercut from range in a championship prizefight. Howsoever one chooses to throw it, the punch must begin with a hand perilously lowered, placing an unusual defensive onus on footwork. It is a punch one is taught never to throw moving forward, an instruction a young fighter needn’t hear more than once – hard enough as it is to switch his feet and body weight correctly to throw the punch even when it is a logical counter and available, like when a volume punching opponent repeatedly sets his chin over his front knee, as every volume puncher is wont to do whether by audacity, carelessness or necessity, and charges the uppercut, head lowered.

The uppercut is a punch rarely thrown accurately by the slower fighter in a match, and even more rarely thrown by slow fighters. When thrown as a back-hand counter, the punch needn’t travel far, relying as it does on the opponent’s weight and leverage – rushing into it and impaling his chin on the point of its middle knuckle – and the effectiveness of its shortened leverage can be taught a young fighter by nearly placing his back elbow on the face of its corresponding hipbone, and moving them as one, ensuring both a proper weight transfer and a necessarily restricted range of motion.

To throw the uppercut with one’s lead hand generally makes an up-jab of it, a narrowed glove whose thumb faces its thrower from trigger to contact, and ought be followed with a cross or something from the back else its thrower will expose himself unjustifiably. But to throw the back-hand uppercut as lead? That requires the audacity of a madman in the moment it is thrown, regardless of its employer’s precision. Juan Manuel Marquez used a right-uppercut lead to snatch the fighting spirit right out Rocky Juarez in their 2007 super featherweight match, sending Juarez dejectedly shuffling to his corner between rounds wondering how slow and classless he had to look to Marquez, during “Dinamita’s” mastery period and well before his reinvention-of-physique, to prompt the Mexican to consider such a lunatic ploy, much less snap his head upwards with it.

It was the very sort of audaciousness Guillermo Rigondeaux used against Joseph King Kong Agbeko, Saturday, in as one-sided a championship match as has seen a 12th round in years. It didn’t begin that way, either, and Agbeko, despite what Rigondeaux reduced him to, and despite his debut at 122 pounds coming in only his second prizefight since losing a rematch to Abner Mares 24 months ago, did not begin timidly as one recalls, either.

Agbeko, as high-class a volume puncher as the sport had in 2009, when he decisioned Vic Darchinyan and got decisioned by Yonnhy Perez – back when Agbeko’s aesthetically daring ringwalks included a gorilla mask, shackles and a blonde keeper, in a nod to the middle name, King Kong, Agbeko claims is written on a Ghanaian birth certificate probably having a different birth year than what “1980” Agbeko also claims – began the open of Saturday’s match in proper form, throwing a righthand lead or two at his southpaw opponent. Almost instantly, or at least instantly enough to overwrite in our memories what time passed before its appearance, Rigondeaux snapped a left uppercut from his southpaw stance, a back-hand uppercut counter, that snatched the fighting spirit from Agbeko with a frightful economy.

This was not a larger or stronger man unbuttoning a lesser man, a spent cutiepie American suddenly confronted by someone who hit harder and was quicker too, but rather an evenly matched champion unraveling a former titlist from Africa, a continent from which no prizefighter ever ran his way to America. Agbeko, the man who unmanned Darchinyan when the “Raging Bull” was finished stretching Mexico’s slickest boxer, Cristian Mijares, and Mexico’s toughest showman, Jorge Arce, three months apart, got stung three times by Rigondeaux in the fight’s second and third minute and spent what 33 minutes followed doing anything he could not to be stung again – and getting stung again and again.

Legend has it Joe Frazier said to a young Marvelous Marvin Hagler, “You have three strikes against you: You’re black, you’re a southpaw, and you’re good.” Aficionados looking for an explanation of fans’ and opponents’ continuing avoidance of Cuban Guillermo Rigondeaux – a man whose ancestors arrived in the Western Hemisphere the same way African Americans’ did – might take Frazier’s three strikes against Hagler and add a fourth: You don’t speak English. Something like this, though not exactly this, is what Rigondeaux alluded to in footage from an HBO prefight interview, Saturday, when he said all was always harder for Cuban fighters, men whose leader made a habit of making international laughingstocks of American leaders for about 50 years, because they did not need to get hit frequently as Mexicans.

Statements like that, actually, should benefit Rigondeaux, fighting as he does in a division populated with other Latinos, and subsequently lots of Mexicans – men whose aggressiveness and stylistic deficiencies mesh perfectly with the Cuban’s extraordinary offensive arsenal. Too, Rigondeaux should benefit from HBO’s patronage and promoter Top Rank’s matchmaking mastery. Provided he follows the course plotted him and stays what greedy impulses plague men, Guillermo Rigondeaux may well be starting the sort of five-year run, 2013-2018, that makes a prizefighter into a legend.

Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com

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

Saturday at Venetian Resort in Macau a passable imitation of Filipino welterweight Manny Pacquiao whacked about American Brandon Rios in a passable imitation of a Las Vegas superfight. Pacquiao won 11 rounds unanimously while looking less powerful and less precise – the margins by which he feels comfortable making an opponent miss have widened since December last, understandably – and less joyful than the man who once made prizefighting his enchanting spectacle.

Symmetrically enough, Manny Pacquiao looked like nothing so much as Macau, the knockoff host city of his first pay-per-view event in China. Pacquiao was not new in any way, not the labeling or haircut or faith tradition or commitment to extirpating poverty with yellow gloves; he was not the same-old Pacquiao so much as the same, old Pacquiao – much as Macau is nothing new but a taupe version of the Las Vegas strip, as if the deities of Nevada, Steve Wynn and company, picked the seventh day both for resting and constructing Macau, finding in their original blueprints a need to revise only scale, calculating quite rightly no one in China who’d seen Las Vegas would want anything but Las Vegas, and no one with a choice would pick Macau.

Pacquiao was a labor to watch at times, such a labor in fact Pacquiao’s body language afforded Roy Jones his chance to make a first insightful comment in 2013, remarking that Pacquiao appeared to be enduring his work more than whistling through it as Rios did, whistling even as Pacquiao’s fists whistled into every spot on his face. Pacquiao did not look spectacular Saturday. He fought like a talented guy who needs to fight for a paycheck and may have to for a long time yet, conserving his vigor and casting immediate glances the referee’s way soon as Brandon Rios, given the choice to fight every instant or be hurt quite badly by a man many times his better, hit him with a free hand during clinches.

The moment of Pacquiao’s rebuttal to the first incidence of this was probably the match’s most telling, as the Filipino did not remove himself, bounce enthusiastically, slam his gloves together, raise his hands, smile, then leap in the fray with a historic enthusiasm for combat – at all. Pacquiao affixed a grimace on his face and snapped left crosses from his southpaw stance hard as he possibly could, investing every punch with whatever he knows and everything he senses about the physics of leverage, trying to terminate Rios’ effrontery with something ferocious, concussing and spectacular. It was in some sense Pacquiao’s rendition of Floyd Mayweather’s reaction to being butted by Victor Ortiz.

It was the reaction of a man who now feels most every punch and finds himself forced even by an opponent limited as Rios into moments of empathy instead of so much seemly sympathy it once spilled from the corners of his mouth in gentle smiles for what men he stiffened. In his prime, a prime that is now passed, Pacquiao showed such sympathetic joy – “I’m sorry either of us has to go through this but since we agreed one of us did, it’s fantastic to be me and not you!” – an observer sometimes forgot Pacquiao was in a fight at all.

A sense of joy is what one now misses most during a Pacquiao fight; he is a very good and innovative Filipino southpaw, a Manny Pacquiao imitator still better at the act than those whom promoter Top Rank used to stage during Friday casting calls on Pacquiao weekends, but he shows nary the same enthusiasm or novelty. Today Pacquiao fights like taglines for others’ matches, “Revenge!” or “Something to Prove!” or “This Time It’s Personal!”; gone is the otherworldly quality he shone, the awe he felt others experiencing, the awe he too felt in rare moments of autobiographical reflection.

Pacquiao beat up Rios much the way he beat up Antonio Margarito three years ago in a fight friend and colleague Norm Frauenheim quite insightfully suggests was the one that changed Pacquiao’s trajectory – when has he looked sensational since? – and Frauenheim suggests this because he was with a comparatively small cadre of media at the postfight press conference, somewhere underneath Cowboys Stadium an hour after Jerry Jones said good riddance to boxing, when Pacquiao admitted the body shot Margarito touched him with in the sixth changed things: “I’m lucky to have survived that round.”

Rios won as many unanimous rounds against Pacquiao as Margarito did, and if Rios’ orbital bone is still intact unlike Margarito’s it is likely more attributable to Pacquiao’s diminished power than Rios’ defensive mastery, an approach to self-protection that reduced to his hoping to counter the fifth flush shot in a combination, which required hoping his opponent didn’t get bored with striking him after four clean shots – the way Pacquiao did several times Saturday. Rios was typically defiant after losing 11 rounds on sympathetic scorecards, chiding those who predicted Pacquiao would make a heavybag of him moments after Pacquiao made a heavybag of him.

Pacquiao did nothing Saturday against former 140-pound titlist Brandon Rios to make anyone think he might finally beat Floyd Mayweather, a man who had less trouble with 154-pound titlist Saul Alvarez in September. Instead, to make the sort of money he now expects and probably needs, Pacquiao will have to try his luck in a rematch with Timothy Bradley or his chin in a fifth fight with Juan Manuel Marquez, and if either those matches lands in Macau it’s doubtful anyone in Las Vegas will miss it.

Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com

American super middleweight Andre Ward is the sole prizefighter I routinely review in slow motion, the only active world champion whose subtleties bring a continuing euphoria of discovery to me. Ward is, in his way, our sport’s most unpredictable fighter, and most complicated fighter – or did you think he cleaned out the once-competitive 168-pound division some other way?

Saturday found Ward at Citizens Business Bank Arena somewhere in California, unfastening Edwin Rodriguez, a man who, between the ordeal of his prematurely born children and voluntary participation in antidoping tests (whatever his surplus of bacne should otherwise indicate), has enjoyed years on our sport’s good-guy circuit, while fighting nobody. Saturday Rodriguez fought somebody, and even after missing weight by two pounds Friday, Rodriguez lost about 35/36 of the fight, or at best 11/12.

Andre Ward continues to improve, and that brings from the front of one’s mind a retrospective request that sends it on a skittering search for the last time a fighter fractionally as accomplished as Ward improved regularly as Ward does. One wishes to say Manny Pacquiao, from the introduction of “Manila Ice,” the righthand activated for his 2005 match with Erik Morales, an improvement and nickname that introduced many to trainer Freddie Roach’s fresh wit – when he found Shakespeare and lost an entire audience at a prefight press conference, warning Morales: “Beware the ‘Ice’ of March” – but one just as quickly thinks of the Pacquiao who fought his third match with Juan Manuel Marquez six years later, got summarily undressed in rounds 7 through 11, and tactically looked little better than his 2005 self.

Fighters improve in obscurity, like craftsmen of every kind, and obscurity is hard to encounter or embrace once a fighter begins to earn million-dollar purses. What improvements happen, generally, are feats of conditioning that enjoy characteristically dubious origins. Every other time a fighter’s new trainer says adjustments galore have been made, adjustments galore have not been made, even if words galore have been spoken to the fighter and media about adjustments galore, and reversions to form are inevitable.

Ward prides himself on being formless, in a nod to combat-fighting legend Bruce Lee, and one would quickly call that Ward’s greatest strength, if Ward didn’t have so many strengths. Ward does not do any one thing much better than any other thing, but whereas the cliché usually follows that he’s not great at one thing but good at everything, Ward is great at everything. He is Floyd Mayweather if Mayweather had spent the last decade matching himself with men who believed they might beat him. Every Ward opponent believes he can beat Ward, somehow, and that is extraordinary when one watches Saturday’s fight in slow motion – as Edwin Rodriguez is an order of magnitude below Ward’s station and could not have won a clean round against Ward had he missed weight by 20 pounds instead of two.

In a prizefighting ring, even at 168 pounds Andre Ward would beat most American heavyweights quite easily. Are those men physically stronger? Most, yes, but not by nearly so much as we tell ourselves, and Ward’s balance and understanding of his own body and other men’s bodies would quickly offset the physical advantages even much larger men might enjoy when the opening bell rang. What is lost quite often by television but incredibly apparent at ringside is Ward’s superior footwork, especially in clinches; it appeared in this column 14 months ago but warrants repetition: Ward frees his hands with his feet. He churns his feet, which churns his hips, which moves his shoulders and brings his hands out of other men’s grasps, often no matter how tightly they hold.

In this way, Ward is already superior to Mayweather, who utilizes clinches strategically, too, but does not fight out of them – breaks, occasionally, yes, but not clinches – so much as use them to sap an opponent of his poise till a referee’s intervention. When Mayweather is on, every defensive maneuver is a prolonged offensive one, but once Mayweather’s right knuckles start to throb under the leather and foam of his glove, his defensive moves become exactly and strictly that. Ward never finds himself in this position and certainly never gets put there by others. Though Mayweather is many times the fighter – read: the willing participant in a savage spectacle that requires being struck repeatedly to the head as a tariff for striking others more repeatedly – than his newly arrived fans and critics understand, it has been many years since he thrilled in the physical-confrontation element of prizefighting the way Ward does, many years since Mayweather so easily avoided the urge to take another man’s punches personally.

Edwin Rodriguez, introspective enough to realize a lottery ticket was needed to have a chance against Ward, sprinted from his corner at the opening bell Saturday and tried nearly to tackle Ward who dissuaded him both with parrying and with punching. Once the clinches began, Rodriguez struck Ward repeatedly behind the head, and Ward just as repeatedly retaliated and appeared happy to continue retaliating, howsoever worked best, until referee Jack Reiss interfered; it was a treatment of ref-as-annoyance that we rarely see anymore from favorites in prizefights. Much later in the match, after both men received warnings for infractions and lost two penalty points each, Rodriguez caught Ward again on the brainstem, and when Ward withdrew to reset and attack anew, Jack Reiss asked if he was OK, and Ward answered “Yeah” in a way that sounded surprised and annoyed by Reiss’ implication.

If middleweight titlist Gennady Golovkin is fractionally good as his advocates increasingly believe, a day will come when a Ward-Golovkin match will be anticipated by aficionados, if not gangsta rappers, more than Mayweather-Pacquiao was, and Ward and Golovkin will fight, and quite possibly more than once. Ward will win, and when he emerges victorious, he will attain, and eventually be recognized as having attained, a level of greatness for which Floyd Mayweather was ever temperamentally unprepared.

Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com

CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas – There is a gorgeousness to the seashore that is difficult to debase, and yet this town nearly does it, lining its bay and neighboring stretches with gray oil rigs, not what cute rockinghorses play acupuncture on the state’s bare terrain, but edifice-like seascrapers that block the horizon in a way sometimes impenetrable. You see them on I-37 South, after two hours’ driving from San Antonio, and you go quickly from wondering when the hell you’re going to get there to worrying you are there. And you are there.

If this steamy spot, humid enough to make you sweat on its seawall even at midnight on November’s second Saturday, is not nearly the tourist-friendly locale its lodging prices anticipate, it is not a bad place at all for a prizefight, and even an apropos venue for the wonderful violence “Filipino Flash” Nonito Donaire and Vic “Raging Bull” Darchinyan visited on one another, Saturday, in a 10-round titleless scrap Donaire won by brutal stoppage in the ninth.

Donaire showed us he is a fighter – that was the thought that came to mind at the end of his rematch with Darchinyan, one that was significantly more competitive than hoped. Donaire was a skittish, super-talented but still skittish, young man when he iced Darchinyan more than six years ago and genuinely shocked the tiny world of aficionados in 2007 by running the so-called Raging Bull into a fit of his own menace, and a gorgeous left hook, that uncovered an unknown vulnerability in Darchinyan.

Donaire was in only his 19th professional match, and Darchinyan (28-0, 21 KOs) was about to make the seventh defense of his IBF flyweight title, four months after mercilessly beating little Victor Burgos to a coma, nine months to the day after blitzing and breaking Donaire’s older brother Glenn in six rounds. Donaire successfully endured 13 1/2 minutes of Darchinyan rage, a surprise to most, then put a counter left hook on Darchinyan, a southpaw in full self-hurl, left hand and body cocked in a defensively indefensible way. When Donaire put that left hand on him with precision and grace he sent the bully of all boxing bullies stumbling drunkenly about, down then up then down then legless then down again, smiting the mean little bastard Darchinyan was, a man whose spirit manifested itself perfectly in the sharp-featured scowl and hatred-contorted grimace he made whenever he punched the hell out of men best as he could.

Darchinyan, then, was a man whose promoter at the time, Gary Shaw, had to remind him to show an iota of decorum while paramedics tried to save Burgos’ life a few feet away, salvage what vital signs remained after Darchinyan finished savaging for 34 1/2 minutes an opponent who looked three weightclasses mismatched for a live-television tragedy that remains, today, an enduring companion for the word “preordained.” When Donaire iced that man, he did boxing, and humanity too, it seemed, a plethora of favors. Darchinyan, a bully to the last, accused officials of conspiring against him with an early stoppage – rather than thank what two sets of ropes twice kept him from careering into snack bars a hundred feet away.

Donaire became instantly an aficionado’s fighter, left his promoter soon thereafter and with Top Rank’s help squandered heaps of goodwill by appearing on “Pinoy Power” pay-per-view telecasts, occupying for a dwindling number of fans the ethnic on-deck circle while Manny Pacquiao was at bat. Donaire came out of hiding in 2011 in a most spectacular way, dropping with gorgeous precision, on HBO, Mexican Fernando Montiel, a prodigy of matchmaking who dropped a lackluster decision to Jhonny Gonzalez in 2006 but reemerged 57 months later as one of the sport’s most-feared men, somehow, just in time to get chloroformed by Donaire in five minutes. And HBO commentators stamped the moment with a hysterical overreaction that is become their trademark, declaring Donaire a prodigy of the first order.

Donaire squandered that goodwill, too, and quickly, with an attempt to leave promoter Top Rank just as its investment in him was about to go in the black. That got Donaire matched on HBO against Omar Narvaez, a Patagonian with no plans to get Montieled and all the wherewithal and toughness to ensure the increasingly prettified Filipino could make nothing of their 36 minutes together, turning in an aesthetic spectacle atrocious enough for a B-Hop execution. Donaire spent 2012 garnering incredible praise for voluntarily submitting to anti-doping tests and blasting through decreasing competition before being conclusively outclassed by Cuban Guillermo Rigondeaux in April – a promotional nightmare from which HBO and Top Rank still stubbornly refuse to awake.

All of which led to Saturday’s spectacle against Vic Darchninyan, Donaire’s second opponent of the year who hadn’t plans to lose to him and may have held him in contempt, too – or in Darchinyan’s case, loudly and plainly held Donaire in contempt in the pit of the Armenian’s charred soul. Along the way, too, too, Darchinyan remembered he once outboxed Mexican Cristian Mijares, then one of our sport’s craftiest wizards, and struck an oddly prudent posture in the opening minutes. But Darchinyan was outfighting and outboxing Donaire through eight rounds, Saturday – at ringside, I had Darchinyan up by three points, and two judges had a wider margin still – when Donaire golfed him with a counter hook he’d set the entirety of his fortune on. After that, he fixed a Darchinyan-like scowl on his mug and pounded the Raging Bull like he’d paid for it.

It was Donaire as fighter, a version we’d not before seen and might not see again, but a sight that wholly justified a five-hour roundtrip from San Antonio to this scruffy seaport.

Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com

Photo By Chris Farina / Top Rank

CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas – Jamaican featherweight Nicholas Walters calls himself the “Axe Man,” and in the opening round of Saturday’s final off-television fight, Walters showed exactly why, blasting Mexican Alberto Garza with shots square to the belly for whose power Garza appeared wholly unprepared. Those body shots began a performance eclipse for the Mexican that Walters completed soon after.

Jack-knifing a Mexican prizefighter in a title match is no mean feat, and yet Walters (23-0, 19 KOs) turned the trick with nearly every body shot he landed on Garza (25-6-1, 20 KOs), dropping him in round 4 with a punch that was on the belt-line and clean but ruled a low blow, and stopping him with a right cross to the head a few seconds later. The official line went: Walters by knockout at 1:57 of round 4.

Afterwards, an elated Walters made a number of menacing gestures for television’s benefit, all while smiling, and then went to Garza’s corner to check on his devastated opponent. Promoter Bob Arum, too, appeared elated, leaning over the top rope to say about Walters to those gathered at ringside: “He hits hard!”

REST OF UNDERCARD
The penultimate off-television match of the nine-fight card saw Detroit super featherweight Erick De Leon (6-0, 2 KOs) easily decision Phoenix’s Jesus Aguinaga (1-2) by three scores of 40-36.

Saturday’s fourth match featured highly touted Mexican featherweight Oscar Valdez (8-0, 7 KOs) against Floridian Jesus Lule Raya (6-7, 1 KO), a man who did not know what his record did and who slugged-back at Valdez and took the Mexican prospect’s very best shots before succumbing to a Valdez right uppercut at 2:38 of round 5. Julio Cesar Chavez Sr., ringside as part of TV Azteca broadcasting duties, expressed impassioned praise for Valdez, raising his distinctive voice to shout over the din about Valdez’s technique and precision.

Before that came a six-round scrap between undefeated local bantamweight Oscar Cantu (6-0, 1 KO) and undefeated Georgian Roberto Ceron (3-1, 1 KO), two light-hitting prizefighters who nevertheless entertained the American Bank Center crowd with six spirited sets and a knockdown Cantu scored in round 4, en route to unanimous-decision scores of 60-53, 59-54 and 59-54.

The evening’s second bout saw highly touted Mexican welterweight, fighting by way of Oklahoma, Alex “El Cholo” Saucedo (11-0, 8 KOs) beat down Steven Hall (6-5, 6 KOs), a rugged Englishman who has made nearby San Antonio his home while enchanting its boxing fans. From the opening minute it was apparent Hall hadn’t ammunition enough to keep Saucedo at bay, with “El Cholo” turning over fully his every hook and counter, while Hall was only able to soldier on and collect a preordained beating that mercifully ended at 0:11 of round 3.

Before that California featherweight “Vicious” Victor Pasillas (6-0, 3 KOs) stopped overmatched Kentuckian Salvador Perez (2-3-2) with a nifty right-hook counter at 0:30 of round 2.

Opening bell rang on a sparsely occupied American Bank Center at 5:25 PM local time.

Photos by Chris Farina / Top rank