By Bart Barry-

Thursday at Super Arena not far from Tokyo, Japan’s
Naoya “The Monster” Inoue decisioned “The Filipino Flash” Nonito Donaire to win
WBSS’ bantamweight tournament in a fight that saw the loser dropped by a liver
shot and the winner later treated for a cracked face.

It was splendid, gorgeous, a Thanksgiving-month reminder
to be grateful.  One can leave
of-the-year superlatives to others and say this 2019 match is the one any
aficionado should rewatch first.  This
was the match to show kids who wonder if boxing retains qualities they’ve heard
grandfathers conspire about.

It had class, courage, class, drama, class,
suspense, class, blood, class, concussion, class, bonebreaking, class, violence,
class, violence and class.  It didn’t
make its predecessors or successors worth their suffering because it was an
island, a tribute unto itself of what prizefighting looks like at its very
best.  Notice: It wasn’t horrorflick gory
or WWE paced or Boardwalk Hall thunderstriking – it was proper prizefighting in
a way as recognizable to Benny Leonard as Floyd Mayweather.

Inoue sought and encountered his foil in a way
none of his peers has done.  We now know
he could’ve signed with Top Rank and fought ESPN prelims till 2021 but
self-entered a single-elimination tourney instead to test himself three
weightclasses higher than his debut scaling. 
That’s what a pursuit of greatness looks like.  No cherrypicking, no ask-my-managering, no thank-God-and-Al-Haymoning;
rather, I will fight whosoever draws me and I will annihilate him.

And at tourney start Nonito did not look that part,
as the bracket configuration appeared prohibitive to Filipino Flash.  Three rounds into WBSS’ first round Donaire
looked outclassed enough by Irishman Ryan Burnett to be involuntarily retired before
three, 120-108 scores got read in Scotland. 
Then Burnett suffered a freak back injury Donaire had nothing to do
with, and Nonito was on to the semifinals where he blasted an anonymous
shortnotice sub.  All the while Inoue
stomped to the finals in a series of exertions better captured by punches-needed
than minutes or rounds.

I was ringside for Inoue’s only American tilt, two
years ago, and I did not see anything to make me anticipate the ease with which
Inoue’d go through Juan Carlos Payano and Emmanuel Rodriguez.  This year I went from admiring Inoue’s
character for signing with WBSS to quietly ranking him above Bud, Hi-Tech and
Canelo.  I expected him to blitz Donaire
and bring a mercy stoppage early, definitely before the fight’s mid rounds.  Too fast, too strong, too technically sound
for a 37-year-old returned in 2018 to a division he outgrew in 2011.

But did I remember July 7, 2007, in my
assessment?  Damn right I did.

That extraordinary lefthook against an onrushing
and sadistic savant, Vic Darchinyan, who’d humiliated Nonito’s older brother, Glenn,
then put Victor Burgos in a coma in the two fights that preceded his intended
wasting of Nonito.  Darchinyan’s
signature charge embraced contemptuous entitlement more than strategy, fists not
just waistlow but cocked, when Nonito clipped him and changed both their careers.

True an eraser as exists in our beloved sport,
that Donaire lefthook.  It erased
everything we predicted on Thursday, no? 
It flew in round 1 but got outsped by Inoue’s own eraser, the same way
everything Donaire did most of the fight got outsped by what Inoue did, but in
round 2 it did something wicked.  It
gifted The Monster with a monstrous gash, concussion and facial fracture. 

We hadn’t before Thursday an inkling how Inoue
might react to such trauma and hadn’t much more of an inkling immediately after
it happened; Inoue’s composure revealed that his brow had been sliced, not that
his cheek had been cracked.  In
retrospect and upon review, what is most beautiful about the rounds that
followed is how close the men stood to one another without wasted motion.  No twitching, no hotfooting; Donaire and
Inoue stood inside their arms’ lengths and threw punches at one another.

Donaire knew how good Inoue was, and Donaire gave
him everything he had left.  Inoue did
not know how good Donaire’s chin was, none of us did, frankly, and went after
him imprudently on several occasions but none so predatorily as after blackmatting
Donaire with a precise buttonshot 90 seconds in the championship rounds.  Donaire circled desperately as any man with a
vital organ under direct attack.  Inoue
hunted him with punches fundamentally flawless and a defense that was not.

After 30 seconds of being a prey Donaire let sail
a lefthook that braked Inoue’s engine for their fight’s final four minutes.  If Inoue knew a man is never more dangerous
than when hurt he didn’t feel it till 1:54 of round 11 of the WBSS Final – a
punch he will not forget.  Done were
Inoue’s leads; nearly every punch he threw after that Donaire lefthook got
preceded by a jab, the way you learn your first week in a boxing gym.  If the match’s final round was anticlimactic
it was because the match climaxed four minutes before its closing bell when
both men realized they’d given enough of themselves and enough to one another.

I watched Thursday’s WBSS Final on short rest and 12
hours after an
unsettling adventure with stroboscopic LEDs, so I may be an unreliable narrator,
but Inoue-Donaire was complete a prizefight as I’ve seen in many years.  Bless them both.

*

Editor’s note: This column will return in December.

*

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday at MGM Grand in a light heavyweight title fight
broadcasted by DAZN, Mexican Saul “Canelo” Alvarez discombobulated Russian
Sergey “Krusher” Kovalev in the 11th round of a dull match staged sometime Sunday
morning.  It was an exclamation mark on
the end of a sentence banal as this!

Something artificial pervaded the spectacle
entire.  Nothing untoward, quite.  Nothing worth burning digital bridges
about.  But a weird sensation those who
made the Vegas trip deserved much more than they got for being much more
authentic than what they witnessed. 

Krusher, the psychopath-cum-kitten, fought like a
man worried he might offend his host, his benefactor, his employer.  That would be Canelo.  And Canelo put up with oh so much more from
his new employer, DAZN, than our beloved sport’s flagship man should.

Since when does the a-side glove-up an hour before
he walks?  Canelo ate it in a way Money
May would not have, and that is no compliment. 
To see Canelo’s face as a monitor showed him Krusher enjoying a prefight
siesta about 10 minutes after their opening bell should have sounded was to see
a professional processing how many promises his promoter made to get his
promoter paid so much for delivering him as a fighter.  What the hell else did that flake pledge in
my name?  Time will tell, Cinnamon, for
only time knows.

The match hewed suspicious close to its script.  But allay those suspicions.  No one had to be anything at all other than
exactly himself to end the match exactly when it did exactly as it did.  Referee Russell Mora’s spastic no-count was a
smidgen less than hoped, perhaps, but everyone else played his part perfectly,
right down to a wonderful scorekeeper so nervous his maths might fail him at the
decisive point he gave Canelo the first two rounds at the prefight buffet,
figuring Kovalev’s struggles with weight would bring a slow start and since
nothing much happens in the opening six minutes anyway if he launched his card at
20-18 he could score the rest straight and safely submit a tidy tally.

How about that spot in the middle rounds when
Krusher got himself tangled in a Canelo headlock and began tapping his
employer’s back pleadingly?  It was so
sweet and gentle and tender.  Near an
antonym for the word “fight” as anyone’s done with 10-ounce gloves in many a
moon.  An historic touch on an historic
night.

Not since Julio Cesar Chavez has a Mexican won a
title at 175 pounds, apparently, or else I misinterpreted some of DAZN’s 90
minutes of nonsequitur-filled filler, though not the part where B-Hop talked
nonsensically about himself.  I recall
thinking it odd they’d put one of the promoters beside the broadcasters so
close to the ringwalk.

Hah! 
Yup.  I’m an idiot.  It wasn’t till after the Metta World Peace
interview I realized some programming something was so wrong there was no
choice but to fold: I clicked the Roku to Amazon Prime, started a new episode
of “Jack Ryan” and fell gently asleep about the same moment Canelo reclined
into his own prefight torpor, symmetrically enough.

Here’s what happened when I awoke seven hours
later (and I impart this for your future reference, friends, as goodfolk who might
utilize DAZN’s replay): No sooner did I find the main-event selection on DAZN
than I began some maths of my own, noticing the opening bell was fewer than 48
minutes from the video’s end, instantly rendering all of the match’s scoring
drama an irrelevance.  Which made me
impatient.

Imagine, then, enduring those first two rounds en
route to a knockout.  Imagine listening
to witling chatter about Kovalev’s establishing his pittypat jab while knowing
someone would be stopped by real punches sometime before the closing bell.  Imagine listening to that tedious crew argue
with itself about the definition of a close round.  Imagine watching Kovalev’s fears about his
conditioning mount in the middle rounds while knowing he needn’t go all
12. 

By the end of round 7 here was my greatest
suspense as a DAZN subscriber: Should I continue to skip forward 30 seconds at
a time, at the risk of being bored unto longterm acrimony towards the eventual
winner, or should I pointer-skip ahead full minutes, at the risk of ruining the
grand finale? 

I fearlessly skipped forward and landed between
rounds 10 and 11.  Romance favors the
bold. 

Here’s where I should write a white lie about regretting
my course, something like: Great as the ending was, how much better would it
have been had I let the drama build properly through those 40 minutes!  Nah. 
The ending redeemed the match regardless of one’s investment in it; I
felt my 17 minutes well-spent the same way others felt their 117 minutes
well-spent. 

What I like best about Canelo is his treating this
era as it deserves.  After getting
stripped naked by a 150-pound Floyd Mayweather in 2013, four years later Canelo
knew after 12 rounds with GGG, world’s most-feared fighter, there was nothing
historic about today’s middleweight division. 
So he fought 36 rounds with its two best men, went 2-0-1, signed an
obscene contract, then decided to cherrypick from an equally weak light
heavyweight division.

Canelo can fight any man he wishes at any catchweight
he wishes, and no one will say no to him for the next few years because DAZN is
an infinity-plus-one financier.  Too, if
he fights the cruiserweight winner of WBSS next year, none of us is going to
doubt he could beat Callum Smith at super middleweight – even if he probably
couldn’t.

In flashfreezing Kovalev to win a light
heavyweight belt Canelo made history the way Manny Pacquiao did against Antonio
Margarito.  Canelo could be the next
Pacquiao, in fact, if only he’d had a Barrera, a Morales and a Marquez.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

ATLANTA – Traffic shapes your view of everything
here, and you’re not ready for it. 
You’re a medium-city guy who hails from one and likes others from them,
and you know infrastructure in medium cities is sometimes wanting, especially
in the South, spiritually unprepared as it is for immigration of all kinds, and
yet you’re not prepared for the perilous and timebending nature of this city’s
traffic.

This has something to do with Saturday’s match but
not too much, even if one of its combatants is from the American South.  Scotsman Josh Taylor had something that bent New
Orleans’ Regis Prograis in a way for which he was unprepared, howsoever
well-prepared he thought he was.  And
since I happen to be in Peach State for reasons entirely unrelated to our
beloved sport, why . . .

Class told early Saturday while ruggedness told
later, and that’s not oftenly how it goes. 
Taylor won WBSS’ third Muhammad Ali Trophy by majority-decisioning Prograis
in an excellent fight broadcast by the aficionado’s network, DAZN, from an O2
Arena near enough Taylor’s native Scotland to make it a homegame for the Tartan
Tornado (and since Taylor prevailed, he remains British).

In so doing Taylor joined Callum Smith and Oleksandr
Usyk on a shockingly short list of prizefighters since 2017 who’ve allowed
themselves be matched in single-elimination tournaments against the best
available men in their divisions and prevailed. 
While an argument might be made that Top Rank and PBC assets shouldn’t
be excluded from conversations about the world’s best 168- and 200-pound
fighters in 2018 and best 140-, 130- and 200-pound fighters in 2019, the ranks
of those capable of persuasively making such arguments ain’t exactly swelling.

There was much chatter, for instance, about Top
Rank junior welterweight champ Jose Ramirez, Sunday morning, with Taylor’s
establishing himself as the division’s best. 
Ramirez moves the gate for Top Rank, and the promoter’ll be in no hurry
to risk such prowess against a man who might beat him.  Which brings a very interesting question: Who
of Saturday’s combatants do Top Rank’s matchmakers, boxing’s best for a few
decades at least, think is less likely to beat Ramirez in a way that cancels
future sales?  That question, much more
than belts or rankings, will determine the next direction for the junior
welterweight division.

The aforementioned Smith and Usyk cases are instructive
here.  Both men did everything they might
to scour their divisions, and neither got rewarded with meaningful followup
challenges.  Middleweight champion Canelo
Alvarez decided a match with a 175-pound titlist was more attractive than a
match with Smith, and former middleweight titlist Gennady Golovkin, well, his handlers
now search Twitter profiles for a proximate opponent, #superwelter.  Usyk’s case is slightly different – there was
nobody left when he was done at 200 pounds – but he’s now at heavyweight, where
no champion is matched to lose unless by accident.

The Muhammad Ali Trophy is gorgeous but not magnetized.

Still, what Taylor and Prograis did in its pursuit
merits more words than granted thus far. 
Taylor unmanned Prograis for 2/3 of Saturday’s match by smothering him,
in a twist few anticipated.  Taylor’s
largest liability, going in, was his tendency to defend in the exact manner from
which Prograis’ attack would draw encouragement.

Then Taylor did nearly its opposite.  He introduced Prograis to a degree of
physicality Rougarou did not prepare for. 
What happened eventually, Taylor’s unemployable right eye, was exactly
what Prograis would’ve predicted had anyone told him Taylor’d be brazen enough
to get physical during minutes 4-35, but herein lay the problem for Prograis:
Taylor predicted the same in camp.

Nobody who watched the 12th round of Saturday’s
fight thinks Taylor could’ve prevailed were the match unexpectedly extended to
15 rounds – Prograis won the final round more clearly than either man won any
of its predecessors – but Taylor had a better plan and executed it more
precisely.  Fortune, they say, favors the
bold, and it did Saturday when a nasty gash opened over an eye Taylor wasn’t
using anyway; the southpaw Taylor’d long since replaced his lead eye with tactile
tactics and didn’t bother dabbing at his bepurpled right eyelid while there was
still a chance to counter the southpaw Prograis.

Saturday’s was not a great fight but an excellent
one.  Taylor would not have prevailed in
a great fight, one in which each man was felled or worse; had the match been
any more excellent than it was, in other words, Taylor would’ve been the one
giving a gracious postfight speech rather than Prograis.

A word or two about that, too.  How refreshing was Prograis’ comportment for
an American after losing a decision narrow enough to be attributable to
geography?  He promised no excuses and
made none.  He called his opponent – badly
faded, beatup and blinded – the better man more than once.  Prograis wasn’t chastened in defeat but
noble.  He’d gotten a fight more honest
than expected and talked like it.

That spoke, also, to what Taylor’d done.  When a man skitterskips his way from you,
husbanding his most violent acts for a finalbell chest slap, it’s impossible
not to feel cheated.  But when a man puts
his weight on you, shoulders you and forearms you, gets your sweat cleaned off his
gumshield after a round of knocking it from your head in halos, when he makes
it filthy intimate, that’s another thing entirely.  It’s easier to be gracious after such an
experience – and such things must be experienced to be believed.

Congratulations, then, Josh and Regis, we wish
there were more men like you!

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Sometime last week or the one before, the ballot
arrived for this year’s International Boxing Hall of Fame election.  It had too many great fighters to choose only
five, but rules are rules.  I don’t
recall the other four I chose.  They
weren’t necessarily four who will get in but borderline candidates I hope to
help.  My fifth vote went without
hesitation to a man whose name appeared alphabetically towards the bottom: Israel
“El Magnifico” Vazquez.

This won’t be a persuasive piece, necessarily, so
much as a light exposition, an examination, a chance to write once more about
my favorite prizefighter.

I didn’t vote for Vazquez to be in the IBHOF
because I believe you should, or should agree that I did.  I won’t list the most-prominent fighter on
this year’s ballot for whom I did not vote because I know his misanthropic fans
and haven’t a desire or reason in the world to hear from them again – and he’s
getting in anyway.  I don’t have
reductionist criteria to which I cling for making decisions about who belongs
in a hall of fame or deserves of-the-year awards because I feel no compulsion
whatever to justify these decisions.  I
watch prizefighting often enough to write a weekly column and trust the rest to
intuition.  I don’t argue about these
things, either; this column is an asymmetrical medium.

There is no one I have covered in this, our
beloved sport whom I admire more than El Magnifico.  Nobody I can think of who gave more of the
best part of himself to our sport, either, making naught but world championship
fights in his prime and losing his career and right eye to the quality of
opposition he faced.  And in a sport of
counterintuitively decent men, too, he’s the most decent I’ve met.

My first Las Vegas card I covered for this site
was Marco Antonio Barrera’s 2006 tutoring of Rocky Juarez, and that night’s
co-comain featured the best fight any American aficionado saw live, much less
in person, that year.  Vazquez came off
the canvas twice and ground Jhonny Gonzalez to dust seven years before Gonzalez
put a stamp on Abner Mares.

Man, could Vazquez grind!  He had innate a sense as any of another man’s
accumulating weakness; he saw with a jeweler’s loupe the first fissures in an
opponent’s will.  Once he saw the
fissures he pressured them unto cracks and pieces and pieces of those pieces,
regardless what counterpunches hit him en route.

He had many plans, too, not just a plan A, which
means he was nothing like the kamikaze some wrongly credited him with being.  He stayed on his stool, after all, in the
first of his three fights with Rafael Marquez. 
He wasn’t able to breathe and said he wouldn’t fight on.  If that keeps him off someone’s defunct Gatti
List, so be it.

What it proves is Vazquez’s volition; it proves
that every time he marched through his era’s best super bantamweights he did so
voluntarily, capable as he was of calling-off the match if the contest became
futile.  Oscar Larios (63-7-1, 39 KOs),
Jhonny Gonzalez (68-11, 55 KOs) and Rafael Marquez (41-9, 37 KOs): Vazquez
fought these men a collective eight times and went 5-3 (4 KOs).  He knocked-out two of them in rematches after
they’d stopped him, and in the case of the third, “Jhonny” Jhonny, he
knocked-out Gonzalez after being dropped by him a twotime.

El Magnifico’s legacy is, of course, his trilogy
with Rafael Marquez.  As aficionados
bemoan the recesses and tuneups granted men like Deontay Wilder and Tyson Fury
and Saul Alvarez and Gennady Golovkin, they’re reminded Vazquez and Marquez
fought one another consecutively in three matches that spanned less than a
year.  Marquez stopped Vazquez in March,
Vazquez stopped Marquez in August, and they made the 2007 fight of the year seven
months later.

It’s the best fight in the best trilogy I’ll ever
cover.

You can confirm all that on YouTube.  What you can’t confirm is how ruined, broken
even, Vazquez was in the postfight pressconference after his victory.  There he was, his face like a powdered
Halloween mask – allwhite but for lipstick circles where his eyes and mouth
should’ve been.  He humbly mumbled his
praise of Marquez through torn, swollen lips and graciously ceded the
microphone to Marquez’s jackass promoter and assistant manager and their braying
about protesting some detail nobody remembers. 
Eleven years later, and that scene still boils.

Sixteen months after Vazquez won 2007’s fight of
the year, good fortune put me at a dinner table with him in New York City,
where the BWAA honored him and my mentor and friend Norm Frauenheim.  Who knows how many surgeries Vazquez’s right
eye had undergone by then.

El Magnifico was there with his wife’s brother,
and before dessert Vazquez’s cuñado loped over to take pictures with what
bedizened models accompanied the evening’s presenters.  Vazquez and I exchanged incredulous glances,
and I told El Magnifico his brother-in-law was gaming every woman with a line
about knowing Israel Vazquez.

“Pero, yo soy Vazquez,” he said, and he motioned
to himself and started laughing.  “I’m
Vazquez!” 

I don’t care if empiricism says there are fighters
more deserving of IBHOF induction.  I
don’t care if someone knows so little about prizefighting that he looks at the 27
losses listed above, or the 5 losses (4 KOs) on Vazquez’s résumé, and scoffs at
someone being dumb enough to vote for Vazquez and admit it in a column.  Frankly, I don’t care if this is the last of
my columns you ever read.

Israel Vazquez epitomizes for me everything that
makes prizefighting worth its writing.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday in Chicago, 2018’s best fighter, Ukrainian
Oleksandr Usyk, made his first-yet heavyweight prizefight against former
American contender Chazz Witherspoon on DAZN, the aficionado’s network.  After a yearlong injury layoff Usyk made
Witherspoon quit after seven rounds in a turn unsurprising as it was
undramatic.

We have seen the best of Usyk.  Years from now, after Usyk is at least a
partially unified heavyweight champion of the world and myriad casuals know him
for it, we can look back at the World Boxing Super Series of 2018 and know we
saw the best version of him, the same way aficionados look at 2006 Manny
Pacquiao and know, whatever his achievements in the 13 years that followed (or
23; hell, he may regularly undress PBC welterweights till he’s 50), Pacquiao never
was better than the 130-pounder who stopped Erik Morales a twotime before decisioning
Juan Manuel Marquez and redecisioning Marco Antonio Barrera.  As Pacquiao scaled heavier, questions arose
about his power and durability and agility but no one ever doubted he was a
better boxer than his new foes at lightweight, junior welterweight,
welterweight and junior middleweight (mind the ‘new’ there; never did Pacquiao
outbox Marquez at any weight).

No one, either, will doubt Usyk is a better boxer
than everyone he faces the rest of his career. 
But can his stamina suffer much harder punches from much larger men? can
Usyk suffer their blows while making them suffer enough to suffer him no more?  Those be exactly the questions Saturday tried
to ask.

Witherspoon, a shortnotice opponent in every sense
of the term, was apt an initial interrogator as boxing’s flagship division had
on offer.  Since power is the last thing
to go, at age 38 Witherspoon, who reliably looks like an A-level guy against
C-level competition and loses just as reliably to every B-level man he faces, needed
to put a few good punches on Usyk, which he did, and absorb a few good punches
from Usyk, which he did, and tell us if Usyk’s move to the weightlimitless
division was foolhardy.

It wasn’t. 
Usyk took punches enough from Witherspoon to prove he can take
heavyweight fire.  And he stopped Witherspoon
faster than 2009 Tony Thompson if slower than 2012 Seth Mitchell. 

Saturday answered every question of power, yes,
but asked a brandnew question of geometry we mightn’t have imagined
otherwise.  The cruiserweights Usyk made
his career undoing were physically narrower, as were the heavyweights Usyk beat
to become an Olympic gold medalist.

It became apparent very quickly Saturday the
precise spinning of Usyk’s signature attack was disrupted by nothing so much as
Witherspoon’s simple girth.  The geometry
was wrong; there was now a need to take a wider step round the opponent, which
meant there was no longer the same space between ring center and ropes or corner.  This made Usyk fight in wider circles,
requiring more skipping than stepping; Usyk was no longer transitioning
balletically from spinning trap to spinning counter to spinning departure so
much as moving defensively sideways or moving offensively straight forward.

And moving straight at a 240-pound man who knows
how to punch is a different thing altogether from moving straight at a
199-pound man.  When a cruiserweight
punching up at you hits your gloves, you expense it to the cost of doing
business at the championship level; when a heavyweight punching level to you or
downwards hits your gloves, it hurts your face and jars your spine.

Usyk is fast and athletic but not so fast and
athletic that a nearing-40 Chazz Witherspoon couldn’t countertouch him with
righthands.  Is that a detail ruinous to
Usyk’s prospects at heavyweight?

No, and the reason why came at the end of
Saturday’s match.  The tale was told in
Witherspoon’s stature and aerobics, not his bleeding mouth.  How open that mouth was and how wilted his
posture, both, indicated what made Usyk unique among cruisers and’ll make him superunique
among heavies.  Usyk is an attrition
hunter who runs his prey to unconsciousness. 
An attrition hunter needn’t fell a beast with a single hurl of the spear
– he need only pain his prey enough to make it flee.  Once it runs, he has it.

Witherspoon sagged on his stool after round 7 like
a sealevel mammoth marched up Mount Everest. 
Thirty seconds into its postround rest Witherspoon’s body had yet to
contemplate recovery, certain as it was about drowning.

What does that say about Usyk’s prospects against
AJ?  Everything.  Men with a third Usyk’s talent and craft collaborate
with Joshua’s massive pecs, delts, traps and bis to fatigue him by midfight.  And Joshua’s June (and December) conqueror,
Andy Ruiz, is nothing so much as a fat cruiserweight loosed on giants who are
basic.

Which brings us to the one genuinely compelling
challenge for Usyk: Deontay Wilder.  Nobody
at cruiserweight hits fractionally so hard as Wilder, but no one at heavyweight
is near so physically narrow as Wilder. 
The geometry of Wilder’s width is all right for Usyk, while the geometry
of Wilder’s height is not.  Neither is
Wilder’s conditioning, which absolutely rivals Usyk’s.  A Wilder-Usyk unification match in 2021 will make
the most-athletic heavyweight prizefight in 25 years.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday at Madison Square Garden in a prizefight
broadcast on the aficionado’s network, DAZN, Gennady “GGG” Golovkin (no new ‘i’
needed; we go with birth names, round here) narrowly decisioned Ukrainian Sergiy
“The Technician” Derevyanchenko to retain his HBO Middleweight Championship and
collect an assortment of other belts Canelo Alvarez doesn’t care for.  The match was bloody, rough and suspenseful.

And when it was over and the scorecards were read the
selfstyled Mecca of Boxing booed Golovkin loudly enough to elicit a “c’mon
guys” from boxing’s once-charming malaprop machine.  Then the postfight interview devolved into
the same scattering of the same Google Translate phrases into which every
Golovkin interview devolves, though it wasn’t nearly so amusing this time, was
it, guys?

For this time Golovkin had faced a man his own
size and looked it.  This time Golovkin,
who somehow became The People’s Champion by being unable to stop in 24 rounds a
smaller man who is between 10 and 15 times more popular than he, countered
interesting and relevant questions with his usual dumb phrases, and nobody was enchanted
as before.  All this and more, in a turn
ironic as it was predictable, oversparkled a Golovkin performance that was more
compelling and confirming than its predecessors.

All the booing and dissent served to make and
subvert what was the first underrated performance in Golovkin’s canon. 

From the third round to the closing bell Saturday the
look on Golovkin’s face was exhausted betrayal. 
One doubts Golovkin’s American assimilation comprises cultural awareness
enough to ring an internal alarm like: By jettisoning the handlers who
hoodwinked late-HBO programmers, Comrade Pyotr et al., I put myself in an
unprotected status with a network interested in feeding me to Canelo Alvarez
the way my previous network’s braintrust wanted Canelo fed to me.

Why, that’s madness, you’re now thinking, what
sort of braintrust would wish to see boxing’s one ticketseller from boxing’s one
reliable ticketbuying public mauled by a man from Kazakhstan?

You had to be there.  GGG was a mania.  In 15 years of doing this, the craziest
things I ever heard said by the sanest boxing minds were things uttered about
Golovkin’s prowess.

In this sense, what happened Saturday, what has
happened in four of Golovkin’s last six fights, was a betrayal of sorts to
those men who invested so ferally in the Golovkin legend.  Because each time Golovkin has confronted a
fellow titlist or a proper middleweight recently – notice the ‘or’ there –
Golovkin has looked like much, much less than the most-feared man on the
planet.

Daniel Jacobs, middleweight permacontender, rose
from the canvas 2 1/2 years ago and showed Golovkin’s hypemen how poorly
chopping down a welterweight prepared the middleweight champion for a defense
with an actual middleweight.  Canelo then went 36 minutes with GGG.  Then, as DAZN’s otherwise annoying broadcast
crew reminded us Saturday, Golovkin first got offered a match with Derevyanchenko
but turned it down for a chance to poleax yet another career super welter.  Canelo then went 36 minutes with GGG.  Someone named Steve Rolls got excavated to launch
GGG’s new-network debut.  And then
Saturday happened.  Another career
middleweight. 

There was a particularly disingenuous game GGG fanatics
used to play with the rest of us – a game they learned from The Money
Team.  When you mentioned the HBOGGG tagline
about Golovkin’s readiness, willingness and ability to make war with any
champion between 154 pounds and 168, at those weights, and mentioned your own
annoyance with Golovkin’s only making war on 147- and 154-pound men forcefed to
160 pounds, GGG Nation would start listing titlists at 160 and 168 pounds and
ask you if you didn’t think he could beat them.

Your hypothetical assumption of a hypothetical
Golovkin triumph in a hypothetical fight was proof Golovkin had already beaten
these men, shouldn’t be required to fight them and – this is the richest part –
frightened all these larger men such that Golovkin should only don gloves for
those smaller men brave enough to face him. 
You would try to argue it didn’t matter, really, Golovkin’s ultimate
record against men his own size; you just wanted to see him fight men his own
size before you partook in any GGG Nation naturalization ceremony.

Which is a torturous way of writing this: Golovkin
is not today diminished.  What is
happening to him now is what always would have happened to him.

He hits quite hard but certainly not that much
harder than any other middleweight champion and not nearly hard as the best
super middleweights.  His footwork is
plodding, his punches are often telegraphed, his defense is porous, and his
ring IQ ain’t that high either.  His
vaunted ability to cut-off the ring never was a product of more than his
ability to walk through smaller men’s punches (you should see me cut-off the
ring on my 110-pound wife!).

Saturday Golovkin cut-off Derevyanchenko’s escape
routes often and just as often learned they were traps Derevyanchenko set for
him.  Imagine that.  A prizefighter with a 30-percent lower
knockout ratio than GGG’s, a prizefighter felled in round 1, a prizefighter
bleeding constantly into his right eye, opined so little of GGG’s power he made
strategic retreats to walk Golovkin into counters.  He made Golovkin miss quite a bit too and
bent The People’s Champion in two, too, with a midrounds left hook to the
button.

And Golovkin responded with true heart and
chin.  Two things soft matchmaking and
hard overpromoting deprived us of seeing during Golovkin’s reign of terror as
HBO Middleweight Champion.  That’s the
good news for GGG Nation.

Here’s the bad: Y’all are out of your collective
gourd if you think Canelo “A Side” Alvarez is going to come down from 175
pounds to 160 to redeem Golovkin’s legacy. 
Canelo may well give GGG his badly needed rubber match, but it won’t be
at middleweight.  Eight years and 20
lucrative prizefights later Canelo is going to run a check on that “fight any man
from 154 to 168” credit and see what’s actually in the account.  It says here: Canelo KO-10 is what.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday at Staples Center welterweight titlist
Errol “The Truth” Spence split-decisioned “Showtime” Shawn Porter and unified
the WBC and IBF titles in an entertaining tilt that exceeded expectations by a
margin that was not small.  In Saturday’s
comain former super middleweight titlist David “La Bandera Roja” Benavidez
sliced up WBC beltholder Anthony “The Dog” Dirrell, proving once more how
emphatically class tells over time.

If Benavidez indeed proved the most intriguing
talent on the card, Spence-Porter nevertheless exceeded expectations at least wildly
and maybe more than that.

Here’s the main criterion for such an assertion:
When the mainevent began my eyes were fixed on the favorite, but by round 3 my
eyes were fixed on the underdog, on whom they stayed for most of the next 27
minutes of combat.  That is attributable
almost wholly to Porter’s professionalism and savvy but partially, too, to what
matchmaking woes rendered Spence so vulnerable to a fellow welterweight who
knew how to fight.

For large parts of many rounds Spence didn’t have
much of an idea what the hell Porter would do next and was offended by such
unpredictability.  Most of Spence’s recent
foes were predictable or if not predictable so impotent their capricious attacks
meant nil to the champ.  Not Porter.  Showtime Shawn was big enough and committed
enough and schooled enough – in the crucible of meaningful competition – to
discomfit The Truth quite a lot.

Spence did every technical thing better than
Porter and probably hit harder, too, but he did not set the conditions of the
confrontation the way weak opposition recently accustomed him to doing.  Frankly Porter walked through nearly all
Spence’s best shots and was flashed to the canvas by a fully leveraged Spence left
in round 11 but never imperiled.

Spence did not look invincible Saturday.  Most of us predicted a lopsided, dull affair,
and most of us were wrong.  No, Spence is
not great as we thought; yes, Porter is better than we thought.  A blessing upon both men for being
professional enough to show us these things.

The comain went about as planned, with a result
most predicted, but showed David Benavidez, however-youngest and
however-many-timesest champion, remains a work in progress.

Before I go further, let me confess Benavidez
enchants me like no other prizefighter currently.  He doesn’t know how good he is or how bad he
is.  He’s cocksure more than confident;
he’s pretty sure, where men like Hi-Tech and Bud and Canelo are certain.  Sometimes his smile is not congruent to his
mood.  From his physique to his chief
second’s urban-combat-outfitters attire, everything about Benavidez is
fragile.  To watch him closely is to know
the entire Benavidez train could derail at any moment (it may have derailed
even as you read this, or just before, or just after, or just now) with a drug
test or arrest or worse.

But damn, is he fun to watch.  Such nonchalance, such patience, such willingness.  He didn’t do things all that technically well
against Dirrell, Saturday, in part because he never thought he needed to.  He saw Dirrell as a chatty victim from the
bell’s first tone.  He liked the idea of
Dirrell’s courage and loved giving Dirrell a chance to exhibit it: Go on and
show us how brave you are, Dog, while I go smirky sadist on your right eye.

Benavidez is a natural because you cannot teach
his level of relaxation in a prizefight. 
If you doubt this, go back and watch videos of Oscar De La Hoya’s
greatest hits.  Few fighters of the last
generation had De La Hoya’s natural gifts, but the dude never learned to
relax.  There he is, even in his very
best moments, jaw bulging like a cheeky walnut. 
Which is why the worst moments of De La Hoya’s prime were marked by late-rounds
fading.

Which is also why Benavidez, a guy with all the
upperbody musculature of a prepubescent gamer, doesn’t get tired of punching his
statuesque opponents till well after they tire of punching him. 

Then there’s Sampson Lewkowicz – whose presence in
the Benavidez stable is the main thing allowing a weathered, withered observer
like me to dare stake his afición on a project with future heartbreak’s every
hallmark.  Lewkowicz has had his misses,
sure, but he’s also had Manny Pacquiao and Sergio Martinez when no one else
wanted them.  Benavidez already has tried
to break Lewkowicz’s heart a twopair or better, but Lewkowicz was there in Saturday’s
ring, one of few Red Flaggers without a vest on, and it made you hope reason
might continue to prevail upon Benavidez.

Capitalistic sensibilities, on the other hand,
will continue to prevail upon Errol Spence. 
Saturday’s postfight weirdness proves it.  Danny Garcia – seriously?  A year removed from his loss to Shawn Porter
(yes, that Shawn Porter) Swift came down from grooming One Time to challenge The
Truth before our disbelieving eyes. 
Whose idea was this? is Spence that covetous of Garcia’s WBC silver
title?

Spence is an excellent prizefighter who wants to
prove it.  PBC ought to let him.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday on a “FOX Sports is proud to present PBC
Pay-Per-View events” event in Los Angeles welterweight titlists Errol “The
Truth” Spence and “Showtime” Shawn Porter will vie for Spence’s number-one Ring
rating without jeopardizing Terence Crawford’s number-two pound-for-pound
rating in a match between two good guys whose disparity in talent should
preclude anything too thrilling from happening. 
Fans of thrilling talent should look to Saturday’s comain.

Because the most interesting talent on the card is
WBC super middleweight titlist David Benavidez, an uncharacteristically ascendant
PBC asset.  Spence may be the greater
talent, and well may not be, but he is not intriguing as Benavidez, not after getting
outdone by Benavidez in March.

We probably have seen the best of Spence.  While Manny Pacquiao (along with Floyd
Mayweather) is the greatest talent ever to fight on a PBC card – a sentence
likely to hold up, still, in 2030 – he is far too old to make someone of
Spence’s age and size improve.  Pacquiao
undressed Keith Thurman a few months ago, sure, but does anyone think Thurman
will be better for it?  Pacquiao wants no
part of Spence, either, because of the youngster’s physicality; Pacquiao, way
way smarter than we realized in his prime, knows someone big and vigorous as
Errol can do a lot of things wrong and still win, and there’s no dissuading him
with activity.

There’s dissuading Spence with inactivity, as
Mikey Garcia showed us at Cowboys Stadium (we go with birth names, round here) but
not with an attack.  It’s a reason Porter
hasn’t much of a chance Saturday, but we’ll be back to that below.

PBC hasn’t the stable or matchmaking acumen to
keep Spence on an upward trajectory. 
Spence would be improved by a fight with Bud Crawford, who’s small
enough to see his craft advantage offset, and an eventual move to 160 via 154,
but none of those things will happen in Spence’s prime.  Not while Danny Garcia and Keith Thurman and
Alfredo Angulo haunt the FOX Sports airwaves. 

Which is, in its way, a tragedy.  PBC didn’t really know what it had with
Spence, but soon as it did, it got cautious as could be, feeding him a b-level
vet, a hopeless lad named Ocampo and then a former featherweight.  Subsequently Spence has not felt a punch in
28 months.  That’s no way to season a
prime talent. 

Which is why Benavidez is the most interesting man
on Saturday’s card.  PBC still hasn’t
much of an idea what he is or what to do with him.  None of us has.  Benavidez is loose in the midsection, failed
a VADA test a couple years ago, and Dr?ma adorns his coat of arms.  But he is a natural, and sneaky-ascendant
because he doesn’t look the part.

Our beloved sport’s myriad of hyperbolists begin
their marketability prejudging with criteria borrowed from the late Hugh
Hefner.  Benavidez once was obese, and
extra skin is a mortal no-no.  In this
sense Benavidez is a bit like boxing’s version of golfer John Daly, whose obesity
and publicized vices allowed his sport’s hypemen to overlook Daly’s singular
athleticism.

Really, who the hell ever mistook a rotund
chainsmoker for a great athlete?  I
suppose I just did. 

Next time you see a golf club, or even a heavy
stick, try to get it to the place Daly gets his backswing while keeping your
feet planted.  Never mind maintaining
that balance long enough to hit a ball, never ever mind doing it the exact same
way at age 53 as you did at 23; just try to get your body in that position –
then imagine doing it drunk in front of 50,000 spectators.

Benavidez’s comain foe, Anthony Dirrell, is no
one’s idea of an ascendant asset, but he is a veteran prizefighter who is proud
and has spent his entire career at the same weightclass.  He’s not the better athlete in his family,
but he is the better fighter.  He will
test Benavidez’s will. And that is precisely the test a fighter like Benavidez
needs to improve.

Will Showtime Shawn test Errol’s will?  A bit, yes. 
But barring a sprained ankle or Fan Man type of event Porter hasn’t much
of a chance.  Which is too bad because
Porter is a guy to cheer for.  He’s joyful,
humble, buffoonish, happy, fun.  His
efforts to play an antagonist generally go nowhere because he likes the guys he
makes punches with (when he and Spence “trash-talked” one another before Pacquiao
embarrassed Thurman, Porter couldn’t stay in character long enough to get his
lines right, and both men came off more endearing than fearsome).

Which is a winding path to writing this:
Saturday’s mainevent won’t be very good. 
Styles make fights – have you heard? – and Spence and Porter have
similar styles.  And Spence is better at
every facet of that style, so much so that we miss how similarly he and Porter
are as stylists (too, Porter has been matched much less sympathetically than
Spence lately, which makes Porter look like a flailing volume guy while some
aspiring aficionados might’ve once mistaken Spence for a power-puncher).

I can forgive myself for admitting a year ago
I’d’ve picked Spence to ruin Porter in 10 rounds or fewer.  But Spence’s slap-and-tickle contest with
Garcia weighs heavily on such predictions now. 
Porter should look about twice Garcia’s size and girth swimming his way
towards Spence, Saturday, and we’re not altogether certain how well Spence
fights off his backfoot, are we?  But
lest we forget, boxing’s clown pauper, AB, dropped Porter flat in the final
minutes of their 2015 contest, and one must believe at 147 pounds Spence hits
much much harder than About Billions.

I’ll take Spence, UD-12, in a match not even Ray
Mancini can call a candidate for fight of the year.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Latenight Saturday on ESPN+ lineal heavyweight
champion Tyson Fury will defend his strapless title against an undefeated
28-year-old Swede named Otto Wallin, a man BoxRec’s rankings place squarely
atop the formidable, fourperson Swedish-heavyweight heap (while allowing him to
crack the world’s Top 50 just barely). 
It will be shocking joyful if Wallin featherdusts Fury, and he won’t.

The Fury victory tour continues apace.  He rose from substance abuse to challenge
Deontay Wilder nearly a year ago and rose from Wilder’s wildness to win a
draw.  Those feats and promoter Top
Rank’s feat of finding its way back to a division in which its touch has not
been magical for a decade or two are the reasons we got served the June fight
with Tom Schwarz – ostensibly about a lineal championship (that traces all the
way back to Wlad Klitschko, who beat no one the previous generation considered
great but is brother to a man who gave Lennox Lewis a couple tough rounds). 

Aficionados rightly saw the Schwarz thing for what
it was.  In case they didn’t ESPN, more
camp than champ, saved its greatest enthusiasm for Fury’s ringwalk.

Saturday’s ringwalk better include live dinosaurs
accompanied by the London Symphony Orchestra. 

Less than that mayn’t reinflate the seeping Fury
balloon.  Ratings and press releases and multiplatform
coverage from ESPN will imply something else entirely, of course, but trust
your gut on this, come Sunday morning.

Fury’s style is not conducive to playing the
overdog.  Had he completed his denuding
of Wilder by remaining upright for 36 minutes Fury and his enablers would’ve had
another 18 months of goodwill to tinkle on. 
Alas, “Wilder &” Wilder dropped Fury often enough to dissuade any
loose immediate-rematch chatter from the lineal champ and make Wilder’s standard-loop
claims of being avoided feel a touch credible. 
Wilder’s folks, obviously, are in no real hurry to see their guy tested
again, or they simply do not know what they’re doing – but Luis “El Viejo”
Ortiz is still a more meaningful opponent at 40 1/2 than either of Fury’s recent
foes (if that fight actually happens). 

Which is all a fairly direct route to saying over
and again: Thank heavens for Andy Ruiz!

Ruiz’s stamping CUR on the nearest thing the
heavyweight division had to an undisputed champion is the one gift heavyweight
prizefighting gave us in 2019.  When he
does it again in December he will fairly well cut Fury out of the conversation
altogether.  However much Ruiz’s manager sacrificially
fed him to a rival promoter in June he’s still a PBC asset.  That means when AJ taps out again a few weeks
before Christmas, PBC will have each heavyweight belt except Fury’s imaginary
one.

It will require no imagination whatever for PBC to
host a fullthroated superfight in 2020, crowning a WBC/WBA/IBF/WBO Heavyweight
Champion of the World in a genuinely intriguing unification match between Ruiz
and Wilder.  Fury and Joshua will play
footsie for a year or two about a British-contenders-unite match whose purse
negotiations will not be helped by their post-Brexit economy. 

While the rest of the world forgets who they
are.  ESPN+ will have full coverage of
the negotiations and quite a few features about Tyson’s dad, “Gypsy John”, and
Anthony’s dad, Robert, with the striking, unforeseeable conclusion these men
influenced their sons.  “Not since I
promoted Muhammad Ali . . .” will go many of Bob Arum’s colorful quotes about Fury.

While we’re on about Arum let’s use one of his
best verbs: To dissipate.  About 15 years
ago I had a chance to ask Arum a few questions at a media gathering in a
Phoenix supermarket.  One of those
questions concerned what qualities he looked for in a prizefighter before
signing him, and Arum listed but one: “Does he dissipate between fights?”

If Fury hasn’t dissipated fractionally so much as
expected between fights, interest in his rematch with Wilder sure has.  As goes its flagship division, so goes our
beloved sport.  If there isn’t less
collective interest in boxing in 2019 there most certainly is not more, and
that’s with the full might of late-boom economics driving network acquisitions
and broadcast calendars.

Storm clouds now gather on the American economy’s
horizon, and while a recession may mint a new generation of prospects it’ll do
nil to prod this generation’s fatted calves towards greatness.  Showtime will follow HBO, while Fox follows
DAZN and ESPN to boxing’s destination platform: App Store.  Circus barkers will contrive a new language
of YouTube likes and trailing-month replays, and what few of us still write
regularly about the sport will begin a fifth or sixth search for green shoots while
the BWAA hasn’t a choice but to award boxing’s best tweeters.  Floyd and Manny will make a desperate
cashgrab of a rematch, and the old salts’ll use whatever gaudy revenue number
comes along to do a 27th installment of the Boxing Is Not Dead serial.

Whatevs. 
We’ll always have and must always cherish what Andy Ruiz did to Anthony
Joshua on June 1, 2019.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday a Thames riverboat ride east of London, one
of the world’s five best prizefighters, Ukrainian lightweight Vasiliy
Lomachenko, outfought Yorkshire’s Luke Campbell to collect Lomachenko’s third
of four sanctioning-body titles and defend his (much more meaningful) Ring
championship by unanimous decision.  It
was another test passed by Lomachenko, another test administered by a proctor
much stricter than those subs who passed him so flatteringly at the lower
grades.

The inverse logic of things being what it is an
exodus from the Lomachenko bandwagon is probably underway just when the bandstand
ought be overflowing.  As Lomachenko does
things that fulfill what hyperbole greeted his debut six years back, the
hyperbolists, many now out of business with HBO’s welldeserved demise, turn
their miniscule attention spans to new kids who turn sensational feats against
hopeless opposition.

With each Lomachenko title acquisition the
hyperbolists see more wear, less sublimity, more exposure.  These lads yearn for some highlight-ready
stuff like GGG duly delivers whenever matched at middleweight with welters.  Lomachenko tried that route for a spell – the
Rigondeaux debacle – then took the very next offramp.  If the hyperbolists forget it, the historians
shan’t. 

Rather than stay at his natural weight, blast
journeyman for easy money while occasionally preying on a brandname from a
couple divisions below, Lomachenko went above his proper weight and began to
unify titles by beating men who acquired those titles someway or another.

Luke Campbell is by no means boxing’s most-feared
man but he sure as hell wasn’t a cherrypick either.

While the hyperbolists hop off the Loma bandwagon,
I find myself gradually lumbering on.  I
verily enjoyed watching Lomachenko make battle with a man who did not fear him
or have reason to, a man against whom even the most balletic footwork wouldn’t
forego Saturday’s attrition requirement. 
Just as happened in his other three lightweight matches Lomachenko had
to strike Campbell multiples harder to get any English out of him.  Campbell fighting at home before some of our
beloved sport’s best (if often delusional) fans, too, added another inch and
five or so pounds to the Brit’s dossier.

In the midrounds Campbell did something dastardly
stupid if daring: Throw a halfnaked backhand uppercut whilst moving
forward.  That’s not Boxing-101 verboten,
because you don’t get to learn how to throw uppercuts till Boxing 102.  But no sooner do they put you on the gym’s
uppercut sack than they tell you never to throw the punch moving forward.

History has its share of cautionary clips to
explain why, but let Buster Douglas’ halfnaked backhand uppercut lead against
Evander Holyfield suffice.  Campbell’s
wasn’t telegraphed as Douglas’, no, and for that reason Lomachenko’s counter
left didn’t get leveraged fully as Holyfield’s rightcross in 1990, but it was telegraphed
enough, and Lomachenko looked almost euphoric at Campbell’s plunging forward.

Lomachenko’s counter left chastened Campbell and
then Lomachenko’s professionalism nearly ended Campbell’s night.  Knowing his opponent was gone wobblewoozy
Lomachenko went HAM to Campbell’s body and delivered the Brit to his corner
scrunchfaced wincing.  Had the exchange
happened at even super featherweight Campbell’d’ve seen naught of the
championship rounds.

And we’d be hearing Lomachenko is a force of
nature never before seen with gloved fists. 
But because Lomachenko wants posterity to regard him differently from
his generational peers the exchange happened 10 pounds above Lomachenko’s debut
weight, and Campbell, a significantly larger man, had himself another half
fight to strike and be struck by the smaller champion.

This is why we ask fighters who are not
heavyweights to rise through weightclasses and why even history’s best
heavyweights are underrepresented on all-time lists.  The more the consequences of a Lomachenko misstep
grow and the consequences of a Lomachenko punch diminish the less any of us
cares to hear a 15th recital on Lomachenko’s time in the ballroom.

Lomachenko needs all his wiles, these days, to jab
a fellow lightweight in the first four minutes they share, much less mesmerize
Max and Jim.  And since his opponents are
no longer imperiled by his mere reputation, Lomachenko now finds himself
subjected to what elbows and shoulders lighter men hadn’t the wherewithal to
throw.  Campbell spent a fair fraction of
his Saturday night reminding Lomachenko how many questionable acts might be fit
in the foggy chaos of a championship prizefight, borrowing occasionally from
Siri Salido’s forgotten blueprint.

What Lomachenko did Saturday brought no one to
mind so much as Manny Pacquiao.  He’s the
last man we saw climb weightclasses and so dominate their titlists, even if
there was an occasional cherrypick thrown in. 
Pacquiao is also instructive for this reason: What Pacquiao did and
found himself forced to do against other great prizefighters are why Pacquiao
is thrice the legend for all but the last second of what he did in the sixth
round of his fourth fight with Juan Manuel Marquez than he’d be for icing David
Diaz a dozen times.

Lomachenko is not Pacquiao and won’t be – fortune hasn’t
given him the era for it – but he is now admirably earning the premature
plaudits bestowed on him some years back, even if he’s having to do so in
challengers’ arenas on a mobile app.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday in Hermosillo’s practically named Centro
de Usos Multiples, Sonora’s Juan Francisco “El Gallo” Estrada made a
harder-than-planned first defense of his Ring super flyweight championship
against North Carolina’s Dewayne “Mr. Stop Running” Beamon, on DAZN.  Estrada dropped Beamon twice in round 2 and
punched him till no vim remained in round 9, and Panamanian referee Abdiel
Barragan interceded at the right moment. 
Between rounds 2 and 9, though, Beamon gave Estrada a proper fitness
test.

Estrada is sensational in this way: If you might
employ a hybrid rating system, a blind sampling, that removes size and
ethnicity and purse and broadcaster hyperbole – raw raw, in lieu of rah rah –
he’d be top 5 on any list composed by an honest hand.  He is distinguished by his losses, oldschool
style, much as his wins.

Since 2011 Estrada has lost twice.  His first loss came to Chocolatito Gonzalez
in a fight that helped burnish Gonzalez’s ranking as the world’s best
prizefighter in any weight.  Estrada’s
second loss came to the man who violently stamped the end of Chocolatito’s reign,
Srisaket Sor Rungvisai.  The second loss
narrower than the first, and the first narrower
indeed than scorers had it.  Estrada is
the only Mexican heir in his generation to the master Juan Manuel Marquez;
Estrada somehow fulfilled coach Nacho Beristain’s vision in Sonora, some 2,000
km north of Mexico City, whilst Beristain played celebrity slapntickle with Son
of the Legend and (ghost of) The Golden Boy.

Canelo Alvarez is, of course, Mexico prizefighting’s
greatest financial draw, but despite his admirable pursuit of able competition,
Canelo hasn’t Estrada’s class or mettle. 
After losing to Chocolatito in a world title match at 108 pounds Estrada
fought Brian Viloria for a world title at 112 pounds, five months later, and
won a title Estrada defended five times. 
Then Estrada got outworked by Sor Rungvisai, the man who put Chocolatito
in shavasana pose like a chocolate yogi – not outpunched or stiffened, mind
you, only outworked.  And in April when
the rematch happened with Sor Rungvisai, Estrada went directly at one of our
sport’s hardest punchers and snatched his title.

All of that is a hell of a throatclearing preamble
to writing this: Estrada didn’t look great Saturday against an otherwise-anonymous,
34-year-old Carolinian named Dewayne Beamon (whom the Spanish-language
broadcast assured us gave up promising careers in both basketball [5-foot-5]
and football [114 1/2 pounds] to pursue boxing).  Some of that was Estrada, but more of it was
Beamon. 

Here’s the part that was Estrada.  Making a first world-title defense in his
home state of Sonora since 2015 Estrada found himself subjected to all the
distracting ills of a homecoming – ticket requests, camp visits, interviews
with the local daily.  Those distractions
told in Estrada’s conditioning.  Estrada
would daze Beamon with a counter then unload on him with leads then spend a
bemused next round with his mouth open. 
The oftener that pattern happened, the infrequenter Estrada soldout the
attack.  Often as not after round 4
Estrada didn’t put it on Beamon until or unless Beamon pissed him off.

Beamon, frankly, was too savvy to do that very
often.  If Estrada’s conditioning was
suspect Beamon’s was not.  The Carolinian
trained for a world title challenge in the champ’s hometown and acted like
it.  He absorbed very fine punches from a
very fine prizefighter and didn’t wilt till well offschedule.  Class told eventually, but that eventuality
arrived later than aficionados expected and way way later than Estrada penciled
it in camp.

That tardiness was, in some part, a matter of
class.  Estrada is a masterful
counterpuncher accustomed to landing apex predators on his fists.  Which is to write the force of Beamon’s
attack wasn’t great enough to turn concussively against him – the same way a
hitter might drive an 80 mph fastball to the warning track with the same swing
he’d land a 100 mph fastball in the bleachers. 

Beamon never really got the angle calculated for
his righthand.  While we’re playing with
baseball metaphors, let’s go here: Beamon, accustomed to much lesser hitters,
didn’t hide the ball coming out of his windup. 
However it looked on flatscreen, something Beamon did gave away his
righthand, and Estrada perceived it early every time.  Sometimes Estrada went Mexican with that
perception and ate Beamon’s right glove to emasculate discourage the challenger
a bit.  Most of the time Estrada let the
punch flash over him by the narrowest possible margin.

The two or three times Beamon threw the
telegraphed righthand and neither of the above scenarios played out, the two or
three times Beamon put a sting on Estrada, the champ retaliated swiftly and
disproportionately.

But here’s the thing about Beamon.  He acquitted himself very well in his role of
designated homecoming opponent, giving Estrada far more than his paycheck
anticipated.  Beamon was not going to
decision Estrada in Sonora and he wasn’t going to knock him stiff either, and
if the rest of us knew that during the ringwalk, Beamon surely knew it a
quarterhour before he succumbed.  That
Beamon’s shoulders didn’t sag till round 9 speaks to Beamon’s character and
speaks of it well.  “Mr. Stop Running” –
no, that nickname doesn’t work any more elegantly in Spanish – went in on the
champion, one of the world’s best prizefighters, and got his money’s worth.  A good thing for Beamon, Estrada and the rest
of us.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Editor’s note: For part 18, please click here

MEXICO CITY – Beautiful is a word I didn’t think to
associate with this city before visiting because I’d not heard anyone call it
that, and so perhaps I’ll be its first.  After
nearly a dozen encounters with its airport I am for a first time without its
airport, in La Condesa neighborhood specifically (11 kilometers west of Romanza
Gym), and nearly enchanted by the city’s beauty.

It is doubtful either the Brothers Marquez, on
their first trip to Romanza, or their mentor and trainer, Nacho Beristain, would
recognize very much of their city that I’ve seen and plan to describe.  This neighborhood is “fifí”; a playfully
derogatory Spanish term, like “spoiled” or “snobbish”, that invests its target
with a pride proportionate to its speaker’s envy.  It is Barcelona much more than Ciudad Juarez
and remarkably devoid of what dust and noise dominates most Latin American
capitals from here to Patagonia.

The people are more courteous, or at least less
numerous, than anticipated.  And about
them, here’s an observational parallel: The populations of Mexico’s two largest
cities mirror the populations of the United States’ two largest cities both in
appearance and mien.  Mexico’s
second-most-populous city, Guadalajara, has the beautiful people – just like Los
Angeles.  Mexico’s most-populous city,
this one, has the ambitious ones – just like New York.  There’s a quicker pace here than in Guadalajara;
one imagines it far easier to move from here than to move to here; if few
passersby could pass by beauty alone in Guadalajara, they come from a place
where no one passes by beauty alone.

This neighborhood is aspirational bohemian (a
redundancy in most cases, that) and traffics in the expected incongruencies of
the combination.  Lots of serious eyeglass
frames and fashion beards complemented by an inexplicable tendency to sit among
familiars and exaggerate to strangers – effectively, to care less about the
opinions of those you see daily than those whom you’ll never see again.  In the Massachusetts of my youth we’d’ve
called most guys here “faggy”, but the slur strikes me as entirely
inappropriate today for more than just the obvious reason.

Thirty-five years ago we called each other by gay
slurs in large part because we didn’t know any gay people, or if we did, we
didn’t know we did – I can confidently state I never called a gay classmate by
a gay slur because, by dint of inexperience and misperception, the guys I
targeted went on to have wives and children. 
We used gay slurs to imply something like fifí – delicate, preoccupied
by others’ judgments, unlikely to mate. 
And therein lies an irony one sees quite a bit in this city but especially
in Nuevo Polanco, with its art collections and homage plazas built by Carlos
Slim.

The only obviously mated folks are the gay
ones.  While their ostensibly
heterosexual peers engage with platonic hugs and fraternal banter, the men who
like men are kissing, the women who like women are holding hands, the only
couples anyone can say with confidence are coupled share the same gender.  It’s delicious ironic for an American raised
in the airhead morality of “family values” th’t in 2019 the only men in our
continent’s largest city secure enough in their masculinity to show public love
are those gazing longingly in other men’s eyes.

Dude, this is getting uncomfortable.  Can we get back to Juan Manuel or Rafael?

I thought of them a bit a few days ago in Papalote
Museo del Niño, this country’s largest children’s museum, as the young guides
doggedly presented their educational wares to father and son alike.  Unlike their lessinspired American
counterparts in San Antonio’s DoSeum, a sister venue with a video feed into
Papalote, coincidentally, Mexican guides do not allow failures in their
exhibitions.  You sit at a table, whether
to assemble from papercups a windtunnel-ready flying saucer or to repair a
deadbolt lock, and you do not leave till your work is complete – lest a guide
less than half your age lecture you on what a poor example you’re setting as a
quitter.  And it works.  You feel triumphant when you eventually win
that teenager’s stern approval.

It made me wonder what Beristain told the Brothers
Marquez during their first week in his gym. 
Did he have to tell them the consequences of their new vocation? did he
have to invest them with the seriousness of their hoped-for craft? was Rafael
already the more physically gifted specimen? was it obvious to Beristain?

At Castillo de Chapultepec the next day I thought
of Marco Antonio Barrera, as I often do. 
Also a chilango – and that’s a loaded term, too, as Ciudad de Mexico is
no longer a federal district but recently a state of its own surrounded by a
state named Mexico in a country named Mexico, though a city-cum-state whose
residents may or may not still call themselves chilangos and probably should be
offended if you were to – Barrera somehow doesn’t belong in a boxing gym, in my
imagining of him.  While Juan Manuel
Marquez labors under Beristain’s tyrannical tutelage in Romanza, Barrera gazes
across his city’s extraordinarily large forest park from the ramparts of Maximilian’s
royal home and relies solely on contempt for opponents to prepare himself.

Did you forget Barrera and Marquez fought 12 years
ago?  I had.  Then it came to me while touring the castle,
in a memory of Barrera’s petulant scowl when he dropped Marquez on his gloves
at the end of round 7, paused for two full beats to line him up, and then
clocked his felled opponent with a right uppercut.  Cold contempt, not rage – an almost comical
contempt.

A beautiful city filled with aspirational
inhabitants incubated contempt, apparently, in one of our beloved sport’s
largest brains.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday in a junior welterweight title-unification
match broadcast by the aficionado’s network, DAZN, California’s Jose Ramirez stopped
Texan Maurice Hooker midway through a wonderfully compelling fight that ended with
extraordinary abruptness.  Eighteen-and-a-half
minutes in, the men looked equally formidable. 
Eighteen seconds later, Hooker lay collapsed on the whiteropes, a blueshirt
his only protection from Ramirez’s ferocity.

Both men distinguished themselves by daring to
ratify their once-vacant titles. 
Promoters and their matchmakers are too good to be believed, and so the
winner of a vacant title is not credible till he’s fought a fellow titlist.  We now know Ramirez is the real thing.  And we know Hooker is the real thing, too,
though slightly less of that thing than Ramirez.

If neither man was allowed comfort before the
other, a minutely tally’d’ve found Ramirez acting as discomfitter, not
Hooker.  There was the promise of Hooker’s
substantial rightcross to keep Ramirez sober at every charge, a source of
instant anxiety for Ramirez to be sure, but it was a tool Ramirez solved and
dulled in the fight’s opening quarter.  Ramirez
did this with timing and footwork, somethings he doubtlessly learned before joining
trainer Robert Garcia’s stable.

If you have an amateur pedigree – which means
you’ve involuntarily boxed through your youth against every style and ethnicity
– before you pilgrim to Oxnard, Garcia takes your skillful foundation, puts it
in smaller gloves and commands you attack. 
If you haven’t a skillful foundation, Garcia nevertheless puts you in
smaller gloves and commands you attack. 
As we saw in his younger brother’s spring whitewashing contra Errol
Spence, Coach Robert carries no plans B to ringside in his spitbucket; any exam
question whose answer is not “more aggression” gets left blank for later – a generation
later.

Fortunately for Fresno aficionados Jose Ramirez,
an Olympian, brought skills galore to Oxnard when he arrived a year ago.  That meant Garcia’s plan A, more aggression,
was exactly matched to Saturday’s moment. 
It wasn’t necessarily that an Olympian like Ramirez couldn’t stay
outside and win a boxing match with Hooker, that was about a 40/60 proposition,
it was that there was no reason to try it. 
Hooker’s every advantage disintegrated once Ramirez was within his arms’
length of Hooker.  And Ramirez’s
advantages multiplied proportionate to every inch nearer after that.  Hooker knew this, Ramirez knew this.

Hooker outsmarted himself, though, figuring in round
5 he might do a little sabbatical on the ropes and let Ramirez get tired of
punching.  That was the lapse that cost
Hooker his title.  What happened in a
couple seconds in round 6, Hooker’s straightback headpulling that set his chin
on a tee for Ramirez’s left fist and the legs’ jellying and Ramirez’s swift
adaptation and Hooker’s utter defenselessness, all that, came of Hooker’s vanished
judgement the round before.

There are ways to discourage and fatigue volume
punchers like Ramirez, but none of them permits him to put knuckles on
you.  Knuckling you puts that breed of
man in his most comfortable place.  He’s
no longer burning calories at fractionally the rate you think he is, especially
if you’re a rangy puncher accustomed to throwing on your preferred timetable.

Ali rope-a-doped Foreman, remember, not Frazier.  You rope-a-dope a slugger, and he
autodiscourages by failing to harm you the way experience told him he
would.  You rope-a-dope a boxer, and he
retreats to the opposite ropes, and y’all feint at one another till the ref
starts deducting points.  But you
rope-a-dope a volume puncher, and you leave in an ambulance.

Too soon?

Let’s have a treatment of our beloved sport’s
deadly past week, then.  We are expected
to examine our collective conscience at times like these, I know, perform
public acts of expiation, and especially if we write for daily periodicals
whose pacifistic editors tsk-tsk our ways.

Good news, there.  In 2019 none of us writes for daily periodicals.

That means much of last week’s atonement was
habitual more than sincere.  We know this
because it all reduced to a massive shrug from the moral lowground, or else
niggling about pet safety issues – like tiptoeing a matchstick bridge across a
firepit licking.

Here’s an easier calculus for you, the aficionado:
Do you watch fights hoping to see a brainbleed or death?

No, you don’t. 
Then that’s that.  You’re not
obligated to justify yourself further. 
Those who would ban our sport are unserious; if they coulda, they
woulda.  Those who wish to make
prizefighting safer verily miss the point – our sport survives by dint of its
peril; safe prizefighting is oxymoronic. 

Some primal, though enduring (and thus still not vestigial),
human trait requires public acts of violence. 
In this sense the ban-boxing brigade recalls a Chris Rock joke about
needing bullies, because a couple decades of banning bullying in our schools meant
that when an actual bully showed up in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, no
one knew what to do.

Jose Ramirez would know what to do, and for that
matter so would Maurice Hooker, and if watching them punch one another doesn’t
quite tell us what to do it at least reminds us occasions for punching one
another still exist, however many millennia since our ancestors emigrated from their
caves.  There is real violence within
most of us, and it thrills the spirit. 
That isn’t a solution for prizefighters’ deaths and damages or even a
prescription for a solution.  It is an
amoral report of where and what we are – an act of acceptance, not contrition.

*

Editor’s note: This column will be on summer vacation
next week.

*

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday on Fox PPV in a match for the PBC’s
emeritus welterweight championship at MGM Grand undefeated titlist Keith “One
Time” Thurman got dropped and fairly decisioned by a 40-year-old Filipino
senator, Manny Pacquiao, who struggled to call Thurman even “a good fighter” immediately
afterwards.  Not the always gracious
Pacquiao’s fault, that.  Different era,
different priorities, different metrics.

No sooner does one imagine things going
differently in Thurman’s career were he with different management than he
recognizes different management overlooked him, didn’t it?  If manager Al Haymon plucked fruit from the
Olympic tree – some wellseeded like Errol, most misshapen like Rau’Shee and Terrell
– he discovered Thurman differently, howsoever he did it, which is to write
Haymon outbid the likes of Top Rank and affiliates, almost certainly because
they didn’t bid at all. 

Why is this relevant?  Because at the time Thurman turned pro
(nearly 12 years ago) most every great fighter a young aficionado today can
name got developed by Top Rank, starting with “Pretty Boy” Floyd Mayweather,
the patron saint, emphasis on patron, of today’s PBC stable. 

Whither this rehashing?  It crossed my mind muchly during Saturday’s
match, as it certainly crossed Coach Freddie’s mind and “Money” Mayweather’s
mind, too, at ringside.  Accustomed to
what large-pursed, pillow-gloved, athletic-contest exhibitions PBC bubblewraps
its champions in, Thurman hadn’t an inkling what suffering must traditionally
be endured for a man to call himself champion. 
He knows about it now, though.

Over and again one marveled at how alien a figure
Pacquiao cut on the sanitized island called Premier Boxing Champions.  Like an aged tiger parachuted in the middle
of a clover sheep farm populated only by sheep and clover, Pacquiao, red of
tooth and claw, fists wrapped in Mexican horsehair, not foam, thrilled at
violence as his profession’s only point – not an ancillary unpleasantness to be
got through while doing fitnessy things for large paychecks.

Three times the absurdity of it all manifested on
Thurman’s face: When Pacquiao knocked him asswards, when Pacquiao mashed his
nose through his face, when Pacquiao touched him properly on the button.  First was the look of disbelief then the look
of disgusted betrayal then the look of offended fright.  Thurman collected a righthand and dropped
like he’d been tripped then he spit the yucky taste of his own blood at his
corner en route to his stool then he wheeled away, gumshield in glove, selling a
Pacquiao bodyshot like the foulest of things. 
The last was the caketaker; it was the act of a man unable to imagine in
his 30th prizefight such pain might be delivered by a legal blow.

And all this from a version of Pacquiao five years
past its expiration date, a version of Pacquiao unable or unwilling to contest
more than 45 seconds of a round, a version of Pacquiao much more an ideal of
selfdefense than a predator.

There was Thurman, chastened completely by getting
bluematted in round 1, tentatively pawing and countering through much of the
match, while Fox’s contracted narrative-maker tabulated hundreds of “power
punches”, knowing there was a needle he must thread: Hit Pacquiao enough to
score points but not so much as to make him mad.

Then in your mind flashed Juan Manuel Marquez,
sucking his own noseblood through an open mouth and goading, prodding, goading,
goading, prodding, goading Pacquiao till he lured him, after 125 minutes and 58
seconds of misery and conflict and fear, in the master’s trap to end his era in
ecstasy.  How even do you word such a
contrast between the sinewy savage Pacquaio faced Dec. 8, 2012, and the fatted sheep
he’s seen in 2019?  They are not sportsmen
of the same species, surely. 

O, be not so hard on gentleman Keith; after all,
he comported himself nobly in defeat and gives generous interviews and he’s
telegenic and loves his wife.  Fair
points, yes.  If you are going to lose
there are more ignoble ways of doing it, as Adrien Broner reminds us annually.

O, to hell with that.  This is bloodsport, this is men making their
livings hurting other men. 

Pacquiao just reset the hands on the clock of
PBC’s fraud.  Don’t let Pacquiao’s
reluctance to face Errol Spence blind you. 
Spence is an outlier – PBC doesn’t know what to do with him either.  Thurman was PBC’s champion, Thurman won the
PBC welterweight Super Bowl in 2017, two months before PBC even knew what it
had in Spence, Thurman was the coddled prodigy, Thurman represented PBC’s
post-Mayweather future.  And that future just
spent round 10 with his white tail in the air, skittering away from a
40-year-old.

Because decisioning Thurman this late in the day
marks only about the 27th best moment of Pacquaio’s career, Saturday was not
about Pacquiao.  Saturday was a
fullthroated indictment of the P in PBC.

Be glad “The Truth” was ringside to see it, too,
for the future of our beloved sport.  Now
Spence knows, as Mayweather knew, the PBC on FoxTime belt is a participation
trophy, the glassencased product of a minorleague affiliate, a way to bamboozle
venture capitalists and network programmers. 
Spence now knows if he doesn’t make his manager make a match with
Terence Crawford while both men are still prime Spence’s championship lineage
will run through “One Time” and “Swift”, not “Sugar” or “Sugar”, and a
halfdecade from now some young bodysnatcher will properly coin him “The Fiction”
like Spence properly coined another man “Sometimes”.

Bart
Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday on Fox Sports pay-per-view Keith “One Time” Thurman defends his WBA “Super World” welterweight title against Filipino legend Manny Pacquiao in a Las Vegas match with world’s-third-best-welterweight ramifications. That is, whoever wins Saturday will almost certainly deserve a higher ranking than whoever next loses to Errol Spence or Terence Crawford.

When last we saw Pacquiao he was paddlepurpling About Billions Broner en route to a dull pay-extra-to-view decisioning of boxing’s clown pauper, a man whose schtick in the ring and otherwise has gone wanting since. Pacquiao has that effect when he’s right. He delights, sells tickets, makes lots of money and wins easily without employing any of the brandbuilding antics his PBC stablemates require. If he hasn’t made quite Floyd Mayweather’s career earnings he’s come exponents closer than his stablemates, without having to reinvent himself nearly so often. There has been no one like him since his debut in 1995, and that phrase may hold-up still in the year 2050.

Pacquiao went to PBC because promoter Top Rank ran out of highpaying b-fighters to feed him; if Pacquiao didn’t blame his former promoter for the decision that befell him Down Under two years ago, he didn’t forgive the outfit either. He forewent what desperate warnings Bob Arum surely imparted and handicapped properly the other side of the dial: Yes, PBC on FoxTime has Errol Spence to swerve someday but not till I’ve touched that crew for tens of millions of dollars in peril-less sparrings.

By all accounts Pacquiao is way smarter than the berry-appy mascot he plays in prefight previews and postfight pressers; if he didn’t tell PBC to start heavypursing him with Broner it’s simply because he didn’t have to – his new promoter was benighted enough to think Broner might have him. Time to ringup Thurman next, and after that, win or lose or draw, do a cashout dance with Spence, who’s likely to get softened harder by the tactically limited but physically expressive Shawn Porter than Mikey Garcia’d’ve done him in 100 rounds.

All of this assumes Thurman hasn’t the punch or malice to end Pacquiao’s career Saturday. Five years ago, assumptions might’ve been different. Thurman looked to have skills and temperament enough to bend the next era his way. Boy, was that a long time ago.

Six years in the past Thurman looked awesome in San Antonio, twice, and whetted aficionados’ imaginations. Then he effectively took 2014 off. Then he couldn’t ice little Robert Guerrero at the beginning of 2015, which was a problem. Four months later Thurman collected the WBA’s welterweight belt by giving Luis Collazo his seventh career L, and that was that. He squeaked past Shawn Porter in 2016, squeaked past Danny Garcia in 2017, honeymooned and ashrammed in 2018, and squeaked past little Josesito (Little Jose) Lopez in January. It has been a primesquandering historic for One Time.

But now Thurman takes dead aim at an eighth L on Pacquiao’s resume, a feat for which he’ll garner little praise from aficionados but lots of hyperbole from PBC propogandists and a fat check to cash.

“It’s called prizefighting, dummy” – as Money Mayweather once told Shane Mosley. Thurman gets that in a way generations of prizefighters before him did not. Get the cash and get out, posterity be damned. As a fellow man, few among us could blame him. As customers, of course, we’re entitled to an alternative view: If Thurman wants to make his living nonviolently, he can open a yoga studio, something more befitting his recent mien.

But he’d better not plan to play boxing with Pacquiao. Probably Manny will play boxing back with him, doing something that complements the 60-seconds-per-round workrate Pacquiao has perfected since Juan Manuel Marquez showed him absolute darkness interrupted by a single warm light, but maybe not. Pacquiao knew no exertion was worth extra for icing Broner – if Pacquiao even knew who Broner was before their match. But Thurman is PBC’s welterweight champion emeritus, and snatching Thurman’s 0 should mark at least the 30th-greatest accomplishment of Pacquaio’s career, even if it doesn’t crack his Top 25.

Would stretching Pacquiao 6 1/2 years after Marquez did it mark the highlight of Thurman’s career? Yup. Thurman has never shared a ring with anyone whose greatness is the square root of Pacquaio’s.

More than halfway in his 41st year, Pacquiao hasn’t the reflexes he had while racing through prime Mexican legends 14 or 15 years ago, but he recognizes patterns better than he did back then for having seen so many of them so craftily presented. Stylistically, Thurman is bargain-basement-basic beside Erik Morales or Miguel Cotto, much less the aforementioned Mosley, Mayweather or Marquez. Worse yet, Thurman ain’t that much younger than Pacquiao, and if his reflexes haven’t atrophied with age they’ve certainly rusted with inactivity.

Thurman hasn’t the derringdo to make war on Pacquiao, we know, but he has the tools to keepaway his way to a sympathetic decision, and that’s what he’s best suited to do. Thurman probably has pop enough to put Pacquiao in easymoney mode, the way Mayweather did, but Pacquiao won’t believe that till he feels it, which means Thurman may have to fight Pacquiao off him at some point, a point likely to represent the match’s only entertaining half-round – at the midway point of its fifth or sixth. After that, expect drama and suspense to leak gradually from the ring, punctuated by a forget-me-not flurry in the final 30 seconds of the 12th round.

A week from today, we’ll read Pacquiao has nothing left to prove and ought retire and Thurman has so much left to prove and ought use this narrow victory to springboard his way in a ring with Spence or Bud Crawford. Next year, we’ll read about Pacquiao negotiating a farewell war with Spence or Bud Crawford while Thurman demands a rematch with Lopez or Garcia.

This Saturday, anyway, I’ll take Thurman, MD-12, in a close, dull match one Vegas judge has already scored 117-111 for One Time.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Editor’s note: For part 17, please click here

SAN ANTONIO – This city’s McNay Art Museum, which
has figured heavily (for an art museum) in this ostensibly-about-boxing column,
since 2010, recently opened an exhibition, Andy Warhol: Portraits, that appears
to have no tie-in whatever to our beloved sport.  I revisited the exhibition a few hours before
writing this, unable to imagine a suitable subject, and sat so long at a lobby
table afterwards a friendly security guard came over to tell me I looked tired.  Let that temper what you expect of this.

Nearly a decade ago The McNay had a different
Warhol exhibition that opened round about the time “Son of the Legend” Julio
Cesar Chavez Jr. put the wood to “Irish” John Duddy in Alamodome, in what would
be Duddy’s final prizefight.  The editor
of a boxing magazine asked me to pitch him a unique idea for a story –
“anything out of the ordinary” – and I complied with an idea about this Warhol
exhibition, a visual dissection of Warhol’s fascination with celebrity and its
effect, being open in the same city at the same time as boxing’s greatest beneficiary
of celebrity.  The pitch went nowhere, a
destination shared by the story I wrote instead for the magazine, and I made a
column of the idea.

(Actually, a quick search through the archives
reveals barely half of what’s above is accurate; “Andy Warhol: Fame and
Misfortune” opened in February 2012, not June 2010, and since by then Chavez
Jr. had beaten Duddy and Sebastian Zbik and Peter Manfredo, perhaps a story
attributing the whole of Chavez’s fortune to name recognition wasn’t the crackerjack
idea memory recalls.)

Out of the parenthetical but influenced by it: Memory
is many parts imagination, something confirmed by most adult accounts of childhood
that begin “I see myself . . .” as if that’s what children do when, say, riding
a bike – look at themselves, instead of their front tire or whatever terrain it
touches.

If Warhol never directly addressed memory’s inaccuracy,
and perhaps he did somewhere, prolific as he was, he understood part of the
appeal of his portraits to their subjects lay in a capacity for overwriting
memories.  Warhol was a favorite
portraitist of aging celebrities because his minimalist approach to depicting
facial skin removed wrinkles and most blemishes (except for his Dolly Parton
portraits, which are better than the Marilyn Monroe portraits precisely because
Parton’s face had more imperfections). 
Warhol very much made art for life to imitate and prophesied our
contemporary socialmedia obsession in any of his dozens of commentaries about
Americans and fame.

Floyd Mayweather would look good in a Warhol
portrait, methinks.  I happened on a Fox
Sports promotional movie about Manny Pacquiao last week by accident and tried
to see Mayweather through his fans and commentators’ eyes, being removed as we
are now from the relevance of Mayweather’s schtick.  What I looked for was elegance; what little I
recall of his victory over Pacquiao was Pacquaio’s unwillingness to throw
punches and subsequent inability to strike Mayweather, our defensive wizard.  But what I saw instead of elegance was skittishness.  Not during or after Mayweather got hit but
when the prospect of his getting hit happened: Confident-to-flinching-to-confident-to-flinchyflinching.  It was not elegant.

Of course this was a movie to sell us Pacquiao’s
upcoming tilt with Keith Thurman, and it behooves nobody at Fox to concede
Pacquiao is diminished from the man who got whitewashed by Mayweather, a man
who was fractionally potent as the one who dashed through Barrera and Morales
and Marquez.  Still.  In hyperdefinition, Mayweather’s
squinchyfaced pullback looks nigh bitchy.

Warhol would remove that.  If Warhol was not quite enamored of money as
Mayweather claims to be, he was doubly enamored of money’s effect, and Mayweather’s
selfstyled fixation on money might’ve enchanted Warhol with a question like: If
a man who is by no means the world’s best at making money allowed the last 1/3
of his career to be consumed by making money, a man who was the world’s best at
his actual craft, does that make money omnipotent or the man cynical?

This is why I looked tired in the lobby.  A different range of thoughts happened on the
short, slow drive from The McNay to The Pearl, where this column got wrote: Is
the racing line elegant? is the racing line what Henri Matisse was after? is
Matisse better than Warhol, for eliminating pathways to imitation, or is Warhol
better, for spawning generations of imitators? how much should even a column
such as this be dedicated to a concept, the racing line, you understand at best
partially?

The racing line is a way automobiles may go
fastest round curves.  It’s not the
shortest distance, as that would be the inside line, and it’s not a good way to
go at a constant speed.  Rather, it’s
effectively the straightest way to go round a halfcircle – start wide, cut the
apex, end wide – and by being the straightest line it is the route that allows
the earliest moment of maximum acceleration. 
If you regularly take the racing line against fellow motorists on your
local freeway you will pass most of them so long as you do not use cruise
control (which renders the racing line counterproductive).

The racing line is almost elegant the way Warhol
is almost elegant.  Neither the racing
line nor Warhol is elegant as a Matisse line; the racing line and Warhol do
something worth doing more quickly than other approaches.  The racing line kept through a full circuit
is nearer Matisse than Warhol came; Warhol was the racing line through a single
curve, maybe two.  The Matisse line,
though, is the racing line taken through an unknown circuit drawn but a moment
before.

Tire, tiring, tired.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

There were recent fights aplenty with which a
grateful boxing writer might fashion a column, and this writer should be
grateful as any, writing weekly columns, as he did, through yesteryear’s summer
famines.  But important as it is to write
well about great fights and the courage that makes them so is how difficult it
is to write well about poor fights and the mismatchmaking that makes them so.

One of the Brothers Charlo iced a two-sentence-Wikipedia
opponent a couple Sundays ago, the other Brother Charlo decisioned a
multi-sentence-Wikipedia opponent Saturday, and Demetrius Andrade kept his
resume spotless by keeping away from a featherfisted Pole.  Surely 80 minutes of prizefighting affords
material enough for 1,000 words of opinion. 
Or surely not.

I plead ignorance from the top.  I don’t know enough about either Charlo to
tell one from the other.  Both fought in the
last calendar week, both were defending a title of some sort because the
Brothers Charlo are PBC veterans enough to be titlists, though I can’t say
which Charlo beat whomever to attain whichever title or if either Charlo has
changed weightclasses anytime recently or really was defending a title
(Editor’s note: Actually, never mind).

Full disclosure: The closest I ever followed a
Charlo fight was when one of them sparred writer Kelsey McCarson for charity.

I expected the Brothers Charlo to be fighting on
Fox these days – didn’t they both do so a while back? – but I couldn’t find either
of them on my local Fox affiliate, and I haven’t had Showtime since December.  I watched their joint postfight
pressconference Saturday night on YouTube and came away feeling like I’d missed
not a thing since losing interest in them many years ago during a Houston
undercard or two.

The usual: Everybody respects us, nobody respects
us, the world is going to respect us; we’ve done so much, we’re just getting
started, wait till you see what’s next; nobody knows us, everybody recognizes
us, the people who know us best don’t know us at all; lions only, lions Only,
Lions Only!  If this were an effort to be
mysterious or conflicted or even controversial it would mean something more
than all it actually means, which is the standard and tired marketing fare of
being all things to all people, this time with a scowl of some sort.  One of the Brothers Charlo implied he
might’ve sold so many more tickets if he’d put himself in a larger venue, which
seemed an odd swipe to take at himself or his promotional partner, the other
Brother Charlo, sitting next to him and apparently in charge of booking.

What everyone realizes by now is the Brothers
Charlo and many of their PBC brethren are hamstrung by management.  They can dominate whomever PBC’s network of
matchmakers conjures up and wear whatever belts complicit sanctioners cobble
together, but they’ll not unify anything or attain universal recognition.

They wear the PBC on ShowFox belt, while an ESPN
champion makes war on his network’s nonentities, and a DAZN champ has a modicum
more respect, or much more respect, for having beaten a known opponent – read:
an opponent whose name you knew before the ESPN or ShowFox pressrelease – sometime
and somewhere in the last two years.

This shouldn’t be read, or at least not precisely,
as an indictment of PBC champions.  Most
of their safetyfirst exhibition title defenses happen before unenthusiastic
crowds and overly enthusiastic television crews, perhaps, but at least they’re
getting paid way more than fairmarket value for their efforts.  DAZN champions, meanwhile, are getting
overpaid, too, but with the very real chance they may be upset, through poor
fortune or tournament whimsy.  ESPN
champions get paid about the least and contend with the anxiety of a mercurial
boss and ingenious matchmaker; keep Bob happy and Bruce’ll get you opponents
that make you better, but make Bob unhappy and Bruce’ll get you beat by
Christmas.

Which all adds up to what?  About half a column, according to the count
in the bottomleft corner of this screen.

Then let’s dive shallowly into Demetrius “Boo Boo”
Andrade, the nearest DAZN has to a Brother Charlo of its own (unless you count
Danny Jacobs, whom you probably shouldn’t count because, after all, Jacobs has
tested himself by narrowly losing to his division’s two best men).

So much potential, that Boo Boo!

Literary critic James Wood once wrote, and I could
swear I once quoted but Google does not confirm, that potential is only potent
so long as it goes unused.  Nobody muses today
about Roberto Duran’s potential as a lightweight or Floyd Mayweather’s
potential as a pay-per-view attraction.  Potential
is what we assign teenage prospects, not 31-year-old middleweight titlists.

Andrade gets this. 
If you were to ask him about his potential this morning, probably he
would take it as the insult it intends and tell you how many tickets he just
sold in Rhode Island of all places.  He
should add but wouldn’t: “It’s 20-percent more tickets than Charlo sold in his
hometown the same night, and Charlo’s hometown is 12 times the size of mine.”

The reason he should add that is the reason he
won’t: Charlo, not Canelo, is whom Andrade should target as his breakthrough
opponent.  Who would win that match?  Nobody knows. 
There are potential-fetishists on either side of the debate.

The proper broadcaster for the match, however, be doubtless
– “ShoBox: The New Generation”.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Friday on a Golden Boy Promotions card that DAZN broadcast from Indio, Calif., super featherweight titlist Andrew “El Chango (The Monkey)” Cancio snipped and slipped the stiches from Puerto Rican Alberto Machado in a rematch of their February upset, shortly after Mexican light flyweight Elwin “La Pulga (The Flea)” Soto attritioned Puerto Rican titlist Angel Acosta early in their 12th round.

What Soto did, and Cancio did again, returned meaning
to what was meant by “Mexican Style” before a Mexican-trained Kazakh and his
promotional apparatus borrowed the term for HBO interviews.  Inherent in the term is an underdog status or,
at very least, an evenly matched contest in which a question of mettle must be
answered.

Fighters who employ Mexican Style generally lack
their opponents’ reach or handspeed or power; Mexican prizefighters do not wish
to get struck in the face any more than any other type of prizefighter does but
find themselves at physical disadvantages, realize getting struck they must,
and repeatedly, to prevail, and choose to continue under disadvantageous terms
until the last remaining variable is will.

Here’s what Mexican Style is not: Brutalizing a
20-to-1 underdog recruited from a lower weightclass and so hopelessly outgunned
you can dominate him without risking your own consciousness even a little.  Now that fighters who employ Mexican Style ply
their crafts on the same network as the fighter who uses a Mexican Style hashtag,
it behooves aficionados to continue our reevaluation of all things late-HBO.

In both matches Friday the Mexican Style fighters
had fewer tools than their opponents, both of whom happened to be Puerto Rican
– a detail more ethnic-rivalry coincidental than otherwise.  Setting aside the controversy that properly
accrued round comain referee Thomas Taylor’s premature stoppage – a surprisingly
favorable outcome for Soto, given how much time Taylor bought Acosta with round
3 warnings – the man with fewer tools in the kit all night was Soto. 

Acosta had reach and size advantages, yes, but
also technical advantages and a dandy uppercut boxing’s lexicon suggests be
just the thing to dissuade an over-the-lead-knee grinder like Soto.  The Flea, then, spent most of a half-hour
getting peppered coarsely by a man who knew how.  Yet Soto didn’t relent.  That relentlessness in the face of
unfavorable happenings is a hell of a lot more Mexican Style than making highlightreel
corner stoppages on feckless featherfists who cut quickly. 

Cancio, too, had the same obvious physical and technical
disadvantages in his rematch with Machado as he did in their first tilt.  The result of Cancio’s first fight, though,
the largest upset of 2019 until Andy Ruiz took Manhattan, emboldened Cancio to
reduce his rematch to a matter of willfulness even sooner than he did their
first time.  Machado wanted absolutely
none of it.  The better boxer with the
better pedigree and the better resume, Machado explained away to himself his
first loss like a matter of fitness; he’d nearly missed weight, starved himself
the day before the weighin, faded early and learned his lesson.

But the lesson Cancio gave was one he didn’t
learn.  Boxing circles round Cancio,
having the requisite fitness to hit him and not be hit by him, never was going
to suffice for Machado.  He needed to
hurt Cancio till The Monkey went physically unable to punch back.

“I’m so much better than this guy” – that’s the
trap into which Mexican Style has lured many a flashy prospect or titlist.  Cancio had Machado deep winded after six
minutes.  A deep winded man hasn’t much
left but will, and Cancio thrilled at such a contest 30 minutes early.  He took his time and lined-up the button shot
then watched Machado crumple, rise to a knee and prep for his facesaving 10 1/2-count.

Again, until the world met Andy Ruiz some weeks
ago, Cancio was boxing’s feel-best story of 2019.  Nothing about Ruiz’s ascent diminishes
Cancio’s (or Elwin Soto’s).  Cancio is a
proper workingclass prizefighter, a man you can decision far more easily than beat.

But while we’ve got Mexican Style in mind and
words to spare, let’s return to Andy Ruiz for a spot.  What he did to Anthony Joshua was Mexican
Style not for its toolbox disadvantage but for its colossal physical
disadvantages.  Joshua was much bigger
and much stronger and hit much harder but knew little of relentlessness.  When the time came for teethmarking the
gumshield Joshua made his escape.

Joshua surely awoke that Sunday morning with an
abiding sense of absurdity like what haunted Machado the day after his first
loss to Cancio.  Joshua, with many times Machado’s
sycophantic entourage, invariably learns as you read this the same sort of
wrong lessons Machado gained.

From Joshua’s hangerson we hear about prefight
concussions and the like, which, while quite possibly true, do nothing to
prepare Joshua for what relentlessness Ruiz will show him in their rematch.  Ruiz now knows Joshua’s a flowerchinned wilter
and the directest route to the mettle question should be Ruiz’s line.  If both men hit the canvas in rematch round
1, Ruiz knows, he’ll defend his title in half the time it took him to acquire
it.

But do you expect anyone is telling Joshua this?  Not when there’s a fortune to be made in
excuse-making: “Lucky punch, champ, he caught you cold, we know that wasn’t the
real AJ, can’t trust New York food, don’t know what the ref was thinking, we
know the truth, you wanted to continue – everybody knows that!”

Expect Ruiz to Mexican Style his way through
Joshua in their rematch the way Cancio just did Machado.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday at Arena Riga in Latvia in a pair of
prizefights broadcasted by DAZN the World Boxing Super Series arrived at its
cruiserweight-finals pairing violently. 
Two evenly matched matches ended in competitors’ unconsciousness, with a
Cuban clipping an American’s circuits and a Latvian doing somethings awful to a
Pole.

First, Mairis Briedis’ mainevent manhandling of Krzysztof
Glowacki: In an officiating context what transpired was shoddy-cum-catastrophic
and ought result in a pension for Robert Byrd. 
In a prizefighting capacity, though, it was handsome sporting and
something others might try.

We’ve all seen the preamble hundreds of times:
Fighter A overthrows the right cross, and disbalances himself, while Fighter B
ducks the punch and arrives 90-degrees right of square when he resurfaces;
Fighter A protects his brainstem with his right glove, elbow out, while both
men wait for the ref to untangle them. 
Nearly never does Fighter B wing a left hook at the back of Fighter A’s
head.  But in round 2 Glowacki thought it
a capital idea.

Then Briedis showed us promptly why no one does
this by driving his raised right elbow directly through Glowacki’s unguarded
jaw.  Glowacki received the shot, realized
what’d happened and went full soccer-player. 
This, more than the infractions that preceded it, offended Robert Byrd’s
sensibilities, and he slapped Glowacki on the back and demanded he rise to play
audience to Byrd’s deducting a point from the Briedis tally, without anybody,
including Byrd and Glowacki, realizing how ruined Glowacki was.

A charitable read of what followed is the Latvian
crowd’s zealous disapproval of Byrd’s ruling jarred Byrd such that he was unable
to hear the round’s closing bell.  A
realistic read is that Byrd is too old to be refereeing a scrap between
200-pound, non-English speakers, and Briedis’ scorn for Queensberry’s marquess reduced
Byrd to a doddering elder.

Whatever it was, after Briedis dropped Glowacki on
the blackmat a second time, this time with punches, and Glowacki rose, the
round ended and the Latvian bell began to tinkle, insistently if euphoniously, and
Briedis and Glowacki continued to make war while Byrd went to that tranquil,
nostalgic place grandads do after disabling their hearing aids.  The timekeepers stood and waved frantically,
to no avail.  Fact is, had Briedis not
dropped Glowacki at 3:11, causing Byrd to glance the timekeepers’ way for a
10-count, round 2 might still be happening as you read this.  Briefly returned to lucidity, Byrd
acknowledged the round’s end like an NFL ref stopping the playclock, which
sundry folks, including the Glowacki corner – by then approaching its 30th
second on the apron – understood to be Byrd’s waving-off the fight.

In all of Latvia, only Robert Byrd knew what the
hell Robert Byrd was doing.

Both fighters stood in their corners awaiting a
ruling, and not resting, while the 60-second respite ticked by and Byrd pantomimed
his inability to hear the very bell he successfully heard close round 1.  Glowacki’s chief second ran all the way
across the canvas and pantomimed for Byrd a threeminute duration on his
wristwatch.  Byrd scolded the man then
turned and scolded the timekeeper for not ringing loudly enough a bell everyone
else heard.  Glowacki did not receive
time enough to recuperate from Briedis’ elbow (which, quite probably, Byrd
missed altogether and only thought to penalize via inference) and did not
receive time enough to recuperate from his first legal knockdown.

And recovered Glowacki wasn’t when round 3 began
and Briedis made quick work of his remaining consciousness.  Odds are fair Briedis would’ve won one way or
another had all things happened fairly, and frankly a well-leveraged elbow may
be just the remedy for a well-leveraged rabbit punch; legal or not it’s exactly
what the word “fight” conjures in innocent minds.

But the Byrds must be helped into retirement (yes,
Robert’s wife, Adalaide, and yes, that Adalaide Byrd, was an official
scorekeeper for Saturday’s mainevent). 
Over and again, beginning with the prefight instructions, Robert Byrd
played the role of a senior American who comes upon a foreigner and thinks if
he just yells English at him, rather than speaking it, the foreigner will
understand.  Byrd explained to the
fighters, who’ve been hearing “break” their whole fighting lives, that Byrd
wouldn’t wrestle with them and expected an immediate cessation when he called
“stop” – which of course didn’t happen. 
Then Byrd got his branded-for-TV tagline in, and the fight began.  Then the fight turned into one, between two
large men who knew how, becoming no place for a 74-year-old, something one
assumes the WBSS, if not the Nevada Athletic Commission, will remember henceforth.

Before all that, in the comain and fellow
semifinal, Cuban Yuniel Dorticos drycleaned TMT’s Andrew “Beast” Tabiti with a
round-10 right hand that was gorgeous. 
There was something aesthetically piquant about DAZN’s closeup of Tabiti’s
goldtoothed-vampire gumshield as Tabiti’s involuntary breaths went round it
while his Money Team hangerson sheepishly footdragged to his aid.  They were there for the victory party, not
the cleanup, and hadn’t an inkling what to do while their man spent two minutes
rigid.

What now will follow is another excellent WBSS cruiserweight
final that complements its bantamweight and super lightweight finals.  There’s lots more to be written about the
natural power of selforganizing entities, but for now let us marvel once again at
how much better the tournament format serves our interests, as aficionados, than
what promoter-driven swill generally befalls us.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Editor’s note: In what has become an annual
tradition, Bart Barry ran out of ideas for his column.  So we suggested he interview his favorite
subject about his favorite subject, and he acquiesced.  He even used the verb “to acquiesce” in his
reply to our request!

BB: I was watching an interview with Bo Burnham a
couple days ago –

BB: We’ve come a long way from reading interviews
with Richard Ford, haven’t we?

BB: – and he talks about a couple things that
resonated.  One was about feeling
nostalgia for events that’ve yet to happen, and the other is the artist
treating subjects he’s struggling with rather than things he already knows.

BB: Let me guess – that led to thinking how we
might do this with column-writing?

BB: For a few minutes, it did.  Then we came back, yet again, to Harold
Bloom’s old idea about reading in pursuit of a mind more original than your own,
which is a cry for authority.  Satisfying
someone else’s pursuit of authority can hardly begin by not-knowing things.

BB: I inferred from Burnham an unspoken assumption
his learning process is accelerated enough th’t watching him learn a subject can
be entertaining.

BB: I like that. 
Cognition of any adult sort, too, must begin with knowing lots of things.  While nobody wishes to watch a 5,000-hour movie
of a newborn’s journey to his first successful steps, it might indeed amuse to
watch a person who learns quickly use his existing knowledge to learn something
new.

BB: Quite a roundabout way of conceding you don’t
want to write about Gennady (sic) Golovkin.

BB: I added the suffix in there for you.  He’s changed the spelling of his first name.

BB: Part of the first-loss rehabilitation kit.

BB: New trainer, new network, new name, new
weightclass, lots of new tats.

BB:  He
didn’t go full-Cotto, did he?

BB: (Laughing) He really didn’t.  Maybe half-Cotto.

BB: Good riddance to Abel at least.

BB: Abel was part of the packaging.  But HBO was all the packaging.  That’s why I avoided the subject.  I knew it would spin into another acidic
postmortem on the Heart and Soul of Boxing.

BB: Do you feel unheard on this subject?

BB: That’s well-put.  Few things, if anything, look more craven
online than some goofball leading his generic thoughts with “like I’ve been
saying all along” – as if there weren’t a way to verify this if anyone cared to
do.

BB: Is that what’s going on here with GGG?

BB: Could be. 
But it’s late.  The postmortem to
be performed would go something like: Almost everything I believed about
Golovkin’s greatness got told to me by HBO, but during the same time HBO told
me how great Golovkin was HBO steered its storied franchise into a sandbar and
sank, so maybe I should review everything I believed about Golovkin’s greatness
. . .

BB: You say it’s too late for that because nobody
thinks he’s that gullible.

BB: The most anyone might concede is that HBO
introduced him to Golovkin, but he did all the appraising on his own.

BB: And that’s what few evangelists would yet
admit it was a ruse.

BB: Sergio Mora put it succinctly Saturday night: Golovkin
made his legend by annihilating B- and C-level fighters.

BB: That ruse relied, in part, on there being no
available A fighters.

BB: Nobody will fight him!  Nobody will fight him!

BB: Better yet was waiting till Canelo went 12
rounds with him to decide Canelo must be an A-level fighter because he went 12
rounds with him.

BB: A career 154-pounder went 24 rounds with the
most fearsome middleweight since Hagler. 
Who cares about the judging; that argument is sleight-of-hand.  The GGG ruse collapsed when Canelo stood tall
for 72 minutes in front of Golovkin.

BB: Yet we watched Saturday’s sacrifice.

BB: After what Andy Ruiz did, you sort of have to
for a while, no?

BB: Our sport thrives on misanthropy.  No sooner had Ruiz done something perfectly
unexpected but some pundits criticize him and the defenders pile-on.

BB: “Like I’ve been saying all along . . .”

BB: No disinterested party in his right mind
thought Ruiz would win.  So just enjoy
it.  Just laugh at it.  Laugh at anyone who feigns expertise for the
next month or so.  Be happy for
Ruiz.  Be happy for the way the spectacle
razed expertise.  For heaven’s sake,
though, don’t decide now’s a good time to reiterate your own expertise.

BB:  Whither
the state of the craft, our craft?

BB: “Dilettante” – that’s the word.  It’s the perfect word.  And it disarms, too.  No more aesthetic judgements.  The dilettante is not entitled to them.

BB: Are we reading more or less?

BB: Oh much less.

BB: Whither awards?

BB: Thrilled for Kelsey.

BB: The best thing about all these new broadcast platforms
is how little you must think about what you’re going to write, week-to-week.  The defiance of not-writing has dissolved
with that, no?

BB: It has. 
You enjoy watching boxing.  You
enjoy writing.  Howsoever long it has
been –

BB: Fourteen years and change.

BB: – there is no longer any sense of anxiety
about it.  Volunteer Sunday mornings at
the bus station, go home and change into something absurd, drive too fast to
the coffeeshop at The Pearl –

BB: Taking the racing line.

BB: – taking the racing line, yes, and write till
the place closes.  See what happens.  Let the conversations and songs going on
round you flavor whatever comes out.

BB: Do you ever look back?

BB: Not at any of this.  I looked back recently at some of the short
fiction from 2003.

BB: How was it?

BB: Precise. 
It was all rewritten three times. 
That’s the simple mechanics of it.

BB: Want to talk about the publication of that online?

BB: Nope.  It’s
now feasible to publish 100,000 words anonymously.  Fun, too.

BB: Who’s your favorite fighter?

BB: Has to be Usyk.

BB: Not Inoue?

BB: Not yet. 
I’m more likely to miss Usyk’s next fight, though – hell, I’m more
likely to miss my next breath – than Inoue’s.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday at Madison Square Garden in a fight
broadcast by DAZN, statuesque world heavyweight champion Anthony Joshua and misshapen
challenger Andy Ruiz made quite possibly the funniest spectacle in our beloved sport’s
history.  If you weren’t laughing or at
least smiling you missed one of life’s unique opportunities, and if you were
among others who weren’t laughing with you, why, you must improve your
associations immediately.

Chubby Andy Ruiz, brought in on short notice for a
ritual humiliation with the baddest man on the planet, razed Joshua a fourtime,
made him a passive round-7 quitter, and humiliated the whole of boxing’s heavyweight
institution.

The moment was ecstatic.  As ringside commentators and scribes readied
their solemnest tones to impart the historic import of what just happened, the
DAZN replays, hyper-definition hyper-slo-mo showed the challenger’s back,
jiggling pornographically, as he put the finishing touches on AJ.  It was a form of visual comedy whose
authenticity someday may be matched but cannot be topped.  It was a sight so wondrous a child couldn’t
miss its absurdity and any right-thinking adult had to enjoy it a hundred times
more for its rarity.

Joshua, to his credit, laughed through the entire
episode; perhaps the absurdity enchanted him, too, or perhaps he was knocked
silly or perhaps longsuffering aficionados called for comeuppance in a single
voice and for once the universe heeded us. 
It was not a joke on Joshua so much as his enablers.  The selfaggrandizing fleshpeddlers and
circusbarkers, the celebrity tourists and their publicists, the vlog buffs and
podcast critics and every dweeb with a calculator app and pay-per-view
prediction, the lot of them, didn’t know enough to laugh – didn’t realize the
moment called for joyful selflessness, for losing oneself not in Ruiz’s triumph
but in our sport’s absurdest moment.

“Honest to God, he’s going to lose to Ruiz.”

“AJ’s going to get caught with a lucky punch?”

“Nope.”

“He’s going to separate his shoulder or sprain his
ankle?”

“Not even close.”

“He’s going to get robbed by Yank judging?”

“Colder.”

“I give up.”

“Fully able to continue, after getting spanked and
sparked by an obese lad over whom he towers, Joshua’s going to spit his
mouthpiece, retreat to a corner and refuse to defend his four titles one second
longer.”

Part of the ecstasy of the moment was its impossible
unpredictability.  Even if a wiseacre or
innocent among us bothered to pick Ruiz on a lark, not even he might’ve
predicted Saturday’s final instants: Joshua’s taking a knee, enduring another
count, rising robotically, retreating to a corner, refusing to toe the line,
telling the referee he wanted to toe the line, reclining further in his corner,
refusing to toe the line, telling the referee he wanted to toe the line,
watching the referee wave hands in front of him, feigning a momentary disgust, resigning
himself, reclining once more.

Joshua’s hardest fight was with disbelief much as Andy
Ruiz.  Told his entire career what a
business he was, how many livelihoods he sustained throughout the kingdom, how
groundbreaking be his brand, AJ waited patiently for some institutional
intervention; his majesty requested a sabbatical in round 7, and only the
grandest act of ingratitude might deny it. 
Then it happened – his request got declined.  As you read this, whether on the day it is
published or 10 years later, Joshua still can’t believe his request for recovery
time got rejected.

Do you have any idea who I am?

It’s funnier still to know, as we all now do, his
request for sabbatical, if granted, wouldn’t have changed anything but the
official time of stoppage.  Joshua was
beaten in round 3, not even a halfminute after dropping Ruiz with a dandy
hook.  Ruiz rose, confused, while
something like the word “inevitable” went through every bystander’s mind at
once.  It was, then, time to train our
eyes on Joshua, the better to observe how quickly he took Ruiz’s consciousness,
compare it in real time with our recollection of what Deontay Wilder did a few
weeks back, and birth a fully formed conclusion on who would win the
hypothetical match between them.

And then in the middle of the sacrifice Saturday’s
scapegoat nipped its highpriest.  Just a
nip, truly, a balance shot but nothing a baddest man on the planet should register.  Then the entire artifice came down in a laughable
heap, rose, then came down again and again. 
We can leave the serious analysis to anyone who still takes any
heavyweight seriously but drop a breadcrumb as we skitter away laughing: Ruiz
nearly broke Joshua in half with a midrounds right cross to his midsection that
dropped the champion’s left guard surely as fatigue dropped the champion’s full
self, and that tells you the wisdom of Joshua’s wanting an immediate rematch.

How damnably fragile be these giants!  Ten punches in his finishing move Joshua was
suffocating, heaving his gorgeous pecks and regal delts, pleading Manhattan
thicken its air.  What the hell kind of
professional fighter finds himself drowning 10 punches in to a fight’s ninth
minute?

It added to the moment’s high mirth, though, it
did.  The fatman’s shimmying pursuit, the
giant’s ridiculous retreat, the most important arena in the history of
important arenas gone muted, the imperial palace reduced to what red sauce and
orange cheese cover an enchilada plate.

The spectacle was relentless fantastic.  The champion tagged and toothless, his mouth
alternating between airsucking ovals and get-this! smirks, the champion’s
boundless selfassurance swapped in a realtime identity crisis (how about that
ridiculous bouncing-n-boxing thing in round 6), and all for our entertainment.  Sport can be no more entertaining than
Saturday’s main event.  If you’re new to
boxing be grateful you’ll have a standard of comparison the rest of your days,
and if you’re old to boxing be grateful you lived long enough to witness the
funniest moment of the modern era.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Tomorrow, “Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World” (Riverhead Books) by David Epstein, author of “The Sports Gene”, will become available to the public.  There is but one mention of a boxer in the book, Vasyl Lomachenko, and this happens on page 8.  Because the subject is an interesting one, though, and because its publisher was kind enough to send me a review copy despite my disclosing both this site’s specialized subject matter and my own tiny readership, what follows is a criticism made in good faith.

The longer this book went on, and the deeper I
found myself in it, the less I enjoyed it. 
Not because of some unsettling truth, some grave misreading of myself or
my life’s choices held up to a mirror’s objective gaze; it was because the book
became increasingly repetitive and predictable.

All the usual suspects gather: Tolstoy, Einstein,
van Gogh, Darwin, Edison, Kasparov, Michelangelo, jazz, NASA, U.S. Armed Forces,
biomimicry-driven animal metaphors (foxes, frogs, birds, hedgehogs, darkhorses),
and lots and lots of PhDs.  Little of the
material written about any of these subjects is new or originally interpreted,
which makes their appearances unfortunate – since much of the rest of the book,
parts that don’t detail academic acclaim or retroactively certified greatness, are
quite enjoyable.

“Range’s” most enjoyable character is Frances
Hesselbein, centenarian and accidental CEO, who doesn’t prove the book’s
central theme, which is to be contrary, so much as give the book something
delightful.  Her primary gift, one
assumes, lies in her adaptability, which may make her a generalist or an
oscillating specialist or a fox or a hedgehog, depending where one finds her in
her history and chooses to place her in his thesis.  She is not a tidy package because she is a mammal,
and few such creatures are tidy packages.

But a celebration of mammalian adaptability is
well-trod already (M. Mitchell Waldrop knocked the subject out of the park 27
years ago with “Complexity”), and so a celebration of anti-specialists, people
who aren’t raised to be automaton prodigies like Tiger Woods, composes a highly
anticipated subject in 2019.  Woods
features prominently in the book’s opening, in a well-crafted, turn-the-clichés-around
sort of commentary that actually, and quite surprisingly, suffers in no way
from his unexpected Masters victory a few months ago – a happening that looked
nigh impossible during the time Epstein wrote “Range”.

Woods, of course, is the prototypical,
10,000-hours-to-mastery mold into which a million vicariously thrilled American
fathers have poured their offsprings’ childhoods since 1997 or so.

But watch how that might itself be turned round:

Eldrick had
an overbearing father.  The boy was
forced to play golf all the time because he had a gift, one his father told
business partners would change the world. 
Eldrick succeeded at a shockingly young age.  His course was set.  He would be the world’s greatest golfer and
the world’s richest golfer, the specialist’s specialist.  But after puberty Eldrick realized he had
another calling.  He spent nearly as many
hours practicing seduction techniques as chipping techniques.  He loved to uncover women like he uncovered
his driver (a tiger head sewn by his mother). 
One day the generalist that he loved to be clashed with the specialist the
world expected him to be.  Sponsors fled,
surgeries followed, he lost hundreds of millions of dollars in a divorce
settlement.  But he continued doggedly on
his generalist quest to prove a balding nerd raised at a country club could be
every bit as promiscuous as an NBA power forward or rock musician.  Some successes and many humiliations later, one
quiet spring afternoon in Georgia, Eldrick “Tiger” Woods became only the second
professional golfer ever to win 15 career majors.

*

The money Americans pay self-help authors creates
a gravity nonfiction authors of all stripes now find irresistible.  Subsequently, there’s something a touch too
glib in most American writing.  Every
character finds his life compressed into Forrest Gump’s.  Epstein appears aware of this and often resists
it.  But gravity remains:

“As a final flourish, with just a few hours of
work, a colleague helped (Gunpei Yokoi) program a clock into the display.  LCD screens were already in wristwatches, and
they figured it would give adults an excuse to buy their ‘Game & Watch’,”
Epstein writes about a generalist Nintendo employee.  Just four sentences later, Epstein completes
the epic thusly: “‘Game & Watch’ remained in production eleven years and
sold 43.4 million units.”

In a 100,000-word book, this is about the same as the
Gumpian invention of the smiley-face t-shirt. 

Ah, but this book is supposed to be t-shaped, rogue,
to make manifest its point about sampling numerous disciplines, represented
here as anecdotes, en route to serendipitous, interdisciplinary breakthroughs!

Well, OK. 
But let’s go all the way with our reconsideration of everything and ask
this entirely relevant question: Why bind all of this in a book when there are
more appropriate media available?

It’s because, in an inversion of its inversion,
this book wants the academy’s approval very much.  This thought happened somewhere in the middle
of an Epstein anecdote: “‘Outsider artists’ are the self-taught jazz masters of
visual art, and the originality of their work can be stunning.  In 2018, the National Gallery of Art featured
a full exhibition dedicated to self-taught artists; art history programs at
Stanford, Duke, Yale, and the Art Institute of Chicago now offer seminars in
outsider art.”

The academy approves, see!

But how very mediocre of it, and how perfectly
backwards.

The intended audience for this book, hyper-educated
professionals who fancy themselves rebellious, should be surprised exceptional
things happen for generations without once appearing in textbooks.  Nobody else will be, though, and certainly
nobody who reads often about our beloved sport.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday in Scotland the World Boxing Super Series held the final semifinals matches in its bantamweight and super lightweight divisions, and they went even better than hoped. Hometown southpaw Josh “Tartan Tornado” Taylor defanged Russian Ivan “The Beast” Baranchyk, and Japan’s “Monster” Naoya Inoue proved exactly that against Puerto Rican Emmanuel Rodriguez. The fighters’ aggregate record Saturday morning was 69-0 (52 KOs).

This wonderful DAZN combination of excellent performances in authentic prizefights, the rare fusion of excellence and authenticity, is something WBSS, in only its second season, has given us more of than any of its rivals. Not peers, mind you – rivals. Peers would be doing their best to do what WBSS does, which is provide incentive enough to our beloved sport’s abundance of shortsighted agents to make them please both current consumers and would-be consumers (most of whom self-identify as former consumers).

To wit: across the digital spectrum Saturday a former giant in the prizefighting space – forget not, Showtime, when it was lean and innovative a decade ago, gave us the Super Six – appealed to the worst of its remaining viewership by promoting a mismatch with an a-side’s homicidal musings. Likely there’ll be more here about what Deontay Wilder did, in a few weeks, after Anthony Joshua fights, because unless those guys are fighting one another or Tyson Fury, neither of them nor their exploits merits more than half a column anymore.

It’s much easier to be cavalier about boxing’s flagship division the week after a Naoya Inoue fight, isn’t it? He is the very essence of what pound-for-pound was intended to measure when the concept got launched during Sugar Ray Robinson’s era. If you were able to make Inoue and Wilder and Joshua and Fury the same size and fight them in a round tournament the question is not whether Inoue would emerge as winner or even if Inoue would win every match by knockout but whether any of today’s best heavyweights could make it out the first minute with him. The gulf in craft, leverage and reflex is that great.

To attract casual fans, I know, we’re supposed to pretend this is not so, we’re supposed to squint to see something great about today’s heavyweights besides their mass, but it simply cannot be done during WBSS season, when prime world titlists fight one another, one after the other, showing each other respect before and after their confrontations while subjecting one another to relentless violence between the ropes. It makes farcical inauthentic much of the rest of the year’s fare.

Inoue is the world’s best prizefighter right now. Better than Bud, better than Hi-Tech, better than The Truth, better than Canelo. He is making highlight-reel showcase opponents out of world titlists in matches expected by experts to be competitive. I can’t name his promoter, I don’t know his training techniques, I don’t know if he was an Olympian, and if he’s a heartthrob in his native land I don’t know about that either. I don’t know, in other words, any of the flummery publicists pass our ways when it’s time to grow the brand and risking more than words is out of the question.

Here’s what happened Saturday in WBSS’s bantamweight semifinal: Emmanuel Rodriguez, a larger man making the third defense of a title he won on the road, went directly at Inoue the way a champion does when he thinks his challenger is a hypejob. He moved Inoue back, too, and chastened him with a few counters, and the first round was excellent and competitive, exactly as an aficionado, as distinct from a branding fanatic, should wish every round of every fight be. The second round was going competitively, too, until Rodriguez turned a touch too brazenly on a left hook and got spuncycled on the next. After that things got real academic real quick. Inoue went bodysnatching, not headhunting, as a man does when he wants his opponent’s submission more than he wants a YouTube clip, and Rodriguez collapsed for being caved-in.

It was decisive and quick, not sloppy or preordained. It was another chance to be euphoric at the spectacle of boxing done beautifully.

And it wasn’t even Saturday’s main. That came after a moment of mutual admiration between Inoue and his WBSS-finals opponent, Nonito Donaire, now enjoying a career resurrection complete as it is completely unexpected. Donaire’s winding transition from promoter-creation brat to international ambassador concluded prettily with his sincere congratulations to Inoue, a moment of affection and elegance enough to make you proud of your commitment to our sport, enough to make you wonder, however briefly, if Donaire, once considered a prodigy too, mightn’t have a last hook in him, a sink-all-coffins-to-one counter that he starts with Inoue’s a millisecond earlier and a millimeter shorter and makes all Japan inhale sharply.

It’s a farfetched scenario, indeed, though not farfetched as Donaire’s simple presence in the finals; “dear Lord, give me just one chance to throw the hook” – so went Nonito’s prayer at tournament’s start, and now he will have it. A more answerable prayer will have Josh Taylor who, after blackmatting Ivan Baranchyk a twotime in a prizefight proper brutal, looks forward to Regis Prograis in the finals.

There’s no reason to hold the decisive match on neutral ground, Super Six’s largest mistake; return to Glasgow and let Prograis try and stretch the Scotsman in his home gym, knowing if he lets European judges score one of their own he’ll have read to him by a kilted ring announcer three cards prefilled at Friday’s weighin. Same goes for Inoue-Donaire for that matter; let Nonito choose the venue – Inoue’s supporters have the means and willingness to travel wherever their man plies his craft.

O but the WBSS is so much better than everything else.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday in the comain of an ESPN broadcast from Tucson, Mexican super bantamweight Emanuel Navarrete successfully defended his WBO world title by stopping former WBO super bantamweight titlist Isaac Dogboe in a pretty savage way. Both men were the same men only moreso in their rematch.

There’s something more disquieting about a volume-puncher’s demise, more decisive, something fated like a log being fed in a woodchipper. He rarely has much more than a plan A1 or A2; if plan A was shift-right-throw-left, plan A1 is shift-left-throw-right or jab-jab-hook instead of jab-hook; his primary attack, which is his defense, too, is reliant near entirely on an assertion of will, on a career-defining assumption he can continue longer than his more-talented peers. And the peers are near always more talented because who that had reflexes enough would get hit often as the volume-puncher, and who that had power enough would require such volume? Because the volume-puncher needs hundreds of repetitions to turn his trick he relies, too, on a signature rhythm, and woe betide the volume-puncher whose rhythm gets solved by an opponent.

Since Joe Frazier’s sainted name got invoked in a proper context during Saturday’s broadcast, his case is one worth visiting. He’d not a prayer against George Foreman because volume-punchers haven’t a prayer against true sluggers, and Foreman truly was one. Frazier’d much better than a prayer against Muhammad Ali, a boxer for most intents and purposes, because Frazier’s hit-you-everywhere-at-all-times attack offended Ali’s sensibilities much as his chin. Then came the 14th round of their third fight, their 41st round together (15+12+14 because their 1974 rematch was a 12-round affair for less than the real title), and Ali solved Frazier’s rhythm and movement. And heavyweight prizefighting’s greatest trilogy folded into a vicious target practice trainer Eddie Futch mercifully stopped with a singularly elegant gesture.

No fighter more needs protection from himself than a volume-puncher, as champion-cum-broadcaster Timothy Bradley should and did know. Beneath commentator Joe Tessitore’s hysteria and Andre Ward’s cerebral detachment a close listener heard Bradley’s empathetic fury with how poorly Dogboe’s corner protected its charge and son. Bradley knew well as anyone in the city of Tucson how hopeless was Dogboe’s strategy and how helpless Dogboe was to relent. Bradley, beaten semiconscious for at least half a fight by Ruslan Provodnikov and caught hung over his front knee more than a few times by Manny Pacquiao, registered early and often Dogboe’s masochistic pleas for an uppercut from Navarrete.

Whatever Bradley said, here’s what he silently willed from ringside: Isaac, before you make one more forward step, take your right glove, set it palm-down, and lodge it between your chin and throat, damn it! Dogboe didn’t have this standard maneuver in his quiver because his father proved more conditioning-coach prophet than boxing trainer, and because Dogboe’s title run was too entangled with his father’s proselytizing and NeHo chanting to permit Dogboe seek wisdom elsewhere.

However universal be certain elements of our beloved sport – like: catch the uppercut with an open palm set under your chin – there are others that might should bring pause from a Western pundit like: What in the Sam Hill do I know about the father-son dynamic shared by Ghanaian émigrés to London? And before anyone takes to his hind legs to bray about universal truths, he should ask how many supposedly universal expressions of a father’s love permit a world-title run in prizefighting.

Which leaves us where exactly? It leaves us wondering if Dogboe’s dad should be exiled for malpractice as at least a third of Saturday’s broadcast team insisted, or if perhaps Saturday’s fight got stopped at the right moment.

(Here’s a confession that addresses conviction: I googled “Dogboe hospitalized” immediately after writing that sentence, to ensure it wasn’t already an empirically dumb thought.)

However long looked the odds of a Dogboe comeback eight rounds through Saturday’s comain, they were shorter still than the odds of a 5-foot-2 man from Ghana making $100,000 for 35 minutes of work as a professional athlete in Arizona.

Time and again we return to the ‘t’ in each of life’s algorithms; if you start observation’s stopwatch at the opening bell of a rematch with Emanuel Navarrete, the Mexican who outclassed your son but five months ago, Paul Dogboe looks a sadistic ignoramus for allowing his son enter Saturday’s championship rounds, but what if you start that same stopwatch on his son’s birthday in 1994? If nothing else, you weigh the catalog of theretofore-unbelievable things your son did to bring himself to his rematch for a super bantamweight world title 24 years later. And under that weight, probably, you honor initially his petition to continue fighting.

Let none of the weight of those words diminish in any way Navarrete’s accomplishment. Twice he entered a title fight as its b-side and twice he prevailed, and the second time more prevalently than the first. That makes him the right kind of titlist, and that makes him increasingly unique among his peers. Navarrete did not doubt even momentarily his place in a ring across from Dogboe, wherever his promoter or his promoter’s broadcast partner’s interests lay.

Navarrete was the much larger man and better boxer, and he acted like it, broken right hand or otherwise. He knew Dogboe’s need to make a vacuum of the ring that suffocated any initiative but his own, and he snatched the initiative from Dogboe and did not relinquish it. Brutal as the fight was for Dogboe, it was not gentle on Navarrete, though you’d hardly have guessed it by watching the Mexican.

Aficionados got afforded a tiny peek under Navarrete’s professionalism and decency the moment he dropped Dogboe on the canvas in round 12. Navarrete’s glance at his unmanned foe was conclusive to the edge of contemptuous. Such a glance should delight aficionados about Navarrete’s prospects as champion.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday in Las Vegas Saul “Canelo” Alvarez further unified his undisputed status as world’s best middleweight by narrowly if unanimously decisioning IBF titlist Daniel Jacobs in DAZN’s second-best mainevent of the last two weekends. Canelo did what Canelo does, and if it isn’t worth the $300 million or so his new broadcaster pays him, it’s still worth more than whatever any of his peers makes.

No, the variable Saturday was not Canelo but Jacobs. And Jacobs was no variable at all, turning in another B+ effort – the average of A talent and C audacity – ensuring more generous paydays and flattering profiles to come.

Let’s see if we can mimic Jacobs’ fighting style for a few words.

*

Seems like a good idea might be to start stepping forward and maybe committing a little more, maybe jabbing, or if you’re already jabbing, maybe, you know, start stepping into it and seeing if the other guy’s head mightn’t move back a little or else try seeing if his whole body might, kind of, start moving back or relenting, or maybe relenting isn’t exactly the right term, since boxers, by the way they usually are, don’t tend to be too relenting, however they sometimes seem at times to be, and so it’s probably right to try remembering it seems hitting the other guy is probably as good of an idea for bringing yourself closer to victory as it is for keeping him from, like, going after you too hard if you don’t want him to, but there are also counterpunches that favor his momentum, so, you know, either way?

(Editor’s note: This is indecisive and awful; you have the words, but for God’s sake, you’re afraid to use your vocabulary and, frankly, you write like a bitch.)

Any man who enters a prizefighting ring and doubts for a moment the malice of his opponent is doomed. When a sense of doom pervades any motion by any fighter, it is a spectacle weak as it is unfortunate, but it is tragic, in addition to weak and unfortunate, when the doomed man has more talent than the man dooming him.

*

Most fighters box best when they are happy, not so much in the sense of euphoric as comfortable. They find rhythm, dare we say flow, and that familiar rhythm frees their hands and feet to respond so instantly to the commands from their central nervous systems as to appear mindless, as to fool both onlookers and fighters towards thinking the hands and feet do the processing for themselves.

Daniel Jacobs is an exception to this. He fights best when he is angry. Some of this might be attributable to the physical weakness and subsequent doubt he experienced when his body turned against itself in the form of cancer. More of it is likely attributable to what Dmitry Pirog did to him nine years ago.

In Jacobs’ case, for whatever reason, there is a deep fear of humiliation, and not until an opponent begins to humiliate Jacobs via his own inaction does Jacobs risk the humiliation of what open aggression might get him stretched. In those retaliatory moments, though, when Jacobs fights from a place of deep offense, when he returns fire in a way that says “how dare you!”, he is fine a middleweight as his generation can boast.

But no sooner does Jacobs restore order than he relents once more, satisfied to look good losing a narrow decision, one close enough to keep the money handle cranking for a rehab match then a rematch, rather than chance a humiliating knockout loss by going for another man’s unconsciousness. There were a few times Saturday Canelo knocked Jacobs backwards and used the resulting space to press his advantage. And Jacobs braked that immediately. Canelo stopped, chastened, collected himself, then looked nearly relieved Jacobs was back in his own head, overthinking what might happen if he went further.

These moments were so different from the moments Jacobs went on offense and shoeshined the pitapat till he got hard countered. Jacobs on his shinebox looked put-upon by the task, almost annoyed, joyless robotic: This is what I must do or my corner will lecture me when I get back home. Canelo bought none of it; he knew Jacobs couldn’t possibly decision him in Las Vegas, and so Jacobs’ shoeshining mattered only insofar as it taught Canelo the downbeat upon which Jacobs might best be sandblasted with a counter hook or uppercut.

If all that came through a DAZN stream to a thousand miles from ringside, do not doubt how obvious it was to both men Saturday.

Canelo is not an alltime great, but he is the best thing we’ve got right now. He challenges himself when he needn’t (imagine, for a moment, how many times GGG would lap the welterweight and super welterweight fields had he Canelo’s contractual guarantees as middleweight champion), and he makes reliably entertaining fights. Not great fights, no, not spectacles of such violence and willfulness spectators openly consider the human condition, but reliably entertaining fights. So it has been with him from the beginning, whether collecting a kneeknocker from the other Miguel Cotto in his American television debut, or knobpulling the Amir Khan slurpee machine, Canelo does just a spot more than his critics think he might – and curses them to endure pundits’ hyperbole till the next Mexican holiday weekend.

Canelo was just audacious enough Saturday to make the official scorecards fair. He fought the best prime middleweight he’d yet to fight, too. Our beloved sport has had better standardbearers than Canelo, but recently it also has had much, much worse.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

After two weeks of exhibitionist fare boxing returned Friday and Saturday to competitive and excellent matches, excellent for being competitive. Or maybe the passive voice delivers better here: Boxing got returned to competitiveness by DAZN. The aficionado’s platform delivered simple, striking excellence Friday, with its broadcast of Mexican Juan Francisco Estrada’s super flyweight rematch with Thailand’s Srisaket Sor Rungvisai. Then the next round of the World Boxing Super Series happened Saturday with two of its semifinal matches, Regis Prograis versus Kiryl Relikh and Nonito Donaire versus Stephon Young.

They were all three of a piece and beautiful for the same reason: They participated in a genuine pursuit of the best available competition by identifying that competition and then going to it.

Friday’s participants had the benefit of having already identified, through their own perseverance and courage, the very best opposition they might face, and then, bless their exceptional spirits, chosen to face each other once more. Saturday’s participants, two of the four anyway, did their level best to identify what men would challenge them properly – with one of the other two a latenotice replacement and the fourth, Donaire, having previously identified such men and done his best against them.

More about that in a bit if space and endurance allow, but back to the main event among main events, back to a fight unlikely to be surpassed the rest of this year. No, Estrada-Sor Rungvisai 2 was not what mindless madness we bestow yearend honorifics upon but rather two of the world’s very best prizefighters in their primes and fighting one another best they were able. More clearly written, even had Errol Spence and Mikey Garcia been the exact same size, they’d not have been able to match Estrada and Sor Rungvisai for quality; Spence lacks Sor Rungvisai’s experience like Garcia lacks Estrada’s complexity.

There is, as a matter of fact, no current prizefighter who has on his resume a man better than the man whom Sor Rungvisai took from prime to pursuing-other-career-opportunities. If you take the best win on the resumes of each of prizefighting’s five best practitioners currently and add all those men all together, they just about equal the Roman “Chocolatito” Gonzalez whom Sor Rungvisai decisioned then slept in a halfyear’s time.

Eight pounds and 6 1/2 years ago Chocolatito put it on Estrada thoroughly, and it made Estrada better – and that makes Estrada exceptional. Friday was about Estrada more than Sor Rungvisai. The man aficionados who know what’s what affectionately call The Rat King showed up and made the sort of fight he makes every time, and if DAZN’s mediocre broadcasting crew didn’t realize how close the fight was it was because their headsets precluded them from hearing punches well as the judges did – as, below a din of babbling groupthink, Sor Rungvisai’s body punches, to which he committed from the very start, made audible confirmations of what tariffs they exacted from Estrada’s awesome initiative. And it was indeed awesome.

Estrada showed Sor Rungvisai the same lack of respect that canvassed Chocolatito in March 2017 then savasana-d him in September that year. After 12 rounds of tasting power from a man who’s much of it as anyone fighting, Estrada went after Sor Rungvisai like he’d no inkling who Sor Rungvisai was. This column is proof you can write about our beloved sport 14 years and think about it in your spare time, too, and still not be very close to explaining how a man does what Estrada did – delusion himself into believing a man who beat a man who beat him, and who also punched him hard and often 14 months ago, is so much less than the sum of those accomplishments he might go after him directly if given another chance.

Estrada fulfilled every definition of courage Friday. With both an outcome and his own health in doubt Estrada chose to go first. Compare that statement to the very best you might say or write about what Terence Crawford did a couple Saturdays ago or Vasiliy Lomachenko did the week before that. Among the world’s best prizefighters, and Estrada is exactly that, the nearest one comes to a man making Estrada’s choices is Saul “Canelo” Alvarez, and we’re not allowed to celebrate him too loudly because he’s both overcompensated and guilty of bodypunching the shine right off yesteryear’s embellishment, the former “most feared” champion now readying to make a June war on Canada’s fourth-best middleweight.

Saturday’s fights were excellent and suffer only if one happens to watch them immediately before or after Estrada-Sor Rungvisai 2. No matter how much they might suffer by comparison, anyway, they are redeemed by the tournament that made them happen, even if that tournament’s masterminds have yet to realize their fights do not belong in American venues or any venues unknown to boxing and farflung as Lafayette, La.

Nonito Donaire, a subject of sympathy through his opening 10 minutes with Ryan Burnett in November, now finds himself the WBSS’ unlikeliest finalist yet, after hooksawing poor Stephon Young in Saturday’s comain. Donaire did not belong in the semifinals but Young belonged there much less, and Donaire played him a 2007 Vic Darchinyan remix to prove it.

The evening’s mainevent and ostensible reason WBSS stubbornly returns to empty Louisiana arenas, Regis “Rougarou” Prograis, beat the joy out a very good Belarusian super lightweight named Kiryl Relikh, causing Relikh and his corner and referee Luis Pabon to conclude as one the match needed concluding at its midway point. On his shield Relikh did not retire, but the result’d’ve doubtfully changed had he tried to do so.

Were this another tired exhibition on premium cable or its cheaper counterparts there’d be plenty of reason to doubt Prograis is good as he looks. But that’s the blessed thing about this WBSS tournament (and the Super Six before it): If Prograis turns out to be peerless it will be from his lessening his every peer.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

ZAPOPAN, Mexico – This is a place that looks like Guadalajara on a map but like Chapalita right next door holds itself apart from the city at whose airport you must first arrive to visit. Saturday began with a pool party in the hills, a familiar’s friend’s parents’ house, the sort of thing that made more sense when you were 25 years younger and relies on no one saying or even thinking something like that. In its Late Prosperity manner, it was an apt way to begin an afternoon that led to an evening that concluded with Terence “Bud” Crawford’s unmanning Amir Khan.

Thing about Late Prosperity is the spotlight it shines on bygone aspiration. Whereas a pair of Hush Puppies and a La-Z-Boy remain comfortable years and years after their original influencers have migrated to sneakers and IKEA, what modern sorts of architecture and design hallmark Late Prosperity were quite obviously chosen to make an important statement regardless of their dysfunction.

When the asymmetric fixtures basked in a fresh coat of Miami Vice pink or turquoise it mattered little the sharp edges and discomfort all round them, but it’s been 30 years and the green’s gone moldy and the pink grayish, cream-of-what-once-was, and now the first thought that happens, long before even the least-discerning mind processes it, is a word like “unkempt” – which marches the mind down a path of spent-fortunes and last-testaments ignored of economic necessity. The fiftysomething children or grandchildren, overeducated products of overpriced educations, retain all the cultivated tastes and enthusiastic weirdness of their eccentric forebearers but naught of the fortune; what’s desperately worse than weird rich people is their middleclass descendants.

That made Saturday’s poolparty fine foreplay for Saturday’s pay-per-view broadcast. What are some of the hallmarks of Late Prosperity in boxing? Words like “historic” uttered over and over. Words, for that matter, of any kind, uttered over and over. The motormouth striving for relevance, the venue worship, the tired namedropping:

“Madison Square Garden. What, you’ve never – how about Marciano, Robinson, Frazier, Duran, Ali? Surely you’ve heard of them, everyone has. We were surprised to get the invitation but thrilled to accept, but when you think about it, actually, it makes sense we would be here. My grandfather was from Holbrook, you know, which is very nearby Brockton, where Rocky Marciano grew up?”

Meanwhile, all round this production, the normal people with publicschool educations and jobs with salaries and bosses, folks who know who they are and don’t mind it, politely nod and silently wonder when the cake will be cut. Not for a hell of a while. Not till another halfdozen drinks get mixed and the same halfdozen dull stories get renovated and recounted, not till these normal folks get reminded in every imaginable way how lucky they are to be what bit actors compose the background scenery in the crowded courtyard where the historymaking event is due to unfold in the next hour or two.

It’s maddening enough to make you mad enough to ask how it all happened like this, and if you begin the search for a specific villain and go deep enough in it you realize there’s no villain but the system – everyone who thinks he’s a puppetmaster be entangled in the same string lattice as the paupers whose strings he thinks he pulls. Bud Crawford’s lowblow was a fitting end to such a spectacle, fitting as Amir Khan’s predictable and anemic submission to a better man’s fists.

To watch Khan is not to get surprised by his victimhood in meaningful fights but to get surprised by anyone else’s surprise, to wonder, essentially, who the hell decided we should take him seriously in the first place. There was no moment any aficionado doubted Saturday’s outcome; Khan was smaller and weaker and dumber and slower and less balanced and less prepared, and watching him beaten conclusively unto unconsciousness would satisfy solely our beloved sport’s worst impulses. That’s before we consider this was a pay-per-view event, th’t there was an additional charge to see this mess because a transnational media corporation and its wealthy promoter couldn’t possibly cover whatever purse the world’s best prizefighter wanted for a welterweight exhibition match.

Something only marginally worse happened on Fox Sports for free, Saturday, and if PBC still shows no empathy with aficionados’ plight, at least it gets the price right often as not. It’s exhibition matches far as the eye can see, there, too, though without (as much of) the pound-for-pound puffery ESPN now pounds its viewers with.

While we’re evidently stuck on the letter ‘p’ let’s get into this week’s palliative. DAZN will broadcast a wonderful rematch Friday and the continuation of a still-more-wonderful tournament Saturday – when Srisaket Sor Rungvisai and Juan Francisco Estrada swap blows in Inglewood, Calif., the night before World Boxing Super Series returns with two junior welterweight matches from Lafayette, La.

DAZN does not yet know what it is, but we already know it is not Late Prosperity. DAZN is making mistakes its peers do not, it is choosing events at least as much as personalities, it is aspiring to become a platform while its peers get remanded, yet again, to the role of copromoter.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday morning (ET) once-defeated Ukrainian lightweight prodigy Vasiliy Lomachenko unconscioused Anthony Crolla before long in Los Angeles. Saturday night undefeated welterweight titlist Terence Crawford will batter and fry Amir Khan in New York. Both men are ESPN champions, both men are former HBO champions, and both men will have to wait at least a week before ESPN’s expert, formerly with HBO, tells us who’s the better man.

Saturday’s was not for Lomachenko a win for the ages, despite what saturation coverage said about it – coverage whose best feature was the hour at which it came. But it was a win that might age OK for what it tells us about the toll such wins take, the necessary suffering that comes with increasing one’s risk baseline till the easiest win exacts some tariff on the winner’s physical self.

For if Anthony Crolla does not represent an easiest win for a fighter that man does not belong in any meaningful conversation about the utterly meaningless pound-for-pound argument promoter Top Rank now goads ESPN to have with itself. The pound-for-pound title was/is on the line this/last week about the way the NBA championship is on the line annually at the Verizon Slam Dunk Contest; if a man might be recognized as prizefighting’s best for icing a thirdtier opponent balletically, why not crown professional basketball’s best player according to one’s talent for balletically dunking on an unguarded net?

As friend and colleague Jimmy Tobin so insightfully tweeted: “Talking about P4P shit is especially silly after a Crolla fight.”

But there they were, 2/3 of the HBO-recycle panel, well into the witching hour Saturday morning, talking about the importance of what Lomachenko did to hapless Anthony Crolla. What he did, apparently, was break his right hand on Crolla’s head, which is meaningful in the same way it was when Floyd Mayweather broke his right hand on Carlos Baldomir’s head in 2006. It mattered naught to the outcome but changed a career’s trajectory.

Never again after Baldomir would Mayweather fight often, cheaply or with a knockout in mind. If Mayweather were never naturally likable, after the Baldomir fight he marketed himself as a villain, sowing his fortune by putting as many pay-per-viewers on the against-side of the ledger as the for-. However well he performed financially Mayweather knew he was nowhere near the fighter he’d been with healthy hands.

And how did Baldomir turn the trick of changing Mayweather’s career? The same way Crolla, and before him Jorge Linares, changed Lomachenko’s career: By simply being a naturally bigger man. Unattributable to talent or fortitude or whatever other euphemism we employ for brutishness, Crolla needed to be struck hard by Lomachenko more times than his lighter predecessors did. Each flush shot Lomachenko felt his knuckles deliver emboldened Lomachenko to sauce even heavier the next.

Thing is, though, there just ain’t that much horsehair or foam or tape between Lomachenko’s knuckles and his victim’s cranium, and there’s but so much density in feathery human handbones and tensile strength in what ligaments keep them ordered at impact, and you can only court the catastrophic so many times before it accepts your proposal. There is no irony in Lomachenko’s having to wait till his right shoulder healed from surgery to generate enough torque to break his right hand; it all speaks to what brittleness age and weight-scaling visit on every prizefighter inevitably if not always proportionately.

Lomachenko knows this. And this knowing begins to explain the urgency with which he has made title fights and climbed weightclasses. In the increasingly entertaining Lomachenko cinema – that precedes his increasingly predictable fights – this time Lomachenko held his breath underwater for three minutes. It was an impressive feat suspensefully rendered. Impressive and suspenseful, that is, until Lomachenko revealed he’d been able to hold his breath 50-percent longer as an amateur.

If Lomachenko is 50-percent less adept at oxygen-denial than he was in his twenties, what else is deteriorated and how much – handspeed, footspeed, reflexes, derring-do? Anthony Crolla sure as hell didn’t tell us.

Until last month, the common wisdom was that Mikey Garcia could. That’s no longer quite so assured. If prizefighters are improved by winning championships they’re diminished by first defeats and especially shutouts. One imagines Garcia returning to lightweight and commencing a reign of terror on whichever taxistas and mecánicos PBC tees-up for him, and perhaps that farce shall endure a bit, but what happens the next time Garcia is across from a man more talented than he is? Does he relentlessly press violence, now confident no lightweight has the power to dent him, or does he 1-2-3 his way to another safe loss?

If Lomachenko-Garcia happens, and there is exactly no reason to think it will, here’s what we’ll tell ourselves: Garcia’s greatest advantage is the fundamentally sound and powerful way of his attack; a jab-cross combo thrown by a powerpuncher at 135 pounds is just the thing to scramble Lomachenko’s signals and reduce the Hi-Tech network from fiberoptic to can-on-a-string.

We’ll do this because as aficionados we’re a bunch adaptive as we are resilient. This week, in fact, we’ll be telling ourselves there’s something quintessentially heroic about Amir Khan’s next knockout loss.

Khan might have taken the easy route by retiring once he was no longer the best in his division but instead he has challenged himself to lose more brutally each year. No, he has not always succeeded in this quest, which proves its nobility. After Danny Garcia detailed him in 2012, Kahn spent two years making rehab matches with retreads who’d not spark him. Then came redemption proper: Khan’s faceplant against Canelo Alvarez won 2016 knockout of the year. Back to the lair went Kahn, effectively retiring in 2017 and 2018 despite fighting twice, before emerging like Zorro for a spectacular loss to Terence Crawford this Saturday.

Crawford, ESPN welterweight champion, and Lomachenko, ESPN lightweight champion, now engage in a pitched hypothetical battle for a still-more hypothetical title: If you take the Lomachenko who just broke his hand punching Crolla and the Crawford who seeks to widow Khan’s wife, and imagine they are the same size, and further imagine their promoter would deign make them fight, who would win Lomachenko-Crawford?

Once you’ve answered that hypothetical question according to the imagined criteria above, forget all of it and ask yourself even dreamier questions like who wows you more and what should the purse-split be for the number of pay-per-view buys you imagine this hypothetical match’d garner. Now take that heaping mess, go to Twitter and find someone who disagrees with you, and engage him relentlessly. Prove yourself a historian or a clairvoyant. Stay engaged.

For whatever you do, don’t refuse to participate in this nonsense till the best men in each division choose to fight one another.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday in Los Angeles once-defeated Ukrainian lightweight titlist Vasyl “Hi-Tech” Lomachenko will successfully defend his title against Britain’s Anthony Crolla on ESPN+ in a match that challenges prefight scriptwriters to excavate some superlative as yet unused on Lomachenko. Hi-Tech will look sublime, spiteful, special and spectacular against Crolla. And for a low monthly rate subscriber aficionados will witness all of it.

When this preview strays from Anthony Crolla, and it surely will, indulge me please, since it won’t be a straying of laziness or complacency but desperate boredom.

If there’s occasion for plumbing the depths of Crolla’s highlight reel such occasion escaped me nimbly as I set out to do so. Bygone years this sort of thing was risky. You figured the late Vernon Forrest was so much better than his next challenger, such a prohibitive favorite, you didn’t bother returning to silly episodes of The Contender to see if Latin Snake was any sort of a boxer, and then the prohibited happened and you looked a fool – and back then readers abounded enough to tell you as much.

These days temptations are very much other; go outlandish and put all eggs in the underdog’s basket because the only way anyone will remember any prediction is the occasion of an unthinkable upset, and nobody has attention span enough to bury himself in the archives and see how many times you picked outlandishly for this one ticketcashing score, has he? This column is too regular, though, to make such irregular efforts as fruitypicking the oneoff for a singular story, which is exactly what a Crolla victory over Lomachenko would prove be for a week at least or until some wiseass remembered Orlando Salido had exactly twice so many losses as Crolla when Salido did the unimaginable and fouled his way to a clear victory over a man we later learned was a generational talent.

One needn’t set out for the gloatful score, then, when sturdier intentions favor beginning with a possibility of the champ’s upset and looking for how it might happen then deciding after an appreciable review, say two or three minutes, it cannot happen. This is when you turn boxing sage and answer one essential question: If there were no more important phrase in the English language than “I told you so”, in a couple years how would posterity read your preview? Satisfy that criterion and build nothing to dam what accolades flood your DMs.

Anthony Crolla is a fine, basic lad who won a world title the right way from a Colombian named Darleys Perez, in his second try, defended the title once then made a pair of losing scraps, one of them close, to the man last seen getting wet-tissued in Madison Square Garden not long after being designer-distressed by Lomachenko, chinny Jorge Linares. There was that moment, though, wasn’t there, when Linares dropped the prodigy and made us hopeful something other than yet another woeful mismatch was in the offing. Of course you’ve forgotten; that happened nearly a year ago, and can you remember what Lomachenko has done since?

Oh, in that case, you’re a better man than I. I recall more about Lomachenko from highlight videos and overwrought profiles, and the requisite ESPN fare (Lomachenko, a man very accomplished at violent acts, turns out to share a complicated relationship with his father – in a twist no one saw coming) than anything he has done in the 11 months since he won his lightweight title from the man who won his lightweight title from Anthony Crolla, the man who lost to the man who lost to the man and is about to lose to the man. If that’s not circular symmetrical it’s because it’s not much any geometrical shape that has symmetry; it’s a linear thing. The wrong sort of linear thing, definitively not a lineal thing, then, but a linear one nonetheless.

It’s not too early to start salivating at the prefight Loma footage, pingpong pops in Spidey spandex, it’s not too . . . oh, enough pretending.

Here’s what happened when I looked for Crolla highlights a while ago: YouTube used years of my viewing activity to recommend yet another Lee Trevino video. This has almost nothing to do with boxing save that Trevino is of Mexican descent the way most of the last generation’s best prizefighters were. But whereas those men came out a prizefighting lineage Trevino came out of nowhere, many years ago, an El Paso club pro raised on a dirt floor by a gravedigger grandfather, a marine and autodidact whose first professional victory was American golf’s greatest prize, a master ballstriker and shotmaker who needed no lessons to torque the clubface in just such a way to visit maximal inertia on the back of a golfball.

If YouTube history can be trusted, no visual spectacle delights me much as Trevino’s swing, and not prime Trevino, either, but the 50-year-old version I saw drive a golfball at the Digital Seniors Classic 29 years ago, in a move unmatchable for power, grace and violence. Not since Juan Manual Marquez snatched Manny Pacquiao’s soul has anything in our beloved sport transferred to me what energy a glimpse of Trevino’s swing does.

There, just above, that’s the way I would like to write about Vasyl Lomachenko but cannot. It’s all too precious and prescripted with Hi-Tech, too white-earbuds, not enough analog. He’ll stream through Crolla on ESPN+ and aficionados will get dangled and promised, the usual maybe-Mikey-Garcia-next canard, and made to feel unappreciative for not thanking hard enough what promotional benefactors give us semiannual glimpses of Lomachenko’s otherworldly talent. Then it’s back to the Trevino videos for me.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday in the mainevent of a Golden Boy-promoted and DAZN-broadcasted card from Indio, Calif., undefeated American lightweight Ryan “KingRy” Garcia (2.3m followers, Instagram) whacked-out hopeless Puerto Rican Jose Lopez in two rounds. If Garcia’s punches occasionally wanted for precision they lacked no malice, and their thrower no cocksuredness, and that recommends young KingRy because few are the prizefighters who start an uppercut after missing in the same flurry with hooks and crosses.

If you think Garcia isn’t yet quite what his socialmedia following believes, friend, you’ve come to the wrong place, as this space hopes to be a KingRy fanpage for at least a few hundred of the words that follow.

Without access to any demographic data for 15rounds.com a hunch tells me we lack a reliable readership among women, 18-24, a lack more pernicious than may first appear because our target demographic repels, or at least frightens, women, 18-24. And if you’re thinking “well, frightening them first sometimes does wonders,” you’re making my point – even while you might be right. Consider this column, then, a partial effort to pander and a partial effort to celebrate the potential of a young prospect; if by chance you are reading this column in the year 2024 and KingRy just failed in his fourth attempt to become a world champion, let’s hope it was a 23-year-old woman whose recommendation brought you here.

Rumor has it young women can be charmed by magic tricks, and while this effort, thus far, is bereft of magic, tricky or otherwise, its author has recently taken to juggling for reasons at best tangential to anything prizefighting but a touch germane to Garcia. Let’s see if the metaphor doesn’t collapse before it inflates.

If our focused vision, the detailed and conscious study of a visual object, happens via the cones of our foveae then most of boxing we watch with the rods of our peripheral vision. In a figurative sense this happens during nearly any pay-per-view undercard because broadcasters and promoters stock these with such swill no adult’s fovea need be wasted. In a literal sense, too, we trust most boxing viewership to peripheral vision, what suspenseful happenings occur while we fix drinks for acquaintances or discuss the weather with their wives.

Until Saturday the weight of my viewership of Ryan Garcia fell upon my peripheral vision exclusively; probably I caught some of a couple of his matches during some undercard broadcast or other, and (pander alert) I resolved to open an Instagram account to follow his photogenic exploits, but I never cleared a calendar’s moment for him.

Here’s something you already know but may not’ve considered: The rods of your peripheral vision are far better at detecting both motion and its rate than the cones of your fovea. You’re reading this with your fovea, that is, but if while you’re reading this a redfanged predator is creeping upon you it will be your peripheral vision that does the detecting – and there’s a strong argument to be made it is this, your very unconsidered faith in peripheral vision, that allows you to do something decadent as concentrate on words about boxing (ostensibly).

Which is sort of where juggling comes into play. Like most lads raised in New England I’ve gone through nearly all my life without any fascination whatever for motor sports. My first college roommate was from North Carolina, and until I met him I’d no inkling what NASCAR was nor a first inkling how absurdly popular it was. I still don’t watch live auto racing (or, to be fair, live most-any-sport-but-boxing), but I like sports documentaries of all kinds enough to’ve spent a goodish amount of time in March watching programs about Formula 1 (and even more time watching footage of the late Ayrton Senna). Along the way I caught one pattern more than another: Most Formula 1 drivers juggle to cultivate a discipline like: Look with soft focus on the horizon, say halfway up your windshield, while trusting your peripheral vision to detect others’ motions round you.

Despite an abiding fascination with palindromes I’ve no desire to do anything with a racecar but admit the Formula 1 driver’s discipline has a myriad of applications in life. So I bought the juggling balls (leatherskinned hacky sacks, effectively, the better for not bouncing when you drop them hundreds and hundreds of times) and watched the YouTube videos and did the oneball toss then the twoball toss then the threeball flash and then a halfdozen or so hours into the enterprise things made sense and quite apparently it was easier to keep two balls in the air while juggling three than turn the same feat with only two. (And it applies to this discipline, too: Right now I’m keeping soft focus on a wordcount of 1,000 while trusting peripheral vision will tell me if any worthwhile ideas about Ryan Garcia should come swooping in.)

Oh, here they come. What I like about Garcia: He has his new stablemate Canelo Alvarez’s best offensive traits and moreso. What surprises most about Canelo in person, for translating least on television, is his intensity of attack; if he doesn’t appear much faster at ringside he appears degrees more intentional; he very much wants to hurt you with his punches. The first time I covered a fight of his at ringside was the match with Austin Trout, and the experience impressed upon my memory an enduring sensation like “Wow, this dude is physical.” Not even sure what that means exactly, but you get it.

Garcia doesn’t yet have the same effect, his body is still a boy’s, comparatively, but his attack is relatively more intense than Canelo’s for coming from a relatively less-affected place. Garcia appears more loosely wound when defending than Canelo and meaner when attacking. However much of this should be attributed to opponent-quality remains to be gathered. Garcia mayn’t have Canelo’s chin, and best stop pulling it straight back regardless, but he has a prettyboy’s pride and presence, the relaxed posture of a guy who can pull your girlfriend and likes being resented for it.

Garcia’s a Spanish 102 class and an Olympic gold medal from being Oscar De La Hoya, perhaps, but our beloved sport is a lot more than that from being what it was in 1995, when De La Hoya won his 18th prizefight.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter (though not Instagram, alas) @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

“It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books – setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them.” – Jorge Luis Borges

OKLAHOMA CITY – This proud city stands between Arlington, Texas, and Omaha, Neb., though not midway between; this capital of Oklahoma is nearer Arlington than Omaha, a geographical position whose shading made it quite right for Wednesday’s co-promoter / co-broadcaster confirmation announcement of what numbers have frozen our beloved sport in anticipation for nearly a month since PBC on Fox Sports’ welterweight co-champion Errol “The Truth” Spence (waltzing to a harmless decision over Manny Pacquiao in September) toed the pay-per-view line with Top Rank of ESPN’s welterweight champion Terence “Bud” Crawford (keelhauling Kell Brook in October). Spence won.

“We did it!” exclaimed promoter Richard Schaefer in Bricktown Brawlers Hall, the third-largest conference room on the second floor of the Cox Convention Center, a meeting place named after the Indoor Football League team that warmed Oklahomans’ hearts in bygone days. “Bob said we couldn’t, and I said, ‘Bob, we’ll see about that!’ And now we have, have not we, Bob?”

“This is a stupid exercise but necessary,” averred promoter Bob Arum from his seat at a makeshift dais before a sprawling purple, black and electric-blue canvas billboard filled with the announcement’s tagline: PURSES COLLIDE. “Only an idiot would take these numbers more seriously than the fights or fighters themselves, and since most of you are idiots who write for idiots, here we are.”

Such levity on Arum’s part did little to defuse what tensions mounted ceaselessly in a war of promotional trashtalk that began at ringside in AT&T Stadium after Spence-Pacquiao and grew only louder at the postfight presser in CHI Health Center after Crawford-Brook. His charge having lost by a few hundred thousand pay-per-viewers, Arum may have been eager to change the conversation to a proposed Crawford-Pacquiao tilt early in 2020, but gathered fans were having none of it.

“You come at the king, you best not miss,” said Lil Audi, a self-proclaimed broadcast aficionado in a blue Fox Sports ballcap who chose not to give his real name. “Dadunh-duna-DAH! My boys beat that ass.”

Though neither Spence nor Crawford was present at Wednesday’s event, representatives from both their networks as well as surprise representatives from both fighters’ former networks, Showtime and HBO respectively, gathered and lent gravity to the proceedings.

“‘The Truth’ is, Errol will always be family,” said a Showtime representative. “While we wish we could’ve done the Pacquiao fight, we understand the economics of the situation, and we’re thrilled to announce a Muhammad Ali documentary we’re working on for next spring.

“It’s a spoken-word mashup of Ali in others’ words, featuring such distinctive voices as Californication’s David Duchnovy and Dexter’s Michael C. Hall. And of course Showtime Championship Boxing’s own Paulie Malignaggi.”

Not to be outdone, HBO’s new Executive Vice President of Streaming Services put her own spin on the event.

“Words cannot express how happy we are to be out of this mess,” said Priyanka Malhotra. “I’m here, in large part, to ensure the stake we drove in boxing’s heart has not been dislodged by money or a detente between rival promoters. And yes, to announce ‘LJ on MJ’ – an original series that takes viewers on a tour of Michael Jordan’s favorite parts of New York City, produced by LeBron James.”

So much attention devoted to who attracted more pay-per-view buys, those observers formerly known as aficionados can be forgiven if they inadvertently and initially mistook Crawford’s round-three razing of Brook as more definitive than Spence’s keepaway scorecard-whiteout of Pacquiao. While Crawford’s predatory instinct and Brook’s inexplicable popularity in the U.K. otherwise might’ve combined for a win, the smart money, as they say, was ever on Spence.

“These fans who think they’re promoters never understand international buys,” said Arum, Wednesday. “They won domestic buys, whatever, but when the money is finally counted and Machiavelli is done keeping his enemies closer than his friends, we’ll see which fighter emerges with the better actual paycheck.

“But don’t expect the Swiss banker to throw another press conference about that number.”

“This is a win and a win for boxing,” replied Schaefer. “It’s a win because Errol Spence won more pay-per-view money. And it is also a win because Errol Spence will make even more money in his next fight, which we are thrilled to announce will not be with Terence Crawford.”

While old timers may scoff at boxing’s new fascination with numbers of viewers between fighters, rather than numbers of punches thrown, truth is, this fascination is hardly new.

“Reminds me of the Money Era,” said Lil Audi. “The haters were all ‘It’s bad for boxing if the two best don’t throw hands in their primes,’ but we got those Maidana fights outta Floyd, right, and we got JMM waxing Pac like Rain Dance.”

“Of course he names himself after a German car,” said Arum, when asked about those comments. “He’s an idiot.”

While serious fans are likely to remain fixated on the implications of Wednesday’s announcement for a halfyear to come, casual fans now understandably obsess over boxing’s flagship division. With no chance of Fury-Wilder 2 or Fury-Joshua or Joshua-Wilder in the foreseeable future, post-presser talk Wednesday shifted to broadcaster DAZN’s subscriber rate and a revenues-growth argument for ESPN+ charging more in 2020.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

ARLINGTON, Texas – Saturday in the middle of AT&T Stadium in the middle of the DFW metroplex welterweight titlist Errol Spence beat lightweight titlist Mikey Garcia 36-0 on official scorecards, 37-0 if you count one scorekeeper’s view of a latemiddle round. Accurate tallies, both.

It was a Spence masterpiece until the 11th round ended with Garcia still conscious. After that began the doubts, the narrative’s rewriting, after that began the deeper suspicion on his finest night Spence was not quite Bud Crawford, whose name should not be spoken.

Spence had not before faced an opponent of Garcia’s talent and craft, and Crawford still hasn’t and likely won’t, but Spence fought Garcia with a civility, a decency, a compassion, even, a quarter, finally, Crawford affords no opponent. This makes Spence a lighter soul, a more marketable product, a person you’d rather like to meet, but it makes him less of the one thing anyone reading this wants in his favorite prizefighter.

Indulge a thought experiment: What might Crawford have done otherwise, immediately before or after the 11th round? It’s in the eyes and where Crawford’d’ve set his. Not on the Garcia he was wounding with nearly every punch but on the Garcia manning the corner’s cotton. Crawford would’ve said with his eyes and voice, if his eyes were not emphatic enough, “Robert, I am going to spike your little brother till it spikes your conscience – I am going to break your will, not Mikey’s.”

Spence is everything most want in a prizefighter and promises many joys to come, but he is an athlete-specialist, not a predator. Would he be specialist enough to beat Crawford? I’m not sure he wouldn’t, but at ringside I was sure he would be until halfway through Saturday’s final round. He had a dispirited and physically reduced little man in front of him and an older brother trainer who’d floated the idea of flying the white feather eight minutes earlier, and instead of snatching consciousness with a proper dose of cruelty Spence went sweet on us.

My work is done here, he said, à la Money May; let’s use this time to prep the postfight interview and revel in my accomplishment. It was an acceptable and marketable thing to do, and if we’re honest, such relentfulness likely matchmade a payday with Manny Pacquiao (a man with enough bonedeep cruelty to steel via transfusion the entire PBC stable, lightweight to heavy), but it was disappointing to those know who what’s what.

It was a signature PBC fight in that sense. Little blood, gloves a bit too big. Safe boxing, as it were. There’s something still sanitized about PBC fare, an abiding sense, even at ringside, none of the anointed ones is in true danger. Mikey took the sort of sustained abuse that writes neurology whitepapers 20 years hence but suffered none of what gore’d make Fox Sports reconsider its recent investment.

Let’s precede the next turn like this: PBC has improved considerably its relationship with print media, largely by hiring retired newspapermen, and to imply writers were treated less than fantastically Saturday in AT&T Stadium would be inaccurate as it were ungrateful. But the outfit’s mysterious figurehead was invisible as usual and inaccessible as ever. And his absence brought a postfight thought like: He’s not a violent man, he doesn’t want violence in his life, and he signs fighters according to every criterion save savagery.

All the stable staples were ringside for the main: Floyd, a purple and bedizened toddler; AB, a gleeful rogue in pink, trailed by Gervonta and a greenhaired date; Leprechaun Shawn; Manny, declawed and spacey; the Brothers Charlo, lion tamers more than lions; Deontay, garishly garnished, unable to stop smiling. For edgy you had to look in the cheaper seats and see the elder Benavidez brother – but we know how Bud did him.

It was pleasantly safe the whole night. A better, more committed writer – hell, even this writer 10 years ago – might impart this was not as things should be, but again, the whole night was too pleasant to notice. PBC is a socioeconomic achievement in that sense, too, and an intentional one, one suspects. To have so many men whom the (white) American imagination makes so dangerous assembled in a small space, at the center of which actual violence is the point, and have it blanketed by appreciable calm and fun was at least a part of Al Haymon’s original vision. For it could not be accidentally so.

It really was fun during the ringwalks, too. There’s nothing like the energy of the stadium ringwalk, tens of thousands of lubricated throats and psyches foreplayed into a froth by undercard mismatches and earsplitting technobeats, rising as one in the ecstasy of anticipated violence. Mikey’s mariachi production and glinting eye; Errol’s marching band; both men making a much longer walk through a crowd much longer assembled than anything a casino could host.

The main event that followed was nearer a dud than a classic, true, but that was attributable to every reason every one of us thought the hour the fight was announced and dutifully went about forgetting in the months that followed. Spence was quicker than the man Mikey prepared for; a regimen of adding weight and sparring weighty men did as it ever does, putting weight on Mikey’s chin, not his fists, but quickly it made perfect sense no sparring partner big or bigger than Spence would have the Texan’s reflexes – else that man would be a world champion, not a sparring partner. By round 3 it was not a question of whether Spence would beat the 147-pound Garcia 12 times of 10 but whether, in a hypothetical tilt for Mikey’s lightweight title, Spence wouldn’t be the favorite there as well, so much better were Errol’s reflexes and footwork and accuracy than Garcia’s.

What Spence revealed in Garcia was an excellent technician of exceptional power (below 140 pounds) whose skills were actually orthodox and basic as suspected. The lesser man in size and strength, precision and mobility, Mikey had, by round 9, nothing on which to depend but his whiskers and Spence’s mercy. And blessed he was with both.

While his older brother and protector, dullfaced and resigned, watched silently in the corner.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday in Carson, Calif., American welterweight titlist “Showtime” Shawn Porter decisioned Cuban Yordenis Ugas by controversial splitdecision scores in an uncontroversially dull prizefight broadcast in primetime by Fox Sports to promote the network’s upcoming pay-per-view debut. Saturday’s controversial decision came out more palatable than usual, though; having the match’s loser be the one who wins the outrageously lopsided card, it turns out, helps the medicine go down.

Saturday’s final round reduced to an evernarrowing matter of who wanted it more and ever-reducedly made manifest this answer: Neither man. Ugas, effectively if not expectedly, reduced “Showtime” Shawn to “Fox Sports” Porter, a feinting, doubting, boxer-strategist much more like his PBC stablemates in 2019 than himself in 2015.

Porter’s strategy appeared like: They expect me to attack so they can counter me, and I’m not going to fall for that. Good far as it goes, no sense in giving a challenger exactly the champ for whom he prepared, one supposes, but what was the second part of that plan? It could not have been to meltdown Ugas from making him chase or miss since even minimal preparation on Porter’s part would’ve uncovered Ugas’ reluctance to lead, a culturally ingrained reluctance no camp or chiefsecond might eradicate in under a tenyear, and Porter strikes no one as unprepared.

Or maybe that is no longer so. It was true for the last halfdecade at least, but Friday’s scale reported otherwise, and we might as well not ignore it. If Porter was not before voted by peers Least Likely to Lose His Title on the Scale he was verily in the running each year since gaining his first belt in 2013. Not a stylist gifted as his stablemate welterweights, the madefortelevision gaggle that can’t seem to fight one another despite sharing both the same contractwriters and the same signing pen, Porter remains the most attractive of the lot because of his honesty.

There was something charming about Sugar Shane Mosley’s being ringside Saturday to see Porter; honesty recognize honesty, as it were; if Mosley weren’t at least twice the fighter naturally that Porter is he was also a fighter honest enough to keep choosing newer and bigger and better foes till he came to the same choices Porter often finds himself making. If it’s not certain a prime Mosley would beat Keith Thurman and Adrien Broner in the same night it’s probable enough to wonder if Sugar Shane, inspired by the long money Manny Pacquiao got for such easy work in January, wasn’t in Carson scouting.

If Porter is an honest fighter he gave a performance less honest than usual, Saturday, and if that isn’t Ugas’ fault it’s mostly Ugas’ fault. Whatever else an honest prizefighter does he must at least endeavor to hit his opponent often and hard as possible even if it means being hit in return. In the annals of Cuban prizefighters there are precious few men who meet that standard and Ugas sure as hell isn’t one. (Said list in the modern era likely starts with Joel Casamayor and ends with Luis Ortiz.) Instead Ugas is the latest graduate from Havana’s be-not-shamed school of boxing.

This was the thought that happened halfway through Saturday’s match – when Ugas glared and asserted postround dominance over a man he’d just refused to punch-first in 180 seconds of opportunities. It’s a congenital condition among Cuban prizefighters in the sense it happens at their birth as professional fighters. Many international amateur bouts are fitness competitions much as they are acts of combat, judged and slightly menacing CrossFit happenings wherein you must throw early and often to outpoint your opponent. The Cubans do this masterfully and once understood the geometry of computerized judging (1992-2012) too; there were dead zones on the canvas, wherein the required three of five judges were unlikely to register a landed punch, and the Cubans knew better than to exert while upon them.

Everything changes for these guys, though, once the gloves get smaller or the rounds get longer. They arrive at an ethos that finds immense shame in their being hit cleanly or stopped. Losing “controversial” decisions bothers them little if at all, no matter how many times they and their countrymen lose exactly the same way. Porter’s corner was loudly concerned Saturday their man was putting his title at risk by not engaging more and ferociously with his challenger. Ugas’ corner, contrarily, saidn’t once something like: “We never win these close decisions, so for heaven’s sake hurt this man until he is unconscious!”

There was Ugas, then, in the championship rounds of a match there for his taking, feinting and glowering and taunting and threatening but never leading with anything but the safest of getaway jabs. It can’t be a technical thing, not for a Cuban. So it must be a cultural thing that consigns gifted men to the same tough-test game-challenger robbed-unto-perpetuity role so many Cubans play in professional fighting. And always with the sympathyseeking autobiography, too; if it’s not a loved one’s terminal illness it’s a family jailed by the Castro regime. Anymore it feels like a script designed to excuse a contender’s lack of ferocity with a narrative trick like: After everything he’s sacrificed to be a world champion only the most dastardly official wouldn’t give him every close round, and they’ll all be close – only the scrofulous judge’d render an unfavorable tally.

Whatever say our insipid brethren on the scorecard-ethics beat, I’m glad for every close decision that goes against the challenger. Take the champ’s consciousness or take your seat quietly.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Soon undefeated welterweight Texan titlist Errol Spence will defend his IBF belt against undefeated lightweight Californian titlist Mikey Garcia at AT&T (formerly Cowboys) Stadium in Arlington, Texas, on a PBC pay-per-view card distributed by Fox Sports. The ticketselling onus is on Spence much as the entertaining onus be on Garcia. While one can’t help but appreciate the quality of both prizefighters one is equally challenged to forget the unsatisfying way similar such handicap matches have gone in the last few years. But anyway a preview must be written.

There’s something hopeful about writing a fight preview you don’t find in any other column subject. Indulge me a bit, here, as this might be more about the mechanics of the craft than the upcoming fight – which you’ve got a wellformed opinion about already and hardly need information from me to refine.

At best a preview column might remind a reader of something he already knows. On rarest occasions there’s something overlooked by every expert and a writer taps it, but that’s unlikely to the precipice of impossible in the internet era. Some styles mesh unexpectedly. All fighters have flaws, and the surprises come along when, for reasons indecipherable enough to be called “chemistry”, an underdog sees a favorite’s flaws with a clarity unanticipated by all that favorite’s previous opponents. This is exceedingly rare with every trainer having access to footage of every prospective-opponent’s efforts.

Nothing trustworthy comes out of camps because they’re intended to deceive. You already know this. Every fighter has had the best camp of his career before the biggest fight of his career until he loses. Then you hear about the hand injury, the lacerated eyebrow, the pneumonia, the chief second’s visa issues.

The part of column writing one improves at most over the years is sizing ideas. Your first year of columns invariably includes a Homeric treatment of your chosen subject’s appeals. In this case it would be a humanitarian justification of prizefighting’s very being: makes heroes of underprivileged kids, provides official supervision of violent events that were going to happen anyway, affords the cultural edification of seeing courageous acts publicly done. You know going in these are 100,000-word ideas and you think: Imagine the literary density that’ll happen if I can get a 100,000-word idea compressed into a hundredth of its due!

This doesn’t work, and if you don’t end up in the shabbiness of bullet points you might as well. So you retreat into newsitorials, opinionated reporting, verse-chorus-verse. Then you take another chance in your second or third year: Growing the 100-word idea into 1,000 words. The essence of a left hook, the telltale snicker from the final presser’s dais, why some challenger’s wearing “I Luv U Mom” on his trunks foretold every single thing that happened in round 4.

This is enervating work but more rewarding than year-one’s compression initiative. Here’s why. By missing widely on the spectrum’s opposite end you’ve set a more-workable range than if you tried to make a smaller correction. By trying to stretch 100 words into 1,000, in other words, you’ve improved yourself disproportionately more than a lad who tries in his second year to compress a 50,000-word idea in to 1,000.

If you stay with it long enough, of course, you can’t help but improve. But endurance in this case, and especially in a case of no financial reward, is a function of talent; you might have written 1,000-word columns about a seasonless sport like ours for a decade without more than a lick if you needed to do so to pay rent. But to turn the same feat for free requires facility of some sort – at some level, however invisible it be to the practitioner, doing this must be easier for you than the hundred or so folks who threaten to do it but don’t.

What’ll happen a couple Saturdays from now in Arlington? What we already think will happen. Two of this generation’s best fighters in an unsatisfying handicap match. For what could happen that would satisfy? Garcia stretching Spence is the only thing that comes to mind. And how likely is that? Spence stretching Garcia would be cathartic in its moment, like when Canelo fabric-softened Amir Khan then folded him with ruler-scored creases, but that catharsis would deteriorate quickly into an idea like: Spence did what he was supposed to do.

Some of you may tell yourselves seeing Garcia make a masterclass in boxing and play keepaway unto a 12-round decision would induce longlasting euphoria, but if that were true we would talk about Leonard-Hagler today often as we talk about Hagler-Hearns. Which we don’t.

Errol Spence is one of my favorite fighters. Mikey Garcia was one of my favorite fighters eight years ago – the night in 2010 he took the staples out Cornelius Lock on a card in Laredo was memorable impressive. Garcia squandered much of aficionados’ high opinions of him with the way he ended things against Orlando Salido in 2013 and the way he began them with Juanma Lopez five months later. Not long after that began his hiatus and a comeback against opponents either unproved or proved underwhelming; only in a promoter’s alternative universe is decisioning Robert Easter a meaningful feat for someone of Garcia’s gifts and pedigree.

Which is why Garcia now shoots at the moon, bounding up a couple weightclasses and fighting one of the world’s two best welterweights. He has hall-of-fame gifts unjustified by his resume. Spence’s case is more sympathetic. He wants to unify a division whose fellow titlists are wanting for one reason or another, but absent that he might as well go for the biggest payday available. One assumes this is that. But I’m not sure. Ringside in December a veteran of many Garcia fights told me: “He never did sell tickets for us.”

But one doesn’t book a football stadium otherwise, right? We’ll know soon enough.

Garcia’s quest, to justify his gifts, brings us neatly back to the craft of column writing about boxing. For all but a practitioner or two it is the only reason to file regularly. To justify one’s perceived gifts in a way that precludes regret, to preclude the gnawing sensation that accompanies an admission of one’s own ungratefulness.

Doubtful AT&T Stadium is the place to complete such a journey, I’ll take Spence, KO-11.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday on DAZN in a prizefight between formerly good lightweights matched 15 pounds and nearly so many years past their primes Mexican Humberto “La Zorrita” Soto decisioned American Brandon “Bam Bam” Rios by wide Mexican scorecards in Tijuana. Probably the cards were unfair to the American’s activity and ineffective aggressiveness, yes, but they were precise reflections of the difference the men shared in class. A blessing on such uncommon precision.

What surprised mostly, for being unobstructed by either man’s reflexes, was how markedly better Soto was than Rios, better in a way which caused one’s mind to race backwards and color his memories with doubt’s shadow. Whosoever won the match on an honest card wasn’t relevant to nary a spectator; that sort of determination required a calculus of activity and generalship and sundry other considerations properly dispensed of by any aficionado who knows knockouts matter more than the aggregate value of every other outcome. Perhaps Rios did enough to unsteal some of the rounds Soto otherwise stole, and perhaps it means naught either way.

What mattered Saturday was the clarity of the disparity, as it were, the entire levels, much less details, which separated the combatants’ skillsets. Rios shone as an object lesson in what a toughguy can do in a region and sport whose every participant is not a toughguy and how much it helps, too, if you speak English and once used it to give premium broadcasters juicy soundbites. Soto, conversely, showed how strikingly competent a prizefighter had to be to come out Mexico when he did.

Soto, one can be forgiven for not realizing, lost his first world title challenge – getting nearly shut-out by Joan Guzman in their WBO super featherweight tilt – the same year Marco Antonio Barrera and Juan Manuel Marquez fought for the WBC’s title in the same weightclass. Soto was 10 years and 52 scraps into his prizefighting career without so much as a ticket for the Pacquiao-Marquez-Barrera-Morales lottery.

Soto didn’t get out Mexico without he lost a fourtime. There’s an element of craftbuilding there, though, American prizefighters, even a generation before today’s, rarely endured. Early losses on American resumes were a blemish cursed for getting a fighter blacklisted from television. In Mexico, though, where an undefeated record courted suspicion much as it evinced prospective greatness, fighters like Soto realized the only chance to make a fortune in prizefighting was as a world champion, and if you deserved to be such a thing there were avenues enough to attain it, and if you didn’t deserve it then you didn’t deserve it and the only way to know was to fight and fight.

Little in the Soto dossier looks like a wellmanaged prospect cherrypicking a madefortelevision title. Meanwhile, one border and 16 pounds away Andre Berto was saturating HBO’s airwaves with a six-defense run as the WBC’s welterweight titlist, even while sympathetic pundits agreed he probably wasn’t ready to fight other titlists in his same weightclass. You got onthejob training, in other words, as an American prospect, complete with generous cable contracts and inflated rankings, even while your fanbase couldn’t fill a Tijuana cinema much less a bullring.

Onto this scene exploded Brandon Rios with his 2011 stoppage of Miguel Acosta. Four months later Rios was on HBO obliterating Urbano Antillon, a oncepromising prospect ruined by SoCal gymwars, and five months after that, in December, Rios was back on HBO missing weight and fighting someone named John Murray, a man who’d qualified for his title shot by getting knockedout that July. Seriously. By now there was little limit to the silly things experts were saying and scribes were penning about Rios’ otherworldly feats of chin and fist.

Then came the Richar Abril debacle on HBO. Rios missed weight again and got outclassed in every sense of the word – and only Adalaide Byrd happened to notice. Rios got his toughman matchup after that, making a trilogy with Mike Alvarado, and a lot more money from HBO, interrupted only briefly by his being heavybagged in China by a rehabbing Manny Pacquiao who dropped to Rios a total of perhaps 30 nonconsecutive seconds of the 2,160 the men spent together.

All the while somehow persisted the myth Rios was a prodigious infighter, a man who knew well how to mill on the inside, which he did not. I recall distinctly a gaggle of smug South Texas doofuses (a doofusi?) helping me understand how badly I misunderstood my own eyes during Rios-Abril, a match wherein Rios routinely set his head behind Abril’s left shoulder and winchcranked a lefthanded lob (to replicate the power of this shot, raise your left hand, make a fist, and flex your left bicep, then pull your fist into your cheek). Because every Mexican is a tough infighter.

Except Rios is a Mexican-American infighter, which, as Soto showed so ably, is a lesser breed. The opening rounds of Saturday’s match looked like a YouTube video of a fat American partyanimal picking on the wrong Mexican abuelito in a bordertown cantina. Rios had nothing but the rude force of (relative) youth; there wasn’t a single element of fighting Rios did well as Soto, and if Soto’s cultural norms precluded clowning he nevertheless appeared surprised by how easy Rios was to hit and make miss. Exhausted a minute into the fight Soto still managed to hit Rios whenever and however he wished for the 35 that followed. Rios’ generally overrated, if likable, trainer, Robert Garcia, beseeched Rios stop allowing Soto to win every round with merely 10 seconds of exertion, but Garcia must’ve known what Rios didn’t bother telling him which was the difference in class be so vast Soto probably didn’t need more than five seconds of roundly exerting to do it.

The evening’s biggest losers were its oddsmakers, pros who usually know better, for having installed Rios as a wide favorite fighting a Mexican in Mexico. Guess lots of folks believed those HBO press releases way back when.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry