By Bart Barry-

SAN ANTONIO – Outside the coffeeshop where this effort happens Nature is entirely mixed-up, leafless branches beside trees suddenly in bloom beside trees still shedding dead leaves. One week ago winter was a sleeting vengeance, a few days ago it was 90-degrees, today is more autumn than spring but neither Thursday’s summer nor Monday’s winter. It makes one wonder what dramatic changes home-construction philosophies will undergo necessarily in the next few decades, how inadequately traditional remedies and materials may serve.

This was to be an essay about the difference between what Andrew Cancio did a couple Saturdays ago as the underdog in a world title fight and what Leo Santa Cruz did a late-replacement Saturday as a prohibitive favorite, and maybe it will be at some point accidentally, but there’s reporting and writing and homages of sorts, and this rarely be a space to come for reporting, so let this instead be a written homage in its way to what Santa Cruz did and the way he did it, busyness for its own sake, a ferocious pelting of partially aimed exertions that feel portentous in their moment but ultimately leaven’t a mark on their objects or audience.

Biomimicry, according to neuroscience (that wonderfully flexible science of whatever you wish it be – with every one of a trillion neurons representing the potential for a specialized field), increases human creativity, and so an observation about a dog on a hiking trail: He absolutely has a sense of himself, he is selfconscious enough to know “mine” – whatever else might territoriality be? – even as he hasn’t a grasp, really, of “yours” and at best a fleeting grasp of “not mine” much the way a human child grasps “my toy” years before “not my toy” years before “your toy”. And a dog is better for it since whichever comes first, selfconsciousness or memory, being unable to grasp not-mine or very much of the past-tense allows a creature to go through life with very few lamentations and nearly nothing akin to nostalgia. Most resentment probably reduces to “not mine anymore” and so even if biomimicry hasn’t made this effort any more creative it has limited finely its author’s chances at resentment – like: A talent for writing columns is not mine anymore – and if that doesn’t eliminate anxiety it certainly closes one door to it.

A brief reminder: Howsoever much we fetishize work ethic, when the real thing arrives, true and natural and genuine talent, it is a lightning bolt. That obvious, that different, that awestriking. It is a phenomenon so complete it causes us immediately to ask questions about luck, to pose riddles about what happened to a talent’s possessors born too soon or too late – what happened to the child born with Johann Sebastian Bach’s gift 5,000 years before the violin and harpsichord? what happens to the child born with Bobby Orr’s gift in Lima instead of Ontario? Maybe it’s all luck and has been and always will be, whether genes luckily arranged or luckily arranged genes lucky to come along when and where they did.

Unbeknownst to its readers, y’all, this column gets written after 3 1/2 hours of volunteering at a bus station on Sunday mornings with a nun-organized interfaith coalition whose ministry is easing the passage of just-released Central American asylum-seekers, predominantly women and very young children, as they make their ways to sponsors’ homes all round the country. Backpacks with blankets and coloringbooks and other sundries and bags of nonperishable foods get distributed, one to a family, sometimes 500 in a week, and itineraries get reviewed and maps gets drawn and on the occasion of stranded passengers shelter gets found, and it all adheres with remarkable consistency to a Karma Yoga principle something like: Work without expectation of reward. None of us is the caricature U.S. politics and its media coverage make us; the detention-facility contractors who escort the asylum-seekers to the bus station aren’t heartless or morally compromised, the Central Americans aren’t predatory or transactional but frightened and grateful, the busline is nothing like a psychopathic profitseeking entity, and the volunteers aren’t wholly without competing selfinterests. Every thing buzzes and improvises.

Sunday, though, a young mother with an infant child asked about her younger brother and where he might be, she had his bus ticket, and would they be bringing him to her, he was only five years-old – should she take her afternoon bus to Houston or wait for him at the station, and surely someone must know where he is, a five-year-old? Because the person who accompanied him from Guatemala was not his biological mother but his biological sister he had been sent to a different detention facility, and now his older sister stood in an unknown city, with a Spanish name at least, asking what she should do next.

You pass her on to a volunteer from a different, legal-counsel group, since she might have contacts at the detention facility, and you pass the griefcounseling role to a Mexican nun from a local monastery, and you walk it off by volunteering to get medicinal supplies from the basement of a local church. If fatigue makes cowards of every man so does powerlessness for the same reason, and there be naught so pathetic as impotent rage. With that as a disclaimer, then, take this in the spirit of its intention: The executive who enabled these policies may well be old enough to escape their consequences, but his abettors will not be – there will be trials for this someday, too much evidence has accrued since June and it evinces too much inhumanity, and so lets this act as but a tiny marker. When the apologists emerge, babbling about sovereignty this or patriotism that, calling every prosecution politically motivated and every sentence deeply unfair, know this: Justice is being served, finally if tardily.

Nothing unjust seems to happen in a boxing ring while the fighting happens. Fouls occur, yes, but no one gets to a level of televised combat without he knows how to suffer and avenge such things. There are refs who shade one way or the other, generally a-side, but they don’t get to where they are, either, without a thousand hours of practice. Our beloved sport’s injustices happen offcanvas. Judges, promoters, managers, so forth. The more decisive a man is in the act of fighting another the better his chances of going unrobbed by refs and judges, though, which is another reason to celebrate what Andrew Cancio did some Saturdays ago in California, when he beat his opponent to quitting and took the matter directly out of any hands but his own.

As one ages the more easily he finds it to celebrate individuals who manifest justice with their own fists than to catalog injustices. Or perhaps that is what laziness and cowardice catalogers would say it is.

Outside on the communal green of this revived and repurposed historic brewery a collective of acrobats or yogis perform balancing acts we once called cheerleading but now bedizen with spiritual elements, perhaps deservingly, and it’s the performative act of the whole thing that rankles. But no sooner does one reach for a metaphor about social media’s ills than he realizes human spirituality has often as not been a performative act, has it not, and, anyway, he’s too young, still, to be so curmudgeonly.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry

Saturday in California on a surprisingly rich card of mostly anonymous fighters (outside the Golden State anyway) DAZN and Golden Boy Promotions delivered something wondrous as it was unexpected: American super featherweight Andrew Cancio beating to broken undefeated Puerto Rican titlist Alberto Machado. With unfortunate infrequency does an underdog win a world title and still less often by round-four bodyshots stoppage. Even if it now starts happening monthly it will never be tiresome.

One might fairly infer from this the glimmeringest of hopefuls, yes? We are a dissatisfiable bunch, the aficionados, drawn as we are to violence, subjected as we are to disappointment oftenlike, that no sooner do we have airwaves (cablewaves? satellitewaves?) saturated by our sport than we begin loud lamentations – in volume relative to our experience – the offerings’ quality shall plummet. And it shall. The same way teamsports leagues become diluted with each expansion so too has our beloved sport with its each new league, be that league DAZN, ESPN, Fox or Showtime.

What happens when network trafficopters filled with cash cropdust cities that haven’t opened a new boxing gym in a decade but have closed three or four. When the undeserving suddenly get rich the deserving make comebacks or delay retirement plans under the auspices of what Golden Boy Promotions partner Bernard Hopkins once called “back wages”. Nobody amongst us generally blames them because we know the brutality of this entertainment medium, what grisly things these men do for our amusement, and even a band of misanthropes misanthropic as ours can’t quite cross the line to begrudge them. We suffer it then, unenthusiastically, caustically, characteristically, so long as commentators properly stay their throats and scribes stay their fingers, admitting the fare be reheated retirementplan mush and not worldclass prime.

We’re not the suckers they think we are but a resentful lot. Anyone ever attached to any local boxing scene gets this; every carpetbag promoter comes cantering about with his unique recipe, asking insiders his same rhetorical questions we’ve all heard from each of his predecessors, the conman’s shimmer in his smile, and no sooner do we try to answer earnestly, telling him what we’ve seen work and what expectations are reasonable, but his head swivels elsewhere, the better to spot a new mark. A friend and colleague of ours who’s forgotten more about Arizona’s boxing market than Phoenix’s next dozen promoters will know in the aggregate, Norm Frauenheim, has a typically sanguine view of those swivelheaded promoters: “I figure, hey, it’s their money.”

The new broadcasters don’t care because they’ve run the numbers and know if aficionados were a mass critical enough to seduce HBO’d’ve found a way to sate us and stay in the game. So it’s a game of capturing the naive, which is itself a game for the naive. For among the target demographic of naive combatsports fans who’d fall for such swindles regularly or longly enough to justify recent budgets are gaggles of former boxing fans who pretty loudly declare their lost allegiance attributable to dilution – in the form of too many champions and too many weightclasses and too many too-manies making worthless fights too many.

Shoving into this maw an annual Gervonta Davis mismatch is a surefire way to get canceled (two months ago I finished with Showtime nearly a year to the day after I finished with HBO). Which leaves three leagues: Fox, free, ESPN+, cheap, and DAZN, cheaper than premium cable but more than ESPN+ and Fox combined.

In the apparently revived WBSS, DAZN has something uniquely special, something no other league approaches, and that is meaningful combatants making meaningful fights that go somewhere. It’s a best-of-the-rest strategy aspiring to be more and quite possibly succeeding at such aspirations: No one has come close to building an Oleksandr Usyk mightily or quickly as WBSS just did.

Which brings us to Saturday’s wonderful surprise and what it might portend. Golden Boy Promotions, since its figurehead’s plunge and CEO’s termination a few years back, is a regional attraction with a single moneymaker – currently prizefighting’s greatest – and a magazine. Three years ago that wasn’t just not-much but barely anything at all. But the outfit got through the thinnest of years by equally thick margins and is out the other side, with a meaningfully massive infusion of cash via its association with Canelo Alvarez and a committed network which doesn’t want for dates.

Five years ago this would’ve meant fizzing cases of Tecate commercials stacked shamelessly atop shameless mismatches. But Saturday it surely did not. The favorite got canvassed in the final undercard bout, the favorite got canvassed in the comain, and the favorite got keelhauled in the main. More of that, please, whenever you can, thanks.

There’s something simply cynicism-proof about watching an unretired longshot like Andrew Cancio win a world title by breaking an undefeated favorite in half, especially after that favorite drops him in their match’s opening 90 seconds. It speaks to Golden Boy matchmakers’ matchmaking prowess, too, it does. Years ago, at the firm’s inception, Golden Boy’s fatted matchmakers made ugly showcases; their CEO scammed HBO with sparkly a-sides, and the matchmakers’ job was not to blemish the records attached to those names. Golden Boy didn’t build many fighters and didn’t make many great matches either. That matchmaking staff, now, is chastened and leaner. When the company’s primary earner fights all comers, too, it’s nigh impossible for coworker talents, whether contenders or prospects, to refuse whoever they’re offered. Which is how we get matches like Saturday’s – matches made to be entertaining contests more than gory coronations.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday or Sunday on ESPN+ Russian Sergey “Krusher” Kovalev decisioned Colombian Eleider “Storm” Alvarez in Texas to reclaim one of the titles Kovalev won, in part, by losing so spectacularly to Andre Ward in 2017 that Ward decided to retire on the highest note of his career. In avenging his latest knockout loss, Kovalev boxed well, Saturday, and Alvarez did not, and that was that.

Kovalev is and will be remembered as a b-level prizefighter cleverly presented as much more by a b-level network, in mid-descent from a-level, a symptom more than a cause, a titlist folded in half by the only a-level prizefighter he faced – average ingredients well-prepared during a famine. Much of what happened Saturday, much of what you’ll read and hear for the rest of Kovalev’s career, is and will be about preserving illusive credibility despite concessions to illusions past.

“Others are wrong!” in other words, not “I was right.” Overtraining this or distractions that. Paeans to Kovalev’s age aside, what aficionados saw in Kovalev-Alvarez 2 was the same guy they saw tentatively box to victory against Bernard Hopkins, a once a-level prizefighter 50 or so days from his 50th birthday.

Now that we have the hindsight of the same B-Hop being knocked outframe, outboxing, outring by Joe Smith 13 months after Kovalev’s careful showing we might reexamine our insightfulness before we reappraise Kovalev. Could he punch? Sure he could. Was he a frontrunner? Sure he was. Could he finish? Yup. Was he great? No, never.

There’s selfservice in Andre Ward’s ongoing postrematch analyses of Kovalev, even while there needn’t be, an opening desire to reassert Ward’s superiority followed by a closing desire to burnish Ward’s legacy a smidgen more at halfprice. What remains constant as gravity, though, is a fact like: Were Ward and Kovalev matched at Ward’s best weight, not Kovalev’s, Ward would’ve gone 10-0 (10 KOs) in both this lifetime and the next.

Saturday’s question, finally, isn’t whether Kovalev underwent some historic revision in one training camp with Buddy McGirt (he didn’t) or whether Eleider Alvarez underwent some historic dissipation in the last halfyear, but why we actually care. Some of it, though much less than years past, is standard Stockholm-syndrome stuff. The January boxing calendar is historically anemic, leading young fans and pundits to get unseemly giddy at anything better than an obviously mediocre happening before March.

Most of it, though, is vestigial HBO hype. Like the network’s defunct commentary trio scoring midrounds according to prefight prejudice, quite a few of us did not notice HBO’s shift from singular authority to underbudgeted shell, when it happened, because it was incremental.

The emerging consensus is that HBO Sports’ last great boxing authority was Lou DiBella, who left the network in 2000. That feels about right. The talents and promotional relationships DiBella built and featured carried the network a little less than a decade before the network’s dearth of knowledgeable programmers began showing its ribs. The departure of a talented producer though talentless programmer in 2010 began the qualitative freefall that followed. Wealthy and knowledgeable became wealthy and gullible became middleclass and gullible became poor and gullible became canceled.

Nearabout HBO’s middleclass and gullible stage arrived a surfeit of prizefighters raised in the Soviet Union to prey, at once, on the juvenile nightmares and adulthood nostalgia of fiftysomething viewers. It took little in the way of imaginative squinting, then, for HBO Sports’ target demographic to see in Kovalev, and his fellow Eurasian bogeyman, Gennady Golovkin, far more than what they actually were (later confirmed, of course, when both were beaten by smaller men from North America, “controversially”). A reflexive reality still happened in viewers’ minds and that reality affected commentators’ perceptions even as they sought to affect viewers’ perceptions.

One monument to this, probably the greatest, was Kovalev-Hopkins in 2014. Kovalev dropped Hopkins in their first round together and then did not imperil him again in the 11 that followed. A fearsome 31-year-old puncher, in other words, was unable to snatch consciousness from his dad in 36 minutes of trying. Absurd as that sentence reads today we all obeyed a tacit moratorium on calling it what it was – desperate as we were to keep the juggling balls in the air, to contend our oncegreat sport broadcasted on a oncegreat network was something more than risible goofy. Surrealer still was the twoyear, fourfight Kovalev victory pageant HBO hosted in the great man’s honor after Kovalev decisioned a man 10 years nearer Social Security eligibility than his physical prime.

This really happened. You may even be old enough to remember it.

It took super middleweight Andre Ward 20 rounds to do it, but this too happened surely enough: Kovalev, eyes averted, belly up, offered himself to Ward with thighs splayed – the better to be sniffed – in an act of animal submission more ably narrated by David Attenborough than Jim Lampley.

And still HBO persisted! This time with silly opponents and sillier narratives right up until Kovalev got himself whupped by a shortnotice Colombian making a world-title-match debut after his 33rd birthday. Yet another coursecorrection ensued and Eleider Alvarez, a man who’d knocked-out a perfectly symmetrical if entirely unimpressive 12 of 24 opponents, became some Andean beast whose fists Kovalev would need God’s own luck to survive.

OK, fair point: This last was ESPN’s manufacture, not HBO’s. Alvarez regressed to his mean; the Krusher character begins its next rewrite. Fortunately Kovalev’s latest comeback has found its proper platform, off premium cable and on a $5/month boxing-after-midnight app.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

SAN ANTONIO – Not even a threehour drive from where this was written, Saturday night at Houston’s Toyota Center Mexican super welterweight titlist Jaime Munguia decisioned Japan’s Takeshi Inoue on unanimous scorecards that were semiaccurate despite likely being filled-in over breakfast tacos. The match’s promoter, Oscar De La Hoya, a promise machine, promised to be back in Houston again and again, as he does in every city he visits.

I wasn’t there and through the opening credits of Saturday’s mainevent couldn’t remember why, exactly, I’d forgone the experience, especially considering December’s trip to Corpus Christi for a spectacle promising nothing much qualitatively greater. (Toyota Center, too, remains dear for being the site of a personal ringside highlight and Golden Boy Promotions’ greatest early show: Juan Manuel Marquez versus Juan Diaz, 10 years ago next month.) Then a few minutes in the opening round it came together: I did not believe a month ago, and remain no more convinced today, Munguia is a mainevent fighter.

He may be on his way like Antonio Margarito once was, but he’s not there now, and his promoter’s abundance of broadcasting opportunities more than Munguia’s abundance of talent is why Saturday’s was a headline gig for the Tijuanense. It shines through in Munguia’s hitch, more pronounced when he is moving backwards or sideways than when his aggression bends him forwards. His hands too low, his chin too high, Munguia raises his gloves drops them raises them to get each combination started, and it’s the very way Inoue ducked so many high hooks early (before Inoue decided these punches were better blocked).

It’s a large reason Munguia works best moving forward and should not move to weightclasses whose titlists do not let him move forward on them. Munguia is enormous for 154 pounds, and enormity composes most of his talent at this point. We’re told how young he is and likely to outgrow his weightclass, and that doesn’t bode well for him since adding six pounds will make him punch hardly harder but absorb abler what punches clip his chin, which is many. Because his trainer’s breakthrough professional accomplishment was befriending Joel De La Hoya Sr. decades ago, Munguia hasn’t a proper tutor to admonish his left glove upwards, upwards, and this leaves him scarywide open to rights of all shape and flavor, from dunking-overhand to piston-cross.

Limited as Inoue was in every pugilistic tool save desire he nevertheless struck a prizefighter in his third title defense with punches launched from his own hip. How he did this speaks to Munguia’s want of ring IQ. At least once every round Inoue’d bull Munguia to the ropes, where Munguia’d drop his left hand as if involuntarily. His opponent’s guard pinned at his waste for reasons Inoue found fortuitous if puzzling as the rest of us did, Inoue’d force the palm of his left glove between Munguia’s chin and collarbone then blast Munguia with a right. The first few times it happened one immediately sensed Inoue must be about more than first impressions (dominated as those were by images of Inoue’s crossing right foot behind left every time he pivoted) and onto wily stuff indeed, as he teed-up Munguia’s chin in a way more than figurative.

But no. Munguia simply didn’t have an answer for being bullied back. Sometimes Munguia returned fire, sometimes he brought Inoue to his chest and looked for the ref, and other times he began a rabbitpunch-off and looked for the ref. In this sense if no other Munguia gave the impression of a mainevent fighter, a true a-side: He expected official enforcement of favorable terms and got that quite a bit in the match’s first half from a sometimes officious ref unable to break the fighters without assigning culpability.

On to Inoue. What Japanese pressure fighters have that all pressure fighters have but few have more than the Japanese is self-possession. There are cultural origins for this, probably, or maybe it’s a selfselection sort of thing, whereby matchmakers know an entertaining test will be given their fighters if a b-side gets imported from Japan. How else does one explain Inoue’s presence on Saturday’s card in the first place? It’s not enough to say Inoue’d only once before fought outside Japan; Inoue’d only twice before fought outside Korakuen Hall.

Yet there he was, making his American debut in a mainevent at Toyota Center, home of the Rockets, and making a proper show of his opportunity, too. A little zany, a little eccentric, a little offkilter – that was Inoue during fightweek and into fightnight and right through the last bell. Those aren’t pejorative modifiers because they’re not even tangential synonyms for the pejorative modifier Munguia was after, after all: Intimidated. Inoue was not that. Even when he got near kneedropped midlate by the same basic combo Munguia bounced off him 50 times Inoue straightened and shimmied and recollected on his stool.

Something else Inoue’s self-possession revealed about Munguia: He may not hit hard as advertised. Despite doing regularly the one thing every single completely superfluous commentator demands – punching to the body – Munguia did very little to take Inoue’s legs and still less to take Inoue’s spirit. Frankly the left hooks Munguia landed to Inoue’s body took about much from Munguia as they did from Inoue, blasphemy of all blasphemies.

About the completion of boxing commentary’s superfluousness: DAZN is an innovative platform without innovative commentary. Already the Kenny Mora Leonard trio is brutedreadful for all the reasons Lampley Kellerman Jones became so; the whole enterprise is banal, salesy and most of all constant. The threeman booth means someone or -ones must be talking every instant, and since there aren’t that many ways to sell a product to a customer whose payment you’ve just confirmed and since the new media reality is that no one who might criticize a promoter or manager or programmer, much less an advertiser or sponsor, is allowed a live mic, televised boxing commentary now reduces to a childlike contest of who can say “unbelievable” the most times, where five years ago it was at least a contest of who could say it the most euphemistically.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday on a Showtime pay-per-view broadcast for the gullible and nostalgic Filipino great Manny Pacquiao decisioned American mediocre Adrien Broner by unanimous scores way closer than what action they appraised. Make or break, do or die, verb or other verb, Pacquiao-Broner finished a latenight show that was simply awful.

It was a lowbudget swindle, top to bottom, a return to the days when Showtime was the scrappy underdog, productionwise, while being so very far removed from that, qualitywise. Saturday’s was the work of a rubberstamp applied to a starmaking enterprise without an element of quality control in its ranks. What caustic commentary follows about the undercard is necessarily limited to a foiled plot to miss the whole damn thing, which be nigh impossible when the comain goes off a halfhour after the mainevent should.

In fact, start there: What possible demographic do you sate with a live sports event that concludes at 1:30 AM ET, last-call whoremonger? Stack the undercard a hundred fights deep, à la Don King, if need be, but don’t subject viewers to it; because it sure ain’t our problem PBC has more talent than it can afford to fight annually.

Comain victor Marcus Browne may be an exception to this, he’s on the rare PBC biannual plan, but he’s not exceptional. Perhaps it was the hour of his antics, but there’s something aesthetically offensive to a spectacle such as: After cautiously playing keepaway with a man so bloodied by his own wound even Tony Weeks tries to get the doctor to stop your fight, after wheeling shamelessly in the final 30 seconds from a man blinded by his own blood, you then perform the wrath of Achilles a halfsecond after the final bell frees you from the possibility of being punched again.

An apt leadin, that, for Showtime’s shopworn aping of HBO’s moribund model. Commercial, commentary, movie, national anthems, movie, ringwalk. National anthems, apparently, intend to announce: This is a serious event. But there’s no such thing as a serious event after midnight, that’s when, according to Eric Clapton, one merely chugalugs and shouts, which mightn’t actually be the worst way to describe AB’s performance in the main.

Broner is an entertainer who fights, not a fighter who entertains, and he’s not that entertaining either. He captures Floyd Mayweather’s schtick successfully enough to capture PBC funds, captured from Showtime, but not well enough to capture an audience. Mayweather long sold the prospect of comeuppance, a chance to see a boorish lout lose his undefeated record, maybe violently. But we’ve now seen Broner lose every way it can be done consciously, and the catharsis is long gone: There are committed if casual boxing fans among us who’ve watched hours of his fights live and have yet to see him win. Broner’s a conman who’s not conned anyone but his employer in a halfdecade. Because he rightly distrusts his conditioning, Broner makes dramatic fights that lack suspense and increasingly lack drama, too.

AB’s latest personal trainer, Kevin Cunningham, has collected a couple plump checks for bringing Broner in on-weight and fiercely performing empty orations, the sort of no-nonsense, give me 10 more reps, former-cop, cliche-gushing pap hardboiled sportswriters used to go cuckoo over.

After losing all but a handful of Saturday’s 36 minutes Broner leaped on the turnbuckle like an adolescent thespian following unclear stage instructions – over here, hands raised, OK? Pacquiao, who, a career ago, took the primes from three hall-of-famers seven times in five years, watched it all with a shrug: I guess this is the thing at my new circus, and the money’s nice, so, sure.

A certain barely detectable sadness now accompanies Pacquiao in the ring (or perhaps that’s projection); the men whose vanquishings made him a legend are already in Canastota, or just about, moved on to roles more permanent if less prestigious than Pacquiao’s senatorial gig, while Pacquiao plays acoustic renditions of his greatest hits with inferior and comparatively anonymous bandmates backing him. Maybe Manny needs the money, but more likely he just loves to play, and if the songs don’t have yesteryear’s force they still beat the hell out of silence.

In some odd way it brings to mind Marco Antonio Barrera’s bewildered look in Manchester a decade ago, after Barrera’d left his partnership at Golden Boy Promotions to contract his services on a fight-by-fight basis to whomever would pay for a legendary name on his inferior fighter’s resume, and a cut suffered early but allowed to bleed till Amir “Tomato” Khan could get his Barrera stamp happened, and Barrera absolutely could not have cared less. Fifteen months later Barrera was in San Antonio, going through the motions now with Top Rank, and he wanted to talk about the late Edwin Valero (with whom Barrera’d prepared for his uninspired 2007 rematch with Pacquiao) more than himself, and his cadence resembled that of Manny’s prefight chinwag with Showtime’s never-not-insufferable Jim Gray, Saturday.

It’s not that Manny’s not still fun to watch, he is, and it’s not that someone ringside for his best matches feels Manny’s new PBC tour is demeaning, not really, it’s that Manny himself seems to feel demeaning. Like he feels sorry for anyone gullible enough to swallow Saturday’s swill and call it otherwise.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday on Showtime Pay-Per-View Filipino senator Manny Pacquiao looks to avenge his 2015 loss to Floyd Mayweather by shoving his left fist through the face and out the other side of American welterweight Adrien Broner. This match belongs on pay-per-view only in the sense no network would offer what purse guarantees either man expects, and therefore distributing its financial risk across what remains of the gullible public is the rationalest way to make it happen.

Pacquiao should win well enough to spark six months of rumors about his next opponent, and Broner should collect savage enough of a beating to sate pay-per-viewers’ bloodlust at least until Error Spence does wicked things to Mikey Garcia in March. That’s the assumption, anyway: Those with the means to purchase the fight either revere Pacquiao or hate Broner because nobody hates Pacquiao and nobody who reveres Broner has the means to purchase the fight.

Socioeconomic realities being what they are, and their hatching what priorities they do, the prose excoriating Broner over the years has been exponents better than what writing celebrates him. When he was calling himself Mr. HBO a halflife ago, the usual suspects copy+pasted press releases about him and wrote round them, barely, and a writer or two, too, wrote well about him, one even visited a Colorado trainingcamp, if memory serves, but there was no bottom there to plumb; AB was a caricature of Floyd Mayweather’s caricature of a darkskinned man for lightskinned men to hate.

In that doublenegative of sorts Broner made something positively charged – in the electrical sense if not the ethical one – something Broner was for, where Floyd was mostly against things. How much of television happens in writing and editing, we don’t know necessarily, how much of what we are told to feel about fighters is manufactured by producers who know how, but one gives everyone the benefit of the doubt by writing some nugget of unlikability glowed from Floyd early on and got produced for maximum effect. Floyd was presented as invulnerable even when he looked like he was about to cry.

At root, though, Floyd is a deeply unlikable person – read: on a personal level, nobody likes him – whose fights were for the most part tired and tiring repetitions of one another. It’s worth repeating, the more we got to know Floyd, the more cameras were trained on his personal life, the more we saw someone asleep in most every frame. Floyd wasn’t unlikable because of the caricature he played or because of how gleefully fraudulent the 12th rounds of his fights felt, but because no matter what he did or spent he was a dullard.

To be in any room with Floyd for more than an hour is to be bored.

Broner feels different from that. There’s a vulnerability to Broner. Sure, most of that is born of the losses on his ledger, the salesman’s instinct with an inferior product, but that might be the wrong way to see it. Floyd talked about his undefeated record as a means of comparing himself to whatever fighter aficionados held dear; he wasn’t TBE because he cared about being the best ever – he’s learnèd enough to know no historian could look at the men he fought, and when he fought them, and what they weighed when he fought them, and put Floyd in any top 20 list – but rather because he knew it would drive you nuts enough to buy his next fight no matter how silly its premise or demonstrative it oddsmakers’ eyes-rolling.

Floyd didn’t promise he wouldn’t be hit by his opponent, though in retrospect it would have made his fights more interesting if he had, but rather that he’d make an entertaining fight. That he never did do that accumulated resentment enough among aficionados for nobody to miss him.

Broner, on the other hand, makes an entertaining fight every time he puts gloves on. Broner’s defense is porous, his footwork often a tangled mess. He’s quick enough and strong enough to hit any man and flawed enough to be hit right back. He doesn’t sell his fights like: Come see AB the technician perform flawlessly again. He says: Come see this obnoxious clown get his clock cleaned.

Anyone who was in Alamodome for the signature beating of Broner’s career – Chino Maidana’s 2013 assault – knows there was tension in the championship rounds when, after absorbing everything Maidana could throw, Broner looked the fresher man, the abler combatant. (Another feature of that match that speaks to Broner’s otherwise inexplicable staying power: Never in 14 years of covering fights have I seen a more unambiguously joyful crowd than the one that spilled out the stadium in San Antonio.) And who among Broner’s eloquent undertakers didn’t shudder a bit when AB clipped Shawn Porter in the final round of Broner’s second career loss?

Had Broner an iota of discipline he might’ve proved himself an elite lightweight before eating his way two divisions up; if there’s little doubt prime Pacquiao would’ve beat Broner at 135 pounds there’s much more doubt than what greeted Pacquiao’s fight with David Diaz at that weight.

Which brings us, feet tangled and retreating with gloves overhead, to Saturday’s match. Here’s one way to look at it: Since 2017 Pacquiao is 1-1 and Broner is 1-1-1, making neither guy the rational a-side, and since when do you put a match on pay-per-view without an a-side?

Another way to look at it is . . . well . . . maybe there’s not another way to look at it.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

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

Local politicians say San Antonio is the fastest growing city in the country, which may be true or wildly false – who bothers knowing the truth of anything anymore? – but if one trusts his intuition he’s able to confirm a coarsening, at least, the sort of coarsening that happens when strangers get crowded together; I felt similar traffic patterns living in Silicon Valley in 2001, and since most of the country is a couple decades behind Silicon Valley, it feels about right South Texas should be arriving at San Jose-2001 in 2019.

I believed persons might change themselves through force of will then saw no one turning the feat in more than cosmetic ways, then I believed no one changes but becomes solely more deeply himself then saw folks years later unrecognizable, then I decided no one changes himself but does get changed by life.

Ringside for Ramirez-Hart 2 in Corpus Christi brought further evidence of a mysterious sort of thing like physical IQ, something Norman Mailer jabbed in his treatment of Ali-Foreman, “The Fight”, whereby one’s experiences in combat, or one’s ancestors’ experiences for that matter, make the non-thinking, or anyway non-selfconscious, parts of one’s body abler to respond in a boxing match via bypassing consciousness than pinging it for preapproval, and meandering deeply enough in this thought brings an intersection with one’s selfconcept, one’s identity, that might explain why professional athletes often sense the pain of failure just like the pain of injury.

I can’t envision any viable model whereby unbought boxing-writing pays a living wage for more than a handful of its practitioners, whereby more than a dozen writers work for publications independent from promoters and pay their rents that way, much less mortgages, and this doesn’t make boxing-writing an anomalous form of journalism so much as a predecessor form: when you don’t expect to get serious pay for something you don’t worry about capturing consensus or abiding by it, and that means you strain for objectivity very little, which is probably fine since the obvious bias of opinion be more palatable than what dishonesty can accrue when wellintentioned objectivity becomes your objective.

Pause.

Jesse Hart appeared uninspired during the opening half of his rematch with Zurdo, a rematch Hart demanded, almost begging, which made veteran observers wonder if Hart were unwell or if Ramirez were specialer, and it unraveled thoughts about failure in prizefighting – rarely unaccompanied by somethought like “I’m unable to do this” – which quickly reraveled into thoughts about the essence of relenting, that it isn’t so active as quitting but rather passive like nonresistance; far oftener does a man fail at prizefighting by shrugging than shaking his head.

There’s a hint of schadenfreude for aficionados as the richest prizefighter of our last generation now wears down mixed martial artists and walks down teenage kickboxers; it proves nothing about any of the three sports except economic circumstances disparate enough to drive a man and a boy to seek a payraise by imperiling themselves and failing painfully at someone else’s craft.

There’s nothing yet on the 2019 calendar that rivals Fury-Wilder at last year end; there are curios where old guys fight and little guys dare to be great by scaling classes, and such spectacles, like Kell Brook’s getting expunged by GGG or (again) Amir Khan getting knockout-of-the-yeared by Canelo, bring to mind a distinction strategist Carl von Clausewitz inspired when he defined courage as a trait a warrior uses to overcome doubt; we can invert this and imagine a doubtful outcome is a prerequisite for courage, which is to infer it is no braver to enter in a hopeless contest and lose than vanquish a hopeless opponent.

I wrote all that once before, more than 10 years ago, and now that I read it I realize how much more careful I was then – we were aligned with CBSSportsline.com at the time, and if one hoped to appear on those pages he had to write for a verily casualer fan – and my initial dismay at returning to rehash so easily an idea I explored a decade ago now changes in realtime to a consideration this idea, failure being more passive than active, is better when revisited, else why keep revisiting it?

Boxing keeps posing this question, after all.

(Feet got a bit tangled there.)

Apropos of HBO Sports’ demise, a month ago I wrote a harsh sentence-fragment eulogy for eulogizing, “To hell with all that”, and the words weren’t uninspired; both parents passed in 2018, and their passings afforded me chances to see how voluntary grieving might be, and in some circumstances, I discovered, it can be altogether voluntary, which asks assorted additional questions about both the deceased and their survivors.

Pause.

American Bank Center felt emptier in December than February, much quieter, which spoke in a declarative sentence about the trendline of Zurdo Ramirez’s drawing power, and since nobody’s ever read such a graph better than Bob Arum, one imagined Southpaw Ramirez will get put in hard in 2019: Who better to welcome Gennady Golovkin to the super middleweight division on ESPN?

If boxing is no more hopeful at the beginning of this year than usual it is more ubiquitous, which means something in the future even if it means precious little in the present – there are more American kids, potential NFL running backs and NBA point guards and Major League center fielders, now being exposed to our beloved sport, and at least a few may make their ways in local gyms and replenish our ecosystem – and we’re never more than a great American heavyweight away from being kings again.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

2017’s end-of-year romp, a mosaicked effort about Chocolatito’s abrupt plunge from boxing’s apex, brought an examination of conscience that lauded what salutary effects result from travel to cover our beloved sport, a quiet promise, it now seems in retrospect, to travel much oftener for boxing in 2018, a promise quite exactly broken by its maker with two exceptions, exceptional trips to Corpus Christi – home of Selena – I now hope to explore like a cumbia: left foot and right foot neutral, right foot back, left foot neutral, right foot neutral, pause, left foot back, left foot neutral, and again.

I planned to travel thricely, at least, to locales farflung to cover boxing in the new year when I wrote about traveling to Santa Monica Pier but then life happened, and deaths, too, and the calendar never quite shaped up – the interestingest events being in Eurasia or saturated or not enticing enough in some other way.

Somewhere buried in quips about the size of Top Rank’s platform on ESPN+ for Mexican Gilberto “Zurdo” Ramirez and the champ’s awkward threats to other super middleweights and awkwarder threats to ascend to light heavyweight resides a conceit like: Zurdo might outwork WBC’s David Benavidez, a formerly pudgy kid PBC now fights but annually, but he can’t beat WBA’s Callum Smith, so let’s swerve tourneys like that.

I can’t pretend to enjoy the drive into Corpus or imagine anyone else does, but I still believe there’s no place like ringside, no place so honest, to remind you why you excavate these 900 or so words every Sunday, and I like Shell’s in Port Aransas, too, a 40-minute drive, offseason, and a short ferry ride away.

Pause.

The first week of February found Zurdo in American Bank Center to defend his WBO fraction of the championship against Habib Ahmed, an undefeated Ghanaian making his first boxing trip outside Ghana, while the world’s best 168 pounder, Callum Smith, readied for his WBSS semifinal a few weeks later in a tournament from which Zurdo was noticeably absent.

Now the WBSS schedule sits colorful empty after months of reports about missing bonuses and disintegrating investment, and the WBSS is such a good thing and DAZN such a proper platform, one hopes its organizers dust themselves off, draw a black line through any stateside venues and bring to fruition season 2 in Scotland and Japan and Russia and Poland, places where a proper gate helps purses get paid.

San Antonio doesn’t host big events these days, which is unjust, well as Canelo’s tilt in Alamodome went some years back, and the main reason cited is a dearth of local ticketsellers, which is unjust, well as Canelo’s tilt in Alamodome went some years back, but there’s also a certain relief that comes with such an absence: I can skip hours upon wasted hours of fightweek festivities, empty if hyperbolic tributes to sponsors, and get right to the broadcast itself, which is better earlier and much better with a twoperson booth or fewer.

I sat beside Don Smith in February at ringside – he was visiting Corpus from Phoenix to cover Jose Benavidez’s comeback – and he epitomized the essential eccentricity of the boxing writers you meet as a boxing writer, the guys who publish offline newsletters and set clippings from their bestknown works beside themselves on pressrow, guys fond of conspiracy but fonder of fighters, and a few months later matchmaker Bruce Trampler tweeted about Don Smith’s demise, killed by a motorist at a bus stop, and as I write this I believe more deeply than before Top Rank’s facility with and affinity for journalists separates it from other promoters; it’s the part of the job (along with don’t steal from your employer) Golden Boy Promotions’ Richard Schaefer just never got; it’s the part of the job PBC’s founder founded PBC on avoiding.

Boxing shows itself today nothing so much as adaptable, gliding forward from HBO Sport’s collapse, an event unthinkable to aficionados even five years ago, with barely a blink of acknowledgement, and that gliding happens even as 2019’s calendar looks weak so far.

I don’t find nearly so much discovery in boxing writing these days as I did, say, 10 or 12 years ago, and I don’t seek it, either, like I did that many years ago, and when I wonder why it returns me to a question Lee Samuels asked a few weeks ago at American Bank Center – “What sites do you read?” – and a realization I don’t visit boxing sites to read writers anymore but use my favorite writers on Twitter like portals to the sites that publish them, and if this is a good new bent, writers not publishers, I’m not sure it feels like one.

Pause.

Two undercard guys stood out February in Corpus, Jose Benavidez and Jesse Hart, and this too evinced the importance of matchmakers who know what they’re doing, matchmakers able to balance the oftcompeting priorities of entertaining in the moment while building another moment a halfyear away, so in October it wasn’t a surprise Benavidez got worn to torn by Bud Crawford and a couple months later Hart, so relentless in February, looked nigh relentful against Ramirez.

When dilettantes pontificate about boxing’s failures, assuring the miasma boxing will die or already did, they underestimate the simple inertia of a sport with a century or two of aficionados’ influencing other aficionados, they forget boxing moved on from irreplaceable men like Muhammad Ali to utterly replaceable men like Floyd Mayweather and just kept selling.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday in Brooklyn on Fox, in the debut of a new business model by which the PBC receives money for presenting its fighters on public airwaves instead of paying to do so, Houston super welterweight Jermell Charlo got decisioned by Detroit’s Tony Harrison, controversially, and Houston middleweight Jermall Charlo decisioned Russia’s Matt Korobov, uncontroversially. Another uncontroversial point: Neither Charlo exceeded expectations.

Either the Brothers Charlo are the future of prizefighting or they’re a couple more in an eyeless promotional group’s attempt to manufacture by dint of hardwork and stubbornness future pay-per-view stars, b-less a-sides, in strict adherence to a moribund business model that made a very few folks very rich some years ago. Saturday neither solved that riddle nor brought the riddle any nearer its conclusion, featuring, as it did, a public-airwaves broadcast sans knockouts. For he is an elusive consumer indeed who’ll say in 2020: “Let me pay $80 to see the two brothers I saw on that Fox show at the end of 2018.”

One can fixate on scorecards, like we’re told to do after every single title match that ends with a final bell, or one can concede he’d not be fixating on scorecards were the favored fighters good as commentators promised him they’d be. Or just as possibly these are the musings of a pundit who missed the narrow Charlo window by virtue of poor timing.

If a search of Google Drive be trustworthy I began covering the Brothers Charlo from ringside about 10 years ago. Jermell Charlo decisioned a lad named Juan Serrano in Houston’s Toyota Center some hours before Juan Manuel Marquez memorably hooked, lined and sank Juan Diaz. Charlo’s record was 6-0 (3 KOs) and his opponent’s was 2-5-1 (2 KOs), and yet the fight was an entertaining one because Charlo’s opponent, despite having no power of his own, walked directly through Charlo’s punches. Four months later I began a report of Charlo’s match with Federico Flores in Tucson like so: “Light hitting or otherwise, Jermell Charlo’s got class.”

In 2012, on the undercard of Garcia-Morales 1, Jermall Charlo (9-0, 5 KOs) made that Saturday’s second match in an empty Houston arena against Sean Wilson (5-9, 1 KO) and did not fell him but did stop him. A year later, I covered Jermall in the gymnasium of a small San Antonio college, on a Golden Boy copromotion card, and while a better journalist would take the time to divine whom Charlo fought that evening it’s more fun to share this: When the match was near enough to publish a bout sheet that bout sheet read Charlo (11-0, 7 KOs) vs. T.B.A.

For some stark contrast, there’s this: Vasyl Lomachenko just made his 12th prizefight, in May, and won a world title in his third weight division.

I covered the Brothers Charlo a halfdozen times from ringside and came away from the experiences unable to discern which was who and struck by how little stopping power either’s fists comprised. Sometime after that PBC launched as a venture and I used its indifference to unbought media like an excuse not to perform what acts of diligence previously got me to watch the Charlos.

Imagine my surprise, then, when writers whose opinions I respect began writing unironical accounts of Houston’s lion twins’ savage dismantling of fellow prospects. Was it enhanced matchmaking, or an enhanced training regimen? Yes, it was/were.

But now I do wonder about any newly aspiring aficionados who came upon the Brothers Charlo for a first time Saturday night. No matter how little expertise an American male actually enjoys about our beloved sport, very few American males are more than a nationally broadcasted knockout or controversial decision away from amplifying loudly and confidently whatever they heard they saw. They’ve seen Tyson highlights enough on YouTube to know what’s important and trust their guts in all matters of sanctioned violence. While they may infer a faint affiliation between a promoter and the network for whom that promoter acts as an exclusive supplier of prizefighting talent they trust that network’s commentating team much more than the scorekeepers who turn in official tallies – in a wonderfully American way that confers more legitimacy on any authority whose bribe is right out in the open:

“The judges are on the take.”

“So are the commentators who make you think that.”

“Yeah, but they’re getting paid to give their opinions.”

Which is why Jermell’s getting decisioned by Tony Harrison brought so much more outrage from Fox viewers than Jermall’s 11-rounds-to-1 favoring on an official scorecard published by the son of Fox’s unofficial scorekeeper. The first event was unforgivably offscript while the second aligned neatly with what viewers got promised they’d see.

The bent of most boxing viewers is such that if you don’t give them a violent catharsis they’ll tend to make one, with judges and referees topping their lists of wouldbe victims. If they say they’re leaving because of corrupt officiating they’re not leaving. If they actually do leave trust it’s this: There wasn’t enough violence. That is a problem for any boxing broadcaster but particularly a problem for those who align themselves exclusively with PBC, as PBC does not specialize in violence but rather promise and potential and charisma and skills. For more than a decade the Brothers Charlo have shown lots of all four, and so?

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas – A mile south of American Bank Center stands the Selena Memorial, known as Mirador de la Flor. It overlooks a small harbor that abuts Corpus Christi Bay, which floats to Mustang Island, a crescent sliver of land separating this city from the Gulf of Mexico. Far as coastal cities go, this is an ugly one, truly, but Selena, as both an ideal and a memory, is beautiful, and it feels good when I tell folks I’m heading southwards that they ask about visiting Selena, now, rather than an aircraft carrier.

I’m here because of a fightcard at American Bank Center, of course, one that wasn’t good as its February predecessor, here, though probably better than its Saturday successor in New York, an interminable DAZN insomnia cure with Canelo Alvarez’s tri-spiking of hapless Rocky Fielding’s liver like its Sundaymorning alarm. Fielding was what we knew he was, and Canelo did exactly what a dominant force should do a submissive one. Aside from what matchmaking gripes all sounded months ago the only fair complaint about Canelo’s debut on a new network was the ungodly hour it finally happened.

Does that suffice for a topical summary? It does.

“El Zurdo” Gilberto Ramirez, a Mexican super middleweight titlist who neither participated in WBSS’ first season nor seems slightly interested in matching himself with those who did, gained a lukewarm vengeance on the halfdozen or so aficionados who told people they thought Jesse Hart won his first match with Zurdo 15 months ago, by decisioning Hart narrowly Friday night. Ramirez is the better fighter, the harder puncher, even the handsomer man. He may ultimately have more grit, too, than Hart. But if Ramirez won acclaim from official judges in Friday’s rematch he surely won no new fans and lost some old ones.

Ramirez explained his poor form in rounds 8-11 by citing an elbow injury. Could be. Hart obviously sensed something and stopped hesitating to walkdown Ramirez after the seventh. But Hart did something else, too: He showed how limited Ramirez is. A rangy frontrunner who’s very good from his preferred distance Ramirez hadn’t an inkling what to do with a man inside said distance, even while that man was not punching or holding but mostly just leaning on him. Hart turned the boxing match to a shouldering chesting necking contest and Ramirez didn’t do nothing about it. He planted his feet and waited for the ropes to break or the ref to yell it.

Soon thereafter Ramirez said he wants to move to 175 pounds, where his lack of infighting should adhere itself to a lack of power and get him either decisioned or protected so unflinchingly by Top Rank’s matchmakers he might as well have been.

The more interesting story was Hart, who looked a feral beast against Thomas Awimbono 10 months ago. Still scowling when he approached press row after merely 88 seconds of uberviolent work in February, Hart demanded a rematch as his proper due and convinced those of us who were listening. How much more fragile Hart looked in the opening half of that rematch, though! Talking to himself through an open mouth as he absorbed bodyshots and retreated from Ramirez’s feints Hart appeared like no one so much as a fighter ready to reveal, postfight, a trainingcamp injury or case of foodpoisoning (preceded necessarily by the “I don’t make excuses” tagline).

It led me to a ringside thought like: I have no idea what this man is thinking. Not in the sarcastic sense of “what were you thinking?” but in the much larger sense of an unknowable inventory of factors in Hart’s life that brought him to that moment, as a lubricated female voice a few rows back besought him to do what only she believed he could do, over and over and over, and over, and his corner urged him on, and the rest of the arena cheered heartily against him. Probability says I shouldn’t have had any better idea what Zurdo was thinking – regionally at least, I’m from a part of the world much nearer Hart’s Philadelphia than Ramirez’s Mazatlan – but Hart felt so deeply unknowable it was a thought and word into which I burrowed as Hart went dispiritedly backwards.

This isn’t a pledge to understand a fighter like Jesse Hart better in the future but a confession I probably never knew a thing about a fighter like Jesse Hart and a soft promise not to act like I do.

Which gets me thinking about the art of matchmaking and those who do it better than others. Top Rank does just about everything better than every other promoter, save perhaps signing prospects, but its complexion has changed noticeably these last few years. There are the legends on its staff, another of whom deservedly goes in Canastota next June, and they occupy the same ringside seats as ever they did. But tucked in the left corner of pressrow now sits a braintrust of laptops and tablets and smartphones, and what youngsters understand their mechanics and reach, that represents Top Rank today, a company endangered by economics two years ago and now a lesson in adaptability. Such adaptation has bestowed on Top Rank’s legends a sheen of fated contentment, pleasant to observe as once it was unlikely.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas – Their first match in 2017 was close and controversial. Their rematch was closer but less controversial.

Friday at American Bank Center in an entertaining scrap for the WBO super middleweight title televised by ESPN+, Mexican heartthrob “El Zurdo” Gilberto Ramirez (39-0, 25 KOs) remained undefeated by narrowly decisioning North Philly boxer-puncher Jesse “Hollywood” Hart (25-2, 21 KOs) by majority scores of 114-114, 115-113 and 115-113.

The 15rounds.com ringside card also sided with Ramirez, 116-114, scoring rounds 3 and 10 even.

“I hurt my left elbow in round eight,” said Ramirez afterwards in his native Spanish. “It wasn’t worth dick then.”

After a tentative first round, where neither guy wanted to lead but both wanted to counter hardy, Hart began to absorb left uppercuts from Ramirez in the second. By the fourth Ramirez began to piece Hart up, making Hart relent in a mouth-agape retreat, forcing Hart to exert and punch back harder than planned, which made round 5 the best of the match’s opening half.

Both men presented their chins for uppercuts, and both made tasted and served them, but Ramirez, of the two men, committed far more to bodypunching. Ramirez, too, feinted Hart out of position often, making one wonder about Hart’s confidence or conditioning.

“If I hadn’t hurt my elbow, I would have knocked him out,” said Ramirez of his advantage in the fight’s first half.

With Ramirez no longer fit and right in round 8, though, Hart’s improved physicality changed everything. Hart’s leaning on Ramirez revealed El Zurdo to be an immobile and often lazy infighter of limited leverage and creativity in the ninth.

“I pressured him, I boxed him,” said Hart after the match. “I really don’t know.”

For reasons that were unclear, after his two best rounds of the fight, in round 10 Hart returned to Ramirez’s preferred range and lost some advantage before returning to a more favorable, smothering attack in the 11th.

Round 12 was both excellent and brutal, with Ramirez doing what a champion must, seizing the initiative from Hart and retaining his belt despite a final-minute rally by the Philadelphian. If the decision was close, it was also popular, as Friday’s small crowd was passionate and partisan-Mexican.

ARNOLD BARBOZA VS. MANUEL LOPEZ

Friday’s comain featured a good boxer, California super lightweight Arnold Barboza (20-0, 7 KOs), against a decent one, Coloradoan Manuel Lopez (14-3-1, 7 KOs). The better boxer won, by three scores of 100-90, in a fight that served as a proper – by not being overly compelling – appetizer for the main event to follow.

Barboza is very good but also lightfisted. He leverages his punches correctly, and they sound robust when they land, but as evidenced by his knockout ratio, his opponents suffer surprisingly little damage. Ringside and cheering Barboza on, with near-constant suggestions, was the former master of 140 pounds, Terence Crawford.

The delta between Crawford and Barboza is exactly the delta between Barboza and Lopez.

JOSHUA GREER VS. DANIEL LOZANO

Chicagoan Joshua Greer (19-1-1, 11 KOs) looks the part and punches the part, when he connects, which he did often Friday night, and had to, too, in order to chop down stonechinned Floridian Daniel Lozano (10-6, 3 KOs) and secure a WBC Continental Americas title. Wearing a frilly red-and-white outfit with tennis-ball-green boots, Greer used his speed to discourage Lozano early and often.

In the last minute of round 7 Greer then used power he’d not shown in the preceding stanzas, dropping a four- or five-punch combination (fast as it was, could’ve been either number) that finished with a crisp righthand that put Lozano on the seat of his trunks. Lozano beat the count comfortably and made it to round’s end.

But with their man prohibitively far behind on the scorecards, Lozano’s handlers did the compassionate thing, stopping their man from answering one more bell.

UNDERCARD

The evening’s final nontitle match featured California lightweight Gabriel Flores Jr. battering about the ring Maryland designated opponent Edward Kakembo in a contest that comprised but one doubt: Will Flores stretch Kakembo or not? Not won, and so did Flores: 60-52, 60-52, 60-52.

Mexican super bantamweight Jesus “Veneno” Arechiga (7-0, 6 KOs) began Friday’s match having stopped every opponent inside the distance and in round 1 looked primed to waste Mexican David “Choko” Martino (6-6, 4 KOs) quickly, but in a scheduled execution the condemned survived with some grit and some wiles and some decent punching, and the muscular Arechiga’s faded power, too, Martino made it to the final bell of a fight Arechiga nevertheless won easily by three scores of 40-36.

Friday’s first title match, a super featherweight scrap between Los Angeles’ Mikaela Mayer (9-0, 4 KOs) and Colombian Calixta Salgado (17-11-3, 12 KOs) for the NABF title, finished with a wide decision victory for Mayer, 80-72 three times. The rangey Mayer proved herself superior in every category, from physicality to body punching to footwork, putting a comprehensive eight-round beating on her outmatched if rugged opponent.

In the undercard’s third match BoMac-trained New York lightweight Jamel “Semper Fi” Herring (19-2, 10 KOs), a lighthitting southpaw, decisioned Brazil’s Adeilson Dos Santos (19-6, 15 KOs) by three scores of 80-70, after successfully wearing-down Dos Santos late with left uppercuts.

Before that Mexican bantamweight Ruben Vega (11-0-1, 5 KOs) drew over six rounds with Dallas’ Oscar Mojica (11-5-1, 1 KO).

Friday’s first match saw Panamanian welterweight Roberto Duran Jr. (2-0, 2 KOs) use manos-jovenes-de-piedra to make instant work of Brownsville target Leonardo Pena (0-3), finishing the local fighter in under a minute.

Opening bell rang on a cavernous American Bank Center at 5:17 PM local time.

By Bart Barry-

More historic happenings, Saturday, more unforgettable things you’ve already forgotten, more unbelievable events you believe completely. At New York’s Hulu Theater Ukrainian lightweight Vasiliy Lomachenko unified titles by decisioning Puerto Rico’s Jose Pedraza after Mexican super bantamweight Emanuel Navarrete beat up charismatic Ghanaian Isaac Dogboe and took his title. All the while a oncegreat broadcaster bid itself a weteyed goodbye in a very private ceremony.

It was a night of good prizefighting that acted, in collaboration with the calendar, a fine contrast with a night of great prizefighting six years past. With Dogboe’s selfbelief and Lomachenko’s craft came a reminder of a man, Juan Manuel Marquez, who epitomized both qualities and emerged from a much hotter crucible more heroic than both men, in 2012.

“Ohhhhhh!” went Roy Jones’ call on that HBO pay-per-view broadcast – writing of contrasts.

And let us use this as a proper contrast. When a broadcaster has the time and wherewithal to roll out of his prescripted, canned and shelved tagline during a knockout, trust little what hyperbole follows. “All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling,” quipped Oscar Wilde, and so it be with ageful boxing commentary; the commentator’s desire to make the soundtrack of something historic is sincere as can be but what often comes out are sounds of unseemly striving. Moments are not memorable because someone tells you they’ll be memorable, and no matter how hard he tells you how unforgettable this moment is won’t make it so either. Moments are memorable when they make you fully present, which is impossible while someone fills your ears with his loud forecast about the unknowable future.

In its dotage HBO fell prey to this much as any broadcaster, fell prey to what straining happens when the importance of the platform and its presenters surpasses the importance of what events they present. The amplification, the absurd analogies, the vending. Now that it ends whimpering we get told what a loss we suffer, but that’s neither appropriate nor accurate either. Inappropriate because the departed don’t get a vote in the matter. Inaccurate because boxing has recrudesced during (if not because of) HBO’s demise. The montages and incessant lookingsback to come will play on our vanity, telling us it’s only narcissism if our lives aren’t fully historic happenings, which of course they are, else we’d not have been chosen to witness such historic happenings – and so on in a loop of lugging, effortful prepositional phrases mostly intended to prime us to consume the next historic product.

Salesmen in one aisle, amplifiers the other. One side shepherding and bullying for consensus, the other side adding eight exclamation marks for every witticism.

We return briefly to RJJ’s Marquez-Pacquiao 4 call. The moment was perfect because it was unscripted and Jones’ reaction to it pure. No context needed. Marquez, bloodied and buzzed, planted and threw, consequences be damned. What followed for Marquez was perfect a moment of vindication as sport can afford a man. Hours later on the way out MGM Grand’s main entrance the promotional ring had a guard dissuading Mexicans from climbing on the apron and posing for pics on their faces, hands tucked behind them, Pacquiao style.

Saturday had none of this. It had a charismatic titlist in the comain gutting out an ugly loss and a prodigy – we’re now told ceaselessly – looking less than prodigious in victory. Pedraza proved of Lomachenko what Marquez proved of Pacquiao: They don’t like fighting in mirrors. They are best when their opponents try to react conventionally to their unorthodox attacks, and they are much less when their opponents move symmetrically away from them. If Pedraza is obviously not Marquez he proved Lomachenko is not so much Pacquiao as a standardbearer for our collective desire to find another Pacquiao.

The best part of Saturday’s broadcast came when Tim Bradley asked his cocommentator a direct question about his opinion of Lomachenko’s performance. With that Bradley yanked the broadcast out of the thirdperson past – where experts have said and noted authorities have shared and highly regarded trainers have assured and pundits have never before seen – into the firstperson present. Hey, pal, tell me what you think right this moment.

Firstperson present, like RJJ yelling ohhhhhh. Nobody yelled ohhhhh Saturday. Dogboe barked NeHo a few too many times. We saw very good prizefighters wellmatched. We got told we’d see footwork that was sublime and teaching that was genius. But nobody yelled ohhhhhh at home or in the theater because nothing in the main or comain merited it.

While that happened, the former heart and soul of boxing paid a final tribute to itself in a stadium populated and passionate as a television studio.

If we let the matter be, if we let our sport enjoy its new stature and riches, we will surprise ourselves with how quickly we forget HBO Boxing, with how unstoppably our beloved sport marches on. If there’s an argument it’s ungracious to interrupt a eulogy this way, there’s a counterargument against eulogies in general. We burden ourselves with others’ pasts that we may soon burden others with our pasts. To hell with all that.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday in Los Angeles two heavyweights battled for a significant part of the world championship and surpassed expectations en route to a split-decision draw likely won by Brit Tyson Fury, “The Gypsy King”, over American Deontay “The Bronze Bomber” Wilder. Fury jittered and juked and cuffed and holstered Wilder for all but 25 or 30 seconds of their match, but those seconds were important ones, so important th’t had Fury not landed on his shoulder before his head in round 12 he’d not have afforded sundry pundits a chance to do their misanthropic best while appraising the scorekeepers’ produce.

Boxing won Saturday in the same sense its combatants emerged victorious from their scrum: Both guys to the occasion rose and proved much better than earlier versions of themselves. But these are not great fighters, and while their match was far better than it might have been, to put Fury-Wilder on any fight-of-the-year lists is to consign heavyweights to the soft sizeism of low expectations. Expectations honestly arrived at, albeit.

In his second career championship prizefight Fury was indeed much better than in his first, and if Wilder did not quite finish Fury he at least felled him twice with punches you might in good conscience teach a youngster to throw. As promised the match was often insipid but never unsuspenseful. Both men, too, did their best; they presented great versions of themselves to one another and took honest shots. Neither man awoke Sunday with regrets.

In their ways Tyson and Deontay are evenly matched talents. Were fights still to go till one man got disabled from toeing the line Wilder would win every time, much as Fury’d do were championship prizefights reduced from 12 rounds to 10. Pursuing the feat continually Wilder should expect to knock Fury to the bluemat once every 27 minutes, on average, for the next five years, and Fury should expect to enjoy striking Wilder 60 times flush before his each horizontaling. Conditioning and what pronouncedly variable rates of dissipation affect conditioning being held equal, of course, which it’s safe to imagine they’ll not be; if Wilder looked partially chastened at the closing bell Fury looked elated, vindicated, ready to spend another extended sabbatical traveling and writing.

Whatever the eternally lamenting masses opine of the decision, fact remains in a fight with Tyson Fury, Wilder could win decisively by landing only two punches in any second less than 36 minutes and win controversially by landing just 10 punches in a match settled by official judging. Life is unfair all over but particularly so in prizefighting and magnificently so in heavyweight prizefighting.

If there’s no desire here to play scorekeeper-apologist there’s some desire, indeed, to impart a thought that came along about the time Saturday’s decision did: In a round, such as the first, when combatants land an aggregate of six punches in 180 seconds, a punch every half-minute of threatening the feat, a judge’s position on the mat actually might affect his card honestly. Were you judging three minutes of mutual belligerence you might intuit from what glimpses you caught a general sense of what happened even while being blocked by either of the combatants or the referee or even a camera flash in the background for a few of the decisive moments. But tasked with catching the one punch either man might land every halfminute you might could fail at the sight of a ref’s back obstructing your eyes or the hulking surface area of one of the two giants blocking fully your view of his opponent’s purchasing fist.

Were we more interested in truth than decisiveness we’d petition sanctioners round the world encourage their scorekeepers to mark 10-10 frequently as they mark 10-9, to say, effectively, “I don’t know who won that round so it was even.” What boxing judges I’ve known are decent, average folks empowered disproportionately for a few hours every year. The obviously corrupt ones are not local but imported from jurisdictions renowned for their corruption. If such a person wished to rig his card and withstand subsequent commission scrutiny he might give every early round to his designated man, and in the absence of clean punching cite subjective factors like ring generalship.

Two-point rounds, in this scheme, bring unwanted attention; if gentlemen can agree to disagree about 115-113 tallies, either way, 115-111, to pull an example out of thin air, makes sparkly what probably wishes be occult. (Fortunately for one Las Vegas judge who attempted a similar sort of legerdemain for Pacquiao-Marquez 3, scoring rounds 8-12 geometrically opposite what happened, Pacquiao did not fell Marquez in round 12, for that would’ve made an evidently excusable 116-112 card into an investigatable 117-110.)

But haven’t you written an aficionado should prize knockouts so highly he caren’t a whit who wins a decision, no matter its corruption? Indeed, and that mostly holds, with the conceivable exception of a stylist so negative he mustn’t stutterstep even once along a tightrope spanning 2,160 seconds – for him alone one might justifiably endure the suspense of official scorecards’ unveiling. There’s irony, yes, such a tightroper find himself bequeathed a frame so absurdly imposing as Fury’s. If there’s something aesthetically dissonant about any 200-pound man in flight Fury’s beating a nimble retreat at 6-foot-9 and 257 pounds is ridiculous to the point of beautiful.

In the general range of consciousness prizefighters and aficionados roam nothing worse might be said of a man than others laugh at him. A few bands higher, though, comes this possibility: Causing the world to greet you always with a chuckle and shake of the head, as Tyson Fury does, is a trait wonderful as it is uncommon. Long live the Gypsy King!

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday in Los Angeles undefeated 6-foot-9 Brit Tyson “The Gypsy King” Fury will toe the line with undefeated 6-foot-7 American Deontay “The Bronze Bomber” Wilder in 2018’s most-interesting heavyweight title match. Wilder is a professional athlete who fights like he’s insane. Fury is an insane man who boxes conventionally. Either the affair will be insipid-cum-suspenseful, with Wilder pansearing Fury after nine or 10 eventless rounds, or it will be suspensefully insipid, ending without Wilder landing but one of 1,000 threatened punches.

Embrace the madness – that’s the only sage council for this week. Nobody has any idea what will happen. We’ll all opine freely in a sporadic if predictable game of casual-capture, as none brings the casuals coming like heavyweight prizefights, and those of us who are wrong will disappear from the prediction game till January and those of us who are right will crow toldyousos, keeping and publishing an embellished tally of our past predictions, till everyone is bored(er) of us.

The wisest among us forego the prediction game altogether, the wiser among us forego the prediction game unless we believe fully in an underdog, the gormless among us predict the favorite will win then hogstomp about fightnight reminding those who disagreed what fortunetellers we be. It’s most fun to have no idea what will happen and nearly as much fun to cheer the longshot and anxiously funless to pick the favorite, in the name of being right, and see the underdog transcend himself.

If you’re reading this you’re serious enough about our beloved sport to know following it for any reason but fun is a fool’s errand. You’re also, one hopes, introspective enough to look deep inside your reasoning about Saturday’s match and conclude how much fun it will be, how wickedly suspenseful, when the opening bell rings and you get to cheer for one loon or the other without much idea what comes next.

There’s a good chance not a damn thing, actually, comes next. For 36 minutes, that is, absolutely nothing might happen. Fury is a good boxer but not much of a fightnight entertainer; Wilder is an entertainer but not much of a boxer. From time to time fortune commands such a combination entertain us mightily but most of the time it does the other thing.

If every experience in a lifetime is equal parts impossible and inevitable till it happens, this fight shall make it manifest in real time. If Wilder clocks and clears Fury it will’ve been inevitable an undefeated Olympic bronze medalist should wallop to snot a dilettante exchampion struggling with every known form of autosabotage. When Fury throws a nohitter Wilder’s way it will’ve been impossible a barely tested freestyle puncher might land on a man who slaptaunted Wlad Klitschko 12 rounds deep.

Pressed to choose an outcome, I’d lean impossible, but the good thing is I’m not pressed at all, and the better thing is I’m choosing anyway because it’s fun to watch with a rooting interest and it’s fun to be wrong, too. Were Wilder a product of any but the PBC I’d consider this match a farce, probably, thinking any pay-per-viewer be courting the swindling, Gypsy King and all. But PBC’s approach to boxing has been: Sign everyone, match them with no one, and try to seduce broadcasters.

PBC acquired Wilder via its quadrennial Olympic signing spree then kept him miles from any honestly ranked contender till year 10 of his career. That’s no typo: Deontay Wilder began fighting professionally in 2008 and didn’t get tested till 2018. For a little context, Mike Tyson lost to Buster Douglas in the fifth year of Tyson’s career; Tyson had unified the heavyweight division, peaked and begun his descent five years shallower in his career than Wilder was when he escaped Luis Ortiz in March. For a little more context, Muhammad Ali had won the heavyweight championship of the world from Sonny Liston, defended it nine times, endured a three-year exile, returned to the ring, fought a couple tuneups and lost a decision to Joe Frazier before he was 11 years in prizefighting. There’s no need to pretend times’ve changed is the reason for Wilder’s dossier, either; Anthony Joshua, world’s other heavyweight champion, has accomplished more than Wilder, in five years.

No, by any precedent, historic or otherwise, Wilder is a matchmaking miracle – it’s miraculous in what was often considered a dying sport so many willing victims were excavated from the heavyweight mines. Yet here Wilder is, unencumbered by his resume and earnestly wondering why so many Americans haven’t an idea who he is. Well.

There’s a certain horsesense among even casual fans that values competition more than hyperbole-followed-by-showcase-followed-by-hyperbole. It’s why market forces have shown HBO Sports’ signature-destination philosophy to a signature destination; ain’t nothing compelling about broadcasting LeBron dunking on highschool teams whilst panelists extrapolate how he might’ve fared against Wilt.

Wilder is Saturday’s wildcard. Loopy as Fury’s last few years have gone, variable as his psyche may be, he’s still more of a constant when the bell rings. He’s odd and weird and does everything on an offbeat but he throws the 1-3-2 like a man taught how. Wilder primarily crawlstrokes crazy at shorter men, bodies them backwards incidentally, then hammerstrikes their bowed heads. He inventively uses others’ disbelief against them.

The question, then, is: Can Wilder get Fury to hold in his mind any belief long enough to turn it disbeliefwards?

Each man has the best chance of besting the other man by being himself. Wilder would be a fool to try boxing Fury, and Fury would be a greater fool if he tried to slug Wilder. In the decisive moment that should come in the final four rounds Saturday, when Fury’s lack of conditioning greets Wilder’s abundance of it and Wilder mashes Fury’s head with something dastardly, both men will go hotblooded mindless and their basest combative tendencies will prevail. Wilder will appear a man committed to murder and Fury his resigned victim, and if the referee goes for it Wilder will attain a new stature, and if the ref doesn’t all three scorecards should go 119-110, Fury.

I’ll take Fury, UD-12.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Friday night in Oklahoma, Saturday morning east of there, undefeated Dallas junior welterweight Maurice Hooker successfully defended his WBO title by stopping Mexican-Oklahoman Alex Saucedo in the seventh round of a wonderfully violent contest on ESPN. If it’s tempting to write each man’s stature was improved by the contest it is also inaccurate. Hooker took the left side of Saucedo’s face, with righthands, then Saucedo’s fighting spirit in a masterful assault

He also collected a large purse, acquiesced to the event’s promoter, comporting himself nobly as the b-side, then beat the a-side’s ass. That’s a blueprint for how to thrive in this, our newly re-balkanized and suddenly wealthy sport. Hooker got $1.2 million to defend an obscure 140-pound title round midnight on a Friday, which is way more than he’d’ve made a couple years ago. His copromoters may not have had a cashout in mind when they let Top Rank win the purse bid, but they also may not have expected what happened either. Top Rank sure didn’t.

“Cost-of-doing-business,” one imagines Bob Arum and others to’ve said while creating Saturday’s contract; “we’ll pay-up for Saucedo’s title then control the division, whatever happens.”

Now DAZN’s Eddie Hearn, the solvent one among Hooker’s copromoters, has an admired titlist and a committed platform and a dumptruck of cash with which to build an enticing mate for whoever wins WBSS’ super lightweight tourney. Enviable.

Top Rank, meanwhile, has a chastened contender in Saucedo, a man who has reached his ceiling quite a bit lower than planned. Saucedo appeared like no one Friday night so much as his 17-year-old self, the offensively minded kid who tasted punches aplenty in El Paso’s Sun Bowl when for the first time in his four-prizefight career he happened on an opponent he couldn’t hurt quickly. Perhaps historians someday will regard Maurice Hooker as the best counterpuncher in a generation and Friday will become retroactively sensible – Alex had nothing to be ashamed of getting boiled and iced by an alltime great – but that is not probable. An explanation that ages better might be: Hooker exploited Saucedo’s evidently nonevident defense and hit him more than any chin might withstand.

Saucedo’s chin was Friday’s antagonist, as he took a remarkable number of blows from a man who knows how – a defensive style henceforth known as The Abel. Previously misnamed “Mexican Style” by a Kazakh, misnamed because Salvador Sanchez and Juan Manuel Marquez wouldn’t recognize it, The Abel is where you eliminate a fighter’s head movement, beseech him attack an opponent like a heavybag, and leave every defensive responsibility to his chin.

Each defensive style has its susceptibilities, of course. The Philly Shell, for instance, can be solved by a great jab; The Lock leaves a man open to uppercuts. The Abel is unique in that it relies not so much on what an opponent does but who an opponent is. The Abel requires sympathetic matchmaking to prevail. An example of a scenario wherein The Abel worked exquisitely well was putting a career welterweight in a match with a career middleweight (putting that same middleweight in with a career junior middleweight or middleweight, of course, was less advisable). The Abel is practiced in bars and prison yards round the world but named after its vocalest proponent, Abel Sanchez, a man who sits beside Andre Berto atop the HBO-made Boxing Personalities list.

Years ago, when the flaws in Alex Saucedo’s craft became apparent, a hunt began for a trainer who could cut, sand and lacquer them away. Saucedo was young enough to reform. If Sanchez isn’t exactly the wrong man for that job he’s a workable imitation of the man who was. Rather than fix Saucedo’s defective instrumentation Sanchez plugged Saucedo in, jiltknobbed the amp and told him to wail away.

What resulted was not so much offense-as-defense but offense-or-unconsciousness. Saucedo had no transition Friday; while Hooker was many things Saucedo was binary – either hitting or being hit. Hooker might’ve won 12-0 with his jab alone but couldn’t help himself, took chances, and properly deleted the official scorekeepers’ roles.

There was a moment in round 2, however, when it appeared injustice might be served and Saucedo’s binary commitment to offense might be rewarded another night. He dropped Hooker early with a partially missed cross, and you wondered if The Abel mightn’t be in for a title run at 140 pounds like its run at 160. As Hooker is a career junior welterweight, though, those hopes got canceled a minute later when Hooker thrashed Saucedo through the round’s final minute.

There was another moment, or actually 2 1/2 minutes of them, in round 6, when Hooker retreated to the ropes and let Saucedo punch him like a heavybag. As it happened it looked so intentional on Hooker’s part to make the cynical among us wonder how very much cash might’ve been in Hooker’s cashout package. Or maybe Saucedo’s attack was that devastate fatiguing? No and no. Rather, it turns out, Hooker was metering the dissipation of Saucedo’s power like the battery icon a couple inches northeast of where you read these words. Once Hooker sensed Saucedo’s punches were diminished to breakeven Hooker went for it, knowing he could land 10 flush for every one of Saucedo’s. He was right, too. Hooker beat down a hardpunching, granitechinned Mexican in his adopted hometown and stopped him seven rounds in, gloriously.

Saucedo will return; he’s young and fights charismatic enough to fill a Margarito-sized hole in Top Rank’s roster. But Hooker is the real story and a welcome addition to our beloved sport’s rapidly and radically changing ecosystem.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday in England undefeated Ukrainian southpaw Oleksandr Usyk defended his trove of cruiserweight world titles – Ring, WBA, IBF, WBC, WBO – from the challenge of England’s Tony Bellew, last seen doubleaxing heavyweight David Haye, by emphatic eighth-round knockout. In these United States the match happened before dark, aficionados’ hour, on DAZN, aficionados’ network, while American casual fightfans reliably watched college football.

What a wonderful secret is Usyk for the longsuffering American aficionado. He has fought but twice in our hemisphere, and once in Inglewood on the undercard of Bernard Hopkins’ unforgettable if entirely forgotten farewell to boxing (a lesson from the B-Hop archive: when a man tirelessly tells you you’ll miss him when he’s gone, you won’t). When last Usyk fought in our hemisphere it was 18 months ago and he won via lopsided decision on HBO, which is to write if anyone watched him and remembered him that person has since endured disappointments enough to’ve lost his memories of Usyk in the strogranoff of former Soviet fighters served by Comrade Pyotr during HBO Boxing’s pominki.

Since then Usyk has fought on afternoons, here in the States, on YouTube streams and apps; the nearest he’s come to slickly produced punchstats and pedantic commentators is when he stepped in the WBSS’ whitelight show before unmanning Murat Gassiev in July to hoist the bestlooking new trophy in sport.

It gets better. There’s nothing cool about Usyk in the way American influencers understand the term. He’s zany and awkward and devoutly religious. He’s more likely to kiss a felled challenger than taunt him. And since he doesn’t cherrypick opponents or fight on terms bent to prohibitive there’s no telling how good or bad he’ll look when the opening bell rings. Then there’s the way he fights. He’s none of countryman Lomachenko’s pizzazz, especially not to what untrained eyes have yet to try DAZN. He’s more obviously awkward than innovative, which means whenever the American laity eventually catches up with him they’ll unlikely sense the innovation of making every man across from him, even the most obdurately orthodox, awkward unto paralysis. Usyk is an acquired taste and American casuals haven’t the palate or patience to acquire tastes, accustomed as they are to forcefeedings.

Round 5:30 PM ET on Saturday Usyk began to study and pull apart Bellew in yet another packed English arena (it would be a surprise and mistake if semifinal rounds of WBSS Season 2 happened in many American venues, large and cultivated as the European fanbase is become, comparatively funereal and hollow as American venues now sound). Usyk did nothing outlandish to Bellew. He respected the Brit’s power from the open. He established the quirky beat ever playing between his temples and fought to it till Bellew made him stop. And Bellew did do that numerous times.

As it should be. Two judges in fact had Bellew ahead many rounds later, and whatever DAZN commentators said about it in English, the Spanish booth had Bellew ahead, too. If Usyk was winning on any honest card it wasn’t by much.

There’s not any way to argue Usyk won round 1. Perhaps Bellew didn’t either. That’s a 10-10 round, then, which is not a scorekeeping impossibility, by the way, no matter how anomalous. Usyk and Bellew fairly well split their first 12 minutes together, however that shook-out on the cards. By the midway point of the match the match was close enough not to care about the decision; if one man didn’t snatch the other’s consciousness he wouldn’t have a sympathetic ear among aficionados when his handlers whined about a robbery afterward, as they’re wont to do.

Usyk heard us thinking that, he did. He next invited Bellew to lefthand city, a place not quite inhospitable as Ray Mercer’s fabled righthand city, but a place in the vicinity nonetheless. On the way there Bellew realized he was fully spent.

That’s what will be lost on American casuals most frequently – the psychology of what Usyk does other cruiserweights. Because Usyk is not ferocious his physicality can be lost on careless eyes. Usyk’s combination of size and relentlessness, though, is unprecedented. Nobody his size moves continually for every minute of every round. There’s a tacit assumption harbored by any man who confronts a man big as Usyk: So long as I don’t get hit flush by this beast there’ll be respites aplenty. But there aren’t. Instead there’s a dancing madman with a belligerent jab that portends a lampswitch left. Standing armslength to that is exhausting for any 200-pounder the world over. It’s why Usyk’s attack evinces no urgency. So long as he’s on his rhythm and jabbing and you’ve ceded centermat, he’s swapping your energy for fatigue, and he knows it and you know it and now you know he knows it. And that is terrible depleting.

Bellew was so beaten so instantly Saturday th’t American casuals will mistake the finale for force, they’ll expect other men Usyk touches with his cross to backsplash like Tony, and when they don’t American casuals will accuse Usyk of deterioration and aficionados of exaggeration. So be it. Usyk doesn’t need the bigoted buffoons of the Mayweather faithful to surpass what expectations he’s set for himself, and if he immediately ascends to heavyweight and fights Anthony Joshua at Wembley Stadium it will be unwise but lucrative, and it will happen on a Saturday afternoon in the States, blessedly.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday brought yet another delightful multihour multiplatform celebration of a sport even weekly columnists feared might die four years ago (Pacquiao-Algieri, for bottomwatchers). The World Boxing Super Series delivered another pair of quarterfinal matches on DAZN, late afternoon, and ESPN+ presented an entertaining if not historic scrap from El Paso a few hours later. Our wonderful recrudescence continues Saturday with the return of Oleksandr Usyk on DAZN, in a match to ensure he is recognized as 2018’s best fighter.

Going last to first Mexican super featherweight Miguel Berchelt diswilled Mexican Miguel Roman in a Texas beating brutal as promised. Scottish super lightweight Josh Taylor denuded American Ryan Martin in Scotland. Nonito “Filipino Flash” Donaire benefited from an uncommon bit of bad luck when Northern Ireland’s Ryan Burnett lost his bantamweight title via searing backache.

One of the German philosophers, must’ve been Nietzsche, posited sympathy was the worst emotion because it required its possessor be unseemly superior to its object; a person may feel many emotions towards a person of circumstances superior to his own but sympathy be not one of them. One keeps such a teaching behind his lifelong thoughts after he reads it and especially as he watches prizefighting and especially especially as he watches prizefighting to write about prizefighting. Beatings, hundreds to thousands of them, he witnesses without perching himself highly enough to sympathize with the vanquished because, frankly, why should he? Even the loser of a prizefight has engaged in a display of public courage.

Still, Saturday brought a genuine and weird tingling of sympathy for Ryan Burnett. To see a fighter so dramatically reduced so rapidly through no decipherable fault of his own was unpleasant. So freakishly, too. One sees injured hands, eyes and noses enough to be immune their happenings. Where brittle hands are tragic they’re also to prizefighting what height is to a professional basketball player – sure, theoretically, you could make it to the NBA at 5-foot-9, but it is unlikely your destiny.

But to see a 26-year-old championship prizefighter slip a disk while throwing a cross?

Yet there was Burnett after 10 minutes of movement both mechanically correct and innovative suddenly near paralyzed across half his body. Donaire, having done nothing to cause the injury, had no choice but to exploit his opponent’s weakness unto unconsciousness if possible. Burnett didn’t allow that but neither was he allowed out his corner for round 5 and not too long – though excruciatingly – after that he was wheeled out the arena, unable to make the walk. One winces at thoughts of Burnett’s next week ambling about his house.

Weird and deep as went the pang of sympathy for Burnett, one suspects there was selfishness in the brew. The opening three rounds of Donaire-Burnett were fantastic compelling. Donaire was outclassed but giving an excellent account of himself, and Burnett was beginning to invent and transcend, hitting Donaire disrespectfully and unusually for a fighter his size.

Remember, the last time any aficionado saw Donaire at 118 pounds he was electrocuting Fernando Montiel and unilateraling Omar Narvaez; nobody at that weight who stood and swapped with Donaire did so without fear he’d be Darchinyan’d. Burnett did so fearlessly and creatively. Donaire’s seven years and 15 fights (11-4, 6 KOs) removed from his best bantamweight days, of course, but during lots of exchanges Saturday he was similar enough to prime Nonito – Victor Conte affiliate, future VADA posterboy – to make Burnett look awesome to trained eyes.

No one looked better in a mainevent Saturday than Burnett did those opening 10 minutes against Donaire. The creative way he used the lefthook to corral Donaire into a right uppercut, throwing the 3 as a wide lead, and the way he chalked Donaire with the cross. Then came the cross that felled Burnett, and if you didn’t immediately think “pre-existing condition” you’ve not spent sufficient time round boxers or Democrats. It’s the only sensible explanation that burst over the synapses: Burnett did some sort of campy crosstraining something, whether sledgehammering a tire or pulling a tractor, that made him unright a month out. But with massages, painkillers and pilates, hopes were high things’d hold up. And they did, too, enough for Burnett to move not-gingerly until the moment he was unable to move.

All that is merest speculation but more believable, anyway, than a fighter’s 10,000th thrown punch disconnecting his back from itself.

It was in the shadow of this climactic anticlimax Josh Taylor outclassed Ryan Martin. Readers are duly admonished to suspend judgement on Taylor, as he did nothing more than exactly what he was supposed to do Saturday and in unremarkable fashion. Oh, but his footwork is bewitching!

If that’s true it will manifest itself quickly enough in a tournament designed to reveal character. See, there’s no longer any need to be early on these things. There’s no longer a need to squint at the screen in the hopes of being the only one to see how special a fighter is before he’s proved it, lest he never have the chance to prove it. The WBSS proves it. If your guy is a great fighter he’ll win his season of the WBSS, and in so doing will justify for at least a halfyear your belief in him by being recognized as the world’s best in his weightclass.

Tournament boxing eliminates the matchmaking (cherrypicking) that brought so much misplaced anxiety and argument to Money May’s era and GGG’s middleweight reign. HBO’s gone now, too, so there’s no need to rehash the banal hypothetical hash that became the network’s lowly specialty once Larry Merchant left: Our middleweight champion just poleaxed a welterweight, which proves if he were to campaign at super middleweight he’d have no trouble dominating there, either.

That brings us to Saturday’s third mainevent and a commentary like: Blessed be Timothy Bradley among all ESPN mainevent commentators (Brian “Bomac” McIntyre is fantastic, too, but he does undercards) for realizing our beloved sport is moved on from HBO so there’s no reason to audition for Max Kellerman’s seat, there’s no need to interrupt insights about the present with cliched musings about fighters’ pasts, there’s no need to reargue and reheat and recycle whatever tiny detail your cohosts didn’t buy fully enough, there’s no need to unearth the human condition with every single punch.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday on DAZN, boxing’s now-essential network, the quarterfinals of the World Boxing Super Series super lightweight tournament happened in New Orleans. Belarusian Ivan “The Beast” Baranchyk (19-0, 12 KOs) walloped the sparkle out Sweden’s Anthony Yigit (21-1-1, 7 KOs) in the first mainevent. And in the second New Orleans’ Regis “Rougarou” Prograis (23-0, 19 KOs) decisioned unanimously England’s Terry Flanagan (33-2, 13 KOs). It was puncher-versus-survivor, both matches, and if that pitting didn’t make the best fights the WBSS has delivered thus far, they were still widely better than what American premium-cable swill they usurped.

Prograis doesn’t hit nearly hard enough for the posing he does. One suspects the origin of this posturing bent of his can be found in his record and generally soft stuff he’s built his resume with. He knows exactly how to throw the blastoff counter and admire its results but is less adept at following the counter with a few more punches. At no point in Saturday’s match was he better balanced and prepared for what came next than after he dropped Flanagan in round 8. He had the pose just right and the strut to the neutral corner down, too, much more than what finishing tactics one’d need to cut the lights of a former titlist.

Prograis has oodles of what the kids call swag – something like a young Yuriorkis Gamboa, without the Olympic gold medal to justify it. He is the fighting pride of transplanted New Orleans, a group generally longer on fight than pride. He’s also the number-one seed in a tournament bound to reveal whatever weaknesses he has, even if they don’t unravel him, and deserves a nod of approval for testing his fistic skills in single-elimination rather than some documentarian’s imagination in an episode of HBO’s defunct “2 Days” series.

Prograis will be 30 years-old round about the time of his semifinal match, which is to write he’s in the permanent period of his career, the time when any loudly publicized alterations to his fighting style will be cosmetic (he’s a lopsided-decision loss away from an Abel Sanchez Mexican-style makeover [though, while we’re on the subject, will any boxing figure’s profile go flaccider absent HBO stimulus than Abel’s?], where he’ll learn not to compromise his punches with head movement).

A prototypical U.K. prizefighter, full of heart and chin as he is bereft of power, Flanagan was an excellent opening exam for Prograis. Flanagan knew some tricks. While he did nothing to raise a referee’s suspicions he intended to elbow Prograis if given the chance, he sure brought his elbows back high and wide on the inside for a guy ostensibly defending himself from counters. He dipped low before clinches, too, the better to butt his assailant. Which is to write, he made Prograis earn victory the right way – by fighting.

Few are the men – no current practitioner save Naoya Inoue springs to mind – who have talent enough to win at the championship level and remain virgin pristine in tactic. Great fighters are dirty fighters, men who in their most challenged moments draw on experiential reserves of every trick employed against them by veteran fighters who often didn’t know and always didn’t care about the potential of the men across from them.

To wit, here’s an anecdote a young prospect recounted some years ago about sparring with Yori Boy Campas:

I knew he was going to hit me in the liver if he could. I’m bigger than him, so I don’t need to get too close to him. His arms don’t look that long. We’re two minutes in and he catches me there and nods. Just to tell me he could do it anytime he wanted. I was like, that’s pretty sneaky. He sees me get ready and throws the hook, really big. Except it doesn’t do anything because his glove is open and he’s hitting me on my elbow. But he’s not hitting my elbow. He’s, like, cupping it. Shoving it out of the way. And he’s still on his right side. Then right behind it come the knuckles. It was tap-slam.

You don’t pay the rent for long with hurting other men unless you’re a supernatural talent, which Campas wasn’t, or you master the patterns of your body and others’. Campas won his 107th professional fight in March, how easily we forget, and will never make any historian’s Top 50 list, true, but upon exiting the crucible of a boxing ring with him no man ever did not admire him, in large part because Campas knew, knows, every single way one man may hurt another with gloved fists. Flanagan is no Campas but surely taught Prograis some things Saturday, things Prograis will call upon unexpectedly someday if he’s humble enough to be wise, which he mightn’t be.

If Prograis challenges himself consistently for the next five years his defense is such he’ll find himself exactly where Flanagan was in round 8, eventually, and if Prograis was conscious of anything more than his own aesthetics after he dropped Flanagan, which he mightn’t’ve been, he’ll draw upon the experience of his own frustration in being unable to foreclose on a man like Flanagan who pays the mortgage but sporadically.

Another reason to evangelize for the World Boxing Super Series, and the concept of tournament boxing in general: There aren’t but a handful of gainfully employed matchmakers anymore worth a ha’penny – there are easily a dozen matchmakers worth quite a bit more than that, but the current marketplace has overvalued signature-destination storytelling, or whatever be the PBC’s equivalent, more than earnest competition – and so, select eight men in any division overlooked by American networks, and then let competition, talent and chance do the rest. Throw in a visionary broadcasting platform and some cool white lights and keep the tournament moving.

Whoever emerges with the Muhammad Ali Trophy (named after Muhammad Ali, we learned Saturday) is henceforth a signature-destination fighter for aficionados; if you’re less excited for Usyk-Bellew than you were for Jacobs-Derevyanchenko you’re a publicist, aspiring or actual, not an aficionado. Tournaments value competition over narrative (the 2009 narrative went: Andre Ward, a spoiled American gold medalist, will be stapled to the canvas by Mikkel Kessler in round 1 of the Super Six), achievement over character development.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Three broadcasts Saturday, and nothing that happened was quite great and some was very good but everything was at least good, and a block of five hours of good boxing, live sports programming not storytelling, represents an embarrassment of riches suddenly arrived for every aficionado nimble enough to cord-cut and app-embrace. In such case, we are, as the great man said, the aficionados we’ve been waiting for.

Things happened on two apps in three cities, and if a title or two unexpectedly changed owners it wasn’t the important part because the abundance of available boxing was, and there was at once so much of it and it was so good, one now suspects sabotage more than incompetence put our beloved sport in the dismal two-provider forest we just escaped, completely and enthusiastically.

How about a detour?

Not long after reading my 700th book – that looks like a lot but for a writer, truly, it isn’t – I realized, tardily one might say, the act of reading was doubtful to make me a better writer anymore, and based on my retention from the first 700 books, it, too, was doubtful to increase in any endurable way my knowledge of any new subject. If one imagines the average book length to be somewhere round 300 pages and one reliably reads a page every two minutes he spends about 10 hours with each book, and what does he consciously retain from the experience?

In the first year after reading the book about a paragraph’s worth of information – plot and character and style and other loose associations – and after five years perhaps two sentences and a decade later a sentence if lucky and prompted. Some books considerably more than that and most books a bit less. So I nearly stopped reading for a year. When I returned it was via a revelation of sorts: The only reason to keep reading was if I enjoyed it and the only way to enjoy it was to read books I enjoyed – every other consideration be damned. Unexpectedly, this brought me to reading more books generally and many many more books coincidentally.

Which is where in the hell this column is going in its pursuit of a new way to enjoy and enjoy covering and enjoy coverage of boxing: I now read between six and 12 books at once, and if I don’t try to blur them together I neither mind if they do. Someone famous or important once said or wrote something to the effect th’t were it financially feasible any true artist should choose anonymity. My new reading approach grants authors effectively that since I can’t hope to keep more than two or three voices straight at once when I’m making no effort to do so. I read till I have a thought that removes my eyes from the page, have that thought then pick up another book. I don’t have any order, and I don’t seem to get more than 10 pages deeper in one book before migrating to the next.

I impart this lengthily because if you’re reading this you enjoy reading and might try this approach and because, more to the point, it seems a proper fitness regimen for our new aficionado endeavor.

Perhaps this makes me look a quitter to the prigs amongst us; the day a person who’s given more than an average amount of his life to the sobriety and tranquility of the written word opts to ingest it like a teenager on Facegramsnaptwitter, the evilest faction of information technology has ruined us. Quite possibly. Though happily.

So went my Saturday of toggling between three fightcards on two apps. I went Roku (DAZN) to cell (DAZN) to Roku (ESPN+).

“Ain’t you got a laptop?” say my betters.

I do, but I realized I liked choosing more than absorbing a blitz; I didn’t want more than two playing at once and’ve developed an oddly enjoyable dependence on peripheral vision. What follows is by no means a factual report of what happened but an honest account of how I remember perceiving what happened:

Stephon Young is not in the WBSS, is he, better check, no, then what’s up with DAZN’s notification system, OK, over to the other DAZN to see the Tommy Coyle guy the Spanish-language broadcast from Boston likes, looks like he’s landing on the Pole, but whoa, that hook to the liver from Ryan Kielczweski just changed the fight entirely and the Spanish broadcasters missed it somehow, so let’s check ESPN+ to see if San Antonio’s Adam Lopez is on, he isn’t, but there’s the Irish kid with the middle finger from the Olympics, Michael Conlan, against some frightened Italian – now this belongs in Boston, south versus north, more than Las Vegas – and Conlan can’t cut Nicola Cipolletta’s escape which reveals Conlan is exactly basic as “Bomac” just gently implied; the leadin movies for WBSS look better than I expect Esquiva Falcao will so it’s over to DAZN in Florida where the turnout is poor but the fights won’t be because the Cuban with a name like Doritos can crack proper and the veteran Pole’ll have chin enough to make him, and after five rounds it’s true Yuniel Dorticos concusses more than Mateusz Masternak but after seven rounds it’s no longer true, and this fight is excellent and close just like Dorticos’ last fight, which makes me think the second mainevent, the one between the Aussie pingpong player and the Puerto Rican titlist, too, will be good and close, but there’s “The Monster” Inoue, and after five rounds of Rodriguez-Moloney I think Inoue could decision Rodriguez with the jab at the same time he flashfreezes Moloney with the cross so it’s time to give Top Rank’s next Asian ticketseller a second look, disappointing as he looked a year ago, and who’s this Rob Brant dude, does anyone else think he’s making Ryota Murata look like Murat Gassiev against Oleksandr Usyk, and bless Tim Bradley for choosing to score the fight before him, over and over, rather than scoring debate points on his cocommentator – Tim has found himself a new career, not a mere hobby – and bless the Vegas judges, too, for scoring the match, not its promoter’s best interests.

Three cheers for Rob Brant!

Power off.

After all that I thought of Top Rank and Todd duBoef’s Brand of Boxing concept, late Saturday, with its partial anonymization of fight-provider. A few times I was quite conscious I was watching Top Rank and a few more times I was quite willfully watching World Boxing Super Series, but most of the rest of the time I was watching boxing and enjoying watching boxing and feeling my 15 monthly dollars very well spent on ESPN+ and DAZN – whoever was doing the broadcasting.

For dropping HBO at the end of 2017 I’m still paying with the house’s money, anyway.

My loyalty to Showtime in 2019 is by no means assured.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

GUADALAJARA, Mexico – “How many services must one rent monthly to watch a championship prizefight?” went my thoughts Saturday from an apartment in nearby Zapopan, as ESPN+ and Roku and Sling, one after the other, collected my usernames and passwords then returned unhelpful errors about availability outside the United States. The next gambit, a virtual private network (VPN) that is another monthly service, brought only less helpful errors that implied: We don’t know where you are, pal, and that means you must be somewhere you shouldn’t be.

And so it went, miserably, until four monthly subscriptions took me limping to a compromise pathetic as it was welcome: A YouTube Live stream of a guy holding the camera of his phone at a 30-degree angle to a television, filling 2/3 of his screen with darkspace dark as deep space, while chatty fellow viewers warned him to keep the volume down lest ESPN dam his damned stream.

Without the tranquility of a reliable service and without an audio narration to help me know what I saw, frankly, Saturday’s match ended kind of suddenly, when welterweight titlist Terence Crawford beat to mushy Jose Benavidez Jr. on ESPN, a Disney property still beholden to ancient cable providers the way you and I are beholden to oxygen.

He notices there’s more talk of boxing on SportsCenter these days and imagines such talk representative of boxing’s ascendancy without quite getting his finger on the affiliate scheme that drives much of SportsCenter’s coverage of anything. There’s more boxing on ESPN now, too, which is further evidence of the sport’s ascendancy. ESPN, he assumes, in the few thoughts he bothers giving these sorts of things, has taken the sporting world’s pulse and predicted, accurately it turns out, boxing is rising in the American consciousness the same way soccer did a decade ago. He’s watched his share of Muhammad Ali documentaries and Mike Tyson knockout clips, and if he remembers correctly George Foreman used to do awesome commentary of Roy Jones fights on HBO, or maybe it was the other way around, and since boxing just came on after college football, well, why not?

I didn’t get to a shark metaphor in 5 1/2 previous years of watching Crawford but it came along clear Saturday night after a day at Acuario Michin (admittedly), this city’s new aquarium and its country’s largest – to complement this city’s zoo, its country’s most populous. After the Friday weighin antics, unexpected as a Monday morning, and the symmetrical hatred they supposedly evinced one imagined Crawford’s eyes would flash Saturday if they were capable of it, and they didn’t. Not in the veiny enraged way one understands the term. They were unknowable, like Crawford. They observed Benavidez and did not blink. Which made me wonder if Crawford’s sadism hasn’t been overstated a bit by me and others. Crawford is a predator true. The better a creature is at preying the more indistinguishable be his satisfaction and euphoria, the more lesser predators and prey alike project a euphoria, an almost erotic joy, on his violent activities. Mining such acts for mindfulness, though, introduces an autoimaginary element – how could I do such a thing without it brought me pleasure?

He likes the depictions of street credibility ESPN’s leadin biopics offered before Crawford – “Bud” is a weird nickname for a fighter, but whatever – and “Junior” went after each other Saturday. Lots of athletes come from bad places, but boxers get to really do something about it. The hatred between the fighters was real, anyone could see that. When the opening bell rang he expected the two men to throw the ref out of their way and frenzy violently, but they didn’t because of strategy.

I sat a few feet behind Crawford in February as Benavidez worked through someone named Matthew Strode in Corpus Christi, Texas, and the prevailing emotion Crawford expressed was polite boredom. Some local-sponsor type asked him – “hey, champ!” – what he thought of Benavidez’s performance, and Crawford gazed blankly up from his seat to say, “What do you think?” At 135 pounds, it’s safe to infer, Crawford’d not have been allowed in a ring with Benavidez without first procuring a license to hunt. But at 147 Benavidez was a far abler foil.

He knows these men are smaller than heavyweights, his bailiwick, but there’s this pound-for-pound thing that makes these guys better than heavyweights on a sliding scale of some sort. Crawford is able to drain the spirit out of a bigger man like Benavidez by punching his body. Crawford, too, does this thing with switching his stance that makes him able to hit and not get hit, even if it looks like he’s getting hit. Definitely.

I want men who are not heavyweights to climb weightclasses because doing so reveals their weaknesses in the unfair way of physics. Crawford has few if any weaknesses, but physics precluded him from dashing through Benavidez because Benavidez was a significantly larger man who knew what he was doing better than he was able to do it. Forget not, while an unknown Crawford made fights in Knoxville and Iowa City, 8 1/2 years ago, Benavidez made his third prizefight in a banquet room of our fightweek compound in Texas the night before Manny Pacquiao starred in Cowboys Stadium – Benavidez, not Crawford, would be Top Rank’s successor to Pacquiao.

He sort of sees what the ESPN commentators mean about Benavidez being a good counterpuncher, but he wishes Crawford would just leap in and dominate him like everyone says he can. Crawford’s controlling the outside foot and stuff, and he obviously hits harder, so why not go for it? Can’t be that complicated!

I enjoyed the tension in the ring early, the portentous feeling the wrong man might just win and ruin a whole lot of Nebraskans’ night out. I liked how Benavidez disrespected the champ, hands at his waist, and how Crawford saw something, some honest signal, that dissuaded his attacks for a halfhour, no matter his superior quotient of skill. Benavidez possessed magical skills for a 16-year-old while Crawford possessed them for a 30-year-old, advantage Crawford, sure, but if one were to tally athletic assets then return to Benavidez’s side of the ledger what being shot in a leg took out, the final accounting would be damn close, do not doubt.

I enjoyed the fight.

He loved the ending.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Sunday morning on DAZN Japan’s Naoya “The Monster” Inoue performed the feats of scoring his second knockout as a bantamweight and completing his first round as a bantamweight, in a two-second span. He snatched Dominican Juan Carlos Payano’s consciousness with the first combination he threw in the second season of the World Boxing Super Series. Since arriving at 118 pounds in 2018 Inoue has needed but three minutes and two seconds to go 2-0 (2 KOs).

Actually, that report is unjust to Inoue. To measure properly Inoue’s knockouts by rounds or minutes is to overgeneralize. There’s a more granular method. Punches landed. His knockouts increasingly come in opening rounds, but incredibly the term “first-round knockout” understates what Inoue is up to. “Seventy-second knockout” brings us closer but not even halfway, since Inoue generally does not throw a punch for a match’s opening minute. What he did Sunday with a former world titlist who made his pro debut 13 pounds (and four weightclasses) heavier than Inoue did, needs be measured in punches landed.

Two. Naoya Inoue landed two punches, and Payano was headbanged to boardstiff.

Whatever one opines of Payano as a person or puncher, fact is, a man does not slumber in the gym where he trains then travel across the globe to get atomized by a twopunch. Even in a match betwixt a man who knows how to punch and a man who doesn’t, more than two punches be near always the rule. You could pay your children’s college tuitions by wagering the largest man in every city $100 he cannot take your consciousness with two punches – no matter how great he and meager you.

It’s very difficult to take an unsuspecting man’s consciousness that quickly and nigh impossible to do it a man whose fists are raised. But a twotime Olympian like Payano? A man for whom the gym is both workplace and habitat, with a twodecade dossier of dissuading boxing’s most basic combination? Impossible such a man’s lights might be cut, jab cross, and yet. Inoue so surprised and unbalanced Payano with a jab, the 1, a punch you learn within two minutes of your first handwrapping, Payano somehow had no expectation Inoue’s cross was next.

A halfdecade of squandering the word “devastating” on a Kazakhstani attrition fighter leaves some of us now entirely beneath the task of describing what Inoue’s gloves conceal. It sure ain’t sixth-round-corner-stoppage power or controversial-decision-loss-to-a-smaller-man power, and so let us be chastened by the misdeed of our past embellishments. If we can’t pledge to abstain from exaggeration in the future we might at least pause to concede some of us unduly weakened the language all of us use by pandering to the invention of a disintegrating network reduced to pandering to our beloved sport’s casualest fans.

A pox on such pandering henceforth!

There are sundry lessons for broadcasters to glean from the pending extinction of HBO Boxing, but an accessible one is this: The easiest way to attain 500,000 viewers is to begin with 2 million and replace matchmakers with storytellers.

Since when does boxing need postmodernist cant about contextual empathy in lieu of evenly matched combat? Not only needn’t one be savvy with a textbook to make great matches, but as it turns out, too much textbooking be a liability.

If DAZN doesn’t know this, thus far in its American incarnation it’s doing a workable imitation of a network that does. In 15 days DAZN has broadcast to Americans a heavyweight championship fight attended by 80,000 Brits, the conclusion of a super middleweight tournament in Saudi Arabia, an entertaining many-fight card from Chicago and the opening of two new tournaments in Japan. An aficionado’s total adjusted cost for all this is $5.

That comes with no Gatti List and no pettifogging commentary team. Blessedly. No Game of Thrones, either, which ought be acceptable to adults.

If there’s a criticism for DAZN it lies in the contrast of commentary crews the network trots out for its American cards. Brian Kenny’s mining every act by an official for controversy is tiresome already, Sergio Mora’s too salesy, and why is Sugar Ray Leonard involved? To lend his immortal name. That’s fair, Leonard is genuinely among our sport’s greatest living practitioners, and he’s gracious, too, but there’s no need for him to have a microphone since nothing is lost when he’s quiet.

More to the point, enough with the threeman commentary crews – for if you pay a man to talk, talk he will. Disagree? Check out DAZN’s singleman broadcasts. Whoever that man is, he’s excellent and unintrusive (and naming him would miss the point widely).

*

But if we don’t narrate for the casual fans, why, they’ll go elsewhere to cross-pollinate cultural issues for their lens humanizing mission.

So be it, really, since evidently they are not empathetic enough to be contextualized.

*

The second half of Sunday’s WBSS kickoff, a super lightweight tilt between Belarusian Kiryl Relikh and Russian Eduard Troyanovsky, a match Relikh won by close and unanimous scores, was competitive and entertaining if partly shaded by its predecessor match. There’s simply no following Inoue right now.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Friday in an excellent conclusion to the World Boxing Super Series’ excellent first season, super middleweight edition, England’s Callum Smith stopped England’s George Groves in round 7 to win the tournament and become The Ring world champion. The match happened in Saudi Arabia on DAZN, a broadcaster that, in six days, at a weekly rate of $2.33, featured the world’s best heavyweight and the world’s best super middleweight, each, in competitive matches that ended with knockouts.

Let that sentence mark how much our beloved sport will miss HBO.

Smith won a world title exactly as you are supposed to turn the feat, with one’s opposite number beaten till he cannot continue – whether via unconsciousness or in Groves’ case a deep desire to relent. Groves was awake and headshaking halfway through the count, Friday, emptied, beaten in every sense of the word.

Groves’ foldings ever come suddenly. While nothing incriminating happened much before the Smith lefthook that made Groves consider other careers, something happened between the men in round 6. Groves became a touch more theatrical and Smith more cunning. Groves began an incongruous tactical pairing of throwing punches harder while circling wider. Smith ignored Groves’ noisy punches and inferred Groves’ true signal. Groves’ twitching did little to dissuade Smith in the fight’s opening and much less as Groves did connect with what blows his feints threatened. And all the while Groves made the much wider circles on the blue mat, and Smith knew conditioning’d become a factor eventually.

It wasn’t conditioning that turned Groves into Smith’s dandy hook – “a peach” as DAZN christened it properly – but it was fatigue that made a fully conscious Groves decide to rise at 10 1/2 and not bother protesting as he did when Carl Froch origamied him 4 1/2 years ago. With a minute to go in round 7 Groves had every right to continue and no desire whatever. It taught Groves a little something new about himself, which is ever the most devastating thing you can do a fighter like George Groves.

Groves more than most considers a prizefight a search for character weaknesses and believes his weaknesses fully inventoried before any opening bell rings. He fancies himself both introspective and psychologically superior; Groves has answered every one of hundreds of questions he’s asked himself about George Groves but he’s not so sure you’ve done the same. There’s a fragility to you Groves sees, while any fragilities you sense in him are mere traps, blemishes on his facade he applied like decals to fool you, definitely not cracks. This set of autobeliefs has taken Groves pretty far indeed, confirming him twice the second best man in his weightclass while getting him stamped number 2 by getting stomped by numbers 1. Groves has tangible talents – quickness and form, a good chin and fitness, interesting offense and an eagerness to counter – but not championship intangibles in the ring to match what brand awareness and marketing intangibles he employs outside it.

Smith on the other hand has these intangibles, not unlike Froch – which is not, yet, to liken one to the other. Each beat the spark out Groves, but the comparisons stop there. Smith does things classical well, and he recognizes as an enormous super middleweight he begins any match with what initiative the other man must seize. By virtue of his size and technique Smith enters any title fight at 168 pounds up a round or two, and he does nothing to squander this lead. He maintains a masculine poise, or perhaps it’s juxtaposition coloring this Yank’s view of things.

Twenty-four hours before Smith unmanned Groves an entirely different sort of confrontation happened before American eyes. The testimony of a man who would be, and probably still improbably will be, a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. What follows is neither political nor partisan; it is instead a measure of what sort of public manliness Brett Kavanaugh tried to display, Thursday, a performance subverted effortlessly by Callum Smith’s manly comportment on a small and foreign platform Friday.

Sniffling and barking, his face contorted in something mean and measly, Kavanaugh sought to intimidate septuagenarians and women with a performance he no doubt imagined wrathful. Instead he disgusted most, the septuagenarians wishing they were 20 years younger to punch his mealy mouth, and every woman knowing perfectly well what he was up to. The performance, Americans quickly inferred, was not for us but for our President, alone, a man whose timing and method were learned in the improvisational crucible of professional wrestling. There was something a touch regional about it, too, the audiencemembers on Kavanaugh’s stageleft hailing from professional-wrestling hotbeds like the Carolinas and Texas, those on his right hailing from places where ice-hockey tryouts often outpopulate even football, states like Vermont, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Minnesota. Professional wrestlers are gigantic and flamboyant performers who publicly swear to inflict unthinkable violence on other men before (albeit athletically) enacting rehearsed and premeditated spectacles. Ice-hockey players, conversely, are men of comparatively unexceptional physiques who publicly compliment their opponents before committing nightly acts of unpremeditated assault.

On a spectrum of masculinity, with a five-year-old Shirley Temple at one pole and a 25-year-old Roberto Duran the other, Brett Kavanaugh was no nearer Duran than Temple during his Thursday performance. And on Friday, Callum Smith damn near touched the Duran pole by coolly separating George Groves from his aggression while showing no fear and evincing no weakness to a man both desperately seeking it and possessed of the tools for its discovery.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

Bart Barry-

Saturday world heavyweight champion Anthony Joshua once again filled a gigantic football stadium and successfully defended his multitude of titles by knocking silly a man one doubted any man might knock silly. This time it was former Olympic super heavyweight gold medalist Alexander Povetkin, possessed of both fists and chin. Joshua punched him till Povetkin’s trainer pleaded for mercy on the apron while the match’s referee tried to soften Povetkin’s second plunge to the blue mat.

Whatever happens next, let us pause and rejoice at a present good fortune so aptly illustrated through the pair of Povetkin challenges that just concluded. Before anyone scoffs or even dares consider it, he’s invited, first, to watch this fight, every last second of its 36 minutes, and see what Joshua so blessedly rid us of.

Have you forgotten how awful most Wladimir Klitschko title defenses were? I sure had. Then I took what happened Saturday and subjected my memories of it to what happened five years ago when Povetkin made his first title challenge. The aesthetical disaster of it, the frightfulness that made a man gargantuan as Klitschko fistfight in a way best classified as passive-aggressive: jab-jab-hook-bellyflop-armwrap-tackle | where’s the ref? | leapback-dolphinbreach-armwrap | where’s the ref? | jab-gloveswaddle-headtuck | where’s the ref?

We’re properly spoiled by Joshua if as aficionados we’re not genuflecting to him semiannually. He didn’t untitle Klitschko the way Tyson Fury did, by outwladding Wlad, but rather he made the temperamentally temperate titlist go man-to-man for once and beat him into retirement, beat him right, gave Klitschko a last stand more honorable than the sum of its 20 predecessor stands. And Klitschko thanked him for it in part because, as a 40-year-old man whose career began before YouTube, Klitschko hoped longsuffering fans long since driven to welterweight spectacles instead of his might recall of his legacy only the images of those final rounds in Wembley and the text of his resume.

But do notice how very little anyone misses the Brothers Klitschko, how fully this new era of heavyweights makes us forget the last era’s insipid sibling monopolists.

A brief recap why. Saturday the heavyweight champion of the world, in round 1, stood near enough and grappled little enough with a puncher who knew how to get his nose bloody bloodied and his equilibrium briefly beggared. No preceding quarterhour of guardslapping (what infamous 2008 tactic against Sultan Ibragimov got Wlad exiled a sevenyear from American arenas) – instead a man throwing hands with another man and letting come what might. Then a change in tactics that concerned punching, actual punching, a new target, a changed trajectory, but still punching, not fleeing, not landing the grand jeté, but punching a challenger who wanted to hurt the champ with every offering. And finally the finale, a gorgeous cross thrown at a man still plenty dangerous followed by a pursuit ferocious to a point near recklessness.

Joshua wanted to be tested in a way the heavyweight division’s previous princes never did. He justified once again his enormous following’s faith in him by competing and winning in entertaining a fashion as possible. Then he demonstrated an uncanny rapport with what 80,000 Brits braved the raw conditions of an outdoor arena where the skies drizzled them. He had a laugh at his promoter’s expense. He conceded a sense of the pressure so many folks’ reliance on him brings. He promised an April return. He named fellow titlist Deontay Wilder as his preferred opponent.

Not so fast, there, AJ. Whatever the oddsmakers say there’s good a chance as not a countryman of yours will wear the WBC belt in the new year, not Wilder. My, how fully we’ve forgot, on the evidence of a single showing a halfyear ago, how bad Wilder can be at boxing. And where Joshua should probably outclass the winner of Wilder-Fury nobody should be surprised if Fury outclasses Wilder, 11-1, in a soggydamp spectacle Americans in attendance do not forgive quickly.

There’s a mounting momentum that assumes Wilder deserves a win against Fury because of Fury’s apparent madness, and that’s not how our beloved sport works. Much as Wilder eschews traditional technique is how much Fury eschews traditional entertainment demands. Fury fights nothing like a man his size should, but his style is likely a full foil for Wilder’s. Everything that looked right about Saturday’s spectacle is what will look wrong in December.

Saturday’s challenger attacked, tried to take the champ’s crown by offing the head that bore it. And the champ replied with measure and mastery. Povetkin got in with clever aggression, throwing punches leveraged to devastate. He clipped Joshua with an uppercut-hook combo textbook as it was unexpected. He made an honest confrontation from the opening bell: I’m going to hit you hard as I can, and if that means you do the same to me I’m prepared for it. Before the match Joshua predicted a violent game of chess but it was blessedly more belligerent than that.

December, contrarily, will see a challenger actively endeavor to shame a champ from attacking him – making Wilder hate him so much before the opening bell Wilder hates the idea of failing to hurt Fury slightly more than he hates Fury. It’ll bring entertainment in both a different way and in the bizarre way only heavyweight prizefighters, among all athletes, can. Life’s greatest attestation to this may forever remain the number of German venues Wladimir Klitschko filled.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

“The war’s over. It’s over. I saw it on television. I saw it on TV.” – Conrad Brean, “Wag the Dog”

Saturday in Las Vegas Saul “Canelo” Alvarez narrowly decisioned Gennady “GGG” Golovkin to become the middleweight champion of the world. The fight was excellent, and there was blood if no knockdowns. That should make the judges’ decision irrelevant to most of us.

Canelo and GGG proved their equality, a re-proof that reproves much believed about Golovkin by his champions, a group that long resided along a spectrum of gullible to incredibly so. Before the scorecards were read Canelo won the series for being upright and triumphant after 24 rounds with Golovkin as he was before 24 rounds with Golovkin, just as Golovkin’d’ve won the same way had he remained upright and triumphant after 24 rounds with Andre Ward (stop laughing – HBO’s opening salespitch for GGG included an ability, nay, willingness, to fight any man between 154 pounds and 168, while Ward was still super middleweight champion). But let’s right the hands on that clock one last time: You don’t lose the aggregate of 24 rounds on an aggregate of five judges’ scorecards to a man who made his pro debut at 139 pounds and see one closing bell with Ward, much less two.

But, but, what about everything they told me Golovkin was on television?

Yes, let’s address that, as Golovkin eventually follows his promotional network into boxing obscurity. HBO’s schedule for Golovkin’s debut, lo these many years ago, featured an intriguing match with Dmitry Pirog, the man who cracked open Danny “The Golden Child” Jacobs like squares on an icecube tray. Through no fault of Golovkin’s, Pirog withdrew from that match and boxing itself, and then Golovkin’s ace PR guy, Bernie Bahrmasel, by dint of hardwork and will, persuaded two generations of HBO executive and one tiring generation of commentator Golovkin was the middleweight of their lifetimes. The callouts began – never to men larger, alas – along with the mismatches, and soon the hyperbolic became true to a generation raised on the wisdom of Conrad Brean’s lines above.

This was all over last week’s prediction panels, which read wonderfully similar to last year’s prediction panels; Golovkin’s otherworldly power didn’t imperil Canelo once in 2017’s match because of Adalaide Byrd’s scorecard. Next year’s prediction panels, should Canelo do the quixotic thing and forego easier paydays to grant Golovkin an immediate rubbermatch, will follow last week’s: Golovkin, a puncher of historic might, despite striking Alvarez 452 times in 72 minutes, didn’t fell Alvarez once because Vegas judges scored the boxoffice.

OK, enough practicing on the disappointed, let’s address the only memorable thing, which is the fight. No, not quite yet. A last note for those whose Saturday experience got ruined by the scorecards. Learn to prize knockouts so fantastically much that when one doesn’t happen in a championship prizefight you’re at the refrigerator or in the bathroom when the cards get read. If you didn’t bet on the match you should trust your sense of things and caren’t a whit what the officials officially say, and realize all the pundits who tell you to care about it are being paid to peddle outrage their employers hope to monetize. Better put, if outrage brings you a pleasurable spike, embrace it, by all means, but if it doesn’t, go forward in the faith it genuinely doesn’t matter – no one with a valuable opinion will opine more or less of you for such apathy.

Both guys did one thing incredibly effectively Saturday and succeeded incredibly well and will look back with great surprise how effectively their opponent’s one incredible thing offset that one incredible thing each did. For Golovkin it was the jab, which succeeded viscerally more than anything a scorecard might report. Golovkin tormented Canelo the way Muhammad Ali tortured Floyd Patterson 53 years ago. Like this: If you jab a man’s forehead while his chin be properly tucked the force of the blow traverses his spine and collects in a pool of pressure on his lower back.

Canelo touched his toes before and after every middlelate round, and found his lead leg stiff and almost useless in rounds 10 and 11. For about four minutes Canelo was no more mobile or dangerous than Matthew Macklin or Daniel Geale. He was there for Golovkin’s having but Golovkin had him not.

Because Canelo’s committed bodypunching (and occasional hipstriking) throughout the match’s opening 2/3 detorqued Golovkin’s delivery. Canelo had no way to run or hide precisely when Golovkin had nothing for Canelo to run or hide from.

This was a Golovkin fan’s crowning frustration. The act to justify six years’ fidelity appeared with an unmistakable clang, the finish to whisk a Golovkin fan from gullibility to sagacity happened obviously as Canelo’s frightened retreat, and nothing much after it but a couple 10-9 rounds. It’s not enough to say Canelo’s hand raised a quarterhour later salted this flayed sensibility – it’s worse than that: Golovkin’s hand raised a quarterhour later would have brought no true balm. One doesn’t know how deeply Golovkin felt this, how much of his palpable disappointment was empathy with his unrequited supporters, but it’s there now. Even to the most avid, a whiff of fraudulence will accompany Golovkin’s next act of carnage on a super welterweight, loyally accompanied by an HBO soundtrack of inane historical references and overwrought lectures.

These fights, entertaining though they be, take out of Canelo something disproportionate to their reward. He’s no incentive to do it again in May when he can otherwise continue his predecessor’s reign over undersized aspirants. For moving up a weightclass and fighting a world champion, he was already a greater man than Golovkin before Saturday’s match even opened.

Bart Barry can be reached @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday in Brooklyn welterweight “Showtime” Shawn Porter outworked Philadelphia’s Danny “Swift” Garcia for the WBC’s suddenly coveted iteration of a 147-pound title. The scorecards were fair, and the fight was even enough a draw wouldn’t have outraged anyone who wasn’t already outraged by other goingson. But the fight otherwise adhered to Premier Boxing Champions’ strange template of abundant drama followed by little suspense but Jimmy Lennon Jr.’s cardreading.

Until the final halfminute when a bang of heads caused an abrasion halfahead from Garcia’s chin and some blood meandered its way to Garcia’s cheek in time for the final bell it had been another miraculously bloodless and upright championship match for PBC. Were the manners reversed – were prizefighters unable to break smoke rings suddenly starching fellow champions – conspiratorial thoughts would bubble. But this PBC conspiracy is something else entirely (and counterintuitively): Howsoever do so many competitive 12-round fights with men who can crack end so anticlimactically with their fighters no more scarred, severed or swollen than chiefseconds?

There has long been suspicion PBC’s founder is a pacifist – so drawn he is by defensive specialists and quicktwitch feinters. But even so, how does he get contracted agents to comply? Perhaps by the sublime oddity of his request.

A thought like this happened between one of the 12 selfsame rounds of Saturday’s comain, when Cuban Yordenis “Yawn” Ugas got beseeched by his corner not to be such a nice guy to Argentine Cesar Miguel Barrionuevo.

Anyone else find this curious?

OK, anyone else make it through half the comain?

Men by their 23rd prizefights may have adopted all type of bad habits, but excessive sympathy is a rare one. Maybe Ugas’ tenure on La Finca taught him boxing’s only point was points, and his knockout record does betray this, but how did anyone rub the bad intentions off Garcia’s and Porter’s gloves before Saturday’s main?

By moving one up in weight, is the likeliest answer. Porter has never struck hard or accurate as champions do, but Garcia sure as hell once did.

Oh, good point: Not at welterweight. Garcia’s greatest gambles and payoffs happened at 140 pounds, where if he wasn’t an A fighter he at least never let anyone prove it publicly. He’s been a B- since scaling those seven pounds. He hits hard enough to stand pocketwise and torque the right shoulder backwards but he barely dissuades other titlists now and chloroforms nary a contender and never a champion, which is altogether too bad.

I find myself pulling for Garcia for the purest of reasons. We have nothing in common, not age or ethnicity or home decor; gravity makes Tyson Fury a more weight-appropriate avatar for me than a guy at 147; and frankly the Puerto Ricans with whom I often watch fights make only nominally more claims on Garcia than Kermit Cintron. But I verily love Garcia’s composure when blitzed. It enchants me how he stands and fixates on cocking his left shoulder and another man’s chin even while that other man helicopters right at him. If it’s not the opposite what life’s conditioned me expect from a man in animal prints, it’s at least refreshingly different. It’s an irregular type of fearlessness but it’s certainly fearless more than cerebral.

Garcia, it bears repetition, fights nothing like a six-toed weirdo in a Phantom mask – he plants and preys. He’s a faith if he can get you to throw your best punch at the moment he throws his best punch his will snatch your consciousness and often gives the impression he doesn’t much care what befalls his own consciousness in the offing. The rest of the time, admittedly, he’s quite average. He’s not bad, of course; he’s contender-level in his other facets but nowhere near so special as when he wings the lefthook, and admittedly admittedly, he no longer wings it gorgeous recklessly as once he did. Another unfortunate consequence of his outgrowing 140.

Let this not detract from Showtime Shawn. He is a coach’s overachieving fantasy and the nearest thing we’ve had to Timothy Bradley since Manny Pacquiao ankled Desert Storm in 2012. Saturday Porter wanted it more than Garcia enough to overcome Garcia’s palpable pride and more-palpable delta of talent above Porter’s.

But a confession: I didn’t watch Porter much. There was a string of rounds, latemiddle, when you couldn’t watch the combat and set your eyes elsewhere from Porter, but most of the rest of the match’s 25 minutes it was easier to watch Garcia loadspring his traps. Which Porter navigated expertly. It appeared Porter took Garcia more seriously, as an adversary, than Garcia took Porter. Some of that is style much as temperament – Porter must prepare himself for a specific opponent where Garcia needn’t – but some of it is mean will. Porter bounced in Saturday’s ring imploring the boxing gods like: Let all other things be equal, tonight, and I’ll do the rest with desire. Garcia slid through the ropes like: All other things aren’t going to be equal, Shawn.

Both men fought best they could and executed about as expected, Porter busier, Garcia sharper. Both men had their frustrations, Porter neutralized, Garcia unconcussive. In a fair if close accounting, though, Porter’s evening won the quotient; slightly more execution, slightly fewer frustrations.

For purposes of forecasting, too, one sensed Porter thought his evening might’ve gone even better whereas Garcia was complacent about his work if not the judges’. Garcia might yet jinx some overrated prospect as he hardens in his welter-gatekeeper role, à la Robert Guerrero or Luis Collazo, but he’d need a titlist’s offnight to win another belt at 147 pounds. Porter, meanwhile, promises to make a fun scrap with anyone but especially Errol Spence whose canned postfight callout Saturday suffered in equal parts from his decency and Porter’s. Spence should win that fight with Porter, since they’re effectively the same fighter and Spence is better, and it, too, should prove surprisingly bloodless.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

There is ever much thought given to layers and how they might best be created in a thing linear as the written word but some new thoughts on the subject. The layers be supplied by the reader and the rest is anxiety about how uncontrollable be that reader – the bolding and italicizing and capslocking and footnoting, and, to a lesser extent, the rigid overapplication of commas, howsoever grammatically justifiable. Ultimately it appears folly no matter where its writer’s heart.

Hi Mom . . . had these thoughts while enjoying a bout of what turned out to be a virile and viral strain of food poisoning in the Ecuadorian township of Otavalo – who orders a steak medium-rare in South America (possible answer: hardly anybody; the waitress failed thricely to dissuade my prep instructions)? – and its 48 hours of refractory restlessness, a mashup of thoughts and sensations occasioned by zaniness and immobility 18 storeys above Quito. I was staring out a pair of windows, as you know I’m wont to do, and reading a book I found in my borrowed apartment, “Envisioning Information” by Edward R. Tufte, and thinking about my futile chase in words of what visual artists do in a different sort of collaboration with the human eye. The book did nothing so much as convince me graphic artists, like my Quito host, practice applied visual arts the way racecar (a palindrome!) engineers practice applied physics. Along we go . . . Bart

Juan “Baby Bull” Diaz comes first to mind when I think after a boxing incarnation of the Labor Day spirit for these reasons:

1. He applied a template of constant pressure.

1a. If he relented, everything would collapse – his defense, his footwork, his identity.

2. He wore blue.

3. He was workforce, not management.

3a. He punched-in for a full, 36-minute shift.

4. When he was put in a bad system (against Juan Manuel Marquez) the system won.

Marquez doesn’t spring to mind as a Labor Day prizefighter, and yet, how else did he attain such technical mastery but via hundreds of thousands of repetitions, and isn’t that workmanlike?

A Brief Oral History of Why Marquez Was Not Workmanlike . . .

MONEY: I’m the reason he changed his physique, you know?

MEMO: I don’t know about that, but I truly did not hear from him until after you fought him.

MANNY: I went crazy when he hit me to the mat with that loop right hand in our four fight. The punch was not happy. The punch was a lie.

MEMO: But you opened the door to that when you didn’t want to do testing.

MONEY: Only reason people know he didn’t want the test was because of me.

If you posit those who use modern scientific methods to enhance their performance are undeserving of Labor Day recognition you foolishly imply, at least partially, anyone with the same cocktail regimen of whatever these guys ingest would, too, become world champion. And before this finds you on hindlegs asserting it’s all so unfair to those who adhere to whatever arbitrary group happens currently to be enforcing arbitrarily agreed-upon standards, maybe ask a few questions about the testing agencies’ agents’ self-interests and just how pure you’re certain all the publicized adherents are actually. Marquez didn’t need PEDs to be elite and neither did Barry Bonds, but the sort of ambition that brings eliteness is not slumberous. It rarely obeys a threshold and hasn’t an off switch. Which is to imply in an era of PEDs any argument about any athlete not needing PEDs to be elite is self-invalidating.

[Hit to start]
Thank you. Please take your seats. Thank you. (PAUSE) (Spread hands) Congratulations to Prizefighting University’s class of 2018! (((((())))))) When I was asked to give this commencement address, I did a lot of thinking. What might I say to send y’all off from the amateur ranks of boxing and scoring to the (raise crooked fingers in air quotes) hurt business? (Lower hands to podium) Then it came to me. (Pause) Two things, actually, came to me. (Take sip of water) The first was a five-word admonishment from a trainer friend of mine. The second was about layers, levels, what have you. (((((())))))) First the five words. (Raise right hand and count on fingers) You. Ain’t. Gonna. Reinvent. Boxing. (PAUSE) Keep your damn chins tucked and your damn guards high. (((((())))))) Now I’m going to riff a little about layers. (Signal grandly with right hand for TelePrompTer to be powered-off) (((((())))))) Conclusion: The year of your graduation, one way or the other, will see a Ukrainian named Fighter of the Year. Supply your own metaphor.

These thoughts about creating a threedimensional experience with a twodimensional medium like words-arranged-in-paragraphs began in 2001! A few writer friends had a magical vision: To spread goodwill by making the already enjoyable reading experience way different by departing from proven methods. Whether in an effort to hide stylistic shortcomings or in the name of literary revolution (founder’s note: Or boredom!) these writers sought to celebrate a subversive experience for their readers by applying a “rigid standard of ultimate quality, craftsmanship and creativity” like Happy Socks!

In conclusion, whatever happened to labor in America or appreciation of those who do labor – and if you’re reading this from your job on Labor Day, why, that’s the point – things shall certainly worsen before they betteren. Employers flatten and automate, making entrylevel a permanent level, now that leveraged shareholders have replaced customers and workers, and so, and still, if boxing does not repay fully what vicarious expectations – better put: expectations for vicariousness – we lend our beloved sport, it ever holds the possibility a man, some man, may rise from hopeless circumstances, may overcome derogatory socioeconomic factors numerous, and improbably become celebrated and secure while entertaining us. If Oleksandr Usyk, world’s unified and undisputed and undefeated cruiserweight champion, possessed of a quirky workhorse style that requires constant motion and occasional improvisation, does not represent every American everyman’s Labor Day ideal, he represents ideals enough.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday at Gila River Arena in the greater Phoenix area Ghanaian super bantamweight titlist Isaac Dogboe raced through Japan’s Hidenori Otake in about two minutes of their comain tilt. Those two minutes got so filled so well with courage and technique and menace as to make any who saw them suddenly more interested in querying the Dogboe videovault than staying awake till Sunday morning for ESPN’s mainevent.

Just as baseball scouts celebrate Dominican batters’ promiscuous strikezones by saying “no one walks off the island” so should aficionados acknowledge African prizefighters’ chins by saying “no one runs off the continent” – before you saw Dogboe tested, then, you already knew by virtue of his Ghanaian birthplace he had a chin. But then so did countryman Joshua Clottey.

No, what makes Dogboe special is his audacity. Isaac Dogboe is a bad man. How good it feels to write that without irony or hyperbole or satirical smirk.

It feels like when this column began it needn’t be written often because it was assumed often; Pacquiao, Barrera, Morales, Marquez – none of them was mysterious about his intention in a prizefighting ring. His role was to hurt the other man unto unconscious or the closing bell, whichever came first, but he wasn’t to relent trying to hurt the other man unto unconsciousness till the closing bell clanged. That was his brand. That was his legacy.

For reasons of culture or simple good wiring those men doubted the next morning’s risen sun more than a belief like this: If I fight every man unto unconsciousness, his preferably but mine otherwise, I’ll have done my job and should be beloved. If these men feared pain and mortality much as the next they did not fear humiliation; their professional code of conduct drew for them a straight line. They stood apart from the twitchy brand-obsessed Americans who followed, the men who for reasons of culture or simple poor wiring feared nothing so much as public humiliation and fought like it.

Things are getting better by dint of volume – the more airwaves contracted to provide prizefighting the more committed the search for fighters who follow a code in lieu of building a brand. For this, too, we probably ought thank the PBC, for believing so completely in the power of branding above every other consideration as to show our beloved sport the logical ends of the gambit, for not pausing to glance at a Ghanaian bantamweight like Dogboe during the outfit’s Olympic courtship of an American flyweight like Rau’Shee Warren.

Dogboe might’ve succeeded regardless, Errol Spence has somehow, but Dogboe’s chances of succeeding as a fighter if not a brand were improved by his alliance with Top Rank, an outfit that develops prizefighters best. Everything else belongs to Dogboe. His commitment to punches, so full, is uncommon for a man who places them well as Dogboe does. Saturday’s left hook sent every man jack with internet access to YouTube to see what he missed by way of a bullshit filter that kept him offline in April when Dogboe first entered the collective consciousness of American aficionados. Far too many champions and contenders and prodigies and prospects, even, have been prematurely blazoned these last 10 years for any reasonable man to attribute to anything more reliable than Stockholm syndrome most sudden socialmedia enthusiasms. Too hungry are we for something credible to doubt reflexively (as we should) the publicist-readied origin stories that reach us well before our fighters’ first meaningful tests.

Oh, I know, I know, it’s not careful matchmaking that keeps a fighter from being tested his first halfdecade but rather his otherworldly talent, and that’s why I should care about his stepdad or immigration status years before I know if he’s the whiskers to be entertaining or elite.

If that reads like an indictment of Saturday’s mainevent it is one, if only partially. After what Dogboe showed, after the obviousness of Dogboe’s presentation, it was ugly hard to appreciate the subtlety of whatever Jose Pedraza and Raymundo Beltran did one another in their sweepstakes drawing for a December cashout against Vasyl Lomachenko. Saturday’s mainevent was, in a word, mediocre. That’s not to besmirch Beltran’s I-485 application to register permanent residence or audit what paternal love got showered on young Pedraza but more to report yet again none of that matters a whit if what happens in the combat itself is dull, and it was.

Aficionados are a generally shameless lot, but just in case, let’s reiterate: Be not ashamed to call a halfhour of grappling punctuated by an uppercut what it is.

For it cheapens what Dogboe did to call what followed it more than that. Perhaps Dogboe’s mother is a real taskmaster, maybe his dad strapped him with the leathery rinds of a studded soursop, or maybe Dogboe fights for his people – you know not of it matters truly because you didn’t need to know any of it to appreciate the hook he pronated on Otake’s chin in round 1, the same hook he pronated on Cesar Juarez’s chin in January. What’s wonderful about that hook is when it’s thrown – against Otake, before Dogboe knew if Otake could cut his lights, and against Juarez after Dogboe knew the Mexican could pepper him if Dogboe snapped his chin on Juarez’s left knuckles.

Which is most of Dogboe’s charm – he imperils himself for our amusement. Is he open for a counter when he launch-land-plants himself for the lead hook? Why, certainly. But Dogboe wagers his consciousness no opponent’ll combine precision and commitment at that same instant fully as he does. More of that, please.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Editor’s note: For part 16, please click here.

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QUITO, Ecuador – No telling where this’ll head as its teetotaler writer’s synapses get tickled by the nutrients of a café bombón after what 48-hour involuntary fasting now evidently succeeds any hike he conducts more than 9,000 feet above sealevel. The empty stomach and mindful, not moral, abstinence from any substance stronger than chlorophyll, whose benevolent effect can be noticeably strong at altitude, already do their work: Who knew teetotalism (probably once t-totalism) had nothing to do with tea but rather extra totaling – the same way the Spanish prefix “re” takes the writing of this column from divertido, fun, to redivertido, absurdly so?

This city is lovely gentle by any measure but especially the measure of Andean capitals. Gentler is the word that presents itself more than another here. Among its sierra siblings, somewhere betwixt Bogota’s relentless vice and Lima’s suffocating virtue, Quito balances gently and invitingly, courteously curious, not professionally so as in Colombia, not stonefacedly unso as in Peru, interrogating an American tourist the way you might question a newly arrived and friendly seeming Martian. With one outlier worth noting:

A Venezuelan taxista so distraught with his country’s freefall into monstrous disrepair – 4,000: that’s the number of daily Venezuelan refugee arrivals to Quito everyone cites – he declares, in Spanish, without a sense of hyperbole much less irony or recourse to a plan b: “Trump! Trump is our only solution!”

Gentler is this city but not gentle, as the Andes are not gentle. Nothing soft grows above 10,000 feet. The plants, though plentiful and often gorgeous, make no outstanding effort to shade you from a sun that glares very much in the transitive sense of the verb, taking an object – namely your oncepink flesh. There’s not the same sense of pending elimination one gathers from subzero temperatures so much as a flinchless indifference; you do not exist to the Andes.

Burned and fatigued after four hours and a thousandfoot ascent, wandering dispiritedly away from homebase while wondering about fractals and how the circumference of a volcanic lake, if measured by microscope, might be infinite, you lose any doubt how unimportant you are. Ambivalence is all: I got myself in this ordeal (empowered) and nothing for 3,800 km is careful enough to get me out (powerless) so I can continue (empowered) or not (powerless) but there will be no conscious witness to my plight while I’m still conscious (ambivalent).

Whysoever more ambitious souls than mine freesolo mountains, I realize I punch at hikes well above my weightclass (by recommending bodyweights well below) not because they’re there but because they can be done, primarily because others not only did them but did them so comfortably and found their doing so worthwhile as to return them with infrastructural equipment – stones in Cusco, logs in Cotacachi – to ease others’ ascents. It may not be gratitude, quite, as one oftentimes resents these handmade staircases as they finish with him, but it is at least a small homage to one’s betters.

Writing of which, the tens of hours of idle thinking that mark this trip much as its altitude, the Airbnb vistas chosen to encourage mindless gazing, arrived unexpectedly at the works and thoughts of a Quiteño painter, a British bodybuilder and an American novelist: Guayasamín, Yates and Wallace.

Capilla del Hombre (Chapel of Man), designed by Oswaldo Guayasamín though not completed before his demise in Baltimore, makes Quito every bit what an aesthete’s destination is Donald Judd’s Marfa or Antoni Gaudí’s Barcelona. A stone box the majority of whose contents are subterranean, La Capilla’s cupola depicts in part those indigenous women of the Spanish conquest who perished in South American mines. But “perished” doesn’t approach what happened.

These persons were born in the mines, bred like livestock in the mines, and discarded in the mines, without once they saw sunlight. If it’s a feat anylonger to horrify in the 21st century Guayasamín’s tribute does it; imagining a life considered so disposable as to be denied even natural light touches a place anymore invulnerable to expertly arranged statistics and expertly layered depictions of man’s cruelty.

Whatever his myriad of influences Guayasamín’s works themselves feel like a synthesis of the Mexican Siqueiros’ murals and the Briton Lucian Freud’s portraits.

Thoughts of a Brit good at layering brings us to Dorian Yates, a letter to whom in Flex magazine in 1994 marked my first “published” “work” and whose lat spread was in its time a transcendental grotesquery. What an interesting journey Yates has taken himself on since injuries ended his Mr. Olympia run 21 years ago, and thanks to whatever YouTube algorithms mixed my affinity for Ravishing Rick Rude ringwalks and comedian Norm MacDonald compilations to recommend Yates interviews that’ve filled many of my Andean-dark evenings in Ecuador.

All but one, actually. That evening got filled by an excellent Netflix offering called “The End of the Tour” – a movie about David Foster Wallace, the American writer whose novel “The Pale King” may be the joyleast posthumous work ever published. Wallace, though, as depicted by actor Jason Segel and subsequently confirmed in hours of interviews, had at least as much a capacity for joy as a capacity for postmodern irony (or whatever Wallace’d’ve preferred we call it).

Wallace’s legion of imitators, too, are perfectly if not quite intentionally portrayed by the actor Jesse Eisenberg – anxious little anglers desperate to achieve literary acclaim by footnoting every sentence, written or spoken, with fauxinquisitive annoyances like “let’s unpack that word ‘desperate’” and “what do you actually mean by ‘acclaim’?”

A last observation unrelated to anything above or anything pugilism (no kidding, bud). Spirals figure prominently in the patriotic signage of both Ecuador and Peru, the latter choosing a font like Maya script and the former choosing a versicolor underlined by “ecuador ama la vida (Ecuador loves life)”. Amen to all that!

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Author’s note: The picture that accompanies this column features a mixedmedia piece, “Vencedor condenado a la derota por agotamiento sucesivo (Victor condemned to defeat by successive exhaustion)”, created by the Ecuadorian artist José Luis Celi and displayed in Museo Nacional de Quito. The scrolls in the boots read “LA DIGNIDAD” and “LA ETICA”.

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Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Sundays like these you spend wondering if this will be it, the last Sunday, the one when the words or at least the impetus to type the words won’t come eventually. Last was scheduled for a thoroughly mediocre weekend of prizefighting and should’ve remained such but for the surprise effect of a Colombian-Canadian light heavyweight who finished what work Bernard Hopkins demonstrated as possible and Andre Ward made manifest.

There was never too much to recommend Sergey “Krusher” Kovalev but cruelty and his promoter, Kathy Duva, who is excellent at her craft and among the final and most-deserving beneficiaries of HBO’s collapsed empire. Kovalev himself was not particularly compelling unless he represented a chance at unification, which we learned last month be among the most-compelling products boxing can deliver, but once such a unification gambit went away with Adonis Stevenson’s departure for another network Kovalev became a frontrunner bully the totality of whose offseason outreach comprised punching a keyring speedbag when HBO cameras reliably panned to him during most every broadcast.

Kovalev won a boring decision over Bernard “The Fighting Quinquagenarian” Hopkins and got copious plaudits for so doing. Then Andre Ward showed the world what was what, and Kovalev rode down the usual rebranding conveyor, firing what cornermen built him and traumatizing overmatched challengers en route to a manufactured title or two. HBO ran out of money not so quickly as it ran out of talent, and so Kovalev benefited alongside his comrade at middleweight, and Danny Jacobs.

Saturday made future benefiting considerably more difficult when Alvarez fragiled Kovalev more clearly even than Ward did, dropping him thricely and yanking the bitch out him unforgettably as Ward did, which is another way of writing: There aren’t enough Vyacheslav Shabranskyys in Christendom to make Kovalev viable again unless he avenges what just happened, and he doesn’t have it in him to do that – Alvarez knowing what he now knows goes through Kovalev quicker next time, as did Ward – and so Krusher’s network is down to a couple middleweights, the super flyweight division and Andre the Giant.

This should be a celebration of Eleider Alvarez, I get that I do, but it’s too late to reverse course and was too late to do so even when a couple disbelieving texts arrived in what felt like the middle of Saturday night.

Since a weekend headlined by Kovalev, Andre Berto and Devon Alexander hasn’t quickened the pulse in a halfdecade, if ever, previous considerations for this column revolved round Lucas Matthysse’s retirement and the man who caused it and why that man continues to fight, and if there’s not 1,000 words of interest round those subjects there’s at least enthusiasm for them where there wasn’t for what preceded them.

Matthysse feels a bit like Kovalev, though it might be the calendar allowing such clumsiness of analogy; excellent in a firefight in which he’s sure he’s the outgunner but fragile in the clutch. Life’s not so symmetrical but if Krusher announces his retirement in a couple weeks the analogy matures to metaphor, and there’s another column written during the slog betwixt now and GolovCanelo 2, though I’ve a plan for just that (see author’s note below).

What’s more interesting are Manny Pacquiao’s reasons for continuing to fight. Before Pacquiao’s successful showing against Matthysse, newsletterman Rafe Bartholomew’s enjoyable “Respect Box” made insightful counterarguments against the Manny-is-broke refrain that was never convincing as its selfinterested proponents believed. Here’s a sample:

“We apply the ‘Joe Louis, casino-greeter’ narrative to Pacquiao, when it’s not a perfect fit, and we have no real way to know how rich or poor he is. The articles about Pacquiao’s finances tend to quote Freddie Roach, Bob Arum, and other Americans with some but not full insight into his situation.”

The first thing many of us noticed about Pacquiao many years ago was the joy he exuded during ringwalks – he was so delightfully eager to fight. Only Felix Trinidad springs to mind as a man so enchanted by the prospect of public combat and the injury and humiliation it might bring. While many of us can imagine the euphoria a victory might cause and imagine the humiliation a defeat might summon very few of us have the experience needed to calculate a quotient that makes one justify the other.

Probably none of us does, not even Manny or Tito. Their secret, then, is to revel in the entirety of the event, to derive euphoria from leaving the hotel room, driving to the arena and touching the toes, taping the hands and watching how nervous others around them are for them in the dressingroom, listening to their names called and punching another man in the face, being punched by him, too, and being nearly unconscious with exertion. That sort of autogenerated presence, addictive, is enough to keep a man sparring till 50 other men in empty gyms – much less thrilling a full and feral arena, a deafening collective of other men momentarily freed from their lives’ every worry. Much less making an entire country suddenly proud.

What replaces that feeling? Certainly not legislative matters or the campaign trail. Certainly not concerns about abstractions over future health. And most especially not watching the digits grow in one’s checking account.

If Manny does not fight on solely for the boundless thrill of it, that thrill, anyone can concede, is a part of why Manny fights on. Would that any man’s passion might make others so euphoric.

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Author’s note: This column will not appear next week, as its author will be in Ecuador to get krushed by a hike up Rucu Pichincha volcano.

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Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday in Los Angeles in a match that unified lightweight titles without undisputing them Mikey Garcia outboxed Robert Easter and decisioned him unanimously, much as oddsmakers, aficionados and Garcia himself expected he would. Then Garcia did something unexpected by requesting a match with one of the world’s two best welterweights. Potent at 135 pounds, Garcia’s punching didn’t march to 140 quite as expected in March, making him something less than a twofisted threat at 147.

Garcia made his shocking callout immediately after beating Easter because he’s aware enough of everything that happens in a prizefighting ring to know how temporarily gullible television makes us and how fully history later erases what enthusiasm accompanied the gullibility, often with a bite. On television you can get yourself likened to Manny Pacquiao and Juan Manuel Marquez by beating Sergey Lipinets, and likened to Diego Corrales and Jose Luis Castillo simply by signing to fight Robert Easter, but you also know if ever you bump into Pacquiao or Marquez and present your Lipinets and Easter scalps they’ll wonder what you’re doing.

Garcia touched Easter early in round 2 Saturday and an alarm sounded on the canvas, a vibratory something both fighters and the referee sensed immediately: “A protected man is here.” Whatever victories brought Easter in a ring with Garcia, however deserving’f celebration they were in their moments, they were not proportionate with his titles, and now everyone had to know. Easter sensed in that moment his ascent was a bit of a ruse, and now the ruse was up, and worst of all, he sensed, Garcia knew it too well to let it go. Easter still had his prohibitive height and reach advantage, prohibitive enough his handlers (who ought’ve known better) failed to notice these last 5 1/2 years his poor footwork and pushy jab, but he’d no chance at intimidating or dissuading Garcia unto victory; Easter was going to lose, the question was how, and what might change after he lost.

Garcia went in Easter with classic boxing, 1-2 3-2 1-2, chastened Easter with every jab, frothed him with every cross. Therein lies most of Garcia’s appeal; he proves what every boxing coach has preached every year since about the time of Odysseus: If you take what you learn your first month in the gym and practice it till perfection then apply it fearlessly, you’ll surprise everyone how far it takes you. A minute into Saturday’s match Garcia feinted Easter out of position by throwing even his rangefinders properly; Garcia measured Easter for counters and realized the task before him might be still easier than he visualized while partying in his dressing room during the undercard.

Easter didn’t yet realize his task was hopeless. He was the taller, busier guy with the fast hands, and everyone told him his combination of speed and reach was otherwordly – so what if he tripped over his feet a little just then?

Then Easter’s righthand started wandering out to do pickoff duty. Garcia hooked round it just to see, and what he saw was Easter yanking on the back of his own head, tweaking the axle, imbalancing the apparatus, making mistakes too big to correct with the bigness of his frame. Easter started moving back like he didn’t know why he was moving back but yet he was moving back. If Easter wasn’t frightened he began to look frightened.

Garcia did things just right; he took Easter’s jabs to the body without moving his hands a centimeter offline: If this gangly dude is willing to shrink to my height to pittypat my belly, amen to that! In round 3 Garcia dropped Easter linearly: 1-2-3. That basic. Everything about Easter’s ascent told him basic couldn’t touch him, and yet basic just dropped him near effortlessly, Easter’s feet a tangled then splayed mess. Do notice how unaffected Garcia was by the act of dropping Easter – he’d said the right things in the leadup and promised Easter was a fellow champ, not a bend in the road, but Garcia’s prerehearsed postfight plans belied most of that.

Round 9 Easter bloodied Garcia’s nose by fighting deep inside but the tactic pained and exhausted Easter while energizing Garcia, and Easter smartly cancelled it for what nine minutes remained. When the results were announced Easter wore what placidity of countenance told most of this story; he stayed buoyant in case his handlers made good on implications he was the money fighter, the future, and anything close should go his way, but relief washed over it all when the result was just and he could relax.

Which is a way of writing none of this is Robert Easter’s fault and shouldn’t be held against him or his other Band Campers who are good athletes doing what any of us might. It’s hard to imagine there being impetus or skill enough to overhaul Easter’s flaws – Kevin Cunningham, after all, never repaired any part in Devon Alexander’s jab and telegraphed delivery – and so there’ll be roundrobins and such between prospects and “the youngest lightweight champion in PBC history” (or however else they market Easter), but whatever greatness Easter attains will be of the sterile, PBC sort, safe and gainful paydays under an unacknowledged ceiling above which actually historic things happen.

Those things might elude Garcia as they have thus far, and it scares Garcia more than Errol Spence does, evidently. Why else suggest Spence afterwards? No one asked for the fight. It makes little sense for either man. A Spence victory makes Errol look like another cherrypicker bully. A Garcia victory, highly unlikely, takes years off Garcia’s career.

Maybe that’s what Mikey’s after. He’s incredibly good at something he’s a little reluctant to do – frankly, challenging Spence is the act of a man who simply has had it with hearing from familiars: “If only I’d have had your talent . . .”

It’s not a cash-out but a legacy-out, a way to preclude what demonic what-ifs keep preternatural-in-their-prime men like Roy Jones still collecting headshots decades later. Better to reach one’s limits whilst feeling limitless than after, better to mark the boundaries of your talent, set your arms in a W and start doing more seriously things you’d rather be doing.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday in Moscow undefeated Ukrainian Oleksandr Usyk became the first unified cruiserweight champion of the world since Evander Holyfield, pitching a 12-round no-hitter against Russia’s Murat Gassiev to win the inaugural season of the World Boxing Super Series. Usyk decisioned Gassiev so lopsidedly not one round went unanimously the Russian’s way. It was a remarkable conclusion to a remarkable run in no way diminished by Americans’ having to watch it on a YouTube stream from Turkey.

Usyk’s was a wonderful performance in consequential of a match as we’ve had in years. What Usyk betrayed through nearly every moment of 36 minutes and Gassiev failed to disrupt more than a pair of times was comfort. There’s an equation of sorts for how a stalking powerpuncher attritions a clever boxer, and it relies mostly on fatigue begotten by discomfiting. If Usyk’s jab and movement looked nervy anxious in Saturday’s opening two minutes they looked strategic gorgeous in the closing round, and the importantest part: They looked nearly the same all through the 32 minutes separating those.

Gassiev may not have landed a single clean shot the entire fight and certainly nothing Usyk didn’t see en route; Gassiev’s few noteworthy blows went through Usyk’s southpaw guard and touched Usyk’s gloves and arms before touching his head.

There was subtlety and awkward wonderment in what Usyk did, and if it was missed by many Americans for the match’s inaccessibility, well, let’s correct what of that we might.

No matter how the opening 2:50 of most rounds went, and most especially the especially consequential middle rounds – when Gassiev had to take anything he learned watching Usyk for five six seven frames and apply his rebuttal – Usyk found a way to punctuate doubt in Gassiev’s mind as the round closed. A wellplaced right uppercut, 5, or uppercut-hook, 6-3, didn’t so much hurt Gassiev as tell him: “I can hit you anytime with anything I want, and I beseech you remember that as your trainer whispers sour nothings in your ear for the next minute.”

Gassiev didn’t get angry, he’s too good and unattached for that, but he got verily discouraged in those pivotal rounds when he expected to begin striking Usyk properly. He trudged cornerwards while Usyk strolled.

And who was there to greet Gassiev when he arrived?

Why, none other than Abel “Plan A” Sanchez, the architect of Mexican Style, a form of prizefighting not one of Mexico’s five greatest prizefighters would recognize. Sanchez’s fighting philosophy appears to rely on, well, not head movement or innovative defense but perhaps initiative – a Sanchez fighter must want to hurt the other man more and oftener, and then everything else sort of works out? To carry such initiative, such enduring and quicksummoned rage, through 36 minutes, is nigh impossible, so a Sanchez fighter must be well-conditioned and attrition his man well before the championship rounds. He must hurt his opponent with every landed punch, and this works because, at the championship level, surely even the least-creative attack must find some purchase sometime in 2,160 seconds of opportunity.

Except Saturday.

In Moscow the Sanchez tactical vision for Gassiev reduced to: Go punch that guy.

Usyk obviously knew what Gassiev would do a third of a second or more before Gassiev did and a halfsecond or more before Gassiev started to do it. If it were a football game Saturday’s fight would evince a stolen playbook; stolen signals, were it a baseball game. Since it’s a fight, though, and there are only so many punches and ways of throwing them, there’s no conspiracy – the verb “to outclass” suffices.

Gassiev recognized it, applauding for Usyk through the reading of the scorecards, but since it might be less apparent to aficionados treated since 2012 to what gullibility has marked Mexican Style’s reception, let’s set the hands unmistakably upon the clock: Usyk outclassed Sanchez at least as much as he outclassed Gassiev.

This was no aberration, either – and a replica preview of how Gennady Golovkin would fare against Billy Joe Saunders, were GGG’s handlers careless enough to make that match (unlikely: Saunders is an actual middleweight).

Usyk is a weird and wonderful gentleman pugilist, dancing ever elegantly to a ballet of his own conjuring. He is physically enormous; let not the title cruiserweight mislead you. And howsoever lightly he appeared to hit Gassiev he is mighty and unwilling to be moved or bullied about the ring. While there’s no doubting Gassiev had power enough to affect Usyk painfully in the first eight rounds of the match – hence Usyk’s abiding vigilance – there’s neither doubting Usyk’s resilience and power of resistance. Out of ideas by round 3 Gassiev’d’ve shoved Usyk where he could were he not routinely chastened by Usyk’s lefthand. Usyk didn’t (doesn’t) hit hard as Gassiev but he sure as hell hit hard enough to dissuade Gassiev.

With frustration came fatigue and with fatigue went Gassiev’s initiative. Even had Gassiev found a way to surprise Usyk after the ninth round nothing about the result’d’ve changed – Gassiev alternately winged wildness or tentatively threw darts, and if Usyk was far too seasoned to be caught by Gassiev’s windups his chin was also far too low to be destabilized by anything less than a combination, and Gassiev threw nary one of those #MexicanStyle.

Let’s close with a few words of gratitude. Thank goodness for the Turks on Saturday. Tivibu Spor, a 24/7 sports unit of Istanbul’s TTNET, delivered for aficionados where no American broadcaster bothered. Much of Saturday’s undercard and every second of its main event happened on Tivibu Spor’s YouTube channel, crisply, cleanly and legally. No logons, no credit cards, no monthly fees, no popups or pirating – just live boxing with commentary blessedly outside our comprehension. One of the talkers was wild for Gassiev, shouting crazily the three times Gassiev threatened Usyk, but otherwise it was a flawless broadcast.

Bart Barry uzerinden ulasilabilir Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday on the ESPN+ app Filipino Manny Pacquiao smelted Argentine welterweight titlist Lucas Matthysse in Malaysia. Saturday on no app whatever undefeated Russian cruiserweight Murat Gassiev will fight undefeated Ukrainian cruiserweight Oleksandr Usyk in Moscow to unify their division. If the latter’s lack of an American broadcaster is bizarre, the former’s broadcaster was indeed apropos.

A temptation at times like these is to hedge one’s SportsCenterish prepositional phrase. Y’all know the drill: “in recent memory” is the way you take credit for boldness one word before you walk things back with a comma. Not today. After Saturday’s 25-minute comain of commercials, junior-dev graphics and overwrought pontification, it’s time someone other than an ESPN employee asserts what so many of us feel.

Manny Pacquiao’s comeback tilt in Kuala Lumpur was the greatest ESPN+ fight in history.

Before its cancellation some years back ESPN’s “Friday Night Fights” consistently presented the weakest boxing on television, the sort of underbudgeted slop advertisers and reputable promoters skirred. Far from appearing on FNF himself Pacquiao wouldn’t consider permitting towelboy Buboy to chiefsecond even Manila minimumweights on the program. Yet here we are in 2018 and Pacquiao’s now fighting on the smartphone equivalent of FridayNightFights.com.

A word or two about that, actually. What the hell are commercials doing on a paid stream? Having charged us $5/month ESPN gave us at least a halfhour of commercials during its otherwise-inexplicable 150-minute prefight Pacquiao promotion, and had its commentary crew act like nothing was the matter. “Two revenue streams!” some pitchman inevitably proclaimed, but that’s all sorts of wrong because most Saturday viewers were on a free trial and won’t be renewing after the three hours of their lives they just gave ESPN+ for seven rounds of desired boxing. “But wait,” they say, “there are all those Muhammad Ali fights that come with your subscription!” – like either they don’t know about YouTube or figure we don’t.

Almost a decade ago one of promoter Top Rank’s leaders talked about a concept he called “brand of boxing” – encouraging his peers to imagine their sport as an ecosystem whose general health be far more important than any one of their events. Today an American aficionado spends monthly $25 for basic cable (ESPN), $10-$15 for Showtime, $5 for ESPN+ and soon $10-$20 for DAZN – and that $50-$65 monthly bill assumes both a savvy cordcutting bent for our aficionado and his cancellation of HBO some time ago. But here’s the brand-of-boxing punchline: That kind of money spent the first week of July, our aficionado looks forward to the year’s best fight this Saturday and finds to his amazement somehow not one of these sundry pay services is televising Murat Gassiev vs. Oleksandr Usyk to crown the rarest thing in our beloved sport – an undefeated, undisputed, unified champion of the world.

A word or two about that, too, actually. Gassiev-Usyk is a fascinating cruiserweight culmination of World Boxing Super Series’ inaugural season. Former Golden Boy Promotions CEO Richard Schaefer is associated with the WBSS and repulsive. There’s no history needed to make that assertion; if we, as men, were taught to trust our intuition the way mothers do, we’d all have heeded our genuine first impressions of Schaefer 14 years ago. But while Schaefer once combined visibility and repulsiveness in a unique way he’s not otherwise repulsively unique and definitely not repulsive enough to keep us from enjoying what exceptional cruiserweight matches WBSS gave us in its semifinal round. But Schaefer or somebody affiliated with him appears to have repulsed American broadcasters sufficiently to keep Gassiev-Usyk off even our smartphones.

Which makes brand-of-boxing, for the next week at least, toxic.

Writing of which, how about that Lucas Matthysse? We already knew power punchers kept prizefighting’s frailest psyches, but Matthysse’s comportment these last few years makes one consider the symmetrical possibility a boxer’s mental hardiness is inversely proportionate to his punching power.

Five years ago while writing The Ring cover story mentioned on Saturday’s broadcast I came across an exquisite Argentine boxing writer named Osvaldo Príncipi whose Spanish prose and presence make him something like South America’s Hugh McIlvaney. During our correspondence he attributed a whole lot of things like Mathysse’s tattoos to a divorce. I felt for Matthysse then; by all accounts the guy does little in his life but love his daughter, play with his dogs, avoid the media and fight.

Saturday’s second knockdown, though, is hard to excuse. It’s one thing to realize you’re in over your head and race towards unconsciousness, but it’s something else entirely to court it so wishfully – to hope a punch cuts the lights, find it didn’t, then in full consciousness genuflect to your opponent. Let’s move on.

Saturday’s iteration of Manny Pacquiao was a pleasant return to what belligerence once endeared him to so many of us. A return to the man who dealt swiftly and disproportionately with anyone who caused him a sting, a man who didn’t collect grievances or connive but rather sought instant redress – that’s who we saw go after Matthysse each of the three times the Argentine did something offensive to Pacquiao. And it was electrifying.

So Pacquiao fights on. One can’t seriously entertain the possibility GGG is a great middleweight – hard stop – and begrudge Pacquiao three or four farewell tours against career 140-pounders like Matthysse or a talented lightweight like Vasyl Lomachenko. In fact, Pacquiao-Lomachenko in Helsinki might make a great Christmas present for ESPN+ subscribers.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

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By Bart Barry-

Editor’s note: A year ago, bereft of ideas for his weekly column, Bart Barry interviewed himself again about the state of the craft. That went so well, we asked him to do it this week.

BB: Looking better, kid.

BB: It’s the fasting.

BB: Really?

BB: Doubtful.

BB: Yet it persists.

BB: Fasting, Kundalini, cold showers – they’re all of a piece, wethinks. Something gets read about these things’ benefits so they get tried suffered through. Month laters their effect be nighnil, but by now it’s a question of discipline or will.

BB: Fasting –

BB: Breaks up the monotony. Not eating on Mondays or Thursdays makes the week compelling. Half of two days spent under the illusion a bite of food can solve every problem. Their successors followed by ambivalence.

BB: This solved nothing, and it’s wonderful to be free to eat again?

BB: Yes!

BB: No more boxing gym.

BB: Not for quite a while. Miss it not slightly.

BB: What do you miss the least?

BB: The heat the heat. San Fernando that damn heater.

BB: Barbaric.

BB: Fighters make weight, they don’t lose it. Look at Duran.

BB: Is he the purest manifestation of –

BB: Yes.

BB: How goes the craft?

BB: Easier.

BB: Because the quality of subject improved?

BB: Not noticeably but maybe.

BB: Then it’s a venue change?

BB: Not a change of venue but venues changing. As this city grows denser there’s less space less time that makes everyone tenser. Even in the South Texas heat there seem more heels tapping more nervousness more suspense less time less space.

BB: That helps the writing?

BB: Helps the boredom.

BB: When did boredom surpass wordlessness as top concern?

BB: One doesn’t mark these things but it must’ve been when we started writing the column at coffeeshops instead of using them as rewards for having written the column. You write in a hermetically sealed space when you’re afraid you’ll stop because you can’t fill the blank page.

BB: Now it’s a matter of its being unamusing?

BB: But it is exactly amusing. Sunday trips to the coffee shop are the weeks’ best parts that are predictable.

BB: Who excites you the most right now?

BB: David Benavidez.

BB: Why?

BB: There’s something perishable there. An originality, too. I didn’t realize how much I liked him till you asked.

BB: Is it a Phoenix thing?

BB: No nostalgia. In a dozen years there never felt a Phoenix thing – not in the way there’s a San Antonio thing or a Silicon Valley thing or a Boston thing.

BB: When you think of Phoenix boxing, Arizona boxing even, you think of Benavidez?

BB: No. I think of Norm, I think of Desert Diamond Casino, I think of the late Don Smith.

BB: Lately.

BB: February I sat next to him in Corpus.

BB: You conflate him with the Colorado matchmaker?

BB: Invest each with the other. Was a Top Rank card – Zurdo Ramirez. We didn’t recognize each other till we started talking about Norm and the Brothers Benavidez, Jose on the undercard. There’s a guy down here with a local chapter of Veterans for Peace, reminds me of both Don Smiths.

BB: A name you say like a single word.

BB: Like an alias.

BB: Excited about GolovCanelo 2?

BB: No.

BB: Should be a good fight.

BB: Yup. Don’t care about either guy. Both good men. Professionals. Talented. All that. No sense of character with either of them. Their first fight was two good fighters making a good fight.

BB: The fight wasn’t great. They aren’t great.

BB: It feels business cycle more than boxing cycle. We’ve got a redhead Mexican can fight a bit. HBO loves the Soviet Bloc. Golden Boy needs money. Golovkin can’t be the second coming of Hagler till he beats his Hearns. The fight has to be made because it can’t be made. Before anyone can settle into addressing how historically average both guys are we get keelhauled with revenue projections.

BB: And that’s the story.

BB: It’s a reflexive trick sort of halfassed bullying: You don’t know what you’re talking about because look at how much money it’ll make!

BB: What’s the rebuttal to that?

BB: There isn’t one because it’s a different conversation. The person who makes that argument doesn’t want the original conversation or wasting cycles to persuade you or you him.

BB: You wrestle him back?

BB: Nah. He has the energy. You sidle away. What’s the difference?

BB: What are we reading?

BB: Mitochondria.

BB: Why?

BB: No idea.

BB: Here’s a go. There’s a theory out there mitochondria was a predatory bacterium that eventually found symbiosis with a eukaryote, and cancer is a reversion by mitochondria to its original predatory state –

BB: And since Mom just passed away from cancer –

BB: This is a tribute of sorts.

BB: But it isn’t, really, not even a weak one.

BB: Then why do it?

BB: This week?

BB: Aside from calendar, boxing or general.

BB: It goes back to “Las Meninas” by Velazquez, painted, as you know, 41 years after Cervantes writes the second volume of “Don Quijote” in the same city. Cervantes has his fictional characters reading about themselves. Then Velazquez paints himself painting himself. Both do it a little messily, with irony.

BB: In the sense of not-sanitized?

BB: Cervantes is satirizing imposters. Velazquez pretends to be just painting something, that you later discover is a portrait of some royal couple, that you later discover isn’t that at all. The technical mastery is obvious and beside the point.

BB: This is neither.

BB: Neither, yes. This isn’t even Picasso cynically looping and looping till you’re so confused he must be a genius.

BB: Then do it for the ease.

BB: Easier than mailing-in a preview of a Pacquiao fight you don’t honestly care about.

BB: And because of Vermeer.

BB: You determined to make this a two-parter?

BB: If you are.

BB: Across the room from the wood-mounted print of “Las Meninas” is a wood-mounted print of “The Art of Painting” – as you know.

BB: Again.

BB: It’s the crown-thingy on the model’s head. Notice the artist is painting it differently on the canvas than Vermeer painted it on his canvas.

BB: Because of the angle of the artist’s painting.

BB: A tie-in with what Velazquez and Cervantes are up to. Vermeer is painting himself painting a model differently from how Vermeer is painting that same model.

BB: You don’t see any of this in boxing?

BB: Almost. Sometimes. Nearly. Chocolatito hanging the jab near his opponent’s right shoulder so his opponent’s counter, a right cross naturally, bangs his shoulder into Chocolatito’s glove, which bangs into his opponent’s chin.

BB: Punching himself for trying to punch Chocolatito, or Vazquez pinning –

BB: Yes, kinda, Vazquez pinning Marquez’s right arm to Vazquez’s left shoulder to pull Marquez into a right uppercut. Mijares making an opponent miss so wildly so often he injures his shoulder. Marciano and Valero punching their opponents’ arms. Rigondeaux rehearsing a combination, in full, before he throws it.

BB: What about Lomachenko?

BB: He has the timing and space to do it, but where’s the irony? He’s sensational. Technically transcendent. But he’s like what happens in the middle of Vermeer’s studio, where he’s got easel legs and chair legs and the artist’s legs and tiles all juxtaposing so successfully you have to believe him, and know you couldn’t pull it off, and suspect no one else could either.

BB: But is it joyful?

BB: But is it joyful.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday on ESPN in Oklahoma City junior welterweight Alex “El Cholo” Saucedo made an adopted-homecoming match against Australian Leonardo “Lenny Z” Zappavigna thrilling in the moment as it was disappointing for Saucedo’s future. Saucedo ultimately prevailed when Zappavigna, blinded by his own blood, got rescued by his corner. Within an hour of the match’s conclusion Zappavigna retired from prizefighting.

Alex Saucedo, meanwhile, is now upon a plateau, or perhaps beneath it. He is not what promoter Top Rank thought he was or hoped he’d become.

The first time I interviewed Bob Arum, 13 years ago, I asked him what was the most important quality a fighter might have. Arum answered in the form of a question: “Does he dissipate between fights?” It does not appear Saucedo does (Juanma Lopez, conversely, was a worldclass dissipator).

If it is essential to Top Rank one of its fighters not forfeit quality when he is not fighting one can easily infer it is doubly better when a fighter gains quality in that same unsupervised stretch. This brings a second, if unspoken, prong to the Top Rank development program: Can we work with his trainer?

Top Rank’s matchmaking staff, best in class, is not particularly fond of the we-grow-together, entrepreneurial-dad model whereby a fighter’s father or fatherfigure acts as chief second during junior’s ascent. Trainer dads be tolerated so long as junior progresses on Top Rank’s aggressive schedule, but once a fighter falls offpace Top Rank is not timid about recommending the pursuit of a new trainer in a new city.

The first time I was ringside for a Saucedo fight, El Cholo’s pro debut on a Son of the Legend undercard in Houston, 2011, hopes were high for the lanky 17-year-old welterweight. Three months later hopes at ringside were even higher in San Antonio for Saucedo’s second professional match. Four months after that in El Paso hopes were still climbing, albeit at a slightly reduced rate. Saucedo’s first year as a prizefighter concluded in Houston on the undercard of Nonito Donaire’s soulsnatching Jorge Arce. Saucedo was by then 7-0 (5 KOs), but the two matches that were not KOs brought some concern given the opponents involved. A pair of matches back in Oklahoma preceded a return to South Texas: Laredo, Corpus Christi, Laredo. Which preceded a return to Alamodome, another Son of the Legend undercard, and openly expressed concerns about Saucedo’s development.

Saucedo costarred on Donaire’s HBO card at the end of 2012 but was an afterthought 16 months later.

“You know any good trainers in Oklahoma?” went one insider’s reply when I mentioned at ringside Saucedo was not where we thought he’d be 13 prizefights in.

I found the mood dispirited enough to stop following closely Alex Saucedo much the same way I stopped following closely Jose Benavidez, who in his third career fight, as part of Pacquiao-Clottey weekend, looked every bit promising in 2010 as Saucedo did 20 months later.

After Saucedo failed to score a knockout in 2016 against three men whose résumés indicated an ability if not a willingness to be stretched a new trainer and region got summoned for Saucedo. Abel “Mexican Style” Sanchez, the great beneficiary of HBO’s manufacture of Gennady Golovkin, became Saucedo’s chief second and evidently decided Saucedo, born in Chihuahua, wasn’t Mexican Style enough and needed a Big Bear residency at the GGG School of Robotic Pursuit where Saucedo could learn at the master’s feet exactly how far a fighter can go with the right combination of careful matchmaking and no head movement.

Reliably enough Saucedo next went down a weightclass then went lunatico on Gustavo David Vittori, an Argentine who made his pro debut 10 pounds below Saucedo’s and didn’t get a chance to leave Argentina till the call came for a Saucedo sacrifice: KO-3. Four months later it was Abner Lopez’s turn: KO-7.

Which brought Saucedo loping to Saturday’s match with Lenny Z, a b-level trialhorse and a-level bleeder. Zappavigna, who made his pro debut as a lightweight, was 32-1 in his native Australia but 5-2 in the U.S., and looked the perfect opponent for Saucedo’s homecoming on ESPN, primetime, a proud man whose face came presliced.

And for most of the match’s opening, things followed their script: El Cholo attacked without too much variety, Lenny Z swelled and readied to bleed. Then round 4 opened and Zappavigna decided to stop pretending he didn’t notice Saucedo’s head remained ever stationary. Zappavigna tagged Saucedo with righthands enough to realize Saucedo wasn’t open to them because he wanted to be but because he hadn’t the defense to have a choice. Then Lenny Z caught Saucedo going Mexican Style with a left hook, and clocked him.

Saucedo stumbled backwards to taste a lefthand hungrily as he’d eaten what right preceded it. Zappavigna went after Saucedo and in so doing showed Mexican Style comes unadorned with footwork or infighting. (Confirmed, not showed, actually; Canelo Alvarez showed this the world last September, no?)

How this was the round of the year in the fight of the year is anyone’s guess. Zappavigna beat Saucedo all round the ring for three minutes and bled profusely from the mere exertion of it. Saucedo bled, too, but did little more than that and survive Zappavigna’s relentless attack.

From there Zappavigna’s face did as it was contracted to do, spilling open and gushing everywhere, until Saucedo did exactly what an undefeated prospect in his 28th prizefight is supposed to do with a retiring journeyman – pillowface his every initiative till a handler flies the pink towel.

Saturday’s match was good and hard but won’t make anyone’s Top 5 list by year’s end, and neither, frankly, will Alex Saucedo at 140 pounds. That’s an endorsement neither of his talent nor his new trainer.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

This is not a trigger warning but a preamble. What follows is a consideration of fantastic writing about men, the sort of writing we aspire to do while treating our beloved sport, that happens to be written by a gay man about gay men. This column will attend neither to prurience nor politics. Rather it’s a coincidental product of a Monday falling within LGBT Pride Month after a weekend I spent reading fiction more than watching boxing.

This space once was about writing much as it was about boxing. Though it had floated away from most concerns about description by the time it began in 2005, its author nevertheless fancied himself quite good at description when called upon, since like most writers, his ability to describe objects better than others do was what first got him recognized by a teacher (in this case, Ms. White, fourth grade).

The move away from descriptive writing was not conscious, quite, but happened via a definitely conscious choice to avoid “writing” in the meretricious sense of the term, to avoid those squeamish points in all forms of literature when an author suspends subject to go on a look-at-me-I’m-writing! riff. If memory, unreliable as ever, manages to serve, the move away from descriptive writing happened in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, 2002, when a visit to a writers club found a bunch of selfcelebrating folks rarely bothering themselves with the unglamorous toil of writing while unrarely sharing brief moments of inspiration that sparked “writing”.

If this reads like an oddly hesitant preamble perhaps it is born of nervousness about treating what follows justly. Well, anyway, off we go:

“. . . as I waited, and looked around at the dozens of bodies, squatting, lying, straining, muscles sliding to the surface in thick-veined upper arms, shoulders bending and pumping, the sturdiness of legs under pressure, the dark stains on singlets that adhered to the sweating channel of the back, the barely perceptible swing of cocks and balls in shorts and track-suits, with, permeating it all, the clank and thud of weights and the rank underarm essence of effort.”

I read that about a month ago and decided I’d not read before the male body or a collection of male bodies so aptly described. That passage happens about 50 pages in to Alan Hollinghurst’s masterfully executed novel “The Swimming-Pool Library”, a firstperson account of a young gay man in London in the early 1980s, remarkable for its profiles and voice and its numerous descriptions like what’s above. What makes these descriptions remarkable is their departure from the way men’s bodies generally get described by straight authors, both male and female.

Straight men describe other men’s bodies like sanitized, actiontaking machines – on the rare occasion a muscle ripples it does so to cause an act: the shoulder vibrated as his left glove struck the opponent’s ribs. Straight women do something similar, though describe qualities of masculinity that are physical mostly by coincidence:

“Mr. Darcy soon drew the attention of the room by his fine, tall person, handsome features, noble mien, and the report which was in general circulation within five minutes after his entrance, of his having ten thousand a year.”

Contrast that with what Hollinghurst does. He sees and smells and hears men in a way crossed between a predator and a food critic.

Would it help our descriptions of prizefighters in the act of prizefighting if we saw them through a lens of sexual attraction? Quite possibly. It would sate, too, any writer’s search for originality. But there is, of course, the rub: Such things are not easily faked since most pathways to forgery betray their takers – you can imagine your favorite fighter is a woman and describe him thusly but imagining him treating you like a woman is another leap entirely, and unless you have both you’re not fooling any careful readers or even careless readers’ intuitions.

Good news. There is some boxing in “The Swimming-Pool Library” to leaven this Pride-month celebration of fine description. Hollinghurst’s narrator attends a night of youth boxing and offers it his often irreverent voice:

“One trio of teenage stylists bawled their encouragement while grinning and chewing, selfconscious, acting manly, caring and not caring.”

and

“After brief deliberations between the ref and the officious, serious judges (this was their life, after all) the unanimous decision was announced.”

and

“The mood here also was one of pure sportsmanship, of candid bustle, like a chorus dressing room.”

There is one more element to this novel, a historical one, that recommends it. Lost in the recent events of European marriage-equality referendums and an American Supreme Court decision is the matter of 16th-century British sodomy laws (inherited round the world) and their successors and their arbitrary and generally cruel enforcement in our lifetimes. In a few episodes Hollinghurst shows how very easily it was to be entrapped and sentenced to jail time for a man who pursued, if he did not consummate, a sexual relationship with another man. Undoubtedly this charged the exciting act of seduction with danger’s energy right up till the moment it didn’t, when, with a thud, a man’s hormonally induced sense of invincibility disbelievingly crashed into disbelief.

And of course no irony is lost on Hollinghurst: How very much serendipitous companionship awaited a gay man sent to prison for gay acts. Or is this merely an empathy offramp taken by a straightmale reader – some way to dull what a profound sense of injustice sometimes happens in us?

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry