By Bart Barry-

Early Sunday morning on ESPN2 a fight for a middleweight title of some sort featured Japan’s Ryota Murata and Franco-Cameroonian Hassan N’Dam in a rematch of N’Dam’s evidently damnable decision victory over Murata in May. This match was another installment of promoter Top Rank’s fledgling union with ESPN, and if the union’s premier match, Manny Pacquiao versus Jeff Horn, happened on a Saturday during primetime, Murata-N’Dam’s happening on a Sunday during predawn felt right, too, when N’Dam and/or his corner surrendered to Murata’s mechanical attack just before round 8 could begin.

As sports and the shortsighted greed of their managers get moved by television from entertaining contests to mere entertainment assets – some combination of superhero movies and reality-television series, something increasingly interchangeable with professional wrestling – obedience to narrative becomes important as authenticity of spectacle. Murata seems to be wrapped in a narrative driven by promotional desires to monetize what Pan-Asian interest Manny Pacquiao catalyzed.

The opening three rounds of Sunday morning’s contest, as an example, saw him confront N’Dam’s ineffective aggressiveness with what one might call effective inaggressiveness, doing not particularly much while preventing particularly much from being done to him. Somehow those rounds were supposed to be autoawarded to Murata, with the chastening and rare event of a twojudge suspension after the first N’Dam-Murata fight ensuring no close round should go to anyone but Murata. Well, OK.

What professional wrestling began – and, lo, there are plenty of us still alive who remember serious debate about whether those results were rigged – and professional basketball followed is now a growing part of professional football and hockey. While the timing and nature of NBA foul calls have been suspect for at least 25 years, the NFL’s and NHL’s separate pursuits of suspenseful endings now court a similar disbelief in their fanbases, a disbelief deliciously undermined by the use of instant replay.

At least a halfdozen infractions occur away from the ball on every single down of a football game. Only the most egregious get called in the first two or three quarters of games. Forever this has served the continuity and flow of the game; if you call every infraction you turn football into fútbol, with its comely diving and unmanly theatrics, and nobody wants that. But now it serves an additional and different purpose: Increasing the number of choices an intentional official has for intervention in games’ decisive plays by increasing the probability more fouls are committed by players whose transgressions have gone unnoticed for most of the game (and most of the history of the game).

Fans react with indignity if yellow flags begin to fly on nearly every play of the final two minutes of close or closing games, but then a telecast can helpfully switch to a plethora of camera angles and replays to prove that, yes, the defensive end did in fact contact the tightend’s jersey for a twosecond or so, and since rules are rules no matter how much it hurts to admit – defensive holding! Since no replays are available for the other dozen times the same thing happened in the first half, uncalled, and since suspense is necessarily high, we’re told it was a mental error by the penalized player, understandable if intolerable, and we accept it as a tariff charged us for having one unbelievable finish after another unbelievable finish after another unbelievable finish, to include the most unbelievable comeback in Super Bowl history.

And that word and its many pronunciations, UN-believable / unbeLIEVable / Un. Be. Liev-able, and its durability, may just be more than what witlessness jocks-cum-commentators generate across the universe of athletics. Perhaps the commentators are selected by name and excitability, but the fans aren’t, or at least not exclusively so – lots of intelligent people watch football and hockey and basketball and tolerate the soundtrack of unbelievables because the word fits well how their collective subconscious reacts to most of those unbelievable plays and outcomes. They are in fact not believable.

Boxing and baseball, for being caught rigging results at least a halfcentury before other sports got in on it, have relied more on narrative and performance-enhancing drugs for their ratings this era. Creative nonfiction, though, can only be so creative before it becomes fiction. Much of HBO’s 24/7 series tightroped its way through this for 10 years, planning spontaneity and scripting improvisation, while Showtime’s (Emmy-winning) All Access novelas with Floyd Mayweather captured the surreality of Money’s lifestyle by being themselves surreal. A comparatively tiny few of us criticized this conversion of bloodsport to infomercial, and journalism to entertainment vehicle, while industries far and wide fixated on what effective marketing this brand of storytelling happened to make, until it became so pervasive th’t today one feels like a prig for making a point of its deep inauthenticity (in his madcap scramble for 1,000 weekly words).

That same creeping sort of feeling happened Sunday morning as Murata knuckleraked N’Dam’s brainstem and pistonstroked his chin to an unsatisfying corner stoppage: This guy isn’t that good, is he, and nowhere near what they’re telling me he is. Since ESPN’s lead boxing commentator pledges fealty to none but the voices in his own head, one suspects the Murata manufacture will go more Shimingly than Golovkinly, as it were; Teddy means a hell of a lot less to ESPN than Jim and Max and Roy mean to HBO, and he’s accordingly more apt to betray his network’s prewritten narrative.

Such is the risk Top Rank took when it departed its symbiotic if suddenly miserly HBO host for a network that broadcasts Top Rank stars as time allows (Sunday morning at 7:15 during football season). Still, Top Rank and Murata are wise to take this finagled timeslot on a new network – especially when one considers how Murata’d likely fare against HBO’s GGG, Canelo or Miracle Man.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Editor’s note: For part 14, please click here.
AUSTIN, Texas – We’ll get to the meat of this column quickly, but first a goodfaith effort to tie loosely what follows to prizefighting, specifically prizefighting broadcasted by Showtime. Long before PBC and the Brothers Charlo – and if you’re now suddenly interested in the latter after Saturday’s showing, read Kelsey McCarson, who’s been keeping well the Charlo beat longer than anyone – Showtime was HBO’s scruffy cousin, in budget, and HBO’s superior, in quality.

Back then, too, this current mess of a column was blueprinted with a T-square on a draftingboard the night before it got written, and often with a background audiotrack of whatever came on Showtime after boxing. One time 10 years ago that background audio featured a guy walking in a dark New York alleyway and talking about why standup comedy only works in places it is terrible to live – the opening of Doug Stanhope’s Showtime special.

Today there are nearly a myriad of talented comedians, and thanks to Netflix, podcasts and other such services, comedians are accessible as they’ve been – Burnham, Burr, Chappelle, CK, Holcomb, O’Neal, Rock, White, to name personal favorites in alphabetical order – but only one has yet struck me as a genius of the form, as a performer original enough to fail for long stretches at a time before hitting so cleanly you find yourself alone in a room, and subsequently impervious to what the late Patrice O’Neal called laughter’s “contagious effect”, struggling for breath, eyes watering. That is, or perhaps was, Doug Stanhope, the end of whose “Beer Hall Putsch” is so caustic and original and layered one is awed by the man’s talent much as he’s offput by Stanhope’s vivid imagery.

Thus I drove for two hours the terrible stretch of I-35 from San Antonio to the capital, unrivaled west of the Mississippi for its aggressiveness, danger and misery, and stood two hours in the lungdamp heat and stench of an outdoor moshpit, Friday, to give thanks more than be entertained. Often as we’re told by cable news the political stakes have never been higher and our quadrennial vote is oh so essential, what’s been true in my lifetime is likely to remain so: Who you vote for every four years in the United States matters not nearly so much as what you do with your creditcard; your franchise is more reliably found in your wallet than any ballotbox.

Or so I believe. And so I reliably buy tickets for live performances expecting little more than a chance to offer anonymous gratitude. Stanhope is still magical but no longer miraculous, and it makes you wonder how much of the magic you now import as an audiencemember and how much of the magic he still exports from thin air.

Friday Stanhope introduced his opener, Jay Whitecotton, as a friend (and later proved it by addressing Whitecotton in the wings throughout the performance) with a short bit that felt more confession than stagecraft: I’ve been drinking since this morning, Stanhope said (or something close), but I just took some Adderall and I can feel it kicking in so I’m going to go review some notes and come out after Jay. There were a couple other references to Adderall and they were instructive for the reason much of Stanhope’s Friday show was more instructive than hilarious – process.

Stanhope’s bits are cobbled from handwritten notes on pink paper, or at least these were what he brought out and began to use after his closer didn’t punch, and they appear bulletpoints of an outline more than the sea of metered legalpad essays Jerry Seinfeld floats in his new Netflix special. Which comes as no surprise. The stakes for Seinfeld are multiples higher than they be for Stanhope. Seinfeld is as many times the professional comedian that Stanhope is as Stanhope is the artist that Seinfeld is. One man continues to build a comedic and financial legacy while the other maniacally pursues a single unforgettable experience. Seinfeld knows; Stanhope discovers.

Stanhope breaks script often, though one suspects less often when he’s off than on. There seemed less improvisation Friday by Stanhope for his being less confident in new material, commenting several times on the choppiness of his delivery and what poor timing he attributed to jetlag and the daily battle his body and mind host between depressants and stimulants.

A personal note about Stanhope’s use of Adderall: I’ve not tried Adderall but spent a fewmonths’ stretch writing under the influence of Modafinil, which promotes a similar sort of synthetic concentration under the auspices of wakefulness. I didn’t stop because of some trite dependency or moral pang; I stopped because it didn’t work in writing for the same reason it does work in Stanhope’s form of comedic improvisation: It takes you deeper in every thought like “thought, a thing one thinks, which is a thing the brain does, or maybe the mind, that collection of billions of selfinterested neurons none of which has interest in thinking but only electrical connectivity, a billion unthinking binary switches that somehow form a thought, whatever that is, like Daniel Dennett’s ‘competence without comprehension’, and don’t listen to neurologists either, that petty and selfaggrandizing lot, till they can zap a piece of fat to see an idea.”

That sort of directionless ferreting usually proves futile in writing, where it proves extraordinarily creative and funny when it meets Stanhope’s timing – a delivery perfected in the crucible of three decades’ stage performances – as he masterfully fills the second and a half his mind needs to burrow another level, with stuttering. But it also proves dark. And 30 years of deepening darkness can come to an unfunny place.

Stanhope knows this but commits to it, choosing his accommodations by one-star reviews, touring in filthy rental vans, reveling in selfdecimation, but also glancing routinely at a chemically dependent crowd that is ageing bitterly, many outpacing their favorite performer, while reflecting back at Stanhope something he no longer appears to find so energizing. Then there’s the internet and the President and just how leathery they’ve made audience sensibilities; robbed of the 1/3 of material touring comedians safely mined from the quarries of national political figures (Trump defies inventive satirizing), comedians have to find weirder social commentaries to make, but that, too, is difficult, since the web makes all intriguing local happenings global events eventually.

An hour with Stanhope previewed the ends of the craft as currently practiced.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Recently my Saturday hike saw a canine companion turn instantly from goldenfleeced cutie to predatory lightning bolt. Still more recently Netflix recommended a very good documentary – “Ice Guardians” – about professional hockey’s enforcers, the players whose tenures in the NHL begin and end with their readiness, willingness and ability to fight. As this remains a column nominally about fighting consider what follows a form of crosstraining, a means of sharpening one’s afición by mulling some ungloved acts of violence.

Kiwi is a three-year-old cocker-spaniel mix who weighs little over 20 pounds and swings widely and acutely between affection and surliness. He is a carnivore, of course, with a taste for Texas barbecue that approaches lunacy: He prefers his ribs dirty, covered in meat, and doesn’t clean them so much as masticate the entire organ – muscle, tendon, cartilage, bone, marrow. When he’s had roast beef he tends to take a small and fluffy blue whale toy and put in much work, throttling it with a series of rapid neck twists, smashing it to the carpet then throttling it some more. It’s not cute or menacing, quite.

The role of enforcer in the NHL is, according to enforcers, entirely distinct from the role of goon – a disparagement used in the game at most all levels for a player whose lack of skill forces him to choose brutality over aesthetic options like passing or shooting or defending cleanly. An enforcer creates a preventative tension on the opposing team’s bench, acting like an insurance policy for his team’s talentful players who subsequently maneuver with the freedom of knowing nothing untoward or particularly physical will befall them. To hear enforcers explain it, their menacing presences govern other teams’ wouldbe scofflaws more certainly than lesser deterrents like suspensions or fines or even lifetime bans do – those deterrents are abstractions, where the threat of a large man’s bare fist racing from your nose to hypothalamus is a deterrent that is objective.

Guadalupe River State Park sits 30 miles due north of San Antonio and has a main entrance used by hikers and campers and bikers and tubers, and a back entrance with a gate that allows hikers alone. The backentrance trail winds through woods and meadows before descending to a river overlook, and it’s nearly always empty enough for Kiwi to gambol without a leash.

There is no type of combat like hockey fighting. Begin with the idea of trying to gain purchase on a frictionless surface. If you punch your target without having a hold of him, physics’ equal and opposite force sends you impotently backwards at the decisive moment. What you have to do, then, is grab hold of his jersey with your lead fist and pull his chin into your jab while cocking your back fist for a blow most concussive you verily do not wish land on his helmet or faceshield. Of course, he’s trying to do the very same, and the trick is tricky enough to turn th’t the NHL sees very few knockouts, even while most every fight ends with a knockdown of some grappling sort. In the good old days, as it were, before fightstraps and other such accoutrements, the goal was to get your opponent’s jersey over his head, extending his arms involuntarily, the better to lash him savagely with right uppercuts. Prizefighting is sportsmanlike and orderly by comparison.

The small armadillo may have been lame or lost or merely careless when it caught Kiwi’s attention. Kiwi, who’d dashed and trotted through a couple miles of rugged Hill Country terrain by then, breathed heavily with his tongue out, the better to scoop air in his throat. Less than a second after the armadillo made some fateful sound I did not hear, Kiwi’s mouth was shut, his ears up, and he bounded off the trail. In a single, silent motion, he rammed the armadillo with the bridge of his snout and knob of his thickboned forehead, putting it on its side, diggerclaws frantically scrambling. Once Kiwi’s lower jaw got in the armadillo’s fleshy underside, the throttling commenced. The sight became natural and horrifying, naturally horrifying, horrifyingly natural.

The biggest surprise “Ice Guardians” holds for anyone who’s played the game at any level above peewee is the surprise its laity commentators describe at their discovery NHL enforcers are actually decent men who are preternaturally loyal to their teammates. Raised in a bubble of superhero flicks and prowrestling villains, one assumes, these professors and doctors imagined psychopathy alone might lead a man to make his living punching other men. It’s an irony initially lost on them a dispassionate psychopath might make the very worst sort of enforcer, detached as he’d be from his teammates’ suffering, hypothetical or actual; whatever their size or temperament, NHL enforcers are generally men empathetic to a fault.

Kiwi’s teeth acted like saws while his neck torqued infinities, one two, then smashed the flailing armadillo on the earth – the way he’d practiced his toy whale for three uneventfully domestic years. Then another ramming to put the armadillo bellyup and another throttle throttle smash. Three altogether till the armadillo’s vital red organs bubbled orange out its chest while its legs went from twitching to ticking, animation dwindled. The job finished in 15 seconds, Kiwi wandered off and left me to end the little creature’s suffering. When Kiwi returned to the armadillo’s warm carcass, having hungrily licked the blood from his teeth and gums, he gazed curiously from the armadillo to me like “What have you done, pal?”

There’s lots of beerdrinking in the NHL, even more in NHL lore, and one imagines nobody better to have a beer with than an NHL enforcer. A paragon of masculinity in a profession that cottons to nothing effeminate, the enforcer speaks softly if directly, laughs loudly and ensures everyone gets home safe. By the time he ascends to the NHL, the enforcer is capable of precise, professional violence – which lets some forget how he was selected years before to become an enforcer. In a sport of Irish tempers and irrational pride, the candidate enforcer showed a lower threshold to offense than his peers and a unique propensity for violence. And a strict adherence to the game’s code: A professional hockey player settles differences with the knuckles of his bare fist, not the lumber in his gloves or the razors on his feet.

By the time we got back to the car, a couple miles and 45 minutes later, Kiwi was bouncing and yipping like usual, tail wagging, licking my chin and panting, returned to his euphoric, playful self.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Editor’s note: For part 13, please click here.

*

CUSCO, Peru – The morning air is crisp here in the Andes, 11,000-foot-altitude crisp, and the sun is bright, 11,000-foot-altitude bright in a way whose rays the locals call “burning, not tanning” and the two cause a unique latemorning event in the small room of this bed and breakfast: The glass of the window is too hot to touch but opening it makes the room uncomfortably cold. That may be the only phenomenon the locals don’t cure with coca-leaf tea. And about that coca plant . . .

Shaking, no, shuddering: Not the way your hand moves after a third cup of coffee but how your body moves on a sudden chill, except not confined to a second or a minute or an afternoon – an involuntary shudder vibrating the body its length till the day divides itself as Nature did before we imposed clocks on Her, just meaningless darkness or meaningless light, no conscious associations. An unscheduled way to spend one’s last day in Peru, but the day after Montaña Machu Picchu’s ascent was scheduled for recuperation, though who knew so much freight might be loaded that word’s stanchions?

Ah coca, the magic miracle plant of Inca lore, potent more as an appetite suppressant and diuretic than anything registerable as a stimulant; it might get you up the mountain embracing absurdity but you don’t attribute it till a fifteenhour passes and a 2,000-foot ascent and (more harrowing) descent gives you nary a hungerspike nor even hunger enough to force down luxury rail fare and while you do wonder at it you figure fatigue reasonably overwhelms hunger till the next day. Sometime that afternoon you realize unwittingly imposing the coldest of turkeys on what now loudly declares itself a chemical dependency was unwise; it might be sunstroke from the descent – an afternoon Andean glare that dashes through SPF 30 like wet tissuepaper – or it might be foodpoisoning (did that alpaca steak taste gamey? compared to what?) but it almost has to be the “tea” you mixed to muddy with green hoja-de-coca dust from the convenience store and an enormous bottle of water with a tiny mouth into which you futilely windfunneled your green dust the night before the climb, a concoction so vile your limeña boothmate spent her ninetyminute beside you on the train from Ollantaytambo to Machu Picchu disbelieving and rhetorically asking if you’d complete your illadvised journey to bottlebottom.

Which you proudly stupidly did before resuming assault on your stunned belly with coca-toffee snacks perfect for suckling all the way up the mountain. Twenty-four hours to the quarterhour later the shuddering begins and does not subside for a thirtyhour till it expertly passes misery’s baton to dysentery’s fay cousin, who makes a host of you for a week.

Nothing recreational or edifying about the climb, either, friends. Thirty degrees unrelenting upwards on narrow ancient stones, every CrossFitter for the last hour telling you in Spanish or English or Dutch or German you are but a tenminute from a top you cannot see until you do and wish you didn’t – so high and steeply above you and covered in colorful North Face attire it resembles an Afghan fighter kite at full pench – then a sideways descent on cramped legs that shows you a sheerness of drop you missed going up, a vista that sets you to spidermanning boulders along the silent drumbeat of a mantra that goes: Legs soft like Bode’s!

A perfect time, evidently, to wonder at how much of language is but courtesy. All of grammar, as it happens. Look at that last fragment of a sentence. “Grammar” is the only word my mind needed to communicate the idea to itself; “all” was assumed since less than all would be more sensation than qualifier; prepositions like “as” and “of” serve purely diplomatic roles, softening and qualifying for another’s benefit; “it” is redundant; “happens” is stylistic fluff not even a frivolous mind would say to itself. In that light most editing reveals itself arbitrary as any other pursuit: You’re telling me you got the gist of things without the decorative prepositional phrase “as it happens” but I know I got my thought’s gist simply with “grammar” and so now we haggle to a compromise we assume acceptable to readers like us.

Lima is neither pretty nor pleasant – a Latin American capital in the harshest sense of the term. A desert with a coastline, dusty and trafficful, unfriendly to locals and visitors alike, still deeply scarred 25 years later. Taxistas and innkeepers, what talkative folks comprise the majority of any solo traveler’s conversations his first day in any city, get blankfaced and silent at first utterance of these unmistakable seven syllables: Sendero Luminoso. The ostensibly Maoist domestic terror organization that put Lima in a shoot-on-sight sundown curfew until its leader, Abimael Guzman, was captured and set in a cage for public viewing – its mention still snatches all animation from limeños’ faces.

When compared to other Latin American places there is an almost militaristic efficiency to Peruvians’ concept of time and its elasticity: Peru uses every hour of the day and night, planes land on the Jorge Chavez tarmac at 0200, trains depart their stations at 0400. But Peru also strikes a visitor as among Latin America’s most enduringly indigenous countries – from Peruvians’ appearances and dress to the successful preservation of Inca culture. Perhaps the Spaniards brought to the Americas more than what pestilence and durable brutality trumpeted their arrival; perhaps, contrary to centuries of Eurocentric scholarship, Spaniards also brought a cultural flimsiness Peru found resistible better than its neighbors did.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Thursday afternoon Andre Ward announced the conclusion of his excellent career. The retirement feels legitimate because Ward feels legitimate, ungiven to publicity stunts or publicity in general, and the reason he cited – an unwillingness to keep suffering – is a hard one to walk back later: “With my body now two years older, my desire to fight has returned in 2019.”

Ward joins Floyd Mayweather, whose third retirement, one hopes, is his final retirement, Juan Manuel Marquez, Wladimir Klitschko and Timothy Bradley, on a worldclass list of five prizefighters who retired this year.

What follows is a meandering, unstructured series of thoughts and runon sentences about the careers of these men as seen by one aficionado deeply interested in our beloved sport during their best years. This is no final word; even if such a thing existed this wouldn’t be a finalword piece because its author hasn’t the shoulders or stomach to bear the burden of a final assessment to the end of days.

First a clarifying hypothetical question (that I doubt I’ll answer myself as, the more I’ve considered it, the less certain I am, after beginning uncertainly): Pretending all five men didn’t just retire this year but also made their career’s final matches in 2017, only three would be eligible for Hall of Fame induction in 2022 – and so, which two shouldn’t get in? This question is wigglier than it looks. As a member of the Boxing Writers Association of America, which I am (just checked; I honestly didn’t remember if I’d remembered to pay this year’s dues), I am allowed to vote for all five guys – which precludes a hypothetical crisis of conscience. Too, Marquez announced his retirement this year but stopped fighting three years ago and will be on the ballot in 2019, and Bradley will be on the ballot, or should be, in 2021. The question, then, seeks a statistical prediction more than an aesthetic judgement: Not “who would you leave off your list?” so much as “who would mathematics exclude?”

Probably Ward and Bradley. Mayweather was one of the world’s two best fighters for most of an era. Klitschko was the heavyweight champion of the world for a goodish while. And Marquez has nearly as many career prizefights as Ward and Bradley combined. There’s an argument to be made Bradley doesn’t belong in this particular conversation, and fairplay to that, but as this is my meandering, unstructured series of thoughts, and as I have a general weakness for volume punchers and a specific weakness for a prizefighter honest and decent as Bradley, he’s in.

Fine, but after what Ward just did in his rematch with Kovalev, how dare you, sir?

Hold on there. It’s not me – I’d love to leave Klitschko off the list, truly I would – but you can’t fight as many times for a world heavyweight championship as Klitschko did and expect a majority of voters to overlook that because, and this is especially important when we judge recent made-by-television careers in lower weightclasses, the heavyweight champion is the one person in our sport who cannot scale weightclasses in search of better opposition. You can’t hold the heavyweight champion’s era against him if he fought all comers, and for the most part Klitschko did.

That’s not fair? No kidding. Neither is Klitschko’s being 11 inches and 100 pounds bigger than Marquez (before Juan Manuel dedicated himself to the sort of fitness regimen Wlad and brother Vitali followed since the amateurs).

This may be the only time pound-for-pound musings can be amusing: What sort of horror movie would a prime Marquez make with a 130-pound Klitschko?

Good one. Let’s play a touch more. Mayweather did not fight Marquez on terms even resembling even eight years ago but showed enough in their 36 minutes together to imagine 130-pound Mayweather beats the Marquez who snuffs shrunken Klitschko, at least seven times of 10. Prime Bradley sneaked past 40-year-old Marquez in 2013, but 130-pound Bradley probably wouldn’t win two rounds against 30-year-old Marquez. That leaves 130-pound Ward against 130-pound Marquez, and frankly, what a lovely fight!

I’ve chosen Marquez as the axle round which our circle twirls because Marquez is my favorite fighter who retired in 2017. He is also the man I’d least like to encounter in a dark alley. Again, while plenty of fighters I’ve interviewed have expressed a willingness to die in combat Marquez is the only one who’s given me a sense he’s willing to kill in the ring – and that’s neither hyperbole nor metaphor.

Back into the dark alley a bit. Second on that list would be Ward; I saw him sitting in an Oakland hotel lobby the night before he cuberooted Chad Dawson (Ward’s defining fight, along with his manhandling of Mikkel Kessler, till the Kovalev rematch), and dude’s eyes were dead as a mako shark’s. Mayweather’s third on the darkalley test because he’s a bully at heart, and things’d get intentional and sadistic right quick with a man whose temperament and skills could leave a disgusting mess. One doesn’t get the sense either Klitschko or Bradley has been in a dark alley or’d have much interest in fighting there; Bradley’d hit you a couple times then tell you to chill out, and Klitschko’d keep jabbing and bounding backwards till he ran out of alley or the cops showed up.

What Hall of Fame induction actually means to boxers is anyone’s guess; I’ve heard lots of young gymrats want to be champions but never heard one want to be a Hall of Famer – halls of fame have a definite meaning in teamsports they lack in sports like boxing or swimming or golf, whose hallowed edifices serve more as museums.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday in Las Vegas the adverb-adjective noun in the noun preposition adjective noun(s) happened when Kazakhstan’s middleweight champion Gennady “GGG” Golovkin drew with Mexican junior middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez in a prizefight that burnished somewhat Canelo’s legacy, not Golovkin’s. One scorecard went for Golovkin, one scorecard went for both, and the one scorecard that went for Canelo was sufficiently wide to stoke outrage and preserve its embers till May’s rematch.

Saturday’s junior middleweight did not deserve to win the decision, and Saturday’s middleweight did not deserve to win the fight by virtue of its going to a decision. A draw was just fine.

I did not score the match because promotion of both fighters’ punching prowess since 2012 assured me there was no conceivable way the detonation scheduled for their opening bell might lead to both remaining upright, much less unscathed, and so why bother with the formality of an incomplete card? Nobody’d care, after all, I had it 3-2 for Canelo when the deadliest puncher in middleweight history put him on a gurney.

Golovkin’s supporters lost Saturday night. Canelo proved himself the better athlete, craftier technician, possibly the harder puncher and decisively the better finisher, while Golovkin proved himself, well, bigger. The ratification catharsis Golovkin fans have anticipated for five years – the night all their grainy camp videos and faith in Abel Sanchez coalesce into a spectacle so feral their hypothetical legend is ratified as something greater – did not happen, and so their catharsis got loosed on a scorekeeper’s card.

If that’s not an admission of defeat, it’ll do till one shows up.

Whatever the scores should’ve been makes exactly no difference because the fight was good enough to merit a rematch and nobody became interested in our beloved sport on the quality of its split decisions. Now’s a decent moment to reiterate that: You didn’t start watching boxing because you heard about its awesome fourheaded scorekeeping criteria; you grew to love boxing on the virtue of its best events needing no judges whatever. Since Saturday’s event needed judges it was less than best and way less than promised.

A sixtymonth campaign of pretending GGG’s knockout ratio against undersized overachievers is somehow historic now devolves into a shouting match over how many points he scored on a junior middleweight whose consciousness he did not imperil and whose ribs he did not crack and whose nose he did not bloody and whose eyes he did not shutter and whose spirit he did not nick, in 36 minutes of trying? How embarrassing. Golovkin is and will remain a B+ middleweight in a D+ era, but let us have no more happy talk of inclusion on lists with Marvelous Marvin Hagler or Carlos Monzon or Harry Greb – however much longer GGG’s reign of terror on former welterweights and super welterweights continues.

Against a heavybag or a smaller man frightened into behaving as one Golovkin is, no doubt, an annihilating presence. In his postfight comments, somewhere between his fifth “Mexican Style” and seventh, Golovkin accused Canelo of not being that sort of heavybag, and he was right. Canelo’s brand of Mexican style has always been offbrand, more Puerto Vallarta than Culiacan, but as the smaller man he was entitled to do something other than stand and trade mindlessly with a man whose only midfight adjustment was to stand and trade mindlessly-er.

And before we get any higher on our hindlegs about that decision it certainly felt like an honest hand could score rounds 1-3 for Canelo and rounds 10-12 for Canelo, and since three plus three still equals six, if disputing Saturday’s draw becomes your new identity, kid, that says not a damn thing about Saturday’s decision but lots of damning things about you.

Canelo’s winning clearly the last two rounds and less clearly the 10th was the most impressive thing either man did Saturday, especially after preceding those rounds with toetouching backstretches courtesy of one factor, Canelo’s carrying into the championship rounds more weight in his upperbody than he’d done previously, and courtesy of a much larger factor – Golovkin’s stiff jabs to the spot on his forehead where the headgear’s patch would sit, the happenings of which jar the spine its length (see also Ali-Patterson, 1965).

From the fifth round through the ninth the geometry of Canelo-Golovkin 1 appeared like nothing so much as Margarito-Cotto 1, right down to the parry-shuffle-set Canelo did while a large, tactically limited man chased him nodding and smiling. At the fight’s exact midpoint, 30 seconds after round 6 ended, Canelo looked towards the ceiling like he hoped it would say round 9, not round 7, then he fought the next six minutes like he wanted merely to weather them. He was quick and experienced enough to see Golovkin’s telegraphed punches as they left the signalhouse and widely avoid the worst of them, but he hadn’t the conditioning to chasten Golovkin’s sloppy delivery with anything worse than taunts – and if neither man exhibits effective aggressiveness it is never improper to reward ineffective aggressiveness, which Golovkin showed every single minute of the fight.

Thus Golovkin’s largest quality lay in his being the larger man; Canelo’s blocking punches thrown by a 160-pound man fatigued him more than blocking a 154-pound man’s punches (yet another reason why GGG’s inability to fight above middleweight will remain a mark against him). I watched the match with an ethnically diverse group of aficionados, the majority of whom have themselves thrown hands, and the consensus as round 10 began was that Canelo was there for the having. But then Canelo delivered the sophomore level of a lecture Danny Jacobs began in Golovkin’s last match: What happens when you try to mincemeat a man who doesn’t fear you.

There was never anything devastating about a single Golovkin punch – but who could forget the early days of the Golovkin manufacture when HBO leaped to liken a round 7 corner stoppage to prime Mike Tyson? – and Canelo established this early then worried about it midway, but by round 11 Canelo knew no single thing Golovkin could do would unconscious him, and so Canelo went for the win while Golovkin stayed at cruising velocity. Which is why Golovkin fans’ rage at one card of Saturday’s acceptable splitdraw decision is disappointment with their guy, masquerading as a stand against injustice.

Just wait till y’all see the scorecards and purses on Cinco de Mayo!

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

SANTA MONICA, Calif. – Onto the mess of rainbows and the Beach Boys and vivacity of this city’s Pier, else the whole effort mightn’t come off: A cleansing be needed because what happened Saturday in the grittier unhappier but still uniquely special climes of Carson, 20 or so miles southsoutheast of here, brought something funereal – a funereality? – disproportionate to its event. It was not merely an a-side got stiffened in the main, an all too infrequent occurrence anymore, but how remarkably few b-side supporters attended, and thus how remarkably quiet got ringside within 15 minutes of Sor Rungvisai-Gonzalez 2’s opening bell.

The compulsories: Thai super flyweight champion Wisaksil “Srisaket Sor Rungvisai” Wangek iced Nicaragua’s Roman “Chocolatito” Gonzalez early in round 4 of their rematch in the tennis stadium at StubHub Center. Chocolatito entered the arena, as much a West Coast mecca for aficionados as Madison Square Garden in the East, with a surge of excitement, a wildflower festival of Nicaraguan flags suddenly flying everywhere round the bowl, but left 45 minutes later on a stretcher in the back of an ambulance, a precautious formality, we’re assured, but possibly more: Nobody liked the way Chocolatito twice crumpled on the bluemat – his arm chickenwinged behind him, knockdown 1, from which he rose with eyes that went startled to incredulous to fearful, shortly before he got put in savasana.

What was understandably lost in Chocolatito’s breaking was Sor Rungvisai’s lonely ecstasy – while commission officials and doctors rushed awkwardly through the ropes to Chocolatito’s disconnected consciousness and indifferent body Sor Rungvisai even more awkwardly performed a victory somersault stageleft. It was the first indication in the six months we’ve known him he knew Roman Gonzalez was anybody at all and beating Gonzalez was a lifechanging feat. And therein lay Sor Rungvisai’s defining advantage. He didn’t appear to care for a moment of his 45 or so minutes of combat with Chocolatito what aficionados opined of Chocolatito or what Chocolatito’s career led him to opine of himself. To Sor Rungvisai he was a smaller man open often to exchanges and given to complaining quickly to officials about what headbutts happened accidentally till Sor Rungvisai saw their outsized effect on Chocolatito’s spirits and began accidenting them frequently.

A telltale tell it was, too, when Chocolatito began his Saturday appeals before the fight was a halfround old. Sor Rungvisai ignored the referee and watched Chocolatito, unblinking – and did you notice the man didn’t blink even once during their Friday postweight staredown in the brilliant California sun? – then knew he had the little Nicaraguan and acted like it. Sor Rungvisai brutalized Chocolatito with the punches Chocolatito blocked and worse yet with those he didn’t: Welcome to super flyweight, flyweight! Just because Chocolatito’s body no longer wished to touch 112 pounds semiannually did not him a super flyweight make, and if Carlos Cuadras spoke such to him in short declarative sentences last year Sor Rungvisai growled it in March and roared it on Saturday.

However Chocolatito prepped for their rematch, and one senses a wrongheaded emphasis on Sor Rungvisai’s head headed Chocolatito’s camp itinerary, it all got obviously scrambled to apart before the second round was through and probably well before that. Whatever his supporters told him about a March robbery that truly wasn’t Chocolatito rededicated himself, etc., to avenging his career’s first loss and got properly flattened in fewer than four rounds, and when he returns to Managua and those who love him tell him to consider retiring he will do well to heed their admonishments.

The problems Chocolatito has with super flyweights cannot be remedied with strategy or tactics or anything at all, save borrowing Juan Manuel Marquez’s personal trainer and supplements regimen, and since VADA shan’t smile upon that, it’s time for Chocolatito to call it a once-in-a-generation career and make his living doing something that is not prizefighting. Videos out of Nicaragua show Chocolatito’s dad and aunt hissing about managerial malfeasance and what illadvice moved Chocolatito from 112 pounds to 115 (and American television and American purses), but when ambulance videos from Carson get seen in Managua bygones should remain bygones at least till a retirement announcement comes.

Roman Gonzalez leaves behind a weightclass and sport very much better than he found it. He topped mythical status lists and an HBO broadcast without ever performing within 80 pounds of the average American male’s weight and bequeathed to his fellow tiny warriors an incredibly healthy ecosystem. Better, too, the decisiveness with which Sor Rungvisai removed him from the division; one retrospectively fears what might’ve come of Chocolatito’s health in an 18-month stretch that comprised a brutal rubber match with Sor Rungvisai and a title defense with Mexican Juan Estrada and a culminating decimation at the fists of Japan’s Naoya Inoue.

Those other two too plied their wares Saturday and promised many good things for aficionados and no good things for Chocolatito. HBO hasn’t the funds or impetus at the moment to unify heavier divisions with heavier purses, but Mexican Carlos Cuadras, who lost a fair and very close decision to Estrada in Saturday’s co-comain, would surely make a wonderful scrap with Inoue, and Estrada, who boxes with fantastic precision and class, would need every one of his wiles to relieve Sor Rungvisai of his belt. Such a card could not sell 10,000 pay-per-views but might sell 7,500 tickets in Carson and confirm HBO as the unlikely but enthusiastically welcomed new home for our beloved sport’s longsuffering aficionados.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Nicaraguan super flyweight Roman “Chocolatito” Gonzalez seeks to avenge his career’s first loss against Thailand’s Wisaksil “Srisaket Sor Rungvisai” Wangek in the main event of this Saturday’s extraordinary “Superfly” card in Carson, Calif., a card HBO will broadcast and in so doing stake an unlikely and indisputable claim to 2017’s best boxing broadcast. The comain will have Japan’s Naoya “The Monster” Inoue making his first match in the U.S. And the co-comain will have yet another 115-pound man, Mexican Carlos “Principe” Cuadras, whose claim as the world’s best super flyweight is not an unreasonable one, making combat with countryman Juan Francisco Estrada.

Frankly it’s an honor to cover a card of this quality. A quick query to the memory brings back a nullset of a better constructed threematch finale to a card I’ve attended – though Barrera-Juarez II in 2006 comes tumbling forward on the virtue of what Israel Vazquez did to Jhonny Gonzalez in the co-comain (while Marco Antonio Barrera bemused Rocky Juarez too thoroughly in the main to make the card actually historic, despite its fine construction).

Most importantly it could be the last chance to see a historic prizefighter like Chocolatito in the mainevent of a consequential card. Whatever happens Saturday Chocolatito is unlikely to retire and stay retired, a more likely occurrence is that long past the viable economics of the act Chocolatito’ll continue to work for backwages in a futile bid to do things the Money way, and he’s too good and decent for that to be a thing worth traveling to Los Angeles or Managua to witness.

The march upwards in weightclass and age is too much for any man to endure flawlessly much past his 40th fight or 30th year if he weighs less than 120 pounds, and in March Sor Rungvisai played reminder of this much as its cause. Chocolatito did more to accomplish less against Sor Rungvisai than any Sor Rungvisai predecessor and being reminded of it exhausted Gonzalez till the ratio trebled but still Chocolatito spun and whacked and resisted what disbelief surely came thumping. If there were special preparations Sor Rungvisai made for Chocolatito he did not betray them; perhaps his fruitfullest tactic was treating a legend like a shortnotice swingbout replacement to be butted and beaten as whim bade.

Whatever the weighting supposedly be, a good metric for ring generalship, that squirrely criterion with which we justify our biases when scoring rounds that’re close, is: Who files first appeal to the referee? who petitions an official’s intervention in lieu of making justice with his proper fists?

In March it was Chocolatito and an unfailingly bad sign. If Sor Rungvisai’s heady comportment was less than purely sporting Chocolatito’s conduct was more worrisome. Great fighters are dirty fighters and Chocolatito is a great fighter by this measure and every other but in March Chocolatito was a statesman, and offended too. He knew what Sor Rungvisai did was not accidental but once referee Steve Willis refused to be more officious than a point’s deduction from the Thai’s tally Chocolatito needed to remedy fouls with fouls, as craft told him he should, but Chocolatito did not and did something oh so much worse: He let selfindulgence touch him a touch.

Such indulgence begets brutalization and it surely did in March. Chocolatito’s face and head was an ugly mess by the concluding bell. What stung worse than his first career loss coming at the hands and head of an unclassed brute like Sor Rungvisai was Chocolatito’s realizing he’d have to face the man again and immediately if he chose not to retire – something like what the late Vernon Forrest felt the day after losing to Ricardo Mayorga. If Sor Rungvisai did not inflict the same mental cruelty on Chocolatito as Mayorga did Forrest he distributed a commensurate physical cruelty that would render a lesser man cautious in rematch.

Fortunately for Chocolatito there is only one strategy in the ring and a startling array of tactics for employing it – endeavor to attrition any man toeing the line before you. He expected Sor Rungvisai to fold of his own discouragement and got surprised when Sor Rungvisai did not. Class did not tell ultimately in March because it got thwarted by Sor Rungvisai’s fouling and obliviousness of his opponent’s class, which may be a roundabout way of writing class, of a certain sort, did indeed tell.

Expect Chocolatito to be the offender Saturday; if Sor Rungvisai did not pack a cup packed with reinforced beltline padding for his trip from Thailand he will regret it; Chocolatito will be targeting that beltline and a few inches above and below it from the opening bell until he is told to stop and after he is told to stop until a point gets deducted and maybe after that, too. Accustomed to enjoying benefits of all scoring doubts in his career’s 27 or so championship matches Chocolatito did not expect to lose March’s decision and now says in a convincing tone he intends to strip Sor Rungvisai of his fitness to continue, and if so, what difference will a point deduction in round 3 and another in round 8 matter?

There’s a genuine possibility, though, Chocolatito’s belting Sor Rungvisai early and often will not avenge his first loss. Sor Rungvisai well may have Chocolatito’s number; he well may have too much physicality and chin and derringdo for this 30-year-old, 115-pound iteration of Nicaragua’s second alltime great, remanding Gonzalez to retirement but leaving HBO with enough pieces – in Sor Rungvisai and Cuadras and Inoue, at least – to make an historic unification of the super flyweight division.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday in Las Vegas retired welterweight champion Floyd “Money” Mayweather (50-0, 27 KOs), a 40-year-old American, beat mixed martial artist “The Notorious” Conor McGregor (0-1, 1 KO), a 29-year-old Irishman, to a fraction of himself until referee Robert Byrd’s intervention after the first minute of round 10. If the match ended predictably, it gave its pay-per-viewers unpredictably more entertainment than we deserved. Mayweather-McGregor was way better than expected.

Credit for that properly goes to McGregor, whose unorthodox approach to boxing and his pronounced vulnerabilities – the greatest of which was not knowing how pronouncedly vulnerable he was – made Mayweather comfortable enough to eschew what thick, goopy layers of cliche form his public persona, remember the hardened amorality at his core, and hurt the man across from him until he was ordered to stop.

What makes boxing different from all other combat sports is that no matter how defensively adept you fancy yourself you are going to get hit often, and getting hit often is a uniquely stressful experience. No fighter’s fantasies comprise being hit thusly, but boxers expect it and vigilant themselves accordingly. The act of being hit repeatedly and the unwavering threat of being hit repeatedly more is what surprised McGregor the most. You can do roadwork and elasticarm bends and backflips and CrossFit and all the rest, and maybe even some sparring with undersized guys, too, but there’s nothing to condition you for being punched a whole lot but being punched a whole lot.

Mayweather gave McGregor a combination of force and precision no sparring partner did (or that sparring partner would be Mayweather), and McGregor receded and wilted subsequently. And wilted is the proper word for what happened to McGregor – a thing we see in boxing gyms round the world every weeknight when two equal physical specimens begin to punch each other and one grows mighty and the other wilts until a coach shortshifts the bell and waves the session off. McGregor’s handlers likely’d not’ve known to do that, and fortunately for them Saturday’s otherwise incompetent referee did instead.

McGregor, in a weakly megalomaniacal way, indicated in his postfight interview when he gets tired his legs get wobbly. Yes, son, that’s called fatigue, and it makes cowards of us all, it makes us not want to fight – it makes us go whole minutes of combat without doing anything but flee – and it’s a universal sign in our beloved sport, the manly art of selfdefense, a match is concluded.

Even claims of quick stoppages are universal, not something invented by McGregor; any aficionado who’s attended an undercard has seen some version of the 10 1/2-count, when a fighter remains on his knee till 10 then leaps upwards, arms spread, pleading to continue, all strength miraculously restored. Except McGregor didn’t get that far because, in lieu of taking a knee and regrouping, he decided to use the “just energy” of going “wobbly” while a professional fighter placed the middle knuckle of his left and right fists on his chin and temple. More exotic strategy and tactical innovation by The Notorious, perhaps, but also a loud plea for official assistance.

Good that it came, too, because McGregor hadn’t enough time in his brief career as a boxer to learn how to comport himself when things went awry. He was a frontrunner, not unlike prime Mayweather or anyway Mayweather against a fellow boxer, and didn’t have a plan C, once McGregor’s vaunted power never activated and his one uppercut counter failed to cut Mayweather’s lights.

For a threeround, though, it was interesting – far more interesting than expected. The larger man, by what looked like three weightclasses at opening bell, intended to win by decision, outpointing the spoiler unless the spoiler took scoring chances as the fight progressed. If that wasn’t the most suspenseful happening, it was quite unexpected and a little dramatic; it set the imagination cooking with ingredients of Mayweather like a risktaker and knockout needer.

By round four, when Mayweather had done very little and yet McGregor was suddenly diminished, arming and pawing punches like someone less than a novice, the standard Mayweather slowmarch was underway, and one hoped only something conclusive might happen. Tradition dictates the worst thing that might befall a pay-per-viewer is Mayweather realizing, with an audible click, his opponent cannot hurt him, as tradition dictates that be the time for Money to begin melding time and space together till the final six rounds of a championship prizefight, a thing which should be both dramatic and suspenseful, become an 18-minute lump of bodyjabs and a rolling lead shoulder and talk of Money’s legacy and retirement plans (Saturday’s was his fourth or fifth final fight). Instead McGregor was defenseless enough for Mayweather to accelerate for once and do what you are supposed to do with a defenseless man in front of you: Try to take his consciousness violently.

If it’s the last we see of Mayweather, it’s an image that should please him is the last we have: eyes predatory, mouth maliciously set, punches properly leveraged for force and angled intentionally: Floyd Mayweather, a prizefighter – not a Pretty Boy or a Money, but a man professionally committed to hurting other men with his fists. It took some fraudulent matchmaking to get there, a professor against a bachelor’s degree, but Mayweather got there with his wealth and wits intact.

Enjoy your retirement in good health, Floyd, and now leave our sport be.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday in Lincoln the fighting pride of Nebraska, Terence “Bud” Crawford, unmanned and unbellied Namibian Julius Indongo on ESPN to become the first unified champion of the junior welterweight division in . . . who knows, maybe the history of that young division. Most importantly, Crawford did it with aggression and form, beating the sauce out his man.

This Saturday Floyd “Money” Mayweather enters the silly season of his career with a special-attraction-championship-exhibition match against an Irish MMA champion named Conor McGregor.

What these events have in common is the calendar. Let us not waste that.

Unifying titles in this era the way Crawford just did is, conversely, less likely and less admired. If it’s less admired it’s a consequence of the saturation grift sanctioning bodies perpetrated on the sport with promoters’ and networks’ assistance decades ago – the belts mean nothing, so he who collects them is the king of nothing. That may well be aficionados’ reality but it’s not one common among prizefighters. They know the difference between meaningful belts and less meaningful belts because they suffer to come by them and keep a precise accounting thereby.

The odder part of the unification labyrinth, though, is the logistical difficulty of this generally thankless feat. It’s not enough to imply the sanctioning bodies are indifferent to sharing a champion with one another – they’re fully and actively against the ruse. Once a man has unified all the belts he is larger than their sum, and many multiples larger than any one of them, and boxing’s major crime families move swiftly against him; each sanctioning body has a unique mandatory challenger and invariably a unique mandatory challenger behind him, and so to keep his unified titles unified a unified champion must fight eight times in about 11 months against men nobody has heard of and far fewer would pay to see.

The sanctioning bodies are collectors, not distributors, they are sponsored, not sponsors – they expect their titlists to take whatever prestige accrues to those titles and vend like hell to pass a percentage of winnings their sanctioners’ way. One wrong move, too, one misplaced obscenity, one improper flirtation with an unsanctioned challenger or promoter, and the stripping commences. If it be nigh impossible to unify titles, it is irrational to keep them that way.

Terence Crawford knows this and knows too what logistical gymnastics were required to get to Saturday’s match and knows still better there ain’t no money in satisfying sanctioners’ requirements one moment after unifying. He owns the junior welterweight division just seven matches after joining the junior welterweight division (Gennady Golovkin, conversely, has been trying to unify the middleweight division since beating Nilson Julio Tapia [14-2-1] in 2010). Crawford benefits greatly from a promoter that knows what it’s doing, a promoter that has been here oftentimes before, knows which levers work and where to set the fulcrum and, perhaps most importantly, doesn’t lowball the owners of what titles its champion seeks to unify.

Top Rank likely overpaid some of the opponents Crawford whupped these last two years, but it now has a man near to being a household name as boxing gets, who is also a regional ticketseller, and after an abominable showing on pay-per-view, something of a chastened economical realist. Top Rank continues increasing the quality of its fighters’ opponents until its fighters lose and thereby assert a quest for greatness that goes: I took my talent far as humanly possible.

Nobody knew this better than Floyd Mayweather; had Mayweather wished to be “TBE” Floyd would’ve stayed with Top Rank and, like every realistic candidate for the “TBE” title, Floyd eventually would have lost. Floyd didn’t like Top Rank’s compensation algorithm in the least – way way too much risk for way way too little reward – and followed his heart to great wealth but now enters a carnival stage in his career to silence what angsty voices nag a talented man who knows he didn’t take his talent to its limits. A dangerous space for the man because if Saturday goes as expected, what comes next?

Nobody who believes Floyd squandered his talent in part on handicapping every match to near bloodlessness – swerving Kostya Tszyu and Antonio Margarito completely; swerving prime versions of Manny Pacquiao and Miguel Cotto; fighting Juan Manuel Marquez three weightclasses high, etc. – will suddenly reform his opinion after watching Money safely avoid an MMA dude for 36 minutes. Since he can’t stay retired, obviously, what does Floyd do next to make himself feel great – fight the Brothers Charlo at the same time? throw hands with Adrien Broner from a stripper pole?

(Having never seen a minute of a Conor McGregor fight but having trained at a predominately MMA gym for years and boxed some of the lads, I assume the chalk is right and McGregor hasn’t a prayer, with one caveat: How many folks who are positive Floyd will win were just as positive Hillary would win, and of those same folks that say “predictions in boxing and politics are completely different!” how many wouldn’t’ve used the exact same logic if the events’ chronology were reversed? The trend: Folks who aren’t always right but are never uncertain.)

The calendar juxtaposes Floyd and Terence for us, and the comparison may well be apt. Floyd was 35 fights in his career when he got off the Top Rank track, buying his way out of a promotional contract that guaranteed some unsavory combination of Margarito and Cotto, to fight instead Carlos Baldomir. Crawford is 32 fights in a career that did not begin auspiciously as Mayweather’s but is becoming increasingly dominant. He has not peaked yet as a fighter or as an attraction. He hasn’t Floyd’s upside as a fighter or an attraction.

But Floyd never put more than 75-percent of his talent on the line and Crawford will have to if he stays with Top Rank. The question then becomes: Is 100-percent of Terence Crawford’s talent greater than 75-percent of Floyd Mayweather’s? If so, many millions of Americans more are about to watch Crawford’s prime happen on ESPN than ever saw Floyd’s on HBO, and we know how finicky be public opinion and what polling writes history. Poor Floyd.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

by Bart Barry-

Saturday Ukrainian super featherweight titlist Vasyl “Hi-Tech” Lomachenko defeated Colombian featherweight Miguel Marriaga after seven rounds when Marriaga’s corner decided not to continue. Though Lomachenko felled Marriaga in round 7 it was Lomachenko’s face, not Marriaga’s, bleeding when the fight got stopped by a trainer that was merciful – the sort of mercy we’re told often is a proper substitute for suspensefulness.

By a show of hands, how many aficionados want another Soviet Bloc nonheavyweight Olympic medalist to dash through showcase matches with undersized men while his handlers claim nobody will fight him?

Nope, didn’t think so.

Me either.

What made Lomachenko so initially refreshing dissipates with each showcase match and subsequently so does the refreshment of watching his technical acumen. Back when Lomachenko was an undercard fighter for “Son of the Legend” Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. he performed in San Antonio and did not impress. Lomachenko got roughed and decisioned by Orlando Salido a year after Salido got dropped a fourtime by Mikey Garcia.

I recall two sensations ringside that night: Sympathy and relief. Lomachenko clearly prepared for a contest betwixt sportsmen more than a fight and hadn’t technology high enough to discourage Salido’s hitting him wherever Salido pleased after the Mexican missed weight whimsical audaciously the day before. That brought sympathy. The sense of relief came with a rude pop just after the decision got read and Lomachenko’s hyperbole balloon burst.

Though evidently it’s forgotten now, back then there was a burgeoning controversy about Lomachenko’s actual record, too. Editorial instructions from The Ring led my report to read:

“Lomachenko (7-1, 1 KO), whose official record on Fight Fax showed as 7-0 before Saturday, counting the six World Series of Boxing matches for which Lomachenko received payment . . .”

That clause happened prefight when all assumed Lomachenko’s tilt with Salido be a limp formality, not a lesson that was stiff, and journalism wanted to preempt loose promoter taglining on record this and historic that. Lomachenko got manhandled forthwith, and I recall thinking: Good, he’ll have to go deep and redemptive before we hear exclamation marks about him again.

So naive. Not only do veteran commentators now parrot Lomachenko’s promoter, but Lomachenko believes so deeply his run is historic he cannot believe a 130-pound athlete who speaks Golovkin English is not a sensation in the United States already and the rest of the world. Well. If he thinks boxing owes him a celebrity run at super featherweight like Manny Pacquiao’s he needs be told boxing thinks he owes us a Marquez, a Barrera and a pair of Morales.

Lomachenko gave us Gary Russell in 2014 and Nicholas Walters in 2016, both are good and neither belongs in the preceding sentence, but Lomachenko’s 2017 is not thusfar near so dazzling. Instead, with Marriaga, Lomachenko’s handlers began down the tired path Lomachenko’s fellow Olympian blazed for them: No 130-pound man in the world dares face Lomachenko, so we had to get a 126-pound man to do it!

This ain’t gonna work for a few reasons, the first being th’t that trail is already blazed, razed and worn baldly. The second concerns the 70 pounds of opponents between Lomachenko and heavyweight among which must be found a handful that do not cower at the syllables Hi Tech. The third if not final reason is Lomachenko’s promoter and its new network. Top Rank is better than Lomachenko-Marriaga; it’s the sort of jam-it-past-the-keeper garbage-goal the outfit scored often and lucratively on HBO.

It feels like ESPN knows this. Compared with Horn-Pacquiao what happened Saturday and the way it was broadcasted was inferior. Along with leaving Friday Night Fights’ crew in place like wait-and-see ESPN overwrote the twofight undercard with a reheated NFL marathon of football players making speeches – something unimprovable by metaphor.

You give us a Donaire-Narvaez main, we put your undercard on a smartphone app.

Nevertheless aficionados now are expected to play the opponents-in-common game with Lomachenko in lieu of seeing him compete, like: “Yes, Nicholas Walters and Oscar Valdez each beat Marriaga in the last two years, but they didn’t stop him, and speaking of Walters, Lomachenko beat him the way Sugar Ray Leonard beat Roberto Duran.”

This game is one more lamentable part of the fallout from the illadvised buildup to Mayweather-Pacquiao, when the hypothetical wholly supplanted the actual, and therefore one more lamentable effect Money May took on boxing. If we play this game we put ourselves in a bidding battle with our own imaginations till we see in an undertested titlist Harry Greb’s footwork and Sonny Liston’s jab. Or we can choose not to play. We can say: You look supercute in a kiwi bodystocking, yes, and you have more angles than a cubed octagon, but your career mark is 2-1 in fights anyone thought you could lose and that is the squareroot of historic.

Whatever Teddy and Max opine of Lomachenko the lad is yet to do fractionally enough in his career to make appealing the way he taunted Marriaga, who looked more than a weightclass smaller. Your promoter puts you on national TV with a little guy coming off a loss, you snatch his consciousness in three – you don’t squaredance your way to cuts and a midrounds corner stoppage.

There’s nothing invincible about Lomachenko – Salido proved that – and he can make fantastic and compelling fights against larger men. Even a 135-pound version of someone like Marriaga might’ve been interesting. But a few more showings like Saturday’s and there’s a good chance ratings are going to remand Hi-Tech himself to the high technology of ESPN’s smartphone app.

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Author’s note: This column will not appear next week, as its author will be in Peru en route to being conquered by Montaña at Machu Picchu.

*

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry–

Saturday in Brooklyn a junior welterweight special attraction broadcast by Showtime saw California’s Mikey Garcia decision Cincinnati’s Adrien Broner by three fair if fairly generous (to Broner) scorecards. There were no knockdowns, no kneetremblers and only a trickle of noseblood in 36-minutes of fistfighting.

It was an average fight, however much reporting so betrays the narrative.

Garcia, who has long been considered at least as good as he is and on occasion considerably better, decisioned convincingly a b-grade fighter and a-grade selfpromoter without once imperiling either man. It was, in other words, about the best fare for which one dares hope from PBC and its many broadcasting benefactors and affiliates and aliases. Now aficionados’re expected to attempt a contortion like: It was a great fight between two great fighters that lacked action because Garcia’s extraordinary class neutralized Broner till he was the sort of mediocre fighter who might get decisioned 8-4 or 9-3 in a championship match.

Afterwards Garcia’s brother and trainer said Mikey only looks basic when you watch him, 1-1-2 and 1-2 and 1-2-1-1, but in the ring, where we might assume none of us will spend time with Mikey, he’s altogether more complicated. Perhaps. But truly there’s nothing wrong with basic boxing – in fact in just about any confrontation any man is likely to have in any lifetime basic boxing beats the stripes off its myriad of alternatives. Even in prizefighting.

There was absolutely nothing wrong with Garcia’s performance Saturday. It was perfect for those who want to build Garcia as an undefeated attraction and for familiars who of course wishn’t see their brother or son elephantgunned, but it left a goodish amount to be desired by aficionados who watch for what entertainment spontaneity brings, which is different from watching to confirm one’s own expertise.

Broner never lacked offensive artistry and made himself famous in large part by being a large part bigger than his opponents; much of his early run happened via his ability to absorb others’ punches to deliver his own. It happened so fast, oftenly, and others’ punches so lacked effect, it was unapparent Broner traded evenly. Then Marcos Maidana, a slugger considered limited even by his fans then, exposed Broner in the fairest sense of the word and made 12,000 San Antonians euphoric in so doing. That win got Chino a chance at Floyd Mayweather that went so much better than expected Maidana got a second chance at Mayweather, but aficionados’ collective estimation of Broner improved little along the way. Maidana, after all, hit Floyd with sky hooks and sundry oddities, not clean lefthook leads – Broner’s defense against which was a stiffarmed thing he flashed in his other loss, to Shawn Porter.

Whether he extended his arms downwards, elbows locked knuckles ogling the canvas, or upwards, elbows locked knuckles saluting the ceiling, Broner did not have a fundamental sense of what to do when a likesized man charged him. Even the forearm shimmy Mayweather mentored him worked less well against a man of comparable strength. Broner ever suffered the imitator’s dilemma: He could passably ape an innovator like Floyd without understanding why. Where Floyd successfully improvised defensive adjustments, Adrien queried the database first what Floyd would do and when a nullset came back Adrien tried to improvise himself – which victoried his hands overhead or downed them pistonpopping.

Had he a classic sense of discipline Broner might’ve stayed at 135 pounds and enjoyed a historic run as a lightweight anyway but AB was about billions not selfrestraint which kept him in his best weightclass for merely a twofight.

Long forgotten in the Mikey remake is Garcia’s own struggles with discipline, specifically a 2013 featherweight title defense against cult hero Juanma Lopez that saw Mikey miss weight by 32 full ounces after comporting himself questionably enough against Orlando Salido five months before th’t aficionados who took him for boxing’s future in 2012 took a harder look. That harder look was only commencing when Garcia disappeared in a contractual conflict. Garcia’s comeback is but three fights along and in 37 prizefights Adrien Broner marked his sternest test; let us not hyperbole just yet.

There’s a frontrunner’s perfection about Garcia but nary an adjustment to be found. This makes him less entertaining than Terence Crawford, even while future comparisons of their reigns should prove apt. Crawford mightn’t have stopped Broner Saturday either but at least would’ve switched stances a halfdozen times between southpaw and orthodox. Garcia made no offensive adjustments and showed no creativity in the championship rounds because he was unsure his footing – whatever private desire he had to finish Broner stayed altogether private because after 30 minutes with Mikey’s fists Broner was not shaped half badly as expected.

Bullies and buffoons be expected to fold, but no matter Broner’s buffoonery the man does not fold. Ask anyone at Alamodome for Broner’s first loss: Aside from Richard Schaefer everyone in attendance was there to see Broner get jigsawed proper, so everyone in attendance was more than a bit tense after round 11. If this reads like a nostalgic sendoff for AB it shouldn’t; yes, there’s a wee bit of nostalgia one should give any man who courts others’ hatreds and does not bend, but no, Broner’s not going anywhere. Hell, PBC’s braintrust fully expected Broner to prevail Saturday because the company’s cultural cornerstone is a concert promoter, not a matchmaker.

Probably Broner’ll fight again before Garcia does, and probably Garcia’s next opponent won’t be anyone you want him to be. When 2018 begins Broner will remain about billions and Garcia will remain undefeated.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Editor’s note: Eleven months ago we asked Bart Barry to interview himself about the state of the craft. On Tuesday Bart sent a note saying he’d no idea a subject for this week’s column, his seventh such note of the year. To spark his flagging interest, once again, we asked him to return to the subject of writing and boxing.

BB: Sometime soon, maybe even next month, Conor McGregor fights Floyd Mayweather in what is widely expected to be . . .

BB: . . .

BB: . . .

BB: Go on.

BB: You were supposed to interrupt and rail against this mess.

BB: Nah.

BB: Then you support it?

BB: I won’t be watching.

BB: That’s slippery.

BB: I have no strong feelings about it, pro or con. I saw enough enthusiasm on Twitter to watch some clips of those staged performances in the cities, and it didn’t do much for me.

BB: Were you familiar with McGregor’s work previously?

BB: No.

BB: Were you impressed by his gift for trashtalking?

BB: Are we considering that a gift now – like athleticism or perfect pitch or eloquence?

BB: Aren’t we?

BB: No. As you know from watching Mayweather it’s a con created for five-second sound clips. It’s like a live rehearsal with a hundred takes. They say the same thing over and over and over, and then they keep the best one for YouTube.

BB: Floyd was outgunned.

BB: He’s a great, great fighter. But he’s not witty or creative. He’s a miserable dude. The best sorts of performers in the hiphop set, which has never seen Floyd as one of its own – unlike, say, Tyson – take the craft of wordplay incredibly seriously but not themselves. They wink at you. Floyd gets this backwards. He takes himself altogether too seriously and says the same unoriginal thing every promotion. During the best performances, the artist interrupts himself to say he’s only kidding, then at the end you realize how serious he was. Floyd interrupts himself to say how serious he is, then after the fight he tells you he was kidding the whole time.

BB: Not sure that works as an analogy.

BB: Then edit it out.

BB: And defeat the purpose of this?

BB: Don’t take ourself so seriously.

BB: Name one professional athlete you’ve never met but would like to.

BB: Bode Miller.

BB: Last year you’d given up on boxing but were approaching the craft of writing with immense enthusiasm and hope. This year, that has switched.

BB: Started to, anyway. Something started to happen in January, it’s too early to say what, but the compulsion to write, and by extension to read, dissolved very quickly. It was like waking up one morning, looking in the mirror, and discovering I was now a seven-foot woman from Beijing. An attractive, intelligent woman with a loving husband, maybe, but still an entirely different identity than I took to bed the night before.

BB: Seventeen years of saying “Hello, I’m Bart, a writer” sort of became “Hello, I’m Bart.”

BB: Yet there’s an optimism in your view of our beloved sport you haven’t had for years.

BB: Very true. It coalesced during the Horn-Pacquiao broadcast.

BB: You sure about this?

BB: Yes. Because it was unplanned. The opposite was planned, frankly; it was to be a chance to criticize ESPN’s approach to sports broadcasting and roll eyes at Arum telling the truth tomorrow, again.

BB: But instead you enjoyed it?

BB: I really did. The volume was off, so I don’t know what that commentary did to the experience for others. But the sunshine, and the vindication for the longshot, and Pacquiao’s always infectious enthusiasm. It just felt warm. It felt good. It felt authentic. Real fans, really smiling, really caring.

BB: Yet your column was satirical.

BB: In retrospect I didn’t trust my own enthusiasm. The last few years have taught us to trust reflexively our doubts but rarely our enthusiasm. I trust my enthusiasm for a fighter, for Chocolatito as an example, but not for events. Boxing was always cynical, but somewhere within that cynicism there was authenticity – genuine men genuinely bleeding. PBC changed that, methinks.

BB: A Mayweatherization of boxing.

BB: Yeah.

BB: That’s changing because of Top Rank’s alliance with ESPN?

BB: I’m almost ready to say yes with an exclamation mark. Top Rank has the best development plan for its fighters and the best matchmakers. But for the longest time they’ve trapped themselves in this premium-cable-capture game, where they try to get one over on HBO or sell Showtime a dud. There’s nothing to save it for now.

BB: And they don’t have a Pacquiao in the pipeline.

BB: There’s no obvious pay-per-view star in their stable, no. They have to make the best fights on the best network. It’s no longer about Arum outsmarting a few corporate guys. It’s now about the entirety of Top Rank’s outfit proving it is what it thinks it is.

BB: Why didn’t PBC’s model work?

BB: That’s the sweet irony of this. It did! PBC sold its product at a massive, anticompetitive loss for a couple years in order to get a major network interested enough in boxing to pay for the rights to broadcast it. That network was ESPN. But it chose to pay Top Rank instead.

BB: The longer a fight goes . . .

BB: The more class tells, yes.

BB: Whither HBO?

BB: Who cares?

BB: Go on.

BB: That’s not flippant. Does an NBA fan worry about the health of basketball based on what “Real Sports” says? Does an NFL fan think football is dead if “Hard Knocks” gets cancelled? Some of HBO’s cards this year are good, and that one in September is perfectly excellent. But more and more, if you’re not ordering HBO PPV, you halfway expect to see a Just for Men ad between rounds.

BB: Showtime?

BB: They’ve got the heavyweight champion of the world. And he’s another reason for a recrudescing excitement about our sport. They’ve got PBC’s stable whenever they want it.

BB: Why couldn’t Haymon go back to HBO?

BB: HBO’s no longer that rich or that dumb.

BB: You look healthy, kid.

BB: I feel good.

BB: This was fun.

BB: Dave Grohl looks at Paul McCartney and says, “Why can’t it always be this easy?” And McCartney says –

BB: “It is!” Touché.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday in Inglewood, Calif., Mexican Miguel “El Alacran” Berchelt defended his super featherweight title against former titlist Takashi Miura in a good mainevent televised by HBO’s “Boxing After Dark” program. Meanwhile, one state to the east, an improved broadcasting experience happened.

Miguel Berchelt is a good fighter who won his belt the right way – as a b-side, by knockout – but not a world champion so long as Vasyl Lomachenko can make 130 pounds and not a great Mexican super featherweight, either, so long as there survive men who saw Marco Antonio Barrera or Erik Morales or Juan Manuel Marquez at that weight. Berchelt will experience some accumulating ambivalence about that; because of those three men casual fans now watch prizefighters who weigh 100 pounds less than those fans’ general preference, and because of those three men Berchelt will be judged by his merits more than his birthplace and judged to be considerably less than he thinks he is.

El Alacran came of age in Mexico when broadcasting logistics precluded the best Mexican fighters and their best fights from happening on public airwaves, which meant far fewer Mexican boys found a passion for boxing. More ambivalence for Berchelt: It is much easier for a talented prizefighter in this generation to get out of Mexico, but he is unlikely to fare nearly so well at the championship level as his predecessors did. If Berchelt’s path to a title had included a prime version of Barrera or Morales or Marquez, in other words, Berchelt would’ve remained an undercard gatekeeper very, very far from an HBO main event.

This is no criticism of his Saturday win. Berchelt found himself matched against a worn veteran who knew lots of tricks and years ago had better technique then Berchelt imposed the rude force of youth on his elder, exactly as one should. Berchelt adhered to his handlers’ strategy and made Miura move much more than a man of Miura’s age and resume wishes to anymore. Berchelt fought no more than he had to fight. That kept Miura discouraged from opening bell to closing. When things got rougher for Berchelt than he preferred he made appeals to the referee that received sympathy, including an uncommon timeout for rabbit punching.

Something about El Alacran, maybe his pleas to Raul Caiz Sr. or the wide punches or his neck tattoo, feels a bit fragile, alas. And he is way open to counters. That’s what gets one thinking about previous generations of Mexican prizefighters and the comparative cleanliness of their technique: Marquez never wasted a step, Barrera never floated his chin, Morales never threw an arm punch. These were men told from a very young age they could not expect to be the fastest or the strongest or even the toughest in a championship prizefight, and therefore they must employ at all times precision, economy and leverage. To see Berchelt bounce in wide circles and cock his chin much as he cocked his punches and swim forward flailing was to imagine how quickly a 130-pound Manny Pacquiao might’ve raced through him.

If Berchelt never will rival Marco Antonio or Erik, in his best moments he does resemble slightly Juan Manuel’s little brother Rafael. Berchelt has Rafael Marquez’s frame and desire to win with his right hand but not quite Rafael’s matchstopping power.

Still, it’s proper to applaud HBO for the informal super featherweight tournament Boxing After Dark has hosted thus far in 2017. Though the network lost the division’s most talented fighter when Top Rank departed for ESPN, the division’s most talented fighter lost most of the competition that could justify what hyperbolic acclaim he enjoys, too, and while Vasyl Lomachenko’s technical domination of contender-level competition already grows tired, ferocious combat between Latino and Asian prizefighters will not.

Writing of broadcasting: Saturday also comprised a card from Arizona that featured an innovative medium worthy of discussion. Roy Jones Jr. Boxing promoted a show presented on pay-per-view ($0.99) by Ultracast, a company specializing in 360-degree content. Effectively, Ultracast is a bunch of cameras pointing in different directions mounted above a single ringpost, with their various feeds stitched together in a way that allows a viewer to both zoom and roam his perspective in most every direction he could move his eyes were he similarly situated atop a ringpost.

I used the Ultracast app for Android on a Samsung Galaxy S8 phone, and despite the comparatively small screen it was a more rewarding experience than most fight-viewing parties and any sportsbar. It’s not a social way to partake of our beloved sport, but it exceeds the standard HDTV experience and rivals the ringside experience – and all previous jokes about stationing stepladders for visually impaired judges aside, it presents a surprisingly apt and innovative way to score fights more accurately.

What you experience is a static, unobstructed look at two fighters – no anxiously orbiting referee blocking you, no videogame-emulating camera switches from the production truck, no narrative-building replays between rounds. You see every punch (from an unfamiliar angle, yes, but still), you see the entirety of the fighters’ bodies – including, and most importantly for those who know what they’re watching, the fighters’ feet – and you see as far as the backdoor of a small arena and as near as a ringside doctor taking notes during an undercard match. If I were a trainer or fighter reviewing footage of a future opponent, it is absolutely the view I would wish to have.

Without seeing the hardware involved, one imagines it’s far less cumbersome than previous attempts with 3D, which means it might be a portable solution that complements Showtime’s recent modernization attempts with live sports on social media platforms (something HBO surely will adopt once AT&T finishes selling off its parent company’s assets). Take Ultracast, switch the commentary team for an enhanced arena-sounds audio feed, charge $0.99 for every fightcard in the land and $5 for world championships, and call it The Aficionados App: Eventually you could get a reliable $50/year from about 500,000 hardcore boxing fans. That might just be viable.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Thursday night Mexican middleweight contender David “The Destroyer” Lopez and his son were attacked in Nogales, Sonora, Mexico, Lopez’s hometown, while driving in Lopez’s pickup truck. Lopez was declared dead at the site of the shooting and his son was taken to the hospital in critical condition. No motive for the shooting is currently known, or at least none is being reported by Mexican media. The murder of Lopez is a boxing death that appears to have nothing to do with boxing but leaves anyone who covered Lopez’s career with what gnawing sense of helpless monotony one feels after receiving tragically bad news.

I did not know Lopez well but sat ringside for seven of his matches in Southern Arizona at Desert Diamond Casino, a property of Tohono O’odham Nation not technically in Tucson though nearby. More to the point Desert Diamond Casino is an hour’s drive north on I-19 from Nogales, a bordertown that exists in both Arizona and Sonora – effectively a single city with a large wall slicing its middle – once a place of reasonably safe diversion. Many aficionados made that drive northwards to Desert Diamond; Lopez drew disproportionate to his talents. He was a durable spoiler type, a natural underdog, an attrition fighter, without any particular punch or charisma. For a stretch, though, 2005-2009, Lopez was Nogales’ hometeam, and 800-1,000 Arizonans and Sonorans reliably attended his every match.

When Oscar De La Hoya and Richard Schaefer created Golden Boy Promotions they began hosting bimonthly cards at Desert Diamond as a farm league of sorts for their growing stable of prizefighters. The cards were exceptionally well constructed by local matchmaker Roger Woods and exceptionally well attended for what were effectively Spanish-language telecasts of club shows. Invariably Golden Boy would send one of its partners along, too, Marco Antonio Barrera or Shane Mosley or Bernard Hopkins or De La Hoya himself, and Desert Diamond’s publicity team would ensure those guys were available for interviews with local media. After each undercard match publicists would visit the press table and ask if anyone were interested in a postfight interview then lead the winner and loser to a small conference room in the back, beside the fighters’ dressing rooms, and let us ask whatever we wished. During those four years every Golden Boy fighter – Juan Manuel Marquez, Winky Wright, Robert Guerrero, Kassim Ouma, Deontay Wilder, Rocky Juarez – spent time in that small conference room politely conversing with the same dozen reporters. (Even Richard Schaefer occasionally dissembled for our amusement.)

Back then Telefutura’s fantastic “Solo Boxeo” program was at its best and the main and comains were generally excellent. But no one drew like The Destroyer. Lopez built his fanbase quickly and passionately with a TKO loss to Colombian Fulgencia Zuniga the first week of 2005, just before Zuniga made another wonderful Arizona fight with Mexican Jose Luis Zertuche – not long before both Zuniga and Zertuche got pistonstroked by Kelly Pavlik. The loyalty Lopez’s fans showed was the sort best founded upon a courageous loss – these were middleaged, workingclass, bordertown men who didn’t respect or trust sparkly things. Lopez returned to Desert Diamond four months later in the comain of a card that marked Alfredo Angulo’s professional debut, coincidentally, and began a torrid streak that saw him go 8-0 (4 KOs) at Desert Diamond, while converting himself from a narrow middleweight to an even narrower super welterweight in the hopes of a world title challenge.

That challenge came eight months after his final match at Desert Diamond, in the form of a lopsided decision loss to Austin Trout. It broke the spell for Lopez. He fought six more times in the four years that followed and posted a typical, career-unwinding record of 2-3-1 against foes like Jose Uzcategui in venues like the Salinas Storm House.

Even that torrid run of eight Desert Diamond wins in four years isn’t particularly torrid-looking, is it? Yet there was something electric about Lopez’s fights in that venue, an accidental chemistry of performer and stage few enjoy and no one quite explains.

Lopez was somewhat prickly after his matches, much like Desert Diamond’s other synonymous performer, Jhonny “Jhonny” Gonzalez, and memorable for his terse, tense answers about wanting his title shot. At the ringside media table we didn’t really understand Lopez’s popularity but didn’t deny it either. Guys who wrote for Tucson papers knew they had to cover Lopez because local interest in Lopez was genuine. Sincere inquiries about The Destroyer’s outsized popularity from Phoenix journalists generally got some jocular variation of “Because he’s ‘The Destroyer’!”

We didn’t understand his career and evidently understood the fortunes of his retirement even less. If someone’d’ve asked me to name Desert Diamond fighters I expected to have pleasant lives after boxing I mightn’t have named Lopez straight away but if the followup question had been “What about David Lopez?” I’m certain I’d have said “Yup, him too.” Some sort of dreadful twist changed that Thursday night. The tenor of the reports from Mexico suggests Lopez was a target – the victim of heavily armed shooters, not a traffic dispute gone to lunacy.

Mexico has always been a dangerous country in the style of every other region of the Spanish conquest and possessed of a cultural view of death quite different from its neighbor’s to the north. But the last decade’s internal war has created a toxicity that beggars scale. It poisons the root of a people famous the world over for its humility and friendliness; every Mexican has been traumatized by it regardless of residence. David Lopez’s death is a reminder unpleasant as it is unneeded.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Hi new boxing fans! We’re excited to have you!

By “new” of course I mean “smart” and “knowledgeable” and even “surprisingly insightful”; hell, I’m almost half as sure you can teach me new things about our beloved sport as you are 🙂 You’ve seen everything Sylvester Stallone has worked on – every Rocky movie, The Contender, Canelo Alvarez beer commercials – and you already know everything about other sports, and although you’ve never put gloves on you’ve been in a couple shoving matches with bouncers and almost beat up a plethora of bros from other fraternities a decade or so ago. I’ll give you a wide berth because I know what’s good for me.

You’ve got a very strong take about what happened Saturday night or Sunday morning in Australia – and admittedly, late as the telecast ran, it verily transcended timezones – your hot take’s like a hybrid of Teddy Atlas and Stephen A. Smith, raging adlib or flowing shock, and you already know you’re right, and you probably are, but I’m going to take a shot at nuance here, nambypamby spineless milquetoast weakass nuance, roughly my 600th such weekly effort, then hand the mic back to you and everyone else who knows better, OK?

Australian welterweight Jeff “The Hornet” Horn decisioned Filipino Manny Pacquiao Saturday in Brisbane in an excellent match. What’s actually important about that sentence is what happens after the words “in”; the unfortunate souls straining at the oars of ESPN’s mothership have hundreds if not thousands of hours to fill between now and the next ESPN prizefight and thereby have the onerous job of dissecting events for microscopic departures from the network’s promotional script, microscopic happenings they can magnify with hyperbole till there are controversies everywhere, but really, truly, it isn’t your job to rebrand life’s anxieties into outrage about a sport.

Did you enjoy the fight? Of course you did. That’s enough then.

I know you think I’m missing the point. But I think you’re giving me the benefit of your inexperience. So I guess we’re even.

Here’s my point: The longer I’ve watched boxing the more I’ve learned not to care about any result that is not a knockout. Prizefighting is not about selling yourself to ringside judges or commentators; prizefighting is about hurting the man across from you unto unconsciousness or incapacity of some other sort. Did you see what Andre Ward did to that Russian guy a few weeks ago? Of course you didn’t. That’s OK, very few people did, apparently. But that was the essence of prizefighting: Ward hurt the other man till he was fatigued – and fatigue makes a coward of every man – struck him precisely till he was broken, and then continued to beat him savagely, even illegally, until the referee commanded him to stop.

That’s it. That’s what happened. Its summary took 43 words and about as many seconds to type. Imagine if I had to fill 24 hours with highlights and commentary about it, though? I’d deserve your pity, I would.

What happened in Australia on ESPN does not lend itself to such decisiveness because neither man’s consciousness got taken, neither man’s spirit got broken. That means neither guy won decisively or it doesn’t much matter if he did. You didn’t score Saturday’s match because you didn’t really know what you were watching – even at 38 years old Pacquiao moves way faster than Ivan Drago – and that set you at the mercy of the broadcaster’s cameras and replays and scorecard, and those, my new friends, are not disinterested entities. Not disinterested in the slightest. Television is an entertainment medium, and while live sports have always entertained a fraction of the populace for a fraction of its time, in order to justify shareholder expectations by selling exponentially more advertisement time broadcasters that are publicly traded decided a few decades ago scripting or at least framing outcomes was a better business practice than merely rolling the cameras and hoping.

Saturday’s script featured the legend Manny Pacquiao departing pay-per-view for the first time in forever – except in the fight’s host country of Australia, where the fight was broadcasted on pay-per-view, but never mind – to knock out a tough Aussie in front of a record crowd of rugby fans in Brisbane. The limited Jeff Horn would do his level best for 15 or 20 minutes then succumb to Pacquiao’s class and power.

We know this was the frame because ESPN analyst Teddy Atlas told us so before the opening bell. Pacquiao would tilt to his right, throw his left cross, and spearchisel The Hornet. This didn’t happen, no matter how often or passionately Atlas willed it from ringside (and yes, that was Teddy’s anger at being almost exactly wrong you saw him projecting on the judges’ decision, and that poor table, postfight). What Atlas’ prefight analysis omitted, and appropriately so, was that Pacquiao has ever set that punch by moving counterintuitively to his left, conceding outside lead-foot position, and thereby turning his bemused opponent into the left cross.

Pacquiao didn’t set Horn properly for the leftcross because Pacquiao lacked the legs for it. Is that because he’s 38, or because he was fighting in baking sunlight at 38, or because he was fighting in baking sunlight at 38 against a younger man who didn’t give him time and space enough to do it? Yes.

Horn fought Pacquiao. He didn’t box him – he forearmed him, shouldered him, wristed him, taped him, butted him, and bled all over him. Pacquiao has always thrilled at roughtrade and did Saturday, too – his lust for feral exchanges is why he’s beloved by aficionados – but the expected ratio of Pacquiao’s class to Horn’s resiliency was wrong. And so it goes.

If Pacquiao keeps fighting it will be for the same reason every great fighter keeps fighting long after he can ice the likes of a Jeff Horn: money. Pacquiao also thrills at combat – there was nothing feigned about his ringwalk elation; he’s been that way his entire career. Pacquiao will retire as a legendary attraction for his fights with Oscar De La Hoya and Ricky Hatton and Miguel Cotto and Floyd Mayweather, yes, but there’s something you should know that ESPN won’t tell you: Pacquiao could have retired before all of that, nine years ago, and gone in the Hall of Fame, first ballot, for what he did to Marco Antonio Barrera, Erik Morales and Juan Manuel Marquez, for what he did before you knew his name.

One last thing. Be happy for Jeff Horn. Or just be happy, anyway. Our ranks have too many sour prigs already.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday or Sunday somewhere in Australia, Manny Pacquiao will fight an Australian welterweight named Jeff “The Hornet” Horn in a match televised by ESPN. While Horn is exactly the sort of fighter one expects to see on ESPN, Pacquiao, even at this late stage, is an extraordinary improvement. In its press release ESPN indicates Pacman-Hornet will be privy to a full suite of the network’s promotional instruments. This sort of immersion commitment should prove beneficial to Pacquiao’s promoter, Top Rank, and may even prove beneficial to our beloved sport as a whole.

Hand it to Top Rank, the outfit understands how to stretch an attraction longterm. Imagine if Manny Pacquiao’d stayed with Murad Muhammad or Gary Shaw or Golden Boy Promotions all those years ago – would Top Rank even be in business any longer?

Yes, absolutely. Nothing about its current business model or the model of its last decade would resemble its current business model, but Top Rank would be in business and profitable because it is institutionally better at what it does than anyone else in boxing. While its founder occasionally plays a crazy old uncle on TV the company moves conservatively and reliably follows reliable revenue streams.

Yes, it once built a pay-per-view infrastructure to promote its fighters after they were signed to large contracts but before HBO might supplement those contracts, a broadcasting arm that monetized Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. without improving him more than an iota or two, but even that riskylooking model was about recovering its investment someday from Time Warner (did a Top Rank a-side ever lose a main event on Top Rank PPV?). Years ago even Pacquiao fought on Top Rank PPV to keep him busy before politics did but then returned for a fouryear stint on HBO pay-per-view before Top Rank moved him, for a single fight, to Showtime and then back to HBO pay-per-view for a fouryear promotion of his eventual loss to Floyd Mayweather. When the fights were too risible to be promotional themes themselves – Joshua Clottey, Shane Mosley, Brandon Rios, Chris Algieri – Top Rank made the venue or broadcaster the theme, encouraging a suspension of disbelief like: I know this won’t be any good, but seeing a boxing ring in a football stadium, or a Chinese casino, or on the child affiliate of an American terrestrial broadcaster, why, to miss those things would be to ensure a lifetime of regret!

Where Arum was improvisational, relying on experience and charisma to propel him through whatever exotica the week’s announcement needed, his step-son, Todd DuBoef, was more strategic, talking about a concept he called Brand of Boxing, from whose spirit Al Haymon’s PBC borrowed liberally a few years later. The one enormous difference between the two visions was talent; Top Rank has a collective talent for spotting potential, developing it and matching it in a properly violent spectacle that is historic; PBC does not. DuBoef assumed if boxing’s popularity ascended his company would benefit because it had the best matchmaking, while Haymon assumed saturation was a better ploy – especially with someone else’s money. PBC was more innovative than Top Rank in its gambit but its founder’s enduring contempt for the very media whose platforms he expected to saturate kept his model insulated from what negative feedback journalism freely offers and thus vulnerable to what expensive feedback shareholders do.

The common wisdom in architecture is that there are but two ways to avoid catastrophic mistakes when building something: Get lucky, or make many tiny mistakes. PBC, whose blueprint began with a figurehead who does not conduct interviews, made the same mistakes over and over because it set itself in professional conflict with its critics, ensuring no small mistakes would be noticed till they became catastrophic ones.

To switch metaphors, if PBC is a long, well-set banquet table with one man at the head and nobody else in the room, Top Rank is more of a family style buffet with people arguing at every table and tables arguing with other tables. Where Haymon refuses interviews, Arum spars with members of the media routinely. Top Rank makes thousands of tiny mistakes and corrects them – if it lacks PBC’s derringdo it also lacks PBC’s ideological purity. Top Rank was on free-television decades ago then went to cable, Top Rank was on HBO for years then went to Showtime, Top Rank was on premium cable for decades now returns to basic cable – all the while Arum makes enemies of last year’s friends and friends of last decade’s enemies and enemies of their friends and friends of their enemies.

Were Pacquiao-Horn scheduled for Friday Night Fights it would be no better than an admission Pacquiao-Horn couldn’t do 50,000 buys in the U.S., and all the details to follow whatever details they followed wouldn’t matter – just Arum making noise again with whatever materials he can bang together. But then one hears the weighin will happen live on SportsCenter, an institution that quite rightly ignored its network’s Fright Night Fights franchise for however long Joe and Teddy were shouting about the abominable judging of what meaningless fights happened in between Just for Men commercials, and it does bring pause.

Whatever one opines of ESPN’s prepositional approach to hyperbolic coverage – on SportsCenter, for instance, this would be “the first column ever written, on a Chromebook, in the month of June, by an Irish-American writer wearing a pink Kangol, in a San Antonio Starbucks, during a rainstorm, for a website named after the previous duration of a championship prizefight” – the network owns a fantastic share of what thoughts happen in the minds of American male consumers, ages 18-34. As a fighter Pacquiao has been what the kids call “washed” since Juan Manuel Marquez snatched his soul 4 1/2 years ago, but as a brand? Goodness, ESPN has vended much, much sillier things.

HBO hasn’t had its heart or soul in boxing for a good long while, and if that trend showed any signs of reversal Top Rank would not have begun its ESPN overtures when it did. After bemoaning the cycle for a few years, Top Rank now accelerates it – leaving HBO with Tom Loeffler, Oscar De La Hoya and Kathy Duva to sustain an entire boxing ecosystem.

What’s that – a pick for Pacquiao-Horn? No, that’s OK.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday at Mandalay Bay, in a rematch barely anticipated for being unpromoted, American Andre Ward defended his light heavyweight championship by stopping Russian Sergey Kovalev at 2:29 of round 8. Aficionados will litigate the finale for a long while because, bereft of reliably violent spectacles these last five years, aficionados have evolved into a litigious, petty bunch.

Here’s how the match ended: One man, contracted to fight, bent himself at the waist, perched himself on the ropes, and silently beseeched the referee to intervene. The other man contracted to fight threw haymakers at his opponent’s midsection until the referee made him stop. Because this was a fight, the man who kept fighting won, and the man who stopped fighting lost. If you’re looking for more nuance than that, stop reading this and go watch HBO replays with the volume turned up.

There is something uniquely nauseating about a man who uses the word “unfair” to describe his plight. It implies both a lack of volition and a childish belief some parental figure or other is supposed to ensure outcomes correspond to his wishes – whether those wishes are for fairplay or preferential rulings or a compliant media. It is an expression of weakness that says: “Whoever was supposed to protect me from the unfavorable didn’t, and I had to fend for myself, and I couldn’t, and it’s not my fault.” It’s a speech difficult to abide from a toddler and impossible to respect from a man.

Immediately after being folded in two by an opponent whose career he promised to end violently, Kovalev didn’t use the word “unfair” – and the charitable interpretation of this is that he has enough character, enough masculinity, not to do so. The uncharitable explanation is that he lacks the vocabulary. For, at various moments in the fight, Kovalev did wear the mien of a man whose mind cycled through the Russian word for “unfair” way more than a prizefighter’s should.

In the first match of what will not be a trilogy Kovalev dropped Ward, and Ward wore the customary look of surprise – lead actor in a theater of the absurd – every great fighter wears whenever he gets dropped. Ward was not prepared for what happened but soon regained, through some combination of character and great conditioning, sufficient semblance of himself to neutralize Kovalev’s attack just enough to get to his corner and 60 seconds of refuge. By comparison to Ward, Kovalev looked singularly unprepared for the experience of pain and fatigue he felt in Saturday’s eighth round.

Did Ward’s punches land below the upper line of Kovalev’s silvertrimmed trunks? Yes. Did they land below Kovalev’s bellybutton? Maybe. Did they land on Kovalev’s testicles? No.

The universal remedy taught in every gym in the world for a man who hits you low is to repay him with the same coin. This is prizefighting, after all, not boxing, and when you are paid 40 or so times a workingman’s salary to entertain workingmen with your savagery you forfeit some of the appellate processes afforded lawyers and bankers, see; you are expected to remedy most injustices with your own hands. Heaven knows Tony Weeks would’ve allowed it. Weeks is a fight-friendly ref – part of the reason Marcos Maidana roughedup Floyd Mayweather three years ago, part of the reason Ward broke Kovalev in half Saturday, and all of the reason Kenny Bayless was in the ring for Mayweather-Maidana 2.

One of the qualities that make Ward a great prizefighter where Kovalev is a good one is the men’s differing reactions to what adversity happens when their opponents break rules. Kovalev struck Ward behind the head a number of times in the match, and each time sharpened Ward’s concentration on the objective of giving Kovalev commensurate pain. Ward struck Kovalev lower than Kovalev expected to be struck a number of times in the match, and each time sharpened Kovalev’s concentration on the inadequacy of the referee’s reaction. “Krusher” Kovalev, the man who would beat Ward till he could no longer support his family with prizefighting, lowered his hands and lowered his head and winced and turned his back – overcome with pain and an acute sense of unfairness.

Again, if your fortune is made pandering to Americans’ lasting fears of psychopathic Soviets, you don’t get to sit on the lower ropes, arms crisscrossing your belly and a look of betrayal on your face, while a guy from Oakland wales the daylights out of you – it’s catastrophic to your brand.

Writing of brands, since that’s the thing these days, Krusher will probably be back on HBO before Ward is because HBO no longer has the money or energy to do better; Kovalev can fire his American trainer, import some legendary coach from Chelyabinsk, go back to hipthrusting at overmatched opponents for reliable purses, conduct ferocious postfight-interview callouts at men who’ve no reason to fight him, and dance nimbly round the fact his career’s defining win came against someone two months from his 50th birthday.

For Ward the future is trickier. A unification match with Adonis Stevenson is the best idea, but Stevenson’s understandable fidelity to Showtime (who else’d’ve paid him to fight such challengers?) is an obstacle only pay-per-view revenue might surmount. Trouble is, Ward’s not a pay-per-view draw, and everyone in the fight game knows it except Ward and his promoter. Ward’s not a ticketseller or a salesman, a very good commentator or interview. Honestly, he’s not much of an an entertainer of any sort.

But he is one hell of a fighter.

That’s worth more than the sum of every other thing.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday brings a rematch of 2016’s most-anticipated match, Andre Ward versus Sergey Kovalev, in Las Vegas, on HBO pay-per-view, and it may be 2017’s most-anticipated rematch, but that’s the most to be said for it. Good as the first fight was it ended in a way that anticipates a predictable result the next time, no matter how many mean sentences the combatants now speak about one another.

As this fight nears interest dwindles. There are various reasons for this – neither guy is particularly likable or charismatic hence neither guy’s vindication feels particularly relevant to any of us – but that’s nothing good promotion should be unable to surmount. Except nothing like good promotion is anywhere near this fight, is it? The HBO “24/7” franchise is hollowed-out from exhaustion; the idea turned 10 years-old a few months ago, making it a three-year idea stretched to thrice its proper duration, and now it sputters leglessly along with cameos from a branding executive and a lawyer and whatever media still shows up for kickoff press conferences.

Remember when folks thought Jay-Z’s Roc Nation would change boxing because Jay-Z was a hustler and boxing had never seen one of those before? Whatever ingredients make a great promotional outfit Roc Nation has none of them.

Here’s Saturday’s promotion thus far:

Ward thinks Ward won. Kovalev thinks Kovalev won. HBO’s unofficial scorer thinks Kovalev won. HBO’s onair hypeman thinks Ward won or maybe Kovalev did but it really doesn’t matter because whoever won is a great fighter which means it really matters a lot or not at all or a whole lot!

By the fifth minute of the first HBO infomercial I started trying to remember who I thought won the first fight and arrived at the conclusion I cared deeply about the match in its first four rounds, when someone might be knocked unconscious, and substantially less with each round that followed. I vaguely recall surprise Harold Lederman’s scorecard was not tilted to Ward and vaguely recall not-disagreeing with it, which makes me think I thought Kovalev won, but that’s no reason to feel enthusiasm for this rematch. More telling: I traveled to Oakland years ago to watch Ward fight Chad Dawson but haven’t seriously considered attendance at either of his fights with Kovalev. This looks like evidence one can disembark the Ward bandwagon without he becomes a Kovalev fan – which I kind of imagine I was, too, a couple years back.

Ward is tired of Kovalev’s smiling-psychopath schtick, and evidently so am I (though I didn’t realize it till the moment I wrote it). It’s a generational thing. I was in highschool when the Cold War ended and in college when it became apparent the Soviet Union had rotted from within way back when I was in grammar school, hence Perestroika, and therefore a pivot to Japan as our new bogeyman was just the thing – business as an another form of warfare, etc. What was obvious to hockey fans even before Glasnost – Soviet athletes were disciplined and conditioned and creative but in no way evil – became increasingly obvious to the rest of my generation, even while our parents remained fixated on Russian nukes and domino theories and satellite states and the like.

Sergey Kovalev’s handlers have capitalized on Americans’ abiding suspicions of Russian malice, and a weak era in boxing history generally, to make of Kovalev a mythical creature many times more malevolent and less crafty than he actually is. According to HBO’s intrepid reporting, though, Satan got fatigued after round 5 of his November match in large part because a biased referee was letting Satan get held and clenched before biased judges stole Satan’s belts and . . . well, they don’t make evil quite like they used to.

Kovalev assures us he will end Ward’s career Saturday, Ward claims there’s nothing frightening about Kovalev, and reality is leaning Wardwards. Kovalev’s best chance of beating Ward happened 10 rounds ago, and every moment since then, to include the rest of their match and the months that preceded their rematch’s signing and their trainingcamps, has made a Kovalev victory less probable. Ward solved Kovalev, and if he didn’t deserve the decision in their first fight he would have had he not been dropped by a threequarter cross, and he won’t be dropped by that punch Saturday. If Kovalev intends to beat Ward he will have to make a messy attrition of it. There’s a good chance Kovalev doesn’t have the constitution or technique for that. More to the point: Kovalev’s promotion of this match is that he will visit an atrocity upon Ward and Ward knows it and fears it, and you can’t talk like that and then pout if judges don’t give you a decision again.

Ward’s wager is on Kovalev’s emotional fragility – the Russian is a frontrunner who folds when things start to feel unjust. Ward likely will begin the fight at distance, a touch disengaged, looking to run Kovalev into an accidental headbutt or two, while exaggeratedly endeavoring to steal rounds in their final 30 seconds. If this drives Kovalev to a paralytic froth of rage Ward will look to stop him in the championship rounds, otherwise Ward will continue adapting and hitting Kovalev’s body in clinches till Kovalev has another inexplicable onset of midfight fatigue. Other scenarios are possible but don’t feel probable.

I’ll take Ward, UD-12, more decisively this time.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

A large portion of my thoughts in the last few months has gone to the consequences of a psychological compass that does not point due north but instead a few or many degrees east or west of its magnetic calling and the events – disease and depression and addiction, specifically (and often kinfolk) – that can cause such untrustworthiness. I’ve been having many fewer relatable thoughts lately so nothing should be read into the outsized portion of this thinking; it’s more like a portion of a fraction than anything direr.

No subject more interesting than this happened in our sport Saturday, and as some of this might pertain to Andre Ward and Sergey Kovalev’s upcoming rematch, it feels appropriate as not a time to treat such things.

The metaphor to the compass feels aptest because there are few scenarios more dispiriting than finding oneself lost in the woods with a compass one doubts. But here’s one: Being lost in the woods with a faulty compass one trusts absolutely. Magnetism and electricity and polarity and the rest ensure this doesn’t happen, but all the more reason to use it as a metaphor. Blinded by rage, as an example of a competing metaphor, feels comparatively flimsy; the blind person is well aware he doesn’t have sight and compensates for his blindness in sundry ways. Depression and disease and addiction in general do not work quite that way; a diseased person is not blind at all but rather filled with vibrant sight of a world that is sideways or motioning backwards or colored otherwise.

This is why oldfashioned appeals to bootstrapping and willfulness bring exponents of satisfaction more to their speechmakers than their audiences: “I remember when I overcame blah blah blah by making a list of blah blah blah and doing blah blah blah, daily!”

Yes, but what if you can’t help misplacing your list, or finding your whiteboard routinely erased, or adhering to a calendar that mixes days with weeks and hours?

A lesser malady to all this and a nearly universal part of the human condition is anxiety. Back when I had many more relatable thoughts than I have lately I committed a disproportionate portion of these thoughts to anxiety’s eradication. Identifying one’s anxiety, though, becomes an exercise fulfilling as picking oneself up by his own hair: a robust and ceaseless search for anxiety’s every harbinger evinces nothing so much as anxiety, and what could be more anxious than an anxiety-hunt that causes anxiety? And around.

And around.

There are ways to begin in a better direction, yes – and if anyone relates painfully to any of this, at least try a meditation routine of some sort before arcing the white towel over toprope – but if there be an ultimate solution, however temporarily enjoyed, it resides, again and probably, in anxiety’s eradication, not its maintenance. And the irony of that riddle is here: Anxiety reduces in most cases to narcissism, and a partial remedy to that seems to be this: Endeavor to make others like the version of themselves they are in your presence. Inwards to outwards to inwards to outwards; the remedy to the first problem, faithfully applied, is nearly the opposite of the second problem’s remedy. #WelcomeToLife

This is a boxing column?

OK, OK.

The art of championship prizefighting – used in this case like a synonym for combat between two evenly matched men – is many times the art of discomfiting another man by repeatedly making him do something he does not wish to do till he is exhausted. Sluggers do this by giving their opponents pain with each blow; boxers do this by frustrating their opponents’ offense and punctuating that frustration with counters that sting; volume punchers do it by setting a pace that is at least a beat or two faster than their opponents’ natural fighting rhythms.

Being thus discomfited becomes an emotional or at least mental state from which the world’s best prizefighters must recover quickly. It’s a function of proper conditioning much as the physical elements are – who can return closest to full strength, however defined, in the 60 seconds between rounds (while the very best, like Floyd Mayweather, are able to do it midround).

Since this entire column is an aside of sorts, let’s have one more: Emotional states work like this, too, for all of us, and the folks we consider the stablest are at best marginally less prone to disequilibrium from life’s quotidian events but mark themselves exceptional via quicker recovery times.

Much of Andre Ward’s comportment since his questionable decisioning of Sergey Kovalev in November, one hopes, is attributable to some effort to discomfit Kovalev prefight by making Kovalev so angry his compass stops pointing due north. Some of this, too, could be a matter of good luck: Ward’s generally unlikable demeanor and his promoter’s generally accepted incompetence are events Kovalev mistakes for personal affronts, but beyond a certain talent threshold, we already know, the greatest professional accomplishments are leavened significantly by luck.

Trying to divine the arbitrary border where talent ends and luck begins (beginning with the luck of one’s genetic predispositions that begin with the luck of one’s parents) is an anxious fool’s errand that unduly courts what anxiety someday can court disease, depression and addiction. And we shan’t have that.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday in Sheffield undefeated Texas welterweight Errol Spence beat Sheffield’s own Kell Brook to a knee from which Brook did not rise halfway through round 11 and like that Spence became one of the world’s two best prizefighters at 147 pounds. What the conclusion wanted for suspense it enjoyed in decisiveness with Brook physically bowed and emotionally crumpled.

As an aficionado ages in the sport of boxing – a cynicism incubator, if you will – he becomes increasingly less interested in controversies because they never resolve, as little in life does, and folks pettifogging judges’ scorecards in the name of something like closure look increasingly undernourished. A roundabout way, that, of reporting this: In most cases if the final bell rings on a match, I don’t much care who wins anymore. If violent decisiveness is what attracted me to our beloved sport as a boy it’s what keeps me interested as a man in direct proportion to the number of world titles won by knockout.

Title defenses that end in knockouts are certainly better than title defenses that do not but cynicism’s incubator teaches you at some point about the craft of long-game matchmaking, setting up b-sides over a year or 18 months to make a-sides look all the more spectacular in victory (the reason a Canelo knockout of Golovkin would be so much more meaningful than any other outcome of their September fight). Maybe it’s the enduring rot of Money May’s effect, of handicapping each prospective match to within moments of expiration, that embellishes this desire for a conclusiveness that manifests itself in postfight silence: the vanquished being so vanquished nobody’s listening and the victor being so victorious no word can improve him.

Such was Saturday’s conclusion. Spence had nothing he might say to improve what he did, and Brook had nothing he could say to improve what he did either. Brook lost his title on one knee in a fight he was leading. All the publicist spin in the history of dictionaries cannot improve that. He spent not an instant of the match unconscious, and he resorted to that same squeamishly bad tactic of pointing to his eye for the benefit of fans and referee and commentators as he did in his previous match. Whatever sort of lion Brook may be when signing for fights he is not hardy enough to be a great prizefighter.

To listen to British broadcasters Brook was within a punch of losing his life when he took a knee the first time, in round 10, and only his irregularly large heart got him to the end of that round. Which makes good theater if Brook somehow blitzes Spence in round 11 to retain his title, or at least gets circuitbroken, but every moment of consciousness after the first knee invalidates the peril that brought that first knee and makes the second knee simply poor form.

Don’t see it that way? Watch Spence deflate in the moment before his brain processes he’s now welterweight champion; Spence is neither frightened of what he’s done to Brook nor particularly triumphant so much as disappointed in his rival’s comportment; he knows the best moment of his career thus far has become a question of Brook’s character much as a confirmation of his own prowess.

That’s not Spence’s fault, of course, so let’s move on from Kell Brook and not look back.

Errol Spence went to another man’s hometown, and after appearing outclassed in the opening third of the match beat a titlist to quitting. If Spence is not a special fighter, in other words, he’s yet to prove it. There were some subtle adjustments made by both men at various moments of the fight but the decisive adjustment Spence made was to go harder at his opponent’s body, and it was not subtle. Sometime after the match’s midpoint Spence sensed a bend in his opponent, a spot of give, a fragility he planned through training camp to exploit but hadn’t seen in 20 minutes of looking. No one farther from the apron than a trainer sees these things, and often the largest part of a trainer’s task is convincing his charge to trust his sense of it: What you saw that round, son, that fissure, was true, was right, trust yourself, he’s cracking.

Spence needs to reminders because he knows no differently; he breaks the men placed across from him and trusts unconditionally any intuitive flash that tells him another man is hairlined. Once Spence confirms the other’s weakness he accelerates. “Truth” is an apt nickname for Spence because what one gathered from the entirety of Saturday’s match was an abiding honesty in the combat Spence makes.

What remains to be seen in future championship fights – and let us be relatively greedy in hoping Keith Thurman remains serious about unification in 2017 – is how Spence reacts to a man he cannot break on schedule. Thurman may be that man, and he probably is not.

Finally, Spence is the first prizefighter to give one hope about PBC’s prospects for survival as a promotional outfit, not merely a venture-capitalist black hole. Spence is PBC born and PBC raised – the one part of Al Haymon’s 2012 Olympian-capture initiative that will work out. If Haymon’s outfit gives us a unified champion of our sport’s best division by the end of this year the PBC and its model will deserve a second look and maybe even a bit less cynicism.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday at Madison Square Garden, Nebraska junior welterweight champion Terence Crawford beat Dominican Felix Diaz by corner stoppage after 10 rounds in a fight enabled by HBO. If it wasn’t dreary neither was it masterful, and if shifting the onus of entertainment from punchers to writers was Crawford’s strategy he’ll find it an open failure in what follows: As Crawford was insufficiently inspired to entertain Saturday neither was his performance sufficiently inspirational to engender any imaginative explanations.

Terence Crawford is bored with boxing. And boredom leads to something like contempt, and I can relate because I’m bored with Terence Crawford and it’s leading me to watch Crawford and his fights with increasing contempt.

Why Saturday’s match had to be stopped is very hard to say; an Olympic gold medalist signs for a championship chance and without being dropped or even buckled needs his corner to rescue him before the championship rounds even commence, in Madison Square Garden? We might as well return to open scoring if we’re going to use this mercy rule, and stop broadcasting such tripe.

A number of times Saturday, in a championship fight, mind you, the combatants had to be instructed by referee Steve Willis to mill, as each scowled his opponent’s way and drew some sort of line with his glove and bade his opponent cross it. Neither man cared to make combat badly enough to forgo exact terms, and this led Crawford to show Diaz increasing contempt, something, once more, Crawford partisans outside Nebraska now begin to share.

Watching the contest with volume muted, as I do whenever possible, I set myself in the seat of an imaginary viewer who flipped to HBO, or was already there for some other reason, because somewhere he’d heard or read about this Crawford dude, son of Omaha’s meanest streets (boxing alone could find their intersection), and saw tentative tapping early and good footwork and something like a bitter countenance and quite a lot of confidence that did not manifest as action. Crawford engaged when threatened and did things technically and well enough, but there was no excitement, and these things, over and again, cannot be argued for; nobody had to talk himself into finding Crawford’s signature match against Yuriorkis Gamboa thrilling.

Saturday’s attendance number in Manhattan appears unavailable, or at least not included in any official reports, not unlike the way Crawford’s pay-per-view number against Viktor Postol went untallied for a good long time: no announcement is indeed an announcement.

Crawford remains in a sticky place with his promoter, Bob Arum – who was ornery as hell Saturday after his champion’s supposedly impressive knockout victory – not wishing to bid goodbye his one reliable revenue stream, Manny Pacquiao, till no hope remains of a last gigantic payday (not to be found in Australia or Nebraska), and Crawford entertaining evidently no pressing desire to move to welterweight till a unification is achieved, as if that were still meaningful to anyone. Part-time Pacquiao is still good enough to buzz Crawford if he catches him at 147 pounds, and there’s a good chance their match might be a good one – while Pacquiao’s days of entertaining fights ended with Juan Manuel Marquez’s right fist years ago, he’s fought better competition since the Shoulder Match with Money May than Crawford has – good enough even to resuscitate interest in Crawford.

Would anyone who watched Saturday’s match believe Crawford made the fight of the year in 2014, when he . . .

And like that, writing about Crawford, once more, has gotten dull (notice how short on words ringside accounts were for a championship match that lasted 30 minutes). Enough then.

Let’s address Gary Russell’s dominating win over hardhitting . . . just kidding. Let’s not.

That leaves this week’s noteworthy match, Englishman Kell Brook (1-1 in career defining fights) against American Olympian Errol Spence who might be genuinely special and is taking the sort of risk a genuinely special fighter takes (not unlike Crawford’s 2014 trip to Scotland to beat Ricky Burns) in a fight so good, so potentially exciting, experts can’t help but interpret it as a sign of PBC’s financial woes, even if this will be the second such welterweight fight PBC has made in the first half of 2017.

Brook has not punched professionally since his illadvised September vacation in the middleweight division, and some combination of Brook’s necessary weightloss and reconstructive facial surgery does raise some questions about his fitness for the Spence fight. Brook will enjoy British scoring, though, and a well-lubricated Yorkshire crowd when the bell rings on this match, and his experience is such Spence should be unable to unscrew him quickly as he’s done to most other men set across from him.

I was ringside for three of Spence’s first 12 prizefights and entirely skeptical of anyone off that 2012 U.S. Olympic team (by medal count, the worst in American history), but Spence appeared kinda special. He moved better and hit with more commitment than the rest of a team that, in yet another bit of eye-for-talent foreshadowing, Al Haymon signed and shepherded into the professional ranks.

What’s much more important than the likelihood of Brook-Spence being an excellent match is that it will open without a winner already established in the mind of every aficionado, unlike last weekend’s curdled fare. That’s a special occasion. And if the winner fights Keith Thurman, in a true welterweight unification match in the fall, PBC may well have turned a corner.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday the world’s best junior welterweight, Nebraska’s Terence Crawford, will fight on HBO at Madison Square Garden against a 33-year-old Dominican named Felix Diaz. Saturday the world’s second best featherweight, Maryland’s Gary Russell Jr., will fight on Showtime against a Colombian named Oscar Escandon. These are important fights, one supposes, featuring very good fighters, one of whom may even prove great.

And yet Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. is more fun to write about than both of them, and maybe that’s the point of his popularity, a magnetism everyone wishes attribute to Canelo in his assignment of credit for what appears a post-Mayweather-Pacquiao pay-per-view record, but Canelo just sold more with Chavez than he vended in a combination of Amir Khan and Liam Smith, which indicates his opponent’s ethnicity and charisma make more of a difference than his opponent’s resume and Gennady “160,000 buys” Golovkin may not actually make any more dollars for Canelo come September than he makes sense.

Canelo was marketed better than this weekend’s main event fighters and marketed to a better demographic, too, and luck is luck, but as a prizefighter he appears to’ve been developed somewhere between the two men, with Crawford obviously in the front and Russell behind. Russell’s handlers knew from the moment they signed him he was the future of boxing, which, it turns out, is a problem when those handlers don’t know what they’re looking at and have much less an idea how to develop it. Crawford’s promoter, meanwhile, treated Crawford’s talent with the same skepticism Top Rank and its ace matchmakers treat every prospect they sign:

Can he sell tickets in his hometown? However fast his hands or feet, does he hit hard enough to keep world-class competitors off him? How pesky are his parents and manager? Is his childhood trainer a benefactor or beneficiary? How are his whiskers in a shootout? And most importantly, how does he comport himself afterwards – or in Bob Arum’s actual words, “Does he dissipate between fights?”

Whatever criteria PBC uses it is not that criteria and probably comes closer to a criterion like: How many people say he reminds them of Floyd Mayweather, or at least Sugar Ray Leonard?

Russell and Crawford are about the same age and have about the same number of fights, and yet Crawford is multiples more accomplished than Russell, and it wasn’t that way six years ago when HBO, as Al Haymon’s pre-PBC affiliate, began to shine Russell highlights and matches at its viewers. The details of what happened to Russell after that aren’t important, though surely there were contract issues and a dearth of opponents for a man of such otherworldly handspeed, the usual “nobody will fight him” gambit used by cheap or incompetent managers and promoters everywhere. Then Russell met Vasyl Lomachenko three years ago and got conclusively outclassed, which was not shameful but an indictment of all things said about him before that match.

Too, it was an indictment of what development happened to Russell before his match with Lomachenko: Russell’s two preceding opponents shared 20 losses in their 60-fight collective. It was the usual Haymon-managed concern with building an attraction rather than a fighter, and it went the way things with Haymon-managed prospects usually do when a return-on-investment alarm rings somewhere and their competition gets improved by a few hundred percent overnight. His unblemished record now blemished, a mortal sin in the Haymon stable, Russell went back to whupping guys who, for one reason or another, hadn’t much chance against him. One suspects the same ideal’ll be in play Saturday against Escandon; PBC’d not risk another Russell loss on Showtime when CBS and HBO are willing to pay substantially more to broadcast PBC superstars being beaten.

Terence Crawford, while more accomplished than Russell, now risks being considered a box office dud outside Nebraska if he doesn’t sell a respectable number of tickets at Madison Square Garden against Felix Diaz the same way he didn’t sell a respectable number of pay-per-views against Viktor Postol in July. According to Madison Square Garden’s website Diaz (19-1, 9 KOs) is a “hard hitting southpaw” with an Olympic gold medal, but when one sees a gold medal round the neck of a fighter with less than a 50-percent knockout ratio as a pro, well . . .

Know what? This is dull. Watch the fights or don’t, but nothing historic will happen Saturday, so let’s go back to Chavez Jr.

A video leaked online last week that besmirched Chavez’s spotless character by depicting the fallen champ enjoying his loss a bit too much. Someone, it seems, believed a wedge might be driven between Chavez and his fans. But no. Chavez is a circus act no one can stop from plying his craft to a ripe older age. He doesn’t appeal to slackers and potheads the way his detractors insist he must. Rather he appeals to anyone who’s ever been told to do something he didn’t want to do and then done it well enough to be mistaken for someone capable of doing it before ecstatically sabotaging the whole damn thing in a flurry of shrugs. Chavez neither called in sick nor told his boss to go pound sand; Chavez continued showing up at a job for which he was illsuited, played videogames on the clock, took extended breaks and giggled his way through quarterly evaluations; Chavez didn’t shout “I quit” but sat in his cube wondering “When are they going to fire me?”

If there are Mexicans actually enraged by Chavez, I’ve not found them. Mostly my interviews have gone like this.

Bart: “Did you see the Chavez fight?”
Mexican aficionado: (Laughing) “Yes.”
Bart: (Laughing harder)
Mexican Aficionado: (Laughing harder still)
Bart: “Think he’ll retire?”
Mexican aficionado: “No.”
Bart: (Laughing)
Mexican aficionado: (Laughing harder)

Remember this when the hyperbole reaches a boil on HBO and Showtime this weekend: To date Chavez has sold about 1.5 million more pay-per-views than Crawford and Russell combined. It is kind of funny.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday in Las Vegas, in boxing’s must daring exploitation of Cinco De Mayo loyalties yet, Jalisco’s Saul “Canelo” Alvarez won every round, minute and second of his match with Sinaloa’s “Son of the Legend” Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. while clearing his throat for a scripted callout of Gennady “GGG” Golovkin, Canelo’s next opponent. Chavez, too, saved himself for postfight festivities, wherever they were.

What suspicions some Mexicans will harbor after Saturday’s postfight announcement, the postcharade charade – a $70 staredown, as it were – reduce to this statement: Chavez Jr. fought exactly like a guy who knew his opponent’s next contract was signed before the opening bell and got paid generously to participate in the promotion. Chavez, twitchy with embarrassment or concussion or the lingering effects of whatever copious stimulants he ingested to hollow himself for Friday’s weighin, stood in the ring after Saturday’s defeat and should’ve found it curious as the rest of us he was being interviewed first but appeared untroubled by it because, let’s be honest, as part of the promotion and broadcast he knew Canelo’d be calling out “Globekeen” and had a contractual need to don his sponsor’s headwear. Or did you think Chavez was otherwise hankering for a chance to explain the worst performance of his farcical career?

Some personal notes about that career, now that it’s unofficially through: Luck and geography put me ringside for a disproportionate number of Chavez matches while promoter Top Rank was inventing him, including Chavez’s dominations of Ireland’s John Duddy and “Irish” Andy Lee, and there was ever a wide chasm between the way Chavez expected to be treated in interviews and the way he prepared himself for fights. He was a haughty prick in his native language, un fresa, an unlikable combination of awkward and arrogant, ever casting impatient glares at his handlers to get things moving while he mixed cliches evasively and said absolutely nothing. You waste enough time on a subject, though, and some sense of selfpreservation or efficiency helps you begin to imagine admirable qualities, and when you can’t, you settle on redeeming qualities, and Chavez did have one in particular. He truly made others funnier.

Saturday I sat in a roomful of aficionados representing nearly every ethnicity on this green earth and each one was funnier in his expressions of disgust for Chavez than he was on any other subject. Sunday morning I scrolled through Twitter, too, and found myself manifesting an uncommonest form of mirth: Laughing aloud alone. This backhanded celebration of Chavez is not a gratuitous lunge at fulfilling wordcount, either; what I will miss about Chavez is a chance to write humorously about something in our beloved sport.

That almost never happens. Through his indifference to preparation and tacit acknowledgements a fortune was being made by charging persons for hoping to see him beaten to death Chavez gave writers a waiver of sorts to make fun of him in a playfully amoral way. Anyone who’s tried to do this with any other fighter has quickly found himself a target of moralists’ umbrage: “How dare you – he’s risking his life in there!” Which means what humor we’re allowed is either artless stock (“his chin is an insult to fine China everywhere”) or bitterly facetious: “I suppose if I were a recovering addict who wanted his legacy stolen out from under him and sold to a faceless charlatan, I probably couldn’t do better than hire Richard Schaefer, either.”

You could make fun of Son of the Legend while smiling, in other words, not scowling. I’ll miss that.

While we’re on the subject of selling talent, a quick thought about an occasionally overlooked detail of the Chavez legacy: How well he predicted PBC’s eye for talent. Recall that Al Haymon and friends got themselves sued by Top Rank three years ago when they poached Son of the Legend. As a Haymon-managed practitioner Junior went 2-2 (1 KO-by) in a disgraceful fourmatch march that fell somewhere between plain ingratitude and corporate sabotage. Bless Junior’s ungrateful heart for that.

And so we come to Canelo, the man Chavez now concedes is the best Mexican prizefighter of their generation, a selfmade marketeer, Jalisco horseman and entrepreneurial son of a Mexican icecream vendor, all that, and a redhead too. Canelo looked genuinely fantastic against Chavez but did not stop him. Or even hurt him. Which means there’s very little chance of his winning the 2017 Fight HBO Most Wants Seen. (As an aside, how richly absurd was that segue to Golovkin in the broadcast’s second match? Orbital bone, orbital bone, why, that reminds viewers of GGG’s September victory!)

Golovkin and Canelo are basically the same fighter, and Golovkin is bigger, and without squandering others’ chances at 100,000 words of handicapping, there’s no reason to think their match will be any more complicated than that. Fine, I take that back: Canelo is better defensively, and Golovkin hits harder, but Canelo hits pretty hard too, and Golovkin’s defense is actually underrated. There you go, peers, I left the last 99,980 words for y’all.

We end with a correction to a point above. There was one other fighter I’ve covered who was fun to make fun of as Junior, and he was another junior: Hector Camacho Jr. Difference being, Machito was a great storyteller and amusing conversationalist. But he did say to me one thing germane to Chavez’s situation today: “I’ve disrespected the sport of boxing so many times I’m surprised they let me put gloves on.”

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday at Wembley Stadium in London, before a crowd of 90,000 or so, British heavyweight Anthony Joshua defeated by 11th-round technical knockout Ukrainian Wladimir Klitschko to become the undefeated, undisputed heavyweight champion of the world – in an excellent and valorous four-knockdown brawl anticipated by nothing on Klitschko’s resume. Any impulses to lead a treatment of Joshua’s victory with Klitschko’s age or previous knockout losses to men unremarkable as Ross Purity or Corrie Sanders should be stayed by a paragraph or two, even if they weren’t just now.

What belongs at the top of any consideration of Joshua from this moment till the end of his career is that he became recognized as heavyweight champion the right way.

Perhaps Klitschko was no longer what we considered him in his 30s but he was still the best prizefighter above 200 pounds in the world – as there is nearly no doubt he’d’ve beaten Tyson Fury in a rematch the Gypsy King avoided shamelessly. Klitschko’s reign was, again, unremarkable as any in the modern era, a string of mostly mediocre performances against mostly mediocre opponents with occasionally some emphatic violence against an occasional, emphatically bad opponent. He left Saturday’s ring entirely diminished in physical stature if not legacy. Klitschko’s legacy was to remain the same, win or lose; he got dropped and stopped by, let’s see if it’s possible to get this right, A YOUNG HUNGRY LION and therefore will not rise in historians’ esteem anytime soon; but if Klitschko’d’ve won Saturday historians’d’ve moved him no higher in historic ranking because no one would yet know if it were feat or farce till Joshua revealed his true self in the decade that followed, sort of the way aficionados’ esteem for Fury underwent a nineminute revisionist fever after Klitschko dropped Joshua in round 6.

When Joshua tore out his corner to open the championship rounds, comporting himself like nothing so much as a champion, and Wlad’s legs got somehow stiffer in flight than they were in pursuit, my spirits lifted a touch. The hyperbole was en route, desperate as British fightfans are for a man who justifies their passions, but it was not going to be misplaced as other recent happenings like the Fury coronation. When Joshua’s right uppercut took Klitschko from Go-Go-Gadget neck to legless jitterbug and you knew there was no way a 41-year-old was getting to round’s end my spirits crested then fell then rose anew: It’s hard for a disinterested viewer to escape some sense of sympathy when a man enormous as Klitschko shrinks to a bony quivering thing, his physique transformed from ripples to lumps; that sight dropped my emotions and their descent got further weighted by what faux expertise was then sure to awaken and now does awaken – when every toughguy with a microphone or pen who abandoned boxing after Lennox Lewis tenderized Mike Tyson 15 years ago comes roaring back, old hungry lions they be, to tell us how much the new champion reminds them of their favorite old champion who reminded them of themselves and that time in the bar or backalley when they brought extreme justice in a bareknuckle violence orgy for whose storied perpetrator local authorities today continue their search.

A couple seconds of those thoughts, though, happily yielded to a sense of relief and gratitude; relief for the Brits in our legion, as no one save the Mexicans has done so much to keep our beloved sport afloat this last decade, and gratitude that our new face of boxing is so preferable to our last face of boxing. In the deafening cheers of 90,000 spirited Brits one heard many things among which was a crashing halt to the Money May era. Anthony Joshua is already better at every facet of prizefighting than Floyd Mayweather, with the exception of fighting itself – and Joshua’ll never be more than half as good at that as Mayweather, so it hardly matters.

(No, a 147-pound version of Joshua would not win a round against Mayweather, the same way a 130-pound version of Klitschko would not survive a round with 2005 Manny Pacquiao.)

One now halfway hopes Klitschko retires while splitting the other half of his hopes between an immediate rematch and a pasting of Deontay Wilder in PBC’s consolation league. Dancing Wlad lacked the movement and energy to dissuade Joshua for more than a halfhour and will fare still worse on the next go, but he’s still way too young and active to lose to “Wilder &” Wilder, which would make Joshua-Klitschko II an even bigger spectacle than Saturday’s was. Joshua, meanwhile, has no earthly reason to fight anywhere but London for the foreseeable future; in all of boxing only Canelo in Mexico City or Pacquiao in Manila could hope to sell half as many tickets as Joshua just did. There’s absolutely no reason for him to do Las Vegas or Madison Square Garden; he’s already larger than both those venues, and there’s not currently an American heavyweight who belongs in the same arena as him.

There’s much room for Joshua to improve as a prizefighter, but here’s to hoping he doesn’t; he’s good enough to ice any man in the world but not good enough to jab-jab-hold smaller men to decision victories. Joshua is perfect as he is right now. May he remain that way for a good long time.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday at England’s Wembley Stadium British heavyweight Anthony Joshua will fight Ukraine’s Wladimir Klitschko. One week later at Las Vegas’ T-Mobile Arena Mexican Saul “Canelo” Alvarez will fight Mexican “Son of the Legend” Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. Both matches have their charms.

But one undefeated man to be found in the fourman bunch, too. Aficionados didn’t care much about undefeated marks before Money May – the fixation on Rocky Marciano’s record never felt like a product of aficionados so much as what casuals necessarily predominated a sport that dominated American culture in that time (like nonmusicians harping on albumsales because they have to have an opinion on what’s current and can’t very well muse about chord progressions) – and evidently don’t care much in our wasteland of a post-Money sport.

Look how quickly Mexicans forgave Canelo’s moneymaker of a whitewash against Money May. Too they forgave Son of the Legend’s loss to Maravilla Martinez; there was no dishonor in being wholly outclassed by a superior athlete and nothing but honor in that final round – which, for whatever we opined of Chavez every day before and every day since, nevertheless yielded the most suspenseful 90 seconds of prizefighting anyone has seen in a generation at least.

Hating Canelo or Chavez has never enchanted anyone the way he hoped it might. Canelo exudes professionalism, shows up ontime and ripped for every weighin, fights with reliable intensity, and stiffens lesser opponents with a quickness (and count me among those who verily do not hold it against Canelo he’s yet to move up in weight to fight a man who’s never moved up in weight). Son of the Legend, meanwhile, is nearly a legend in his own right – a different sort of legend, granted, but, well. For all his tries at channeling Dad’s pride and intensity Junior will ever be a raspberry-briefed cereal-scarfing goofball to the rest of us, and bless his heart, he knows it. You glare contemptuously at Junior for squandering his birthright, and he looks back at you through puffy bloodshot eyes and says, “Dude, what’s your problem?” – and if that doesn’t disarm you giggling, you’re wound too tight, and that’s not Junior’s problem either.

Both guys can fight a bit too. Canelo is a b-level novelty act in any good era, as Juan Manuel Marquez bitterly exclaimed years ago, and Chavez is a backup accordion player lipsynching on Televisa for Banda Ensalada de Fruta in that same era, but chance has put them together in this unserious era and they’re here to party and have some fun – which is about all the hundreds of thousands of Mexican fans who’ll buy their pay-per-view want anyway. There’s no sense scolding los mexicanos; they know better, obviously, but why not buy the fight – it’ll be fun!

Less fun but indeed more serious is Saturday’s spectacle between a perfectly untested British heavyweight and Wlad Klitschko, whom a panel of experts just rated the 16th greatest heavyweight of all time for “The Ring” – which means, conceivably, the future ratings of James Jefferies (15), John L. Sullivan (14) and Gene Tunney (13) could be at stake if Klitschko upsets Joshua, though Lennox Lewis (T-11) and Evander Holyfield (T-11) are right to rest easy. Truthfully, Klitschko might’ve jab-jab-held his way to a decision victory against at least a few of the top-10 guys on that list, but what is most clearly reflected in Klitschko’s lowly seeding is: Wlad has brought to sport a larger ratio of size-to-risktaking than any fighter, nay professional athlete, before him. Even in Klitschko’s greatest wins, whatever those were, one got the sense the physical advantage Klitschko enjoyed was preposterous – and yet there was nervous Wlad, chin 40 inches behind his lead foot, rippling quadriceps primed for a balletic leap backwards at an opponent’s first twitch.

In Joshua, though, Wlad faces a second consecutive opponent over whom he enjoys less than his career-standard sixinch height advantage, and worse yet for Wlad’s chances, a man whose physique looks every bit enhanced as Wlad’s always has. It’s improper to note this, of course, but with 70,000 attending Super Bowl LI and 90,000 about to attend Joshua-Klitschko, it doesn’t look like 2017’ll be the Year of the Antidoping Crusader, does it?

Maybe Joshua-Klitschko will deliver in a way Klitschko-Haye disastrously did not, maybe Klitschko, stripped of his physical advantages and sympathetic officiating and hometown scorekeepers, will reveal a sinister ferocity that makes all gasp as he chops down the Joshua tree then steelhammers a dozen drunken Brits at ringside in a rage only brother Vitali (17) can extinguish.

No probably not. It’ll be incumbent on Joshua to supply all the meaningful aggression Saturday, and across from a man roughly 50-times accomplished as anyone he’s faced heretofore, chances are good, Joshua’s going to need to warm to the task. If the final bell rings on this fight stamp an L in the column of public perception for Joshua; if Klitschko stays upright for 36 minutes nobody will leave Wembley Stadium satisfied. Drunk, yes, but not satisfied.

The same cannot be said quite of how Mexican fans will perceive Canelo if he fails to circuitbreak Chavez a week later. Chavez hasn’t the defense to make a fight boring, and if Canelo is dumb enough to retreat for long Chavez will catch him and cream him. What’s far more likely is a far better fight than Joshua-Klitschko.

All this haggling is ungrateful. Both fights promise suspenseful moments because both fights’ outcomes are unknowable. Let’s take it, say thank you, and walk away smiling.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry

The biggest prizefight since Froch-Groves II, as measured by ticketsales (an idea at once novel and ancient), is nearly upon us, but near as anyone can tell Americans don’t yet know on which channel we may watch British heavyweight Anthony Joshua against Ukraine’s Wladimir Klitschko. This may well be a plot to drive the last 50,000 committed boxing fans in our nation to pirated streams, but it probably isn’t – though it does ask a question like: If Showtime and HBO wanted to send what few subscribers of theirs still subscribe because of boxing to unauthorized outlets, how would they behave differently?

Nope, I can’t think of any ways either.

This latest premium-cable conflict is the sort that happens in an environment of mutual distrust where public facesaving is a higher priority than it should be. HBO, long supposed to be the A-side of American cable boxing providers, found itself some years back, with Manny Pacquiao’s departure for a fight preceding Floyd Mayweather’s departure for many fights, the B-side, and its esteem as a network has yet to recover.

Showtime has problems of its own, obviously, with its boxing content provider now succumbing to the inevitable – or did anyone really think PBC’s powertrident of inconstant matchmaking, oversized purses and contempt for unbought media was a visionary approach? – but it also has exclusivity with the heavyweight division’s two ascendent names, Anthony Joshua, who probably can fight a bit, and Deontay Wilder, who absolutely positively cannot.

Meanwhile HBO has its aged Ukrainian – along with every other prizefighter raised in the former Soviet Union – and not a whole lot else going on. Never stronger, never better, I know, but HBO Sports is about to join the downward spiral if it hasn’t already: Budget reductions to ensure profitability lead to subscriber departures that lead to further budget reductions to stave away takeovers or supplement “Game of Thrones” or somesuch and that leads to more cablecutting, and before you know it a $3 million licensing fee to broadcast the best-attended heavyweight prizefight since Tunney-Dempsey II is worth a 100-day catfight with a network that used to be your farm-league affiliate for both prizefighter and executive talent.

Some mediation is required, clearly, and that will be the case, still, when this issue gets resolved acrimoniously this week or next. It shouldn’t’ve come to this; it makes the participant leaders of Showtime and HBO look tiny. As one reads over the rumored obstacles in this negotiation, who gets to announce the results of the fight, who gets to announce the results of the negotiation, it reads like so much Money May branding, and we used to laugh about that stuff. The absurdity of it hasn’t changed nearly so much as the players and stakes have – and both for the smaller.

How these details get negotiated by dealmakers in New York didn’t matter to a single generation of fight aficionados until this one, but this generation of American aficionados, for all our suffering, at least preceded the country’s exasperation at giving one’s hopes to a dealmaker from New York.

Likely what is most needed in these negotiations between Showtime and HBO now and in the future is a little magnanimity, a little farsightedness. Regardless of what happens in Joshua-Klitschko I there’s no chance Wlad Klitschko is the future of boxing and at least a fair chance Anthony Joshua is. So negotiate the future accordingly.

If you’re HBO recognize you’ve got the weaker hand here and give away your overpaid veteran for some future draft picks – when Showtime’s beneficiary-cum-sponsor-cum-beneficiary auctions off his assets in 2018. Add a lunacy clause, though, à la Michael Lewis’ “Big Short,” whereby, in the unlikely event both Joshua is a fraud and British judges are honest, and Klitschko somehow decisions Joshua at Wembley Stadium, you rip Showtime’s guts out with rematch fees. Showtime’ll probably sign-on because catastrophes are necessarily improbable; some combination of Showtime’s inevitable dismay with the Joshua product and the disaster insurance you bought from them in negotiating the first fight will lead Showtime to give you full rights to the rematch to do with as you wish (pay-per-view).

If you’re Showtime, realize you’ve got the better product and will have for the next five years at least, and show a willingness to let HBO stay afloat with premier nonheavyweight talent till 2022 or so. When PBC collapses and its fighters return to the predations of the open market, you’re going to have more money than you know what to do with, which matters little ultimately, and the heavyweight division cornered, which matters greatly – or as New York’s most famous dealmaker’d put it: Bigly.

Take your eyes off this moment, in other words, and show some vision, both of you.

The respective heads of Showtime and HBO boxing are young enough to have to make deals with one another for the foreseeable future and the benefit brought by a bit of good faith could be disproportionate. That’s a soft idea, of course, which means a mediator better than a network executive should introduce it. Eleanor Roosevelt, though, had a durable line about such things:

“Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.”

Klitschko and Joshua are people; Klitschko versus Joshua is an event; good faith negotiating is an idea. Probability says the winner of the Joshua-Klitschko negotiation will be the longterm loser, anyway, so either HBO or Showtime should recognize this, advise the other side of it, and then let the other side win, let them enjoy their big event unencumbered by pettiness and subversion, and then enjoy the fruits of that choice for years to come.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday in Maryland, Ukrainian Vasyl “Hi-Tech” Lomachenko, super featherweight champion of HBO, beat New Jersey’s Jason Soto to a corner stoppage at the conclusion of round 9. The performance was tactical and cold as wintertime in Kiev with Sosa being exactly durable and outclassed as promoter Top Rank anticipated.

Some thoughts:

I drive a Mini Cooper six-speed and despite its pep, at all times it feels too safe because of traction control (and disabling traction control in any car equipped with traction control is a universally bad idea because it was designed with traction control in mind and its engineers generally don’t consider the fate of any motorist dumb enough to disable it). You can still ruin yourself in my car if you’re hellbent on the task but it’s much tougher than you might think, especially if you take a corner too fast, at which point traction control kills the engine and in many ways takes over administration of the automobile. The Texas Hill Country has sundry winding roads that should be intoxicatingly dangerous in a small quick car with a Sport setting, but I’m disappointed to report driving aggressively a car with traction control more nearly resembles a videogame than a mechanical feat (and a Mini – British designed, German engineered – is fractionally so videogamelike as any Japanese sportscar).

I mention this because watching Vasyl Lomachenko fight increasingly reminds me of driving a car with traction control; yes you can slam in a tree if you aim for one but even moderate danger brings the dashboard light with the skid pattern and a cessation of all fun. Lomachenko’s not interested in ringside risktaking – I know, I know; it’s his right as a higher being recognized by Michael Buffer as “the greatest amateur fighter in boxing history” to follow his druthers to no risk whatever – but I’m quite interested in seeing risktaking and as uncouth as this admission may appear, if Lomachenko plans to take no risks going forward I’d rather he used his supernatural gifts to levitate above the ring and strike opponents down with the Force or whatever.

Thankfully Lomachenko lost early enough in his professional career he still has some sense of debt – otherwise we’d be subjected to the Jones/Golovkin Defense: It’s not that Roy beat schoolteachers and Gennady cancer survivors because they can collect generous paydays taking no risk whatever, no, it’s that they’re so dominant everyone except a fulltime government employee or a man strengthened by chemotherapy is frightened of them.

Lomachenko lost foul and square to Orlando Salido a few years back but comported himself with honor throughout and forewent all opportunities at assigning culpability elsewhere. He is indeed a gifted fighter. But until he’s subjected to championship prizefighting’s crucible again and again – where, once more, the object is to hurt the man in front of you, not tally points in flurries like in the amateurs – we won’t know what we have, no matter how incessantly his copromoters Bob Arum and HBO tell us he’s an historic happening (and as an annual reminder: Arum once told this site Kelly Pavlik “will be much bigger than Oscar De La Hoya ever was”).

However incredible Lomachenko’s footwork and artistry, fact remains the Ukrainian just ain’t accurate with his punches as graphical representations imply. Saturday’s opponent was not previously mistaken for elusive but managed to make TGAFIBH miss surprisingly often in the opening 10 minutes by employing rudimentary head movement and not much of it. Lomachenko fights with an arrogance that isn’t quite contempt – again, a probable consequence of losing early in his career – but strays close to it, close to a Jonesian touching of the gloves behind his back, once he determines an opponent is not skilled as he but able to absorb a hundred punches without being felled.

Lomachenko complements this near-contemptuous comportment with regular infight instructions for the referee, undoubtedly a prerogative of being TGAFIBH but a bit of an annoyance too. He treats opponents as targets more than men of volition and if that doesn’t affect the outcomes of his matches, outcomes beginning to feel unappetizingly inevitable, it evidently affects the viewing experience of at least one aficionado. To date Lomachenko has proved a magical solo act but not much of a band leader; he entertains concertgoers with hits from the TGAFIBH catalog – the matador shimmy, the guard slap, the hi-low – but he demonstrates precious little of what intimacy with an opponent the greatest sportsmen find; he is too unaffected to gel or swirl or whisper with another combatant.

It’s an unfair comparison to pit Lomachenko against the Chocolatito standard but since the aforementioned Roy Jones, hyperbolic about anyone who reminds him of himself as he’s understated about everyone else, made the comparison some weeks back, saying Roman Gonzalez was only the world’s best prizefighter if one went strictly by record, much like Warren Buffett is only the world’s greatest investor if one goes strictly by investments, it’s worth a sentence or two to consider the difference between the way Chocolatito fights and Lomachenko does.

Hi-Tech approaches opponents with all the interest of a Gmail spam block; offenders don’t make it to the inbox and Lomachenko remains a great product. Chocolatito meanwhile melds with other men, empathizing with them and guiding them and hurting them and then empathizing with them once more, in a spectacular union of violence and beauty. Some of that is cultural, sure, but other of it reduces to how each man sees his opponents. Lomachenko would do well to feel greater respect for those men and Top Rank would do well to match their guy with more respectable opponents.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

SAN ANTONIO – Saturday at this city’s fantastic Luna Music Bar & Lounge a talented blues singer from Houston named Annika Chambers, also a friend, expertly played to an enthusiastic full house. As the blues as an artform so obviously comes from a place of pain, and as Annika so exquisitely balances this pain with expressions of euphoria and sexuality, and proper stagecraft, the show afforded hours of opportunity to consider pain’s role in performance, and the traditional if not so uplifting tariff it demands from performers.

Saturday brought a reminder that if you’re going to endeavor to entertain others you must sell it out and leave little of yourself at the end or there’ll be resentment or worse indifference. There’s a sort of preparational willfulness that enables flowing through a performance, even one such as this, but it’s a dangerous place to be, this mania for one’s own maniacal preparation, because it posits some knowledge of others’ preparation, a thing that cannot be better than an estimation and usually much less, and comes with a trickier-still definition of “others” to include one’s past self.

One wonders if it’s possible to flow simply from practice to performance – like a chipping style golf embraced a generation ago wherein a player takes practice chips, three or four, within his stance, then merely extends his hands a few inches out for the fifth practice swing, connecting with the ball and overcoming what anxiety brings yips – or if performance integrity requires one make an intentional shift, one to the other, before doublingback years later to realize all previous performances are in fact practices. When we talk of seasoning and experience in boxing as in the arts we refer to this doublingback, this feedback loop, wherein the performance experience benefits the performer more than further practice would.

But whither preparation?

And again.

Blessed be the performers who ply their wares without this autointerrogation: Either they’re joyful beginners who’ve yet to make improvements substantial enough to interrogate or they’re joyful masters who recognize such questions’ futility as they arise. And in between comes the obligation to make it look masterful onstage regardless of doubt, to occupy one’s performance personality and show boundless authority – because an abundance of authority fools all but the masters (never more’n a handful in any discipline) while an absence of authority is the one sin no member of any sort of audience forgives.

Prizefighters used to know all this and only recently forgot it, using publicity mechanisms to offset their lacking authority onstage, successfully fooling themselves and a few kids following the sport on illegal streams but absolutely nobody who would purchase a ticket or pay-per-view. From here a few will luck into competitive confrontations, matchmade accidentally, and win a relative sort of acclaim and a relative sort of wealth but ultimately it all feels authentic as paying an alltime great like Sugar Ray Leonard to liken Thurman-Garcia to his first match with Thomas Hearns; not Leonard or Hearns or Keith Thurman or Danny Garcia could respect or even like anyone who fell for this.

It betrays a variably concealed sort of contempt for its audience one finds in the very roots of the PBC; where Bob Arum and Oscar De La Hoya, and before him Don King, often lie boldly and baldly to and about us they do it to keep the balls in the air and attract attention to whatever they’re vending, but the PBC’s founding vision appears to be something like: Anyone who would watch something violent as boxing is a lowlife, a savage, a malcontent, and to that sort of organism only brutality and volume matter, so give them half-naked men punching and lots of neon and noise, then sit back and watch the jackpot pay-out.

We’ll see.

This seems good a place as any to consider the role pain plays in performance, so let us. Some 19th century thinker – must’ve been a German – wrote something about pain being a primary source of creativity, and if it was truer then than now it is only just. Pain brings an agitation of sorts that is alleviated or endured a number of ways, and for some of us no way more effectively than creating, which in this context may be a synonym for performing (which may be a lunge too desperate to connect this column to Saturday’s concert to boxing [we’re about to find out], but in case it isn’t, watch this:).

In the enduringly excellent documentary “Pumping Iron” the preternaturally charismatic Arnold Schwarzenegger, before he became a Hollywood icon or California governor, talks about a willingness to experience a transcendent sort of pain that necessarily changes a person from a contender to a champion, and to punctuate his point Schwarzenegger encourages lifting weights till unconsciousness or vomiting intervene. On the other end of this suffering, provided it be horrendous enough, lies acclaim, which takes one directly to Marvelous Marvin Hagler’s silk-pajamas conundrum. But working backwards, notice how few prizefighters find acclaim enough to stroll happily away from our beloved sport – or for that matter how few writers arrive at a state from which the acclaim-seeking act of publication appears absurd, or how few stage performers blissfully retire on their own terms.

Those who have reserves of pain abundant enough to master their craft – and recall: longevity is an equal partner of talent and originality’s – probably deplete themselves so fully in the performance act they continually return to a weakened state that lets more pain seep in. That’s the ambivalence Annika’s performance brought Saturday that was the same ambivalence Israel Vazquez’s third match with Rafael Marquez brought years ago at ringside: As an admirer I have no right to ask this much of another person; but as an audiencemember, gosh, I’m glad their preparatory suffering was so thorough.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-
— Photo Credit : Chris Farina – K2 Promotions
SAN ANTONIO – So goes a Sunday afternoon at Brown Coffee some miles north of downtown, across Broadway from The Pearl:

This is the sort of thing you do when there’s nothing interesting you in a sport about which you’ve found a way to write 1,000 words every Sunday for a dozenyear: You’re well away from writer’s block which handicaps you counterintuitively enough since you no longer worry what might come of your column if you approach it unprepared – gone years from sweating Saturday nights over the blank page – you come to the page blankly filled with enthusiasm at some capacity for improvisation then don’t improvise and don’t worry but do begin wondering when the alarm might sound. And sound it doesn’t because you’ve muted it – experience, presence, other numbing agents. There you sit bypassing the alarm right to indifference, certain the alarm will sound later and you’ll not end so uneventfully as apathy, then begin combing YouTube hoping something’ll spur you to begin wordstringing and it does, Golovkin-Jacobs on mute, having watched it as you did with a roomful of others live, the room comprising East Coast lads in the house of a Brooklynite Puerto Rican, a collection of guys crying Robbery at the screen when scorecards got read, you wonder if, as you suspected then, the room’s commentary offset HBO’s banter, interested as the Golovkin promoter HBO immodestly became a few years ago.

Instead a welladjusted and attractive woman, 19 years your junior, comes in the coffeeshop where y’all’ve conversed before and you offer a seat at your table and confess you’ve not an idea what this week’s column should treat, and since she knows it’s ostensibly about boxing she says:

“How about that new Ed Sheeran video?

“It’s bad, but he’s boxing. You could write your column about the way boxing is done in that video.”

And you playfully laugh and return to Golovkin-Jacobs, round 2, and get bored and do in fact watch the Ed Sheeran video, song muted, and the boxing isn’t bad at all. Sheeran, a southpaw, was on an episode of “Top Gear” you saw years ago and seemed humbly likable, and you find yourself cheering for him more in that video with the female pugilist than you cheered for either Golovkin or Jacobs eight days ago (though you made theatrical overtures to Jacobs’ chances to ensure you got invited back for Chavez-Canelo in a couple months) then the love interest disappears from Ed Sheeran’s video while the deus ex machina cranks rustily along and a sumo wrestler shows up bareassed, and it’s back to Golovkin-Jacobs a spell.

Golovkin has maybe a robot’s head movement so his defense is but punching power, though occasionally he picks-off a shot, keeping his redtaped black-n-white Grants up till an opponent strikes them; an ability to catch shots on his chintip and not buckle composes his defense mostly. Therein lies the reason Golovkin is not moved upwards in weight and will not be: Without chloroform on each knuckle he surely would not take with him to 168 pounds, Golovkin has little technique or tactical whatnots in his tricksbag – sorry, Abel! He would make an average super middleweight and way too much has been promised about him to afford any average happenings. Round 3 Jacobs lands his first lead shoulder of the match, a tool upon which he relies increasingly, but bless his heart it’s a fight, so why not (he writes, in large part because Jacobs’ shoulder slamming Golovkin’s jaw is not some Thai super flyweight’s head slamming Chocolatito’s head – and you can’t adjust for bias until you recognize bias).

And now a muscular and charismatic lesbian – who insists against all evidence she’s actually bisexual – comes in the coffeeshop and starts talking trash about your new haircut while the young attractive girl at your table recommends for your column a hypothetical effort on what might happen if you and she sparred, and you assure her the hypothetical is already welltrod in these columns.

Now Jacobs begins grimacing and flexing at Golovkin, and it’s not a good idea. Perhaps in the mirror or across from outmatched sparring partners what Jacobs elicits in his shows of rage is fear but in the ring with a man who punches hard as he does and absorbs better Jacobs’ glares and ripples make him look mentally fragile and a little too hopeful: He doth protest his toughness too much, wethinks.

It’s impossible to tell in realtime if Golovkin’s punches felled Jacobs in the fourth because HBO cameraswitches between Golovkin righthands, and it’s one more reminder how much presentation influences what we think we see when we watch a boxing broadcast. While Jacobs doesn’t appear particularly compromised by the knockdown or what blows caused it he does switch wisely out his southpaw stance when combat resumes. The knockdown on replay looks a touch tangled, and before anyone reports it’s not a tangle but Golovkin’s nuclear power, he’s advised to recall Jacobs withstood that power for 24 more minutes after the knockdown. And by the end of round 8 Jacobs is quite obviously the faster fighter even while the order of his punches doesn’t make much sense.

Now the charismatic, muscular lesbian joins our table and you introduce her to your attractive friend from a loving family and nothing chemical or dangerous happens but talk turns to loves lost, and it’s right depressing – so back to Golovkin-Jacobs and a finish you know won’t be suspenseful for anyone who knows its result.

In the ninth Golovkin actually ducks a punch and then eats a shoulder and then for some reason Jacobs begins clowning rough again while Golovkin breathes deeply round his gumshield. In the fabled championship rounds there appears to be little on either guy’s punches and even less on Jacobs’. Clearly exhausted Jacobs begins to throw floppy wrists like Steven Seagal running.

The decision’s a fair one for an honest scrap between two good middleweights. But let us have no more loose talk of greatness.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday the Chocolatito Era concluded when Nicaraguan Roman Gonzalez got narrowly and perhaps unfairly split-decisioned by Thailand’s Wisaksil “Srisaket Sor Rungvisai” Wangek in a brutal 12-round affair. In the mainevent a different tradition of matching the world’s best middleweight against a fellow middleweight began, when Gennady “GGG” Golovkin decisioned Daniel Jacobs, and let us hope this new era endures fractionally long as the other one did.

Whosoever would be idiot enough to write something like this: “After the decade Chocolatito labored in obscurity it brings no joy to write a match of his does not belong on American television much less HBO PPV, but heavens to Murgatroyd, this one verily does not”?

Guilty, my friends, and decisively so.

Whether Sor Rungvisai deserved to become a champion Saturday he belonged in a ring with Chocolatito in a way no one before him has done and once there he made brutal combat – disrespectful, randyrough, unfair, despicable – till he was eligible for a title few gave him a chance at (even if no one publicly gave him less of a chance than this column’s agebadly effort).

It was inevitable: If a prizefighter moves upwards in weight as he moves upwards in age someday he gets beat by a man who is not good a prizefighter as he is but able to offset class with physicality by absorbing what punches smaller men cannot and damaging with less effort than smaller men can. Exactly that happened to Chocolatito, every bit Saturday his diminutive suffix -ito, who struck Sor Rungvisai with the same accurate shots he strikes everyone with and applied much of the same tactical originality he applies to every opponent’s head and body but the difference was Sor Rungvisai’s size and desire and apparent obliviousness of who was the man punching him. Whereas the mainevent saw a b-level middleweight will himself past an obvious consciousness about his opponent’s identity – and in so doing reveal quite a lot about the actual quality of the middleweight champion (and how about the postfight sparkle in Golovkin’s eyes when asked about a September return to a junior middleweight opponent!) – the comain saw a man who showed up for a world title fight against an anonymous smaller man and acted like it.

Wherever or however Sor Rungvisai hit Chocolatito in round 1 he dropped him true and it tolled Chocolatito’s psyche finding himself seated, a ref fingerflashing overhead. It portended still worse things for anyone who hoped to enjoy Chocolatito for more than another match or two, too: You don’t make a fight-of-the-year candidate with Sor Rungvisai and go on to enjoy a long pleasant stay in your new super flyweight division. Instead you cautiously win a wellpaying rematch then cash yourself out – making, as an aside, charismatic Carlos Cuadras Saturday’s biggest loser.

On a personal note the emotions went something like: Excitement (here we go) to surprise (Chocolatito’s on the blue mat) to shame (what did I write?) to sadness (Chocolatito looks so small) to elation (he’s spinning him gorgeously!) to indignation (that butt was intentional) to anger (he butted him again) to amusement (butting when in you’re in trouble is effective in its way, isn’t it?) to excitement (he’s spinning him again, yes!) to disappointment (the geometry’s wrong) to nervousness to sadness.

Whatever dudgeon happened in the moment and however much pain Chocolatito is in today and tomorrow and the rest of the week, fact remains Sor Rungvisai, as a large southpaw, sold accidental headbutts sufficiently to remain undisqualified while severely altering a championship match’s trajectory with his head. There was little if anything accidental about any but the first butt and it was apparent three ways: 1. The timing of the accidents, 2. Chocolatito’s evident disgust with the accidents, and 3. The asymmetry of their effect. When two fighters’ heads keep colliding whenever one fighter is hurt, and the other fighter is the only one buzzed and bleeding afresh after each collision, there’s no chance at the championship level anything accidental is happening.

There are ways to remedy these things and Chocolatito, who has gone below the belt plethoras of times in his career, did none of them, and one suspects he didn’t do them because he didn’t think them necessary. First time, shame on Sor Rungvisai; second time . . . expect Chocolatito to go low early and often in a rematch the Nicaraguan’ll take personally and more seriously than their first match – and expect the new champion to be looking refereewards in the rematch more than his challenger.

While the damage suffered in the comain was asymmetrical the card itself did conclude with a symmetric quality of sorts: Chocolatito nearing the end of a career marked by increasing weightclasses and challenges; GGG beginning what one hopes is a career of fighting men large enough to hurt him – and looking only a touch better than average in so doing. While ESPN scrambles to revise its bro-science feature on Golovkin’s otherworldly power (something about Daniel Jacobs’ episode with cancer making his chin exponents more resilient than it was before both cancer and Dmitry Pirog) and HBO manufactures demand enough for Canelo-GGG to put this uncomfortable Jacobs episode behind us all, aficionados can use what they saw Saturday to temper, once more, their opinions of undefeated records.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry

Saturday at Madison Square Garden on the undercard of HBO’s pay-per-view match for the unified middleweight championship of the world, the world’s best prizefighter, Nicaraguan Roman “Chocolatito” Gonzalez, will defend his super flyweight title against Wisaksil “Srisaket Sor Rungvisai” Wangek, a fighter whose recent reign of terror on Thailand’s amateur program Chocolatito should bring to a brisk and violent conclusion – and perhaps rekindle in so doing.

After the decade Chocolatito labored in obscurity it brings no joy to write a match of his does not belong on American television much less HBO PPV, but heavens to Murgatroyd, this one verily does not. Instead this represents the sort of back-wages wager Bernard Hopkins taught prizefighters to make with their managers and promoters and broadcasters, today marginally more one-in-the-same as they’ve ever been, once acclaim was had and serious observers were seriously interested in observing one fight. We shall hitherto call it the Morrade Hakkar Clause in homage to the silly Frenchman HBO approved for the second defense of a middleweight title Hopkins won from Felix Trinidad in the greatest moment of Hopkins’ career to that point. Before Hopkins’ negative fighting style and self-intoxication were considered alternately brilliant and charismatic they were considered properly unbearable but HBO was hot on the trail of a rematch between Hopkins and Roy Jones Jr. in 2002 and eager to agree to most any demands Hopkins made, and Hopkins’ demands, inspired by Jones’ demands, were wild for a man who couldn’t sell 8,000 tickets in his hometown but reasonable through a lens of his accomplishments and Time Warner’s annual corporate revenues. HBO acquiesced and Hopkins-Hakkar was atrocious.

And Trinidad put Hopkins through fractionally the suffering Chocolatito experienced against Carlos Cuadras in September, writing of back wages, which is part of the reason Chocolatito mentioned HBO by name in December:

“I’m 29 years-old, and one has to seize the moment we are in,” Chocolatito said. “I will give a rematch to Cuadras, but I need a good purse from HBO. I believe I deserve it.”

As a craftsman of course Chocolatito deserves it but as an entertainer he likely doesn’t and it’s no one’s fault he believes he does because, after all, America sells meritocracy to the rest of the world, and so why shouldn’t the prizefighter American aficionados consider the world’s best make 0.4-percent the purse the last guy Americans considered the world’s best made against Manny Pacquiao? Because we didn’t know what the hell we were doing a few years ago and we still don’t – that’s the honest answer, but what American businessman’s honest enough to say it, and what Nicaraguan’d be ingenuous enough to believe it?

Instead we’ll cite the dynamics of a free market, when convenient, while having the world’s best fighter defending a title in his fourth weightclass on the undercard of a middleweight-unification bout, HBO champion vs. PBC, between two men who’ve never chanced a moment outside the middleweight division, though the HBO champion is frequently reportedly willing to fight anyone between 154 and 168 pounds and hobbled only by junior middleweights who won’t come up to 160 and super middleweights who won’t come down to 160 but otherwise ready, willing and able. The main event is expected to be mismatched enough for last week’s prefight promotion to be about gossiping whether the HBO champion has time between Saturday’s inevitable defense and September’s better-paying inevitable defense to make another inevitable defense in June.

Not to be outdone Roman Gonzalez will fight Wisaksil “Srisaket Sor Rungvisai” Wangek, a man whose last two opponents sported a cumulative record of 0-0 before Sor Rungvisai, in his 45th and 46th prizefights respectively, welcomed them harshly to the professional ranks, in a match Gonzalez will win decisively no matter his opponent’s physical advantage. There’s no way to rehearse for someone gifted as Gonzalez, though if fighting men in their pro debuts properly prepares Sor Rungvisai for Chocolatito, one weeps for the futures of amateur heavyweight boxers with Deontay Wilder on the loose. Absurd as we rightly consider most athletic commissions in the U.S. how about that Thai commission(s) approving the WBC silver super flyweight champion for four 2016 matches against opponents with a cumulative record of 15-19! (Sor Rungvisai fought as many men making their pro debuts in his eighth year of professional fighting in Thailand as he did the year he made his own pro debut.)

There’s no occasion for not being snide on occasions such as these but enough of the griping: Any opportunity to see Chocolatito ply his wares must be embraced because Chocolatito is a rare talent, and as aficionados we owe HBO a debt of gratitude for bringing him more exposure, a debt all aficionados will argue is still much less than the cost of an HBO subscription and quarterly pay-per-view bills, but some gratitude’s due nevertheless. From Saturday’s victory things’ll go one of two ways for Chocolatito: After taking another 36 minutes of abuse from a career super flyweight he’ll double his demands for a rematch with Carlos Cuadras and price himself back to obscurity, or he’ll glide so easily through Sor Rungvisai and receive such disapprobation from the Nicaraguan media – “Stop talking about money like an American, Alexi never did; you’re better than that, you’re a Nicaraguan” – he’ll abandon his campaign to match compensation to achievement and return to beating fellow world champions for somewhat less than he deserves but way more than another 115-pound athlete makes in the world.

Making him what Floyd Mayweather would call a “dummy” and historians will call an “all-time great.”

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry

Saturday welterweight Keith “One Time” Thurman majority-decisioned Danny “Swift” Garcia to become the undefeated, undisputed, unified champion of the PBC. The fight went along like PBC championship bouts often do, with neither man felled or bloodied and both in conscious attendance at the reading of official scorecards, guardedly optimistic. As PBC tradition tends to dictate the gloves looked too big in round 12 – Thurman’s patriotic Rivals and Garcia’s neon-canary Reyes – and both men looked fresh enough to box till a 15th round despite laying everything on the line and giving all their blood sweat tears nuts and guts etc.

It wasn’t as much of a PBC-style spectacle as others in the storied management company’s predecessor years because it featured evenly matched titlists, something no one in Al Haymon’s outfit anticipated being fiscally mandated until 2020 at the earliest. Turns out, not even casual fans are quite dumb as the PBC business model supposed which might’ve been obvious – not even the diehardest Patriots fan’d watch a season full of Pats v. Browns – had more than mere market saturation been considered during the company’s formation but apparently wasn’t.

Danny Garcia has long been a Haymon-model outlier while Keith Thurman’d be its purest incarnation were it not for Deontay “Windmill” Wilder. That started Thurman a few points ahead on PBC scorecards that came in fairly for a reason like: Garcia is a 140-pound athlete who outgrew the junior welterweight division, not a welterweight, and therefore his properly applied counterpunches did a few fractions less than sufficient to win rounds Thurman successfully stole in their final 10 seconds. Fair play all round.

But color me enduringly unimpressed with Thurman, now the unified welterweight champion of the PBC if probably not the world. What adjustments did Thurman make Saturday? He holstered his righthand for about three rounds after Garcia baloonpricked his liver a twotime but there’s no calling that a strategy or tactic when words like “compromise” and “surrender” remain available. Aside from that Thurman ferally overshot with 2/3 his powerpunches and did the retreating resting skipping thing the PBC calls “boxing” in homage to master “boxer” Amir Khan’s signature flight pattern, while Thurman must’ve reminded his Florida trainer of no one so much as fellow Floridian Jeff Lacy who once walloped hapless opponents with thrice Thurman’s rage till he came to someone competent and hadn’t the squareroot of a plan b.

Thurman manages to have roughly Lacy’s accuracy with a whole lot more hedging on his shots, often swimming tentatively forward in a way Lacy never did. Combine that with PBC matchmaking and opponents born in lower weight divisions, with the noble exception of Thurman’s single 2016 tilt against Shawn Porter, and you have a unified champion and comparative superstar, as planned, even if not yet sharing celebratory stature with Deontay “Wilder &” Wilder.

I began watching Saturday’s fight with no particular sense for it – and again, credit where it’s due: with no certain forecast – but a suspicion Garcia’s craft and experience’d crack Thurman for having faced at least three men superior to Thurman at junior welterweight (and probably four [Nate Campbell] and possibly five [Kendall Holt]), and when Thurman spent the better part of rounds 4-6 with his right elbow protectivepinned to his liver one rightly assumed Thurman’d get wild and get countered properly, and he did, and it didn’t matter. Credit to Thurman’s whiskers or PBC’s matchmaker but really not both.

Even in losing a fair decision Garcia was simply the more compelling man to watch Saturday in part because he plays against type in a way few of his coworkers do: He dresses gaudily and gives his dad’s jackassery free reign but then throws punches proportionately audacious, which in a different time might’ve been expected but surely isn’t these days. Experience leads one to anticipate Garcia’s ringwalk anticipates an accordion’s posture before adversity but Garcia does the opposite surprisingly often – he imperils himself and chances embarrassment or worse by whipping hooks with little technique allotted to selfpreservation.

Say what you will about his dad, their pairing works very well and not merely for the obvious reason Angel Garcia makes a target of himself for the terminally anxious so his son isn’t one. Somewhere in Garcia’s audacity lies a trust in his father’s judgement; if Garcia’s gambles on hooks bankrupt him, Dad will intervene before any too-permanent damage accrues. That’s much more than can be said for most prizefighter-trainer relationships, isn’t it? Tomorrow Garcia can fill PBC’s welterweight-gatekeeper role when Robert Guerrero and Shawn Porter are unavailable and spoil a few coronations, too, but his days as undefeated top billing are through.

Which leaves the PBC welterweight champion Keith Thurman, captain of the junior varsity, in a better professional position than his resume or technique necessarily justify. According to PBC highlights Thurman is all things to all people: a ferocious beast in the ring and a philosopher of pacifism outside it, a classically trained pugilist and a selftrained flautist, a man so mindful he meditates before cameramen. Neither Thurman nor his matches are nearly good as PBC tells us they are, but that’s where we find ourselves, still, in 2017.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday at Legacy Arena in Birmingham, Ala., Alabamian Deontay “Bronze Bomber” Wilder dropped California’s Gerald Washington in round 5 then went nuts long enough to frighten a technical stoppage out the match’s Canadian referee and retain a WBC heavyweight title.

The preceding words are believable if you didn’t endure the PBC broadcast but incredible if you did. The Bronze Bomber: Seeing is disbelieving.

It’s nigh impossible to write well about mediocre subjects and far as Wilder is from even mediocre this column ought be submitted in Crayola magicmarker on cardboard so adjust expectations accordingly. Things aren’t even farcical with Wilder anymore because they’re not fun and that might be the cruelest turn of all: Wilder was a fun dude when first he turned pro. You knew then at ringside he’d not amount to much of a prizefighter but tall as he was and friendly, too, you cheered for him to sprint through hopeless men a few years before his handlers fed him to a Klitschko or less but never did you or anyone ringside foretell a record of 38-0 (37 KOs) because lads like Harold Sconiers (17-20-2) and Jason Gavern (25-16-4) are both rarer and better than Wilder’s handlers expected or at least rarer than the rest of us did.

Yet here we are, miraculously enough; Wilder’s approaching one of the great matchmaking feats in modern boxing history and doing it with a 97-percent knockout ratio that makes a piker of K2 Promotions’ stabling of cautiously matched titlists. Oh, but Wilder wants to travel to foreign lands to obliterate formidable challengers and true champions alike, but nobody can pass a drug test or meet reasonable contract demands or whatever else. There’s far too much irony in boxing to believe anything that happens anywhere but the blue canvas and fly the most-feared canard in Wilder’s direction, but if you’re PBC and you can fool naifs in Alabama the target is altogether too rich not to try.

Wilder looked awful in the opening rounds Saturday and the closing seconds, too, being pulled windmilling off an opponent who appeared in no serious jeopardy, and that’s symmetrical a thing as might be written about anything Wilder does in gloves. Washington, ostensibly an overmatched 34-year-old in only his 19th professional fight, didn’t flinch when Wilder feinted in the match’s opening 10 minutes which presented a problem for Wilder whose primary strategy was looking ominous for the opening four or so rounds. If Washington didn’t buckle Wilder with his jab he did move him and if it wasn’t by hurting Wilder it was by exploiting his poor footwork and questionable balance. Both men fought with their guards lowered in part because they didn’t know they should be raised and in larger part to taunt PBC viewers.

Washington threw punches more than his contract terms dictated – much as Wilder made for the fight he didn’t inconvenience himself with more than a handful of attempts every three minutes, and much less as Washington surely earned for his challenge he didn’t need to fight like he did – and this sent Wilder scrambling a few times to the ropes where he sort of yanked his chin backwards and leaned rightwards, or maybe to his left, no matter, and assumed he was long enough to stay out Washington’s range, which he was, just.

Wilder’s record and what’s said about him on PBC broadcasts raises this fear: There’s more to Wilder than appears and it behooves all of us to find it. Since nobody has found it, since little more than commentary on Wilder’s height and ferocity fills analyses of his success, I selfishly watched part of Saturday’s match with an open mind hoping to crack the riddle but got tired and missed swaths of inactivity and inevitably abandoned the enterprise yet again.

Deontay Wilder is not a good prizefighter and won’t become one in our lifetime. He’s not one Emanuel Steward from setting title-defense records the way Wladimir Klitschko evidently was; Klitschko had offensive form and footwork and needed a psychologist more than a trainer so once Steward had Klitschko’s fragile psyche and chin tucked nervously behind jabjabhold jabjabhold jabhookcross there were lots and lots of fightstarved Germans to feed Wlad’s signature attrition style. The last thing Wilder needs is a psychologist; if the day arrives Deontay looks inwards or down from the tightrope he now treads the entire charade crashes momentarily so it is better he despise his opponents or attack bystanders in hotel lobbies but not seek to improve at the craft of prizefighting.

Fortunately for Wilder and the entire Alabama ecosystem he sustains there’s no chance Wilder is about to start improving. If anything he looks worse today than he did upon turning pro 8 1/2 years ago, even when a spectator considers the (slightly) improved competition he now confronts: The Bronze Bomber I saw at Desert Diamond Casino in 2009 threw a much straighter and necessarily better cross than what whirligig-dervish finisher PBC viewers routinely witness and with each passing year Wilder borrows from craft to pay rage.

It’s worked so far and no one at PBC should hasten to change this formula: Get decent fighters picked-off with drugtesting, put matches in locales with inexperienced commissions, let Wilder’s lunacy frighten referees into premature stoppages, and get VADA on the Anthony Joshua trail soon as possible. To hell with cashouts – Deontay Wilder could be the undefeated, undisputed, unified heavyweight champion of the world by this time next year!

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry

Saturday on Twitter @ShowtimeBoxing American bronerweight silver titlist Adrien Broner decisioned Adrian Granados by majority scores at Cintas Center in Broner’s hometown of Cincinnati whose crowd leavened Broner’s acts with applause enough to sway judges to give the hometown man a nod in a decision that was not egregious – as hometown nods go. Granados applied heat and humidity and Broner did not wilt and the fight was very good, marking consecutive weeks of broadcasting excellence for Showtime, double the PBC’s mark in 2016.

Adrien Broner is what we’ve got now and it behooves us to enjoy him and appreciate him best we can. Whither this new, sporting approach? Why, it’s not like anyone with access to YouTube from a codger aficionado to a teenage boxing naif could mistake this era for a great one; we no longer need to write disclaimers round the shabbiness of one’s competition – it’s baked in. It’d be graceless anymore to insist someone like Granados is a c-level guy who probably’d not’ve made it out the amateurs 30 years ago much less to a 10-round main with a “former four-division world champion” like Broner who at age 27 is in his physical prime and still going relief-by-scorecards with an opponent who couldn’t’ve gotten in the fourth round with a 2009 version of Manny Pacquiao or been kept out the hospital after confronting even a one-eyed Antonio Margarito.

Broner is not an elite fighter, however many world titles Richard Schaefer and HBO once conspired to win him; Broner is a gifted athlete with some elite offensive moves who’s plied the craft of leathering since childhood and learned some tricks thereby. Had his body and lifestyle allowed him to stay at 130 pounds or even lightweight, though, he’d be esteemed today more highly than Gennady Golovkin for a breathtaking streak of chloroforming every man in fewer than 10 minutes easy. But Broner took illconsidered chances and rose upwards to larger weights and purses and got exposed in the fairest sense of the word (as would Golovkin, truth be told) – or did you think it accidental nobody noticed Broner’s footwork was embarassing and his infighting consisted of forearms and tackling exclusively when AB dashed through Jason Litzau (28-2), Eloy Perez (23-0-2) and Antonio DeMarco (28-2-1)? Until Broner was made to retreat, in other words, nobody knew Broner didn’t know how to retreat and until Broner was unable to tremble an opponent with a single punch nobody knew Broner’s commitment to one combination took so much from him he’d need 15 seconds of breather when finished.

Perhaps Paulie Malignaggi knew it before he proved it in 2013, but Malignaggi has always had an elite-level eye whatever he is as a prizefighter.

Writing of whom, Malignaggi is good a place as any to start a reconsideration of Showtime in February of 2017. While HBO alternately hibernates, schedules starryeyed spectacles, and employs more Soviets than the Trump administration, Showtime quietly strung together two excellent main events in two weeks, which, given the current state of matchmaking, puts Showtime’s Feb. 11-18 in the running for Boxing Week of the Decade. Showtime did it on a budget, too, and did it on Twitter and announced, get this, future live streaming of sports – a technological hurdle most American broadcasters still claim insurmountable even while Brazilian models approach their third decade of webcamming. How in the hell Showtime will monetize Saturday’s online broadcasting excursion is anyone’s guess – I watched the match on my phone’s Twitter app, sitting in my car outside a coffeeshop, using a 4G connection – but then, aside from those aforementioned webcam models, who really has monetized an online service (as opposed to selling ads)?

Had Saturday’s match happened in Granados’ native Illinois before a partisan-Latino crowd Granados’ performance would’ve gotten him a majority decision which wouldn’t’ve changed his career trajectory or Broner’s more than a degree or two. Too many words and other resources are already committed to the Broner mythos to make him a welterweight gatekeeper yet, and too much evidence already has accrued on Granados’ resume to promote him as greater than one.

The match was there for Granados’ taking in the final rounds but he didn’t take it and showed fatigue enough to embolden Broner to finish effectively enough to deserve another go at a junior welterweight title if he can make 140. Broner may not finish fights effectively as he sometimes begins them but he does finish fights much better than his socialmedia persona anticipates: loud boorishness tends to crinkle when things get harder than incredibly easy, and Broner does not. Broner nearly came back on Chino Maidana in his first loss, and Broner dropped Showtime Shawn in round 12 of his other loss, and whatever badfaith kept Saturday’s match at 10 rounds while not-keeping it at 142 pounds, Broner brought every bit as much fighting spirit to round 10 as his lesstalented opponent.

To paraphrase Malignaggi in the closing rounds, say what you will about Broner, but he’s never in a bad fight. However that happens it’s good that it does – and may it continue.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry