By Bart Barry-

Friday at Buffalo Run Casino in Miami, Okla., in a match televised by ShoBox between Russian-Oklahoman super lightweight Ivan “The Beast” Baranchyk and Arizona’s Abel Ramos an unlikely thing happened: An inspired fight before an inspired crowd – folks donning Jason Voorhees hockeymasks to see The Beast ply his wares – with excellent refereeing and commentary.

An honest prizefight is what it was, was what it is; two guys whose records corresponded and whose styles meshed and whose officiating was proper and whose willingness to exchange was admirable. But thrice as admirable when pitted against their competitor spectacles on other locations round the cable spiral both Friday evening and most evenings these last two years. ShoBox used to do lots of this sort of thing and perhaps hasn’t stopped doing so but its parent network’s sequestration by an overleveraged manager returned home to a network that pays him after plethoras of failed gambits on networks he paid to broadcast his miserable mismatches made most aficionados move their Showtime subscription dollars to more essential products like sugary breakfast cereals, organic avocados or almond milk: Nobody took a stand and cancelled his Showtime subscription so much as he elected to deselect it when he remembered he still got billed for it, and his Showtime-dedicated funds went aimlessly back in the household budget.

Friday was a wondrous break from what PBC fare ruined Showtime, in other words, and a chance, too, to see a Russian fighter developed somewhere other than HBO, and development is exactly what one hopes will come for Baranchyk now that he knows his admirably mindless commitment to punches becomes a handicap when no one is there to stop his punches for him. Round 1 saw something an aficionado doesn’t see every day: a double lefthook lead throw in doublestep. Baranchyk leaped with a lefthook lead missed widely enough to land squarely enough to stutterstep then launched himself again. Where does one practice such a maneuver often enough to unveil it in a televised prizefight – on a line of heavybags?

The problem for Ramos, well, for both men but especially Ramos, was how unpunished went Baranchyk’s bad behavior; if you let an opponent hurl himself unabashedly in your direction and do not welt him for the offense, he’s going to keep on keeping on till he clips you. And clip you Baranchyk did in round 3, throwing fearlessly an overhand tornadomill right that clubbed Ramos into the deep ropes, from which Ramos energetically rose to drop Baranchyk with an even better lefthook counter, a favor returned by Baranchyk a few minutes later. By then the fight was even-to-favoring-Ramos but about to move quickly in its opposite direction as Ramos’ one glaring flaw became exploited tirelessly by Baranchyk.

Ramos floats his chin slightly at ringcenter and muchly in retreat. In the match’s opening moments Ramos looked a touch too elegant in his long and relaxed frame though one couldn’t quite name it till Baranchyk made him step backwards, and up came the chin. It’s a slight but real flaw that, worse still, is really deep, and here’s why: The plane on which Ramos now rests his eyes in a fight is different for his having learned to look out the center of his eyes than if he’d learned to look out their tops, and very much of his natural tempo and balance would now be disrupted by the claustrophobia of lowering his chin another inch to the top of his chest, where Baranchyk’s chin gets plugged soon as his hands come up.

Fathers, teach your sons to tuck their chins the same day, first day, you set their stances.

It’s very possible Ramos’ floating chin was no more apparent to Baranchyk than it has been to Ramos’ handlers but the comparative ease with which Baranchyk made Ramos take backwards steps was not lost for an instant on the Russian. Once Ramos was getting moved back the forced retreat generally continued till the ropes, and once the men were pitched on the ropes Baranchyk was an inevitable favorite because, while Ramos might’ve been able to infight slightly better than other tall folk, he was doing the one thing Baranchyk wanted to do, which bears reiteration: Had Ramos stood at ringcenter and strafejabbed Baranchyk the Russian’s naked leads would’ve grown more desperately emphatic, but by fighting chest-to-chest as Ramos did he gave Baranchyk the one chance Baranchyk’s tempo and technique and conditioning are shaped to exploit.

Ramos might have prevailed fighting Baranchyk’s fight – à la Alexis Arguello – and he would have certainly prevailed fighting from outside while Baranchyk could not have prevailed from the outside, so it made no sense for Ramos not to fight there. Some of Ramos’ infighting was pride but much of that pride was a reaction to feeling the scratch of shiny wrappingtape on his shoulderbacks and knowing if he didn’t fire back the Russian’d deposit him on the scorer’s table.

Which moves to a final point of applause for Friday’s prizefight, and it goes to the referee: Oklahoman Gary Ritter did a fine job of remaining practically invisible in a scrappy contest whose delicate balance would have been ruined by an official more officious. Did Ritter’s relaxed policing favor the adopted Oklahoma volumepuncher from Russia? Surely it did a little but it also gave Abel Ramos valuable experience and entertained a partisan Miam-uh crowd and a nonpartisan Showtime viewership. More of that, please!

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

For a decade now when you ask a contemporary prizefighter or even just a kid in the gym eight years from turning pro if ever to name his favorite fighter, what he hears you ask is: Who among active fighters do people say made the most money in his last match? Since talk of a-sides and pay-per-view buys has replaced in many cases arguments about chin density or fistic mass the answer your query receives shouldn’t surprise you – even as a slowfooted Mexican kid says Floyd instead of Chocolatito.

Been thinking muchly on competence these last few weeks and as there’s no prizefighting of particular note this month or next month or the month after it’s good an idea as any to treat because it feels increasingly fleeting and comes with increasingly fewer reminders. A fetish has become of “flow” in some circles like psychology and neurology – fields reliably comprising a ratio of two scientists for every 1,000 gurus – and while it’s an interesting idea (“the mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity,” according to Wikipedia) its most zealous adherents see in it a shortcut more than a performance enhancer. They do not achieve flow via mastery but flow in lieu of mastery, bumping from one unverifiable accomplishment like fluency in a language no one round them speaks to another like deejaying, without suffering the inconvenience of fundamentals.

Since these trends are pendular a fit argument can be made sometime in the last decade society fetishized certifications and reductionism too far and now the pendulum swings its way back, but there’s more to it than one pendulum. There is a shifting-criteria idea, too, gaining momentum – alternative facts from the American political right and grade inflation from the left – wherein standards are moved to meet subjective ideals instead of objective values. Here comes the concerning part: If you eschew expertise and ignore those who protect the canon, as it were, you do no lasting damage and likely enrich yourself in the process (pop musicians); if you pursue expertise while others weaken the canon little damage is done to anything but your savings account, as you commit personal resources to accomplishments less valuable than before (poets); but if you eschew expertise while others refine the definition of expertise in your favor you achieve influence.

Since this still purports to be a column about boxing we’ll use the example of Floyd “Money” Mayweather. For a goodish amount of time aficionados cared deeply about competitive spectacles and nothing for purses. With the advent of closed-circuit- and pay-per-view-type viewing experiences the number of aficionados willing to pay for a match contributed to a formula for evaluating its appeal, and reporters duly recorded it and later wrote novelty round it – how many dollars/second, for instance, Mike Tyson make in his match with Michael Spinks. It was never the primary criterion, though, till “records” began to fall and fighters other than heavyweights, Oscar De La Hoya being the first to come to mind, began to set those records. But even recently as De La Hoya’s match with Felix Trinidad aficionados cared far more about the match’s deserving winner than who made how much, and for all his accumulated wealth De La Hoya, who had genuine prizefighting expertise, really did fight prime versions of men who could beat him.

But the erosion was underway. Mayweather, who also had genuine prizefighting expertise, changed his nickname to Money and went about selling his undefeated record in place of competitive spectacles, which mattered little at first because those who protect the canon saw it as an amusing aberration and trusted aficionados’ perspective on Floyd would ever weigh his handicapping opponents against what revenues he generated to ensure he did not become more than an amusing aberration. But then circumstances began to converge, and a dearth of prizefighting expertise among prospects decimated the ranks of aficionados – which meant no one was left to guard the canon even while hustlerish things like purse size replaced expertise. This is how you get an Adrien “About Billions” Broner whose blinding handspeed, flow, in fact blinded observers to his abysmal footwork and defense, mastery, and merged with an evolving marketplace view like: the quality of a prizefighter is proportionate to the size of his purse.

A partial antidote to this is Mikey Garcia – partial, not full, because he lost years of his career to a fixation on purse size – who just untied Dejan Zlaticanin a couple Saturdays ago and reasserted his mastery of timing and space while so doing. Garcia is much better at the prizefighting craft than all but a handful of his contemporaries, most of whom are foreign-born and foreign-schooled. Garcia is of a prizefighting family: his handspeed remains a complement to his expertise not its replacement. To see Garcia from ringside, not unlike seeing Andre Ward, is to witness, in a word, competence, and while that may no longer ensure the wealth it brought even a generation ago it still pays quite well or at least better than poetry does.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

SAN ANTONIO – Saturday at a livemusic venue called Fitzgerald’s sometime round midnight underground hip-hop artist R.A. the Rugged Man (R.A. Thorburn) took the stage before an audience of perhaps 300 people and scaled his performance for 20,000, which came expected to anyone in attendance: there was no chance Thorburn’d give less than everything to a show whatever its size. About two hours later and 30 minutes past lastcall and 15 minutes past closing Thorburn continued to perform, playing his fifth or sixth “one more song” of the night.

Like most anyone reading this column I discovered Thorburn through his roughtrade undressing of Floyd Mayweather in a 2009 interview. Curiosity about a guy who knew Floyd’s mind and spirit well as Floyd got me to listen to a few samples from a musical genre I loved until 1992 then abandoned completely. Thorburn’s talent arrived like a flash of light, unmistakable, and I pledged to see him in the crucible of a live performance if ever the opportunity arose.

It did Saturday and so did this observation: Never has a performer needed the stage more than Thorburn does. What happened at the end of his concert betrayed a compulsion more than a desire to entertain; his numerous appeals – “If y’all make some noise, I’ll do one more song” over and over again – were pleas much more than demands or even statements; it was a glare inside the psyche of a man doing the one thing that holds him together, manifesting a need for his audience’s energy and kindness, affirmation of a potent and unusually physical sort, in a charming-to-the-edge-of-disconcerting way.

It is no secret the sorry financial state of the music industry – and notice you never hear talk of a sculpture industry or a literary industry – but slightly more of an insight to see musicians’ necessary return to performance art, vending concert experiences in lieu of studio experiences, as the exclusive future direction for those who hope to make a living at the craft, but what three hours of undercard performances showed Saturday is contemporary hip-hop artists either don’t know this or lack the tools for it. What one sees in the coming generation of rappers is weakness, simple stagefright, hoping to disguise itself as a personal journey towards higher consciousness. From the hunched shoulders and swallowed syllables to a common retreat from the stagefront edge, complementing sundry cliches about day-one this and haters and enemies that, these aspirants resemble nothing so much as a oneway series of emails from a dating profile:

Message 1: Whatup bae this is Hier Konshuznezz the Unlimitid 1. im one of a kind so im kinda the one. Hit me up if you down. Holla!

Message 2: lol this thing on? im talkin at you gurl

Message 3: HELLO! Holla!

Message 4: u think ur 2 good for me bitch?

Message 5: can we jus start over? im sorry for using that word in my last. im not that kinda guy. i have so much pain in me. i understand if you dont want to talk to me. Sorry. Bye.

Then Thorburn takes the stage and the tenor changes. He and his apprentices are large and imposing in a way that’d be menacing were they not smiling at themselves and the audience, had they not the presence and ironical knack that once composed basic stagecraft but now’s a rarity: Their exaggerated gestures are enormous, they reclaim the stage’s front edge from the audience the way competent trainers teach their charges (King of the Mountain: You imagine the center of the canvas as the base of a mountain against which you set your backfoot, and which you do not forfeit), they make eyecontact with their audiencemembers and project to the backwall, they use their bodies as instruments. Then Thorburn in his desperation to connect pulls strangers onstage with him and bangs against them like props and urges them to be irresponsible, and when this doesn’t suffice Thorburn climbs offstage and moves through his audience colliding with them, telling them to collide with him, offering them something they will not forget instead of something “unforgettable”:

The audience is no longer 100 strong the houselights are on brightly the bar is clean and Thorburn starts to clear the stage by telling audiencemembers to dive in the waiting arms of, well, perhaps two or three others and some splatter and others get caught and still Thorburn does not relent, starting a fourth one-more song or fifth. Then he climbs offstage a final time and tells everyone to follow him to the door for pictures and handshakes, where he remains.

Last week by way of coincidence I read Geoff Dyer’s wonderful “But Beautiful: A book about jazz” that does what all Dyer’s books do which is defy classification between fiction and non- before concluding with an essay about what happened to jazz as popular music: It stopped being about improvisation and began being about technical mastery and thereby receded from our country’s predominant artform to a niche notch on the FM dial and a catalog of deceased household names. This is where underground hip-hop now heads. Its need to distinguish itself from what cloying slop fills arenas is understandable, admirable: Keepers of the Public Enemy flame, as it were, artists proudly inspired by Kane, G Rap, Erick and Parrish, and Rakim, not Kanye West and Nipsey Hussle, but this distinction brings about a display of technical mastery that is nigh unlistenable.

Like Coltrane throttling his sax the velociraptor speedspitting feats exemplified best by A-F-R-O, Thorburn’s 18-year-old prodigy protege, go from astounding to tedious in less than a song – you admire his linguistic capacity to know and use so many words that rhyme while being so unable to decipher what he’s saying you’re unsure if he’s rhyming words or making sounds but trust he’s rhyming words until you ask yourself why you should have to trust this about something that ostensibly happens in your native language.

Oh well. It’s still stagecraft. It’s still part of the Rugged Man experience. If it’s art for art’s sake that’s not a bad way to go out.

*

Editor’s note: Next week this column will take a deserved sabbatical and return on Feb. 6.

*

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Friday brought what announcement boxing craves – a superfight! And here it is: May 6 at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas Mexican cinnamonweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez will trade hands with Mexican chavezweight champion Julio “Son of the Legend” Chavez Jr. at the celebrityweight limit of 164 1/2 pounds. What we know of boxing contracts assures us even this loopiest of catchweights remains open to negotiation till opening bell – and without mandatory-minimum sentencing there’s good a chance of Chavez weighing over 200 pounds on May 5 as under 165 – and so as to ensure competitive bidding there are still threats of returning to the stadium where the Dallas Cowboys play, whatever it’s currently called, but if you’re a Mexican national booking his Cinco de Mayo vacation plans anywhere but Nevada, eres un payaso.

The obvious temptation is to go full misplaced aggression on this fight and use it as a convenient metaphor for what plagues our oncebeloved sport as if such metaphors composed a paucity, and of course for those GGG fans who long for a fight that justifies their ardor by legitimizing their guy last week’s announcement brought more ire – which says lots about the chances they honestly give a post-Pirog Daniel “Miracle Man” Jacobs, and the word ‘honestly’ must be emphasized because the promotional center of boxing is about to pretend Jacobs is a daunting foe, maybe even dangerous as David Lemieux – but Cinnamon versus Son of the Legend is an actually intriguing prizefight in spite of itself. It’s not what boxing needs, but who in the hell even knows what that is anymore? Boxing’s woes now need remedies prescribed in years, not fights, so it’s way outside the point to accuse any fight anylonger of not benefiting the sport that, were it not for certain broadcasters’ bespoke budgets, would soon find itself remanded to UFC undercards in the U.S.

This fight will sell hugely among Mexicans largely because it is so exclusively Mexican – it has nothing to do with WBC titles (though one gets giddy imagining what sanctioning ploys Consejo Mundial de Boxeo has planned) or official records or contrived gravity and legacy; it will feature two Mexicans who at least partially resent one another’s acclaim in the sense one man’s acclaim taxes the other’s revenue in the finite if inelastic Mexican boxing marketplace. From an aficionado’s perspective this fight made much more sense when this column prescribed it six years ago but from a promoter’s perspective it’s good a time as any.

Chavez ate himself hastily away from Canelo before HBO succeeded in making Canelo the draw he is now – HBO’s interest in Canelo began with the network’s stint as “an Oscar De La Hoya-search company that populates its undercards with Al Haymon-managed trial balloons” until Haymon bought Showtime and now HBO’s interest in Canelo is some combination of wanting exclusivity with the last guy in the sport who moves the pay-per-view needle and selfinterested altruism: without HBO as a partner Golden Boy Promotions probably wouldn’t see fiscal 2018 and then HBO would be stuck broadcasting solely Top Rank cards and every single product of the former Soviet Union’s amateur program.

Which brings us limping towards Son of the Legend whose career and life were shortened by his 2012 match with middleweight champion Sergio Martinez. Never a picture of discipline before Maravilla calmly, crisply, cooly diddled his cranium hundreds of times Chavez Jr. lost his remaining impetus thereafter and snuck through the next two years and two sizable paychecks beating on Brian Vera before changing his manager and promoter and advisor and getting bitchmade by a limited Pole named Andrzej Fonfara. Rumors of Chavez’s reform persist as ever, but making fights in El Paso and Monterrey as Chavez has done for the last two years has convinced no one Chavez is on the fruitful side of his career, and therefore the time is now for making a fight that proves nothing, but again, so what?

It’s no insight to say Golden Boy Promotions cannot afford to get Canelo beat; Cinnamon is nowhere near frightened of Gennady Golovkin as Oscar De La Hoya is since Canelo is not using his fortune to supplement more than a car collection and some houses while De La Hoya is using Canelo to subsidize a whole lot more. There’s no chance De La Hoya or HBO thinks Chavez can beat Canelo, but Chavez can beat Canelo, and Mexicans know this because whatever fuzziness Chavez’s lifestyle has brought his fighting trim the fact remains Chavez took Martinez to the quivering precipice of a knockout, and that Martinez was better in every way than Canelo.

The Maravilla whose career Chavez effectively razed in 90 seconds was creative and mobile and talented as any fighter Canelo has faced including the Floyd Mayweather who embarrassed him in 2013. And Chavez came a punch from snatching Martinez’s consciousness with nothing but size and will; he measured the physical disparity between a man who walks the earth at 210 pounds and starves to 160 and a man who had to eat his way up from 154 and invested in it by being hit relentlessly for 34 minutes simply for a chance to spend one minute whacking that smaller man with impunity.

Canelo is naturally larger than Martinez but not nearly large as Chavez, and if Canelo plans to stand in the pocket and counterpunch with Chavez he will get hit. No evidence has surfaced Canelo’s whiskers aren’t stiff but 36 minutes with Chavez should moisten them for Golovkin (unless Canelo can sue revenue projections for another year of PPV showcases), and therein lies the delicious irony of this money grab: In seeking one last enormous payday for Canelo before his reckoning with Golovkin the Cinnamon handlers ensure their man’s eventual middleweight-unification match will be a cashout.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Twenty months after a fight that put boxing pay-per-view in a death spiral, Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao – along with their handlers and hangerson – did not reflect in their own words on the way their match ruined boxing. But here’s imagining they did.

FLOYD MAYWEATHER: Blood, sweat and tears. Hardwork and dedication. Forty-nine tried, 49 failed. You wanna see the check I got? It’s over here (motioning to a 30-foot x 45-foot hanging print of himself showing the media a check at his postfight press conference).

LEONARD ELLERBE (CEO, Mayweather Promotions): I took that pic and we got it mounted by AllPosters.com.

BOB ARUM (CEO, Top Rank): We knew what Mayweather was. We promoted him for years. An exceptional talent and just a rotten human being. We had to watch his fight with Oscar (De La Hoya) and his fight with Canelo (Alvarez), and they made all this money. And we created Oscar too. And we get nothing? Something had to be done.

MANNY PACQUIAO: I fight for the people. Especially the poor people. Seriously. Manny Pacquiao loves everyone. The fight was not happy. My shoulder hurt.

FREDDIE ROACH (Pacquiao’s trainer): After Marquez nearly killed Manny, I thought there was no way the Floyd fight would happen. I talked to Bob (Arum) and asked him if he was going to fire me. Bob said, “Maybe. Maybe not. We’ll get Manny a few heavy bags. We’ll put him in exotic places, maybe do a Bradley rematch. You just keep saying Floyd’s an easy fight. This could work.”

LA-Z THE SCRIBE (Editor in chief, FloydDaGOAT.com): Yeah, after Marquez obliterated him, I got a call from Money. He’s all, “That piss-drinker just cost me a billion!” I was the first to tweet it.

RICHARD SCHAEFER (former CEO, Golden Boy Promotions): You know, when I hear people saying Mayweather-Pacquiao ruined pay-per-view, it actually makes me kind of mad. I had a big part in ruining boxing, and a big part of that success was pay-per-view. We also got Andre Berto overpaid, over and over. It’s easy to give Ken (Hershman) and Stephen (Espinoza) all the credit today. But I’m proud of the work Ross (Greenburg) and I did to make most of that possible.

KEN HERSHMAN (former President, HBO Sports): I wish I hadn’t left Showtime. We did some really good things over there on a shoestring.

ROSS GREENBERG (former President, HBO Sports): I don’t miss anything about boxing.

STEPHEN ESPINOZA (General Manager, Showtime Sports): I miss working with Richard.

SCHAEFER: Please tell Stephen I’m back in boxing!

FLOYD MAYWEATHER SR. (Mayweather’s trainer): Listen, man, I told you I don’t know. Floyd and I allegedly wasn’t on speaking terms at that moment.

ROGER MAYWEATHER (Floyd’s former trainer): I told them motherf–kers it was a dumb idea. Shopping for a turkey? My nephew told me to do it. Them charges got dropped, OK?

PACQUIAO: They make me give the blood too much. If my shoulder happy, I win. Give me a rematch, Floyd. And half.

MAYWEATHER: VADA, ADA, USADA, DABA, DABA. All’s I know is when my dad says that power-pellet stuff all them years ago, some of you thought Manny could beat me. Then the fight happens, and it ain’t close – you tell me, ya dummies.

BRUCE TRAMPLER (Matchmaker, Top Rank): Was I surprised by the result? What do you think?

JAY Z (Founder, ROC NATION Sports): Floyd can’t read. Fifty can’t flow. Arum’s getting old. Al (Haymon) doesn’t answer calls. I’m a hustler. I told my people to find the biggest draws and sign them. Well, Dre (Andre Ward) got no charisma, and Miguel (Cotto) is ancient. I’m leaking a fortune in the fight game already. I need a word that rhymes with ‘divestiture’.

ARUM: Look, Manny’s a pragmatist. He knows there needs to be a chance of his getting killed at this point to sell his fights anywhere but the Phillipines, or he can take less money. He doesn’t want to get killed, right? The silver lining in all this is it led to our finding a continent where he hasn’t fought yet – Australia! Right now, we’re saying there’s interest on all the networks, but in a few months we’re going to decide to put it on our website again.

ELLERBE: We’re back on pay-per-view. We’re doing a three-rounder soon between two of the largest stars in the hip-hop universe. Our production company did that video of Girl Collection already. It broke the internet. Floyd’s the smartest businessman in the world.

ESPINOZA: I can’t believe we won an Emmy for a commercial either. But that’s Floyd!

AL HAYMON (Mayweather’s adviser): …

SAM WATSON (Haymon’s assistant): Be sure and thank Al Haymon for this interview opportunity.

ARUM: We knew things were going sideways when Floyd had to announce the fight with his cell phone. We covered our bases by leaking the imminent announcement to a number of journalists in case Floyd’s battery died. That kickoff press conference looked like a junior-high dance. And Machiavelli (Al Haymon) didn’t help anything by doing what he did.

ROACH: I’d never seen anything like that fight week in Vegas. I hope Manny gets the rematch (grinning widely); I think we’ll win easily next time.

OSCAR DE LA HOYA (Founder, Golden Boy Promotions): Everything I built in all my pay-per-view fights? They ruined it. We didn’t make a dime. Now K2 (Gennady Golovkin’s promoter) wants us to get Canelo knocked-out for less than I made fighting Felix Sturm. ¡Felix pinche Sturm, imagínate! We’re rebuilding right now, old school. But we need Canelo. Maybe a rematch with Floyd would sell? We’d take a fight with Manny too. Let’s stop talking about GGG.

MIGUEL COTTO (former middleweight world champion): Miguel Cotto fight next month against somebody. Pay-per-view. Miguel Cotto no promote fight because Miguel Cotto has guarantee purse.

MAYWEATHER: I killed boxing (laughing). Told ya!

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Apropos of an article about Western languages’ overuse of nouns when compared to Eastern languages’ preference for verbs I dove in the archives last week and happened on my younger, more-optimistic self (while undeciding the matter of nouns and verbs as inconclusive). Bubbling with sincerity and enthusiasm in 2007 I wrote this column about where I imagined we should be sometime between Sunday and Dec. 31.

I still like that guy. I like this guy better, but far as 10-years-past selves go, that Bart Barry wasn’t bad if a bit too eager to please. We’ll get round to what happened to him and all of us, but first a personal-finance riddle:

Q: What’s the quickest way to become a millionaire?

A: Start as a billionaire and invest in strip clubs.

Some Money May levity to kick-off 2017 because he’s still retired and, one hopes, will remain that way for another year – as each year of retirement increases substantially the probability of his remaining retired into perpetuity. He’s still one of the world’s two best fighters, too, which is a counterintuitively good thing: So long as Money May believes people like me believe he can beat anyone between 135 and 155 pounds he will remain retired because he is our beloved sport’s predominant hypothetical predator – the one prizefighter no man in history would wish to confront in imaginary combat. The great ones make it look easy and not only did Money May hypothetically beat prime versions of everyone from Sugar Ray Leonard to Muhammad Ali but he taught a generation of messageboard aficionados how to dominate vicariously Money May’s hypothetical matches:

Im the GOAT cuz Floyds GOAT cuz you dont now bout SRR but i KNOW bout Floyd, lol

All this is a meandering and surprisingly bitter – it should be noted – explanation for my 2007 prediction being so terrible, and looking back those radio bits were fun too because answering questions is very much easier than crafting them. What seemed to derail things catastrophically for our sport was the event that happened a couple months before I wrote that cursed column, and I might have guessed better. The advent of HBO’s “24/7” program as a promotional vehicle for Mayweather-De La Hoya marked a shift for premium cable from selfinterested broadcaster to promoter. It was shortsighted greed – the first and obvious answer any time someone asks “What happened to America?”; the novelty of what appeared to be unscripted happenings in the lives of Oscar and Floyd generated tens of millions of additional dollars in PPV revenue, and whenever windfalls like that happen rest assured the television industry will celebrate them with awards and critical acclaim, and it did.

As a buyer of content television is reliably more interested in outcomes than print media, which is why broadcasters’ friends and familiars get credentialed nearer ringside than writers do – HBO or Showtime may risk $1 million in licensing fees while a newspaper risks a reporter’s plane ticket and per diem. Television probably wasn’t destined for objectivity regardless but buying content ensures a conflict of interest television neverminds as it borrows print media’s sheen of objectivity and predominantly makes infomercials to show between commercials. Premium cable once was different for having subscribers and not having commercials, and while television was still an entertainment medium, not a journalistic one, premium cable felt more serious. Parking its cameras in the Big Boy Mansion for Money May’s many many takes of his many many renditions of his wholly wholly unoriginal speech about blood and sweat and hard work and young lions began premium cable down a cannibalizing eight-year path to Mayweather-Pacquiao and the end of interest in boxing for a generation.

It made sense because it made dollars, etcetera, but the gyms were emptying while sundry revenue records were decimated and smashed and obliterated and and and. If my imaginary 12-year-old American heavyweight did make his way in a gymnasium in 2007 his trainer was elsewhere by 2010 or 2011 because his gym was empty, and if it was too late for my prospect to learn football or basketball it was a good time to find a part-time job. Nobody at school talked about boxing anyway unless Mayweather or Pacquiao was on SportsCenter promoting placeholder shams while they threatened one another until they finally did fight one another, and who that wanted to become a prizefighter in 2007 found his interest rekindled by that spectacle?

Boxing got back on terrestrial airwaves a year later but ratings indicate my prospective American heavyweight was anywhere but in front of a PBC broadcast when that day happened. Broadcasters transformed themselves so successfully to promoters it was no wonder a promoter decided to become a broadcaster, and still the ruse goes on though alongside the squareroot of its previous enthusiasm and promise. Eventually the heavyweight division did give us its surprise champion a little ahead of schedule, of course, but an obese gypsy from England was hardly the “kid’s hidden grace and power” I prescribed.

As we begin the fabled year of 2017, then, there are two tacks to take – honesty or something else. Honesty says: Nothing went right in the second half of my 10-year prediction and boxing engendered more welldeserved pessimism in 2016 than any year of its predecessor decade.

Something else says: I was exactly right, and his name is Deontay “The Bronze Bomber” Wilder!

Stop laughing.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry

SAN ANTONIO – There’s a perfect park not far from the downtown area here, in fact it may well be considered the downtown area, and it’s called Walker Ranch Historic Landmark because something historic happened or was anyway commemorated here but it’s not entirely important this history – as we learn via immersion daily and will soon learn at an accelerating rate history is barely more factual than fiction and converges upon it for its first, say, 100 years and then the two become interchangeable in a euphemism like “legend” – not important, certainly, as the convergence in this park of a colorful new playground and airplanes passing overhead almost continually. There’s an urgency to the sound as these planes pass, and both adults and their children invariably toss their eyes upwards with each arrival, the children with wonder and the adults with longing and both with awe at the crafts’ immensity. No persuasion required.

What this has to do with boxing in 2016 as this year concludes is nothing in particular but perhaps something in general: The casualty of persuasiveness. It may never have existed and it may well be I just noticed it this year, eyes drawn to aircrafts floating noisily over a park, but the old rhetorical methods we learned in school’ve gone wanting officially. Perhaps none of us was ever persuasive and perhaps none of us was ever persuaded, perhaps most of us simply believed what our parents believed or its exact opposite, rarely anything in between, then went egghunting for corroborating events we converted from coincidences to facts through repetition and some loose consensus loosely perceived, but it became more obvious this year as publications and broadcasts played their congregations’ greatest hits for their congregations and those few who did try to persuade were so bad at it.

Fact-checkers became quite nearly annoying to me in 2016 as the liars they refuted, as the liars were sometimes creative while their opponents were as often torpid bullies – doing the same work of God or Truth or Morality as every other halfwrought loon (though none, thankfully, in this park on a Christmas afternoon). Or perhaps an awakening introspection brought more of us to saying “I don’t believe that” – a wonderful mechanism for disarming both liars and fact-checkers alike by making the liar reveal his sources and the fact-checker declare you an idiot and go away – in lieu of saying “That’s not true,” a bullfighter’s red cape of a phrase that makes both liars and fact-checkers charge.

There is a diminishing feedback mechanism to great fights and great fighters that requires a witness to share his experience sincerely with others who may not have witnessed them, and that feedback is akin to a mirrored sincerity wherein an audience measures the witness’s honesty and returns it as an interest the witness is free to mistake for conversion, while a performer’s dishonesty reveals itself in a moment and if others humor him because they are polite or drunk they are no nearer convinced and only the performer is fooled. This is broadcasters’ metronomic use of words like “great” and “unbelievable” to tell halfinterested and quartersober viewers they live in historic times. Conversely your great aunt probably doesn’t care how suspensefully the Martinez-Chavez fight ended but she finds your enthusiasm sincere and therefore attractive enough to share with her Wednesday bookclub whatever details she remembers from her nephew’s account of a trip to Las Vegas sometime in 2012.

Not this year, or at least not nearly so much this year. Boxing is further outside the public consciousness as 2016 concludes than it was as 2015 concluded than it was as 2014 concluded than it was as 2013 . . . and boxing budgets now reflect it mercilessly, with HBO effectively putting promoters on ESPN’s old pay-to-play model (under the auspices of pay-per-view), Showtime husbanding its resources, and Premier Boxing Champions – well, does PBC even still exist? An essential fight happened in the final quarter of 2016, the sort of who’s-number-one fare for which aficionados claimed to clamor from 2009-2015, when Andre Ward controversially decisioned Sergey Kovalev, and nearly no one cared and still fewer care today no matter how much we reiterate there was controversy.

What was the best fight of 2016? None springs to mind. Who was the best fighter in 2016? No one springs to mind. That’s a large part of the point: Wherever my interest in our oncebeloved sport has gone I still have to find a weekly subject to fashion 900 words about, and yet when I look back at 2016 and ask myself to which fights I cared enough to travel, for the first time in 11 years my answer is none, and when I ask myself what fights I regret I didn’t travel to my answer is still none.

Oh, but you see, so-n-so versus so-n-so was epic. I don’t believe that. But if you study his record you’ll see so-n-so is actually becoming a great fighter. I don’t believe that. We’re lucky to have Abel Sanchez. I really don’t believe that.

A resolution for 2017: Don’t talk yourself into doing the job of promotion or legacy for others – if the greatness of a fight or fighter doesn’t hit you with the bolt of a jet passing overhead, simply say “I don’t believe that” and proceed merrily along.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday at a 1/3-full Forum in Inglewood, Calif., handpicked American light heavyweight opponent Joe Smith retired Bernard Hopkins just before Hopkins’ 52nd birthday, on HBO, by rendering Hopkins unfit to continue their match in the eighth round. Smith beat on Hopkins throughout the fight, regardless of what narrative twists HBO replays tried to impart, and even taunted “The Executioner” by switching to southpaw when he wasn’t otherwise winging righthands fearlessly – exactly the way a man should do against someone twice his age. Hopkins invented an alternate ending to his KO-by, of course, and HBO let him, of course, but the good news nevertheless was twofold: Smith won the right way, and Hopkins is now retired.

That Smith knocked Hopkins clean out the ring with a left hook brought from aficionados more gasps of relief than horror, knowing as we all did how many times Hopkins had used threats of retirement and elastic conceptions of ending his career his way – and who’s going to deny a legend that! – to promote fights no fan asked for, or at least didn’t ask for in any way measurable by boxoffice receipts. From his flattened spot on the concrete outside the ring Hopkins rose, in a show of indomitable will and tactical cunning and immortal somethingorother, and began to harangue nearby officials about an illegal push that injured his ankle and was nothing like either the left hook that put him through the ropes or the left hook that put him geometrically nearer to spectators than he was to Joe Smith, suing posterity (and any other eligible parties) for a palatable outcome.

“Bernard is a difficult person to deal with,” said the late-Bouie Fisher in 2005, after Hopkins fired him. “He wants all the glory, he wants all the credit, he wants all the money. It’s all about him, him, him.”

What few dared mention during his career and no one will mention now that it finally ended is how much more Hopkins frightened the boxing media than actual boxers, how much more writers and broadcasters discussed Hopkins’ predation than other fighters did. Hopkins was by no means a media creation, for he was a self-creation first and foremost, but he was a media confirmation, filibustering as he did every interview with very little lucidity but a whole lot of autobiography and portentously delivered cliches before closing his monologues with an allusion to Graterford Penitentiary, his nearly inevitable exclamation point. He intimidated the hell out of journalists. Exploiting in his subjects some combination of privilege-induced guilt and physical inferiority Hopkins discomfited his media opponents early in interviews then talked in circles about himself until he was certain “legend” or “one of a kind” or “unbelievable” would make its way in whatever his subject soon wrote or said about him.

But few actually liked being round the guy. Plenty of writers admired him and felt honored by his meandering answers to their stock questions – as if a quarterhour soliloquy from Hopkins somehow burnished with genius an inquiry like “Talk to me about training, Champ” – but none came away from an experience with Hopkins enduringly proud of the way he comported himself while in Hopkins’ presence. That was all part of the Hopkins schtick, er mystique, exploiting others’ fears – a task at which Hopkins never failed, except in his matches with Jermain Taylor, Joe Calzaghe, Chad Dawson and Joe Smith.

“(Hopkins) thinks he can intimidate me because he’s been to prison for robbery,” said Calzaghe before beating Hopkins in 2008. “So you burgled somebody, you brave boy. That makes you a thug, not a fighter. It makes you an idiot.”

Before anyone says there are too many incredibly good moments in Hopkins’ career to approach a summary of the great man in fewer than three volumes he might admit there were a historic number of insipid moments in that storied career as well. For every Felix Trinidad there was a Morrade Hakkar, for every Antonio Tarver there was a Carl Daniels, for every Kelly Pavlik there was an Enrique Ornelas; when Hopkins wasn’t neutralizing a much larger or younger opponent he was nigh unwatchable.

Honesty is ever more believable than even masterful insincerity, and so: I esteemed Hopkins highly as any fighter in the world the night he beat Tito till Papa Trinidad personally intervened and I was pleasantly surprised by his activity and effect against Tarver in the first “final” match of Hopkins’ career (lest we forget the retirement angle was used to hoodwink HBO into broadcasting Hopkins-Tarver in lieu of Cotto-Malignaggi, 10 1/2 years ago) and I was impressed if dismayed by how easily Hopkins unmanned Pavlik in 2008, but all that was done happening eight years ago and since then I’ve mostly felt exploited by the entire Hopkins hustle: danger / legend / Graterford / danger / legend / legend / danger / Graterford / Graterford / legend.

If there be a genius for confrontation Hopkins has it, the sort of exquisite intuition only to be found in one who hones his expertise by treating every single interaction in every day of his life as a confrontation, through four decades, but it’s not a pleasant place to visit even vicariously and I sure as hell wouldn’t want to live there or have B-Hop as a neighbor. No, I will not miss Bernard Hopkins, but I’m glad in Joe Smith he’s given us a compelling opponent for Sergey Kovalev while Andre Ward avoids that rematch.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday in Omaha junior welterweight Nebraskan Terence “Bud” Crawford (29-0) spiralsnuffed Californian John Molina (29-6) in the eighth round of their match for Crawford’s 140-pound championship for which only Crawford was eligible. The fight happened on Crawford’s network, HBO, but not along his network’s pay-per-view branch because of how quickly receipts from Bud’s PPV debut got tallied in July – as HBO’s search for someone to rediscover its millionth (or 500,000th) buyer continues along: Not Gennady, nor Terence, nor Andre and Sergey.

Rarely do a prizefighter’s trunks do the work of premonition but Molina’s did with uncanny precision at CenturyLink Center. Molina and his cornermen all wore a garish ensemble covered in question marks of varying shapes and positions, like Halloween store runway models doing The Riddler. There were ?s and ¿s everywhere to ensure no semblance of certainty and that’s how Molina fought, outquestioned and unanswered from the opening bell till he hit the canvas in round 8. Every question about the fight’s quality, beginning with those raised at the Friday weighin when Molina missed weight aggressively, persisted and persist.

Everyone already knew Bud Crawford was special – after all, no one who wasn’t special’d be allowed to fight John Molina on HBO in Nebraska – and nothing Molina brought Saturday undermined anyone’s opinion of Crawford, even if it didn’t genuinely enhance it either. On the roster of happenings that make a fighter lessen in his prime, certainly, poor competition is well well below inactivity, but poor competition still makes the list, and a perusal of Crawford’s opponents since his signature win 30 months ago against Yuriorkis Gamboa should induce a tremor of concern to his handlers. He’s selling tickets in Omaha and that’s great and he’s staying active and that’s still better but he’s staying active against whomever his promoter can get at Black Friday rates and that’s not the same as improving: It’s brand management more than career management.

But there weren’t any cracks in Crawford’s game Saturday, were there?

There were a few, actually, yes.

The main one is his increasingly vaunted footwork, and having your footwork noticed by pundits and commentators and casual fans, come to think of it, might be an alarm every fighter should set going forward – though while we’re treating footwork referee Mark Nelson garners mention of his own as, in the busyness of his inexplicable but unceasing half orbits round the combatants, Nelson spends an absurd amount of time directly behind one fighter or the other, where he can see nothing just before he gets bumped into.

Fighter footwork fascinations go like this: The sort of hyperbolic character who fetishizes handspeed and footwork never praised Juan Manuel Marquez like he celebrated Erislandy Lara – while Marquez’s footwork, Marquez’s everything, was much much better; the type of fan who dizzied himself with glee as Amir Khan dizzied himself with jumping jacks from corner to corner to corner can’t often be found on Twitter hashtagging Roman Gonzalez’s footwork – which is, like everything else Chocolatito does in a prizefighting ring, nigh perfect. Once a fighter’s footwork becomes exaggerated enough for some people to start talking about it, in other words, it’s probably gone from a bit much to a mark of inefficiency to a cause for concern.

But you see Bud Crawford can switch from orthodox to southpaw!

Well gee golly.

Such switching is often a mark of anxiety, a means of stating loudly to one’s opponent you cannot figure him out, and Crawford knows this – which is why he began orthodox till he figured out Molina, which took about a round, and then Crawford went southpaw and stayed that way because Molina held no mysteries and Crawford sells tickets in the Midwest in some part by not being a frilly dude. Crawford used his footwork as a southpaw mostly to keep himself from getting hit by Molina until Molina figured this out, sort of, and started lead-hand corralling (clotheslining really) Crawford about the seventh round, at which point Bud came to a quick realization the show needed closing because however obviously confused Molina was he wasn’t so properly dissuaded as to stop whacking Crawford when given the chance.

Crawford is starting to take three steps where he need only take one, and it’s a mark of his recent competition more than carelessness: Against an equal you worry about fatigue and conserve motion by parrying a cross with your shoulder or ducking a hook, but when you haven’t a fear in the cornfields about what capacity for violence the man across from you bears, you get too cute by half and make disco circles in lieu of L-steps.

When he wants to be, Crawford is among the sport’s best closers, and his triple right hook – head, body, head – thrown after his initial hesitation brought Molina’s left glove off his cheek, was gorgeous a finish as any aficionado has a right to demand. Molina crumpled, and Mark Nelson crumpled on top of him, and one of Top Rank’s guys in a Cowboys jersey somehow decided he needed to be the first to congratulate the victor – which was both unseemly and uncharacteristic of a Top Rank employee. Alas.

Whosoever will Bud fight next? Preferably Manny Pacquiao before he retires again or at least someone whom Antonio DeMarco didn’t stop in 44 seconds 51 months ago.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday in Moscow Russian cruiserweight champion Denis Lebedev lost his title by split decision to Russian Murat Gassiev by scores that were at best wide and at worst wrong: 114-113, 112-116, 111-116. Gassiev dropped Lebedev in round 5 and fought ably in most every other but did not appear to punch enough to depart Khodynka Ice Palace with Gassiev’s jewelry.

It was an honest prizefight between two men who knew how to do it and went about the labor of bludgeoning one another quite a bit differently: the southpaw champion, shorter and thicker, moved at times nervously but generally effectively and squaredup to turn his left cross to a hook round Gassiev’s guard, and the orthodox challenger, tall and coiled, landed far fewer clean punches but absorbed his opponent’s blows more indifferently and benefitted from a bodyshot knockdown in the middle rounds that gave two ringside judges liberty to weigh his work generously. It was an honest viewing experience for American audiences, too, because it came effectively bereft of biography – though the cornermen, the once-quotable Coach Freddie and enduringly obnoxious Abel Sanchez, surely biased some American eyes somewhat.

But that doesn’t explain the judging and for once it’s good not to bother autopsying scorecards for improper interest. On the Russian broadcast it did not appear Gassiev did sufficient to unstrap the champion but the acoustics of a YouTube feature from the other side of the world might be suspect so one never errs giving ringside sounds and those who experience them benefits of scorekeeping doubts – for the sake of one’s own peace of mind or at least solace. Lebedev was indeed busier throughout and controlled no fewer than eight of the match’s opening nine minutes then got caught a while after that with a left hook to the liver, a quite odd thing for a southpaw to collect, and dropped without a standard halfsecond’s delay as if he knew how badly things’d go when the liver’s report reached his brain and wanted to get in position for it, and the tenor of the judging if not the action being judged shifted dramatically, or else Gassiev’s punches simply sounded that much more ferocious at ringside than they looked on video. The widest scorecard came from an American judge in Moscow watching two Russians trade hands, and one hopes therefore he didn’t bring a rooting interest to a card that otherwise felt lopsided, though the IBF sure flew him a long way to that ringside seat.

If Gassiev won fairly he did so by punching much harder than the champion because it sure as hell wasn’t Gassiev’s defense, pedestrian, or head movement, scarecrowlike, that brought his W and new title. The idea of that title is worth a revisit because it addresses the way fights are scored and the way aficionados think fights ought be scored, and they’re not the same.

Barring a decisive act the man being watched more by a judge during a round will win that round from that judge. None of us, that is, watches impartially enough to keep his eyes fixed on the floating cube of space between two combatants, following each fist across the cube’s threshold and judging its effect from there; each of us begins each round watching one of the two fighters and why we watch that fighter is a plethora of subjective things like identity and empathy and psychological goingson we couldn’t catalog exhaustively if we had unlimited time and inclination. Yet we dive headlong at the most obvious considerations when judging judges, which is fine actually because in large part it’s what judges sign up for.

Somewhere round here is the genesis of the idea a challenger must beat a champion more decisively than a champion must beat a challenger – not because any judge’s scorecard (that isn’t prefilled anyway) is prefilled with a handicap for the challenger but because, by virtue of the precious metal he wears round his waist when he steps through the ropes, a champion brings a presence scorekeepers’ eyes find irresistibly shiny – the champion is the default object on which a judge’s eyes fix. Nobody said it had to be like that in the beginning; it turned out like that often enough to become probable and then men who trained challengers decided it was an apt tool to tell their charges in camp the champ would be entitled to every close point, and soon enough those challengers became champs themselves and decided such entitlement, while unofficial, was a binding rule. One of them probably said that much in an interview once long ago, and drunken fanatics have been loudly quoting him ever since.

If members of the Sergey Kovalev camp didn’t cite this rule directly or publicly after their charge’s narrow loss to Andre Ward a few Saturdays back they surely alluded to it privately and attributed to bias an outcome decided by American judges’ susceptibility to a jingoism that overwhelmed the subconscious bias Kovalev’s waistwear should’ve brought. Perhaps. But Saturday a Russian champion did about as much to defend his title in Russia as Kovalev did in America and got the same sort of result though he lost by a greater margin in his home country than Kovalev did in Ward’s home country.

And that returns us ever and again to there being but one way to win a prizefight objectively and that is by knockout. The rest is noisy twaddle.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday in Las Vegas the runnerup for 2016’s most-anticipated fight featured undefeated Jamaican Nicholas “Axe Man” Walters getting stripped bare in a super featherweight title match by once-defeated Ukrainian Vasyl Lomachenko. Walters decided quitting after seven rounds of being felled not once somehow blazed a nobler trail than absorbing a beating certain to multiply and deepen. Well. Unpleasant as things must’ve been for Walters he made the wrong decision and should expect in the future white feathers in lieu of television contracts.

Styles break fights, and if one compares the reality of Lomachenko-Walters to the fantasy so many aficionados entertained about it Saturday’s fare fairly well serves as the largest disappointment of 2016 – which, as disappointments go, is like being the captain of an all-star team. The boxer-slugger matchup, as Joe Frazier teaches us in “Boxing with the Pros”, ever favors the boxer, but even so, that was a bit much.

Anyone who’s not been ringside at a Walters fight before Saturday no doubt now entertains suspicions Walters was a Top Rank invention of (typically brilliant) matchmaking, a properly manufactured frame with which to hang the promoter’s latest masterpiece, but that’s inaccurate for once; Walters was special in an especially concussive way when he arrived in 2013. I was ringside for Walters’ American debut, a 3 1/2-round hatcheting of Mexican Alberto Garza in Corpus Christi, Texas, and it left a mark. I recall clearly but three emotions from the fights that night: Thankfulness San Antonio’s Steve Hall did not perish in his encounter with Alex Saucedo, amusement Vic Darchinyan outboxed Nonito Donaire for eight rounds, and holy mackerel that guy with the wooden axe can crack! Very few fighters at the championship level have gamechanging power not because very few guys at the championship level hit hard but because everyone at the championship level hits hard, and subsequently fighters don’t make it to the championship level without they can absorb stiff shots. Walters didn’t just hit his opponent with a stroke that shocked Garza but observed Garza’s fright with no shock of his own – Walters waded into what panic emanated from Garza without malevolence: “I’m supposed to cause that.”

Four months later I was ringside when Lomachenko’s debut in a championship fight did not go nearly so impressively against Mexican Orlando Salido in San Antonio’s Alamodome. Salido missed weight by a couple or three weightclasses, if memory serves, and fouled Lomachenko compulsively but as we’d been promised by Lomachenko’s promoters some combination of the greatest amateur in boxing history and the greatest professional to come in boxing history most of us succumbed to schadenfreude and were at least amused by the spectacle of a 12-loss grinder decisioning the future of boxing – not amused as we’d been 90 days before when Chino ravished About Billions, but still.

First impressions and all that: I fully expected Lomachenko-Walters to be intense and intensely memorable and wanted very much to see what the future of boxing did with his introduction to the Axe Man’s blade. We’ll never know, will we, as Lomachenko so wildly outclassed the Axe Man the few punches Walters nearly landed were thrown with so little resolve as to be pittypats had they landed and whiteflags otherwise.

Does that make Lomachenko the most skilled fighter in the world? Hell no, actually, it doesn’t; give the minimumweight equivalent of Siri Salido 10 extralegal pounds and all the fouls he can muster and he’d still not win three rounds against Roman Gonzalez in 100 minutes of trying, much less decision him on scorecards that are just. Lomachenko is an innovator and a supremely talented fighter, yes, but Chocolatito is perfect – and they’re not quite the same thing.

Watching Lomachenko dance and pepper, shake and grind Saturday recalled no one to mind so much as Sergio Martinez, another southpaw innovator who got beaten early in his career by a Mexican grinder. Lomachenko circles tighter and does everything a bit tighter than Maravilla did but he doesn’t hit so hard or he’d have copterforked the Jamaican long before Walters quit since there’s no confusing the Axe Man for the Punisher. While we’re on the subject of Walter’s stooljob, a couple lessons learned: First, when a guy attends a weighin with a marijuana leaf on his getup, no matter his nationality, don’t be shocked if he mills like a pothead; and second, remember always what makes sluggers vulnerable to boxers is the fragility of sluggers’ psyches – they get discouraged much quicker and more deeply than boxers or volume punchers do.

For all his abundance of showcased skill Lomachenko’s not too exciting, alas, no matter how much one interrogates instant replays and immerses himself in the audio of whatever promotional lunacy Lomachenko’s American cable network now amplifies about any prizefighter from the former Soviet Union. Unlike the rest of the Eastern Bloc fighters HBO has peddled aggressively at us seemingly since the Berlin Wall fell, though, Lomachenko is promoted by an outfit that knows how and occasionally asks its charges to take risks commensurate with the fortunes HBO is wont to invest in marketable personalities.

Saturday Lomachenko looked enormous at 130 pounds and shouldn’t have any trouble rising in weight to much bigger fights with Top Rank’s much bigger fighters, or they can give us a rematch with Salido on pay-per-view and see if that goes.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas undefeated American light heavyweight Andre “SOG” Ward decisioned unanimously and narrowly undefeated Russian Sergey “Krusher” Kovalev by three scores of 114-113. Kovalev hurt Ward in round 1, dropped him in round 2 and sent him racing backwards in round 12, but in between Ward may have, conceivably, possibly, theoretically, landed exactly the number of enough punches to prevail on a fair scorecard.

First things first: I picked Andre Ward to win by late TKO. I watched the fight with four other Americans, all of whom picked Ward to win, and the five of us composed three distinct ethnicities. None of us thought Ward won before the decision got read, but one of us, having suffered the card’s preposterous co-main, advised the group to gird itself for a questionable decision in the main. That’s what we got. And we all felt a touch queasy when the judges’ scores were read.

At some point during the match one of HBO’s prissy broadcasters calculated Ward’s margin for error was zero. True as that statement sounded those judges scoring for Ward enjoyed a still narrower margin, didn’t they? If you bulged your jaw and squinted you probably could get a Ward scorecard after 36 minutes but even a moment’s absentmindedness’d’ve skewed it all to hell. But the judges played fair and turned in varying rounds of favoritism, and frankly things ringside are demonstrably different from things triplefiltered by the HBO lens – and our own Norm Frauenheim, more credible than a combination of Nevada judges and Harold Lederman, multiplied by ten, scored it for Ward 114-113 from ringside, so acceptance is appropriate.

Such a wise course’d feel appreciably better, though, were it not for that left hook to the liver Kovalev placed in the final minutes of round 12, the one that dropped Ward’s right elbow and sent him retreating – not feinting, not trapsetting, not resting: retreating – during the moments he was scheduled by friend and foe alike to trade his life for a knockout.

Ward won the benefit of ringside scorekeepers’ doubts by enduring then overcoming more pain and humiliation in the opening six minutes of Saturday’s match than he collected in the whole of yesteryears’ Super Six tournament. In round 1 a Kovalev jab buckled Ward and made him do the eye dance of widenblink widenblink while Kovalev enjoyed the view. In round 2 Ward drove his face in a sawedoff cross that, had Kovalev had time and space to turn it over, likely would’ve stopped the show then and there.

Then the bell rang for round 3 and Krusher seemed to mistake Ward for Bernard Hopkins, deciding he might hurt Ward whenever the impulse struck him and anyway let’s save some feet and force for the championship rounds. From there Ward got better every round and Kovalev did not, and while that still didn’t win Ward the match necessarily it did create objective space enough in scorers’ minds to fill with subjective considerations of patriotism and activity and heroism and such.

The difference in physicality was pronounced as possible; for those of us who recognize the futility of battling interested audio and video elements in pursuit of an accurate home scorecard, for those of us who no longer bother, in other words, with scoring fights on television, there’s a subjective criterion that serves just as well and requires a fraction the effort: Who appears the larger man? In the final 30 seconds of round 2 Kovalev appeared several weightclasses larger than Ward the way a 150-pound man appears several weightclasses larger than a 135-pound eighth grader. However much one cheered Kovalev after the knockdown it was hard not to feel sympathy for Ward – that’s how much bigger and more effective Kovalev appeared. But then.

Recently director Oliver Stone’s series “The Untold History of the United States” landed on Netflix, and whatever it intends to do or fails to do and however much it may tend toward agitprop it succeeds in encouraging Americans raised during the cold war to imagine Soviets and their leaders like decent and selfinterested folks no different from Americans. That sentiment returned to mind again and again during Saturday’s fifth and sixth and seventh rounds; however much the Krusher marketing plan relied on menace, in a pitched confrontation Kovalev was much more athlete than psychopath; butted and tackled and scored against, Kovalev expressed betrayal, not rage – whither fairplay, comrades?

The damage Kovalev did Ward nevertheless shortened SOG’s career while it revealed the American’s profound willfulness, even if things didn’t conclude conclusively as aficionados hoped. The untenable space between Ward’s fights of the last four years coupled with their dismal lack of competitiveness did nothing to prepare Ward for what he saw in Saturday’s opening rounds. Ward did not improvise so much as endure and believe; he used his entire body to offset Kovalev’s physical advantages while investing fully in his corner’s faith Kovalev’s advantages would diminish with time. They did, too, reducing the Russian’s offensiveness while doing nothing to soften his beard; the few times Ward’s punches did more than dissuade or marginally disrupt Kovalev’s rhythm those punches were to various parts of Kovalev’s body and not his head.

There should be a rematch, and for once the party most likely to benefit from such a happening is the entity most empowered to make it happen: HBO. If the network shows continuing backbone with Ward and tells him there’ll be no victory lap till a decisive victory then tells him too to tell his people to go to Showtime and fight Adonis Stevenson if they think that’ll pay better and not come back, there’s a good chance aficionados can have the rematch we deserve. Or we can have another four years of explaining how complicated such things are and see if there’s anybody left to buy the rematch in 2020.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry–

Here’s what’s going to happen Saturday at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas on HBO pay-per-view: American Andre “SOG” Ward will fight Russian Sergey “Krusher” Kovalev for the light-heavyweight championship of the world. Ward will verb, Kovalev will verb, and adjective noun will fight adverb until Noun has won a bloody, brutal noun.

In our new postfactual world what matters indeed more than everything else is what one witnesses with his own senses and experiences with her own emotions, and that courts the most attractive element of this fight: Aficionados do not, for once in years and years, have any certainty who will win a pay-per-view main event and have a chance to experience catharsis. Let us rejoice in that before we project a myriad of unrelated grievances on this combat spectacle. It’s OK to rejoice for once, really it is, without fixating on what is known or insisted by others.

Here, I’ll go first: I didn’t see Andre Ward grow up in a biracial home, and therefore don’t much care that it happened; I did not experience the Nagasakis-worth of radiation dumped in Lake Karachay, 100 km northwest of Sergey Kovalev’s hometown, and therefore don’t care much that it happened; I care deeply about what each man will do to the other with his fists and very little about why.

Is that a loss of empathy? No it is not. Empathy is a connection with another creature one experiences genuinely and spontaneously in the presence of that other creature; one does not successfully plan empathy; whatever sadness one feels for a stranger on social media is sympathy, not empathy, and thus open to entire industries committed to its manufacture and monetization. Such pitches are all a way of gaming others’ emotions, and one of the many admirable things about both these men is how little they’ve sold autobiography and identity in lieu of violence. Recently we’ve got more identity from them than before but that is attributable to a couple things: 1. Dreadful competition – since a tremendous stoppage of Chad Dawson four years ago Ward’s resume is, in a word, embarrassing; since making a signature win of a 50-year-old in 2014 Kovalev mostly has marked time and cashed checks – and 2. Floyd Mayweather taught HBO and the rest of the boxing industry this is how fights are sold (some department at Time Warner, we can be sure, has metrics and models, polling in effect, that prove this – and we now know how much more trustworthy big data is than intuition, don’t we?).

No aficionado is going to buy Saturday’s match because of post-Soviet food shortages or drug addiction in Oakland but, one theory goes, if we can get enough sentimentality in the eyes of casual sportsfans perhaps we can flush from his burrow that millionth pay-per-viewer who went underground the morning of May 3, 2015, and anyway aficionados aren’t going anywhere – which is true so long as you don’t keep count or, better yet, don’t publish the count (expect those Pacquiao-Vargas numbers right about the time we get the Cotto-Malignaggi tally).

The best Ward beats the best Kovalev every time they fight from now till their 50th birthdays, but will the best Ward be there to swap hands with Kovalev or will Ward’s weightgain and aforementioned competition send somebody less in the ring? Not if Ward has any say about it, one assumes, and Ward does but perhaps not so much as he and his trainer believe. Ward fetishizes control the way Mayweather did, for much the same reasons, though Ward’s control appears more self-directed than Mayweather’s, which often manifested itself in the way he handicapped and selected opponents – there’s no way in this life or the next Mayweather, in Ward’s position, would have acquiesced to a prime Kovalev.

So long as Ward is in control of himself in the ring Saturday Kovalev has very little chance of doing enough to win this fight. And there just isn’t enough unpredictable in Kovalev to believe otherwise will happen; he outworked old Bernard in every round, sure, but he didn’t hurt him and didn’t surprise him and that’s a problem because while there is no reason to believe Hopkins is a better prizefighter than Ward – greater, yes, but not better – there’s plenty of reason to believe Ward is 19 years younger than Hopkins. That matter of age is important because it speaks to activity, and relentlessness is the reason most intelligently given by those intelligent folks who believe Kovalev may beat Ward.

There’s an argument to be made for Kovalev’s power, too, perhaps, but reports of Kovalev hitting proportionally harder at 175 pounds than Mikkel Kessler or Carl Froch or Allan Green or Arthur Abraham hit at 168 do not feel credible, and Ward took shots from each of those guys and didn’t buckle a bit, so this old adage will favor SOG: Fighters gain weight on their chins more than their fists. Kovalev is sound and mean but not particularly imaginative and he’ll need to show imagination when Ward gets on his chest and wrestles him and fouls him and puts him in an honest-to-goodness fight.

Does Kovalev have the means, the will and fortitude and energy, to react courageously and violently to Ward’s provocation? Yes, and then some. That reaction will be part of Ward’s plan, though, and what happens next is what makes this the most compelling fight of 2016.

I think Ward pieces him up, KO-12.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday on UNLV’s campus or thereabouts Filipino senator Manny Pacquiao unanimously decisioned American welterweight titlist Jessie Vargas in a good match that proved Pacquiao’s fighting class has not dissipated fast as the welterweight division’s. Vargas was a top-10 guy at 147 pounds whom Pacquiao beat conclusively without exerting more than 45 seconds of any round, the same way Pacquiao conclusively beat Timothy Bradley, a top-5 guy at 147 pounds, in April.

Pacman’s fighting capacities have not diminished nearly quick as American interest in his capacities – as represented by purse guarantees – have: His reflexes and savagery are down about 20-percent from where they were before Mayweather while his Saturday purse guarantee was about 20-percent of what it was before Mayweather. Of course an 80-percent paycut from $20 million still makes Pacquiao what American conservatives call a “job creator” and Pacquiao at 80-percent remains very much better than other titlists in the welterweight division though nothing close to enough to beat Floyd Mayweather till Money’s 45th birthday.

Pity that Manny cannot be remanded to a cryogenic lab till 2021, then, especially if greed and desperation force a rematch of the Fight to Ruin Boxing which they will if Manny and his promoter have any say because Manny’s promoter has nary a better option – whatever talent Bud Crawford has, whatever doggedness Timothy Bradley maintains, neither guy has more than a city much less a state much less a country much less a global region he captivates or might monetize.

The preamble of the moment, the consensus throatclearing, goes something like: Pacquiao, while not nearly the man he was in his prime, is still very good. That’s about half right. Pacquiao actually is much nearer the man he was in his prime than we say he is; what has changed is our perception – our memories and our expectations and our tolerance and ourselves generally.

That’s a bold statement, Mr. Barry, are you being dumbly controversial to court traffic in the spirit of contemporary politics?

Yes! actually no. I watched the Russian rebroadcast of Pacquiao-Vargas on Sunday morning (pro tip: putting the words ““???? ???” in front of your YouTube search criteria for most any match gets you an early rebroadcast without perception-skewing commentary to suffer) and then, ready for a mindbending trip through the fourth dimension, I called up Pacquiao-Morales 1, a match Pacquiao lost, sure, but a Pacquiao 11 1/2 years younger and 15 pounds smaller and presumably quicker than today’s iteration. What I expected was the nonlinear thing that happens when you juxtapose any heavyweight title match of the 1990s with a Wlad Klitschko fight – wait, you mean heavyweights once fought with bent knees and courage? (OK, that’s not fair: Klitschko fought his courage most every title defense) – but that’s not what I got.

Pacquiao was more explosive and frankly weirder back in 2005 but he didn’t have fractionally the wiles he has today, and yes, that’s allowing for the feral qualitative disparity between Erik Morales and Jessie Vargas. Pacquiao’s head movement is perhaps the largest difference between then and now and that’s a tribute to Pacquiao’s latterday conditioning. Head movement is rarely a matter of moving one’s head; effective head movement is at least pendulous upperbody movement but best when born of the feet and knees and thighs. Eleven years ago Pacquiao windshield-wipered his hands back and forth in lieu of moving his head and Morales hit him often and hard with the Mexican’s worldclass jab.

Part of what doomed Vargas, aside from trying to do what Juan Manuel Marquez did without understanding why Marquez thought to do it and therefore a hundred microscopic adjustments of both physique and character Marquez learned to make (ain’t nothing like the real thing, Jes-sie) was Vargas’ inability to jab at uncertainty after Pacquiao snatched his confidence in round 2. Nearly no one can jab confidently at uncertainty – if there were anything natural about it the double-end bag’d not exist – and Pacquiao’s creation and maintenance of defensive uncertainty (offensively he’s been a wildcard his whole life) is one sure source of his longevity.

And even at 80-percent Pacquiao is fast in an elite way today’s fighters are not. There are quick hands aplenty out there, Showtime Sports, formerly known as The PBC, now bursts with them, but that’s different from being fast in a way that instantly closes space as Pacquiao does in yards, not inches. While Pacquiao had seen a few dozen Vargases in his career, Saturday it was clear in the match’s second half Vargas’d not before seen a Pacquiao, and some combination of fatigue and inactive offensive imagination and hyperactive defensive imagination (anxiety about consequences) kept Vargas’ hands at home while Senator Pacquiao, ever a vote-counter, did barely more than he needed do to win each round.

Never again will Pacquiao be quick to the breach as he was the night Marquez pistonstroked him, in part because every opponent now chants “jab-feint / leapback / jab / cross” through every trainingcamp, in part because Pacquiao no longer thrills quite so much at the fray, and in part because there’s no need. Today Senator Pacquiao resides in a curious yet lucrative space: He’s good enough, still, to unify the welterweight division and not nearly good enough to win more than two rounds against Mayweather.

At least it’s lucrative.

Bart Barry can be reach via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday at Thomas & Mack Center in Las Vegas, Filipino former world champion and current senator Manny Pacquiao matches himself with American welterweight Jessie Vargas in a pay-per-view fight televised by promoter Top Rank. Pacquiao retired in April after decisioning Timothy Bradley in their third match but returns seven months later because that was always the plan. Vargas lost to Bradley a month after Pacquiao lost to Mayweather in 2015 but recently stopped Sadam Ali and got chosen for Saturday’s fight because that flash of power in March is expected to prove anomalous – if Pacquiao or Top Rank thought there were any way Vargas’d stretch Pacquiao this fight would not happen.

There isn’t much to be done but write about this spectacle however undeserving. In bygone years the hungerstrike we experienced these last howsoever many months would induce an appetite coiled as a spring and ready to leap towards a million buys after a month of promotional coverage under the auspices of reportage, but no more. There are but two types of boxing coverage that survive today in the United States: the financially selfinterested and the quixotic.

They’re easily identified. Positive coverage of Pacquiao-Vargas is financially selfinterested, the line between publicist and reporter gone to the publicists, and quixotic coverage, those who cover the sport from habit or nostalgia, is not positive. No American without financial selfinterest understood Pacquiao’s retirement and even less his comeback from that faux retirement – since declaring Pacquiao’s third match with Timothy Bradley in April the last time Pacquiao would fight did little to promote the match and according to Pacquiao’s promoter Bob Arum did not begin to offset the damage done the fight’s marketing by Pacquiao’s strongly worded reiteration of his strongly held beliefs about others’ sexual orientations or the lasting damage done the sport by Pacquiao’s terrible 2015 match with Floyd Mayweather.

Yes, the shoulder match. No one has forgiven Pacquiao for that halfassed performance, nor should he, but most of us have forgotten it – until Pacquiao decides to promote his match with Vargas by telling us he’s healed and ready for a second serving of Money. It’s the wrong message because it makes some of what few consumers remain interested enough in our sport to purchase a match from a promoter’s website reconsider that purchase for fear their support might launch another yearslong buildup to another terrible superfight no one asks for anymore, and Richard Schaefer just began a comeback of his own, too, in case more nostalgic dissonance were craved (incredibly he says fans approached him at fights and told him the sport needs him).

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COMMERCIAL BREAK
Boxing’s only eight-time world champion and sitting senator returns Saturday in a match you can purchase through his promoter’s website because, in a historic show of ungratefulness, HBO and Showtime and all the terrestrial networks on which Pacquiao was possibly rumored potentially to fight for the last eight years declined to pay retail prices for what worn and defective merchandise they’re now offered.

Camera-phone footage indicates the Senator is in the best shape of his life.

“Manny’s in the best shape of his life,” reported Coach Freddie from training camp. “I know I’ve said this each of his last 12 fights, or more, but this time? The best. Unbelievable.”

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Pacquiao looked quite good against Timothy Bradley seven months ago, better than Jessie Vargas did, but just because Vargas lost the Pacquiao sweepstakes 19 months ago does not mean Vargas lost the Pacquiao sweepstakes. Vargas did after all clip Bradley at the end of their match and may very well have . . . if only the referee . . . in an unprecedented act of interference . . . the very integrity of the sport . . . and probably deserved to win by knockout, something Vargas’ promoter was not at liberty to disclose while selling Pacquiao-Bradley 3, but now after a closer look thinks all aficionados should revisit.

Talk of Pacquiao’s milling with someone who might beat him like Terence Crawford and make Pacquiao actually retire succumbed this summer to sobriety and brought us limping to Saturday’s spectacle, possibly a tuneup for Pacquiao’s future match with middleweight champion Gennady Golovkin, a rich promotional subplot given how much press Golovkin’s trainer receives for threatening the world’s best light heavyweights while trashtalking a junior middleweight and actually fighting a welterweight.

Pacquiao press releases now include airlines and flight numbers in the hopes of materializing an enormous crowd at LAX, something worthy of promotional footage on SportsCenter, alas. The American fight scene to which Pacquiao returns for Saturday’s fight is worse than the one he visited in the spring but more apparently awful to Pacquiao because, one assumes, Pacquiao’s previous purse guarantees were voided by his retirement and the dearth of interest the Pacquiao brand now generates among cable-network executives – before one considers what American consumers now know of politics in the Philippines complemented by our own fatigue with domestic politics. One begins to wonder if promoting Pacquiao as a successful Filipino politician still is the sage tact it once appeared.

Or perhaps all this is superfluous because nobody is about to discover Manny Pacquiao; those of us interested in Pacquiao enough to purchase Saturday’s fight, or heaven help us travel to it, know Pacquiao well enough to know how steadily his capacities have eroded since that 2012 encounter with the Marquez spearchisel and aren’t any longer candidates for a Pacman conversion. We know with Pacquiao we are either at the beginning or the middle part of the embarrassing stage many great prizefighters end their careers with. However extraordinary Pacquiao was in ascent, his descent is all too ordinary.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

In Tokyo on Sept. 5, 2014, Roman Gonzalez became the second Nicaraguan prizefighter to become a three-division world champion, putting him deservedly beside his late mentor Alexis Arguello, and it brought more emotion than he appeared to expect. Gonzalez marked the achievement and defense of his other world titles with understated celebrations but not in Tokyo. His third championship won, his blue gloves folded on his raised brown forehead, Gonzalez wandered in circles sobbing.

By early 2014 Chocolatito’s postfight comportment had begun to manifest nothing quite so much as gratitude, perhaps life’s most universally attractive quality because it confidently expresses something akin to humility but better: However much I deserve, I’ve received slightly more, and I’m aware it didn’t have to be like that. Maybe Chocolatito’s gratitude began with his religious devotion – by now he wore “Dios Te Ama (God Loves You)” on the back of his every pair of trunks – or perhaps a simple, rational accounting led him to recognize he was given superior athleticism and a mentor like El Flaco Explosivo, both exceptional and exceptionally available, but his sense of atonement certainly came from his deep religiosity and began showing itself in the way he treated opponents immediately after bludgeoning them with a talent God gave him to hurt other men deeply and permanently.

If Chocolatito’s calculus did not figure how much more permanently he would hurt opponents at higher weightclasses, men whose thicker necks and larger bodies absorbed more concussive force while their brains did not, he intuited it and began to clean his opponents’ faces and look after their wellbeings more firmly in 2014, instructing the trainers of the men he felled where to apply icepacks and how to look after their charges. There was nothing unprofessionally merciful about what Chocolatito did while a fight was on, though; he realized combat with larger men brought disproportionately more peril, especially when they were hurt, and he finished them with his same quickness as before and increased ferocity. But he saw in the men’s sudden imbalance and brokenspiritedness how much dangerously further these larger men’s bodies and wills took them after their brains wanted no more. Too confident to doubt his power as he fought larger opponents Chocolatito kept a private tally of how harshly he must treat these larger men – the greater sums of fully leveraged, completely pronated, precisely placed punches he now delivered them.

Because his purity of technique went nowhere. Properly grown in his new 112-pound division, trim and light once more, Chocolatito began fights with uppercuts to the head as diversions from what hooks he planned for the body to sap what strength kept the hands highly protective till they dropped and others’ unconsciousnesses went irresistibly to his hooks and crosses. He didn’t mind missing in his new weightclass either – a return to indifference: So long as a punch was balanced properly and executed with intent it mattered little if it landed because it cost even less to stop it and cocked its successor anyway and that one’d land.

Gonzalez needed to throw every punch wickedly in his new division, a lesson processed in Chocolatito’s six-round February beating of Mexican Juan “El Loquito” Kantun in Chiapas and three-round April leathering of Filipino Juan Purisima in Japan, because his handlers knew he was a generational talent they didn’t intend to fiddle in a nostalgia quest for unification, belt-collecting or purse-aggrandizement: Chocolatito’s first title fight at flyweight was against the division’s best man, Japan’s Akira Yaegashi, for The Ring’s flyweight championship, in Tokyo.

Yaegashi was larger than Chocolatito and stronger and more physical and forced the Nicaraguan backwards with jabs in the first round. Chocolatito retreated and counterpunched but didn’t run, and guarded against Yaegashi’s invitational traps and lowered hands and ropesward stumbles. In round three Yaegashi opened a hook off his cross, 2-3, and Chocolatito’s 3 was shorter and corkscrewed the champion to the mat. Yaegashi rose undissuaded and less chastened and continued a spectacle whose violence befit its world-championship occasion. Five rounds of combat did little to soften the Japanese and Chocolatito met in round 9 a belligerence nearer Yaegashi’s very best than he faced till then. The desperation with which Yaegashi opened the ninth belied his resources and betrayed his hopelessness, and 39 prizefights and thousands more hours of sparring and their tens of thousands of lessons in completing patterns, all, told Chocolatito th’t Yaegashi was on his way out and there was nothing to be done now but throw punches to the head to raise the guard then throw punches to the body to lower the guard then throw punches to the head till either the referee’s forbearance or Yaegashi’s consciousness lost attrition’s race, and it was a tie when Yaegashi dropped from physical failure and concussion.

Chocolatito needed a signature win no more than Leo Tolstoy needed a signature story – such talents don’t define themselves like that – but he had one just the same against a larger man who made him make creative choices like ending combinations with a jab, youth-boxing style, and so in 2014 Gonzalez was the world’s best prizefighter even while the world argued about great fighters well past their primes and good fighters lollygagging through their primes. Chocolatito returned to Japan two months later for his first flyweight title defense and fourth match of 2014 and wrecked Filipino Rocky Fuentes in six rounds then brought his championship home to Managua and began 2015 by roughly disciplining Mexican journeyman Valentin Leon for 6 1/2 minutes.

After that, things serendipitous happened for Gonzalez and HBO and aficionados. Y’all know the rest of the Chocolatito story from here.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

BY Bart Barry-

Roman Gonzalez made the sixth and final defense of his light flyweight title on Nov. 17, 2012, at Los Angeles’ Sports Arena against Mexican Juan Francisco “El Gallo” Estrada, a defense difficult enough to be Chocolatito’s last at that weight one way or another. Gonzalez had by then grown too large to make 108 pounds effectively and very nearly gave away too many opening rounds to decision Estrada – who since losing to Gonzalez has gone 8-0 (4 KOs) and beaten Brian Viloria and stopped Giovani Segura and iced Hernan Marquez.

The unfailing benefit for the aficionado of watching a great fighter make matches against increasingly larger foes is the adjustments the great fighter necessarily makes because what works against a man smaller than you often fails against a man larger than you and very few professional athletes grow into new physiques immediately or properly. Exceptional in a host of other ways, in 2013 Gonzalez would prove himself every bit susceptible to this rule as another athlete.

When Chocolatito completed his light flyweight reign against El Gallo Estrada it was a pitched contest either man might’ve won by decision but Gonzalez won in some part for being champion – the fighter even impartial judges unconsciously watch more closely. Estrada chose a world title fight to make his 108-pound debut having made each of his career’s preceding 27 prizefights between 112 and 119 pounds and the advantage of size Estrada enjoyed was not lost on Chocolatito who had formed a habit – neither yet good nor bad – of alternately hanging his left hook and bringing it home lazily, relying on head movement to duck the rightcrosses his opponents never failed to throw. And when he didn’t respect an opponent’s power Chocolatito often let the triggered rightcross catch some of his left ear or crown, especially if an opponent’s partial contact would compromise that man’s balance or defensive positioning. (Later Chocolatito would leave his hook high and extended in an opponent’s chest-shoulder crook to reduce the other man’s leverage via range and impetus via jarring – as the opponent’s right shoulder invariably drove into his own face Chocolatito’s left glove.)

What Chocolatito learned against Rooster Estrada, though, were the perils of his casual approach against a man larger than him and necessarily accustomed to contact from men larger than Chocolatito, too. After throwing nary a punch in the opening 2 1/2 minutes of their tilt Chocolatito peppered Estrada with a left hook and a right cross that offered the Mexican a taste of the Nicaraguan’s punch but where previous opponents retreated hastily from such a sample The Rooster didn’t mind it enough to relent, or very much at all. TV Azteca’s commentating crew that included a legend named Chavez and a genius named Barrera performed ably its role of Mexican partisan, of course, and awarded Estrada each of the first four rounds but only a Nicaraguan, or an American judge named Druxman, could argue Chocolatito merited more than one of those opening four “episodios” – as Latin broadcasters call them.

The one early criticism the Mexican broadcasters did have for their countryman told: Where Chocolatito’s footwork was light and efficient, Estrada’s was busy, almost nervous. It was what wasted energy Mexican prizefighters abhor and did abhor openly, noticing Chocolatito took steps to move his opponent while Estrada took steps to settle himself. But it was a tiny detail till the later rounds when both men whacked one another and both men considered taking backwards steps and both men told themselves not to, and Estrada did anyway a few more times than Chocolatito. The decision got read unanimously in Chocolatito’s favor, then the feasting began.

Six months later Chocolatito nearly lost the diminutive “ito” from his nickname and became Chocolatón by gaining 8 1/4 pounds for a homecoming match with unheralded Colombian flyweight Ronald Barrera whom Gonzalez stopped quickly and looked pretty good while he did.

Four months after that and about four pounds lighter, once more in Managua, Chocolatito looked bad against an inexperienced Mexican flyweight named Francisco Rodriguez Jr. who was too inexperienced to know how pure and perfect his opponent was supposed to be and didn’t fight like he was against a talent rarefied as Chocolatito’s. Rodriguez saw a soft man in front of him struggling with balance and being surprised by that struggle with balance and punched Chocolatito a whole lot more than experience and competition anticipated he should. Chocolatito outweighed himself and when his left-hook leads missed he folded over his front knee like he hadn’t before. Class told eventually and Gonzalez’d’ve ground Rodriguez to his component parts but not nearly soon as the official line – Gonzalez TKO 7 – indicates: Nicaraguan referee Onofre Ramirez’s stoppage was so premature the voice of Nicaraguan boxing chanted “¡Se lo precipitó! ¡Se lo precipitó! ¡Se lo precipitó! (He rushed it!)”

Fairly and undoubtedly dubious about Gonzalez’s hometown preparatory rituals Chocolatito’s promoter Teiken wisely returned him to Japan and a journeyman opponent, Mexican Oscar Blanquet, for Gonzalez’s final match of 2013, a year after the Gallo Estrada ordeal. Against an opponent on a two-fight losing streak Gonzalez looked grimly determined but returned to form of a sort in walking through Blanquet before four minutes were up – but grim for the first time. At the match’s end Gonzalez was dignified, not joyful. Happiness had left his eyes but so had sluggishness left his legs, and Chocolatito was almost grown sufficiently into a flyweight’s body to challenge for a world title in a third weightclass.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Round the time of Roman Gonzalez’s 28th prizefight – a March 19, 2011 decision defense of his second world title in a light flyweight beating of Mexican Manuel “El Chango” Vargas in Mexico – Chocolatito picked up a modifier suddenly persistent in use by comentaristas whether Nicaraguan or Mexican: Elegante.

How apt.

Chocolatito’s physique, the wingspan and unobstructive chest complemented by shoulders fit for a 150-pound man on any downtown sidewalk in North America and tapered midsection set on powerful legs all supporting a noticeably handsome face on a head whose top did not gain the uppermost rope of every ringpost, made one consider he might be special before his athleticism proved it, his long arms never improperly stretched out their centered frame.

To see Gonzalez advance on an opponent in his slight crouch both legs bent, a line of symmetry crotch to lowered chin, brings the quintessence of every hope every trainer has ever for every charge his first day in the gym when told to put his left fist forward with his left foot – no, not your right; no, it doesn’t matter what’s comfortable; no, no, I don’t care how your cousin showed you; yes exactly, because you’re right handed; no, no, not . . . get your hands up; listen kid, you’re not gonna come in here and reinvent boxing – and makes that trainer smile like he forgot he could at our beloved sport so badly stained by a halfdecade’s waiting for Mayweather-Pacquiao. It’s that sensation more than others one feels when he sees the opening rounds of Gonzalez’s match with El Chango Vargas: “Finally, someone I can tell others to watch, this, the little guy in the blue and white, you see that? it’s perfect, it’s exactly how you’re supposed to do it.”

Too much later got made of Gonzalez’s temperament outside the ring his religiosity and philanthropy and general goodness because too much is always made of everything in America’s vending of athletes – a pathological greed tells us to tell others one can have it all and be all to every and be meaningful to meaningless people if their lives’ meaning might temporarily be derived from buying our product which is such a bargain we’re practically giving it away – but the Nicaraguans saw it at once as one of their own and the Mexicans saw it soon as Gonzalez began dashing their best little men. Gonzalez’s temperament was unusual for a man who made his living concussing other men depicting no malice no rage nothing to imbalance while stopping never to admire his craftsmanship or effect just continuing to twirl his hips and whirl his fists sans intent of any kind till there was the other man’s face, behold! a bloody lumpen mess.

Twenty months by then passed since the violent death of Chocolatito’s mentor, Alexis Arguello known uniquely simply as “Alexi” in Nicaraguan broadcasts, by Arguello’s own hand or someone else’s and those who suspected someone else’s suspected nothing so ghoulish might be done Nicaragua’s greatest ambassador without consent from President Daniel Ortega, running for reelection in 2011. Whether by personal passion or health insurance for his family Chocolatito went in the ring wearing a white cotton “I (heart) Sandinista National Liberation Front” t-shirt each match of that campaign season – setting American viewers of a certain age to wonder whatever did happen to those Contras and Iranians and Ollie North?

Chocolatito elevated his opponents even while he razed them and then toweled a red gash over one eye (Omar Salado) or helped lift the ruined to his stool (Omar Soto) after framing an act of ceaseless heroism for El Chango Vargas in the Mexican state of Puebla, once more at 7,000 feet higher altitude than Gonzalez’s native Managua and it told, as the Mexican’s jaw looked surely broken in round two but he didn’t relent for a halfhour more and didn’t take an iota’s fraction off a single punch he thrust at Chocolatito in a barely noted show of valor so extreme Hollywood’d make 90 minutes and a love story of it, were Vargas an American heavyweight. Instead it was a 108-pound Nicaraguan versus a 108-pound Mexican in San Pedro Cholula and both men, “Little Chocolate” Gonzalez and “Monkey” Vargas, wore the same classic-red Reyes gloves and did ringwalks to each other’s music and caredn’t a whit for what pomposity happened in American ringwalks and ringwear that same year.

Even Chocolatito’s American debut was unfrilled in the fall when after brutalizing and decisioning the Mexican Vargas in Mexico and brutalizing plainly the Mexican Salado in Mexico Chocolatito iced the overweight Mexican Soto in Las Vegas on a night that deservedly belonged to an Argentine middleweight in Atlantic City broadcasted by HBO, the American cable network that recently and fortunately decided to make a promotional celebration of Gonzalez. Fighting on a Top Rank card for Teiken Promotions Chocolatito went in deep and savage with “El Lobito” Soto who barely made flyweight for his junior-flyweight scrap in which Gonzalez proved himself right formidable at the next weightclass when he alpenhorned Soto to the blue mat with a left uppercut that made “The Little Wolf” submissive.

That year Nicaragua again ratified the Sandinistas with Comandante Daniel’s reelection and Gonzalez boxed Vargas gorgeously, spun Salado expertly, stretched Soto frighteningly – while Floyd suckered Vicious Vic, and Manny sparred Shane and robbed Juan Manuel.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

On Sept. 15, 2008, Roman “Chocolatito” Gonzalez defeated Japanese minimumweight world champion Yutaka Niida in Kanagawa, Japan, bringing Gonzalez’s first world title and Niida’s retirement. Whatever Niida expected in his eighth title defense did not include a career-ending fourth-round TKO in his hometown, right eye shut by Gonzalez left hooks and nose bleeding from all of it. What no one in attendance either expected was the pronounced disparity in size Gonzalez enjoyed; not all minimumweights are stitched from the same bolt, and as Gonzalez began to wing left-heavy combinations Niida’s reactions illustrated the physical disparity between the men – along with boxing’s standard optical illusion of the beater growing larger while the beaten shrinks quickly.

On the Nicaraguan telecast that evening was the late Alexis Arguello who praised Gonzalez’s tranquility above his other virtues and broke a selfimposed code of journalistic objectivity only after the match was stopped, whooping at his microphone “¡Viva Nicaragua!”

If winning a world title did not immediately improve Gonzalez by 20-percent, as lore says it should, his opponents didn’t know it and prepared for a fifth-better Gonzalez, especially Mexican Francisco Rosas who stood as Chocolatito’s first title challenger in a corner of Auditorio Guelaguetza five months later and at 105 pounds positioned beside a quite leggy Corona girl appeared more smurf than mature prizefighter. Like his country’s diminutive comedic genius Jose Rene Ruiz Martinez, beloved and feared as Tun Tun, Rosas took others’ opinions of his stature and turned himself spiteful over it. With none of Chocolatito’s handsomeness or charisma or physique – Rosas’ fatless midsection was broad as his arms were short – the Mexican brought a champion’s tally of spite with him in the ring and upon finding a subpar Gonzalez converted the match from athleticism to attrition and almost succeeded too.

Gonzalez’s first title defense was either a lesson in the economics of prizefighting or something worse and was not in Nicaragua but Mexico – Oaxaca, specifically, 5,000 feet higher than Chocolatito’s native Managua – and the difference told when Gonzalez’s mouth opened early and stayed that way. Chocolatito fought once in Nicaragua between his winning the title and defending it, but both the expectations and consequences were considerably lesser for that tilt than his Oaxaca match against a Oaxaqeño, and that was before food poisoning. Mexican altitude requires adjustment but its want of food inspectors requires much more, and while Chocolatito’s conditioning and craft might’ve overcome the altitudinal difference his inexperience with the Mexican craft of masking lost fish with spices served him well as a tourist should expect.

“I believe I outdid myself,” Gonzalez told La Prensa after his victory by split decision. “In the morning I ate eggs with beans, and at midday fish with potatoes and avocado. I don’t know, but I believe that food is what sent me to the toilet.

“Before the fight I emptied myself of the food, but just the same it gave me a strong pain. I had much fear because I felt I might soil myself in the fight.”

The diarrhea stilled for those 48 minutes but Gonzalez’s stomach did not, and he vomited in his corner between rounds and spit nausea’s salty offense off his tongue often as corner time allowed but showed naught to Rosas, and had the Mexican even a fractional inventory the champion’s maladies he’d have fought more fiercely than he did, even fiercely as he did, and he might well’ve stopped Chocolatito a halfdecade before Americans knew the Nicaraguan’s name.

Rabbited often and crumpled against a neutral turnbuckle while Rosas’ gumshield got replaced midway through their 12th round Gonzalez looked the picture of an underprepared athlete, one who mistook his attainment of a world title as an arrival at predestined showcases, but this was before the PBC: Gonzalez won his world title in a disappearing time when such an achievement marked a fighter more like a target than a corporate asset and Chocolatito knew it already and expected opponents to transcend themselves as Rosas did. Gonzalez was not the master Mexicans expected to take apart their man even as they swore they didn’t that night in Oaxaca but neither was he a lesson in the perils of illpreparation, contrary to Nicaraguan suspicions well-voiced by Enrique Armas, comentarista extraordinaria, imploring Gonzalez to remember his faith and country and raise himself higher than his obviously poor training camp prepared him to do.

Had Arguello been ringside with Armas that night he might’ve defended his prodigy protege but “El Flaco Explosivo” had demons of his own haunting him, and those demons may have been his countrymen, and Nicargua’s gentleman champion and sportsman ambassador would be dead of a gunshot to his chest in five months.

Tagged repeatedly by Rosas rights in the final rounds of his first defense Gonzalez ceded the bluemat uncharacteristically and wore an unlikely but appropriate look of apprehension while Mexican officials slowtallied their split-decision scorecards afterwards – a robbery narrowly averted, according to Armas, a robbery to shame Mexico for the ages. Gonzalez was gracious in victory but honest, too, speaking openly about his food poisoning and saying he would grant Rosas a rematch but not in Mexico. Mexican fans heard that as a concession to their man’s superiority of grit and execution and accused Gonzalez of inventing pretexts for his poor showing in Oaxaca.

Twenty months later Rosas got his rematch, this time in Japan, and Gonzalez was returned to Gonzalez, not his Oaxacan imposter, and Chocolatito belligerently dropped the Mexican thrice in round 2 and ended the rematch in its fifth minute – vindicated.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

As 2016 approaches its final quarter still enjoying a fine chance at being remembered like the worst year for boxing in the 21st century there is little reason to pile on since we already all know the culprits and hopelessness of our current state. There is even less reason to begin a monthlong countdown to our sport’s one superfight of the year. Better then to assume so few of us accessed foreign broadcasts of Nicaraguan master Roman “Chocolatito” Gonzalez’s early career that visiting them will prove fruitful while knowing even if it doesn’t a late-arriving effort to celebrate Gonzalez brings more pleasure than available alternatives do.

On Jan. 14, 2008, Chocolatito (16-0, 16 KOs) matched himself with Japanese light flyweight Hiroshi Matsumoto (17-7-4, 8 KOs) at Bunka Gym in Kanagawa, Japan. Gonzalez wore royalblue satin trunks with “Visit Nicaragua” on their seat, either in the hopes an English-speaking audience uncertain what to do with “Visita” might be watching or, just as likely, Japanese aficionados in attendance would fault no one from America who did not inscribe his country’s name in kanji or hiragana or katakana, and would be literate enough in English to appreciate the goodfaith effort of the Nicaraguan Chamber of Commerce or whomever.

While it is impossible for a fighter to turn pro fully formed it is nearly as inconceivable a fighter who wasn’t fully formed learned enough in his career’s opening 16 prizefights to be perfect as Gonzalez was in his 17th had he not come into prizefighting fully formed. In the first month of 2008 Gonzalez bore a remarkable resemblance to the fighter he was earlier this month, 30 prizefights later. His match with Matsumoto was noteworthy for being Gonzalez’s second appearance outside Nicaragua (also his second appearance in Japan) and for being the first match of Gonzalez’s th’t Chocolatito did not win by knockout. Matsumoto’s finishing upright was attributable to Matsumoto’s selfknowledge more than any shortcoming of Chocolatito’s.

What strikes first the viewer is Gonzalez’s detachment from the act of bludgeoning another man – in this Gonzalez is most notably Central American, not Mexican; he has Dinamita Marquez’s efficiency with none of the Mexican’s contempt for an opponent. Which brings the most delicious juxtaposition found in a Gonzalez match: He is calibrated perfectly to an opponent he seems to regard dispassionately as a target, not a man. How, one wonders, can Gonzalez capture so quickly and ably another man’s physicality without hating him or loving him or envying him or pitying him? Here he resembles his mentor, Alexis Arguello, about whom it was often said Arguello did not find other men’s weaknesses and exploit them so much as he found other men’s strengths and did those things better too – if you made your living with a 1-2 Arguello gave you jab-cross better than you’d ever given it; if other men feared your bodypunching Arguello was your man for that as well.

As Chocolatito has added weight to his tiny frame he has become admired for his incredible activity and stamina, but watch him against a career volume puncher like Matsumoto, a southpaw to boot, and see the ease of Gonzalez’s adaptation – how comfortably he waits for Matsumoto’s aggressiveness to undo itself by sending the Japanese’s weight tumbling over his front knee (Volume Puncher City, as it were) and landing himself on Gonzalez’s uppercuts, a disproportionate number of which the Nicaraguan fired in their match’s first five rounds.

Like most volume punchers Matsumoto hadn’t a backup plan because volume punchers generally don’t; contrary to others’ misperceptions of them, volume punchers are intelligent men who find the one fighting style that complements their talents and dispositions well enough to make their livings as professional athletes, gainful employments that surprise former coaches and trainers who told them they were too slow or fat or small for the better athletes they later disarm and unman.

Matsumoto was pure volume puncher in the sense his absence of discouragement was a tool for discomfiting more gifted opponents much as his fists. You struck him and struck him and calculus told you he would break, and when he didn’t and didn’t and didn’t it began to worry you. But it didn’t worry Chocolatito. His offensive purity, the perfection of his technique, left in him as much or more volume and activity as Matsumoto and thrice the accuracy.

Gonzalez neither took a wrong step nor allowed one from Matsumoto in Chocololatito’s ongoing pursuit of perpetual motion, the elusive machinery the very best teachers try to instill in students and rarely do: pulling the left shoulder, extended by the jab, powers the cross that extends the right shoulder whose return snaps the left hook that cocks the right uppercut and so on, all fired by the hips that turn and plant the driving feet. Many of us get told “the best combination has no end” but Chocolatito somehow absorbed it well enough to inform his every motion – even in the molten madness of combat’s crucible – till the fiber of who he is as a professional athlete became inseparable from it.

There is nothing not discouraging about being struck hard and often in the face by a man who knows how, but Matsumoto’s reaction to finishing his career’s 24th match in an upright position evinced something otherwise and deeper: the elation of a man condemned to die and pardoned.

And while the unanimous and lopsided decision got read in his opponent’s native language Chocolatito stood poised in his unmarked face evincing nothing so much as detachment.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

NOT ARLINGTON, TEXAS – Saturday Mexican junior middleweight Saul “Canelo” Alvarez toed the line against former Commonwealth super welterweight titlist, former BBBofC British super welterweight titlist, former WBA Continental super welterweight titlist, former WBO Inter-Continental super welterweight titlist, and reigning and defending WBO World super welterweight titlist, Liam “Beefy” Smith. Canelo prevailed by ninth round knockout, nevertheless, a result that suffered nary a moment’s doubting since their contract was signed.

Canelo selected Beefy, softened Beefy, slipped Beefy and stabbed Beefy – in a spectacle ending with a left hook to the liver and resembling more nearly a bullfight than a competitive athletic contest between men. The bullfight metaphor holds as a way to impart what our sport’s championship matches have become in the Mayweather and post-Mayweather eras, because if Saturday’s attendance figure in the former Cowboys Stadium can be believed, the real problem most of us had with Mayweather fights were not their lopsidedness or handicapping but rather Mayweather’s ineptitude at the estocada – an ungrateful and graceless unwillingness to risk himself slightly enough to thrust his sword in a hopeless opponent.

We didn’t mind Mayweather’s taunting the dimwitted creature in a corral beforehand just as we didn’t mind Mayweather’s attention to securing his traje de luces just as we didn’t mind Mayweather’s picador jabs to soften the flailing beast just as we didn’t mind a festooned decoy like Joe Cortez on standby in case things got unexpectedly competitive, none of it, but we were deeply insulted by Money’s failure to square his shoulders to a dying creature and give us our catharsis by taking its consciousness. Not even a billion-dollar purse would buy Mayweather that ear.

Canelo conversely thrusts his sword with precision and aplomb, and in an era when competitiveness is not demanded by consumers the Mexican’s habit of closing fights imperatively rather than dully or via his opponent’s trainer makes him an exceptional draw, along with Mexicans’ extraordinary appetite for a sport that is now much less than they deserve. Less explicable is Brits’ passion for a sport in which their exports fare so poorly at the international level; where the Mexican retains a still-justifiable belief his country’s best fighter in a weightclass may well be the world’s best fighter in that weightclass it’s hard to imagine a British aficionado who believes likewise very often.

But still we get Khans and Brooks and Smiths and Murrays served to Canelo and Gennady Golovkin because of their reliable fanbase and predictable fighting styles; they are toros bred to lose valiantly, not gore. No banderillero is needed in these bullfights because no bull is eligible for import to a corrida till figurative spears decorate his nape – it is best if he is slow of foot and quick to bleed but if not his chin should be suspect, and if somehow he is both nimble and durable he’s put in the ring with a man much too large for him to render unconscious.

“Brook landed some great combinations in that round!” we say; “Smith really showed valor when all was lost!”

All was lost for Smith throughout but he absorbed a beating gamefully and soon was distracted by futility enough to mistake Canelo’s retreating as opening, and Beefy remained so confused through three rounds and two knockdowns he’d still be tripping the Mexican’s every trap as you read this had Canelo not put his middle knuckle on the button, that quarter-sized opening to the liver that resides between the right hipbone and lowest rib, in round 9. Smith crumpled as every man does when struck there, and Canelo had another knockout victory that in another era would corrupt his legacy more than burnish it. Or as Saturday’s commentary crew might put it: What combination punching! what red hair!

We cloak fated mismatches like Canelo-Beefy with lore to obfuscate what we know they are, recollecting for our friends that time the underdog did this or the favorite broke his hand doing that or statistics showing, historically, being a torero is a dangerous trade whatever the fraternity’s record against its opposition. Our matadors play along best they are able – taking a backwards step every other round or bleeding every third or fourth fight – but ultimately their contempt tells, contempt for their opponents’ weaponry, mostly, but also contempt for their promoters’ embellishments and contempt for fans who would reward them so longly for such short risk.

Then we tell ourselves Canelo and GGG deserve their riches because any man who steps through the ropes blah blah blah without mentioning how complicit we’ve become in the brutalization of these victims trotted to the ring for b-side paychecks. Perhaps it’s better Mayweather was so professionally opposed to risktaking schemes, then, doing enough to subdue and humiliate his toros but nothing so personal or sadistic as clipping their consciousnesses.

This whole ugly flesh trade was more honorable, frankly, when promoters matched two men of equal ratios of talent and size then bought judges’ favoritism; spectators at least enjoyed 36 minutes of competition before getting outraged at official scorecards. Today’s opposite of that: Imagine for a moment promoter Oscar De La Hoya feeling desperate enough about Liam Smith’s chances Saturday to waste money ensuring a decision victory for Canelo by bringing, say, Chuck Giampa out of retirement. At long last we’ve come to the clean sport Oscar promised us a decade ago.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday afternoon HBO broadcast the latest episode in its ungainly series of Gennady “GGG” Golovkin feature films against hopeless welterweight Kell “Special K” Brook, who won a minute of the fight’s first 12 then signalled his corner “anytime fellas!” and got the match towel-waved in round 5, before HBO redeemed itself Saturday night with the genuinely brilliant Nicaraguan Roman “Chocolatito” Gonzalez in a genuinely competitive championship match with Mexican Carlos “Principe” Cuadros.

The best thing to come of what has become a shameless promotional manufacture of Gennady Golovkin – whose handlers are inexplicably opposed to seeing him challenged – is the emergence of Chocolatito, a master prizefighter deserving of mention in the same paragraphs as other master prizefighters, unlike just about every one of his remaining contemporaries including Golovkin. Making Gonzalez a mainevent attraction may well be the only exceptional thing HBO has done with its sports budget in years, whatever it tells itself about itself.

Much as putting Gonzalez at the top of billings with Golovkin is a service to Gonzalez and his legacy and HBO subscribers, though, it is becoming more and more a liability for Golovkin’s legacy – as it becomes obvious to viewers which man seeks greatness and in a ratio, more alarming still to Golovkin apologists, inverse to viewers’ knowledge of our oncebeloved sport: While the aficionado has historical comparisons with which to delude himself about embarrassing mismatches like Golovkin and Brook – and, hey, look at the soldout arena! – the naif sees one man’s opponent frightened from the opening bell and wonders how this sort of entertainment sates any manly impulse save sadism.

Whatever the scales said the eyes told you Golovkin and Brook did not belong in a ring together much as Chocolatito and Cuadros did not, but whereas Golovkin-Brook fulfilled only the worst suspicions Gonzalez-Cuadros came stuffed with pleasant surprises as the significantly smaller man spun and wacked and maneuvered and pressured and absorbed the larger man’s aggression in a properly competitive spectacle that renewed albeit temporarily one’s passion for prizefighting.

Golovkin-Brook saw a fight in which one man was powerless to hurt the other whatever his technique and the other was powerless not to hurt the one – whatever, again, his technique; Golovkin’s technique has improved no more than his English since HBO’s biannual forcefeedings commenced in 2012, due to dreadful opposition and a trainer who’s three parts savvy selfsalesman for every one part sweetscience sage. Golovkin did more damage to Brook with his jab than Brook did Golovkin with a perfectly placed uppercut thrown in combination, a thing to tell you exactly nothing about Brook’s power or Golovkin’s chin or Golovkin’s power or Brook’s chin but everything about what farcical matchmaking now bedrocks the Golovkin legend.

Such is not an indictment of Golovkin so much as his handlers; one senses Golovkin is all-fighter and wants to mill with real opponents who might really improve him by really stretching him, converting his potential finally instead of merely growing it, but that cannot happen so long as the industry’s rapacity protects him, a lifetime middleweight, a man 40 pounds from the heavyweight division, with continuing nonsense about a dearth of suitable opponents (no one at 168 pounds will face him; only someone from 147 would) – risibly the same industry that once chided Floyd Mayweather, who made title fights in five divisions and climbed 24 pounds, for not challenging himself adequately and now wonders aloud when Chocolatito will jump to his fifth or sixth weightclass.

While Golovkin and his big payday Saul “Canelo” Alvarez, faces still CoverGirl fresh, unite to unify the welterweight division, Chocolatito wears the scars of a man who challenges himself properly in a pursuit of greatness by matching himself with increasingly larger men and narrowing dramatically his margins for error. Therein lies the insult of Saturday’s spectacles: Golovkin strode forward with an aluminum bat in a waterballoon fight while Chocolatito suffered each time Cuadros struck him and didn’t relent.

Put Golovkin in the ring with men large enough to hurt him or shut up until you do.

To the suddenly empathetic souls who saw Brook motion for 20,000 spectators and one fellow combatant the very moment his right eye was hurt Saturday, actually waving his glove and pointing to his eye midround, a question: Can you imagine Gonzalez or Cuadros giving another man on earth the satisfaction of knowing he was injured? Then came the predictable perversity of cheering a premature corner stoppage for preserving future paydays the vanquished and his sympathetically complicit cornermen may enjoy in 2017 scams and one more at least in 2018. What sort of afficionado, exactly, feels compelled to celebrate the continuation of a career unremarkable as Brook’s in lieu of continued violence?

If you’re enthusiastically watching a fight for the middleweight championship of the world and fearful a man may lose his life in the opening 15 minutes you’re being disingenuous – either when you say you’re enthusiastic about seeing the fight or when you say you’re genuinely concerned for the loser’s health. Both are unseemly.

After their respective matches Golovkin gave himself a low score and likened his assault to sparring while Chocolatito, both eyes swelling shut, said he knew the perils of rising in weight but welcomed them because rising to challenges (rising for challenges) is what great fighters do. Credit both men’s honesty.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry–

SAN ANTONIO – This city is named after a river.

Too, it’s nicknamed after a mission where a battle happened and Davy Crockett fought. Saturday the domed venue named after the mission where that battle happened and Davy Crockett fought, Alamodome, will play host to Mexican WBC Silver Caneloweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez’s decimation of British welter/middleweight Kell “Special K” Brook in a Cinco De Mayo HBO PPV extravaganza, “GolovKanelo,” that will also see HBO Middleweight Champion Gennady “GGG” Golovkin make a homecoming hospitalization of British super welterweight Liam “Beefy” Smith in Kazakhstan.

“Kell Brook reminds me a lot of myself,” said an enthusiastic Oscar De La Hoya at GolovKanelo’s kickoff presser in April. “And Canelo Alvarez, obviously, reminds me a lot of myself. It’s like Oscar versus De La Hoya. Expect fireworks. Two champions. Both were undefeated before their primes.”

The Texas Commission of Licensing and Regulation is on high-alert for Saturday’s premeditated assault. Despite reserving ringside seats for more than two dozen “medical officials” Commissioners expect to be powerless to stop the battery when Canelo brings more than two centuries of his countrymen’s grief, first with Spain and later with corrupt locally grown leaders, to the chin and ribs of hapless Kell Brook, a once-undefeated welterweight who ate himself to a handsome payday and vicious beating from Gennady Golovkin in September, a London match that went off lopsidedly even in the drunken betting shops of Brook’s hometown.

One of the Brothers Smith, apparently the one Canelo made a brutal “lesson in the obligations of independence” out of on Mexican Independence Day Weekend 2016, will make the second part of HBO’s split-venue / split-continents pay-per-view fiesta when he serves himself warm to GGG and 20,000 rabid Kazakhs in their country’s third-largest sports venue, Kazhymukan Munaitpasov Stadium, in a contest expected to satisfy any outstanding criteria for naming Golovkin the HBO Middleweight Champion of the Decade – an honorarium that precludes GGG from ever moving to 168 pounds, unless he wants to.

According to an unnamed source in the otherwise unreadable “Official GolovKanelo Blog” the enmity betwixt Alvarez and Golovkin was too much for one continent to sustain after what insiders now call The Incident. As reporters have hashed and rehashed since September: Budgetary restrictions precluded Golovkin’s handlers from booking a direct London-to-Dallas flight after Golovkin’s near decapitation of Brook, which caused Golovkin to land in his adopted hometown of Los Angeles and drive to Texas where he arrived 37 minutes too late to see Canelo break the stream of electricity to Smith’s brain in the fifth round of their woeful mismatch.

According to De La Hoya, Canelo’s earnest promoter, Canelo might’ve stopped Smith in round 3 if he’d had a proper warmup but instead spent the final private moments of his prefight routine before a restroom mirror practicing a new speech and glower he intended to deliver to Golovkin immediately after another successful defense of the WBC Caneloweight Silver title (Alvarez also holds the International title, the Gold title and the Americas title in this division).

“The only thing that held Canelo back from scoring the fastest knockout of a British fighter in Mexican history,” De La Hoya explained in Part 4 of a riveting blog, “was me telling him to rehearse his lines for after the fight. He won’t do that again.

“Now he’s going straight to the top.”

When Golovkin was not yet in the city limits of Arlington, Texas, at the time of Canelo’s important announcement, the fiercely proud Firehaired Horseman of Jalisco stated flatly:

“Mexicans do not tolerate the disrespect. We do not fight a man who disrespects us, because that means respecting a disrespectful man and that is not how he learns to respect. Wherever he is, tell that guy he will not share a ring with me until he learns respect, and since these things take a year to learn, at the very least . . .”

Whatever applause then burst from the partisan-Mexican crowd at AT&T Stadium in September – a crowd De La Hoya estimated “between 20,000 and 100 million but definitely more than 10,000” – a terrible rift opened between the two champions’ promoters, HBOGBP and HBOK2, time alone may heal but may not – not as proud as these two men are, not as proud as they are of their respective fighting traditions.

Further complicating matters was Canelo’s refusal to pay Golovkin step-aside money for Canelo’s expected match with David Lemieux, whom Golovkin blasted apart some years ago, and about whom Canelo later said, “For what would I beat a guy Golovkin beat after many years when I can broil (asar) more English beef the other guy tenderized Saturday?”

Tweeting from the bed to which doctors consigned him after his match with Golovkin, Special K eagerly accepted Canelo’s challenge, promising to bulk up to 190 pounds by March in the hopes of cutting a pound a day in April.

“With no chance of Canelo and Golovkin now fighting one another in 2017,” an HBO representative said, “we decided to give fans a truly innovative experience. We call it the HBO Virtual Scorecard. This way our subscribers can watch Canelo against Golovkin’s most recent victim and Gennady against Alvarez’s most recent opponent, and score who would win each round if Canelo and Gennady were fighting each other.

“Max has been doing this for years!”

By Bart Barry-

Editor’s note: To commemorate his 543rd Monday column for 15rounds.com, we asked Bart Barry to interview Bart Barry about the current state of our craft.

BB: When we began, thought was write for free a while and enjoy access then eventually make some money, if not a living enough to travel enough to enjoy access, and then, even if we didn’t get money in the end, we’d always have access, right?

BB: Now there’s no access. It’s worse than indifference; it’s a model built on going round print media.

BB: When did we first notice?

BB: Richard Schaefer. He did not like the idea of an independent media but didn’t have a model where it could be circumvented so he followed Arum’s lead like he did everything else. But Arum liked print media. Liked to spar make outrageous accusations wink once quotes were down. King too. Maybe it was generational cultural but Schaefer did not see. He had his dozen or so media guys he was false friendly with but you could tell he didn’t trust or like them any more’n they trusted or liked him.

BB: How hard is it to write this column?

BB: Much easier than a couple years ago.

BB: Really?

BB: Before Mayweather-Pacquiao you felt an obligation to make three-quarters of your column about the sport because there were still good stories going on you could meet a young fighter and know he’d be developed and follow his ascent. Immensely rewarding. After Mayweather-Pacquiao there was no excuse to challenge yourself because the hopelessness of things was too apparent.

BB: And there were personal problems too.

BB: No need to delve in those.

BB: That has to affect outlook.

BB: Nothing bad enough to miss work. We’ll use that as a tenable threshold, compadre.

BB: Then we blame The Fight to Save Boxing?

BB: Only out of convenience. Its very satirical name above implies boxing needed redemption of some sort, which it did, and didn’t get any.

BB: How much boxing reading do we still do?

BB: Fractions we once did. Carlos, Jimmy, Norm, David, Tom, Steve – a few others irregularly. But the writing 10 years ago had a vibrancy to it we don’t have any more. We settle scores or fluff things we know don’t deserve it. The writing a decade ago was no better but there was more of it and felt urgent. Now if it’s positive it feels like a press release. And if it’s negative you think: Well, yes, obviously.

BB: What about awards?

BB: Some years past it felt futile and we stopped for the same reason we stop any extra effort: It wasn’t improving the writing. Some of that stuff’s a literary search for truth and admirable. A lot of it is gaming a committee and not. Still read the emails and try to congratulate people whose work we admire but returning to the first point: The more awards we won, worse access became. It wasn’t causal but gave an able excuse to stop entering both columns and credential applications.

BB: This is all pre-PBC then?

BB: Actually yes. The PBC amplified bad things whose effect will endure but created very few new problems. There’s nothing innovative there, is there?

BB: More money, more television, saturate the market with product.

BB: Not saying Al Haymon’s not bright – Rick James wrote very positive things about Haymon in “Memoirs of a Super Freak” – but Haymon’s not Edwin Land or anything.

BB: Still on about Rick James.

BB: Was as an autobiography should be. Vulnerable rough randy as a quiche.

BB: This year’s reading has been everywhere.

BB: Last year’s too.

BB: Why?

BB: Start with fiction, invention of a sort from the unity of one’s imagination. Then you cycle into nonfiction because of some interest or other. You get only so far in that and its requisite reductionism and soon you’re down to –

BB: Names. Numbers. Colors.

BB: – classification of one sort or another. You decide all reduction takes you to a void looking suspiciously like unity. Then you cycle back to fiction.

BB: Miss being ringside?

BB: Only ringside. None the rest of it. The credentials scramble. Nitwit publicists. Airport checkpoints. Cliche characters. Caricatures of wizened old trainers. It’s been years since the experience justified the hassle.

BB: Since Martinez-Chavez Thomas & Mack?

BB: Could be. Really don’t care.

BB: Advice to a young writer.

BB: If anything can stop you from writing –

BB: Let it.

BB: – let it.

BB: Cynical.

BB: No. Wrong. That is not cynical. It is about finding a thing you were born to do. Passion. Since this column is a commemorative effort it marks at least 535,000 words published here. That accounts for only about 1/3 the words we’ve written during that time. If you do not revel in the process –

BB: If anything can stop you . . .

BB: – you should not pursue writing about this sport or another subject. The affirmation is nighnil. If what’s within is too little and you write for without don’t do it. Not because we don’t want the emboldening competition but because you’re precluding yourself from finding a passion.

BB: Social media?

BB: Useless. No, worse. It’s a reflexive anxiety device. Perhaps an historic one. You look at Twitter and see massive anxiety manifesting itself as a need to comment on everything and the machine’s job is to provide more items to comment on because those comments are something to comment on.

BB: You loved Twitter, didn’t you?

BB: Years ago.

BB: Maybe you’ve changed.

BB: One should hope. That’s our adaptation to whatever. Twitter necessarily adapts to our adaptation. We adapt to its adaptation of our adaptation. Tiny adjustments and directional deviations and more adjustments to follow. Nature’s way.

BB: The shape of an oak branch.

BB: You want real ambivalence, lad?

BB: Hit me.

BB: Ralph Waldo Emerson knew all this and wrote it down a century and a half ago.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry

To hike South Texas in the summertime one must rise unconscionably early on a Saturday morning and be at the nearest state park when it opens and even then a line of early risers crowds the entrance not to hike but barbecue with familiars which might be the nuttiest thing I’d imagined till I saw it done – dozens of men hunched over open flames beneath a roasting sun while enveloped by air humid enough to sag oak branches. The same parks are vacant in the fall and winter when it is livable outside and all is much prettier because, evidently, cooking while cooking is a Lone Star State event more social than communal; one communes with fellow Texans outside in the heat more’n nature and if there is an appeal to all this it escapes me deftly.

Guadalupe River State Park is the one closest to downtown San Antonio and so I was there early last week to saunter more than hike a few miles to an overlook whose trail abandons the sand and desert of its larger part for a short bit through a primary campground. There are sundry overlooks of the shallow green river and its kayaks, bathers and splashers but few of them are isolated as I like and so what parking and hiking precedes the overlook compose the most part of a personal exercise regimen best called “light” in the summertime but part of an epiphany like this: The elimination of anxiety is nearer a theory of contentment as most may come and some weekly hours alone in nature subvert anxiety disproportionately better than more obviously pleasurable endeavors or their pursuit.

The grills were aflame all round the campgrounds on my traipse homewards and Texans are customarily polite people so I waded among the tables doffing my Wallaroo at anyone whose eyes I met. A number of students discussed a big test or the like and they were adorable deriving as they did so much nervousness and attendant anticipation from something so trite it brought to mind an honest friend who once told me she continued pursuing advanced degrees into her thirties because “It’s something I’m good at” – without deducing you can be good at most anything you pay $100,000 to do. A different group considered the legal troubles of their son or nephew or neighbor and as I’d attended a local-artist lecture a few evenings before I participated thusly:

“There’s a wonderful Mexican artist, or she was born here in Texas but raised in Mexico, her name is Jimena Marin, and apropos of her abstract early pieces she told us a bit of advice from her grandmother or aunt and it went, like, I think, we’re all born with a monkey, or, well anyway, a metaphor for problems, and some of us like to collect others’ monkeys and some of us like to give our monkeys away and some of us, I suppose (and by now I was improvising), nurture our own monkeys and watch them grow, and others of us neglect our monkeys and they shrink.”

It was an idea that was not tidying itself up as it did Thursday night for Ms. Marin and in a panic I decided to see if anyone wouldn’t forgive my changing the subject midway and proclaimed: “The Olympics, though, man!” A few other tables joined and soon we turned our spot near Rio Guadalupe to Rio de Janeiro. Someone held forth on the physics of women’s gymnastics and while it was absurd in its way to watch a man so large speak so confidently about the acrobatics of tiny teenage girls it was also interesting – the same way our other quadrennial obsession, figure skating, is interesting for the week it is interesting.

There was talk about Usain Bolt and his breaking or tying records only PED users before him set and I smiled and nodded along not because I believe any of it but because I’m not a sourpuss. And there was that swimmer, too, who faked his own hold-up in a gas station, the guy with the white hair, and I said “Michael Phelps?” partially to jog the others’ collective recall (it wasn’t Phelps, they’d know instantly, and how many other Olympic swimmers can a randomly sampled group of Americans name?) and mostly to keep momentum going in what by then was a premeditated direction.

Friday’s piece by Norm Frauenheim was excellent, of course, and as Norm knows more about the summer Olympics than the aggregate of our tables and our tables’ friends and families, I looked for a chance to insert in our campground chinwag Norm’s longheld theory about the robbery of Roy Jones and what it did to our sport in the decades that followed – best posed as a question like: How different might things have been if the world’s best fighter for a decade did not refuse to leave the country for fear of being robbed a second time?

“How about Olympic boxing?” I said, and I looked round the tables eagerly.

Four beats of silence got broken by the women’s gymnastics physicist saying he would check on the meat.

“Is that on television?” his wife said, sympathetically.

“The Brazilian men’s volleyball team plays the Italians tomorrow!” said a little girl.

“Is curling in the summer Olympics or winter?” asked her brother.

“Winter,” I said. “Did anyone see The Onion gave Kevin Durant the gold medal in Men’s Individual Basketball?”

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

My new friend Sammy and I became friends at a coffeehouse in the Pearl Brewery complex because of our socks or fate. I didn’t ask if his brand were Happy Socks and he didn’t ask my brand either but neither of us needed to ask with as much ankle as we both showed; a man who orders his socks from that website never alights on the best pair instantly and necessarily scrollcombs dozens of varieties before landing on the pair(s) he’ll purchase. Such considered scrolling familiarizes him with patterns more than he knows till he’s across from a man wearing a pattern he didn’t realize he considered till that instant – and still mayn’t realize he considered till he begins to write a story opening with another man’s socks in a coffeehouse.

I admired Sammy’s stature while he stood in line beside his wife. His was a physique I decided to call Tex-Mex in the moment; someone sometime in his family tree came from some country south of Texas but many generations of Texas residency made him much taller and thicker and assertive than ancestors of his whom I imagined like Israel Vazquez or Rafael Marquez. Sammy’s wife was not from Texas but somewhere much norther and more eastern and seemed uninterested in our banter about the cultural and tempo differences between Texas and places less fortunate. Sammy was a native of San Antonio very much unlike me and had a hardened intelligence about the city’s boxing scene I did not have and couldn’t passably fake in my first decade for the same reason a young man who lifts weights fewer than ten years, no matter the poundages he moves or pharmaceuticals he ingests, does not have to his muscles the gnarled girth of a professional bodybuilder – which is a meandering way to define maturity, muscular or cognitive, I guess.

Sammy asked what sort of work I do and since he didn’t preposition the ending – “for a living” – I told him I was a writer, as a means of explaining my dress more than my identity, and because when one says he’s something other than a writer he finds himself explaining that other thing which devolves insipidly but when he says he’s a writer he often gets to hear the other person’s idea for a novel. Sammy did not have an idea for a novel but asked what sort of writing, and imagining the most-interesting conversational fork, I said, “Boxing.”

“Once you see MMA, man, it’s hard to go back to boxing,” said Sammy.

I didn’t agree with him not because I didn’t wish to be accommodating or initially reciprocal but because I’d never seen MMA with an interested pair of eyes and didn’t wish to start things dishonestly with Sammy because he seemed the serious sort of South Texan who’d know a man fibbing and hold it against him by abruptly ending the conversation. I was reading a story by Hemingway on my lap and inverted the characters to imagine myself bolting Sammy’s disapproval, much to his wife’s dismay, and thinking such a show of cowardice’d ruin the next morning’s camp breakfast, and instead of disagreeing with Sammy I began to list local fighters like Ayala and Leija. Sammy knew them both from hours spent in his adolescence at San Fernando Gymnasium, and now we had something in common and there’d be no bolting, no lions laid flat in the grass breathing pink bubbles, no buffalo in a thick swamp where it was impossible to get a shot.

Sammy knew a trainer who had a kid recently signed by the promoter, the, what’s his, the guy who beat Leija, the golden – oh, Oscar De La Hoya! who was building like a farm system or something. I didn’t bore him with the particulars of addiction and poor choices and a scrofulous bastard who posed like a friend and sold a man’s lifework to someone else and just now returned to boxing, because it was a mean, bitter path senseless to Sammy.

“Who was the last fighter you truly cared about?” I asked instead.

“Julio Cesar Chavez.”

I recounted a tale from a Mexican writer seated beside me 11 years ago at Chavez’s final fight, a loss to Grover Wiley in Phoenix none of us who attended thought’d be historic:

“And he told me, ‘For those terrible ten years, Chavez was the only thing that went right for us’.”

Sammy’s eyes were blank as he searched for something surely unrelated to my unimpressive anecdote about the last man who interested him in a sport that no longer interested him slightly.

“Salvador Sanchez, though,” said Sammy, interrupting my account of all the things other than Chavez that went wrong in Mexico during Chavez’s tenure as El Gran Campeón Mexicano – like the peso’s collapse, the assassination of Luis Donaldo . . . “Sanchez, man, I idolized Salvador Sanchez. Never been anybody like him.”

Killed in a car accident, boxer-puncher, Top Rank tried to sell us a knockoff with the same coif – these were the only ideas that came in my head. Sammy was older than me than I thought or else privy to entirely different public programming in 1980 South Texas. We talked about Wide World of Sports till Sammy’s wife went outside.

“Once you’ve seen MMA, man,” Sammy said, and he shook his head, stood up, shook my hand and left for a seat by his wife’s side.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-
Saturday in Oakland light heavyweight Andre Ward decisioned a Colombian named Alexander Brand on HBO by scores predictable as they were lopsided. The match was the final installment of a four-part infomercial for Ward’s fall fight with Russian Sergey Kovalev which will happen unless one of them moves to a rival broadcaster the way Adonis Stevenson did the last time HBO used light heavyweight matches as advertisements.

The problem with Alexander Brand was not his incompetence at any skill save enduring consciousness – fogging up the ol’ mirror these days is the larger part of landing a televised role on the side which is B – but how incompetently he met the hopes of Andre Ward’s promoters Throne Boxing (three shows this year, two of them Ward’s) and HBO who put its dwindled credibility behind broadcasting two Ward warmups in 2016 and two Kovalev warmups in the name of a Nov. 19 match whose contract is signed though its venue remains undecided which makes you wonder what else but signatures adorns this fabled contract. Surely someone between HBO and Throne (remember that weekend we thought Big Daddy Kane’s former hypeman was going to save boxing?) hoped Brand would remind viewers of Kovalev in some way less superficial than complexion. And yet.

Brand retreated from the beginning and made himself a barely mobile bag for Ward to practice on in a way that was near to opposite Kovalev’s approach as possible and practice on him Ward did though without anything suspenseful as peril or, heaven help us, a knockdown. Ward seemed to want to harm Brand in the late-middle rounds but overshot his cross uncharacteristically and made disconcertingly little progress with a leaping lefthook lead. Ward was not much of a puncher at 168 pounds and probably isn’t thrilled to be at light heavyweight with Kovalev there awaiting him but what Ward did have seven pounds ago was a defense that looks less impenetrable today than it did when Ward fought and cleanedout real competition as recently as four years ago.

Part of what goes forgotten in the throes of Ward’s Embarassment Years, 2013-2016, is Ward finished the Super Six undefeated and next fought Chad Dawson who beat Bernard Hopkins five months before Ward iced him. Whatever infamous squandering Ward did after he unbuttoned Dawson that name along with Mikkel Kessler’s and Carl Froch’s composes a triumvirate more impressive than every name on Kovalev’s resume save Hopkins’ which has to have an asterisk, even in this dreadful era, if the name belongs to a man in his 50th year when you decision him. To further incite Soviet apologists let us doubledown by adding each name on Gennady Golovkin’s resume to each name on Kovalev’s resume and diminish Ward’s preeminence in no way whatever: Half-century Hopkins remains the only name deserving mention among Kessler’s and Froch’s and Dawson’s which means, in defiance of what industry and relentlessness publicists have dedicated to the cause, in one meaningful category Ward has accomplished about three times the sum of Kovalev and Golovkin.

But toss that when you consider Saturday’s spectacle because Saturday diminished Ward’s legacy more than burnished it so if you need solace it’s here: Ward looked bad enough against Brand to convince a goodish number of the folks who reliably purchase pay-per-views (OK maybe not Crawford-Postol but most) the guy who needed judges to best a 49 5/6-year-old Hopkins is going to rip through Ward. Kovalev is not going to rip through Ward. If ripping through Ward could be done somebody at least would’ve decisioned him in the past 20 years.

Oddly the best argument in Kovalev’s favor is not Kovalev’s career record but Ward’s recent record. Had the guy who snatched consciousness from Chad Dawson gone directly in the ring with even the current version of Kovalev oddsmakers justifiably would’ve set Ward a 4-1 favorite and should still favor Ward though not because of anything they saw Saturday or anything they’ve seen from Ward’s mentor Virgil Hunter in a decade.

What oddsmakers saw to sober them Saturday from Ward were a few righthands that Branded him. Ward complemented the Mayweather low-lead hand with a low-lead shoulder wrinkle of his own – a terrible idea that defied the extended left arm with which Ward otherwise steers opponents – and it got him clipped a few times that did not tell because it bears reiteration: Alexander Brand is godawful. Worse yet for this morning’s oddsmakers was how Ward dropped to his own right to collect those punches in a way that belied what mobility Ward has or once had.

Ward has narrowed his stance considerably against recent opposition to allow a greater transfer of weight back-to-front when he punches and because widening himself as a target hasn’t been a problem for him – opponents of Brand’s caliber have the same chance of solving Ward’s defense in 36 minutes as a fourth-grader has of solving an encryption algorithm with a pencil. But if Ward doesn’t return his feet to the wide spread he previously employed, against Kovalev he’s going feel fragile. He shouldn’t plan either to be so bored by Kovalev he spends rounds as a southpaw like he did against Brand.

So long as Ward keeps stabbing Kovalev’s gut with his jab, though, he should decision the Russian in a match that is compelling. Not four-tuneup compelling, of course, but compelling nevertheless.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday in Brooklyn a fight for the WBA’s “Super World” featherweight title saw Northern Ireland super bantamweight Carl “The Jackal” Frampton decision Mexican featherweight Leo Santa Cruz by some scores that varied. The fight was competitive in the sense th’t both guys threw lots of punches and landed a similarly small portion of those lots and did not hurt or knockdown the other man or get hurt or knocked down in 36 minutes of sanctioned assault. Some who attended no doubt walked out Barclays Center into the summer night convinced they’d witnessed a classic battle whose name will reside eternally on the lips of men.

Harder than scoring Frampton-Santa Cruz was caring about the official scores because if you have integrity about your own biases and having checked such impulses you accept the fight was even enough to be uncertain who you favored you know better than to pile on, pro or con, the judges’ decision – no matter how gutless that appears to online scorekeepers. It’s just not that important. Both guys did their limited best to win a match neither seemed to think could end in the other’s unconsciousness.

Those are the grounds upon which this fight can be indicted: once more there was no suspense and little building drama since neither man was hurt or felled or imperiled in 12 rounds, and less than a generation ago we knew that was the measure of what’s memorable in boxing. Yes there was a slippy sort of thing early and there were a few decent counters throughout and there was even a series of consequential-looking flurries towards the end but there was not a moment that made you ghasp in thrill or fright and frankly the gloves looked too big again.

This has become a personal measure of a match’s honest delivery of what matters in a confrontation which is some sense of danger: How big do the gloves look? So much of a boxing telecast today is committed to fooling you – hyperbolic commentary, prefight pyrotechnics, sexy lighting, celebrity sightings, staged replays, biographical meanderings, indecipherable scoring, father/son forensics – one’s initial impression cannot be trusted because it is necessarily coated with so much promotionally interested gunk the truth becomes a derivative of a fraction of whatever just happened in the surprisingly large spaces between combatants’ gloves and network cameras and an HD screen and your eyes. My current and albeit late-arriving solution to this fix is to ask myself how big the fighters’ gloves look because my perception of glove size is a metaphor that is reliable for how much danger happens in the ostensibly violent spectacle before me.

When Antonio Margarito and Miguel Cotto fought the first time their gloves looked tiny enough to be varnished knuckles; Cotto’s punches were so sharp and Margarito’s effect (however attained) was so profound both men felt to me imperiled from the match’s open. In the later rounds of their third fight both Manny Pacquiao’s and Juan Manuel Marquez’s gloves looked diminished – as each held within his fist the chance to injure instantly and humiliate the intensely proud man across from him. One of my clearest memories of being ringside for Israel Vazquez’s third match with Rafael Marquez is how tiny Vazquez’s right glove looked to me in the 12th round as he threw it over and over and over again at an involuntarily retreating Marquez.

Saturday Leo Santa Cruz’s gloves looked enormous. Some of that is television and some of it is the way the color white flattens by softening creases and enlarges whatever it covers but most of it is a way of translating to metaphor an intuition held throughout: Frampton is in no danger whatever. The Irishman’s face was marked afterwards and it was a refreshing proof some of Santa Cruz’s aggressiveness was effective and no skin shines thinner than Irish-white but otherwise Santa Cruz’s inaccuracy was something not even Showtime’s leading replays cleaned up. When Santa Cruz’s feet were positioned properly he hit Frampton on every part of his body that was not the head or liver and when Santa Cruz did land targeted punches his feet and fists were a conflict of interest. If Santa Cruz was ever more than half what his advisor and promoters had us believe he has not been that in years and feeding him poor opponents has done none of us any favors except his advisor.

If this diminishes in some way Frampton’s performance, well, so be it. Frampton used a keen sense of time and space to neutralize Santa Cruz’s once-frantic offense and Frampton’s dexterity reduced Santa Cruz to an average boxer but if that evinces merit it’s a merit also belonging to Cesar Seda who neutralized most of Santa Cruz’s attack three years ago at Alamodome just before Marcos Maidana became the busdriver who took Adrien Broner’s ass to school. Back then Santa Cruz reminded us of Antonio Margarito because we were told he did and because, more importantly, someone like Santa Cruz – a rangy and busy Mexican attrition fighter – never would’ve found himself on television young and early as he did without Margarito’s expansive influence on the narrow imaginations of television programmers.

Since his debut in that giddy, insincere medium Santa Cruz’s quality as a prizefighter has moved opposite the quantity of promotion given to convincing us what an historic item Leo is. As usual they do protest too much.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday at a half-full MGM Grand Garden Arena undefeated American junior welterweight Terence “Bud” Crawford dully decisioned Ukrainian Viktor “The Iceman” Postol on pay-per-view to become the lineal and HBO and non-PBC 140-pound champion of the world. A half-full arena was about right and Crawford is almost certainly the world’s best junior welterweight but this thing had no worldly business being on pay-per-view.

If Bud thinks there’s any appetite remaining for a talented American boxer who safely decisions limited opponents Saturday’s pay-per-view receipts should disabuse him and his promoter and their distributor of it. No good whatever came of Mayweather-Pacquiao 1 including the likelihood of fooling consumers with handspeed and defense in lieu of knockouts for another decade. If you are able to dominate a man in the boxing ring you should snatch his consciousness in a half-hour of trying or you’re not trying hard enough for today’s chastened pay-per-viewer. To box Postol the way Crawford did and satisfy disgruntled consumers Postol would need to be big as Golovkin and feared as Kovalev.

Instead Postol was a rangy counterpuncher with a single speed and dimension who last year caught a once-feared Argentine at the end of a witheringly violent career then bounced enthusiastically round the ring with Crawford for 36 deeply unsatisfying minutes. Postol was a C student Saturday who hoped to score a B- by being early to class and trying real hard. Making Postol look ordinary was not a function of Crawford’s greatness so much as making Postol look remarkable was a function of Lucas Matthysse’s October bankruptcy.

Crawford switches stances often in every match and switched early from orthodox to southpaw Saturday and th’t it seemed to unravel every facet of Postol’s training camp at Coach Freddie Academy does not speak well of preparations done by The Iceman or his trainer. Crawford’s choice to screw with Postol’s lead hand for most of the match was tactically sound but hardly ingenious. One imagines the first three or four times Crawford successfully slapped Postol’s left knuckles with his right palm then rolled his fist forward into a jab Crawford thought: “Sweet! Didn’t think that’d work but let’s do it a few more times until this guy adjusts.” If Crawford wasn’t surprised Postol had no cure all night for such a rudimentary poison he certainly ought to have been.

Rounds 6, 7 and 8 were nigh unwatchable and Crawford deserves the blame for it. He learned everything there was to know about Postol in the fifth round and instead of walking him down and putting the Ukrainian’s lights out Crawford decided to show us a defensive prowess not 50,000 people in a world of 7 billion still wish to see. Crawford was able to keep Postol out of position by changing directions and angles continually and if that was genuinely compelling for a full minute that minute passed in the match’s opening rounds and was no longer welcomed. If Postol was still dangerous – even after Bud clipped him and despite Postol’s negligible KO record – all the better: In history aficionados have been willing to spend more than $50 to see only one man remain undefeated forever and Crawford will not be the second.

Not one financially disinterested person is clamoring for Floyd Mayweather’s return to boxing anyway; whatever one feels about watching a skilled practitioner master a lesser man can be felt in a minute or at most a round of boxing; no one needs to see it done 12 times over. It’s not suspenseful like a tightrope walk unless the lesser man is frighteningly larger or at least frightening in some way. Viktor Postol had 12 knockouts in 28 prizefights.

This was a tryout of sorts, we’ll soon learn, for a chance to welcome Senator Manny Pacquiao back from a retirement he didn’t dignify even with skipping a fight. Is Crawford-Pacquiao a compelling match? Actually yes. But decisioning Viktor Postol anticipates the outcome of Crawford’s match with Pacquiao like a clever Facebook post anticipates a Man Booker Prize. Friday night we didn’t know how Crawford might fare in a match with Pacquiao and Sunday morning we still didn’t know.

What plagues boxing now and will do so for at least a generation is its lack of depth. Chris Algieri decisioned a puncher? Put him in with Pacquiao! Viktor Postol attritioned a puncher? Get him to Crawford! It’s not merely that men with Algieri’s and Postol’s records were prematurely fed to far superior practitioners but worse than that there were few opponents with which to build them properly before cashing them out; Postol and Algieri were sacrificed early because they were not going to become more than sacrifices and at least were marketable.

Empty gyms round the country will not remedy this and neither will USA Boxing’s inevitably poor showing next month in Brazil. We can stop the search for our sport’s next savior, in other words, because even if he crash-landed on the Vegas Strip in a spaceship we wouldn’t know what to do with him – though PBC would offer him an advisory contract and shot at “Son of the Legend” Julio Cesar Chavez Jr.

Once more: Order leads to increasing returns which bring chaos that leads to decreasing returns which bring order and so on forever and ever. We’re in the decreasing-returns part of the cycle now and it behooves none of us to deny it. Paying $60 for Crawford-Postol is denying it worse than charging $60 for Crawford-Postol.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday at the Bartow Arena in Birmingham the reigning Alabama and PBC heavyweight champion Deontay “Bronze Bomber” Wilder discouraged California’s Chris Arreola to a referee or corner stoppage after the eighth round of a match Arreola took on short notice because he was going to lose anyway after Wilder’s intended opponent anticipated his country’s ban from the Summer Olympics by failing a drug-related IQ test. The PBC on Fox in conjunction with Showtime but not CBS and NBC as part of a synergistic agreement with ESPN, Spike and Fox Sports 1 (though not Fox Now’s buggy app) had the call in the U.S. and apparently much of the broadcast was ad-free.

Though Wilder’s confidence grows with each title defense his precision diminishes more quickly.

Somewhere in the last month or so I read about the virtues of watching television programming at increased speeds. The article grew from an unrelatable foundation like: There’s so much television one simply must watch today and so little time when one considers other necessities like, I suppose, Facebook updates and Snapchats th’t one must utilize technologies to gulp what one’s parents sipped. I neither sip nor gulp from television and so I filed the article under curios and downloaded the Chrome plugin to procrastinate from doing something strenuous as yoga – and if you don’t know what a Chrome plugin is you probably paid three times too much for your laptop. Since then I’ve deactivated my Flash player and casted about for a chance to be amazed by this amazing new technology and none presented itself till Sunday morning.

There’s always something better to do on a Friday or Saturday night than watch PBC matches live because the main reason to watch live sports is to prevent others’ robbing you of the suspense and drama of outcome (unless you’re one of those few honest folks who entertains the collective delusion one’s witness to an event from distance changes the event, which remains probable as it is impossible to prove) and PBC matchmaking delivers both suspense and drama at ratios low enough to be historic. Anyone interested in our sport enough to read this column could run his index finger down the next two years of PBC main events and mark the winner with 95-percent accuracy and Saturday’s mismatch was more mismatched than usual. Where the pessimist drops his head in his hands and gnashes teeth at what’s become of boxing, though, the optimist sees an opportunity to test a wonderful new technology he downloaded sometime in the last month, with a YouTube video of Saturday’s main event.

Pay close attention because a bit of technological dexterity may be needed to decipher the riddle of the next few sentences.

You should not watch a PBC heavyweight match on YouTube at 2x speed because you’ll miss a few of the punches and the Scottish guy on the commentary team sounds muddy more than muddled and while his insights are reliably nil his garbled consonants distract from the action before you at speed. You should try 1.5x; anything less is not worth the trouble of a plugin download and if you’ve not been watching much faster and better prizefighting in lower weightclasses for the past two decades you may find heavyweights moving 50-percent faster than usual a touch too suspenseful. Goldilocks says 1.7x is the perfect rate.

It’s so right and Sunday morning’s 20 minutes were so proper I’ve decided to put the perfect viewing rate of a PBC heavyweight match right in the name of the PBC’s flagship commodity: Deontay “1.7x” Wilder. At the 1.7x rate his Saturday opponent moved like a cruiserweight and even appeared at various intervals to want to fight the man across from him.

There are two reasons Wilder did not stop Arreola in Alabama. The first is Arreola’s sense of pride that trends inversely with his conditioning in a ratio that allowed Arreola to lumber from a fat guy who could box to a trimmer guy who bleeds on cue and absorbs like a paper towel. The second reason is Deontay Wilder is awful at boxing.

According to breathless ringside reports Saturday night Wilder tore his right bicep while punching. Do you have any idea how difficult that is from an orthodox stance? To turn the trick one cannot merely throw a straight punch wildly crooked but also must touch no part of his knuckles to the target at impact. It’s a feat of both technical incompetence and faulty depth perception; if you throw the right hand correctly while being blind in one eye or throw the right hand incorrectly while trusting a third dimension exists, either one, you cannot tear your right bicep while punching and that means you fail in a way Wilder succeeded Saturday.

He succeeded for the right reason at least and that was rage. When Wilder gets another man hurt in front of him he verily loses his mind and while his finishing moves resemble an infant in tantrum more than a predator in the wild he looks dangerous to inexperienced eyes, 9,000 of which showed a patriot’s zeal in Birmingham.

Wilder is a great regional champion, the best heavyweight in Alabama and perhaps the entirety of America’s South, but in a meritocratic world he’s a scalp. Even at age 50 Vitali Klitschko would wear Wilder’s silly bronze mask like a codpiece.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Sometime soon – or conceivably as you read this – light heavyweight champion Sergey “Krusher” Kovalev will beat up a South African named Isaac Chilemba in a Russian city called Yekaterinburg. HBO will air the mess sometime this evening as part of a yearlong promotional attempt to have Kovalev fight Andre Ward in the network’s one anticipated fight of 2016.

Since now everyone is a promoter anyway . . .

This afternoon the man who calls himself “The Golden Boy” but others know as the Joburg Jo and the Malawi Malcontent, the Gauteng Gatlin Boy and the Terror of Turning Stone, Miguel Isaac Chilemba Zuze, brings his broadfists and rage in a Russian ring with the express purpose of mauling Sergey Kovalev not far from the Soviet Union’s best-known nuclear-waste dump. Frankly the broadcast in broad daylight should be rated R and the reason HBO will not do its tapedelay till after dark. That a network specializing in naked violence and graphical gore like “Game of Thrones” would ultimately flinch at a live broadcast of a boxing match reports to its viewers the unalloyed peril that accompanies Chilemba whenever gauze mounts his knuckles and leather rides his flying fists.

Actually Chilemba is the right man for the job of launching HBO’s one-off MNB series as men returning from second shifts at work will conduct an informal race with Krusher to determine if Kovalev can put Chilemba to sleep before Chilemba snatches the consciousness from HBO’s viewing audience. Such suspense now heralds the Monday arrival of the manly art of self-defense.

The case of Chilemba raises what has become a common question for main events in a way it once was a common question only in undercards and walkouts: Does Chilemba know he is going to lose or will awakening from unconsciousness bring him more than the standard surprise? And if he does know he’s going in the ring as a sacrifice, did he know it before signing the contract or while boarding his flight to Russia or during the weighin that probably happened while this got written?

There was a time so many Mexican taxistas and albañiles staffed the nohoper side of undercards one brought his opera glasses to spot Alfonso Zayas at welterweight or Tun Tun at straw, a time competent matchmakers allowed nary a victor to shuffle from the red corner across a 12-match marquee. After showing valor and a certain whimsical willfulness for a quarter hour this hopeless opponent of the prospect being developed would catch a left hook or right cross flush and drop as if shot then rise to his right knee before the seven count and retain his crouch till the fabled 10 1/2-count at which time he would spring upright and spread his gloves to plead the ref allow his continuance. The referee would make some avuncular gesture or other embracing the lad to tell him neither could conscience his absorbing one more blow. Then the nohoper would do a shameless lap of posture and disbelief before conceding it was not the prospect’s fault and in a show of abiding sportsmanship raise the victor’s taped fist high above both heads.

After a short medical suspension this taxista or albañil would be back on the circuit making enough money to bid zealously on a used pickup truck postfight (my favorite such character was the supremely courteous Genaro “Trancazos” Trazancos who after beginning his career 1-1-1 managed to get himself on television a number of times and fight Miguel Cotto’s older brother and Steven Luevano and Edwin Valero in a three-loss streak that became a curtain-calling 1-11 [10 KOs] close to his career). Such men had no believable chance of prevailing but truly believed they might ring one up and slice the other man just once – since it takes only a punch – and gave honest fighting efforts in a way few of us circumstanced similarly would do. Their job was to ensure a knockout. They were stuntmen who expected to complete the jump but didn’t mind a net stretched just below.

With the advent of the PBC and its quality bending effect there’s no longer any banking on an opponent’s honest effort. Most of the a-siders have adjusted to this and found solace in admonitions to win tonight and look good next time and while that next time never comes it’s not a thing PBC handlers think a biographical video cannot fix. Writing of biographical videos, the only reasonable explanation for HBO’s signing a contract that binds the network to air this farce is a chance to roll viewers towards a Terence Crawford infomercial for a pay-per-view match that mayn’t find its 100,000th viewer in a couple weeks.

Kovalev is a problem for the contemporary nohoper arrangement. He’s a bully-cum-sociopath who derives open joy from torturing lesser men. One might hope performing before a crowd of fellow Russians would leash his psychopathy a teensy-weensy bit until one recalls Kovalev killed Roman Simakov in the very same city five years ago. Kovalev is a loving father now, we’re told, and probably appreciates human life fractionally more than he did then and so Chilemba may well be safe this afternoon.

Therein lies another explanation for boxing’s moribund fanbase: Another main event, an HBO main event no less, finds aficionados fixated on the health and safety of its network-sanctioned opponent.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

SAN ANTONIO – There’s a coffeehouse and bar concept called Halcyon in the south-downtown part of this city called Southtown and what brought me here the first time years ago were the make-your-own open-flame s’mores they bravely serve under the paintings local artists hang for-sale on their walls. What brought me here this afternoon was the eclectic crowd that assembles on Sundays and Mondays. If this column is about boxing at all its author’ll be surprised.

There’s a finch nest tattered in the corner above the window that reflects beside my seat. The nest hung there a month or so and by design was unnoticeable unless you were seated directly beneath it when an occupant flew home or you were an airborne predator and in the second case it was still necessarily unnoticeable. The nest came apart a half hour ago when the wind took the dominant strand away and the unraveling accelerated to disorder. The occupants returned a few minutes ago, a couple – not unlike the folks who just sat across from me on a couch fractionally comfortable as it looks and we’ll see how long they endure it. The finches have no apparent memory how was the nest when they departed but recognized instantly the place they alighted on is uninhabitable currently but shows potential as a home with some repairs – a fixerupper possibly in foreclosure. They set off fusslessly on their task and collect from the ground a blessedly large collection of twigs – what good fortune, this! – that is their former nest unbeknownst to them.

The lass across from me is attractive but covered in tattoos each with a story and pretty clearly in the throes of a tinder date with a douchebag of sorts who nonetheless satisfies the Texas female’s one mating requirement: He is tall. He’s whispering to her about me and it raises an interesting question for any writer: Did he know I thought this about him before I read what I’d written and realized I thought this about him because I didn’t realize I’d noticed him so much as the finches, much less like a competitor, till the beginning of this runon sentence? They’re giggling girlishly now (about my hat probably) and it brings to mind the timeless wisdom of Sir Mix-A-Lot: “I’m a giggle wit’em, ‘cause I wanna get wit’em.”

It’s later than usual and that keeps the brunch crowd from occupying too many tables and it makes the mix in Halcyon right now quite good – modellish women, bearded men, students, lesbians, a few toddler siblings dressed in matching purple outfits by their conscientious mom. The temperature is rising unfortunately because there’s only so much of the good fight any establishment might wage against the summer suffocation of South Texas and if the cooling system kept things below 75 when the place was 1/3 full it’s got no chance against the arrival of the second- and third-third. Its initial emptiness signed departed South Texans, our townsfolk off and enjoying the holiday elsewhere, and much as one hoped the city removed itself to Calgary or Montreal to enjoy rejuvenating climes the greater likelihood is folks who’d otherwise be here brunching were instead floating inebriatedly southwards on one of our many waterways.

Even a year ago I might’ve glanced at a boxing calendar on some site or other before writing a column about not writing a boxing column but it didn’t cross my mind last night when the idea for this column scurried on in. That marks its own demarcation of an extraordinary sort: There was a time I started worrying about my next column Tuesday morning and chastised myself openly if Wednesday evening didn’t bring a workable plan. While I haven’t quite drawn a bead on what my more honorable and mechanical self of 2005 should’ve opined about the writer I am now I suspect he’d have been amused – an appreciation of absurdity being the one thing that held constant in the boiling variable stew of this last decade. Or so I hope.

A good column in a good paper this morning returned me to a months-old pledge to read more Rudyard Kipling and so I enjoyed “The Drums of the Fore and Aft” before going to Central Library, this city’s colorful architectural event that comprises a Botero sculpture in the front atrium and Chihuly glass in its middle. There was a time a tale of cowardice and redemptive courage such as Kipling’s on a Sunday morning would’ve won a tangential inclusion in the week’s column. Instead its allusion here is direct and freely unrelated. Read Kipling because he’s imaginative and not in order to learn something.

Funnily enough the working title for this column was to be “Planning a trip to Johannesburg instead of writing a column” – as planning was what I’d planned to be do doing – but thoughts of a short and wonderfully cheap flight to Cape Town midway through a two-week stay in South Africa seemed unacceptably premeditated when set below all that preceded. It’s something like intuition the way these destinations get chosen or a feeling assembled preconsciously of sounds and images and promised delight from Dublin to Barcelona to Bogota to Joburg.

And now I’m going to mention the young lady who replaced the tall-n-tatted couple on the lima-green sofa, in a faded midnight-blue blouse with upsidedown pink elephants marching between paisleys because I just imagined a conversation with her in which I’d tell her I’m writing about the rebuilding birds’ nest reassembling above us in lieu of writing about boxing and after a 20-minute soliloquy about creative process at the end of which she’d say in exasperation she was overdue at her boyfriend’s or girlfriend’s place I’d tell her to check this column the next morning and see if I was joking when I said I’d mention her.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday in Brooklyn, Florida welterweight Keith “One Time” Thurman hit Ohio’s “Showtime” Shawn Porter many many times and all over though not too often on the chin and beat him by three fair scores of 115-113. Social media reacted with uncharacteristic sobriety to a match Showtime-on-CBS-presented-by-PBC commentary mistook for a historic war from opening bell to closing after promising a historic war over and over and over.

The match was better than expected and about a third what viewers heard it was from the PBC’s circusbarking play-by-play dude. Somewhere in his relentless drumbeat of historic punchstat figures and legendary power this contradiction became obvious in a way best posed like a question: How come Mike Tyson never set any activity records in his heyday?

Television, mankind’s greatest yet enthusiasm-dissemination device, embraces then amplifies emotions as they arise, picking them up and setting them down instant by instant, and therefore no conflict registered to Saturday’s on-air lunacy. But here it is in a plainspoken way television can’t do: If Keith Thurman hits so damn hard, how come 200 chops with the Thurman axe didn’t dent much less fell the Porter tree? How come a Sunday morning camaraderie pic of Thurman and Porter saw Porter looking so clean, safe and sane?

Because Porter has a legendary chin! Sure, right, whatever; legends don’t get dropped by clowns like Adrien Broner and Porter did.

Great acts of combat inspire great prose.

“They both appeared exhausted in the final round but let it all hang out,” wrote ESPN’s Dan Rafael.

“With the kind of tremendous action they created in the ring, a rematch is a no-brainer and an easy sell,” wrote USA Today’s Mike Coppinger.

Porter was what his supporters believed he was and Thurman was a bit less. Like every other volume puncher in history Porter erred with his chin over his front knee, too anxious to impose himself and consequently wide open to counter uppercuts. Thurman landed a few and more of other counters like his left hook but often Thurman was in such frantic and tanglefooted retreat the punches did not measure on Porter’s chin the way they attacked PBC viewers’ ears.

Congratulations of a sort for that: The missing component of television broadcasts has long been its flattening audio that makes all punches sound the same. PBC raced directly past that issue in a wide circle that now has every punch sounding much louder and the same.

It is easy to call Porter a fun fighter without calling him or Saturday’s match legendary and probably advisable too. Being anywhere but Brooklyn for a columnist had the advantage of being far from the event’s boorish puppet-promoter sweating and screaming across press row about the quality of his product. Porter combines athleticism, desire, and yes, intelligence the way young Timothy Bradley and Juan Diaz did. He is aware of his limitations in a way his opponents are not; volume guys do not fear violence or exhaustion or ridicule the way they shudder at others’ right uppercuts but it takes a Juan Manuel Marquez – much more than a Keith Thurman – to plant and hold steady with a wildman racing your way. Porter’s jab wasn’t merely the decoy it appeared but wasn’t much more than that either. When the two men jabbed together Porter’s jab was often the first arriver but no credible source ever said Thurman had a great jab.

What Thurman has is a right hand and sometimes a left hook but it’s been so long since he fought an opponent bad enough to make him look invincible it’s admittedly hard to recall what made us so excited about him years ago but speed and intensity are good places as any to look. Or perhaps it was our delirious search to find some welterweight who might ice Floyd Mayweather that made us see in Thurman more than was there. Whatever images once danced in our heads Thurman’s footwork today rates, on a scale of novice-to-master, about: Amir Khan + 1.

Porter was able to jab him out of position and spin him fairly easily because, whatever postfight allusions Thurman concocted about Muhammad Ali (who as an aside gave away opening rounds in order to knock George Foreman out, not decision him narrowly) Thurman’s feet rarely anchored his body properly. His vaunted power, which took precious little fight out of Porter, relied heavily on Porter’s aggressiveness and Porter delivered that aggressiveness, swinging and missing ferally and fairly often(ly), but Thurman was out of position or in-position and retreating at the time of Porter’s arrivals mostly. A generation raised to confuse wide circles and wasted effort with great defense surely saw in Thurman’s tactics something like genius but not the rest of us. Better put: In 36 minutes of what horizontal ferocity snaps heavybags from gym ceilings vertically Thurman didn’t once show Porter as much conviction or technique or effect as “About Billions” did.

Still, Thurman-Porter 1 was dramatic throughout and suspenseful occasionally. Let us see an immediate rematch. According to their Sunday pic neither guy was ruined by Saturday’s match and according to previous box-office receipts neither guy is popular enough to spend another year starching novices. Provided the check clears this week CBS should agree to air the rematch in December, too – maybe even at a discount.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday in Brooklyn in what remains of an anticipated title match for an expiring sport Ohio welterweight “Showtime” Shawn Porter will square up with Florida’s Keith “One Time” Thurman in a match that figures to disappoint what exaggerated expectations desperate aficionados have affixed to it. This will be yet another chance and in all probability one of the last for PBC to captivate a nationwide audience and win new fans to its brand of boxing.

Thurman and Porter have nearly identical records and nearly identical stretches of inactivity, and while that sort of thing once may have marinated things richly today it does little more than serve as a reminder of the incompetence with which they’ve been handled. Their manager/promoter group, once the brainchild of a visionary and rapidly becoming what kids these days call a cautionary tale, has taken whatever whitehot enthusiasm ever existed for either of these fighters and doused it to soggy.

Thurman, a charismatic action fighter whom an accomplished promoter like Bob Arum might’ve made an international heartthrob, is now a joke of sorts. He has steadily lost others’ esteem even while not losing a match. Wait, when did I last see him fighting? – you probably wonder. In a July homecoming fiasco that saw Luis Collazo wave off his own bout to ensure the PBC darling got another w and Collazo got his name engraved on the PBC Employee of the Month plaque hanging above a headquarters restroom with what majesty GoPros hang off PBC-referee headbands.

Is that too irreverent? Then let us acknowledge the irreverence as a reflective surface off which bounces former aficionados’ disgust with what has become of their, our, oncebeloved sport.

Nothing holds constant in this game. That is the lesson of what has happened to a sport that was passably popular if not thriving just five years ago. No, folks round the proverbial watercooler were not fluttering their tongues about prizefighting but those who cared about the sport had four or five annual events worth traveling to, incredible happenings in no way tarnished by others’ absent interest. That is gone now. Quickly as the quality of combat deteriorated the reverence for sanctioned combat accelerated directly past it. Boxing attracts misanthropes and was long vulnerable to its supporters’ routine sneers. What it collects now is fulltime indifference occasionally interrupted by derision. People, often former readers, now ask boxing writers what sort of writing we’re doing these days, convinced it couldn’t be boxing and too uninterested to find our URLs in the forgotten Boxing folder of their Favorites bar.

Do Porter and Thurman deserve the blame for all that? Of course not, but their manager and promotional network deserves a halfshare.

Thurman postponed the match, too, helping folks to assume someway it would not happen. But that postponement should not undo our memories; if this fight had happened when it was scheduled to go off, the gap in both men’s careers still would’ve been unacceptable: Sugar Ray Leonard and Thomas Hearns, two fighters whose first match in 1981 remains the standard against which all welterweight tilts are measured 35 years later, each fought less than three months before their championship match – a true superfight.

This is what that has come to: Both Thurman and Porter went in tough about a year ago, Porter barely surviving Adrien Broner and Thurman needing Collazo’s selfejection to remain undefeated. Neither Leonard nor Hearns would’ve needed more than five rounds to obliterate either Collazo or Broner (or Thurman or Porter), and both men would’ve fought again round Labor Day having done so. With the collective departure of Mayweather and Pacquiao, Thurman and Porter are two of the world’s three best welterweights and considered the benevolent PBC god’s reply to years of aficionados’ futile prayers.

The worst part is the fight won’t be great and likely not entertaining either. Porter, for all his ferocity, just isn’t very good. He’s a boxing-is-bodybuilding sort whose physique anticipates a concusiveness well subverted by his technique. But what musculature!

Whatever we thought Thurman was three or four years ago he hasn’t been very much of it in recent fights. If your talent or tactics see you grinding out a lame decision against a 40-year-old Leonard Bundu, you’re probably not going to go HAM on someone with 16 career knockouts. Expect a keepaway effort from Thurman, while the announcing team drills and exercises about courage and nonstop whatever.

It will be sanitized, too, whatever else it is. PBC boxing feels far too safe to keep serious fans or attract casual ones. It is Mayweather’s brand of violence without Mayweather’s brand of promotion. It is men behaving like gentlemen in press conferences and amateur boxers in the ring, concerned with points and safety and so forth more than violence or pain or willfulness.

I’ll take Thurman by dull decision, in a match social media, queued by PBC commentary, initially mistakes for a historic war.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry

Originally conducted for the San Antonio Historic Preservation Society in 2012, this interview is reprinted with the gymnasium’s permission.

BB: I sure appreciate your getting together to do this chat with me. It’s an odd request, I admit.

SF: Not a problem. Surprises me more people don’t ask. This isn’t going to be a podcast?

BB: No, this is for print.

SF: Obscurity does not offend me.

BB: You began as a bowling alley, correct?

SF: In part. The apartments (Soap Works, today) round me were all part of a campus. We were a Catholic school, and I its gymnasium. The legend is another thing.

BB: Of the church or the saint?

SF: The church. I don’t know much about my namesake. We feel our influences but don’t know our fathers too well. What I know comes from construction chatter as the walls went up.

BB: Before we began, you mentioned being a young edifice in an old city is a different experience from being a young edifice in a young city. These things are relative, too. But what informs your thinking of one city being older than another?

SF: Friendliness. I notice it when there’s a tournament upstairs or down. People come from younger cities. They’re used to bending edifices which way they want. They’re gentler to the walls, harsher to the regulars and staff. Things break all over me after big tournaments. Always with the water. They talk faster. They talk about making a difference to their sons or the generation after that. That’s young-city talk.

BB: That’s not refreshing in some sense?

SF: In no sense. If they get their way, I get torn down, made into more hospital parking or another hotel in –

BB: But you recognize the value of touri –

SF: Some of the buildings I admire most are hotels and hospitals, yes.

BB: As someone who moves around on your mats –

SF: (Smiling) I’ve seen you.

BB: Figuratively speaking, then, as someone who moves around on your mats, there’s a unique, almost hollow feeling. There’s not concrete on –

SF: There’s concrete down here, but you don’t want to touch it.

BB: It’s wooded-over, then?

SF: Yes, exactly. I began as a bowling alley. Some of the wood rotted. It’s been a half century. Those were fun times. Made quite a racket. The buzzer is not torturous as the candlepins were noise-wise. But it’s worse in its way.

BB: Not volume?

SF: Not at all. It’s soft and tinny by comparison.

BB: Then?

SF: My concept of time is decades. It’s hard for me to imagine increments less. Like y’all with millimeters –

BB: Milliseconds?

SF: Yes. I prefer metric. The buzzer goes off so often, so many times, and it builds this terrible anticipation. Like waiting for the next water to drop on your forehead. Relief comes when the damn thing gets turned off at night.

BB: Speaking of which, you’re well preserved in part because of how little time you’re actually open these days. You get mornings off.

SF: That is true. I do enjoy a lighter schedule. It began round 1980, six years after the Close Call.

BB: When they were going to raze you?

SF: Pretty euphemism.

BB: How close did you come?

SF: Well. They had demolition guys walking round. You think they do that at Monticello?

BB: How the hell do you know –

SF: Be surprised the things one picks up.

BB: Basketball game?

SF: Roller derby. They began coming on Tuesday nights some years ago. Then there’s the basketball people. And you guys in the ring below.

BB: Ever have any famous roller-derby participants?

SF: Any what?

BB: How about basketball players?

SF: Doubtful.

BB: Boxers?

SF: Plenty.

BB: How can you tell?

SF: It’s a congregation thing. There’s a way men and women upstairs look at certain players. It’s an admiration, like they’re watching while they imagine themselves being those persons. Then there are the looks sometimes downstairs. It’s a look of incredulousness. It’s the look persons give to persons they did not think they would ever see in front of them.

BB: It’d help this exercise a lot if you remembered any names.

SF: Julio Cesar Chavez, Mike Tyson, Danny Lopez, Jack Johnson, Oscar De La Hoya, Evander Holyfield, Salvador Sanchez.

BB: Those guys have all been here?

SF: Except Jack Johnson. Made that one up.

BB: He was from Texas at least.

SF: Like me.

BB: I’ve read there’s a rule every building grows. But you seem not to have grown.

SF: Inside, some, but no, not outside. They’ve updated bathrooms and put on coats of paint. The lockers and shower downstairs, those weren’t with me before. There are walls inside, concrete. The materials are cheaper inside than out. Because of that infernal heater, I guess.

BB: It’s the only part of you I hate. Who the hell installs an industrial heater in steamy South Texas?

SF: The crazy Portuguese, that’s who!

BB: Joe Souza?

SF: Yes. He did all my interior decorating, too. Such as it is.

BB: These are his fight posters?

SF: All of them. They say his family wants them. The Parks & Rec guys will probably paint me again once they’re gone.

BB: How long have you been city property?

SF: 1974.

BB: Does it bother you?

SF: Not like it did. We are not all destined to be museums, coddled and soft, temperature-controlled this and that. There’s the historic-preservation people, too. Seeing y’all makes me hopeful. It means if someone decides to buy me from the city, which I do not expect to happen, these people will not be able to tear me down.

BB: That’s good.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry