By Bart Barry–
Editor’s note: For part 11, please click here.
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“Paradoxically, it is in the core administrative and entertainment districts of European cities, be it Frankfurt or Barcelona, where urban marginality makes its presence felt. Its pervasive occupation of the busiest streets and public transportation nodal points is a survival strategy destined to be present, so that they can receive public attention or private business, whether it be welfare assistance, a drug transaction, a prostitution deal, or the customary police attention.” – Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society
There is an interesting and advisable thing that happens to one’s view of what manufactured boisterousness accompanies most prizefighters when he considers it more a survivor’s adaptation than an anxious person’s nervous tick: It becomes nearly admirable, not merely tolerable. Most interpretations of outsized dress and behavior pass a moral calculation on their subjects, one that posits a victory of others is in feral fiesta – as though the subject’s involuntary participation in life’s voracious zerosum competition for resources caused him loudly to remind the vanquished who their champion was. But what if such appearance and behavior are better explained as a rational adaptation made by a person who realizes, from an early age, while some forms of attention are perilous, invisibility is most perilous of all?
Looked at that way, the PBC’s partial sanitation of its fighters represents yet another way this venture-capitalized boxing experiment may not succeed in the long term. It is a symptom of the same malady, which is inauthenticity. What is much worse than seeing a caricature like Adrien Broner, gold teeth sparkling and exaggerated self-regard broadcasting, in a brutal affair with Marcos Maidana, is seeing a partially subdued Broner whacking away at someone who hasn’t a chance to beat him (though Broner’s want of ring generalship makes him a lesser example of such mismatchmaking than most of his a-side coworkers).
Writing of which, the upcoming fight schedule is abysmal. Prizefighting is become a pursuit drained of its spontaneity. What limited suspense remains is the suspense born of a question whether the favorite will keepaway his way to a dull decision, or apply himself and take his hopeless opponent’s consciousness, or in taking the defenseless man’s consciousness, render him a candidate for emergency medical treatment right on the blue mat itself. It is one thing to see two evenly matched athletes war to an attrition that leaves one ruined evermore. It is something else entirely when that sort of thing results from matchmaking that ensures nothing competitive happens from the opening bell.
The PBC deserves much of the culpability for this current schedule, yes, but it is not alone. Aside from Saul Alvarez’s match with Miguel Cotto, and perhaps Timothy Bradley’s match with Brandon Rios, is there a single upcoming main event this fall in which the b-side’s trainer or manager, even, expects his charge to compete? (And if you’re thinking David Lemieux right now, you’re one of those folks an American circusbarker once said is born every minute).
Back to boxing as metaphor, then, and the small network that governs prizefighting and employs what complexity all networks do. The prizefighting network comprises nodes that act on the structure that contains them, changing the structure in variable ways that force all other nodes to make changes that also change the structure that contains all of them: A variable number of variables influencing other variables in varying ways at variable rates. The prizefighting network, today, is more interesting than the fights it promotes, and that is not an aesthetically favorable development.
What the PBC understands that its predecessors, and its predecessors’ collective adherence to American anticompetitive laws, too, didn’t is this: capital rewards stability more than democracy or parity or vitality – three things our oncebeloved sport had so very much more of in decades past. The PBC, by making a league of itself like the NFL or NBA, presently succeeds in suspending the free-agent model that has governed prizefighting for as long as anyone can remember: Free agents promoting free agents managed by free agents. Television, boxing’s detriment and enabler, makes possible this gambit.
A few years ago Top Rank’s wholly outmatched leader Todd duBoef feinted at an idea he called the “brand of boxing” – a vision ever doomed by labor concerns no promoter wanted to tackle (as the NFL both knows and increasingly learns anew). Apparently the PBC’s Al Haymon, at least, was listening; while duBoef and Oscar De La Hoya played what can best be described as an HBO-capture game, pleading with boxing’s largest benefactor for a monogamous relationship, Haymon set out to seduce numerous other television networks the American way – with borrowed money.
If Haymon’s ploy works it will be because he thought so much larger and moved so much quicker than his competitors (think what a big deal Bob Arum made about Pacquiao-Mosley infomercials appearing on CBS in 2011, while just 4 1/2 years later, Haymon now casually employs NBC and ESPN as his distributors). There are a few erroneous assumptions in Haymon’s model – specifically fighter talent (deteriorating, not constant) and domestic interest in the sport (deteriorating at a rate that is accelerating, not constant) – but at least one of those might be overcome by treating HBO and the promoters it employs as a farm league to develop tomorrow’s Eurasian fighters for PBC contracts. Or maybe that, too, is smallminded imagining.
What the PBC lacks in fighter development it could remedy with an acquisition of Top Rank, and what the PBC lacks in a public face it could remedy with an acquisition of Golden Boy Promotions. Realizing this, or perhaps not yet, both Top Rank and Golden Boy Promotions are now engaged in legal battles with the PBC that are, almost definitely, existential struggles for all three entities. For the next year or so, the competition and cooperation between the promotional nodes of the prizefighting network will be more dramatic and suspenseful than that network’s actual products. As consumers, we, too, shall adapt . . .
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
