Dessert before dinner

By Bart Barry

Last Saturday night, serious boxing fans enjoyed their dessert. One cable network served Brothers Marquez, a sophisticated, strong-tasting tres leches cake. Another cable network served a bowl of Kassim Ouma, the always palate-pleasing African treat of more than 1,000 calories. Then came Forrest-Quartey, a complicated ice-cream sundae topped with an odd-tasting cherry. Indeed, it was a decadent weekend.

This Saturday night, serious boxing fans have to eat their dinner. A large, scrumptious helping of broccoli. In a pay-per-view tilt to determine the WBC heavyweight champion, Hasim Rahman will face Oleg Maskaev in the rematch of a fight that happened almost seven years ago. And while last weekend’s dessert was effectively free, this weekend’s dinner belongs on a gourmet menu.

But there are some childhood lessons here that fans shouldn’t forget. First among them is this: While every child dreams of a dinner table on which vegetables are traded for double servings of chocolate cake, parents know better. They know better because, upon arriving at adulthood, most tried the desserts-only diet. It was disastrous for them; their bodies lost shape, their metabolisms slowed, and their appreciation for desserts went away.

So it goes with serious boxing fans and our love for lower weight classes. We gorge ourselves on bantamweight wars, welterweight grudge matches, and flyweight knockout artists. We marvel at how much better, punch for punch, many Telefutura fights are than what casual fans consider pay-per-view-worthy events. We fill up on dessert then cry like petulant children when a promoter asks $50 for a heavyweight championship bout.

Heavyweight boxing, however, is the financial fiber that holds our body of a sport together. When serious fans don’t forget this completely, we tend to resent it. We criticize promoter Top Rank for Saturday’s $50 price tag, while forgetting that Bob Arum’s initial success with heavyweights kept him around long enough to make superstars of Michael Carbajal and Oscar de la Hoya.

Because of what fortunes Mr. Arum and others eventually made in the lower weight classes, last Saturday night Gary Shaw Productions and Showtime were able to make an entire two-hour broadcast of Rafael and Juan Manuel Marquez – two brothers who, together, may not outweigh Hasim Rahman. And the Brothers Marquez didn’t disappoint. Rafael, his right eye shut by a hundred left hands, would knock-out Silence Mabuza at the end of nine rounds. Juan Manuel would then win an even more violent scrap with Terdsak Jandaeng, a minute into Round 7.

Meanwhile, HBO was opening up a “World Championship Boxing” episode composed wholly of junior-middleweights. First Uganda’s Kassim Ouma would outwork Sechew Powell, winning a unanimous decision. Then Ghana’s Ike Quartey would lose a questionable decision to Vernon Forrest. All four of last weekend’s fights were excellent, and filling.

Now we sit at the table and threaten not to eat this Saturday’s dinner. “Desserts taste better! We’re too full,” we say. Well, that’s too bad. Certainly, neither Hasim Rahman nor Oleg Maskaev deserves our finicky whining.

If serious fans want to blame some party for what’s being served this weekend, we should blame the World Boxing Council. After all, it’s their mandatory match. Hasim Rahman is the WBC champion, and Oleg Maskaev is his required challenger.

We should not, however, blame the fighters. Hasim Rahman knows he’s not bigger than the WBC belt round his waist. He’d probably love to unify the titles and become bigger than any one of them, but as he acknowledged last week, the odds of that are long:

“Unless somebody comes up with a tournament with one belt and one champion, that’s going to be always the champion, nobody can ever defend all those mandatories . . . paying all those entry fees.”

Nor should we blame Oleg Maskaev. He did what he was supposed to do. He fought a title-eliminator bout last November, and won. If fans don’t think a decision victory over Sinan Samil Sam should qualify a fighter for a shot at the world title, well, those sentiments need to be conveyed to the WBC.

Both Rahman and Maskaev are good guys who make fine representatives for our sport’s flagship division. In fact, this fight’s promotional title, “America’s Last Line of Defense”, is about their only point of animosity:

“I can say, yes, [the fight’s title] bothers me,” Maskaev, a Soviet-born and naturalized U.S. citizen, explained last week. “Because whoever is going to win is, anyway, going to be American.”

Hasim Rahman was just as animated about the fight’s title:

“Patriotic, that’s what it is. Look around you, all the other belt holders are not American, and they’re trying to get a clean sweep. They’re going to send me out there to represent my country, and I will do that.”

In a time of ongoing strife for America, we’re about to have the good fortune of a fight between an immigrant who’s angry he’s not considered American enough and an American who says, “I need to hold it down for my country.”

Just as importantly, this is a heavyweight title fight between Oleg Maskaev, who’s only ever lost by knockouts, and Hasim Rahman, the man Maskaev knocked out of the ring and over a table and onto the ringside floor, in their first match. In other words, the WBC heavyweight champ will be fighting an opponent he can knock-out, and who has already knocked him out – and not an overweight, foul-mouthed, defensive specialist.

This Saturday night, then, serious fight fans should consider a helping of broccoli. If ordering the meal is too costly, we should visit a local restaurant or bar, pay the cover charge, and have it there. But if some of us are simply too full from dessert last weekend, we should at least keep our feelings about broccoli quiet. After all, most of our brothers and sisters at the sports dinner table think a heavyweight championship fight is dessert.