A mosaicked revisit to the year’s best fight – Part 1

Because of the breadth of Texas, and its effects on time – zones and flight – to arrive at Houston’s William P. Hobby airport, collect a rental car and make a 1 p.m. weigh-in, you’d better depart Sky Harbor before 8:30 a.m., which means being in downtown Phoenix round 6:00.

I didn’t know how much wiser a choice Hobby was than George Bush Intercontinental till I rented a white Chevy Cobalt, found myself outside Toyota Center 20 minutes later, and then overheard others’ tales of $100 cab rides and 90-minute treks southward from the city’s larger airport.

The weigh-in for “Supremacy,” what they called Juan Manuel Marquez versus Juan Diaz for The Ring’s lightweight title on Feb. 28, would be promoter Oscar De La Hoya’s first public sighting at a boxing event since his December humiliation in a ring with Manny Pacquiao.

Outside Toyota Center’s front entrance and beside the Rockets’ team shop, two large Tecate signs stood guard over an aluminum stage with black skirting; there was not nearly enough shade to go round, and the heat was a big, unpleasant surprise in February.

I took my seat round 12:50 p.m. and immediately began to worry about where I’d parked and for that matter what a racket urban lots never cease to be: Clownish bands that manage dried cement and use uniformed city employees as shepherds to heard customers their way.

Sheepishly nestled between Golden Boy Promotions partner Bernard Hopkins and matchmaker Eric Gomez, De La Hoya accepted his introduction by taking a step or two forward, but the customary throng of enchanted lasses that whoop numbered fewer than 20.

Doubletree Hotel Houston Downtown had no wait for check-in, a Wi-Fi-enabled lounge, a bar that was empty and warm chocolate chip cookies at the front desk.

I sat in the lounge with my laptop on a table, ate cookies and wrote a 350-word report that called Marquez’s physique a “combination of gently rippling abs and muscle-knotted back” and Diaz’s midsection “tighter than normal,” while considering the idiocy of having a rental car for a 10-block trip that might end with nowhere to park.

Doubletree is less than a mile from Toyota Center but wasn’t “Supremacy’s” official hotel, a distinction belonging to Hilton Americas, and so it was near enough the venue to walk but far enough not to have a lobby of what “1990 Golden Gloves Champion” jackets – now worn like belly shirts by their original owners – congregate in the vicinity of prizefights.

To head north out of Houston you can take either I-45 or US-69, and without a map or plan for seeing East Texas, you can bet on US-69 for scenery.

I drove northward with no destination in mind but admired how green Texas is, how different from its El Paso stereotype of flat brownness, and lost myself in a CD recording of the previous year’s finest novel, “Netherland” by Joseph O’Neill.

Saturday’s match would be a legitimate championship fight because Juan Manuel Marquez had starched Joel Casamayor who’d decisioned the late Diego Corrales who’d stopped Jose Luis Castillo, in the fight of the decade, and so on down the line – one way or another – till either Sugar Ray Robinson or Odysseus.

The eastern edge of Sam Houston National Forest is marshy, verdant and hazy as Americans’ recollection of its namesake, an intriguing War of 1812 veteran, governor of two states, U.S. senator and two-term President of Texas while it was a country of its own.

I marveled at Joseph O’Neill’s capacity for making an American reader care about the sport of cricket in a novel literary critic James Wood – the finest man of letters in English today – described as “one of the most remarkable post-colonial books I have ever read.”

Fight of the year is ever a subjective choice, but its selectors generally agree on some semblance of these criteria: Consequence, violence, texture and definitiveness of conclusion.

If you’ve driven northwards from Houston for a couple hours you’ll find Lufkin is pleasant a rest stop as any in Texas, a fine place to marvel at wherever time went, enjoy some Gulf Coast fare at Ralph & Kacoo’s Seafood Restaurant, and then set “home.”

I returned the Cobalt at the Hobby lot the next morning, took a cab back to Doubletree, had lunch in the bar then ambled along Dallas Street till I came to La Branch.

Any boxing trip to Houston should include a visit to trainer Kenny Weldon’s gym in Galena Park, but that couldn’t happen without a rental car or hours on public transportation, and too, its necessity had been compromised by a Weldon charge’s questionable withdrawal from an ESPN2 fight when Jesus “El Martillo” Gonzales waited till fight week to cancel his 154-pound match with Richar Gutierrez, citing an inability to make weight.

Toyota Center’s administrative entrance at the intersection of La Branch and Clay Streets filled with writers well before Saturday’s scheduled start, and whereas Las Vegas is ever an organized and sanitized thing, Houston featured more of the fight-day improvisation inexperienced writers detest and everyone else takes in good spirit.

I learned ringside credentials were not yet available, smiled, said “thank you” and then made my way across the street to a park with a basketball court and bench that faced pink and green flora and ornate metallic steeples that sprouted out of clay-colored concrete.

The plaza before Toyota Center began to host the usual fight-night denizens: ticket scalpers in black leather jackets, crews of kids whose gym owners had gotten group discounts, Mexicans bearing traditional redwhitegreen garb, sharp-dressed Americans with sponsor-exempted tickets and a whole lot of folks who weren’t even planning to attend but looked for shelter from Houston’s intensifying wind.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter.com/bartbarry

Editor’s Note: Check back on Wednesday for Part 2.