A mosaicked revisit to the year’s best fight – Part 2

Editor’s Note: For Part 1, click here.

Any passable salesman can seduce a casino and some sponsors then hold a conference call, but it takes a promoter to calculate risk, reserve an arena, engage a community and bring 14,000 fans to a fight card – and whenever that happens it must be celebrated.

I was writing as much for CBS Sports’ boxing page as 15rounds.com in February – until the affiliation ended in August, most every column was here Sunday nights and there Monday afternoons – and so for once I included the letters ‘CBS’ in an access request, someone noticed, and my credential read Row 2 Seat 1; Marquez-Diaz was the closest I might ever sit to a championship prizefight.

In Row 2 Seat 2 was MaxBoxing.com’s indefatigable scribe Steve Kim and in Seat 3 was RingTV.com’s esteemed editor Doug Fischer, and though they were initially placed apart by someone perhaps afraid Fischer might play Ice Cube to Kim’s Eazy-E, the two longtime colleagues and co-hosts of boxing’s best show were comfortable and fun as ever once circumstances reunited them.

Toyota Center’s Houston crowd favored Houstonian Juan Diaz, of course, but those Mexicanos in attendance, as opposed to Mexican-Americans and Tejanos, showed up likelier to cheer for one of their own than the son of one of their own, and so Juan Manuel Marquez had vocal supporters aplenty.

I began the fight with the same two files open on my laptop as I begin every main event – FightJournal.doc and Scorecard.xls – and though I hardly ever use the paragraphs I type between rounds, because they’re so rough, I will now:

“Round 1: What a round. Marquez got in a firefight. He went toe to toe, fought him punch for punch. That pace was way too fast for Marquez. He can’t sustain it. First round to Diaz on generalship.”

When he’s unsure how to attack, Diaz swats with his jab and slaps with his hooks, but when he is sure, Diaz holds his jab outstretched like a jousting sword and gallops forward.

I looked leftwards after each of the first two rounds and watched Marquez and his trainer Nacho Beristain both study Diaz for an instant or two, and while neither seemed worried, Marquez – mouth agape – seemed to lack his trainer’s nonchalance.

“Round 2: Again, it doesn’t much matter who’s landing the better punches or cleaner combinations. Fact is, at this pace, Marquez – who was rocked just after the first minute – hasn’t any chance of going this hard throughout, not for 12 rounds. He is every day of 35 right now.”

In “How the Mind Works” Steven Pinker posits the light reflected off objects and landing on the human eyeball is so different from how objects actually are that what we think of as vision is only description; what we “see” is our brain’s interpretation of “a two-dimensional kaleidoscope of throbbing, heaving streaks on each retina.”

I watch the fight on television, now, and disbelieve how close the opening stanzas appeared through a camera lens; at ringside my brain interpreted Marquez as confused, fatigued and worn.

“Round 5: A tale of two halves. Marquez was controlling distance and space and throwing that nifty cross/uppercut/cross combo he throws, but then Diaz swamped him. He jumped him and wore him down. Marquez is so proud, though.”

How much was the legacy of this fight tarnished by what happened a half-year later at MGM Grand when Marquez made the mercenary’s choice by taking a fight he was far too small to win and getting shut-out by Floyd Mayweather?

I began to worry after the fifth round Diaz was all wrong for Marquez, that the old Mexican’s pride was going to combine with Diaz’s activity and fault of power to make something tragic happen, and yes, such drastic fears after 15 minutes absolutely affected how I interpreted what followed – and no, I wasn’t alone in thinking like that.

“Round 6: Marquez cut over right eye. Diaz is wearing him down. Doug (Fischer) just predicted Marquez won’t get out of the eighth. Diaz can turn it up whenever he wishes. And once he turns it up, Marquez’s counters only do so much. The offensive part is that Marquez is outboxing him, but so what?”

The offensive part of Marquez’s legacy is that after beginning as a near-flawless counterpunching champion at featherweight, he became a thrilling tactician at lightweight – stopping Diaz and Joel Casamayor, two men nobody had stopped in 76 collective bouts – but will be remembered by most Americans as “who, the little Mexican dude Mayweather handled?”

I recall with such vividness Doug Fischer predicting Marquez’s demise because it was exactly what I was thinking, and because it was such an honor to sit beside him and Steve Kim – guys who convinced so many to become boxing writers by showing us it was possible.

“Round 8: Wow! Marquez cut him over his right eye with a left uppercut then rocked his world and wobbled him with a double left hook. That was the first time Diaz has looked ruined. Marquez’s class turned the trick; that was almost a 10-8 round for Marquez. What a show by JMM!”

The right uppercut Juan Manuel Marquez used to finish Juan Diaz in the ninth was such a violent thing, such an act of precise execution and one that brought such an unexpected conclusion, that it was boxing’s single finest instant of 2009.

I followed Nacho Beristain to the Toyota Center’s tunnel after the post-fight press conference and asked him if, really, he wasn’t worried, not for a moment, in the opening six rounds of the match, and Beristain made a disdainful face then said of Marquez: “¡Juan no es fragil!”

“Round 9: Finished! Marquez was losing the round and then ran Diaz into a left hook. After that, he hurt him and sent him to the ropes. Diaz got up too quick, and then Marquez finished him with a right uppercut. What a fantastic fight!”

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter.com/bartbarry