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

Mosaic (n.) A picture or decorative design made by setting small colored pieces, as of stone or tile, into a surface. 2. A composite picture made of overlapping, usually aerial, photographs.

In Las Vegas the Planet Hollywood Hotel & Casino has an entrance more like a backdoor because the actual front, the part on the Strip, is a silver-faced and perpetually illumined mall that couldn’t be mistaken for a hotel or casino were it not backgrounded by a boomerang-shaped tower.

I arrived before check-in that Friday morning – it’s a lesson I never learn – and climbing out the minivan cab that had brought me from McCarran International, I noted little of the economic ruin my driver, a transplanted Chicagoan, assured me was everywhere.

Planet Hollywood was oblivious of the weekend’s prizefight; where MGM Grand understandably featured Manny Pacquiao and Miguel Cotto in its lobby and on its keycards, “ph” understandably featured “Ghostbusters II” – in posters and drawings – all over one seventh-floor room.

The lobby leads to elevators that go to rooms and an escalator that takes you to the casino floor and its perimeter of eateries, and if you find all casinos on the Strip interchangeable, remember there’re formulas at work; only tourists in Sin City wager earnings on unproved strategies.

I sat in Starbucks for three hours waiting till my room became available and reading Bill Simmons’ “Book of Basketball” – a 700-page act of attrition made in the best of faith, if not craft, and built to resonate and resonate.

The cab ride to MGM Grand brought a faint recollection of a credentials-approval email implying pick-up was not outside the media center but rather will call.

Before the entrance to Grand Garden Arena was a swell of boxing personalities jostling and angling and assuring security they knew Bob Arum personally and a quick call would straighten this credential misunderstanding all the way out.

I arrived in maniacal a scene as I’d beheld at a weigh-in, a thing the fire marshal closed two hours before the scales were taken by the prizefighters, and happily sat behind writer Michael Marley – a figure not unlike the folks stopped by security, if they were full of good stories and talented as hell.

Pacquiao took the scale and looked relaxed and ripped; Cotto looked drawn but fully healed from being plastered (of Paris) on his last trip to MGM Grand.

Friday night’s appetizer card happened in Mandalay Bay at House of Blues, a funhouse of removable walls and a sunken stage and perhaps not one paying customer but Azteca America.

I took a seat in the auxiliary press area, steeled to what that could portend for Saturday, and got the weekend’s best surprise: Aux press was a balcony dangled over the ring, which offered the best view of the fights a writer ever had.

From the balcony you saw the first rows of ringside media and got a kick out of being able to see all the ring but only two rows of “ringside” reporters.

“No promoter has a better feel than Top Rank for the passion ethnic rivalries breed” began Friday’s report that spanned nine matches and a Latino opponent for every Filipino.

I marveled at the oddity of the entire event; balcony seats half-filled with credential-bearers whom I didn’t recognize, and below us that intriguing sunken ring.

Every American fighter wanted to be Muhammad Ali before he wanted to be Roy Jones Jr., but if you think those guys’ influences were heavy, wait till you see the next three generations of Filipinos; half are trained by Buboy Fernandez, all are southpaws that leap in with left crosses, and after winning, each folds gloves over closed eyes with an expression of tortured ecstasy on his face.

Z Gorres had won most of nine close rounds when he hit the 2:30 mark of the 10th, got hit by Luis Melendez, dropped, rose and finished by running and clutching.

I was writing a paragraph about the Gorres-Melendez result while looking at the ring between sentences and noticed the flag of the Philippines waving behind Gorres and then, one sentence later, saw paramedics rush towards the Gorres corner, and my first thought was “preexisting condition.”

The brutal efficiency of what Hugh McIlvanney calls “the hardest game” is such that – no sooner than the oxygen mask is in place, the gurney is wheeled out and another ambulance can be found – a boxing card marches along to the next fighter’s entrance music.

Hours later, as the night yawned its arms to 10 and 12, prizefighting’s best publicist folded one leg over the other and watched Friday’s ninth match from the bleachers, inconspicuous as always, unknowingly preparing himself to recount how his first credential put him so far from a field of play he could only guess what was happening while still feeling damn grateful.

I walked round the balcony and asked Lee Samuels if he had a status on Z Gorres, and when he didn’t I availed myself of as many off-the-record opinions as he wished to give; I didn’t remind him, because there’s no way he’d remember, that he was the man to hand me my first credential, at Fort McDowell Casino in Fountain Hills, Ariz., on April 5, 2005.

Top Rank is boxing’s best promoter because it is concerned with proficiency, not personality, and that’s why the question of what promotional outfit will outlive its founder can, itself, be reduced to a question: What promoter’s name bears no reference to its founder?

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter.com/bartbarry

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