Editor’s Note: For Part 1, click here.
The media center at a Vegas superfight is only a converted conference room, but it’s not till Sunday morning – when the meticulous overhaul is complete and no evidence of the previous week remains anywhere but on keycards left on bathroom countertops – that you realize that’s all it was; until then it’s a guarded fortress of camaraderie, ego and deadlines.
I arrived at the media center round noon the day of Pacquiao-Cotto, after retrieving my credential from will call, and the first person I saw was my friend, mentor and colleague Norm Frauenheim who noticed my credential was green like his, not red, and his face flashed amused relief; I’d be on the floor with my laptop to cover the pre-television undercard so he wouldn’t have to.
Whatever truism Lee Samuels had imparted the night before the fact remained that, all prestige aside, writing a report from auxiliary media, your overheating Dell laptop balanced on your actual lap, was much more of a feat than writing a report from ringside.
The Boxing Writers Association of America had scheduled its yearly West Coast meeting from 1- 3 p.m. at studio 8 on the Grand Garden Arena’s lower level, and if you’re wondering why Nov. 14 and not Sept. 19, friend, you’ve been hoodwinked by Money May into believing he might actually be the draw in a fight with Manny Pacquiao.
I joined the BWAA in 2009 after years of thinking it comprised solely East Coast guys giving one another awards in the provincial way of Northeasterners (I was born and raised in Massachusetts, calm down), and aside from June’s dinner in New York City, this was my first time round members that proved to be friendlier, funnier and more argumentative than expected.
They were from everywhere and worked harder than you’d think to make a ballot of nominees for the Al Buck and Marvin Kohn awards.
Back in the media center a vacuum of sorts happened the way it tends to happen; those writers charged with covering another interminable Vegas undercard shuffled out the door while those who wrote features for big publications were off napping or enjoying early dinners.
I was shuffling out the door myself when someone across the expansive room called “Bart!” and I turned to see Thomas Hauser, whose columns are the chronicles of this era most likely to endure; Hauser is taller, gentler and more eccentric in person than his writing makes me imagine him, and his role in maintaining some integrity in boxing is greater than Ali’s biographer or HBO’s watchdog.
Hauser’s schedule that Saturday was unlike any other writer’s – round the time television came on, he made his way to Pacquiao’s dressing room and took a don’t-speak-unless-spoken-to seat yards from the world’s most famous prizefighter.
MGM Grand’s was emptier than any arena you’ll ever see two matches into a card because that’s the way Vegas (high) rolls, and no-one watching its young prospects in a venue for 16,000 is the cost a promoter suffers for the site fee a casino will pay.
I arranged my laptop and bout sheet, verified the night’s Wi-Fi password and settled into the one-paragraph-per routine of undercard reporting and later learned that following @timdahlberg, @KevinI and @fightingwords2 – all tweeting from ringside – was more entertaining than the fights themselves.
Within the ropes another couple Filipinos – Richie Mepranum and Eden Sonsona – did Pacman impersonations in fights two and four and served as reminders of what impossible odds had brought a kid from General Santos City to what Pacquiao is today.
Julio Cesar Chavez’s filial epigone put the polish on another dreadful performance, and then the feral anticipation happened as it always does, this time with a video cone above the ring and an upgraded sound system that forced bass ruggedly through your chest.
I stopped in the madness of noise and light and adrenaline, as I try to do during ring walks, and let appreciation spread a smile on my face; in the tiny corner of the world that is prizefighting there was nowhere else to be, and I was there and grateful.
The fighters touched gloves, and the nervous roar that came next was the sort of thing that made Friedrich Nietzsche rejoice in the Dionysian 137 years before.
Cotto’s jab was too quick to register as anything but what made Pacquiao’s black wet hair snap backwards in the first six minutes.
I embraced the underdog for two rounds, keeping a mind open to the historic but not at the expense of the historical, recording in FightJournal.doc: “Cotto moved into Pacquiao’s attack and countered effectively. Close round, yes, but Cotto executed better and landed more punches (in round 1).”
Then the fourth happened, and Pacquiao had him ruined and retreating, and the spectacle was more gruesome on television, with its promiscuous close-ups, than from 30 feet away.
It was not the year’s best fight, but it was 2009’s biggest fight, one that would see more than 1.25 million Americans pay more than $50 each to see a 147-pound Filipino and a Puerto Rican – after neither guy promoted the fight in a fluent English tongue.
I made my way through the crush of people trying to get to the casino floor and took a detour at the media center where Yuri Foreman kept the podium warm till Pacquiao’s right ear was bandaged.
An HBO personality assured the overcrowded room he’d just heard from Golden Boy Promotions’ Richard Schaefer and, improbable as it sounded, negotiations for Pacquiao-Mayweather would commence on Monday with HBO’s full support; without an HBO escape clause Mayweather would have to make a real fight to make his next million dollars.
Then there were drinks with Norm at the Sports Book and the bracing wind outside that preceded a ride back to Planet Hollywood and the outline for Sunday’s column, always Sunday’s column.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter.com/bartbarry
[...] A mosaicked revisit to the year’s biggest fight – Part 2 | http://www.15rounds.com/a-mosaicked-revisit-to-the-year%E2%80%99s-biggest-fight-%E2%80%93-part-2-122309 – view page – cached Latest Boxing News, Results, and Rankings., Editor’s Note: For Part 1, click here. The media center at a Vegas superfight is only a converted conference room, but it’s not till Sunday morning – [...]