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Saul Alvarez
SAN ANTONIO – Monday round 6:00 PM a large crowd awkwardly gathered round a stage awkwardly situated in the plaza that precedes Misión San Antonio de Valero, known today as the Alamo, and bent its collective neck in a variety of unnatural directions to catch glimpses of Mexican Saul “Canelo” Alvarez and American Floyd “Money” Mayweather, as they made what had become, with the day’s earlier cancellation of a Phoenix stop, the penultimate destination of a 10-city tour designed to announce “The One” and enrich those gathered onstage – except only One, Alvarez, was actually onstage, while One was, by his much later account, contending with a scheduling cross-up and a delayed flight and a family emergency in Houston.

The temperature was unseasonably cool, and as the media were seated beneath a famously large oak tree left of the stage, the only point of complaint at the open was the extraordinarily tall and robust speaker fewer than six feet from the press seats and given to pitiless eruptions whenever its deejay stopped spinning and welcomed his emcee to the microphone.

“My name is Tattoo Golden Boy Promotions,” the emcee announced, without inflection – too real for a comma – named, anyway, after an act Mayweather has often enjoyed.

Haranguing and Twitter-handling and hyping ensued, beseeching a crowd significantly smaller than announced, and significantly smaller still by the time it crescendoed at 7:53 PM with Mayweather’s arrival, to practice cheering the fighters’ processions along a carpeted ruby walkway. It was a curiously reflexive spectacle: townspeople gathered to be entertained by persons who will charge them to watch boxing on pay-per-view being put through rehearsals for how to act entertained, Monday. Of course, out of pomp’s context, the entire idea of a press conference with fewer than half its media-reserved seats filled, a press conference with a deejay and an emcee, for that matter, was an absurd spectacle nobody doing journalism 25 years ago would have recognized.

Mayweather’s tardy arrival afforded such observations; the hour that passed between Canelo’s terse greeting and Mayweather’s attempt at improvisation stripped the spectacle of its pomp, and therefore context, leaving a mostly bare stage, bored administrative types, a sheepish emcee, a humiliated CEO, a tired but seemingly amused television executive, and two prizefighters of Mexican origin, Alvarez then Oscar De La Hoya, who departed the event right about the time Mayweather’s flight departed Houston. It was De La Hoya, nobly enough, who had the least patience for his former rival’s antics. With no music or deejay onstage but a plethora of live mics, De La Hoya said to one of his employees at 6:39 PM: “He hasn’t even taken off yet?”

With that, a goodish number of those gathered made plans for takeoff. It was De La Hoya’s clearest moment. There is no chance he enjoys being onstage with Mayweather, not after the boorish way Mayweather comported himself on their 2007 press tour, the event that changed “Money’s” moniker and career entirely, and being stuck doing promotional work for Mayweather often leads De La Hoya to offer uncomfortable non sequiturs like: “I have to admit, I do miss the ring. That doesn’t mean I’m coming back. It means Canelo Alvarez is ‘The One’.”

The disjointedness, though, was not really even underway when De La Hoya went out the front entrance, signing autographs and looking both annoyed and apologetic. The disjointedness would come 75 minutes later when Mayweather led a diminished crowd through a few soggy bars of “Hard work! . . . Dedication!” then looked over his left shoulder at the Alamo and asked promoter Richard Schaefer, a Swiss national, to say the place they were gathered, to ensure it was pronounced correctly, before Mayweather rambled through a few lines about his wagering on the Spurs, before he rambled through the same lines again. It is not until one sees Mayweather in person, a 150-pound man with quick eyes and nervous mannerisms, so inept at ad-libbing that he fills time on the microphone telling assistants what great jobs they’re doing, that a person properly appreciates what a transformative power television wields.

Remaining media were invited backstage after a few more “Hard Work!” sing-alongs, and when television was done with its 16 minutes, print journalism got its six, and Mayweather got one serious question about a thing he said on one of Showtime’s infomercials for his May fight with Robert Guerrero – an uncannily insightful moment, when Mayweather talked about his time in jail, saying that while the incarcerated was supposed to be getting rehabilitated, all the incarcerated actually did was get angrier – a question treating the epidemic of young black men today being incarcerated for profit by America’s privatized prison system, and Mayweather’s potentially using his platform to address it. After smiling intermittently through the question, like a chess player watching a witless opponent attempt an unsophisticated trap, the man who sociology professor Michael Eric Dyson once allowed to compare himself to Muhammad Ali, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X explained he didn’t like to see anything as a “black thing” but rather saw his time in jail as evidence of things happening to a person in life, and that it was just a thing he had to get through.

It was a well-rehearsed, publicist-prepared answer for a gotcha question that was not asked – “Aren’t you setting a poor example?” – and a reminder to any parent who might mistakenly forego Charles Barkley’s 20-year-old advice and teach his children modern athletes are heroes: Barkley was both insightful and correct when he declared “I am not a role model,” and Barkley was much closer to being a role model than today’s best prizefighter.

Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com

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