As Cristian Mijares walks to the ring, trades punches with an opponent or conducts an interview, one side of his mouth rises higher than the other. His eyes twinkle. Mijares’ expression says everything is OK. Nothing has happened here that I didn’t plan.
It’s not a sneer. Not Mike Tyson’s glare of the unreformed psychopath. Or Floyd Mayweather’s almost-tearful grimace. It’s a smirk. It’s more than playful, less than menacing. Call it knowing. Mijares’ knowing smirk.
Saturday night, he had reason to wear it. Before an estimated crowd of 12,000 in his Mexican hometown, Mijares decisioned Venezuela’s Alexander Munoz. Mijares now wears the WBC and WBA super flyweight belts. He’s not only the world’s best 115-pound prizefighter, he’s also one of the world’s 10 best fighters, pound-for-pound.
Ringside judges were split. The judge living closest to Venezuela, Panamanian Gustavo Padilla, saw the fight 115-113 for Munoz. The two American judges saw it 116-111 and 115-112 for Mijares.
My card also went for Mijares, 116-111. I gave Rounds 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 to Mijares. I had Rounds 1, 2, 3 and 7 for Munoz. Because of a penalty to Munoz, Round 6 was 10-8.
Some who watched Saturday’s fight were frustrated by the closeness of the judges’ verdict. All who watched Saturday’s fight are frustrated by the small American audience it undoubtedly garnered. Oscar de la Hoya’s and Wladimir Klitschko’s recent sparring sessions have attracted millions of HBO viewers while this unification fight went largely unnoticed. Such frustration is understandable but ultimately futile. Something we’ll revisit later.
Saturday’s fight was compelling but not Mijares’ best. That speaks to Munoz’s craftsmanship. Until Mijares has solved an opponent, he clinches and studies. But he doesn’t run. Mijares goes forward when in doubt. He uses his shoulders and head to ensure an opponent’s leverage is not quite right, his feet never quite set.
Then Mijares makes you miss. Once he has a workable model of your offensive moves, he stops letting you hit him. That’s an essential difference between his defense and others’. Mijares does not catch punches on his shoulders, forearms and elbows. With Mijares you hit only air.
Hitting only air is the one debilitating thing a prizefighter can’t train for. There’s no exercise in the gym that prepares him to stop his own fully committed punches. Every punch is thrown with the assumption that someone else will stop it. When a fighter’s muscles and joints have to do the job of pulling punches out of the air, rather than simply pushing them into the air, things get painful and discouraging.
If points should ever be awarded for defense alone, Mijares’ style merits it. Allowing another man to slug at your wrists, arms and shoulders — on the logic that he’s not hitting your chin or liver — does not deserve favorable scoring. But having a man break his tendons and spirit, missing you, probably does.
How Mijares accomplishes this makes him special. At first, he looks to have an amazing sense of anticipation. He appears to guess what his opponent is about to do just as his opponent decides to do it. But a closer look reveals more. Mijares knows what punch is about to come at him because it is the punch he tells his opponent to throw.
How does he tell him? By providing targets that championship prizefighters tend to hit hard. From his southpaw stance, Mijares throws a straight left. Then, instead of returning to position, he leaves his body uncoiled. His left arm wraps across his torso. Mijares’ closed left shoulder tells his opponent the combination is done. The opponent automatically loads his own right cross.
Then Mijares bends at the waist, slips under the punch and returns to his southpaw stance. The opponent’s whole world is behind a right cross that fails to hit anything at all. Now the right shoulder has to keep his arm from sailing into the third row. That doesn’t just hurt one’s pride.
Once he has you tired and discouraged, Mijares begins to throw straight, accurate punches. If you are a slugger, he takes away your identity and punishes you for relinquishing it. All the while he smirks at you.
Jorge Arce knows about this. He too was in action on a small pay-per-view show Saturday. He escaped with a close unanimous decision against Devid Lookmahanak. That makes Arce the mandatory challenger for Mijares’ WBC super flyweight belt. Great for him.
Remember the Alamo? Thirteen months ago, Arce was on his way to becoming Mexico’s most popular fighter. He went to San Antonio and tried to take Mijares’ WBC belt. That went very poorly. Afterwards there was an exchange Arce’s handlers would do well to consider before enforcing any mandatory challenges. It went something like this.
Arce: He fought a good fight. I hope he’ll eventually give me a rematch.
Mijares: I will be happy to give you a rematch immediately.
Arce: I said eventually!
That night, like most others in his career, Mijares had faced an opponent who fought under the illusion of his own volition. Arce was game as hell, just like Munoz. But both did what Mijares told them to do, all the while thinking they were wearing Mijares down.
And about being worn down: That’s how serious fans felt last week. They knew they had the genuine article at a bargain. Mijares would be fighting on TV for $30. But their American friends wanted no part of chipping-in to buy the pay-per-view fight. Heck, they didn’t even want to come over for free. Not to watch two 115-pounders. Their loss.
Appreciation for Mijares is a new line of demarcation — serious fans to one side. Leave the others to get excited about boxing personalities and ceremony. We know we have a gem. Cristian Mijares is something to smirk knowingly about.