This is not a grateful farewell to Erik Morales. That column happened six years ago, when it was still merited. This, rather, is an acknowledgement “El Terrible” has fully amortized his legend and no more is due him. No longer must his failures in the ring be treated in reverent, hushed words wrapped with dignity. Anymore, the dignified aura Morales wears is a projection – some combination of a recently more approachable self when his gloves are off, and aficionados’ appreciativeness for what he gave us the first 50 matches of his career.
There was nothing dignified about Morales’ performance Saturday in the inaugural main event of Brooklyn, N.Y.’s Barclays Center, and there was nothing dignified about the maneuvering last week to ensure it went off. And there was nothing dignified – splendid, perhaps, but not dignified – about the way Danny “Swift” Garcia defended his junior welterweight titles by screwing Morales into the blue mat with a gorgeous left hook at 1:23 of round 4, after taking Morales’ measure in the final minute of the opening round by nimbly retreating from Morales and noticing he did not bother to give chase.
Morales is Erik the Terrible no longer. He is Erik the bloated, today, Erik the uninterested, Erik the mercenary, Erik the unmotivated salesman who tells you he’s got a product that sells itself. The “El Terrible” to remember and tell kids about ended his career with aplomb March 19, 2005. That night Morales, having lost the third match of his trilogy with Marco Antonio Barrera fewer than four months ago, beat back the man becoming known as “The Mexicutioner.” That night, in a show of mindless bravery, Morales, leading on all scorecards after 11 rounds, fought Manny Pacquiao as a southpaw for the 12th, an act in contemporary prizefighting without equivalent.
Since then Morales’ record in world title fights is 1-6. The best part of Morales’ career was over when Barrera was through with him, though no one suspected it. The prime Morales looked starved, his ribs countable on a skinny, almost weird body that conjured paeans to malnutrition more than athleticism. He looked frail enough for his fellow Mexicans to go for those ribs, and his liver, and get served right-uppercut counters unlike anything their palates knew before.
Within six months of his signature victory over Pacquiao, though, Morales’ face was puffy in a way it has been ever since, flesh glommed onto the pits where his cheeks were once hollow – when his lightweight debut saw him undressed by Philadelphian Zahir Raheem. Saturday it was Garcia, a different Philadelphian, who undressed him. More accurately: Morales got stripped, not undressed, Saturday, the remnants of his greatness in a prizefighting ring yanked from one arm, spinning him rightwards, then snapped off his legs, spinning him left.
In a merciful twist Morales should find absurd on reflection, the lower two ropes preserved years on the end of his life. Had Garcia’s seeing-eye left hook caught Morales in the center of the ring, Morales’ torqued shoulders would have pushed into the blue mat and bounced the back of his head off of padded plywood, jostling his brain and ageing it still further. The knockout was violent enough to bring Morales’ chief second rushing at the same ropes that now tangled his charge and struggling through them as the 10-count commenced. If Morales wanted an exclamation point on the end of a sentence that told him to give up boxing, Garcia put two punctuation marks on it in homage to their Spanish heritage: ¡Retírate ya!
It is no longer easy to doubt Morales’ capacity for absurdity as it once was, because Morales is no longer as honest a prizefighter as he once was. There was a time his then-promoter Bob Arum rightly compared El Terrible to Marvelous Marvin Hagler – a professional who showed up and fought whomever under whatever circumstances. There was a refreshing obliviousness about Morales then; if he knew what others opined of him, he did not let on. He has long been more self-aware than that, long been fluent enough in English to know exactly what is written and said of him and react to it, but this awareness of himself as a legendary figure whom tradition stopped constraining years ago, the awareness he now brings beneath a layer of fat to each weighin, is unseemly.
Did he take the banned substance clenbuterol to suppress his appetite during training camp – as U.S. Anti-Doping Agency’s samples A and B and C and D but apparently not E and F indicated last week? More must be learned on that score, but no disinterested observer can put banned substances outside the reach of any modern athlete, much less one whose name has long cashed checks his body was unable to cover. Most disinterested observers should admit, too, American sportsfans don’t care a bit about PEDs, deep down, as the NFL’s popularity in America would be said to have grown proportionately with its players – had the league’s 53,200-percent increase in 300-pound players between 1970 and 2010 not made that a mathematical impossibility.
Nutritional pharmacology is a science like economics, not physics – filled, that is, with invented constructs, like “metabolism” and “caloric value,” used to obfuscate more than clarify – but this much about the effects of central nervous system (CNS) stimulants like clenbuterol can be proved: They suppress appetite and race the heart. Coming off them, though, is a horror of deep headaches and malaise. It is an understatement, indeed, to say a suddenly clean athlete whose body has acclimated itself to CNS-stimulant use might begin a competition, or even the perusal of a morning newspaper, “sluggishly.”
Would clenbuterol, known colloquially as “clen” in boxing gyms everywhere, make it easier for an aged fighter like Morales to starve himself but still have adequate energy and concentration for the daily toil and boredom of a training camp?
Does Antonio Margarito like ephedrine with his coffee?
Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com
