By Bart Barry–
Saturday at the newly reopened Forum in Inglewood, Calif., Mexican “Dinamita” Juan Manuel Marquez and Colorado’s “Mile High” Mike Alvarado engaged in a fight entertaining as any that ends with one guy besting the other by wide, unanimous scores, the way Marquez bested Alvarado. It was an engrossing if ultimately inconsequential tilt that approached today’s premium-cable-prizefight definition of transcendent: The favorite was knocked-down, and genuinely tested, if only for a round or two.
These days, even the threat of such belligerent happenings usually lands a fight on pay-per-view, and an annual calendar of five or six pay-per-view events says all that needs saying about how often competitive, elite-level fights even get threatened.
If you do not love to watch Juan Manual Marquez fight, you do not love boxing. You may have favorites whom you prefer to watch, but if boxing is what you derive your joy from, if boxing is the entity that takes your life into the present tense, that cleansing place, you love watching Marquez in a prizefight. If ethnic considerations or rivalries or the like preclude you from being enchanted by the spectacle of Marquez plying his craft, it evinces no fault of character – boxing just isn’t what you love.
Every punch with Marquez is a personal event, a thing in which he personally invests, whether landing or being landed upon. He is predatory in a way few other men are predatory; he is predatory even by a standard set by those who make their livings hurting other men in sport’s most intimate way. He is a meanspirited perfectionist, a man, one gathers, who has acquaintances more than friends and loves what few others he loves in the perfunctory way Mexican culture demands he love them. In his treatment of opponents, he has an offensive brilliance exceeded only by Mayweather’s defensive mastery, among contemporaries, and in the public personality that boxing has given him, he is Bernard Hopkins sans charisma and verbosity.
He is not surly, quite, but that is a calculation; his surliness and trainer Nacho Beristain’s tutorial surliness once landed them in Tenggarong, Kutai Kartanegara, Indonesia, eight years ago, across from Chris John, for a purse that wouldn’t cover Floyd Mayweather’s weekend earbuds budget. Marquez is now something of a Spanish-television personality, and while he cannot help but be honest when treating matters of his own fights, he otherwise does a passable impersonation of every other ESPN flummery boiler, never anticipating an upcoming fight’s inevitable dullness.
Mike Alvarado understood the stakes Saturday: If he got stretched, he was off premium cable for life; if he could stay conscious for all 36 minutes, regardless of the assault visited upon him by a master pugilist, he had a decent shot of economic realities prompting his promoter to propose him for a last profitable purpling on HBO. But Alvarado did not catch Marquez repeatedly with a jab merely because Marquez, three months from his 41st birthday, has reflexes eroded slowly by time and combat but also because Alvarado is an excellent athlete who’s never had trouble jabbing an opponent effectively.
If Alvarado’s ability to touch Marquez with nearly every jab the Coloradoan tossed Dinamita’s way was not surprising as Marcos Maidana’s recent outjabbing of Floyd Mayweather, it was nevertheless at least as surprising as a training camp strategy that treated Alvarado’s jabbing and Alvarado’s winging right crosses but evidently not Alvarado’s ever mixing those traditionally harmonious elements together. Being generous, one might assume Alvarado’s corner knew their guy would get countered savagely by Marquez if Alvarado threw more than one punch at a time, but irony happened to dictate thusly: Alvarado’s best moments were in the frantic exchanges – as they ever compose Pacquiao’s best moments with Marquez – when Marquez’s pathological need to land an exchange’s final punch left him open in a way no lead punch of any kind from any one ever would find him.
Alvarado dropped Marquez in round 9 and buckled him a few minutes later with counterpunches. Their other, earlier exchanges, though, were a bit more telling: For once, Marquez voluntarily disengaged from sustained volleys, pivoting away and ducking Alvarado’s right hands, in a way he’d not done even against the much larger Mayweather in 2009 or the much faster Pacquiao in 2004, 2008, 2011 or 2012 (or the end of 2014).
No one in boxing, perhaps no other athlete in any sport, discovers better the fissures in another man’s façade than Marquez, or calibrates the circumstances most likely to convert them to suppurating crevices. Whatever permanent damage Ruslan Provodnikov visited on Alvarado’s spirit and brain in October, this remains true: But for the instant at the end of round 8, after Alvarado pulled himself back through the ropes and onto the canvas, rose uncertainly and trudged resignedly forward, an instant that followed a gorgeous right cross from Marquez, an instant that – were it merely 14 instants larger – would have seen Alvarado’s consciousness snatched from him by prizefighting’s greatest closer, Marquez saw a resilience in Alvarado he did not expect to see, a resilience that surely left Marquez’s fists painfully tender on Sunday morning. That the man who, with a single punch, temporarily suspended Pacquiao between the living and the dead could strike Alvarado crisply and precisely and sustainedly for 12 rounds, while leaving him fit to continue in a way he was not against Provodnikov, surely was not lost on promoter Top Rank’s matchmakers.
Provodnikov will see a five-division-catchweight match with Guillermo Rigondeaux before he’ll ever be allowed near Pacquiao.
Which is fine, frankly, because the makeable match that is most desirable today is a fifth Marquez-Pacquiao fight, one that will see the men’s diminished reflexes and enhanced familiarity – and all the contempt that engenders – provide a violent and vengeful spectacle that ends with one of them unconscious, and the other vindicated evermore.
Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com
