DALLAS – Four miles north of this city’s Main Street District, on Southern Methodist University’s beautiful campus, stands Meadows Museum – a collection of Spanish art so extensive it fulfills founder Algur H. Meadows’ vision of a “Prado on the Prairie.” Complementing perhaps the finest collection of Diego Velazquez’s work outside Madrid are works by Spanish masters Murillo, Goya and El Greco. Here hangs, as well, an excellent Fernando Yanez work of Saint Sebastian, cheekily called “the pin-cushion saint” by art students.
Sebastian, a third-century Christian martyr, was a subject treated often by Renaissance painters and always with arrows piercing his body. Tradition says those arrows represent pestilence. Martyrdom, pestilence and masterpieces compose a vantage fitting as any from which to preview Saturday’s undercard scrap between Colorado’s Mike Alvarado and California’s Brandon Rios, a junior-welterweight title-eliminator match that will begin HBO’s “Boxing After Dark” program. It is a fight to which both men seem eager to martyr themselves, a fight to rid boxing briefly of its pestilence, and a fight more likely to become a masterpiece than any this year or next.
Beside my laptop sits a six-year-old media credential that acts as a reminder Mike Alvarado was once something quite different from what he is today. On June 2, 2006, Alvarado represented a future of sorts for his promoter, Top Rank. That night in Tucson, Ariz., at a venue called Club Envy, Alvarado was the main event even if he wasn’t in the main event.
The night’s final match, actually, was Jesus Soto-Karass against “Cool” Vince Phillips in a brutal fight broadcasted by Telefutura’s once-invaluable “Solo Boxeo” program. Soto-Karass beat down the man who stopped hall of famer Kostya Tszyu in 1997 – and yes, Phillips, himself, is on this year’s ballot – in a fashion so assiduous and harsh Phillips tried to retire immediately afterwards. Programming issues, though, prevented Phillips’ public retirement, and so, unsurprisingly, Phillips was back in a prizefighting ring, this time in Russia, one year later.
But my credential makes no reference to Phillips or Soto-Karass. It emphasizes boxing, Top Rank and Mike Alvarado – in order of font size. Alvarado went through a welterweight target named Maximino Cuevas that night, stopping the overmatched New Yorker in round 5. One paragraph about Alvarez from the Tucson report stands out:
“Despite absorbing a number of right hands in the first round, Mike Alvarado quickly adjusted to Cuevas’s style by the start of the second, allowing more distance and landing straight punches. In the closing moments of Round 2, Alvarado rocked Cuevas with a fierce right uppercut that was the fight’s best punch.”
Two notes: 1. Six years ago Alvarado was open to right hands as he is today, and 2. Alvarado’s arsenal included, and one assumes still does, a fight-changing right uppercut. That is germane to Saturday’s match because the right uppercut is not a punch anyone but the peerless Juan Manuel Marquez throws as a lead. It is ever a counter, one thrown at a volume-punching aggressor who unadvisedly gets his weight over the lead knee. It is a punch executed by taking a quick hop backwards, planting one’s right elbow just about on the right hip and shooting both upwards at once. The counter right uppercut is devastating for a volume puncher – the one blow they all fear. It requires of its thrower poise enough to take a hop backwards, geometric awareness enough to establish a tempting plain for the aggressor to stretch himself over, and timing enough to drop that aggressor’s chin on an upcoming fist.
In 2006, after only 28 months of prizefighting, Mike Alvarado’s record was 14-0. Seventy-six months later, Alvarado’s record is 33-0. This dramatically slowed rate is attributable, in part, to time Alvarado spent in jail. His career has been a disappointment. He is 32 years old, which surprises fans who believe they’ve made the discovery of a new action fighter. Alvarado is more exciting than ever, now, because he has to be.
He and Brandon Rios are the sorts of fighters Top Rank makes an industry of. They are the prizefighters Bob Arum threatens other fighters with, the way he shook Antonio Margarito, like a fist, at Jose Luis Castillo when the latter got his rubber match with Diego Corrales canceled because of twice missing weight.
If that sounds at all familiar, it is because twice is how many times Rios has missed the lightweight limit of 135 pounds since ruining Urbano Antillon in July 2011. Remember, the plan was for Rios to fight Juan Manuel Marquez in Cowboys Stadium three months ago, not Mike Alvarado in a co-main event on the tennis courts of Home Depot Center.
Alvarado can outbox Rios because Alvarado is a better athlete than Rios and because, as Richard Abril demonstrated in April, Rios can be thoroughly outboxed. Whatever his amateur pedigree, Rios’ ring IQ is questionable. Alvarado chooses to make savagery with others because he has to, Rios because he can – for when he has to, as he did against Abril, Rios often trips over himself. Alvarado represents for Rios his largest opponent; Rios represents for Alvarado his best.
Both men need redemption. Their fight is, in essence, Margarito versus Margarito – and promises to be that entertaining. In redeeming themselves through suffering, in absorbing abuse that will probably shorten their lives and invariably compromise what health they take to retirement, Alvarado and Rios will also, like Saint Sebastian, rid us of the pestilence that adheres to our sport – for a spell anyway.
I’ll take Alvarado, MD-12, in a savage affair that redeems both men.
Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com
