By Bart Barry
Saturday on BET, American super middleweight world champion Andre Ward made his much-needed return to boxing, stopping in the ninth round a hapless but stubborn Brit named Paul Smith, right about the time NBC served its viewers a terrible main event called “The Battle for Ohio”, from Las Vegas, that ended with welterweight Shawn Porter decisioning Adrien Broner by refreshingly wide scores. Before his match with Ward, Smith baldly missed weight and got himself beaten bloody for the indiscretion. Before their opening bell, Broner and Porter verbally antagonized one another, then spent 35 of 36 minutes hugging it out.
Adrien Broner’s defense is an atrocity. It took Marcos Maidana to indicate this a ways back, but Shawn Porter offered its definitive proof in round 1 of their Saturday scrum. After feinting Broner into a retreat – one doesn’t say Broner was feinted out of position, since, defensively, he’s never in position – Porter pursued Broner in a sort of relenting-wildman style Porter employed the entire match, and Broner, whose hands and feet obey autonomous, often-competing masters, leaped backwards and threw his arms directly upwards. When Porter’s punch landed and nearly touched the back of Broner’s head to his C1 vertebra, Broner had both white gloves overhead – in a feat of contorted defenselessness not seen in televised fighting since Marco Antonio Barrera slammed Naseem Hamed’s face on a Las Vegas turnbuckle 14 years ago.
Sensing his stick-em-up pose would not disarm Porter so much as a lackadaisical mugger, Broner immediately, and relentlessly, employed his backup plan: Unrepentant hugging. There’s a reason this worked, sapping Porter of what energy a formless volume puncher like him needs to be effective: Broner has disproportionate upperbody strength even for a welterweight (or whatever weight he now campaigns at). Porter badly wanted to punch Broner, but he was generally unable to, both because Porter is nearer to being bad at boxing than good, and because when Broner got his head and arms in a variety of grappling holds, Porter stopped churning his feet and merely tried to outwrestle Broner.
Before one criticizes Porter’s dad for not telling his son to free his hands with his feet, one pauses, in observance of both Fathers’ Day and regression to the mean, to impart: Andre Ward is just about the only athlete left in prizefighting who knows how to do this. Mediocre as his work may be with most everyone else he’s touched, trainer Virgil Hunter deserves much credit for what fantastic work he did teaching Ward how to fight.
How good it was to see Ward back in a prizefighting ring!
Rusty? Yup. Older? Sure. Less effective punching a cruiserweight than a super-middle? Of course. Likely to lose more than three rounds to Gennady Golovkin in a 12-round fight? No way.
Ward is a serious professional. It was a relief, in this sense at least, to see a man in an exhibition match who wouldn’t foul it up with hotdoggery, sloppiness or boredom. Ward punished Paul Smith for coming in at Chavezweight in his BET debut, also BET’s boxing debut; it was indeed cathartic, however cruel and misplaced the catharsis, to watch Ward make Smith repent for the ordeal of a prefight Nipsey Hussle concert.
Saturday, Nipsey stretched the boundaries of imitative talentlessness to a point at which they’d have snapped even 20 years ago; Nipsey Hussles have always existed, but hip-hop’s natural selection – or, heavens, any selection – did not accommodate them until recently. The nature of the hip-hop business is such that new acts must be discovered for each Tuesday release, and there are not, nor have there ever been, that many talented lyricists in America. (Friday evening in Dallas, LL Cool J will headline a show that features Big Daddy Kane and Doug E. Fresh and Whodini and Sugarhill Gang, and it’s instructive to ask, before the first Nipsey apologist draws breath: Is there another iteration of the known universe in which even a creative record-label executive imagines Nipsey Hussle headlining a concert in 2045?)
If these days I read like a curmudgeon, I’ve made my peace with it. The same element, time, that led a once-sprightly optimist to curmudgeonhood, anyway, is what, in part, PBC relied on to draw ratings for its godawful Saturday show. I watched the fights with a couple Puerto Rican friends from the boxing gym, and after fast-forwarding through much of the undercard offerings – NBC helpfully juxtaposed an excellent U.S. Olympian, Errol Spence, with a dreadful one, Terrell Gausha – we all kept reminding ourselves how wonderful it was this unwatchable bore of a main event was on free television, in an unthinking application of a childhood metric. In the digital era, network television mostly means more ads and scripts written round selling things, but for a certain, later portion of the demographic PBC aims at there is still nostalgic meaning in hearing an event will be broadcasted by NBC or CBS or ABC.
Take the pros with the cons, then, say the cons, because if they’re talking about us, they’re promoting us. True that. It’s one of only two things Broner did well Saturday – along with applying a left-hooked tag to Porter’s floating chin at the top of round 12: Respect the brand. Having lost widely to a competitor who lacks most every one of his gifts, Broner was reliably, and durably, self-aggrandizing in defeat. While intellectually incapable of aping anything else Floyd Mayweather tried to teach him, Broner unwaveringly applies one idea that enriched Money May: Tariffs exacted from men who wish to see my bitch ass beat to death look the same on a spreadsheet as fees gratefully paid by admirers.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry