By Bart Barry–
Saturday in Birmingham, Alabamian heavyweight Deontay Wilder brought la ruine to Frenchman Johann Duhaupas, stopping him in round 11. What follows is a transcript of my thoughts during the match:
Wilder is so tall. The Alabama fans seem uncertain when to cheer. What to do, what to do: Rush Wilder to the Klitschko cashout quickly, knowing any top-10 heavyweight might end the Wilder fantasy before you liquorstore that winning ticket, or continue googling “big tough guy France Sweden Belgium Netherlands Norway Ireland Scotland Switzerland” and see how enduringly gullible Alabamians are? Probably the first time attending a fight for most of them. Like American tourists watching the gold-medal hockey game, Canada vs. USA, in a Puerto Vallarta bar. The French guy is stretching in the corner like a nervous plumper in the weightroom his first day, that odd, shoulders-like-scissors thing they do just before their buddy makes them move weight with muscles that have nothing to do with shoulders or scissors. Wilder is tall and tall. But if human cognition is about pattern completion, not pattern recognition, that works as a decent model for explaining how machine learning stalled so long ago. Like so many guys in this dreadful era, Wilder can attack or defend, but his transition between the two requires a hanging, empty space wherein his brain audibly changes settings. Maybe, like that British art essayist posited about the appeal of Edvard Munch’s paintings, what people like most about Wilder is an abiding belief that, if they were tall and violent, they, too, could be WBC heavyweight champions. Could Klitschko stop Wilder in one round? one minute? The Frenchman is actually touching Wilder here. But if Wilder can hold on to the belt, maybe post a decision win against Alexander Povetkin – goodness, that feels unlikely – and then cashout against Klitschko in another three years, when Klitschko is too old to hurt him too badly? The thing about entropy is that most calculations treat its potential, not its existence. How does Wilder not break his right hand lashing it on the tops of guys heads? Too facile a metaphor, that one. NBC has conceded the entire cable model with this well-functioning app; why would anyone pay for cable now that live sports look this good? Wilder’s defense is that he’s tall. There he goes whipping rights and lefts. Most of his offense, too. Bless Wilder’s heart for not having a plan b, or even a plan a+1/2; he’s going to wing those punches, and if the opponent’s guard or head gets in the way, all the better, a direct hit to the chin is quite unlikely, but there’s something attractive about his singlemindedness. Wilder is confident. When aficionados preamble through a Wilder speech like “He may never be great, but”, it’s sensible as a 5-foot-6 45-year-old who hasn’t played basketball since junior-high gym class saying, “I may never make it to the NBA, but”. An American Olympic medalist who is good looking, athletic and 6-foot-7: it sounds so compelling, doesn’t it? Think what a boost Vitali got from losing to Lennox Lewis. And yet, by and large, Wilder is considered a fraud by aficionados. That loss changed the world’s view of the Klitschkos. Wilder’s confidence is a function of his being undefeated. He has the same Olympic medal as Floyd Mayweather, and he saw Vasyl Lomachenko win gold that same week, so he knows what good boxing looks like enough to know he isn’t it. All that was then required of Wlad was surviving Samuel Peter, barely, and the Klitschko legend blossomed – in Europe at least. In defense of the PBC, if Main Events had an Alabamian fighting before a hometown crowd, wouldn’t we be making greater allowances – talking about competitiveness and sturdy matchmaking with unknown European jewels like this Frenchman? If human actions are governed by mental processes additional to self-interest, if something like, say, altruism actually fires and clears the action threshold, what does that do for empathy? Is empathy even possible when we add more than self-interest to our analyses of strangers’ behaviors? Must be the inauthenticity thing again. The screen splash, at least, read “title holder”, not champion, and that feels like an altruistic concession to aficionados. This person across from me is not crying because she’s sad; she’s crying because, in causing me to look at her she averts my stare from a different woman at the bar, one she knows to have filed a paternity case against a different guy she met at a different bar, all the while signalling with her tears a willingness to accept the apology just offered by the woman, her sister maybe, seated beside her – is there any way, even with so much detail, one might empathize with her? “Duhaupas bomaye!” – leave it to @JohnPaulFutbol. Wilder’s secret to healthy hands is never landing with the same knuckle twice. His inaccuracy is his self-preservation, the way someone who doesn’t know how to type, no matter how many thousands of hours he spends at a keyboard, never develops carpal tunnel syndrome; his incompetence at doing something the proper way protects him from what ailments befall competent performers. A ratings victory. Watching a heavyweight title match at a bar on my cellphone: that feels apt – viewing on a mobile device with a tiny screen only because it’s convenient.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
