By Bart Barry-
ARLINGTON, Texas – Saturday in the middle of AT&T Stadium in the middle of the DFW metroplex welterweight titlist Errol Spence beat lightweight titlist Mikey Garcia 36-0 on official scorecards, 37-0 if you count one scorekeeper’s view of a latemiddle round. Accurate tallies, both.
It was a Spence masterpiece until the 11th round ended with Garcia still conscious. After that began the doubts, the narrative’s rewriting, after that began the deeper suspicion on his finest night Spence was not quite Bud Crawford, whose name should not be spoken.
Spence had not before faced an opponent of Garcia’s talent and craft, and Crawford still hasn’t and likely won’t, but Spence fought Garcia with a civility, a decency, a compassion, even, a quarter, finally, Crawford affords no opponent. This makes Spence a lighter soul, a more marketable product, a person you’d rather like to meet, but it makes him less of the one thing anyone reading this wants in his favorite prizefighter.
Indulge a thought experiment: What might Crawford have done otherwise, immediately before or after the 11th round? It’s in the eyes and where Crawford’d’ve set his. Not on the Garcia he was wounding with nearly every punch but on the Garcia manning the corner’s cotton. Crawford would’ve said with his eyes and voice, if his eyes were not emphatic enough, “Robert, I am going to spike your little brother till it spikes your conscience – I am going to break your will, not Mikey’s.”
Spence is everything most want in a prizefighter and promises many joys to come, but he is an athlete-specialist, not a predator. Would he be specialist enough to beat Crawford? I’m not sure he wouldn’t, but at ringside I was sure he would be until halfway through Saturday’s final round. He had a dispirited and physically reduced little man in front of him and an older brother trainer who’d floated the idea of flying the white feather eight minutes earlier, and instead of snatching consciousness with a proper dose of cruelty Spence went sweet on us.
My work is done here, he said, à la Money May; let’s use this time to prep the postfight interview and revel in my accomplishment. It was an acceptable and marketable thing to do, and if we’re honest, such relentfulness likely matchmade a payday with Manny Pacquiao (a man with enough bonedeep cruelty to steel via transfusion the entire PBC stable, lightweight to heavy), but it was disappointing to those know who what’s what.
It was a signature PBC fight in that sense. Little blood, gloves a bit too big. Safe boxing, as it were. There’s something still sanitized about PBC fare, an abiding sense, even at ringside, none of the anointed ones is in true danger. Mikey took the sort of sustained abuse that writes neurology whitepapers 20 years hence but suffered none of what gore’d make Fox Sports reconsider its recent investment.
Let’s precede the next turn like this: PBC has improved considerably its relationship with print media, largely by hiring retired newspapermen, and to imply writers were treated less than fantastically Saturday in AT&T Stadium would be inaccurate as it were ungrateful. But the outfit’s mysterious figurehead was invisible as usual and inaccessible as ever. And his absence brought a postfight thought like: He’s not a violent man, he doesn’t want violence in his life, and he signs fighters according to every criterion save savagery.
All the stable staples were ringside for the main: Floyd, a purple and bedizened toddler; AB, a gleeful rogue in pink, trailed by Gervonta and a greenhaired date; Leprechaun Shawn; Manny, declawed and spacey; the Brothers Charlo, lion tamers more than lions; Deontay, garishly garnished, unable to stop smiling. For edgy you had to look in the cheaper seats and see the elder Benavidez brother – but we know how Bud did him.
It was pleasantly safe the whole night. A better, more committed writer – hell, even this writer 10 years ago – might impart this was not as things should be, but again, the whole night was too pleasant to notice. PBC is a socioeconomic achievement in that sense, too, and an intentional one, one suspects. To have so many men whom the (white) American imagination makes so dangerous assembled in a small space, at the center of which actual violence is the point, and have it blanketed by appreciable calm and fun was at least a part of Al Haymon’s original vision. For it could not be accidentally so.
It really was fun during the ringwalks, too. There’s nothing like the energy of the stadium ringwalk, tens of thousands of lubricated throats and psyches foreplayed into a froth by undercard mismatches and earsplitting technobeats, rising as one in the ecstasy of anticipated violence. Mikey’s mariachi production and glinting eye; Errol’s marching band; both men making a much longer walk through a crowd much longer assembled than anything a casino could host.
The main event that followed was nearer a dud than a classic, true, but that was attributable to every reason every one of us thought the hour the fight was announced and dutifully went about forgetting in the months that followed. Spence was quicker than the man Mikey prepared for; a regimen of adding weight and sparring weighty men did as it ever does, putting weight on Mikey’s chin, not his fists, but quickly it made perfect sense no sparring partner big or bigger than Spence would have the Texan’s reflexes – else that man would be a world champion, not a sparring partner. By round 3 it was not a question of whether Spence would beat the 147-pound Garcia 12 times of 10 but whether, in a hypothetical tilt for Mikey’s lightweight title, Spence wouldn’t be the favorite there as well, so much better were Errol’s reflexes and footwork and accuracy than Garcia’s.
What Spence revealed in Garcia was an excellent technician of exceptional power (below 140 pounds) whose skills were actually orthodox and basic as suspected. The lesser man in size and strength, precision and mobility, Mikey had, by round 9, nothing on which to depend but his whiskers and Spence’s mercy. And blessed he was with both.
While his older brother and protector, dullfaced and resigned, watched silently in the corner.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
