Bart Barry-
A genuine pursuit of greatness is not exasperating. It may be breathtaking or ridiculous or sobering or exhilarating, but it may not be exasperating. What many of us sensed late Saturday night and early Sunday morning was exasperation: This was not the best you could do with the resources allotted you, so stop telling us it was.
Let this be a warning to Ukrainian prodigy Vasyl Lomachenko. If after you decimate limited men in American arenas you tell us in broken English you will fight anyone, you should mean it because eventually we will know if you didn’t. We now know it about Gennady Golovkin. We hope not to learn it about Lomachenko. But there are enough similarities between the men’s backgrounds, ascents and sources of popularity, and limited enough evidence of Lomachenko’s true ambition, to worry a bit.
I don’t know what’s going to happen Saturday when Lomachenko makes fists with Venezuelan lightweight champion Jorge Linares, a former prodigy, and was unsure enough to check betting odds before even typing this sentence. Oddsmakers have a professional obligation to weigh reality against publicity in a way the rest of us do not, and they’re not often seduced. Evidently they’re unconvinced by Linares’ recent farmleague showings and remember his being slapjiggled by Juan Carlos Salgado and bled by Antonio DeMarco and gaffherringed by Sergio Thompson.
Linares is The Ring’s lightweight champion, and that is meaningful, and he’s the most accomplished unsuspended fighter in the Golden Boy Promotions stable, which says little and even less when he’s only a nominal part of that stable. Linares has benefited greatly from HBO’s Canelo-retention moves – though still less than Danny Jacobs has benefited from the network’s AJ-capture gambit (though even Linares and Jacobs must’ve watched Saturday’s midnight snack with jaws agape at what lengths the network now goes for any fighter whose father once sang “Be Glorious, our free Motherland”) – but years before Canelo was a glimmer in Oscar De La Hoya’s eye HBO was hardselling Linares as the Golden Boy’s goldenest successor.
He surely wasn’t that. Now Linares is a hardened professional more than a gorgeous usurper and a tactician whose ferocious mien benefits appropriately from what rehabfare composes his diet for years and years after his each knockout loss. But here’s the thing: Linares is sorta precious the same way Lomachenko is sorta precious, and watching them punch one another should be fun. And Linares has been a 135-pound fighter punching and being punched by other 135-pound fighters five years longer than Lomachenko.
Lomachenko is way nearer his prime than Linares is, but if Linares is able to land a punch – and he may not be, according to Juan Carlos Salgado – he will strike Lomachenko with a quotient of force and accuracy Lomachenko has not yet felt. It is doubtful Lomachenko will next melt; Orlando Salido was about big as Linares when Salido made war on Lomachenko’s codpiece four years ago, and Lomachenko did not complain during or after. But he didn’t dance, either, did he?
There’s something frontrunnerish about what prizefighters come from the former Soviet Union – if they don’t quite fade in later rounds they’re neither known for their comebacks. If they know they’re superior when the first bell rings, they may be jab-and-grapplers (Wlad Klitschko) or tigers (Golovkin) or sociopaths (Sergey Kovalev) or performance artists (Lomachenko), but once their actual noses get punched by actual equals who actually know how, they let caution preside. Or as the kids might put it: They. Are. Not. Reckless.
Yes, comrades, I know there are deep cultural reasons for this, attributable to Lenin or Stalin or Collectivization or Glasnost, but before we virtuesignal about atrocities leading to cautiousness we might also, or at least coincidentally, consider Cold War bogeymen making for great modern marketing. All the guys mentioned above were considered great before they did anything to prove it. While boxing historians will someday marvel at Floyd Mayweather’s handicapping his way to an historic-looking resume they might also marvel at the way this era’s fighters from the former Soviet Union didn’t even have to bother.
In this sense Golovkin’s obliteration of Vanes Martirosyan on Saturday marks GGG’s signature win – seeing the middleweight titlist tear apart an unretired junior-middleweight sub reminded us all why we have whatever strong feelings we do about Golovkin’s reign. Those who believe Golovkin is way more than he actually is now tell themselves fairytales that begin like: “In his 40 previous fights Vanes Martirosyan had never been stopped . . .” The rest of us wonder how the fight even got licensed. Then we talk past one another and write for those who already agree with us.
To date Lomachenko has benefited from this dynamic but that might soon change. As he gets taken literally by his promoter and moved up in weight commensurate to his stated ambitions Lomachenko may soon find his accomplishments outpacing their praise. Top Rank, after all, just spent a dozen years promoting Manny Pacquiao; they know what it looks like when a man climbs weightclasses in pursuit of greatness, and they know there was an Erik Morales for every David Diaz, and they know we know the difference. They also know when they make real fights these days they get an extraordinary platform in primetime, and when they make balderdash they get remanded to an app. Lomachenko-Linares gets you 8-10 pm ET on ESPN, and less than Lomachenko-Linares gets you anytime on WiFi.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
