By Bart Barry (For the final time)–

Editor’s note: After 16 years of boxing writing, Bart Barry now retires.  As we’ve allowed him a space for interviewing himself about the craft each year of the last five, we believe this is the best way for him to explain his departure.

BB: Promise our readers this isn’t about current events.

BB: It surely is not.  It isn’t about exhaustion, either.  It’s about logistics.  A simple lack of electricity for the foreseeable future.

BB: In these United States of America in the year 2021?

BB: No more USA.  By this time next week, as you know, we’ll be fully relocated to a very small, mostly indigenous town in the mountains of Mexico’s southernmost state.  There’s not yet reliable electricity there – no internet, no way to watch fights, no WiFi for miles.

BB: No sense in the hoopsjumping needed?

BB: None.  This has been a fantastic run with wonderful people and asking more would evince greed.  We’re taught, as contemporary Americans, maybe contemporary humans, even –

BB: Cut the prepositions.

BB: – there’s no easing the wrists while there’s milk yet to be wrung.  Thank you, no.  When coincidence intervenes and gives you a chance to be grateful and leave gracefully, there’s no inquisition.

BB: This won’t be a grievance-filled greatest-hits piece?

BB: No, certainly not.

BB: Why now?

BB: Blood pressure and cryptocurrency.  Last Thanksgiving, after an impressive bit of lockdown weightgain and a right miserable stretch at the day job –

BB: Data analytics?

BB: At a large bank, yes.

BB: Carry on.

BB: A trip to the dentist uncovered dangerously high blood pressure.  It was serious enough for me to write letters to my wife, daughter and son, last testaments more than wills, that discovered for me I hadn’t one more item on the to-do list.  Helping my wife build a house in the mountains of her home country was the last goal I had.  From there, in other words, there was only existing.

BB: Without regrets.

BB: There was a place to live, now, and 25 years of frustration and bad timing in the stock market finally hit with Ether cryptocurrency.

BB: Something we wrote about a few years ago.

BB: In part, yes.  I was enchanted by its frictionlessness back then.  And decentralization.

BB: Not any more?

BB: Now it’s more about an unfinished thought I have that combines lots of complexity reasoning and cooperation and the enduring failure of economics –

BB: Its illusion of precision.

BB: That there’s immense value out there, outside what the U.S. dollar captures.  Vaporware built on dog memes, intrinsically, is no more absurd than green pieces of paper with dead men’s faces on them.  Supporting the former, wethinks, makes more sense than dying for the latter.

BB: Sounds partially finished, anyway.

BB: It’s a thought I can see out the window and across the street.  I want to hold it.  But it’s much farther than my arm can stretch.

BB: Do you think there’s any chance you’ll grasp it if you stop writing?

BB: No, I do not.  I am OK with that.

BB: Isn’t that complacent?

BB: It may be, yes.  I can accept that.  The compulsion, the gnawing sense I have a talent I’ve not justified, is gone now.

BB: What will you miss about this?

BB: The people.  Being ringside.  The routine.

BB: That’s all?

BB: This is harder than expected.

BB: We’re already retired.

BB: I think so, yes.  When a fighter announces his retirement immediately after losing, we know, he retired during training camp.

BB: Now we’ve just wasted 70 minutes looking for a picture of you and Norm (Frauenheim) and Roberto Duran from 2006.

BB: Turns out, that’s my favorite memory in 16 years of writing about our beloved sport.  It happened so early, too.  It was a midday press conference at a Phoenix hotel.  Duran was part of a shortlived outfit called DRL Promotions.  There was a different press conference for the Coyotes hockey club or something, too, that same afternoon.  So nobody showed up.  Except for Arizona boxing’s one legendary writer and Manos de Piedra.  Norm interviewed him, and I translated, and I recall thinking, in the moment, the experience exceeded all expectations I had when I started writing about the sport.

BB: Gratitude, in other words.

BB: Yes.  In real-time.  That’s good as life gets.

BB: Other memories to recount?

BB: Don’t want to do that.  I’ll forget some and feel I’ve offended someone.

BB: OK, what’s the hardest you laughed at ringside?

BB: Tom (Hauser) recounted some absurd tale to me about a fan approaching Steve Albert on the street and telling him how much he loved his work, only to be surprised to learn Albert was on TV.  I still laugh at that sometimes.  I don’t know why it remains so funny – probably Tom’s delivery.

BB: Best fight you covered from ringside?

BB: Would have to be Vazquez-Marquez 3 in Carson, Calif., wouldn’t it?

BB: Sure.

BB: Or Marquez-Diaz 1 in Houston.  Sitting between Doug (Fischer) and Steve (Kim), two guys whose work at MaxBoxing inspired so many of us, and thinking Nacho would have to stop the fight to save Marquez from himself.

BB: What about Margarito-Cotto 1?

BB: That was sensational, but the memory got sullied later.  Marquez-Pacquiao 4 is another candidate.

BB: Marquez turns up a lot.

BB: I guess he’s the fighter I most wanted a prizefighter to be.  The synonym for me.  Though Izzy Vazquez is the person I most wanted a prizefighter to be.

BB: No heavyweights for the casuals?

BB: I didn’t cover a great era.  Or even a very good one.  The current guys are entertaining, I guess, but you can’t set them beside Pacquiao or Marquez.

BB: There was Briggs-Liakhovich at Bank One Ballpark.

BB: Yes there was.

BB: How shall we end?

BB: I was read by writers I admire – my greatest accomplishment.

BB: Some ending gratitude?

BB: To Bob Benedetti, my first editor and publisher; to John Raygoza, for creating 15rounds.com and taking me with him to Desert Diamond Casino; to Phil Soto and Lee Samuels, for my first credential; to Tom Hauser for inviting me to write a book with him; to Norm Frauenheim for being a genuine and wonderful mentor; and finally, to Marc Abrams, without whom none of these last 15 years could’ve happened.

*

To acquire the only signed first draft of this last column, as an NFT, click here.

By Bart Barry-

Saturday on ESPN in an entertaining and honest title fight at an Oklahoma casino New York light heavyweight Joe Smith Jr. majority-decisioned Russia’s Maxim Vlasov by fair scores that would have been just as fair and exactly opposite had they happened in Russia.  Neither man claimed the other’s consciousness, which means no crying for the loser, and announcement of the official cards got called correctly, comically and tragically “the big reveal”.  Smith got what he long desired and got it by winning the championship rounds.

There was a relative dissipation, though, by Smith in the pre-championship rounds, relative and relatable.  A deflation of sorts, when the taut covering, be it tattooed skin or shiny plastic (I’m thinking of the inflatable bop bags kids punch), has less air protruding it and goes some slack.

That’s what the corner of an attrition guy like Smith fears most.  Not that he’ll lose energy and get frustrated and make that frustration new energy; that he’ll lose energy and make a treaty with it, lose his defiance, find a resignation, and revel silent counterintuitively in his own helplessness.  Like Oscar De La Hoya pleading with Manny Pacquiao to throw a punch to cut the lights and spare him conscious humiliation.

There’s some wallowing in the Smith biography, doubt not, lest his trainer’d not’ve been so emphatic round the time Andre Ward made note of Smith’s body language.  Lunchpail, hardhat, selfindulgence – they are of a piece, or so say their dinercounters and bartops.  There’s nothing particularly heroic about rising at the same time each day and going to work.  The impediments, the sore back and sprained ankle and tendinitis in the elbow, dash in heroic seasonings.  It makes the next generation of men consciouser of these obstacles, seeing them celebrated in their dads’ overcomings.  The weight of the world and the system and all that.  Balance it just right, take on so much weight – and ensure some poet sings on it – and prevail, that is heroic.  Take on a bit too much, get forward bowed, and you make the infinite rolls of broken men.

For Joe Smith’s good from here till the end he needed to be able to be a titlist.  It’s why the judges’ decision took on outsized import to his corner.  Smith had done enough to win and little enough to lose, but being able to be called champ in a meaningful way, not in the cliched ways promoters and handlers and superfans address everyone who’s worn gloves, that was in the offing after 36 minutes of punching Saturday.  Smith got what he wanted – a well deserved new identity, something our beloved sport owed him for curtaining the B-Hop show years after its curdling.  

Smith is absolutely the best light heavyweight in his country and just as absolutely not the world’s best light heavyweight.  There’s a chance a good fight might be made between Smith and The Ring’s number-3 175-pounder, Sergey Kovalev, another man whose deflation has been public and obvious, but no chance Smith’s handlers should want for him to make any unification efforts with the division’s currently belted Russians.

Smith is in the glow of his greatest night as a prizefighter, his longsought triumph, the apogee of a bluecollar epic, a win for every everyman, so there’ll be no talking him into retirement, even if the time might be ironically right.  He knows he physically doesn’t have everything he did a few years ago.  But he has experience, now, and adulation, especially from strangers, and those things convince a man he’s better than ever, 20-percent at least for his new hardware, and capable of blinding others with status.  But Russians can be brutally oblivious of American status.

When your talent is what you are and the energy that manifests it begins to dissipate there are so very many reasons to say it is not what happens.  Do not discount resentment in those reasons, a general sense others have gotten more with less than you, that even though your product isn’t what it was in your obscure years there are backwages owed, and all those who ignored what you did when you were young and energetic owe you a retirement.  There’s a sweetness in obscurity, though, a private joy in being unappreciated for the right reasons that often proves more durable than an acclaim that comes for the wrong.

To jumble metaphors more than a little, that sweetness is the siren song for a fighter that his handlers lash him to a mast, any mast – be it sparring or roadwork or larger purses – to prevent his tasting.  You owe it to the less-fortunate to make the most of your talent, they say, and that most is a thing insatiable till you’re knocked the fuck out the ring by a younger, stronger man.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday afternoon on ESPN+ in a match from Dubai junior lightweight titlist Jamel “Semper Fi” Herring beat-up Northern Ireland’s Carl “The Jackal” Frampton, a former titlist in three divisions.  It was the finest win of Herring’s career and an unexpectedly convincing one.

Two times in as many months the 130-pound division has yielded the event glorious as any in a prizefighter’s career: The betting underdog winning a title match by knockout.  You’re the real thing once you’ve done that, regardless what comes before or after.  It does not happen often and happens even less often with household names.  Sometimes it happens in a wild upset but more often it happens when a man challenges himself with stiffest competition.  Betting odds speak to that competition, and knockouts speak to decisiveness.

Herring left no more doubt Saturday than Oscar Valdez did in February.  If Herring was not up against a man in his prime, like Valdez, neither is Herring a man in his prime – though primer, much, than he was in September.

A couple weeks ago Russian heavyweight Alexander Povetkin, a recent COVID patient, looked disbalanced and awful, unrecovered from the virus more than partially.  It recalled Herring’s performance against Jonathan Oquendo, the sort of performance that made a veteran handicapper like Frampton try and pick what 130-pound fruit he espied lowest the ground.  Herring’s second title defense, against Oquendo, was ugly an affair as a title match might be.  Herring was off-balance in the opening instants against Oquendo the same way Povetkin stutterswam from Dillian Whyte on Gibraltar.  If the men’s similar balance issues aren’t correlated to their similar COVID issues, it’s a whale of a coincidence.

That’s the bad news.  Here’s some good: Herring looked like a new man Saturday, which means COVID long-haulers need only haul so long.  Herring looked better not merely in the obvious way of fighting much better against a much better man but also, and more importantly, in his willingness.  Herring wanted to fight Frampton in a way he surely did not want a fight with Oquendo.  Frampton was, is, Oquendo’s superior, thoroughly.  That Herring wanted to trade with Frampton, holstering his jab enough to set Frampton a table for eating uppercuts, said nothing so much as: Herring is fully recovered from COVID.

So different was Saturday’s alpha predator that I revisited my column in September to ensure it was the same guy about whom Timothy Bradley said “real eyes real-ize” – disgusted and honest as Bradley was about Herring’s closedeye attempts to end that contest prematurely.  Herring took the initiative from Frampton exactly the way he surrendered it against Oquendo.

Frampton looked outclassed most of the opening rounds.  But he was undissuaded for having watched film of Herring’s last tilt.  If he might parry the jab and slip the cross and get close enough to Herring to hook an arm and clock-in, he assumed, a European ref, even one imported to the desert, would offer Herring no early breaks.  Frampton fought the exact fight that would have won him a midrounds stoppage against September’s Semper Fi.

Saturday’s Semper Fi was a different thing altogether.  In round 5, as Frampton began to remove some initiative from Herring’s grasp Herring kissed him with a lefthand Frampton’ll not soon forget.  It hamstrung The Jackal.  Less than a round later it was an uppercut that cut Frampton’s lights for a second or so.  The Northern Irishman rose bravely, yes, as Americans have come to expect from overmatched European champs.  But whatever courage Frampton showed quickly succumbed to Herring’s cruel plans.

By the time Frampton’s corner cancelled his whupping Frampton was wondering what took them so long.  He spun from the confrontation a bit expectantly, didn’t he?  Not to worry, as Frampton’s relief at the white feather got dutifully overshadowed by Herring and his handlers’ joy.  As it should be.  A titlist comes in a fight as a betting underdog and summons the white towel from his opponent’s corner, he’s deserving of what joy our beloved sport can bestow.

Herring acted fully redeemed Saturday.  So did boxing.  Didn’t it feel great to have a meaningful fight end decisively well before midnight?

Saturday’s event put promoter Top Rank in an enviable position, one it mustn’t squander.  It now has two of the 130-pound division’s three titlists, along with Shakur Stevenson and Vasyl Lomachenko.  Those are the makings of a wondrous four-man, single-elimination tourney sure to crown the defacto champion of the division.

It gets better.  The third titlist in the division is arguably its best and most exciting prizefighter, Gervonta “Tank” Davis, who finds himself in a set of circumstances Bud Crawford would surely recognize.  And therein lies the better part.  Soon enough Davis should demand of PBC what Crawford regularly demands of Top Rank.  When Davis does, we can hope, PBC will offer Crawford a shot at its best welterweights in exchange for Top Rank’s offering Davis some of its best junior lightweights.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday on DAZN in a heavyweight rematch for an interim title London’s Dillian “The Body Snatcher” Whyte snatched the remainder of Russian heavyweight Alexander “Sasha” Povetkin’s body and soul in the fifth round.  Symmetrically, round 5 was the same in which Povetkin unzipped Whyte seven months ago.

Whyte had before him the worst imaginable opponent, and he handled it gracefully.  So often, as Americans, we watch British prizefighters on the other side of things, playing the noble loser exactly as Whyte did last August, that it was a bit disorienting to see what a good winner a Brit could be.

For let there be no doubt the most memorable and meaningful thing that happened in the ring shared by Whyte and Povetkin came after their fight ended.  While I can recall plenty of acts of sportsmanship after prizefights – so many, in fact, the acrimonious way Erik Morales and Marco Antonio Barrera treated one another thrice remains exceptional as their matches – I cannot recall seeing a victor do for his vanquished what Whyte did for Povetkin.  It warrants description more than any punch Whyte threw or will throw.

After Povetkin failed to rise in time and woozied his way to a corner where his handlers gathered round him Whyte strode over for a customary embrace.  Povetkin was upright though barely conscious and apparently uninterested.  Whyte shrugged it off, turned his back and walked away.  About right, really, no man still staggering from blows to the head and the humiliation of defeat wants too desperately to be taken in a better man’s arms.

But Whyte didn’t go on a victory lap as expected.  Rather he fetched a stool for Povetkin.  Then he returned to the corner where Povetkin kept up an uninspired search for himself and positioned the stool beneath Povetkin, ensuring he sat squarely.  It held many times what grace Whyte shows when punching.  After that Whyte got a little carried away as a caretaker – “under the spell of his own sincerity”, as Philip Roth once put it – insisting on squirting water on the top of Povetkin’s head, but there’s no faulting him if he believed Povetkin’s handlers weren’t up to the task of protecting or preserving their charge.

Whyte’s fetching of Povetkin’s stool instantly joined in a library of our sport’s elegantest gestures Eddie Futch’s unfurling hand at the end of Thrilla in Manila – beautiful, simple acts contrasted dramatically by the violence preceding them.

Why might Whyte have assumed Povetkin’s corner wasn’t up to the task of caring for Sasha?  Povetkin’s presence in the ring, for starters.  Hospitalized twice for COVID since he coldcocked Whyte in their first match Povetkin looked like he might struggle with a breathalyzer during his ringwalk and couldn’t possibly walk a straight line after a couple minutes of moving round with Whyte.

Not enough is known yet about the lingering effects of COVID, but as aficionados we have witnessed steep declines in prizefighters known to have contracted the virus.  There are few sports whose preparations require quite the cardiovascular regimen boxing does, even in the heavyweight division.  The first time you spar is the closest you come to drowning on a dry surface.  In short order your lungs burn, your legs hollow at the hips and your eyes start to bulge.  None of these things happens during your first at-bat, your first hockey scrimmage or your first soccer practice.  Boxing with perfect lungs is daunting enough.  Boxing with compromised lungs?  Heavens.

Povetkin did not breathe any more laboriously than Whyte did, no, but he behaved like adequate oxygen wasn’t going all the places it should.  He looked worse than nonchalant before the match.  Then he went through round 1 with the footwork of a firsthour foal.  Whyte’s best landed punches ironically made Povetkin more stable.  It was Whyte’s ferocious misses that sent Povetkin splashing about the ropes, wheeling across the purplemat.

Povetkin’s chin was all the man had for defense from the open.  He had much the same offense he’s long had, a pronounced ability to concuss, but now offset by an approaching 42nd birthday and COVID.  Alexander Povetkin did not belong in a prizefighting ring.  Whyte sensed this but could only do so much about it.  He’d been handling Povetkin pretty easily in August, too, before Povetkin lowered their curtain with an uppercut.

Whyte wasn’t shy as he might have been and deserves credit for that.  Whyte might’ve made a longer and uglier night of it jabbing Povetkin and letting Povetkin’s deteriorated everything do the rest, but he went for the ice.  Even so, outside the United Kingdom and its incredible vocabulary for mediocre products, Whyte had won no new fans by stopping a COVID patient.  It’s what made Whyte’s remarkable act of postfight sportsmanship so important to his prospects.

Dillian Whyte is not a great prizefighter or future heavyweight champion; he is a man twice stopped by merely good fighters.  But he is talented enough to catch a rusty Deontay Wilder cold and have a few Yanks cheering him whilst he does.  He’ll not beat Wilder, he’ll not hear the closing bell against Wilder or Tyson Fury, as he already didn’t do with Anthony Joshua, but he’ll deserve one more sizable payday for being such a wonderful ambassador for a sport in need of wonderful ambassadors.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday in Fort Worth undefeated welterweight prospect Vergil Ortiz made an entertaining match with fellow Texan and former 140-pound titlist Maurice “Mighty Mo” Hooker on DAZN.  The match ended in round 7 when Hooker broke something between his right shoulder and hand, though not his middle finger – whose resilience he later confirmed energetically.  Ortiz was winning when the match ended about exactly the way its 10-1 odds anticipated.

Vergil Ortiz is ready for Terence Crawford.  He is no less likely to beat Crawford in 2021 than he’ll be in 2026.

Bud’s 3 1/2 years at welterweight are an embarrassment for our beloved sport.  Some of it’s Bud’s fault, probably, for pricing himself out of whatever halfassed plans his promoter planned to make for him.  Much of it is Top Rank’s fault for having no viable plan for Crawford at 147 pounds, building no one for him and finding every reason to avoid PBC as a fixed strategy.

Avoiding PBC hasn’t been a bad play for Top Rank these last few years.  But PBC has every other welterweight worth watching, and as one of the world’s two best prizefighters Bud Crawford deserves an opportunity to make at least one superfight in the final year or two of his prime.  He now says he’s moved on from that superfight with Errol Spence, which leaves him alternately courting a semiretired senator in the Philippines and scoffing at a title defense with Ortiz.  Neither option is palatable.  One pays much better than the other, but Manny Pacquiao is way too savvy to fight Crawford without a tuneup or two and incentives aplenty.

Bud was back in Lone Star State to see his stablemate look game but overmatched against Ortiz on Saturday.  At ringside Crawford looked softer than he has in the past.  That is, his smile felt genuine and his laughter too; gone was the dark anger that followed him like a raincloud.  He knows posterity will blame Spence for their non-fight, he knows Pacquiao will be more washed than him if they do fight in the fall or next winter, and he believes, incorrectly, he’s had a first-ballot career.

Just because Bud has been near the top of abstract rankings for a couple years doesn’t mean his reign has been a good one.  If he’s not going to make immediate matches with Ortiz then two of PBC’s top-3 welterweights his best shot at an enduring legacy is moving to 154 pounds, where he can play cleanup with the same poor competition he’s fought at welterweight and get even more credit for it.  Crawford’s unlikely to move seven pounds higher as Canelo is to return to middleweight for a rubbermatch with GGG.

Then Vergil Ortiz is the best option.  Ortiz’s promoter, Golden Boy Promotions, hasn’t a choice these days but to say yes to anything anyone with money offers, and Top Rank has lots of ESPN money to use on a meaningful fight for Terence Crawford.  Ortiz has a very good jab, a gaudy record and unremarkable defense.  Crawford, who’s fought thrice in two years (1-0 against contenders, 2-0 against Brits), should be rusty enough for Ortiz to scare him a bit more than Egidijus Kavaliauskas did 16 months ago.

Ortiz fights in the undissuadable, gladiator-academy style all Robert Garcia’s men favor (except for Robert’s little brother, Mikey, who has too much talent to’ve chosen Robert for non-fraternal reasons).  Ortiz isn’t going to learn nuance under Garcia.  He’s not going to learn much defense either.  Instead he’ll get instruction on walking through punches and ignoring damaged eyes and hitting the other guy hard and whatnot.  His greatest attribute against Crawford will be just how awful Crawford’s competition at welterweight has been (one-legged Jose Benavidez may very well be the greatest welterweight Bud ever fights).

Even grizzled aficionados fall for the all-by-knockout tag.  Fought guys you’ve never heard of? guys in the wrong weightclass? guys with multiple losses? guys coming out of retirement?  Suddenly it doesn’t matter because the wins were all-by-knockout.  There’s plenty of this with Ortiz.  The real tell to listen for is: “But none of those guys had been stopped before in their career!”  That’s when you know a circusbarker, be he promoter or flunky, is pettifogging poor competition.  Maybe Matthew Macklin has lost four times, and maybe there was that unfortunate episode at a lower weightclass seven years ago, but he’s never been knocked-out like that!

Mighty Mo was having none of it Saturday night.  After tasting leather aplenty and taking a knee the round before, Hooker threw a cross in the seventh and broke some part of his hand, and that was that.  Or wait, no it wasn’t.

After refusing to do that b-side thing where you favorably compare the man who just beat you less conclusively at 147 pounds than the guy who unbuttoned you at 140 Hooker explained something about both his hands being broken but one of them popping.  The socially distanced Texas crowd, partisan Ortiz and partisan Latino, booed Hooker, and Hooker, himself a Texan, told them what they could do with themselves.  It was fantastic comical.  He then turned, tossed his middle fingers in the air like smoking pistols, stepped through the ropes onto the apron, and challenged a few thousand of his critics.

Even Bud Crawford had fun with that.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday on DAZN in maskless Dallas a match genuinely anticipated by our sport’s genuine aficionados happens for The Ring’s 115-pound championship.  Mexican “El Gallo” Juan Francisco Estrada defends his championship against Nicaraguan Roman “Chocolatito” Gonzalez, The Ring’s number-two super flyweight and former owner of the division (along with flyweight, light flyweight and minimumweight).

If Estrada snatches the initiative from opening bell, seizes it, and refuses to relent, he wins.  Chocolatito is no longer the hunter he was more than eight years ago, and in their first fight he was well neutralized by Estrada.  Go back and watch (if only for the dulcet tones of our own Marc Abrams’ commentary).  The scores can’t be believed, especially the lopsided one, but Estrada’s reaction can be.

After a nigh-hellacious 12th round, when the final clang came, Estrada and his corner very much believed Estrada the victor.  But for round 6, they had a claim on most every round of the 12.  No more of a claim than Chocolatito, the champion, mind you, but a claim.  Round 6 saw Chocolatito take the initiative from Estrada with body punching.  Chocolatito caught Gallo with a threepair of hooks deep, and it took Estrada the rest of the round to round-up his composure and breath.  

But there was no spinning Estrada.  Chocolatito, at his best, spun his opponents, something like the way Manny Pacquiao did, and the sooner he spun you the quicker he owned you.  He didn’t spin Estrada hardly a bit.  Gallo knew what was what against Chocolatito, and fighting before a pleasantly raucous crown in Los Angeles, he knew what his countrymen demanded a prizefighter.  It was a fully professional showing by a man not even ranked in the WBA’s top 10 light flyweights at the time.

There’s an argument Estrada is undefeated since that night in 2012 though not a terribly strong one.  Rat King got him in their first match three years ago but not by much.  Gallo avenged that defeat properly in their rematch 14 months later.  How hard is it to better Rat King in a rematch?  Chocolatito still doesn’t know because he didn’t get close enough to measure for an estimate.

Since Sor Rungvisai stamped an exclamation mark on Chocolatito’s chest in 2017 our Nicaraguan hero has been on a farewell tour of sorts, or so we suspected till Chocolatito took the WBA’s super fly belt from Khalid Yafai a year ago.  If Yafai was not in Chocolatito’s class it was because very few are; Yafai was pretty well accustomed to successful title defenses when he came to Texas and got beat-up by a legend washed-up.  It was a small vindication for Chocolatito, disproving theorists who said 115 pounds were too big and young for him after Rat King.  A small vindication because Chocolatito appears about the least-vindictive of all alltime talents in our beloved sport’s history.  Those wrongheaded theorists who begged Chocolatito to retire after Carson, Calif., anyway did it out of love, not scorn.  

Chocolatito made a rare co-main appearance in October, outclassing a gangly Mexican youngster nicknamed Jiga just before Gallo made that wonderful match with his countryman Carlos Cuadras.  The postcard festivities had a redemption-earned feel to them.  Gallo would finally be granted his long-sought rematch with Chocolatito because he deserved it.  The way a child gets dessert for finishing veggies.

One gets the sense Chocolatito would like to make some more money and Gallo is the best available wage but could take or leave whatever belts are in the offing because he’s had them before and probably doesn’t want the inevitable demand for a rubber match with the rubberizing Rat King, who has Chocolatito’s number then and now and forever.  Saturday’s match is for Gallo and longsuffering aficionados like us.  However uneager Chocolatito may be for a test stiff as Estrada, once the bell rings there’s no one doubting the way Chocolatito will comport himself.

I can’t help feeling a bit about this match the way I felt before the third match between Erik Morales and Marco Antonio Barrera.  That match was very much about Morales’ vindication.  After probably not beating Barrera in their first match and probably not losing to him in their second, Morales, on a six-fight streak and fully migrated to 130 pounds, got his third match with Barrera like a dessert plate.  Barrera, gone through by Pacquiao like wet tissue paper, was believed a very much reduced version of the guy who’d fought El Terrible for 12 rounds at 122 pounds and 12 more at 126.  Morales barely made their new weight for the rubber match and held his right hand cocked high to signal for all it was Barrera’s consciousness he wanted.  Then Barrera broke Morales’ nose with an uppercut and did not return to Morales the initiative.

If Estrada headhunts Saturday in pursuit of a knockout and legacy he may well get his nose broke, too.  If Estrada enters the fight cautiously, looking to outbox the Nicaraguan master, he may never get into a gear high enough to do so.  Estrada has a direct path to beating Chocolatito, but it is not a wide path.

Certainly Chocolatito believes he is Estrada’s superior.  Soon as Chocolatito realizes he is trading punches with the man who across 24 rounds unmanned Srisaket Sor Rungvisai he is likely to relent enough for Estrada to have his vindication.  Dragging Chocolatito to that realization is everything Gallo must do.

I believe he will.  I’ll take Estrada, KO-11.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday on DAZN super middleweight champion and world’s best prizefighter Saul “Canelo” Alvarez went through WBC mandatory challenger Avni “Turkey Wolf” Yildirim in a few rounds of medium-paced sparring.  The match was not competitive but a necessary part of Canelo’s new approach to our beloved sport.

The Canelo Model is ratified and acceptable.  Roughly it goes like this: Boxing’s biggest draw must make two annual superfights and the rest of his prizefights may be about whatever he thinks makes his two main fights shine.  It’s like the Money May Model, except that by broadcasting his sparring sessions Canelo makes more money for everyone.

Saturday was a broadcasted sparring session with a live gait and concessions and parking tariffs and sanctioning fees and all the usual fixings.  Canelo made far more money for punching Yildirim than he deserved, perhaps, but he also brought a bit of money to Miami Gardens that mightn’t have been there otherwise.  He got Yildirim paid way more than was fair or right, too.

Canelo has found his new home, 168 pounds, and decided to show us exactly how to clean-out a division.  It requires quite a bit more compromise than some might’ve supposed.  One cannot unify a division with superfights alone.  You already know this, but it bears reiteration.  If one tries to unify a division with superfights, he gets stripped of an old belt each time he wins a new one.

The sanctioning bodies, parasitic birds they be, want to lay their eggs in every nest and dip their beaks in every stream.  They make their money conjuring new titles and ratings to bestow on fighters in exchange for a point or two on those fighters’ proximate purses.  The worst thing to happen to any sanctioning body is a unified champion, someone who doesn’t need their trophies and might not pay for them in the future – while spending a year taking selfies with a belt that is generating no new revenue for its bestower.

The general remedy to this problem is to mint new ones.  International, intercontinental, diamond, silver, super, world, interim, gold, youth, and one for every continent and country.  It’s nefarious the way inflation is nefarious and not nearly potent as stripping champions.  Stripping, see, keeps a sanctioning body’s currency valuable in two ways: By not diluting the product and by implying something like quality-control.

Canelo is showing the world what a prizefighter must go through to keep belts.  Avni Yildirim lost a close decision to Anthony Dirrell two years ago in a match stopped early because of an accidental headbutt.  That’s how Turkey Wolf became Canelo’s mandatory challenger.  By losing.  Would Mexico’s WBC have stripped Canelo for leaving Yildirim on the shelf?  Of course not.  But the WBC would have made Canelo pay something extra to defend its belt in his next superfight.  Other sanctioning bodies who see Canelo as the WBC’s guy already want to strip him like Matthew McConaughey; the WBA’s playing along for the time being, but if Canelo doesn’t spar with David Morrell or Fedor Chudinov in 2021 expect “Simply the pioneers” to simply strip him in January.  

Canelo performs a further service for boxing.  By fighting his mandatories during off months, men who’ve worked their ways up through a corrupt system either by dint of talent or by surrounding themselves with equally corrupt handlers, or both, likely both, Canelo shows the enormity of what gulfs separate generational talents like him from everyone else.

Avni Yildirim is much better at fighting than you are or anyone you know is.  Yet he lasted fewer than 10 minutes with a man whose pro debut happened 38 pounds smaller than Yildirim’s.  There wasn’t a moment’s doubt Saturday because Canelo is pure prizefighter.

Canelo doesn’t carry opponents these days.  Not for fun or profit.  He plans to stay oldschool busy this year, too, so he hasn’t a reason to go rounds or knock-off rust or whatever other cliches promoters yip about after their inactive superstars’ bland outings.  He shows his palpable respect for the craft by showing inferiors open contempt.  He walloped Yildirim on Saturday like Turkey Wolf was filled with sand and dangling from a rusty chain, like Yildirim hadn’t any volition of his own.  When Yildirim stayed on his stool after a nineminute, depriving Hard Rock Stadium of its commissioned bloodletting, Canelo didn’t get theatrical.  He thanked his disappointed fans and announced his next match.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday in Las Vegas undefeated Mexican Oscar Valdez dropped Mexican titlist Miguel “El Alacran” Berchelt, The Ring’s number one super featherweight, thrice and stopped him violently in round 10.  Carcrash violently.  It was a much-anticipated match, broadcast by ESPN and promoted by Top Rank, that saw the underdog win in what was, but for a few rounds in its middle, a rout.

This was the sort of definitive ending to a definitive fight you wish on anyone who signs up for prizefighting and so few attain.  Nothing polemical, nothing squishy, nothing for unperspectivèd pundits to unpack.  A fully realized lefthook that dangled the larger man and champion in a space between his ongoing lightness and a perpetual darkness.

Valdez reacted dramatically, crying-out and making running circles.  Nowhere to put all that emotion.  A complete loosening of a man who appeared so tight for so long.  There was a cultural element to it all, too, that solely a Mexican would understand about another Mexican.

You could feel elation for Valdez even as you felt dread then sympathy for Berchelt even as you felt relief, perhaps, for our beloved sport.  When it gets it right and definitive, there’s nothing like boxing, is there?

There was a moment in the match a quarterhour before Valdez’s lefthook that felt unique.  Immediately after round 6, one that saw Berchelt in the middle of his best four-minute run of the fight, Valdez walked to his corner and had the following exchange with his chief second, Eddy Reynoso:

ER: ¿Cómo te sientes?

OV: Bien.

ER: ¿Cómo lo sientes a él?

OV: Cansado.

(ER: How do you feel?

OV: Good.

ER: How does he feel to you?

OV: Tired.)

It struck me immediately it was the first time I recalled hearing a trainer give so much trust to his charge’s judgment during a prizefight.  Lore and tradition tell us the trainer is a father figure, often saintly, and the fighter is an impetuous child, often ungrateful.  Part of the reason folks went in for and still do go in for the Cus D’Amato mythos, aside from Mike Tyson’s untiring salesmanship, is because tradition so well prepared us for the relationship D’Amato told everyone he had with Tyson and Tyson now tells everyone he had with D’Amato.

If that’s too American, here’s a Mexican version: Nacho Beristáin and the Brothers Marquez.  Before Rafael’s third match with Israel Vazquez, Nacho memorably opined, “If Rafael obeys (me), he will win.”  You can count on your fist the number of times Nacho or Coach Freddy asked Juan Manuel or Manny how the other guy was feeling during their 126 minutes of combat.

I ask you how you’re doing then I tell you how your opponent is doing – that’s the gist of the trainer-fighter dialogue, if the trainer doesn’t begin by telling the fighter, too, how he is feeling.  If, as Oscar Wilde wrote, all bad poetry is sincere, so too is all bad corner advice.

Eddy Reynoso is a new generation of trainer.  He has guided, generally gently, our sport’s alpha predator, Canelo Alvarez, to an unlikely state of constant improvement.  Canelo has taught Reynoso how to run a corner.

Surely Reynoso saw with the rest of us Berchelt’s gathering strength in round 6, even if Reynoso probably didn’t expect Berchelt to be emergent as he was in round 7.  Yet before Reynoso began strategizing and stuffing 10 minutes of instructions in 50 or so seconds, he gathered intelligence from Valdez.  A little of that may’ve been curiosity, Reynoso’s wishing to confirm his own intuition.  More of that, though, was proper coaching.

Reynoso wanted Valdez to hear himself confirm his own intuition.  Do believe had Valdez’s replies been disordered – I feel tired, and he feels strong – Reynoso would have altered his advice accordingly.  That is the mark of a great coach.  Reynoso was wholly present, in the moment with his charge, not lost in a thicket of his own pastround observations.  That’s why Reynoso was able to ask a question that began with the word how.

As generations of legal dramas have taught us, yes-no questions are only about confirming already held assumptions: “You feel fine, right?  And he’s tired, isn’t he?”  Questions of that sort are useless to a coach.  The opposite point on the spectrum – questions that begin with what and allow the speaker to learn about himself – would not have been appropriate in the middle of a confrontation like Saturday’s, either, though they’d be damn potent in a training camp.

We hear so often about a fighter’s need to trust his trainer.  Here is a new direction, call it Sendero Reynoso, by which a trainer learns to trust his fighter.

Valdez’s assessment of Berchelt at Saturday’s midway point mightn’t have been flawless – there’s plenty of machismo in any Mexican prizefighter (machismo for which Reynoso has an automated filter, of course) – but Valdez’s hearing himself say Berchelt was tired absolutely helped Valdez make it through round 7 and begin to change the fight back in round 8.  Which is not to imply Valdez lacked confidence at any moment Saturday.

Confident or not, though, there was a little Margarito-Cotto 1 energy (I know you felt it too) when Berchelt started taking runs at Valdez in rounds 6, 7 and 8.  There was nothing inevitable in round 7, then, about Valdez’s vindication in round 10.

An ending like what Valdez put on Berchelt and every expert who doubted him (I wasn’t asked to offer a prediction but am confident I’d’ve been wrong as everyone else) is what we seek in sport.  Something so decisive, so final, you’ve no choice but to shut-up and nod.  ¡Felicidades, Oscar!

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday on DAZN in a non-title match, the fighting pride of Tajikistan, undefeated super featherweight Shavkatdzhon Rakhimov, settled for a majority draw against California’s Joseph “Jo Jo” Diaz, a former Olympian and IBF titlist, in a California casino.  The match was not spectacular but better than what its weighin portended.

This was to be a redemption thing of some sort for Diaz even before it had to be an even larger redemption thing for Diaz.  It sure wasn’t either.

Long before Friday’s weighin debacle Diaz’s comportment raised questions about his willingness.  Setting aside his skedaddling out the featherweight division without rematching reluctant Gary Russell, there was a contract and general understanding Diaz should give a rematch to Tevin Farmer, the man Diaz won his IBF super featherweight title from 13 months ago.  Diaz, in no hurry to fight Farmer again and promoted by an adrift outfit now without its one revenue generator, allowed COVID-19 considerations to scuttle his rematch and assign an unknown Tajikistani in Farmer’s stead.

Then Diaz missed weight by so much weight he wasn’t allowed to try again.  The culprit?  A missing sauna at Fantasy Springs Casino.  In his postfight interview Diaz used his generation’s version of postmodernist cant, beginning a torrent of excuses with the standard disclaimer: No excuses.  There were the hometown haters trying to make money off his name, and childbirth, and a host venue so unprofessional as to tell Diaz to make weight by making his own sauna in his hotel room.  There were Saturday’s judges, too, who mistook Diaz’s blocking everything thrown at him for landed punches.

Somewhere in this no-excuse-making mishmash, delightfully enough, the large gash to the outside of Diaz’s right eye, opened undoubtedly by a blocked punch, began spurting blood down the angering former titlist’s face.  It wasn’t bleeding quite so steadily as Diaz’s nose had through much of the fight – another victim of a blocked punch.

Diaz’s outrage played authentic as his haircolor and promoter’s every utterance.  Diaz long has felt like an Oscar knockoff.  The rehearsed autobiography, the California roots, the Olympic dreams, the vanity.  With about half the talent.

Saturday Diaz was easily the more talented fighter, still.  Shavkatdzhon Rakhimov holds no secrets.  With Freddie Roach in his corner, too, what secrets he once held are fewer.  Coach Freddie wants his men to hurt the men across from them – “he’s not your friend”.  Roach’s own condition, the product of other men once hurting him, lends a counterintuitive credence to his demands.  If a conditioning coach unscathed by others’ fists implored his charges to hurt other men, it would sound bullying, weekend warrior-ish, silly, in its way, as that Vince Lombardi hologram a couple Sundays ago.  That Roach’s neck is strained and his hands shake with Parkinson’s while he implores a fighter to hurt the man across from him says This is the only way, son, for if there were another way, wouldn’t I be the one to tell you?

That Roach says it doesn’t mean his charges take heed, necessarily, as Rakhimov didn’t in the later rounds Saturday, when either his conditioning failed or his affection for Jo Jo succeeded and Rakhimov relented right about the time the fight was there for his taking.  A life-changing event for Rakhimov?  No, not really.  COVID-19 is a life-changing event.  Winning a sliver of a title from Jo Jo during a pandemic is not.

Besides, if we’re going to concern ourselves with what was squandered Saturday, let’s go back to Jo Jo, where the squandering considerations begin and end.  As everyone knows, Golden Boy Promotions is not in a very good place.  Without Canelo Alvarez the company is a regional promoter with a flaky figurehead.  The contract they have with DAZN, such as it is, relies primarily on DAZN’s current lack of meaningful fights and fighters.  That should persist for some time, helping both parties overlook how little value Golden Boy Promotions brings a broadcaster without Canelo on its roster.

It would be an excellent time for Jo Jo to show his promoter and his promoter’s network he is the next Ryan Garcia.  Instead Jo Jo comes to his first title defense woefully unprepared and goofy as hell in orange coif.  Much more Son of the Legend than Niño de Oro.  Does he get in the ring on a redemption quest, bin all self-preservation and ice an opponent we might later memorialize as “that tough Russian”?  Nope.  He tries for a quarter of each opening round then goes on defense and ekes out a draw, much to his father’s vocal dismay (and has anyone thought to coach trainers on how audible they’ve become to judges?).

Jo Jo can now give Tevin Farmer that rematch, if Farmer still wants it, or Jo Jo can go away.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

SAN ANTONIO – We’ve got Covid back under control here, partially, and if we hold the line while vaccinations take their effect we may avert further historic tragedy.  If we do this it will be thanks to local government and local organizations, a very different breed of leader and businessman than what the word Texan rightfully conjures; this city’s mayor and this county’s judge have resisted what shortsighted greed informed most every state-level decision come down these last 12 months.

History will not forgive, even if voters – beleaguered: frightened, unhealthy, desperate for remedy – someday do.  A generation of men raised to genuflect always before the market god went unconvinced there were questions in the universe they couldn’t answer with their childlike supply-and-demand intuition.  Before the first Covid casualties were buried at virtual funerals these jackasses got up to bray about we’ve got to get this economy going again!

Whatever economy returns won’t look like the old one.  A lesson from the Renaissance, courtesy of the Bubonic Plague, is when a half-million citizens die before they’re supposed to die, survivors lose faith in the previous system, and that lost faith expresses itself in unimagined ways.  I’ll leave it to the kids to figure out which churches they’ll swap-out for artists this time round.

Crypto over fiat, doge over dollars, looks like a safe bet so far.  Or maybe it’s just coincidence the U.S. dollar, the one constant in every human’s life since World War II, loses 99-percent of its value against a different virtual currency every month.  Since the presidential election dogecoin is up 2,544-percent against the dollar.  That is astounding when written like that and astounding in an entirely different way if you write it like a loss in the dollar’s value.  Whence does this value come?  Maybe it has long existed in the immense amounts of uncompensated labor humans have done often for themselves and more often for others.

If this account reads like a Covid survivor’s, I suppose it is written by one.  Wednesday night I had the second of two Moderna SARS-COV-2 vaccination shots, 28 days after my first.  It strikes me there are far more speculative accounts of what the vaccine is or isn’t than eyewitness accounts, so let’s remedy that slightly here.

The second vaccination shot ushered in none of the euphoria of the first, unfortunately, but it did bring side effects.  Round 7 PM Wednesday I made my way in the same partially defunct mall I had in January and found quite a few more people in the lobby than there’d been in January.  Yet the line for vaccinations was empty.  I strode to the registration table, presented my CDC COVID-19 Vaccination Record Card and got directed down the same hallway.  There was no one in front of me this time, and within two minutes I was injected in my left shoulder and sent to the same 10-minute-observation room.

Ten minutes later I was back in the lobby and noticing how many more persons were gathered than 15 minutes earlier.  Many more and much older.  It struck me on the way out the door these are people who’ve been unable to attain appointments.  It’s one more blossoming tragedy vulnerable citizens now congregate for hours indoors in the hopes of pulling a leftover vaccine at last-call.  Which is not to recommend anyone forego his second shot; the last thing the world needs in 2022 is millions of half-vaccinated Americans globetrotting to spread their iterated, thrice-as-virulent strains.  

Thursday morning began symptom-free, with a slight pain where the needle went.  At 1 PM, though, symptoms hit.  The best way to describe the symptoms are the fatigued and achy feeling you get when you know you are about to get sick and there’s nothing to be done about it – maybe an hour after Airborne or echinacea or immune syrup could have intervened.  This crummy feeling lasted till 9 PM.  The next morning only a bit of left-shoulder soreness remained.  For those scoring at home, then, an eight-hour window of symptoms occurred in the 18th hour after the second vaccination shot happened.

Sometime by the end of this week I’ll be fully vaccinated.  This brings all the ecstasy of being stranded alone on an island; you have the freedom to frolic naked in the waves and bathe in coconut milk, but without anyone to share this great good fortune with, really, what is it for?  A coworker posed this question Friday.  My answer is that it’s for not-being a vector, for not-infecting others, for disabling one node, of billions, on COVID-19’s network.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry –

Saturday in Los Angeles in a match broadcast by FOX PBC relocated Tennessean Caleb “Sweethands” Plant decisioned Minnesota’s Caleb Truax to retain a super middleweight title that is to Canelo Alvarez’s super middleweight championship what Dogecoin is to the U.S. dollar.  Afterwards Plant congratulated himself for his shutout victory and willingness to fight anybody despite a sore hand.

Even in this traditionally mediocre time of year when mediocrities are mistaken for much more Plant looked mediocre.

When our beloved sport had a more appreciable fanbase the stretch between December and February was when most any decent fight or fighter got sold all over social media.  It was an anticipatory sort of thing wherein youngsters looked at the great fights to come and projected their justifiable enthusiasm for the future on a present that did not justify their enthusiasms.  Though there was a fraction the enthusiasm for Saturday’s broadcast as bygone years’ January offerings there were still folks projecting their understandable enthusiasm for March’s super flyweight superfight on the Calebs.

Caleb Truax, stopped in his prime by both Danny Jacobs and Anthony Dirrell, got presented as some sort of legitimate threat to a super middleweight titlist, which he is not.  For comparison’s sake, imagine what aficionados would say if after undressing Callum Smith, Canelo had called-out Truax.

Yet a guy who says with a straight face he wants to unify all the titles and become the first super middleweight somethingorother chose Truax as his third title defense.  Was his PBC stablemate David Benavidez unavailable?  There’s no telling.  PBC palace intrigue intrigues nobody anymore.  

Benavidez hasn’t been justifying his talents these last few years, either, but at least he looks like he wants to hurt other men.  Plant looks like he takes himself and his conditioning and his boxing seriously but he hasn’t nearly enough malice to make his living as more than a gatekeeper in anything resembling a good era of talented 168-pound men.

This is no such era, as evinced by Canelo’s capture of the division’s championship in only his second fight at the weight.  If you are wont to accuse Canelo of cherrypicking, what does it say he cherrypicked The Ring champion, someone none of the other titlists thought to challenge?

Plant stopped short of calling Canelo’s name Saturday, after hurting his hand jabbing Truax, because he must know somewhere in the pit of his stomach Canelo is an entirely different entity.  Canelo isn’t quite two years older than Plant but has nearly three times as many prizefights, exactly three times as many knockouts, and at least three times as much of any other thing Plant will ever have.  Canelo looks on his new division as overfed and pathetic.  It’s hard to argue with that assessment.  Forget not, Canelo came up in the Mexican system, where he saw men of twice Caleb Plant’s talent ruined in their first 10 prizefights, if not sparring sessions, for the sin of being born to a smaller physique.

Canelo fights like he needs to justify his luck, like he knows he’s had it too easy; the larger body, the red hair, the golden promoter.  By PBC super middleweight standards, though, Canelo’s career has been an ordeal of almost constant, unimaginable suffering.

It’s improbable Canelo watched Saturday’s match.  If he did surely he was unimpressed.  Turns out, in the ring Sweethands has a pretty sweet personality.  Even with that inane crowd noise signaling to FOX’s audience each time any punch landed there wasn’t an iota of suspense.  And let us hear none of the usual horseshit about an unchallenged fighter being so good it’s not his fault he wins 12-0.  If you are good enough to outbox 37-year-old Caleb Truax 12-0 but not fighter enough to make him quit, you do not belong on television.

FOX should include an oddsmakers-veto clause in its broadcasting contracts, henceforth.  If PBC announces a fight and the opening line is greater than 5-to-1 FOX ought to spike it.  Put PBC on the line to overpay their fighters for insipid mismatches.

What’s that you say, they’ll just do it anyway?  You’re right.  Never mind.

The Benavidez-Plant situation puts the lie to all those pity pieces we’ve written over the years about rival promoters and sanctioning bodies undoing our beloved sport.  The Ring’s numbers 1 and 2 super middleweights have one belt and one promoter, they’re both undefeated, and they don’t fight one another.  Before anyone goes too hard on Plant’s matchmaking, take a look at Benavidez’s next opponent in March.  At least Benavidez will ice Ronald Ellis – if you’re thinking that, like I am, you’re a sucker (like I am).

Finally, it’s unrewarding to write like this, to dump icewater on some young aficionado’s affinity for a fighter he’s been told, by Joe Buck of all people, is a surefire future superstar.  If there are disinterested fans of Plant reading this – read: kids without a financial incentive for saying Plant is a future world champion – it’s not my intention to make you feel lied-to or plant seeds of cynicism for boxing to water regularly, even if that’s what I’ve done.  Switch your allegiance to Canelo, today, friends, and stick with him till any super middleweight actually challenges him.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

SAN ANTONIO – Covid cases here last week were about 35-percent higher than during the peak of the summer awfulness, bad enough an increase to set a noteworthy record if setting such records hadn’t been our thing most of last month too.  If help is on the way it is taking its sweet time.  Each new release of an online vaccination calendar sets a new record time for a sellout.

Would that residents were so patient with pandemic protocols as state and national officials are with vaccine rollouts.  It’s a broken system, a system quietly broken by bad actors for decades but openly sabotaged these last four.  History will not forgive.

Wednesday brought performative rejoicing by poor thespians.  The most to be said of the spectacle of America’s new leadership is it’s a tourniquet gradually tightening round a godawful wound pumping fitfully.  One fears it should act as an excuse for worst impulses.  For those suffering internet poisoning to recede further into encrypted systems and frothy swindles while the formerly vigilant lose their defiance, loosen their masks, and become part of the last wave of Americans to die from COVID-19.

A large fraction of a oncegreat country dying of despair.  That’s what is going on, after all, when men crowd indoor areas masklessly.  They want you to infer Big John has no fear, but what they’re really implying is Big John has nothing to lose.  Many Americans, mostly men if we’re honest, have decided, in an otherwise-pubescent round of magical thinking, I’d rather die than have to cover my face to spare others a virus.  There will always be hypemen and hangerson to lionize such figures; history is replete with small, weak men following big, dumb ones to terrible places.

What one hopes changes mostly from last week’s awkward transfer of power is the end of oxygen to the careless who consider themselves brave.  It maddens them to be deprived attention.  Who’d have thought changing a two-year-old’s diaper would be such a complete strategy for managing 1/3 of American men?

(American women, probably.)

Awkward indeed, pal – was that supposed to be a salespitch for Gallo-Chocolatito 2?  More an expression of ambivalence.  I’m happy the fight is happening.  I should be thrilled it’s happening in this state.  I’m not.

Last week’s announcement Juan Francisco Estrada’s March rematch with Roman Gonzalez will happen in Dallas brought strong and mixed emotions.  My first thought was to request a credential.  I’ll be five weeks past my second vaccination shot by then, safe as safe can be, and there are no trips I regularly make that are rewarding as my trips to Dallas.  There are diversions aplenty for me in Big D.  When I tire of those, too, there are the remarkable art museums of Fort Worth, including The Kimbell, one of our country’s great architectural achievements.  There’s Chocolatito, too, for whom I traveled from this city to Los Angeles for his rematch with Rat King.  The drive from here to Dallas is shorter than the flight to Los Angeles, and I would probably fly to Dallas (about 45 minutes, gate to gate).

But what of my diversions honestly exists in Dallas right now?  Are the museums even sincerely open?  I suppose there’s the joy of telling other men forevermore I was ringside when Chocolatito and Gallo made their extraordinary rematch, a fight that proved ruinously retiring for both.  But men trying to impress other men is a large part of what’s made America the world’s most dangerous place to live for 12 months.

A chance to see old friends?  Hardly.  On the odd chance any of them travels from afar to see a 114-pound Nicaraguan and a 114-pound Mexican, how much do we see one another, masked, spaced six feet apart, unable to congregate safely more than 15 minutes at a time?  The solution to this riddle, it strikes me as I type this, is not to defy a virus like a scorned lover but abstain instead.

The fight should be wonderful.  The arena will publish a list of theatrical protocols no one observes – because freedom.  The ultimate effect thousands of drinking, shouting men in an enclosed area has on the local ecosystem will be ignored then suppressed then forgotten.  But in this city, where two prizefights and a bowl game happened at Alamodome the month before new Covid cases started breaking their own records, it’s a less-forgivable act to participate in a superspreader event, however well inoculated any individual feels.

No, I won’t be in Dallas in a couple months.  Not in a pandemic.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

The doldrums are upon us.  Winter is come.  While cable news broadcasts the final hours of America’s worst president, Netflix serially releases serial-killer biopics, and prizefighting hibernates, an interesting new movie related to an important 1964 championship match got released last week and might deserve some of your time this Martin Luther King Day.

Some years Muhammad Ali’s birthday falls on Martin Luther King Day.  This year it fell the day before.  They were contemporaries in the sense of sharing the world stage but were not known to be confidantes, and King was 13 years older than Ali.

Nine years ago I wrote a piece for The Ring about Ali turning 70.  It gave me an occasion to research King, and that research brought me to recordings of his speeches.  I recommend revisiting them.  His talent for speechmaking was enormous, many times that of today’s American leaders’, up to and including Barack Obama.  There’s a majesty to King’s delivery that has yet to be matched.  Even with 57-year-old acoustics, outdoors, King’s voice is unmistakable and gigantic.

I thought about King and the mythology of Ali, too, last weekend while watching One Night in Miami, a Regina King film adapted from Kemp Powers’ 2013 play and recently released on Amazon Prime.  It is an excellent movie, finally, that begins badly.  Even without seeing the play or reading its script an attentive viewer shouldn’t have trouble spotting what is theatrical and what is cinematic, what got created by a talented young playwright and what puerile exposition got added for marketing reasons.  

The clunky introductions to Ali, Sam Cooke, Jim Brown and Malcolm X are very much Hollywood claptrap, turning the caricature knob to 10, and one fears many viewers who watch its preview or opening 15 minutes will never go any further.  If you’re reading this, though, consider it a recommendation for getting through the throat-clearing and into the motel room where much of the movie and all its best writing, in the room and especially on its rooftop, happens.  The acting, too, is excellent.

Despite the night in the movie’s title belonging to Ali, the movie is not about Ali or Cooke or Brown nearly so much as Malcolm X.  When the other characters are not talking to Malcolm X they’re talking about him.  This is not hagiography, which is why the movie works so well.  Malcolm X gets accused of being a manipulator and a parasite and simply a man without a job.  If he isn’t surly he is generally joyless, a scold.

The other three men are nearer their primes; Ali the newly crowned king of prizefighting, Brown the greatest football player of all time, Cooke about to record “A Change is Gonna Come”.  Malcolm X is less than a year from his assassination and aware the consequences of his planned departure from Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam, which Malcolm X formally departed 11 days after Muhammad Ali beat Sonny Liston in Miami.

One of the sadder passages in Malcolm X’s autobiography, a book I read during Christmas break my senior year in high school, decades before “woke” was a word, comes when Malcolm X describes a chance encounter in an airport with Ali.  Both men know they are to remain separated.  Malcolm X portrays their estrangement as a personal tragedy.

Watching One Night in Miami, it is easy to see why.  Cassius Marcellus Clay, as played adeptly by Canadian actor Eli Goree, is an enchanting energy to be around.  Childlike and often childish Goree’s Clay is a gifted young man gliding through life without an inkling what difficulties lie in wait and without very much patience yet for others’ difficulties.  Goree’s Clay is also better than Will Smith’s.

While a large part of the movie’s plot treats Clay’s pending conversion to Islam, or its announcement anyway, the movie’s best parts do not include Clay as more than an observer.  Malcolm X’s relationship with Sam Cooke, their mutual antagonism and love, as depicted by Kingsley Ben-Adir and Leslie Odom, brings the story’s most poignant scenes.

Ben-Adir’s portrayal of Malcolm X brought to mind master literary critic James Wood’s observation that in the Gospels Jesus weeps but never laughs – so much to mind that I misplaced an hour trying to find a New Yorker article in which Wood compares the messianic ascents of Jesus and Malcolm X.  Turns out, that interesting comparison belongs to a different literary critic, Adam Gopnik.

The movie ends with Cooke, having been sparked by Bob Dylan and antagonized by Malcolm X’s praise of Dylan, making a debut of his new, more-conscious song.  Then Clay becomes Muhammad Ali and Jim Brown becomes an actor and Malcolm X’s house gets firebombed.  Before the credits roll there’s a footnote about Malcolm X’s assassination though no mention of Cooke’s death two months before.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

SAN ANTONIO – Wednesday evening I received the first of two Moderna SARS-COV-2 vaccination shots in my left arm.  As there’s nothing to come in our beloved sport for some time, and as I’ve now little interest in revisiting anything that happened last year, what follows will be an account of the experience of being partially vaccinated for COVID-19.

A few years ago, round about the time both my parents passed and an inheritance came my way, I realized there is no grater virtue than generosity.  To those who would counter gratitude is a greater virtue, as I might have before, I would ask: Is generosity possible in an ungrateful person?  This renewed devotion to generosity manifested itself mostly in regular donations of money or time to various local charities and causes.  One such cause was San Antonio Report (formerly Rivard Report).  It is a small website that holds local officials to account the way newspapers used to do.

A perk of donating to this organization, early last year, became weeknightly updates on our city’s Covid situation.  Usually accompanied by some light editorial remarks, this weeknightly newsletter, The Curve, provided a trustworthy barometer during a time the head of the executive branch of our federal government, and our state government for that matter, had proved themselves deeply untrustworthy.

On New Year’s Eve at 7:30 PM a San Antonio Report email came in my inbox with a subject line that read Here’s how to get the COVID-19 shot starting Monday.  I’d not thought about it till then.

I can gratefully report my life has been minimally disrupted by Covid.  I had worked from home for 10 years already when everyone else in my industry, let’s call it “data analytics” to save words, got remanded to their home offices.  What recreational activities I most enjoy, anymore, happen in state parks.  Through the spring and summer and fall, I left my home only to make biweekly trips to the supermarket and have picnics with my daughter in city parks.

I have also been on a weightgain program unintentional as it is successful during lockdown (and I wasn’t svelte to begin with).  I have never placed stock in body mass index (BMI) as an indicator of health – it labeled prime Mike Tyson “obese” after all – but when I clicked from the CDC’s revised guidance to NIH’s BMI calculator I found I qualified for a Bexar County tier-1B inoculation more decisively than I’m pleased to admit.

I went to the registration website as much out of curiosity as intent, after reading vaccinations would be happening in a partially defunct mall five minutes away.  I clicked on a few time slots, got through registration then landed on an error page, indicating I’d failed to make an appointment.  Then I got caught up in the technical challenge of it.  Soon enough I was registered for day 3 of tier 1B.  I’d given the site minimal non-public information, nothing more invasive than the last four digits of my Social Security number, and added a comment about my BMI – as there’d been no other place to indicate why an otherwise healthy and happy 46-year-old should be registering.  

Wednesday evening I arrived 30 minutes early with only a hardcopy of my confirmation email and drivers license in hand.  I was nigh whisked through onsite registration; there was only one person in line before me.  I was assured my being early was no issue, handed a stamped CDC COVID-19 Vaccination Record Card and directed down a hallway.  A minute later I was in a small conference room with five nurses performing injections.  A nurse asked me if my left shoulder was an acceptable target, I said sure, and that was that.  A minute later my record card was stamped with a follow-up-appointment date and time, and I was directed to a 10-minute-observation room.  Ten minutes after that I was out the door and walking to my car.

My left arm was a bit sore for a couple days.  That is the only physical side effect I can report.  The entire experience was effortless bordering on pleasant.

Wednesday night I registered for the CDC’s v-safe program, tweeted a picture of my #WeCanDoItSA certificate and went to sleep.  The next morning, unexpectedly, I did experience a psychological side effect: Almost euphoric relief.

That’s why I’m writing this column.  I was more frightened by Covid than I realized.  The caveats: I’ve not had a Covid scare, no one I love has tested positive, I live more comfortably today than I ever have, and I have meditated for about an hour every morning for seven years; I had no empiric reason to be scared of Covid and every reason to believe I’d know if I were.  And yet.  Thursday morning brought a sense of openness and possibility for which I was unprepared.  I now believe the psychological toll this pandemic has exacted and continues to exact on every one of us is something we dramatically underestimate.

My unsolicited advice goes: Get vaccinated soon as you are eligible, be patient with one another in the meantime, and prepare for everything to lift as infection rates drop.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

New Year’s Eve, Japan Standard Time, Japanese super flyweight Kazuto Ioka defended his title by eight-round stoppage over undefeated Japanese super flyweight Kosei Tanaka in a fight televised by YouTube hours after it finished, or some other way more-committed viewers discovered in realtime.  It was an excellent match and a wonderful showing by Ioka.

There’s something prickly insular about aficionados who fixate on lower weightclasses, but that doesn’t make them wrong.  If heavyweight-only casuals are boxing’s beer-drunk frat boys, flyweight fixators ain’t the kids who got picked first for kickball.  They like knowing things most fans don’t, they’re often smug, they correct your pronunciation, and for being so esoteric they must watch their heroes at times so symmetrically middle-of-the-night they can’t decide whether to awake or remain awake.  This last halfdecade, though, they’ve been rewarded more often than their cool peers.

This habit continued New Year’s Eve in Japan and sometime between Wednesday and Sunday in the U.S.  Truthfully the best super flyweight prizefighters currently in practice are Western Hemisphereans, but enough superb 115-pound fighting happens in Asia to be disproportionate.  One of the world’s three best fighters at any weight – quite probably the world’s single best fighter if not most accomplished – is a 118-pound guy from Japan.

Unlike others who travel to these shores for larger paychecks Asian fighters bring their power and honor with them.  Many years ago, when Golden Boy Promotions was believed an innovator of sorts, there was an event called World Cup of Boxing that pitted Mexico against Thailand in a casino outside Tucson, Ariz.  Mexico won all but one of the many title fights, as I recall, but the Thai fighters acquitted themselves with such professionalism and toughness, the wholly Mexican crowd applauded them often and loudly.  These were the previous generation of guys who survived a culture that made Srisaket Sor Rungvisai possible.

Sor Rungvisai deserves mention because of his place in the 112-pound ratings and what he accomplished as a virtual unknown in a 2017 match with the world’s best prizefighter at the time, and because his position in the ratings, second, between Gallo Estrada and the aforementioned Chocolatito Gonzalez, lends a bit of sobriety to this treatment of Ioka’s accomplishment.

Ioka hasn’t been in a hurry to match himself against any of the guys atop his division, even while defending the WBO’s title a few times.  His name doesn’t come up much.  That’s unfortunate because what he showed against Tanaka was proper compelling.

Whatever the scale said about it, Tanaka appeared the larger man in frame and physicality, Ioka an old, soft guy with high blood pressure.  Were it not for his composure Ioka might’ve looked overmatched from the opening bell.  This is where the difference between super flyweights and super heavyweights, and the divisions’ diverse super fans, pops up.

You don’t have to know very much at all about boxing to know in 30 seconds who’s going to win most heavyweight fights.  The size disparities are often gross, the skill disparities nearly so, and the 1-2s unfurl slowly enough for even the dullest of viewers to ascertain what’s happening.  Things are quite different at lower weightclasses.  The size disparity is usually negligible, and to get on any stage grander than TikTok you must be exceptional.

Back to Ioka’s composure.  Tanaka looked to be moving Ioka with a number of his punches early.  But Ioka undid the larger man like the master Juan Manuel Marquez did to Juan Diaz in Houston and Michael Katsidis in Las Vegas.  Ioka bet on straighter punches.  He fought with a certain obliviousness of whatever Tanaka was doing.  Is he hitting me with straight punches?  No?  Then I’ll win.

There was some irony, then, in it being an Ioka left hook that ruined Tanaka’s night.  Tanaka went down hard and never got back to the aggressiveness he needed if he were to unsettle Ioka – which he weren’t.  If Ioka wasn’t quite the finisher Marquez was it’s because nobody is.  Ioka did just fine.  

If the stoppage were a touch early, especially by American standards, let it be.  I don’t know enough about Japanese fight culture to do more than suspect this, but here it is: The stewardship referee Michiaki Someya took of Kosei Tanaka’s wellbeing is a major reason Japanese fighters comport themselves bravely as they do.  The referee, like any good regulator, is a braking mechanism, and until you install brakes on a racecar you daren’t shift it out first gear.  Too, there’s a homogeneity to Japanese culture, very different from America’s, that allowed all three men in the Ota-City General Gymnasium to see themselves as part of the same ecosystem and behave accordingly.  Both fighters were free to exert hard as possible, knowing their contest would be well and honorably regulated.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

SAN ANTONIO – Nine days since we put an irresponsible number of aficionados in Alamodome this city hasn’t time to calculate new infections because we’re readying for Tuesday’s kickoff of Alamo Bowl – and yes, fans will be in attendance in an indoor stadium yet again because you can’t tell Texans what to do, especially when they’re trying to protect wealthy people’s fortunes for them.

It’s written 30 miles in near every direction from this city: Trump 2020 flags defiantly still flying on poles outside most every ranch.  Wealthy ranchers’ enduring fealty to a defrocked and deregulating protector of their interests is understandable, in a shortsighted and greedy kinda way, but I’ll be damned if I can figure what’s in it for their ranches’ hands.  Something about culture war this or guns that.  Heavens, such aspiring predators are but dimwitted prey.

I started teaching myself the ancient Chinese game of Go a few months back.  No, not because I saw A Beautiful Mind – as a few acquaintances asked.  Rather it came via what inspiration I feel helping my six-year-old daughter learn how to read.

When we began our weeknightly episodes in August the haul looked impossible.  Suddenly something incredibly important to me most of my life, reading, a thing I do not remember learning to do, required immense amounts of memorization and exceptions to rules overwhelming most reasons for committing rules to memory, even.  Why isn’t “enough” pronounced enoo if you’re not going to pronounce “through” like throff?

But in four months, against all expectations, my daughter’s speed of reading has improved fivefold.  Which set me to wondering if there were an activity at which I might improve myself so much so quickly.  I settled on the game of Go.

Years ago a guy in a coffeeshop told me if he were to do it all again for complexity he’d learn Go, not Chess, and towards the end of October I told myself that if I were going to replicate the miracle every first grader accomplishes with phonetics and brute repetition, if I were going to need but a few months to make a 500-percent improvement, why, there was no need to worry about lost time.  After all, it’s a relative measure.  I’m not trying to beat a 9-dan pro (I’m not even trying to beat her six-year-old daughter); I’m just trying to be five times better in four months than I was when I started.  I’m pretty much there, too.

Were I having to find locals with whom to play on a 9×9 board I’d be nowhere near my goal.  But thanks to what AlphaGo has wrought there are lots of artificial-intelligence-inspired apps for playing the game against a machine.  This allows you to learn via repetition – making similar mistakes and being punished in similar ways thousands of times quickly.  (These programs, beginning in the 1950s with machine-learning Checkers, attained their primacy by playing themselves millions of times.)  I suspect those of us who learn to play against machines, not humans, will be different sorts of players than those who learn the traditional way.  This might worry me if I were trying to become a professional or even a competent amateur, but since I’m only trying to be better compared to myself, well.

All of this has a bit to do with how I saw Canelo Alvarez’s undressing of Callum Smith, believe it or not.  In Go there’s fighting and there’s acquiring territory, and they’re only the same thing to beginners.  One wins at Go by acquiring territory, not winning fights.

When you start playing, though, especially as a westerner, you tend to shortcircuit with a misplaced pride that makes you hit back every time you’re struck.  He takes two of your stones, you take three of his!  You obsess yourself with a single fight in a small corner of the board and keep your eyes set till you’ve won.  Then you look up and see you’ve lost the game, bigly, while fixating on your terrible little patch.

Callum Smith didn’t obsess in any such way, a couple Saturdays ago, but he looked up at the closing bell of every round and seemed surprised to have lost so dramatically.  There were invisible lines on the mat, lines and rules visible only to Canelo, and Smith didn’t even know he crossed them, or Canelo crossed them.  But those lines told Canelo all he needed to know; so long as his lead foot got to position A within three steps, it didn’t matter what Smith’s jab or hook did.  Smith was so badly overmatched, so elegantly handicapped by Canelo’s prowess, he would need to fight that exact same Canelo making those exact same moves a dozen times before he’d have a chance at a draw, and 50 times before he’d win a decision.

Impressive to be so many levels beyond a Ring super middleweight champion.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

SAN ANTONIO – Into this friendly city whose citizens have been generally vigilant about Covid, vigilant as local officials have required, many multiples more vigilant than state officials have, strode Canelo for his fourth Texas prizefight, second in Alamo City.  If it wasn’t his easiest Texas fight it wasn’t his most difficult either.  Which is a surprise and a half – since Callum Smith, the man Canelo beat up Saturday, was by far the most accomplished prizefighter Canelo has fought in Lone Star State.

What you opined of Saul Alvarez’s Saturday performance depends mostly on what you opined of Smith on Friday, what you opined of an undefeated Ring champion who’d won his title by knockout in the finals of a single-elimination tournament.  I learned this lesson about opinion’s effect, contrasting my feelings about Spence-Garcia a few weeks back and Alvarez-Smith Saturday.

I did not think particularly highly of welterweight Garcia, after opining quite highly of him at 140 pounds, and Spence’s workmanlike decision did next to nothing for me, aesthetically.  I opined quite highly of Callum Smith, and it rendered me thrice as susceptible to commentator hyperbole about Canelo.

It’s probably in the word subtlety.  When man’s most primal impulses manifest themselves subtly, perhaps someone with a microphone’s shining you.  While lots of subtle things happen in any confrontation, there is nothing subtle about a man’s consciousness being removed from him on television; in the absence of that spectacle recourses to subtlety deserve be discounted.

Canelo has come a long way since his last Alamodome match, hasn’t he?  Then, Canelo made his sixth defense of his first WBC title, a 154-pound trophy he won beating Matthew Hatton (the EBU European welterweight titlist at the time).  Canelo won a fair, unanimous decision over Austin Trout.  I was ringside for that.  Till that point I rated Canelo below “Son of the Legend” Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. among anointed Mexican prizefighters.  If Canelo wasn’t fully a promoter-manufactured entity he was having an awfully easy run – that would end in humiliation with Floyd Mayweather, five months after the Trout fight.

Watching Canelo from ringside afforded something watching Chavez Jr. did not, though.  On television Canelo didn’t have much an identity more than redhaired horseman from Jalisco.  With Marco Antonio Barrera and Erik Morales and Juan Manuel Marquez still active, at various levels of decline, Canelo mightn’t have been among his country’s best five prizefighters, while being promoted as if he’d eclipsed all of them.  I went to Alamodome in 2013 half expecting Trout to undress him.

I was disabused of that in round 1.  The first time Canelo let fly a hook, actually, I noticed he had access to an entire other level from Chavez Jr.’s.  I’ve written about it before, but Canelo has a different sort of intensity than television shows.

Back then, too, Canelo was given to one defensive-clinic round every fight, a round when he tried to be Will o’ the Cinnamon, showing aspirational levels of head and shoulder movement.  It was corny – like a voluptuous Instagram model in prop glasses with a caption that reads “Beauty AND BRAINS!”  Saturday showed Canelo’s cornball defensive rounds weren’t wrong but early.  Across from Erislandy Lara, Mayweather and Trout, men with better reflexes, Canelo was too slow to make his feints look even hopeful.

The higher Canelo moves in weight, though, the more a defensive genius he appears.  Against Callum Smith he showed a defensive awareness that set Twitter ablaze with comparisons.  It might be inferred the worst loser Saturday was not Smith, in fact, but “Saint George” Groves and by further inference late-career Carl “The Cobra” Froch.  How bloody sluggish must Groves’ve been to make such a bull and bully of a man limited as Callum Smith?

Smith was wholly unprepared for Canelo’s intensity, for his presence, for his speed even, Saturday.  A giant of a man, Smith went from graceful athlete to gangly reluctant in fewer than three minutes.  Late as round 6, I continued hoping like a loon a limited Brit might surprise a fully actualized Mexican prizefighter with a left hook – makes me chuckle at myself, typing that – then Canelo just about broke Smith’s left arm in half with a righthand or two.  By round 9 Smith’s corner was threatening its charge with the white feather.  The championship rounds were about one more hopeless UK fighter’s grit.

There wasn’t an obvious opportunity to ice Smith so Canelo didn’t try very hard, which earned him some derision from what GGG deadenders Canelo sneered at in his incompetently translated postfight chinwag.  Healthy as he feels and looks at 168 pounds Canelo hasn’t an inkling to weigh one ounce less to retire Gennadiy Golovkin, who didn’t rehydrate to the super middleweight limit Friday.

Without HBO around anymore to sensationalize Soviet Bloc fighters to feed Canelo, and without any obvious rivalries between 168 pounds and whatever Andy Ruiz weighs right now, and with his agency as a selfpromoter freer than ever, Canelo has some planning to do.  If he’s serious about unifying titles at 168 pounds – he needn’t be; he has The Ring title already – he should forego whoever holds the IBF belt and unify WBC titles in a match with David Benavidez, who at age 24 is at least as good as Canelo was when he lost to Mayweather at 23.  Maybe that fight would go the way of Crawford-Benavidez.  Maybe it wouldn’t.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday at Wembley Arena, in its cafeteria or lobby, British heavyweight titlist Anthony “AJ” Joshua went through in nine rounds a limited old Bulgarian named Kubrat “The Cobra” Pulev in four or so rounds longer than Wlad Klitschko did in 2014.  Saturday in San Antonio, Mexican middleweight champion and light heavyweight titlist Saul “Canelo” Alvarez will challenge British super middleweight champion Callum “Mundo” Smith.  DAZN brought and brings us both.

AJ won the first match of his AR (After Ruiz) career by convincing stoppage that made some new fan, someone who discovered boxing Saturday, there must be one, think AJ is an indestructible force other heavyweight champions’d be wise to avoid.  What that means is a fresh round of socialmedia negotiations commences.  They’re all hypothetical at this point, exactly as most contemporary prizefighters and their followers prefer them.

Until a Covid vaccine is widely distributed round the world and its effect widely proven round the world all plans for heavyweight superfights are noise.  Here in the U.S. we know all about cacophony (and handling a pandemic catastrophically badly).  Bob Arum and Tyson Fury will do their part to ensure failed negotiations for AJ-Gypsy King get blamed on someone else – they’ve already begun that campaign.  Fury has been lucid for a couple years now, blessedly so, but Arum and others know tomorrow is promised to no promoter and waiting for things to marinate “until we can have fans in the seats again” mightn’t be perspicacity’s own path.

Joshua knows to wait favors him.  So long as the AR charade holds up with Eastern Bloc guys – a Pulev to Usyk to Povetkin run has to be the preferred course – there’s no need to go the riskier route of a Fury fight or, God save AJ’s chin, a match with Deontay Wilder.  Saturday AJ proved against a smaller, older, lighter-hitting, less-athletic version of himself he is a monster.

Even still the sheen is off.  There’s no longer an inevitability to AJ.  One no longer thinks of the kid who dethroned Wlad Klitschko but the man who went wobbly woebegone against a fat little guy who could punch in combination.  That AJ, though, had something like pride and initiative – he was trying to finish Ruiz, remember, when his career comically unwound.  Better for AJ that we remember that bemused countenance and refusal to step forward till he good and felt like it, not the way he ran from the Snickers spokesman six months later.

Tentative as he got after Corrie Sanders denuded him Wlad never had athleticism enough to run like AJ did in Saudi Arabia; Wlad had the heart for it but not the coordination.  Pulev wasn’t much of a matchmaking risk for AJ’s braintrust.  He was a mandatory of some sort, a proven victim, and at age 39 near to immobile as a credible challenger could be.  He also wasn’t much of a finisher.  If AJ chose to plant and punch and his righthand arrived in second place, it was essential he’d have time to settle things before he had to punch or defend again.  Pulev was not a man to rush forward.  

Actually, who cares?  Until AJ fights Fury or Wilder he’ll not be considered credible by aficionados, so why shoehorn anything more into Saturday’s match?

Especially when we can be treating Canelo’s upcoming fight with Callum Smith.  Saturday at Alamodome in a city whose daily new Covid cases are now about the worst they’ve been and eight times or so worse than they were in October, there is a misery of an undercard followed by a properly compelling mainevent, for those dumb enough to put themselves in an indoor arena.

After his excellent win at World Boxing Super Series, Smith has been in hiding.  He fought well 18 months ago and badly five months after that.  He is the Ring champion at super middleweight and deservedly so.  Canelo is the Ring’s pound-for-pound champion, having fought at too many different weights recently to be considered anything other than one of the world’s best fighters, regardless of weightclass or belt.

If Canelo is not the world’s very best fighter it is not for reluctance.  He has made a fight with everyone aficionados have asked him to, especially those men aficionados suspected would make him look bad.  He hasn’t given Gennadiy Golovkin a rubbermatch because he doesn’t believe Golovkin deserves one – an assertion Golovkin is doing his damndest to prove by fighting a 31-year-old Pole with a 24-percent knockout ratio, this Friday.

Yes, the world’s most-feared man, one willing to fight anyone, even career welterweights, between 154 pounds and 168, though not at 154 pounds or 168, will, to his credit, be matching himself against his third career middleweight in a row when he makes a good boy out of the Ring’s number-six-rated middleweight, Kamil Szeremeta, in yet another worst-opponent-the-broadcaster-would-approve showcase for GGG.

Golovkin and his enablers consider his rivalry with Canelo unfinished.  Canelo doesn’t even recognize Golovkin as a rival.  Canelo’s right.  After icing a former light heavyweight champion in his last fight Canelo is about to fight the undisputed super middleweight champion of the world.  Golovkin, 0-1-1 (0 KOs) in career superfights, meanwhile, has returned to making war on mediocre middleweights – though, noticeably, without foundering HBO to overestimate wildly his achievements as he does.  Better put: Did you even know GGG was fighting this week?

Canelo-Smith should be excellent.  Smith has all the tools, and talent aplenty too, but not a fraction Canelo’s experience.  Neither suffers a want of selfbelief.  Had Smith kept improving or challenging himself after WBSS he’d be a favorite Saturday.  Unfortunately he hasn’t.

I’ll take Canelo, UD-12.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday at AT&T Stadium in the Covid hotspot of Texas at the end of a PBC on FOX pay-per-view card, welterweight titlist Errol “The Truth” Spence decisioned former junior-welterweight champion Danny “Swift” Garcia by fair, obvious, unanimous scores.  It was the first time the men fought but bore resemblances enough to Spence’s last AT&T Stadium appearance to be a rematch.

It was a decent fight.  Hard stop.  It wasn’t great or evidence of greatness.

Last year Spence and his handlers and enablers did heavy lifting to keep the extent (and cause) of his one-automobile accident quiet for too long to regale us now with a comeback story.  If you’re transparent about what you did, you enroll yourself in the redemption sweepstakes.  Spence did not do this.  PBC handled the entire affair with signature cynicism.  When people wanted updates on Errol’s condition and the cause of his hospitalization, we were to respect Errol’s privacy in his difficult time.  When it appeared Spence was fully recovered and his tilt with Garcia shouldn’t be anything special, we started seeing an image of Spence in the hospital and hearing about his amnesia.

Would Spence be able to withstand Garcia’s attack?  We knew the answer to that question about five minutes in, and the drama of the match suffered for it.  For without Spence permanently damaged by his ejection from a Ferrari at speed, Spence-Garcia would be little more than Spence-Garcia 2.  

There is no evil in Errol.  He is a laidback, likable Texan.  A suburban kid, a country boy, an excellent athlete, a fair entertainer.  Three years ago there appeared a genuine chance at greatness.  There doesn’t any longer.  He fights without malice.  He’s larger and more physical than his opponents and fights like he thinks it would be unseemly to press such advantages too far.

So it was in the moment after the final bell Saturday.  Errol and Danny did a lap round the mat like coworkers, like Danny forgot his badge and Errol held the door for him.  Nobody’d dared to do much for 48 minutes, except when Garcia dared to steal the final five seconds of some rounds.  Spence took no obvious chances.  He applied his template for disarming smaller men and wavered rarely from it, and when he did waver Garcia hadn’t the commitment or crunch to do more than spank him playfully for being naughty.

There was a caveat, and after the opening three or four rounds the only interesting part of the spectacle: Spence reacted bizarrely to every cross Garcia threw at his abdomen.  By comparison to his otherwise nonchalant defense Spence’s reaction to Garcia’s righthand to his belly was cartoonish, jackknifed and jumpy.  Something future opponents should research further.

Spence’s attack is effective but not compelling.  Aesthetically it works best against men large as he.  Two of Spence’s three pay-per-view matches, lamentably, have come against men both smaller and much smaller.  Saturday’s Garcia looked the part at least; last year’s Garcia did not.  Twenty-one months later that fight has aged worse than Tyson-Jones.

At least Spence’s cautiousness in Arlington that night was about not being the future star of an antibullying campaign; had Spence done something dastardly enough to make Mikey’s big brother fly the white feather he mightn’t have been sympathetic to as many people as he is today.  Nothing is more frightful than losing one’s marketability.

Spence didn’t hurt this year’s Garcia because apparently it’s not what he’s into.  PBC fighters treat PBC fights like league events.

It’s why Bud Crawford looked so damn dark in the crowd Saturday.  Into the scripted and tightly controlled environment of a PBC production Crawford strode, a large black bar stretched across PBC’s pastel landscape.  Crawford is dangerous.  He’s unpredictable because he takes this whole thing personally.  It’s not a promotional game to Bud.  He’s not good at the business of boxing.  Bud looked an actual psychopath at the afterparty of a Hannibal Lecter-tribute troupe, Saturday.  Bud sneers where PBC personalities smile.

Spence may fight like Marvelous Marvin Hagler, but Bud has his personality.  Spence had his chance after another highpaying tuneup to demand the one fight every aficionado wants.  Instead he announced plans to horse around, maybe take another tuneup next summer.  It wasn’t quite Marvin attending Sugar Ray’s retirement announcement – there is, after all, almost no chance PBC invited Crawford to be in Dallas – but it had a similar rhythm.

Crawford was there to make that point.  Point made, Bud.

Spence isn’t afraid of Crawford, but he has too many highpaying opportunities with safe coworkers like Keith Thurman to dance with someone evil and unmarketable as Bud.  During the uneventful second half of Saturday’s fight there was time to ask a question like: How would things be different if suddenly Crawford and Spence switched promoters?

Both men would benefit.  Spence would get refined further by Top Rank matchmakers who’d excavate from Bolivia some spoiler that taught Spence the limits to his current style, limits he might transcend.  Bud would get to feast on PBC’s soft spread the way old Manny Pacquiao has, first hospitalizing Adrien Broner than retiring Keith Thurman before stopping Shawn Porter.  Then he could tell horseman Errol their stable is clean.  Time to fight.  Spence would respond as a prizefighter should.  Both men would have a chance to be great.  

After Saturday, I’d take Bud, KO-12.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Friday’s super middleweight fight was awful.  Saturday’s welterweight fight should be excellent.  Saturday’s heavyweight farce wasn’t bad at all.  There’s no laying out with T-square and drafting board a column that treats a sport dominated by a 54-year-old.  The casuals can’t hear you, friends – they’re not sticking round for your junior bantamweights in Tokyo on New Years.  In its superficial, hyperbolic way, though, pop culture gets some things right.  Iron Mike is one of them.

Tyson got by Saturday with what gets him by always since he lost his invincibility more than half his lifetime ago: Charisma.  It was instructive for this reason, if perhaps no other, to see him across from Roy Jones Jr.  Both men dominated their eras for long as they lasted, but only one had charisma.

Jones has admiration and accomplishment and intelligence but not charisma.  I’ve been in the same room with Jones for 10 minutes and not realized he was there till someone pointed him out.  No one can say that about Tyson.  Some of that is scale.  Tyson is naturally a much larger man than Jones and in his prime felled much larger men still and carries himself as such.

There was always something strained about Jones; he memorized the Ali schtick and wore the Jordan shoes but couldn’t shrug things off the way the greatest do; he tried too hard, moving from overanimated to uninterested without pausing at connected.  That came through Saturday.

Tyson lumbered forward with the same head movement and punch combinations he threw 35 years ago; deprived of his speed and power Tyson looked like no one so much as Mike Tyson.  Jones looked like he didn’t want to be there.  He did some of his nervous showmanship then leaped away and didn’t return but to hold and wrestle.  He pulled his punches, too, which was interesting – and understandable.

Tyson didn’t want to embarrass himself but knew so long as he tried hard everyone would forgive him; he’s been fucking up in front of the world and getting forgiven for a quarter century.  For Jones the stakes were higher.  Jones was afraid of making Tyson mad.  Anyone who’s sparred with a much bigger or better fighter has pulled his punches, in the sort of ironical twist you can’t anticipate till it happens to you.  You turn over that cross and it lands crisply, finally, and you ain’t admiring your work – you’re apologizing in the name of deescalation.

Tyson winged away because, really, what was Jones going to do about it?  Tyson is a born showman; it’s why he could come to the ring in his prime wearing nothing but black shorts, while Jones had to wear sparkly outfits and choreograph dance numbers to retain a fraction folks’ interest.

Reportedly the purses for Saturday went 10 to Tyson and three to Jones.  The fairest metaphor of all.

What happened Friday on DAZN was much less a spectacle and a bad fight too.  Danny Jacobs appears to be a genuinely good, likable guy.  His every fight is a disappointment.  In the leadup to his match with Gabriel Rosado he made the mistake of promoting his fight like a grudgematch.  It’s not who Jacobs is.  It’s not his temperament.  When the opening bell rang and Jacobs spent the next 10 minutes cautiously looking for opportunities to peck away at the man he supposedly despises – that was Jacobs’ temperament.

Rosado was no better.  Nobody expected him to be.  There are a number of men both Jacobs and Rosado can lose controversial decisions to in their new division but neither should again be asked to shoulder the weight of an a-side.

Which brings us to Saturday’s match between Errol “The Truth” Spence and Danny “Swift” Garcia.  About the only bad thing to be written about this fight is its pricetag.  It’s not a superfight or a superspectacle.  Fans should not be asked to bailout PBC’s fiscal year with three pay-per-view events in Q4.

For all the celebration of Spence and denigration of Garcia these last few years it’s a fair question who’s more deserving.  Since icing Kell Brook 3 1/2 years ago Spence has gotten praise greater than his record merits.  He hasn’t gotten any better.  He played tag-and-go-seek with Mikey Garcia in his pay-per-view debut, a dud of a fight.  He squeaked past Shawn Porter in a much closer test than aficionados expected.  He survived a Formula 1-style crash.

Now Spence swaps blows at welterweight with a very good junior welterweight who has been, at best, a b-level welterweight.  There’s no reason to think Garcia will offer Spence more than Porter did.  At 140 pounds Spence wouldn’t want to run himself into Garcia’s lefthook, but at 147 there’s less to worry about.

The intrigue, here, the salespitch, is we don’t know what effects of Spence’s crash have endured after 14 months.  Spence hasn’t been fighting, of course, and modern supercars like Spence’s Ferrari have extraordinary safety features, but if Spence isn’t right Garcia should be the man to expose it.  Swift is crafty and feisty and commits to counters – he sees them and commits to them wholly.  Spence has few weaknesses but he hasn’t Garcia’s experience.

The winner of Saturday’s match likely gets to coax Keith Thurman out of retirement.  The loser probably gets to brush gently the rust off Manny Pacquiao.  Enjoy Saturday’s fight for what it is, in other words, because it’s not leading anywhere.

I’ll take Spence, SD-12.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

SAN ANTONIO – Friday afternoon this city landed the biggest prizefight of the rest of the year when promoter Matchroom Boxing announced Mexican middleweight champion and light heavyweight titlist Saul “Canelo” Alvarez would challenge for undefeated Englishman Callum “Mundo” Smith’s super middleweight Ring championship at Alamodome the Saturday before Christmas.  Four hours later every resident of this county got a text message that read:

936 new COVID-19 cases reported today – the most since July.  With the virus spreading, limit unnecessary outings, avoid social gatherings and wear your mask.

936 nuevos casos de COVID-19 reportados hoy, la mayor cantidad desde julio.  Limite las salidas innecesarias, evite las reuniones sociales y use cubrebocas.

If it appears these messages are at cross-purposes with an Alamodome superfight it’s because they are.  Here’s a sentence I didn’t before imagine writing: If you are not from here and planning to come for the Canelo fight, please do not.

The events of 2020 have made, for responsible adults, many previously unimaginable behaviors standard.  Everyone else has, in varying degrees, pretended things are normal, returning to normal, nearly normal or I’ve-waited-long-enough-for normal.  The contortions this has put folks in have been universally ugly.

A quarter of a million Americans have died from Covid.  That reality is too horrifying for all and leads some to dissemble by wondering about the numbers, asking if anything might’ve been done differently, picking nonsequitur fights with elected officials – threadbare arguments about “tyranny” and “free market” and (coming soon) “national debt”.  Looked at as goodfaith inquiries from reasonable people, these arguments raise immense ire in responsible adults.  Looked at as the castings-about of children, these arguments appear tantrums.  Which is what they are.

The formula for not spreading Covid has been unchanging for seven of the last eight months: Stay home unless you absolutely have to go out, wear a mask whenever you do go out, and keep six feet between yourself and others.  To avoid infecting yourself, do all these same things and wash your hands frequently and avoid touching your face.

The absolutely-have-to-go-out clause above raises plenty of socioeconomic questions.  I’m not oblivious of them or the injustice of declaring things like meat-processing plants vital to national security.  In this city, too, a number of busdrivers have died of Covid, their exposures to infected and generally asymptomatic folks – themselves commuting to jobs that preclude their families’ hunger – too great for too many hours to be properly mitigated by some flimsy cloth stretched across rubberbands.  These folks deserve our deepest sympathies and financial aid in whatever form we can provide it.

But the men filling Home Depot every day for six months because it’s what happens to be open and they can’t stand being alone or with their families?  They’re a different story.  Especially the jackasses who do so masklessly.  The uncharitable if understandable reaction to such folks’ almost inevitable acquisition of the virus is they had it coming, which they did, but here are two entities that didn’t: Employees and familiars of these folks, and the American healthcare system in the long run.  What is lost on those who fixate on mortality rates is a question like: What will be the lasting impact of 12 million Americans with lingering respiratory issues?  What will that do to gross domestic product, to healthcare costs, to their children’s prospects?

Aside from the fighters themselves, their trainers and cutmen, and a handful of officials, nobody must be in Alamodome next month.  Every national promoter has proved this, out of necessity, since August.  Canelo, angry his paycheck got affected by Covid like everyone else’s, declared an empty arena, or at least a paycheck empty of a live gate, unacceptable, and a scramble began for some state, any state, dumb enough to host large indoor gatherings during a pandemic.  Nobody had to look hard.

Twenty days before our 10-fold increase in Covid cases PBC held a “successful” pay-per-view event at Alamodome.  Did Davis-Santa Cruz cause the spike in cases?  No, probably not.  Rather there was a correlation between our once-vigilant city’s newfound complacency and a 9,000-person event in an indoor arena.

Oh, I know, Canelo-Smith’s promoter will find a podiatrist or dentist somewhere to say the precautions being taken by a part-time staff of minimum-wage security guards are topnotch, and every patron will get a free squirt of hand sanitizer with any ticket purchase above $30, and thousands of people drinking and shouting for hours cannot possibly spread anything because at least half the guards working the doors’ll have functioning forehead thermometers and half of that half will remember to use them, too, so never mind World Health Organization guidance or restrictions from Center for Disease Control.  They can’t tell us what to do!

Last week’s announcement brought to mind two anecdotes.  A month after The Legend of Muhammad Ali was published, I brought an author’s copy Christmas present to the gym for the kindly father of an aspiring pugilist.  He told me his son idolized Ali.  I told him be ready to talk his limited son out of a prizefighting career someday soon.  He told me not to worry because his son had a great chin and lots of heart like Ali.  I told him I didn’t want to see his son finish his days like Ali.  He assured me boxing had nothing to do with Ali’s condition.

My mother used to say of the most delicious things in life they were “to die for”.  I happen to be a big Callum Smith fan and give him a real chance against Canelo in December.  It should be an excellent, consequential prizefight.  But I don’t think it’s to die for.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry –

Saturday in the Bubble at MGM Grand in the mainevent of a dreadful ESPN card Nebraskan Terence “Bud” Crawford needed about 3 1/2 rounds and punches to stop overmatched Brit Kell “Special K” Brook.  Referee Tony Weeks, generally the perfect man for any Crawford fight, lost interest in watching Brook get brutalized a bit quicker than expected, though no one complained.  Bud got his victory, Brook got his paycheck, aficionados got to sleep early.

Bud did what had to be done to defend his fringe welterweight title and top spot in a hypothetical ranking that only matters so much when no one fights one another.

The title pound-for-pound was invented for Sugar Ray Robinson, if historians can be believed, to clarify how much better Robinson was than everyone else, especially what heavyweights dominated American sport.  It was nobody’s obsession in the 1980s when the best welterweights and middleweights fought one another.  It grew mighty longer legs during the Mayweather era when not-fighting was very much en vogue.  It’s why it’s important right now for Bud – because he’s not-fighting anyone any aficionado wants to see him fight.

It’s a promoters-n-eggheads obsession these days, as a generation of kids raised on destination fights comes of age and isn’t quite sure what to do with someone like Teofimo Lopez who moved himself prematurely and succeeded.  See, what Teofimo should’ve done is let his fight with Lomachenko marinate another few years – what we now call “waiting till there can be fans at the fights again” – and threatened his peers on Twitter and harangued his promoter for more money and given prickly interviews to various apps about what he couldn’t wait to do someday.  Instead Teofimo stamped paid on Lomachenko’s overwrought pound-for-pound bill and sent him out the Bubble.

There was Bud, though, well ensconced in the Bubble on Saturday, making a demand of his promoter not for the one fight everyone wants to see with his peer Errol Spence, no, but instead with Manny Pacquiao, a 41-year-old Senator inactive for 17 months and semiretired from boxing.  Bob Arum’s response was pitchperfect: After rambling about some Middle Eastern venue and ministers of health and such, he reassured Bud talks were ready to restart for a fight scheduled to happen either “before Ramadan or after”.  Bud didn’t press his soon-to-be-89-year-old promoter either because his Midwestern sensibilities wouldn’t allow curtness with an elder or because Bud doesn’t really want Spence anymore.

That sentence was unwritable three years ago when Crawford first moved from junior welterweight.  Back then Bud was everything we wanted in a fighter; he rose on merit, not hype, he cleaned-out a division before scaling higher, and he was a bit of a psychopath when any bell rang.  He’s fatted now.  Too much British cooking, lard, flour and boiling.  No one thought so at the time, but Bud’s second fight as a welterweight, a 12-round bloodletting with Jose Benavidez, a one-legged former prodigy from Phoenix, was the most impressive thing Crawford has done since unifying titles at 140 pounds, maybe the most impressive thing he’s done since stopping an undefeated Yuriorkis Gamboa in 2014.

Now then, much of the grief we give Bud is grief intended for Arum, for the aspiring nonagenarian’s refusal to compromise with Al Haymon, whose PBC manages every welterweight worth Bud’s fighting.  Arum knows this and can’t be bothered to do a thing about it.  He wore gymnasium-casual to Bud’s postfight interview Saturday, talked trash about Spence’s upcoming opponent, Danny Garcia – ranked a halfdozen or more spots above Kell Brook – and enjoyed Bud’s giving him an out with the Pacquiao plea, a demand from Bud for money, not greatness.

Spence is not blameless in all this, but if he beats Garcia and Thurman and Pacquiao and moves to 154, is anyone not affiliated with Top Rank going to accuse him of ducking Bud?

Bud has real hate in his heart and alleviates some of the evil by semiannual sadism sessions with what luckless men Arum finds for him, men like Jeff Horn, Amir Khan and Egidijus Kavaliauskas.  Saturday it was softened Kell Brook’s turn, and the best that can be said for Brook is that he acquitted himself well for a quarter fight then got out the ring without suffering much.

So strapping and muscular that Special K!  Muscles and fists haven’t been Brook’s undoing as a professional, though – his face has.  The first time Crawford put proper leather on Brook’s surgically repaired face Brook flew backwards as if detonated.  From a jab.  Some hours and words shall be lost by others to explaining the extraordinary leverage and concusiveness of Bud Crawford, when the truth of what happened is simpler.  Brook is not that good, and Crawford is.  When an aged b-level guy runs himself into the onrushing fist of a prime a-level guy what happened Saturday is what happens.  Too much lifting was done for Top Rank’s choice of opponent last week for folks to let the simple explanation stand.  After all, Brook was just a dozen GGG punches and another dozen Truth punches from being undefeated when Bud torqued him with that southpaw jab of his.

Brook took his loss gracefully, like a proper b-sider should, while hemming a bit when asked to fulfill his contractually obligated comparison of Crawford to Spence.  He was there, after all, not to pique interest in a Crawford-Spence superfight his promoter can’t deliver but to make a soundbite ESPN can play before each of Crawford’s next couple, or halfdozen, nonevent title defenses, something such as “Spence wears you down like a kid, but Crawford hits like a man!”  Brook wasn’t the perfect b-side, then, but he was a fine one, and really, who are we kidding?  

Nobody was awake when Brook got interviewed.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

SAN ANTONIO – We’ve got COVID under control round here in a way many of our countrymen haven’t.  It affords this friendly city a chance to be a friend to other Texas cities.  For a couple weeks we’ve been shouldering part of El Paso’s burden by treating its patients.  If our new President’s promise of an empathy renaissance comes, it will be cities like this one, cities that kept their decency in an indecent time, to which the country shall look for guidance.

A couple Saturdays ago boxing’s eyes looked this way, I know, and were two of my three favorite fighters not in action on apps I’d’ve made some effort to cover junior lightweight Gervonta “Tank” Davis’ icing of Leo Santa Cruz.  But with Oleksandr Usyk on DAZN and Naoya Inoue on ESPN+ there was no justifying a pay-per-view purchase and still much less justification for a trip to Alamodome.  Not in a pandemic, no.

What I missed was an entertaining scrap contested at a worldclass level by two guys who know how.  It wasn’t complete a coronation as social-media feeds indicated.  In insolation Davis’ left uppercut counter looked historic.  But Davis threw the punch a dozen times before he landed it, which speaks to his opponent’s negligible pattern recognition much as Davis’ ring IQ.

Santa Cruz has never been a crafty fighter.  He’s ever been best when swimming frantically at smaller men.  He was best when swimming frantically at Davis, too, who didn’t have much better of a response than shell-and-tackle.  The rest of the time Santa Cruz retreated in a concession to how much thicker Davis was than he.  Santa Cruz made his professional debut 10 pounds lighter than Davis did.  That sort of difference matters when one man relies on constant activity and the larger man relies on concussive effect.

Davis had the perfect strategy for a man who didn’t have the balance or power to unman him.  He executed it.  Davis must be kept active, as his handlers know, but that brings issues.  He is in the wrong division to make meaningful matches with fellow PBC talent, and he doesn’t really want to go to lightweight and get threshed by Teofimo Lopez, anyway, a fight PBC would never allow.

If numbers can be believed Davis draws.  So long as he stays at 130 pounds he looks likely as anyone to scrub the division.  Those looks allow him to claim avoidance by promoter Top Rank’s junior lightweights, a grift less-talented and less-charismatic men than Davis have run a long, long time.  Davis should make plenty of money in the next few years.  That’s neither a great legacy nor a bad one.

More than can be said for lightweight Devin “The Dream” Haney who looked flat mediocre on DAZN against Yuriorkis “El Viejito” Gamboa on Saturday.  Gamboa fought with what joylessness marks every Cuban prizefighter, supremely competent boxers who go through the dull motions of points compiling whilst saving their few enthusiastic moments for aggressive fouling.  Gamboa’s best moments came after the ref yelled “Break!”

Haney’s best moments were marginally better than his worst moments, a mark of professionalism, yes, but nothing any aficionado had to watch to believe.  Whatever images get conjured by reading Haney UD Gamboa are exactly what happened.

*

Now a detour here, as it’s difficult, apparently impossible, to concentrate for long on anything but Four Seasons Total Landscaping, the one political story of my adult life about which I’ve laughed, heartily, zanily, for an entire day.  We’ll likely never know the truth of how it came to pass, our President tweeting about an upscale downtown Philadelphia hotel he thought his team’d booked, getting informed the event was actually happening at a landscaping company a halfhour away, and staying in the bit.  But to see his legal team leveling the most-serious allegation against democracy in American history, beside a canary-yellow garden hose, was surreal and fitting a spectacle as television has offered.

I haven’t the comedic expertise to say what made this so absurdly funny, but I’m glad to have lived it.  Ron White, Bill Burr, Doug Stanhope, Bert Kreischer, Adam Carolla; I’ve attended shows by each of these men, and I’ve laughed at each show and plenty, but never has any professional comic made me laugh like Four Seasons Total Landscaping.  It’s somewhere in its mix of hubris, irony, sycophancy, layers, possibilities, and most of all professional newsmakers’ incredulous reactions. 

Did the legal team intentionally book a landscaping company, leading their striving philistine boss to reasonably assume a public subversion of America should happen in the finest of trappings? did the striving philistine boss assume a reservation, subsequently declined, and force his flunkies to scramble for any venue with the same name? did the first and most obvious explanation happen – wherein a staffer, from the most dilapidated staff ever to staff the White House, google the wrong venue and not get corrected by whoever answered the phone?  That the official explanation might be true, a day later, is even funnier than were it one more lie.

Not since fat little Andy Ruiz sent the giant and invincible Anthony Joshua stumbling everywhere has something so unlikely and delightful come to pass.  Ruiz-Joshua 1 was an unexpected twist in a niche story written in the darkest corner of sports.  Four Seasons Total Landscaping was an attempt to subvert democracy by the President of the United States, a self-coup, un autogolpe, auto-sabotaged by its own morons standing in a dirt lot across from Fantasy Island Adult Bookstore.

It’s simply too rich.  This couldn’t have ended any other way.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday in England in a heavyweight match broadcast by DAZN, Ukrainian cruiserweight prodigy Oleksandr Usyk worked alongside London’s Dereck Chisora to show what a bad idea Usyk’s migration to heavyweight was, winning a sloppy and close decision against a c-level fighter praised for trying hard, a couple hours before Japanese prodigy Naoya “Monster” Inoue origami-ed Australian bantamweight Jason Moloney in a match broadcast by ESPN+.

I looked forward mostly to Usyk, a fighter whom, until Chocolatito looked splendid the Saturday before, I’d’ve called my favorite among all actives, and quickly.  Had I forgotten about Inoue?  I suppose I had a bit, but for a good reason, for Inoue: I knew Monster was in fine promotional hands.

There’s an evangelical quality to writing a weekly column about a sport that isn’t a league and hasn’t a season.  However limited or vast one’s readership he’s given a chance to petition strangers on his favorite fighters’ behalves.  For many reasons, beginning with its unfortunate affiliation with Richard Schaefer, the World Boxing Super Series has maintained a cursed sort of feel here in the U.S., home of so many recent cursings.  I freely admit a personal favoritism for the WBSS, its participants and especially its champions.

I’m not oblivious as I feign of the fiscal goings-on of our beloved sport, but I don’t care about them either.  It’s not my role.  It’s not yours.  I watch prizefighting to see men perform heroic acts and transcend themselves.  Entering oneself in a single-elimination tourney like WBSS is a proper pathway to those ends.  WBSS has given us spectacular finishes and spectacular champions, Usyk and Inoue chief among them.

WBSS took more from Usyk than Inoue, evidently, as the quirky Ukrainian has not been the same since.  Saturday he was further from the same as he’s ever been.  Chisora was two things too much for Usyk: Wide and slow.  He was, in the final tally, not too powerful, as Usyk wagered Chisora would tire and did not lose the bet, despite getting made proper miserable for some 12 of their 36 minutes together.

No, what foiled Usyk, what made him nothing like the otherworldly cruiserweight we loved a few years back, was the way Chisora’s 55 1/2 extra pounds bent the geometry of Usyk’s attack.  There was no popping and stepping round Chisora; he was very much wider than Mairis Briedis, Murat Gassiev and Tony Bellew.  Far sloppier too.

It was a bit reminiscent of watching “Fast” Eddie Chambers’ 2010 tilt with Wlad Klitschko, a match in which Fast Eddie’s shoulders fit within the span of Klitschko’s chest.  No matter what lateral movement Chambers employed it was hopeless; he couldn’t get outside Wlad to spin him, with four steps and a hop.  At least Chambers was acclimated to heavyweight pace, which is glacial.

Usyk missed a number of the large number of punches he missed Saturday because he threw the second or third punch of a combination where his first punch should’ve sent Chisora, and did send Chisora, too, just a few seconds after Usyk expected Chisora to get there.  The bemused look on Usyk’s face said nothing so much as: “There’s boxing, and then there’s heavyweight boxing!”

Usyk is committed to finishing his career a heavyweight, though he could certainly return to cruiserweight (he’s fought twice in two years and gained merely 15 pounds, which is about the monthly American COVID-19-lockdown rate).  This is poor strategy.  There’s no telling if Usyk realizes this, as he’s too eccentric to read.  He’d have done much better cherrypicking a heavyweight beltholder, while continuing his cruiserweight reign, making a one-night-only spectacle of trying to outbox AJ, Gypsy King or Wilder & Wilder.  Instead he’s getting his tires balded and brain softened by men with a fraction his talent but unlimited size.

I’ll still watch him and tell fellow aficionados he’s one of my favorites, but my enthusiasm for him got beat out me Saturday.  About the opposite how I felt watching Inoue.

If Monster is not fully recovered from what he and Nonito Donaire did to one another a year ago this week, he is quite nearly so.  It feels good to watch a man be excellent at something, whatever that thing be, no?  Inoue is near as we have to a perfect offensive machine.  He is our sport’s apex predator and best fighter.  His attack is varied, educated, balanced, gorgeous.

He turned pro as a light flyweight, won a title there, defended it once, skipped a division and blasted in two rounds Omar Narvaez, a fabled Argentine making his eighth defense of that title.  In three years Inoue outgrew that division, moved to bantamweight and began winning title fights more easily and quickly than he’d done at either his two previous weightclasses.  Nobody does that.  Ask Chocolatito or Usyk.  Fighters gain weight on their chins, not their fists, which is what makes scaling divisions such a feat.

Excepting his fight-of-the-year ordeal with Donaire, Monster hasn’t been tested much in the 11 rounds of his other four bantamweight title fights; it’s not that he’s that much better than what softies he’s been matched with, it’s that he’s that much better than everyone.  We know this because it was a tourney doing his matchmaking in 2018 and 2019, not a promoter.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Friday in Mexico City in the co-main and main event of a DAZN card Nicaraguan Roman “Chocolatito” Gonzalez defended his WBA super flyweight title by lopsided decision over Mexican Israel “Jiga” Gonzalez, and Mexican “El Gallo” Juan Francisco Estrada defended his Ring super flyweight championship by stopping Mexican Carlos “Principe” Cuadras.  Rumor is, Chocolatito-Gallo 2 is next.  How blessed are we!

What a thrill it is to watch Chocolatito and to see other aficionados on Twitter, men whose opinion one respects, watching Chocolatito and their love for this brutal thing of ours and our love for the way Chocolatito does what he does.  May he continue to do so long as he wishes.

Three years since his brutal loss to Srisaket Sor Rungvisai, three years and a title match and title defense in a division Rat King made him look far too small to compete in, Chocolatito forces us to consider it was a styles mismatch more than an illadvised curtain call that put him bellyup in Carson, Calif.  His matchmaking has been far carefuller since 2017, yes, but still he is beating larger and younger men in world-title matches, which a fraction of prizefighters in history can say.

Friday in the opening rounds of his match with Jiga, Chocolatito did what Papachenko wishes his son had done with a larger, younger man: jab with him, step inside his power, let years of mastery dictate the flow of his attack.  Chocolatito is a greater prizefighter and man than Vasyl Lomachenko because of the choices he makes, because he cannot abide not-knowing the way Lomachenko can.  It can never be said of Chocolatito “if only he’d started to attack earlier” because he attacks from every opening bell.  If that means he loses a vicious KO-by rather than what Mexicans call a “polemical decision” then he suffers that fate ungladly but surely.

It’s why he inspires a disproportionate love in his American admirers, men who have very little in common with a 115-pound Nicaraguan but stalk him nevertheless on YouTube and Tokyo broadcasts at various hours of the night and early morning, knowing there’s a purity in who Chocolatito is – respectful of every opponent’s humanity before and after every fight as he is disrespectful of their volition during – that is so different from what swindles American prizefighting and its swindler promoters and swindler networks and, yes, swindler fighters, too, give them.

What doesn’t stop being surprising is how little malice Chocolatito brings to the act of striking other men about their heads and bodies.  Maybe there’s viciousness in his heart masked adeptly by layers of professionalism and mastery.  That is doubtful.  Contempt, hatred, malice, viciousness – these things exact a tariff and a half on their bearers, sapping them, and does Chocolatito ever look tired? 

Friday he went out, removed his much longer opponent’s advantages of length and speed in three rounds then began to strike Jiga with nigh every punch in boxing’s lexicon, breathing metronomically as he did, looking at all times unperturbed.  When Chocolatito found he could no longer miss with his cross, after measuring Jiga for it early (inching his lead foot behind a blinding jab), he began to miss with it intentionally to cock his hips and shoulders for the lefthook to Jiga’s body.  At super flyweight Chocolatito no longer carries the concusiveness he did at lower weights, but he still has more than enough to break opponents’ wills.  Jiga looked little better than discouraged in his final 20 minutes with Chocolatito.

Soon after Chocolatito defended his title Gallo Estrada made a defense of his own against a considerably better opponent, countryman Carlos Cuadras, getting himself felled early, and finishing Cuadras, who’d never before been finished by anyone, not even semi-prime Chocolatito four years ago, in the 11th round of a fantastic scrap. 

Estrada is special.  Super flyweight would belong to him alone were it not for Chocolatito’s return in 2020.

After their matches Estrada, face badly swollen, and Chocolatito embraced, sat beside one another and conspired to have a rematch of their 2012 fight.  Estrada’s strongest words were for neither Chocolatito nor Cuadras but for his promoter, and his desire to get paid well for a rematch with Chocolatito.  Estrada got decisioned seven pounds and eight years ago by an ascendent master.  Estrada would immediately rise to 112 pounds and not lose again in 10 fights until an extremely close decision with Sor Rungvisai, three months after Rat King sent Chocolatito to a California hospital.  Estrada’s first fight with Sor Rungvisai was so good they had a rematch 14 months later.  Estrada won that, close but unanimous.

Which brings us to Chocolatito-Gallo 2, a rematch that almost certainly will happen and just as certainly will be fabulous.  Had they never fought before, odds should favor Estrada heavily; he has had better success against better fighters at super flyweight, he is the slightly larger man, he is today the quicker man of both foot and fist, and he is a masterful boxer.  They did fight before, though, and Estrada is fully cognizant of just how great Chocolatito is.  Too, Chocolatito’s style, volume-puncher, tends to unwind boxers like Estrada, no matter how good they be.

Chocolatito-Estrada 2 will be like only Chocolatito-Estrada 2.  Both men are originals.  No comparisons are needed.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday in The Bubble in the long-anticipated mainevent of a long ESPN card Brooklyn’s Teofimo Lopez conclusively decisioned Ukrainian Vasyl Lomachenko to become The Ring’s lightweight champion.  The fight went nearly opposite most forecasts, with Lopez, the better boxer, building an insurmountable points lead, and Lomachenko, the dirty desperado, trying for a knockout with almost every punch he threw – all 10 of them.

More Taylor-Hopkins than Pavlik-Taylor, Saturday’s fight was a tale of auto-overestimation that began with Lomachenko’s overestimating his defense in rounds 1-6 then his power in rounds 7-11 then his conditioning in round 12.  Not till after the match did Lomachenko flash some of his trademark contempt, replacing with scorn for the result what looks of concern for himself, confusion, discomfort and unpleasant surprise he’d worn for the preceding hour.

How much did Lopez do to create those looks?  Lots and lots.  He had Lomachenko’s number from the opening bell and knew it.  Lomachenko knew, too, even if he didn’t believe it.

There were moments in the fifth and sixth rounds when it became obvious Lomachenko expected judges to score his reputation, and it set one to thinking: He’s only got 15 prizefights, not 150, so what reputation does he expect them to score?  Judge Julie Lederman saw Lomachenko’s resume as balderdash and scored only what she saw, 109-119, in a refreshing manifestation of beginner’s mind; if you didn’t know Lomachenko’s skills are otherworldly and born of traditional Ukrainian dance, etcetera and etcetera, what you scored was a smaller man feinting and twitching and leaping away, for 15 minutes of what had been billed as a superfight, not fighting at all, in other words, and somehow expecting the two punches he landed every other round to even things up.

Whatever Papachenko’s grand strategy be, his son fought like they lost track of the round count, like they didn’t realize they were outside the math of the match till they were way outside it.  There were moments in rounds 10 and 11 when it appeared Lomachenko’s strategy hadn’t been to win a decision at all but stop the youngster, which mightn’t have been a bad strategy had Lomachenko done anything more than interrupt his opening 28-minute dance recital with occasional headbutting. 

No, Lopez hadn’t any idea how far out his depth he was when he signed the fight, and Lomachenko did nothing to show him in the match’s opening half, either, allowing Lopez’s youthful cocksureness to grow and grow.  By the time Lomachenko began to begin scoring points Lopez knew nothing but his being knocked-out should keep the belts round Lomachenko’s waist, and Lopez had long since mitigated what otherworldly angles Lomachenko flashes at smaller men.

It was all in Lopez’s leftfoot backward step.  Howsoever much Lomachenko valued his career’s 15 fights more than Lopez’s 14 what Lomachenko saw Lopez do to Richard Commey in December made a hell of an impression and Lomachenko wanted sample none of Lopez’s power, which meant Lopez, not Lomachenko, applied the pressure when no one was punching.  Fear of Lopez’s power stripped Lomachenko of his creativity, ensuring Lopez might only be hit by a punch he saw coming, and the quick backwards step Lopez made over and over with his lead foot, choosing to move with Lomachenko, not against him, reduced Lomachenko’s offensive arsenal to its square root.

There were flashes of Juan Manuel Marquez in Lopez’s choice; everyone who ever stepped at Manny Pacquiao got spun round and wacked, including Marquez in his first three minutes with the Filipino.  After getting felled thrice Marquez eventually solved the riddle by mirroring Pacquiao and spinning out his lead foot every time Pacquiao readied to attack; Marquez was willing to be hit and hurt by Pacquiao’s 1-2, but he’d be damned if he was going to get spun into Pacquiao’s third and fourth punches.

Lopez’s footwork, although not born in the ballrooms of Kiev, neutralized Lomachenko completely.  There were issues of Lopez’s simple width, too, and Lomachenko’s wariness, but it was most telling Lomachenko’s very few rallies happened when Lopez found himself on the ropes and hadn’t access to the one-step retreat he’d obviously practiced and practiced.

Then there was the decisive round, the reason this match will be remembered as Lopez’s coronation and not for its scorecards.  After imposing himself in round 11 Lomachenko prepared for Lopez to wilt in the 12th.  Wilt he didn’t.  Lopez snatched the initiative from Lomachenko and had his best moments in the match’s most important moments.  This was where Lomachenko’s auto-overestimation shone through.  Lomachenko put his foot down in the final minutes of the fight and found he didn’t have the power he expected – because his defense hadn’t been great as he believed in the opening half, and he’d been hit plenty – he didn’t have the target he expected – because his offense hadn’t been great as he believed, and Lopez was still strong – and he didn’t have the advantage in conditioning he expected because thinking you can apply psychological pressure to a fearless opponent is futile and dumb.

Lomachenko did just enough in rounds 8-11 for aficionados to content ourselves Lopez won, Lomachenko didn’t lose, and embrace the 23-year-old as our new savior, even if the most-feared puncher since Roberto Duran never so much as wobbled the computer nerd across from him.  OK, so maybe some of this was overhyped.  Welcome to boxing.

Here’s what wasn’t: Both guys subjected themselves to the crucible of highest competition much earlier than they had to, much earlier than their promoter even wanted them to, much earlier than their peers have done.  Lopez is right to revel in his accomplishment and publicly ridicule the gradually exiting generation of businessmen whose fears of loss and humiliation ever hid behind promotional conflicts and network loyalties.  That ruse held up only so long as everyone went along with it.  Lopez put paid to all that Saturday – even if Bud and The Truth don’t know it yet.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday on ESPN in The Bubble Ukrainian lightweight world champion Vasyl “Hi-Tech” Lomachenko makes a title-unification match with Teofimo “El Brooklyn” Lopez from, well, you guessed it, a match anticipated to be the finest our sport produces during the pandemic no matter how long COVID-19 lasts.  That this match will happen on basic cable is a wonderful thing.

Lopez is not ready for Lomachenko.  That is the betting consensus, and as usual, it is a good one. 

COVID realities being what they are this match likely happens two years too soon for Lopez and at a fine time for Lomachenko.  How propitious the timing be for aficionados remains to be seen, but ask yourself how propitious anything has been for you this year.  No, not very.

Lopez and his father talked their ways into this fight, a mainevent spectacular, with one of the world’s two best prizefighters, in Lopez’s very first mainevent.  Until his ringwalk Saturday, that is, Lopez won’t have been a mainevent fighter.  That’s surely part of what Lomachenko finds irksome.  Lomachenko has asked whom Lopez beat to deserve even consideration for this fight, and that’s a fair question, even if its questioner remembers quite selectively his own qualifications for fighting Orlando Salido in Lomachenko’s second prizefight, which Hi-Tech lost.

In a deeper division and a different time this fight wouldn’t be ready.  Lopez is currently the best challenger in the division.  If Lomachenko’s stature transcends lightweights, though, his belts do not, and if Lopez is the best the division has to offer the time is right for Lomachenko-Lopez.  Of course, the time has been right for Crawford-Spence for three years, and that hasn’t made anyone jump, so what is right has nothing on what’s promotionally convenient.

Saturday’s fight is nothing if not convenient for promoter Top Rank.  Were Lomachenko a few years older this match mightn’t happen because you’d not want to lose a young marquee talent to a veteran with few fights left.  Lomachenko is only 32 years-old, though, which means if he undresses Lopez and remands him to Brooklyn, tail buried deep in his hindquarters, Top Rank burnishes Lomachenko’s resume for another four-year run, while rehabilitating Lopez with the usual recipe: orphan him, send him to Hollywood, Wild Card him.

Fact is, Top Rank does not like or trust paternal trainers and tolerates them only until a highprofile loss then jettisons them when it can.  With both guys trained by their dads Saturday’s loser, especially if it’s Lopez, can look forward to a greater dose than usual of family drama Sunday morning.

Comparisons of this fight to Mayweather-Alvarez aren’t inapt.  The betting odds are about the same, but that probably underestimates Lopez’s chances a bit.  Bookmakers caren’t who wins or even who’s favored; they want a balanced ledger, and there’s no way Honduras is betting on Lopez the way Mexico bet on Canelo.

What Lopez must do early to justify those odds is hurt Lomachenko.  It can be done; Lomachenko’s been dropped by Jorge Linares and roughed-up by Siri Salido.  Lomachenko is an extraordinarily arrogant prizefighter, and if he feels this entire spectacle is below him, and rest assured he does, he may be willing to forego a bit of his ballroom dancing and seek the initiative earlier in the match than is otherwise prudent.

Lopez is a better counterpuncher than most 23-year-olds with 12 knockouts in 15 fights.  He is not prepared for Lomachenko, no one can prepare him for a guy who did his 10,000 hours to mastery then got bored and began inventing a new kind of boxing, but if Lopez commits to hitting Lomachenko everywhere, he might change the fight’s dynamic early.  Or he might get denuded.  That’s the gamble.

What’s not a gamble is what’ll happen if Lopez decides he can outbox Lomachenko and begins to wait.  Whatever magic Lopez thinks his trainer and father has, there’s exactly zero chance an Olympic also-ran from Team Honduras is going to show Lomachenko – a twotime Olympic gold medalist – skills he didn’t see during his collective 21 rounds across from Gary Russell and Guillermo Rigondeaux.

Lopez’s best chance lies in exploiting Lomachenko’s arrogance, gainsaying it till rage overwhelms the Ukrainian’s ample professionalism.  Lopez’s dad talks openly about being in Lomachenko’s head.  Whether that’s true it does in fact represent Lopez’s best chance of catching early Lomachenko with something decisive.

But here we return to Floyd Mayweather, whom Canelo never caught with more than a breeze, and what happened when a boxer who took conditioning very seriously got clipped in round 2 by Shane Mosley.  Sugar Shane, you’ll recall, buckled Money May good and proper in the opening five minutes of their 2010 match.  How did Mayweather respond?  Hands-up, feet spread, 1-2, 1-2.  A couple minutes of that and Mosley was left behind to imagine what might’ve been.  Mayweather, ever wary of his brittle hands, didn’t try to snatch Mosley’s consciousness, because while Money was nearly arrogant as Lomachenko he was a controlfreak, not a gambler, in the ring.

That was a different time altogether and a pay-per-view event.  Lomachenko knows he must entertain in the ring in a way Mayweather did not, as there will be no 24/7, no pay-per-view, no absurd cable contracts; if Lomachenko makes a match dull as Mayweather-Canelo he can expect less money for his next mandatory defense, whatever pound-for-pound ratings say about it.

As you read this we’re all grateful one thing good, this fight on ESPN – the most meaningful event on basic cable in decades – came out our woeful pandemic.  If this fight goes the way it probably will you’ll wake up disappointed Sunday morning, yes, but at least it won’t be a disappointment compounded by the regret of wasting another $80.

I’ll take Lomachenko, UD-12.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday on ESPN+ California’s Jose Zepeda and Belarus’ Ivan Baranchyk made a junior welterweight nontitle fight that should prove the year’s best.  Each man got knocked-down four times in fewer than five rounds, yet there was nothing comical about the action.  There was nothing lighthearted about the finale, either, when Zepeda dangled Baranchyk over the abyss at 2:50 of round 5.

The most-telling bit of forecasting happened before the match, when ESPN flashed its junior welterweight ratings and showed its main event fighters in sixth and seventh place.  It wouldn’t have mattered if the graphic’d had them one and two or 15th and 16th, frankly, because what mattered is what matters first in any contest: evenness.  Zepeda and Baranchyk over their cumulative 55 prizefights had proved themselves equals in a consensus that emerged messily, as reliable consensuses usually do, as they plied their crafts first in Mexico and Belarus then on the West and East Coasts of the U.S., having few opponents in common.

There’s the matter of styles, too, of course, but that’s a predictor of entertainment more than excellence; any sadist can be entertained by an overmatched slugger mauling a weakling volume-puncher, but such spectacles never make memorable fights.  What makes a fight memorable is when both combatants make choices that make the other man transcend himself, and both did Saturday.

Baranchyk’s strength discomfited Zepeda, but Zepeda’s precision snatched Baranchyk’s consciousness, rendering him bluemat origami.  However many knockdowns there were, or should have been, they didn’t predict the knockout well as other events did.  Credit as ever to commentator Timothy Bradley, who noticed Baranchyk’s stiffened leg while everyone else kept watch on his head and fists.

Zepeda got Baranchyk in trouble early, even in a round Zepeda lost 10-7, by striking the onrushing Belarusian in full rush.  This was not the Zepeda who tried to play keepaway from opponents behind good boxing in the past but instead a pupil of what former opponents outwilled him and used their volition to overcome his class.  As both an athlete and entertainer, Zepeda learned, he must plant his feet and fight.  Whenever he did, Saturday, things improved for him.  When he retreated and gave Baranchyk’s punches room to unfurl, Zepeda got undone.

Commentator Bernardo Osuna made a great observation as to why: Zepeda’s retreats from Baranchyk’s wild lunges became wild themselves, so as to keep time and distance, and wild retreats ever bring a fighter to the ropes and their elasticity.  Baranchyk, who has only one plan but knows that plan intimately, timed elasticity’s effect and doubled the force of his punches by catching Zepeda being rebounded at him.

Zepeda, a prizefighter who prefers a controlled setting, surrendered all control of space and pace each time he got returned to Baranchyk, hurtling, by the ropes.  So long as the match happened at ringcenter, no matter how many times Baranchyk felled him with balanceshot hooks, Zepeda knew he’d be OK if his conditioning held up.  That must’ve been a thought in Zepeda’s mind or his corner’s.  Baranchyk is just about the last man you’d want to show a sign of fatigue, feasting as he does on oppponents’ fear for its rejuvenating effect.

If Baranchyk is not quite chinny it’s still his chin that represents his weakest spot.  In any other test of fortitude, one imagines, Baranchyk might best Zepeda, but not chin.  Zepeda got hit by fully leveraged shots and dropped quarce and barely deflected a halfdozen nearmisses but never lost his wits and stood square to Baranchyk’s attack and looked for what holes he might exploit.

Baranchyk cannot be dissuaded, and Zepeda was right not to try.  So long as Baranchyk was conscious he would rush forward – not unlike Vassiliy Jirov’s stomping towards James Toney even as his legs gave out – as it is his pedigree.  If Baranchyk’s just barely too young to remember the Soviet Union he sure isn’t too young to have been raised by folks who endured the deprivation of its final days, collapse and aftermath, scholars of cruelty and what it does to employers and victims, both.

Hence the immediate sympathy for Baranchyk as he lay motionless; he had followed orders directly to unconsciousness.  There was an air of betrayal to it.  A noble man who finds a purpose and devotes himself to it slavishly, we’re told in everything from fairy tales to epic poems, emerges a hero.  There was Baranchyk following his uncompromising strategy of melting another man’s rubbery will, and prevailing too, and then he wasn’t.  The end came in an instant.  A professional athlete contorted in a wrongful shape by a body severed from its command center, Baranchyk looked desperate for medical attention one second later.

Bradley and Osuna’s class, too, came through on the broadcast; Baranchyk’s ordeal didn’t create Osuna and Bradley’s strong character but revealed it – two men who were pitchperfect in their coverage of a fighter’s injury not because they rehearsed it but because they had experiences and trust enough to go with their intuition and not miss.  How refreshing.  Men who knew how to quiet down, who had more than one speed.  You can watch boxing for decades and never see a broadcast handle what happened Saturday with the grace ESPN+’s booth did.

Rare that a fight be so excellent and require no rematch, but that’s how Zepeda-Baranchyk felt; both men did exactly as they planned to do and one man had to be driven to the hospital afterwards.  Neither man will be the same.  Baranchyk’s chin will be a target and source of doubt henceforth.  Zepeda’s power and force will compose a wildcard that complements his class.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday afternoon, Central Time, Scotland’s Josh “The Tartan Tornado” Taylor broke in half undefeated Thai super lightweight Apinun Khongsong with a round 1 lefthand, on ESPN+, sometime shortly before or after Latvia’s Mairis Briedis narrowly decisioned Cuban cruiserweight Yuniel Dorticos to win the WBSS tournament on DAZN.  Sunday morning Houston’s Jermell Charlo stopped Dominican junior middleweight Jeison Rosario on Showtime PPV.

An advantage of apps like DAZN and ESPN+ is that nothing must any longer be seen live.  So long as one abstains from social media, never a bad idea, he needn’t watch boxing at any moment but his most convenient.  In a pandemic live sports resemble YouTube uploads, in any event, and whosoever imagines a YouTube channel successfully forcing viewers into appointments?

I enjoy reading fight tweets much more than doing them, I’ve learned; the consensus I gather from eight or 10 opinionated lads watching a match often entertains more, and much more efficiently, than watching live action does.  I sit in a large La-Z-Boy chair upon which I now log more weekly hours than any mattress, read contemporary fiction and poetry, and check Twitter sporadically to see how things get on.

My regular survey of boxing tweets is how I know pandemic purchases of the Brothers Charlo were light and actual viewers of the 1 AM mainevent were nighnil.  No, of course I wasn’t awake at that hour.  Sunday morning I scrolled my timeline and saw my 10 regular commentators were down to three by the time Sunday’s result happened.  I did not regret foregoing the pay-per-view, as I never do.  I felt a quick twinge of elation for Jermell Charlo when I read he’d won by knockout; it’s great to have a unified champion, and Jermell is worthy as any.  When I did the math on what time the mainevent happened, I felt relief, honestly, I’d not lashed myself to that mast.

I am already way too old to watch sports at that hour.  I can’t fathom who the target demographic for these schedules is, though I assume some sort of market research informs network decisions else they’d not keep making them.  I fear the market research might only be something like: Well, no one ever purchases a pay-per-view just before the mainevent, even if that’s all he watches, so we’ve already got all the money we’re going to get by, say, 10 PM ET, and who cares?  That would be too fine a fit for boxing’s brutally shortsighted self.

This is fairly well on everyone, including Jermell, who has to be told logistical things like what time he ringwalks, in order to plan his day, days in advance, and evidently doesn’t pipe-up with something decisive like: “That’s after midnight in Houston, and the people who really care about boxing aren’t staying up that late.”

I don’t know what time Josh Taylor’s match went off in London nor what time Briedis-Dorticos happened in Munich.  I didn’t watch either of those live either.

The pandemic has removed much of the weight from much of my life this last halfyear.  Without a fraction the events and obligations that once filled my calendar I began the pandemic believing I should hold to a schedule, just the same, or else.  By the first week of April I’d contemplated else quite a lot and recognized it held no meaningful consequences for me.  With nothing on the calendar I was loosed to do whatever I wished from Friday at 5 PM till Monday at 8 AM.  By May I realized I wished to read – more than I wished to do anything else.

Read promiscuously.  It came as a surprise.  Decades of using the television mostly as a device for falling asleep built a suspicion I was only just keeping 30-hour binges at bay.  I worried I might give the entire pandemic to episodic television and action movies.  Nope.  By June I was no longer worrying I might sound priggish if I told coworkers I liked reading books better than watching comicbook movies. 

One such book I’ve been reading occasionally all through the pandemic, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert Sapolsky, a neuroendocrinologist and excellent writer, mightn’t be surprised as I was by this turn towards the written word.  Everything to Sapolsky is an amplification system; genes lead us to select environments that amplify those genes that amplify previous selections that amplify those genes.  The pandemic has merely amplified who I was before the pandemic.  If that’s true it’s both a relief and a disappointment, a result Sapolsky might enjoy.

I wish Taylor’s match with Khongsong had gone much, much longer.  That was the match that, judging by its opening minute, held the most potential delight and a chance to deliver something stunning as Gonzalez-Sor Rungvisai 1, wherein a world champion finds himself against a man’s power he cannot solve-for.  Instead Taylor felt his left fist “go in” Khongsong’s liver.  That was that. 

Briedis-Dorticos was neither suspenseful nor decisive as its predecessor WBSS cruiserweight final had been a few years back.  Neither man has a sixth gear but only Briedis knows it and plans accordingly; at the elite level Dorticos has warning-track power but fights like his next righthand ends things, and it doesn’t; both guys’ gloves were too big, ultimately, and there’s no such thing as a great fight in which neither man bleeds or loses consciousness.

You don’t need ratings to know professional sports are not back and will not be till there are spectators.  Networks should continue to budget accordingly.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Florida’s Erickson Lubin decisioned Cleveland’s Terrell Gausha by unanimous scores nobody cared to contest.  The prizefight’s quality, and the year’s economic developments, loosened tongues during the broadcast, with all Showtime’s employees expressing record levels of empathy with Saturday’s viewers.  Afterwards Lubin likened the match to chess.

This allusion to chess by boring prizefighters and their enablers has lost its effect.  Chess is invigorating to its players.  On extremely rare occasions it is captivating to spectators who are themselves masters of the game.  Watching chess is never not-awful for casual observers.

What happened Saturday in Showtime’s mainevent was not chess in the Kasparov-Topalov sense either.  It was, to a casual fan’s eyes, Lubin tentatively moving his horse in an L shape, followed by Gausha tentatively doing the same, followed by Lubin tentatively returning his horse to its previous position using the same L shape, followed by Gausha tentatively doing the same, for about a halfhour, until Lubin’s eyes overglazed and he tipped accidentally forward and knocked a few of the pieces across the board, whereupon Gausha, his horse in its 137th tentative retreat of the match, leaped forward with every pawn he had while Lubin tried to get the board reset.  The board quickly reset, Gausha got most of his pawns back to their starting position, Lubin moved both his horses in L shapes, and the final bell clanged.

Halfway through this spectacle, I removed myself from the action, went to the kitchen and began eating something, I don’t recall what, more from boredom than hunger.  My pace was leisurely.  I returned in time to see the Gausha balance shot that breathed life in the evening for a round.  What surprised me about this trip to the kitchen, upon review, was not that I walked away from live prizefighting without pause or that I ate without a sense of urgency but that I didn’t notice either thing.

A few minutes before the match concluded my wife came in the room and said, “It’s still on?  I thought it was over.”

“Oh?”

“You were in the kitchen.”

“Yup.”

Such was the chess match.  It cleansed the home of meaningfulness and made even courteous communication feel futile.  More minutes deeper in this pastoral of minimalist repose, came like a bolt of lightning Erickson Lubin’s maniacal selfassessment.  A branding exercise, of course, Lubin’s words about himself and the fight he’d just made were from a different time – San Jose, 2001? Bogota, 2031? – that led to a startling thought: Someone watching this might be doubting his own memory, right now, as Lubin tells him what he saw was somehow tactical, planned, a product of Lubin’s mastermind trainer.

That’s not the worst of it.  What Saturday’s mainevent did more potently than bore its viewers was cast doubt on this weekend’s product.  I now doubt I will purchase the Charlo doubleheader.  The price is too high for one Charlo, and the price is too high for two Charlos.  That’s not new; boxing pay-per-views are generally priced by asking what any reasonable adult might pay then multiplying it by three, assuming the whole mess gets offset by parties of 12 or more viewers crammed in friends’ livingrooms (in a bygone era).

What frightens me away from Saturday’s pay-per-view, then, is the prospect of being stuck in a series of chess matches and stapled to my seat by the guilt of having spent a week’s groceries on a purchase I regret before, during and after.

Credit where it’s due: The Showtime commentating crew’s honest assessment of the dreariness of Saturday’s mainevent brings hope.  For once a boxing booth didn’t bother selling us our own suffering.  One wonders if this is about the way PBC treated Showtime these last few years, as an off-Broadway farmleague for future Fox stars, as what former Showtime commentator Paulie Malignaggi would call a “side piece”.

Without a pandemic and the disappearance of half the American economy and its advertisers, how likely is it there’d even be boxing on Showtime these days?  Review Showtime’s 2019 boxing calendar before you answer incredulously.

Welcome back.  You didn’t have to go do that.  It’s instructive, though, isn’t it?

It reminds you of a time when all this felt essential, when serious writers did serious work about things like shoulder programming and terrestrial-v-cable broadcasters.  DAZN and ESPN and Fox blew all that to pieces then got blown to pieces by COVID-19.

The recent bubblewrapping of club-level prizefighters has put local promoters on an endangered list.  Major promoters, Top Rank and PBC, at least, have sought to educate their fighters about what economic realities arrived over the summer.  Top Rank appears to have told its marquee names they can fight for smaller purses or stay iced.  PBC is using the more traditional and ultimately harsher freemarket model, whereby you give fighters a percentage of their pay-per-view receipts and wish them Godspeed.  That should prove humbling.

Perhaps it was that, ultimately, that turned me against the Brothers Charlo event – the lack of humility to its promotion, the pathology of promoting this pay-per-view like nothing’s changed, like this is the twins’ just due for all they’ve given us.  I watched some of The Journey after Saturday’s mainevent and waited to hear something like: “Look, we know a lot of y’all have lost your jobs and this is a lot of money we’re charging, but we promise to give you the best show you’ve ever seen!”

Instead it was the usual brand idiocy about lions and dens and jungles.  Jermell’s match with Jeison Rosario is a legitimate unification fight worthy of a mainevent on Showtime.  Jermall’s match with Sergiy Derevyanchenko is not.  I still might buy the show.

If I don’t it will be a function of competition.  WBSS has its finals on DAZN and its last winner on ESPN+.  Lions Only, survival of the fittest, etc.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry