“Mechanism-based approaches are generally dangerous. The problem is that the goal of such studies is mimicry rather than true understanding, and these studies can easily degenerate into the writing of programs that do no more than mimic in unenlightening ways aspects of human performance.” – David Marr, Vision

Tuesday morning the announcement came Peter Nelson will be the new leader of HBO Sports, an outfit that still represents the most prestigious, if no longer the most powerful, influence in boxing. Nelson first accomplished prominence in our sport as a writer and aspiring Freddie Roach biographer. He is smart, scrupulous and navigationally adept. His promotion was expected.

What, then, could the passage above be about? David Marr was a brash psychology professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who, before his 35th birthday, had as many original ideas about the visual component of machine learning as the artificial-intelligence community has spawned in its 35 years since. Marr fearfully anticipated exactly what has happened: Instead of programming machines to teach themselves, technicians would make machines faster, program them with existing knowledge, and convince the laity machines were self-taught.

Two questions: Is Nelson’s professional success a product of true understanding or mimicry? And will it make a difference, either way, in his new role?

Reading Tuesday’s reports of Nelson’s promotion was unpredictably dreary work. They were mostly copy+paste jobs with written-round commentary, weblog style, and nearly no reporting that wasn’t provided by HBO itself. There were a few exceptions to this – childishly exuberant ones.

Nothing new, one says, perhaps rightly, though a tiny alarm might ring for this: Peter Nelson was a writer, and he communicates with writers, and reads them, and often pays them mind. Boxing is generally populated, or was anyway, by greedy eccentrics, men whose theories are selfaggrandizing and whose stories are entertaining as they are embellished. Nelson found partial refuge from this world in men who purported to what journalism survived in 2011 when Nelson, who’d already been a part of HBO’s selfcoverage machine, officially joined the network.

He was not hired by his boss, who left the network in 2013, or the man he now replaces; he was hired by a man who outranked both, which must’ve been a touch awkward for those involved. Nelson now reports to the man who hired him four years ago, completing a (insert cosmic modifier here) ascent that ends the Hershman Era in the same low key that defined it.

Stretching as it did to create a celebratory tone, HBO’s press release mentioned Nelson’s youth and education and a tiny increase in 2015 viewership that, one is to infer somehow, happened in correlation with the network’s featuring Gennady Golovkin and Roman Gonzalez on pay-per-view in the fall. Golovkin and Gonzalez are now HBO fighters because of Nelson’s spearheading sagacity. Golovkin and Gonzalez attracted a tiny number of pay-per-viewers in October because the previous regime was wanting, and those men are now replaced. If it doesn’t make sense particularly, it’s not supposed to; television is a flexible and fun medium about hot emotion, not sobriety.

This is the spot in a column where a writer is supposed to tap his brakes, mention the brilliance of some television folks, toss in a silly garnish about educational television, and assume an authoritative air about a medium, television, he neither understands nor takes very seriously – all in the hopes of ongoing mediacenter access to celebrity analysts, at least, and a job of his own in television someday, at most. It’s not a sensible tack for a few reasons, and the largest is this: Television is an ecosystem that knows its own, intuiting tiny markers, sending and receiving honest signals, and it knows most writers are not its kind.

It marked Nelson immediately as its kind, though, and that may bode well for the Nelson Era at HBO Sports.

At a certain level in any corporation, promotions are political happenings – the inexperienced lament this, believing as they do in what hagiographic and entrepreneurial biographies of entrepreneurs they see in bookstore windows as they walk to the cinema – and the experienced do not lament this, knowing as they do how very little actually happens above a certain paygrade. If Nelson is not now in that paygrade, he’s just below it. You read it in the sincerity of his language about collaboration; he genuinely believes the folks he now manages are uniquely talented and his job is to help them succeed. Nothing wrong with that, any talented person would cherish a boss with such qualities, but it’s altogether more political than visionary, isn’t it?

Enter Bill Simmons, a man who, if he will or will not report to Nelson, surely was not hired by Nelson. Simmons’ talents are marked by journalistic achievement more than political acumen; in telling a truth about the NFL commissioner he set a spotlight’s glare on the incestuous and interests-conflicted relationship shared by Simmons’ former employer, ESPN, and the league it pretends to cover in an objective way, and that got his employment publicly terminated and his creation, Grantland.com, vindictively dismantled.

HBO has long wanted for journalistic integrity, and a Simmons-Nelson collaboration can bring that by making Simmons something of an on-air ombudsman: Borrowing the technology with which flattering tweets are shined below the action on various networks, HBO should try a Simmons chat window somewhere on the screen during its boxing telecasts. If we’re honest, there’s nothing about Soviet-bloc fighters annihilating 20-1 underdogs that cries out for an unofficial scorekeeper anyway – how many different ways can Harold Lederman say “120 to 108, Jim!”? – and since there’s no reason to forecast any end to mismatches in the next few years, why not put Simmons in the Lederman seat and let him describe what the rest of us are already thinking? Simmons wouldn’t even need to be sarcastic or critical: When a match is awful as we already know it is, his use of, say, “. . .”, in lieu of an actual commentary, would turn the trick just fine.

Enough with the helpful suggestions. Boxing is rather diminished from what it was when Peter Nelson joined HBO. Nelson’s career already evinces navigational expertise above all. There will be no catastrophic mistakes in the Nelson Era, which means the era may well be a long one. Let us hope it navigates our beloved sport to a more fruitful place.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday in Germany, England’s Tyson Fury became the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world by decisioning Ukrainian Wladimir Klitschko by official scores of 115-112, 115-112, 116-111. What few American aficionados could be bothered to interrupt their Saturday afternoons with the live telecast expressed nearly universal disgust for Klitschko’s iffy comportment and Fury’s very existence. This reaction did little but solidify the heavyweight championship as a European estate, and if it must be that, frankly, Fury’s victory brings an intriguing improvement to the terrible dullness of Klitschko’s sovereignty.

We’ve been led by a machine for 10 years. Why not try a madman?

Let’s begin with a confession: I’ve not made it to the end of a Wladimir Klitschko fight since he pattycaked his way to a ban from Madison Square Garden 7 1/2 years ago. In that forgettable match, Klitschko, four inches and 20 pounds larger than Sultan Ibragimov, moved like a man weighing with his adversary’s every twitch the primal choice between flight or fight. It was nearer an embarrassment than any defense of a heavyweight title I’d theretofore seen, and I pledged to avoid such queasiness again. Surely I’ve written about Klitschko since, boxing’s schedule being emptied as it was, is, will be, but I’ve not made it to the end of his fights.

A bit more about the choice of queasiness: There’s something perfectly awful about the way Klitschko fights. He is enormous and scared, subverting most of his inevitable advantages in size with a buttersoft chin and a tiny heart. To those who claim any man stepping between the ropes is a paragon of courage, there’s this: When Klitschko stepped between the ropes against Eddie Chambers in 2010, he enjoyed a preposterous, five-inch, 35-pound advantage and still needed 35:55 to finish Chambers. To call that courageous is to stretch the word to snapping.

Odder yet were the pound-for-pound lists that included Klitschko, as if, stripped of his extraordinary natural size advantages, his timid, jab-jab-flee-jab gambits would hold up against a dynamo like Manny Pacquiao or a time-and-space master like Floyd Mayweather – both of whom spent their primes fighting men structurally much larger than themselves. The assumption, of course, was boxing would never unearth a man big as Klitschko who could fight even a little bit, and who was not brother Vitali, allowing the myth of Klitschko as an all-timer, and it nearly happened like that.

Bless Tyson Fury for what he did Saturday. Fury is not a good fighter – that is, shrunken to, say, Miguel Cotto’s dimensions, Fury’s fighting skills wouldn’t have allowed him to turn pro – but he is a very good modern heavyweight. As a matter of fact, he’s now the very best heavyweight fighter in the world, a phrase begging to be followed by an emoticon like 🙂 or 😀

Fury is also a fighter, in the modern-British sense of the word. He wants to mill, the way Ricky Hatton and Carl Froch did, even while being less athletically gifted than his tenacious, smaller countrymen. Saturday’s match, then, featured a very limited fighter against an enormous and handsome robot programmed with a logic loop like: IF condition=perfectly safe THEN feint with jab ELSE retreat and flail. It was a wonderful exclamation point on the Klitschko Era, one that banished heavyweight prizefighting from America’s collective consciousness, enchanting only those whose passion for precision machinery brought tingles of pleasure every time their giant robot dismantled grossly overmatched untermenschen without jarring its shaky CPU.

Setting aside patriotic and ethnic enthusiasms, Klitschko, in the tradition of young and stat-obsessed fantasysports fans, pleased best those who value most being right. To borrow a tasty thing American comic Doug Stanhope once said about New York Yankees fans, cheering for Wladimir Klitschko was like going to a casino and cheering for the dealer (and then browbeating fellow spectators about how good you are at calculating probability). Klitschko was most beloved by those who entirely miss the point of competition, if not fighting itself.

Back to Great Britain. The BBC has a motorsports program, Top Gear, that is perfect as television can be. Its three hosts brazenly test and often undo very expensive automobiles, while hatching fantastic driving analogies such as: “It’s like trying to do a crossword puzzle while being eaten by a tiger!” A few years ago Top Gear featured the McLaren MP4-12C, an extraordinary engineering feat that, in every scientifically measurable way, was superior to any car you’ve likely heard of, including a Ferrari. But as host Jeremy Clarkson noted: “There’s no zing.” For all its perfection, it wasn’t fun to drive, or at least not fun as it should have been; obsessed as it was with perfection, it verily suffocated the human element, the sort of messy vitality that marks life’s richest experiences and sells Lamborghinis.

Tyson Fury is a 6-foot-9 stack of messy vitality. By his own admission he is at least manic and perhaps berserk – an abusing product of abuse no sane person should wish to see angry or drunk. He is amusingly tacky, like many things British, and relentlessly selfpromoting. But he is also selfaware; he is not a polished fighter and doesn’t try to be. Too, he enjoys the same surfeit of confidence as his countryman Froch: Until Fury stood a meter from Klitschko’s raised fists and danced with his gloves behind his back, Saturday, few had seen a delta between talent and confidence to rival the Nottinghamshire Cobra’s. But there it was.

Legend has it, winning a title makes a prizefighter 20-percent better. But Fury didn’t just win a title; he won the title. He is now the undefeated, undisputed, unified heavyweight champion of the world. That ought to make him at least 30-percent better, which should make his reign engrossing if not majestic.

By Bart Barry-

Saturday at Mandalay Bay, Mexican junior middleweight Saul “Canelo” Alvarez widely decisioned Puerto Rican junior middleweight Miguel Cotto to become the lineal middleweight champion of the world. If there were any surprises during the pay-HBO telecast, they came on the undercard – Guillermo Rigondeaux finally fought old as he looks, and Francisco Vargas and Takashi Miura made an incredible match – because nothing unexpected happened during the main event.

It’s the ferocity that counts with Canelo, and until an aficionado has been within earshot of a Canelo fight, he doesn’t know that. After four rounds in which Cotto and Canelo appeared to land an equivalent number of blows, on television anyway, analyst Roy Jones was not hesitant in his analysis: Canelo was clearly the more effective man in the match. Jim Lampley turned to big data – his buddies’ ringside Twitter scorecards – and learned they had Canelo winning every early round.

That announcement brought guffaws of disbelief from my viewing party, a group about inversely proportionate to the Mandalay Bay crowd – we had five Puerto Ricans and two Mexicans and a token white guy – with a curious exception among the guffawing Puerto Ricans: The one guy who’d been a few rows back of ringside when Canelo decisioned Austin Trout agreed absolutely Canelo was handling Cotto from the opening bell.

By round 6 it was apparent to all but Coach Freddie th’t Cotto needed a plan b, and when Coach Freddie returned Cotto to the blackmat armed only with a double-jab idea a few minutes later, a bad idea Canelo blasted crosses over, at will, Cotto decided to treat Canelo like the sort of overmatched b-level guy Cotto feasts on (excepting only Trout, a b-level guy Cotto did not feast on, Cotto’s losses come to a-level guys [or a b-level guy with an a-level equipment advantage {allegedly, allegedly!}]), and when that approach endangered Cotto’s consciousness, Cotto returned to Coach Freddie’s plan, which, in its perspicacity and nuance and adaptability, bore a frightening resemblance to Coach Freddie’s masterplan for Manny Pacquiao’s lame effort against Money May, and the only suspense that remained after that concerned the question of Canelo stopping Cotto, which Canelo simply was not good enough to do. Simply.

That’s a terrible thing to write, of course, on this, the second day of the Cinnamon Era, but aside from his impressive physicality and ferocity, Canelo is not that spectacular. And straining one’s throat to make it so will not make it so. Canelo is much, much better than anyone else Cotto fought during his rehabilitation – a vivacious union with Coach Freddie in which Cotto whispered to Coach Freddie sweet nothings about how much better things might have gone for the starcrossed men if only they’d met sooner, and Coach Freddie whispered sweet nothings to reporters and HBO cameras about the houses he’d bet on Cotto (how does one do this at the sportsbook?) – and Canelo revealed the quality of the Cotto rehabilitation almost deftly as Juan Manuel Marquez once revealed Coach Freddie’s actual improvement of Manny Pacquiao’s footwork.

If that’s ungracious, it’s also written without a hankering for a cinéma-vérité sequel to “On Freddie Roach”: The depth of Roach’s craft has not gotten shallower so much as it has splashed its way from training to marketing. Coach Freddie no longer improves his prizefighters so much as their purses; during training camp Roach sold the certainty of a Cotto victory far better than he assured it. Quite a few times Saturday, in fact, Cotto resembled no previous version of himself so much as the man anxiously scrambling away from Antonio Margarito seven years ago: face swelling, mouth agape, leadhand lowered, backhand alternately wiping and bracketing his face, four steps back-sidewaysback for every one step forwards. Aside from the obvious advantage Margarito may have had over his firehaired countryman, when they confronted Cotto, he also had this: Margarito never misspent a second of his career proving he could avoid a smaller man’s punches.

Because he couldn’t? Well, yes, but. Or perhaps, yes, and.

Margarito was an embodiment of the puncher’s compact: You hit me, and I’ll hit you, and we’ll do this until one of us is unconscious, and I don’t much care which. Had Canelo taken his gumshield more fiercely betwixt the molars and entered the same compact Saturday, there’s a very good chance he would have stopped Cotto, who showed nervous energy, ineffective nonaggressiveness, as it were, from the match’s opening minute.

There’s something like a “geometry of boxing” – Roach’s phrase – that did not fail to favor Canelo every round Cotto committed to stepping round him. More precisely put: Cotto’s circles got wider and wider as the fight progressed, which mightn’t have been a damnable thing if it were the plan, which it could not have been. If a man sets out to make as many laps possible with as little energy expended, that man should choose shorter laps and not longer ones. Cotto’s early steps-around became walks-around became skips-around became laps-around. Frankly, it’s a testament to the conditioning enhancements Wild Card fighters discover at Coach Freddie’s rejuvenating gym that Cotto stayed fresh as he did, working at a rate so much more frantic than Canelo’s.

Now we are told to ready for an epic stripping, if, according to HBO and the other handlers of the network’s middleweight champion, in the next two weeks Canelo fails to agree to open conceivable preliminary negotiations in principle for a potential fight possibly to come in the future with the undisputed HBO middleweight champion. It bears repetition: Not in this universe or the next will a sanctioning body in Mexico City strip Mexico’s most popular fighter of his middleweight title. Call it corruption or greed or scrofulous roguery, whatever, but vague as the WBC’s requirements appear, by ordering Max Kellerman to fetch his gloves in Saturday’s essential postfight interview, Canelo undoubtedly just satisfied Mexico City’s negotiation mandate, even if he shamelessly goes on to make consecutive defenses against the likes of Marco Antonio Rubio, Martin Murray and Willie Monroe Jr.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday at Mandalay Bay, Puerto Rican middleweight champion Miguel Cotto will swap blows with Mexican junior middleweight Saul “Canelo” Alvarez in a main event that should mark 2015’s best pay-per-view match. The broadcast will happen on pay-HBO, a network whose commentators surely will invoke, in tones alternately awestruck and threatening, the name of the Kazakh fighter who holds the HBO middleweight title, reminding viewers Canelo-Cotto happens at a catchweight, 155 pounds, and that its unlucky winner will have fewer than two weeks to savor his victory before a Mexican sanctioning organization promises to strip that fighter of its belt and award the garish green tchotchke to HBO’s undisputed middleweight champion – as if the WBC ever would strip Canelo Alvarez.

The best outcome for aficionados is a Saturday match so even, violent, and robust, fans rise in a single, stentorian voice to demand a Cinco de Mayo rematch. The best outcome for HBO’s champion and at least one of his copromoters, of course, is that one man, probably Canelo, wins lopsidedly and then, in hotblood, gets goaded by Max to say he wants to fight the HBO middleweight champion next.

Among the many things about Latino prizefighters that should enchant aficionados, there’s this: An apparent obliviousness of American media manias. A man like Saul Alvarez lives in a selfsufficient country where, whatever his handlers might say when a contract gets signed, he doesn’t think about HBO or the opinions of its commentary crew or, best of all, its current exuberance for fighters from the former Soviet Union. However it gets broadcasted, the Saturday match between Alvarez and Cotto is not an elimination bout for a chance to face HBO’s middleweight champion; Canelo-Cotto is a prizefight in which each man will face an opponent many, many times better than anyone the HBO middleweight champion of the world has fought.

The winner of Canelo-Cotto, HBO tells us in a chorus with its champion’s official promoter, will have some arbitrarily chosen span of time before the winner has to declare he will face HBO’s middleweight champion or else risk ongoing banishment from HBO’s Gatti List and Fight Game List. Banishment from both lists ripples banishments across social media as a force multiplier, including possible banishments from the ESPN list, Pinterest, a number of influential Twitter polls, and a carefully chosen plethora of whatever apps teenage girls mindlessly refresh at Starbucks. The stakes aren’t merely high for the Mexican and the Puerto Rican, in other words: They’re nigh insurmountable.

Fortunately for both Canelo and Cotto, neither of them cares a jot for the subjective hierarchies that consume an everdwindling number of impoverished wouldbe aficionados who instead came of age in the List Era . . .

We now interrupt this hopeless column to hear from Saturday’s promoter and participants:

“Miguel, you have had an illustrious career, you are one of the marquee names in Puerto Rican fight history, you have fought a number of great fighters, you are one of my favorite fighters – one of the fighters I most enjoy hearing myself talk about, a fighter I can say dynamic, crushing, extraordinary, phenomenal things about – you are a Puerto Rican and a champion, Miguel, how do you feel about our certainty you will lose to the HBO middleweight champion, a man who began his career 20 pounds heavier than you began yours, if ever you find within yourself a fraction the courage required to fight him?”

“Miguel Cotto does not care about HBO middleweight champion.”

“Canelo, when people like me think about Mexican fighters, we think of names like Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, Salvador Sanchez, Pancho Villa, Finito Lopez, the Aztec emperor Cuauhtémoc, Julio Cesar Chavez Jr., Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos – I can go on but I won’t because what I want to know, and what I think we’ve convinced others they want us to know, is this: Do you have trouble sleeping at night when you think about agreeing in principle to fight the HBO middleweight champion within 15 days of your possible victory over Miguel Cotto?”

“No, no, para nada. Lo que los comentaristas de HBO dicen sobre su campeón no me importa. Vivo en México, y ni sé quienes son – ni quien eres tú.”

. . . when mankind’s understandable if wholly absurd desire to impose order on an unpredictable and violent world married itself to a simplified form of written expression, the list, that required no transitional sentences, no spiraling thoughts, and considerably less craft than its predecessor forms.

Saturday’s match is not likely to disappoint. Canelo is best when his adversary attacks him, and Cotto knows he is best when attacking intelligently, stepping forward in an offensive flow. What both Cotto and Coach Freddie know is that if the match becomes a contest of offensive improvisation, where each man’s conditioning allows him to engage the other intelligently and at a comfortable pace, Cotto will have more depths from which to fetch, more opponent tricks he’s solved, more tricks he’s introduced to opponents, all of it, than Canelo will have. It’s not experience’s quantity so much as its quality – the fencer’s jab Cotto used against Shane Mosley in 2007, as an example, is an offensive adaptation of which Canelo, in 47 prizefights, has yet to prove himself capable. All other likely developments favor Canelo. He is younger, bigger, more physical, and most importantly, possessed of a right uppercut onto which Cotto will almost certainly drop himself.

This match will fulfill violent expectations – with Cotto lasting slightly longer than his detractors expect but considerably shorter than his supporters hope. I’ll take Canelo, TKO-10.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry

Saturday in a Thomas & Mack Arena that was not sold out, American welterweight Timothy “Desert Storm” Bradley and his new trainer, Teddy Atlas, combined to retire American Brandon “Bam Bam” Rios after dropping him twice, in round 9. The fight happened on HBO, a network that completed its three-year and 180-degree perspective-pivot on Bradley by celebrating Bradley’s new choice of trainer and Bradley’s new trainer with the enthusiasm of a rookie talent recruiter selling a prospect to Google.

Yes, the makeover is exaggerated, but let us play along for a couple reasons like: Tim’s a good guy, and we don’t have much of a choice because we’re going to be fed a Bradley-Atlas-union feast long after we push ourselves back from the table, hands waving in sated, otiose resistance.

If there’s a gigantic difference between the marketing of the Bradley-Atlas relationship and the Miguel Cotto-Freddie Roach relationship, it is not apparent. Both trainer narratives brought electrical charges to stalled products: Cotto, having been decisioned by Floyd Mayweather and Austin Trout, was out of the pay-per-view business unless something more than cosmetic might be done. A few more tattoos, a lot more hotpink, a goofy boy friend’s weightloss, an unknown handler from Cuba, improved English – these were insubstantial product improvements when set against knockout losses to Antonio Margarito and Manny Pacquiao and a two-fight losing streak. Enter Coach Freddie: what chemistry! what trust! what rediscovery of the left hook! my goodness!

Those enhancements, along with an opponent on the downside of a six-loss career, and the new and improved product was done with infomercials and ready to ship. Cotto then blazed through the tissuepaper of Sergio Martinez’s knee(s), became the linear middleweight champion of the world and perfected his pronunciation of an English phrase he learned early in ESL tutelage: “A-side.” (The ‘SL’ in ESL may be inaccurate, we now learn: the nurses in the Rhode Island hospital where apparently El Gran Campeón Puertorriqueño was born surely brought English to the young man’s ears early.) All the Cotto product relaunch lacked was a mandatory title defense against a hopeless opponent, a chance to remind viewers Cotto reminded them of anyone from Mike Tyson to Benny Leonard, old timers, in other words, who reminded us of the old Miguel Cotto – neither the guy who took a knee against Margarito nor the guy pulped by Pacquiao but the warrior who cracked Paulie Malignaggi’s face – and Daniel “Real Deal” Geale strode on the set in June.

That match brought the hundredth or so chance for viewers to squint for insights at a fight whose outcome not one aficionado doubted. Anymore, an engaged aficionado, an endangered mammal whose ranks continue thinning as its hungerstrikers perish from malnourishment, gets encouraged by broadcasters to watch fights the way an NFL scout investigates combines or a Major Leaguer stares at his radar gun. Since the matchmaking and broadcasting are universally ironic – in the rhetorical sense of meaning other than what they state – aficionados, uniquely endowed with the talent and opportunities for cynicism, cynically derive from results whatever they expect to see.

It would be tragic if it were not, in its way, an intriguing adaptation: As if lifelong basketball fans deprived of watching their favorite NBA teams play one another derived, instead, fantasy basketball teams assembled according to height and vertical leap and whatever glowing commentary Charles Barkley had about players, and then set these fantasy teams loose on high school playgrounds, where they regularly mauled their teenage opponents, leaving the financially interested broadcasters of these contests to say of LeBron James dunking over a 5-foot-3 schoolboy freshman, “Looking at that dominant performance by James, one immediately thinks of Dr. J in the 1983 finals against the Lakers!”

Would such a derivative league survive? Doubtlessly it would. Would it thrive? Doubtlessly it wouldn’t.

None of this describes, quite, what happened Saturday, so much as it describes what might happen in Bradley’s next match, which will not be against Canelo Alvarez, of all absurd suggestions. Bradley beat down Rios more effectively than anticipated. But here we go again: Was Bradley disproportionately improved, or was Rios, career property of promoter Top Rank and its peerless matchmaking, disproportionately spent before the bell?

A quick memory might be instructive. The first time I interviewed Bob Arum, in 2004, I asked him if Top Rank could select a prospect on one criterion alone, what that criterion would be.

“Does he dissipate between fights?” said Arum immediately.

Setting aside how much smarter that answer is than what Richard Schaefer or any of Al Haymon’s subsequent puppets might say, it underlines boldly how closely Top Rank considers its fighters between matches, which is a roundabout way of imparting how unsurprised Top Rank likely was by how helpless Brandon Rios looked Saturday. That is not an indictment of Timothy Bradley or his new trainer. It really isn’t. They prepared for a much larger version of the Brandon Rios who, in 2011, blitzed both Miguel Acosta and Urbano Antillon, surely, and Bradley did in fact look better.

It’s a partial indictment, though, of the silliness that happened during the telecast, the spiraling embellishment that seems modern broadcasting’s default reaction to the predictable unevenness of uneven contests. Couched in the false humility of the conditional tense – could it be? would it have been? were it possible . . . – the intended seeding of the idea finds its roots and caretaking in whatever follows the humblefeint, slipping right past the viewer’s lowered guard. It’s not meanspirited mischief, no, but neither is it disinterested.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry–

Saturday at UNLV’s Thomas & Mack Center, American welterweights Timothy Bradley and Brandon Rios will compete for a world title of some sort and, more importantly, for a chance to be their division’s premier b-side attraction – as friend and colleague Norm Frauenheim insightfully put it Friday. While neither guy sees himself as a gatekeeper – Bradley, in fact, has a loose argument for IBHOF induction someday – no one in the sport sees either guy as the world’s best welterweight, though, again, Bradley has a loose argument for that distinction too.

But finally, an honest prizefight. It has been that long, so long in fact this one almost misses us gazing desperately towards Canelo-Cotto while wondering how to compose a eulogy for Ken Hersman’s career at HBO. There has been, and will continue to be, a want of eulogizing for Hershman because, frankly, we’re not qualified to pen eulogies, little as most of us have minded his career at HBO. Consider this, then, an impressionistic portrait by a writer too uninterested to check dates and figures.

Hershman came to HBO sometime after Timothy Bradley and Devon Alexander made a disappointment of a match in Pontiac Silverdome, then auditioning for world’s largest empty refrigerator, a disastrous show so poorly attended the HBO broadcast trucks, like the one racing at you in those intro cartoons, parked in the middle of the floor, and even by stuffing the fight in a back corner and closingoff the mezzanine, they still couldn’t make the arena look more than 1/10 full because it wasn’t 1/15 full. Legend has it a few HBO VIPs showed up for that disaster, and after recovering from frostbite set about a plot to fire the man who lost Manny Pacquiao to Showtime for a night (the one in which Pacquiao eradicated world poverty by wearing yellow gloves, historians will recall).

Uninspired to do more than rebuild slowly and cheaply, HBO hired Showtime’s guy, who had fought a marvelous insurgency in the preceding years and made Showtime the destination network for serious fans while HBO lazily tended its starsystem. Maligned as it was by misfortune and miscreants, Hershman’s Super Six tournament was a wonderful thing whose ultimate winners, Andre Ward and Ken Hershman and Carl Froch, did quite well for themselves immediately afterwards. Froch is now retired, Hershman is about to be retired, and Ward continues a halfassed comeback from semiretirment – so nothing, as the saying goes, is permanent.

But whatever innovative spirit Hershman had at Showtime, not an innovative thing was done during his time at HBO, unless discovering Eurasia 20 years after the Soviet Union’s collapse should be called revolutionary. Hershman fired Al Haymon and his lackey Richard Schaefer and Schaefer’s spokesman, Oscar De La Hoya, in a move more memorable for spite than creativity: Hersman did not clear away dead underbrush from the calendar, allowing bold, suppressed ideas to spring forth, so much as he avenged his predecessor and sent Haymon to a much wealthier benefactor with whose capital Haymon, a vindictive pacifist, has smothered boxing to critical condition. Hershman is not to blame for Haymon’s ascent; Haymon is a force of nature, where men like Hershman, and the guy who replaced him at Showtime, are lawerly bureaucrats, not entrepreneurs.

Perhaps HBO’s culture is to blame, in part, while we’re introspecting. Fighters, not fights, drive HBO’s starsystem, a philosophy that manifests itself as a panicked paralysis whenever anointed stars like Nonito Donaire get outclassed by men whose superior skills somehow elude HBO’s staff of talentscouts and matchmakers. Whoever replaces Hershman should move first to acquire a professional matchmaker or two – boxing guys, outsiders who drink too much and dress like slobs, not television guys, not aspiring runway models, not writers-cum-publicists, not lawyers from Harvard or Yale, but men with real contacts lists, real shortnotice talent, real chemistry with prizefighters of all skill levels, and decades, not months, of experience – and enable him- or herself to dictate intelligent terms to serious outfits like Top Rank and Main Events and K2, treating them as suppliers, not partners.

There’s a shortage of talent in prizefighting at this time, and HBO’s next generation of broadcasters should realize this and not hardsell us on historic championship runs like Wladimir Klitschko’s or Gennady Golovkin’s – runs even casual fans know are meaningless. Whoever replaces Hershman, s/he should dictate terms in the negotiation, request a bold budget, request increased latitude, request a brand new team, pause to accept whatever’s offered and not act merely thrilled to be picked. A person who does this likely will find s/he doesn’t jibe with HBO’s current culture and turn down the job. A few incidents like that and perhaps the culture will see a need to change, maybe even deciding our sport is not worth the hassle that broadcasting it brings. Boxing will find a way to struggle along, regardless.

Whatever hassles soon get brought, know this: Bradley-Rios deserves your viewership. These are two honest prizefighters who are, for once, evenly matched. Neither belongs at welterweight: Bradley moved up to make more money, and Rios moved up because his offseason diet makes weighing 135 pounds or 140 impossible. Both are worn by experience, both were fed to Manny Pacquiao for different reasons, and Bradley proved to be the considerably less-digestible dish. Bradley decisioned Pacquiao, and many have not forgiven him for it, despite his acquiescent performance in their rematch. Rios lost to Pacquiao more predictably and lopsidedly than anyone save Chris Algieri. Bradley is a better athlete and a better fighter than Rios, but then, so was Mike Alvarado a better athlete and better fighter than Rios, and Rios beat him down twice.

Bradley has a new trainer, the philosopher poet Teddy Atlas, but what Bradley needed and probably still needs is a technician who tells him to lower his chin and move his head, not a motivational speaker who steels his resolve in a crisis. Bradley manages crises better than anyone currently plying the craft; he needs help navigating round them, not navigating through them.

Still, I’ll take Bradley, SD-12, in an excellent and honest prizefight.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday in Omaha’s CenturyLink Center, in what was probably another attendance record of some prepositional sort – in October, against a French speaker, after a Texas fight, under the rules of the WBO, within the American Midwest, without a doubt, beyond expectations – Nebraska junior welterweight Terence Crawford razed Haitian-Canadian Dierry Jean in 10 rounds. Before Jean was able to retrieve his check from the scorer’s table with a shrug, talk turned to Crawford’s next opponent: Manny Pacquiao, in his first last match, in April, on pay-per-view! And the shrugging commenced.

Anybody see Terence Crawford repeating as Fighter of the Year for 2015?

They can’t all be good twelvemonths, and to be fair, the exceptionality of Crawford’s 2014 was impossible in 2015, known forevermore in boxing annals as the year 0 AH (After Haymon), but Crawford, or at least his handlers at Top Rank, the incredible shrinking promoter, might have put in an effort slightly more inspired than what 2015 shined. There was the compulsory migration to a new weightclass, junior welterweight, that might’ve impressed if Crawford’dn’t already fought a better junior welterweight, Breidis Prescott, on no notice, in 2013 (2 BH). Then there was the inexplicable University of Texas venue in Arlington, on a campus even UT alumni needed to google, and a typically tough, hopeless opponent.

Saturday’s match, an achievement-award homecoming tilt, a way for Omahans to thank a fellow Nebraskan for excelling at some sport other than football, happened against a man not even fightweek festivities bothered embellishing. He was Dierry Jean, the Haitian-born Canadian smuggled out of Montreal to rehab Lamont Peterson in 1 BH, after Lamont got spincycled by Lucas Matthysse, just before Lucas got handled by Danny Garcia. Whatever the ratings boards say of Jean, and no, I don’t care enough to check, intuition says he’s roughly half the opponent someone of Crawford’s talent and pedigree should be confronting in his third match at 140 pounds, on HBO.

So bring on the Pacman!

That’s actually an uncharacteristically interesting fight if it happens in 1 AH, which it likely will not, because honestly, how often does anything genuinely interesting still happen in our oncebeloved sport? Faded as Pacquiao is, a return to 140 pounds – where he fought only once, stiffening Ricky Hatton in 6 BH – might quicken his movements some and make a fight entertaining enough to disarm the righteous rage aficionados feel about the performance, and postfight gracelessness, Manny and Coach Freddie staged against Floyd Mayweather in May. Disarm is perhaps a verb too far: Boxing is just beginning to experience the first sensations of the injury it suffered from The Fight to Save Boxing.

If the pay-per-view numbers are to be believed, and they never ever are, Mayweather took a 90-percent haircut, Pacquiao-to-Berto, and Gennady “Our Next Superstar” Golovkin didn’t do even half Mayweather’s new number, despite allegedly breaking Madison Square Garden attendance records not even the Empire State though to track till GGG’s invasion. The official model is probably broken, and adherence to it – basic cable to premium cable to PPV – almost assuredly will frustrate any who obstinately power towards it.

Bob Arum is not to blame. His legacy as a legendary promoter is assured by the company and fighters he built and the enduring changes he wrought (how do you think boxing got off free TV in the first place?), and he’s been semiretired, anyway, since Juan Manuel Marquez dangled Manny Pacquiao between life and death in 3 BH. What has happened to Top Rank since then is a descent that now accelerates.

There’s a chance all living systems follow the same spiraling pattern, and if they don’t, certainly boxing’s television model has: Disorder –> Negative Feedback (diminishing returns) –> Order –> Positive Feedback (increasing returns) –> Disorder.

The consolidation of broadcasting from many to few imposed an orderly system for exponentially increasing the revenues generated by select men like Mike Tyson and Oscar De La Hoya and Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao. This increased revenue summoned new agents, like Al Haymon, and disproportionately empowered a few men to move the sport according to their whims. And the more whimsically they behaved, the more revenue they generated till the order disintegrated in the spectacle of a network, HBO, despite having invested extraordinary resources in the promotion of two fighters, Mayweather and Pacquiao, being powerless to make them face one another.

The Fight to Save Boxing was not the beginning of disorder so much as its highest manifestation: A match no expert believed would please its consumers found the largest paying audience assembled in our sport’s history. What 30 years of splintering titles and feuding promoters and deteriorating talent pools could not do to obliterate boxing’s fanbase – decimate, yes, but not obliterate – May 2 did in less than an hour.

Aficionados’ hostility now makes them casual fans whose indifference ensures diminishing returns for every organism in the boxing ecosystem. Opponents of the truly talented are no longer talented enough to improve them, and the truly talented’s skills subsequently erode till they bore their audiences away or lose in matchmaking mishaps. Suddenly boxing is ubiquitous on free television, the last era’s Promised Land, and yet nobody cares at all. The negative feedback has begun in earnest, and while human technology ever has an acceleratory effect on its spirals, the last cycle took decades to complete and this one is barely begun.

Prizefighting, in the sense of men paying to watch other men bludgeon one another to unconsciousness, will endure, but prizefighting, in the sense of a match generating $500 million again, is finished for years, definitely, for decades, probably, and for a lifetime, possibly.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

“The only way to predict (the result) after a given number of iterations is to actually perform them. This is the ‘hell’ of chaos. There is no shortcut way to predict the future of a chaotic system. Yet it is completely deterministic. If one begins with the same growth rate and start value and does the same number of iterations, the result is always the same.” – Michael McGuire, An Eye for Fractals

Saturday in the co-main event of a Gennady Golovkin fightcard that should not have been on pay-per-view, Nicaraguan master Roman “Chocolatito” Gonzalez defeated by TKO American flyweight Brian “Hawaiian Punch” Viloria. It was, as always, an honor to watch Chocolatito.

There is a joy in seeing Roman Gonzalez ply his craft that serves as a point of personal nostalgia more than glee; it’s a reminder that brings sadness, now, of how much more we cared about prizefighting even five years ago – when there were stakes, when every match wasn’t settled in the contract, when the opening bell rang on a championship match and the promoters and matchmakers and commentators had at least a sprinkle of doubt what might transpire.

Are there upsets today? Supposedly. But they almost universally originate in acts of matchmaking incompetence, which is fairly the opposite of how one supposes they should: Neglecting his homework, a matchmaker imports an unknown commodity from afar and watches in horror as the unknown commodity exceeds expectations, and then reacts in horror as the promoter-friendly judges do not “stay bought” – in Simon Cameron’s memorable phrase. Saturday the favorites on the telecast won at least 90-percent of the rounds, and more than 95-percent of the minutes. Bereft of moments for insight, the commentating crew meandered to its likeliest spot, selfreference and salesy exuberance, violating, as it did, an olden days’ formula that goes: Wisdom = Insights / Words.

But let them not turn you against Chocolatito. Freed from the penitentiary in which Richard Schaefer and Chuck Giampa once held it, “The Ring” magazine ratings panel now recognizes Chocolatito and Andre Ward as, pound-for-pound, the world’s two best fighters, ensuring Gennady Golovkin someday will have to fulfill all those promises we used to hear about his fighting at 168 pounds, if aficionados are to recognize him as the world’s best fighter. Golovkin will not beat Ward, and it’s good to see the ratings panelists recognize that, both conditionally and historically; however many b-level, 8-1 underdogs Golovkin bionically razes, however many junior middleweights abdicate titles to avoid him, however strainedly commentary crews liken his rise to Marvelous Marvin Hagler’s or Manny Pacquiao’s, Golovkin will remain a talented athlete whose supporters looked upon an accumulation of mediocrity and called it great, sometimes absurdly, sometimes soberly, sometimes even with eyes wetted.

It does not behoove Golovkin to continue fighting immediately after Chocolatito; a better promotional programmer would separate them with some heavyweights, a cleansing of the excellence palate, as it were, to make Golovkin look more fluid and faster than he does every time he comes onstage moments after Chocolatito. It is not a talent river forded in the time it takes to sing a national anthem, even if it is America’s, a song somehow far more inflatable than any other country’s; Golovkin looks stiff after a half hour with Chocolatito, and that is not a pointed criticism of Golovkin: he’s simply outmatched the way Golovkin’s opponent was Saturday night.

David Lemieux had power, we were assured relentlessly, and that was the equalizer. In an imaginary match with Chocolatito, Golovkin, we’d be told, has immeasurable power advantages, the sound and ferocity of his punches convincing even the lamest of the laity. One-punch-knockout power, grows the canard, even as Golovkin needs hundreds more punches to stop opponents as his quality of opposition migrates north from level C. Golovkin was technically superior to Lemieux as Chocolatito is technically superior to Golovkin, who does do a number of things very, very well.

Chocolatitio does simply everything very, very well. There is a pure chaos to the combinations Chocolatito throws at an opponent; they are fully sensitive to their starting points, self-referential, and unpredictable. Because he routinely fights men who can hurt him – “every punch hurts me,” Chocolatito said after Saturday’s victory – he throws rebalancing punches more often than Golovkin does (or needs to). Chocolatito has the defensive responsibility of a young Juan Manuel Marquez and the offensive prowess of an old Juan Manuel Marquez and none of the Mexican’s deep contempt.

A perfect combination has no end point, as the old saw has it, because every punch flows frictionlessly to its counterpart: The jab positions the hips for the cross that cocks the lead shoulder for the hook that sets the back hip for an uppercut that places the lead hand for the hook that brings an overhand right that forces an up jab that positions the hips, and so forth. Chocolatito’s conditioning is right, of course, but it is famous because of the mechanical purity of his combinations and how very little energy is lost to the friction of missing and reversing and getting hit in unacceptable ways.

One such unacceptable way was the left hook Viloria landed Saturday in the match’s final round, a punch to the fabled button that frightened Chocolatito with both its instant pain and arriving consequences, and yet, what poise. Chocolatito lowered his right guard, tucked his chin and began to spin and breathe, enduring the misery long as his recovery required. Then he stopped Viloria.

We have yet to see such poise from Golovkin because we have never seen him challenged because, we’re told, he has no equal in the world, man or beast. Such claims are often made. They never survive posterity.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry

I didn’t get through the first five minutes of “Face Off: Golovkin / Lemieux.” It’s not because the format is awful, though it is, and it’s not because all five characters are dull, though they are, but because the language barrier, this time, made the willfulness of HBO’s promotional lugging too much to watch comfortably. Everyone was there to satisfy a contractual obligation to market Gennady Golovkin, and they performed it with all the inspiration of a salaried sales staff chorus-chanting “this product sells itself” for 12 minutes.

It was a now-standard part of prefight festivities, and the fight getting previewed by commentator Max Kellerman was Saturday’s title match between “two middleweight destroyers” – Kazakhstan’s Gennady “GGG” Golovkin and David “The Dangerous, Rising, Action Star out of Canada” Lemieux.

A professional writer should be persuasive, and since most contemporary sportsfans are persuaded by yelling, either indignant vibration or vindicated combustion, it behooves someone writing a column like this to be convicted, and if not to be convicted, to fake conviction (with adverbs). This column will fail, then, by that standard; you, dear reader, are paying for certainty, but this column, for once, will give you exactly what you paid for.

I remain unconvinced by the Golovkin opus, and it is an opus, a model harmony of moving and generally selfinterested pieces – fighter, trainer, promoter, publicist, network – conjuring from superficially hopeless materials a pay-per-view concert in Madison Square Garden. A man born to America’s sworn enemy, learning nearly no English during his extended residence in the United States, beginning his title reign five years too old to achieve a Top 50 consideration, and having fought not one all-time-good fighter during his middleweight reign, will be fighting on pay-HBO an opponent dismissed by aficionados four years ago, after getting washed-and-worn by Marco Antonio Rubio (yes, the same) and decisioned by someone named Joachim Alcine (the only win for Alcine during an eight-match downward swirl).

I’ll be damned if it doesn’t feel good to see someone who looks like me finally winning a fight, though!

That is likely the reason the rules of ascent are suspended for Golovkin by normally sober people. From the earliest moments of Golovkin’s rise, this has felt especially manufactured to me. My first Golovkin experience happened three Junes ago in Las Vegas at a media breakfast the morning before Timothy Bradley decisioned Manny Pacquiao. A goodish number of us gathered at Wolfgang Puck’s, and the excellent publicist Bernie Bahrmasel was our host – and I mention Bernie by name because only Golovkin himself has done more for Golovkin’s career.

I knew nothing about Golovkin but was ringside when Golovkin’s HBO-debut opponent, “Disappeared” Dmitry Pirog, put in some miraculous 2010 work on a guy named Danny Jacobs (yes, the same), and I respected the opinions of the other writers gathered at the breakfast tables, and I was hungry. Golovkin did not speak nine English words that morning – his trainer, Abel Sanchez, fed him some answers and then began to answer questions himself, and then the delightful Rick Reeno suddenly burst in as a Russian interpreter – and yet, veteran writers, excellent craftsmen whose words you’ve read and admired, performed genuine acts of inquiry on Golovkin. I left early and on my way out said to a man whose perspective I admire, “That may be the dumbest thing I’ve yet seen.”

“What? No,” went his reply, “I think Golovkin’s for real.”

It was a reply heard from a lot of guys back in the media room, and I began to think: Pre-work was done here.

It’s late 2015, now, and I wish more than anything about Golovkin’s ascent that he’d had the chance to fight Pirog. I have no idea how the match might have gone had Pirog not withdrawn with a back injury that apparently never healed, but it would have introduced me to Golovkin the way a fighter should be introduced. Instead, Golovkin went right through a shortnotice nobody from Poland, Grzegorz Proska, yanking the chain of his own 1-3 swirl unto retirement, and the fuse was lighted on a giant stick of hyperbole. Months later, Golovkin, at age 29, became a young Mike Tyson by stopping a 21-5 junior middleweight, on the first flush of his own 0-5 swirl, and the Golovkin myth became a mania. Rumors of gym-war feats began to materialize, and by the time Juan Manuel Marquez spearchiseled Manny Pacquiao that December, the name Golovkin was being intoned in Las Vegas fight conversations like Batman at Comic Con.

And of course, nobody had the balls to fight Golovkin, boxing’s most feared fighter, except men of historic courage like Osumanu Adama and Daniel Geale and Willie Monroe Jr.

Golovkin, a pleasant guy and excellent technician, has done nothing in a prizefight that aesthetically justifies a pay-per-view appearance against anyone less than Andre Ward, and David Lemieux is way less than Ward, but pay-per-view is where he’ll be Saturday because, we’ll be told, it’s what the market will bear, because we seem not to have learned a thing by watching Al Haymon use market dynamics to decimate our beloved sport in 2015. The number is fixed, 300,000 buys establishes Golovkin as a superstar, and 300,000 buys will be got if Time Warner Cable itself has to make the purchases.

The most any aficionado can hope from Golovkin-Lemieux is a moment or two examining enough to teach us something we don’t know already about Golovkin – perhaps his recent defensive lapses were not choreographed as they say; maybe a man who needed a half hour to stop Martin Murray actually does not hit harder than Sonny Liston – and that is all. David Lemieux is a b-level talent even in this risible era, and Golovkin’s chloroforming him will argue greatness no more loudly than Floyd Mayweather’s decisioning Robert Guerrero did.

TBE, GGG – I guess it’s all marketing to me.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday at StubHub Center in Carson, Calif., undefeated Ukrainian junior welterweight Viktor “The Iceman” Postol stopped favored Argentine Lucas “The Machine” Matthysse at the end of the 10th round of their vacant-title match on HBO. It was good to see a favorite lose a match in 2015, of course, but it was unfortunate to see it happen to Matthysse – who remains a fighter’s fighter even after quitting against Postol.

A few years back, an interesting correspondence with a remarkable Buenos Aires writer named Osvaldo Príncipi included this about Matthysse:

“In everyday life, he is a man who looks to go unnoticed. . . . He seeks anonymity and life in a small city. He’s recently divorced, and that bothers him. . . . He doesn’t like to speak with anyone he doesn’t know. . . . But he knows the bottom of every letter of the boxing trade.”

That correspondence happened, partially, because Matthysse wouldn’t speak to me for a 2,000-word Lucas Matthysse cover feature in the magazine his promoter owns. It was nothing personal, I gathered; Matthysse is obstinately unavailable.

Television is about myth making, and Lucas Matthysse is not. He is unamerican – in the provincial sense of United States as America; Matthysse is, after all, completely American – as anyone currently plying the craft of prizefighting. From Patagonia, a famously harsh climate of wind, temperature volatility, and wind, Matthysse is a professional athlete in a sense similar to the Brothers Klitschko: he understands the requirements of his craft and does not understand boxing as a metaphor for biological or biblical struggle; Matthysse’s profession is violence, yes, but he feels no more compelled to die in the ring than you feel compelled to die in a cubicle. Saturday, when Matthysse felt injured, ever different from feeling hurt, he quit his job the same way you might quit over an unreasonable business partner or thwarting boss. Rest assured he feels no remorse about it.

Could he have continued? Absolutely. He could have risen at the count of 2, if he so chose. He also could have rolled on his back, rubbed his eye a dozen times, risen and run out the clock till his corner stopped the match, or if he were Kermit Cintron, alternately catapulted himself out the ring or nagged-back at the officious Jack Reiss about an unseen headbutt. He did none of these things because, frankly, he is indifferent to your opinion of him. He is a fighter, not an entertainer, and however boxing regards him – it’s impossible, in this era of a thousand belts, to elect to the IBHOF a fighter who went 0-2 in world title fights – he has fulfilled his obligation to fans often enough that 7,000 Southern Californians showed up for his match with a Ukrainian spoiler known to very few.

Of course he was Ukrainian. He was on HBO, and it’s increasingly difficult to find a match on Comrade Hershman’s network that doesn’t feature a man from the former Soviet Bloc. Some of that is justified – especially if the Soviets keep winning – and most of it is Al Haymon, having overthrown the previous HBO regime in what history will call the Berto Putsch, signing every b-side stiff HBO might have otherwise paid Gary Shaw and Lou DiBella to deliver.

Viktor Postol is a gangly foreigner with a displeasing style who nevertheless won the right way Saturday, and that’s that. His style is awful enough that, were he from anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, he’d have been an essential component in the PBC’s Corpus Christi strategy months ago. Instead he wrestled a shopworn Argentine into something like submission.

A fighter like Matthysse can handle about anything in a boxing ring, so long as he’s allowed to enjoy the rejuvenating act of sinking his knuckles in another man’s flesh. Postol denied him that miller’s chance, and Matthysse wilted. Unable to find time or space where he expected it, or even might tolerate it, Matthysse became mentally fatigued – the mind nearly always quitting first in such confrontations. Rising off his stool to hunt a man he couldn’t find and was tired of stalking, Matthysse probably thought about not-getting a rematch with Danny Garcia, not-getting the benefit of scoring doubts against Zab Judah or Devon Alexander, and what logistics would would cook the carrots of a Manny Pacquiao match his promoter Oscar De La Hoya began to sell last week.

Postol’s trainer, Freddie Roach, certainly saw that. He told his charge Matthysse was ready to go, the Argentine’s exhaustion causing hopelessness causing sloppiness, spilling his chin over his front knee as short aggressors are wont to do against tall defenders; all Postol had to do was aim his punch where Matthysse’s head would drop and let Matthysse do the rest. And Matthysse did the rest.

There’s the pain of torn flesh or cramped muscles or wheezing breathlessness, and then there’s injury. Injury is a nonnegotiable signal sent to the central nervous system. One doesn’t make his living in athletics without knowing the difference.

Did Matthysse feel something injurious as the crackle of a snapping bone? No, likely not. Matthysse felt a pain that registered unfamiliar to a memory that comprises thousands of hours of combat, and that sensation, seasoned by a preceding quarter-hour’s hopelessness, brought Matthysse across surrender’s threshold.

Writing of which, Golden Boy Promotions, never adept at developing talent, recently signed Matthysse, a 33-year-old fighter, to a five-year contract of some sort, there’s almost no chance Matthysse will complete. The Argentine cannot beat Postol at 140 pounds, and the power he relies on will not travel seven pounds to welterweight. He may well win Fight of the Year for his April match with Ruslan Provodnikov – as there haven’t been five good main events in 2015 – an award entitling Matthysse to a gainful rematch, or there’s always the other roster members of the abattoir circuit – Brandon Rios, Mike Alvarado, Marcos Maidana, Josesito Lopez, Diego Chavez, increasingly Timothy Bradley – Matthysse could fight anytime in Carson, Calif.

The Machine’s days as an elite draw or pay-per-view potentiality, though, ended Saturday when Postol put an exclamation point on a sentence cowritten by Danny Garcia and Ruslan Provodnikov.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry–

Saturday in Birmingham, Alabamian heavyweight Deontay Wilder brought la ruine to Frenchman Johann Duhaupas, stopping him in round 11. What follows is a transcript of my thoughts during the match:

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

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry–

Editor’s note: For part 11, please click here.

*

“Paradoxically, it is in the core administrative and entertainment districts of European cities, be it Frankfurt or Barcelona, where urban marginality makes its presence felt. Its pervasive occupation of the busiest streets and public transportation nodal points is a survival strategy destined to be present, so that they can receive public attention or private business, whether it be welfare assistance, a drug transaction, a prostitution deal, or the customary police attention.” – Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society

There is an interesting and advisable thing that happens to one’s view of what manufactured boisterousness accompanies most prizefighters when he considers it more a survivor’s adaptation than an anxious person’s nervous tick: It becomes nearly admirable, not merely tolerable. Most interpretations of outsized dress and behavior pass a moral calculation on their subjects, one that posits a victory of others is in feral fiesta – as though the subject’s involuntary participation in life’s voracious zerosum competition for resources caused him loudly to remind the vanquished who their champion was. But what if such appearance and behavior are better explained as a rational adaptation made by a person who realizes, from an early age, while some forms of attention are perilous, invisibility is most perilous of all?

Looked at that way, the PBC’s partial sanitation of its fighters represents yet another way this venture-capitalized boxing experiment may not succeed in the long term. It is a symptom of the same malady, which is inauthenticity. What is much worse than seeing a caricature like Adrien Broner, gold teeth sparkling and exaggerated self-regard broadcasting, in a brutal affair with Marcos Maidana, is seeing a partially subdued Broner whacking away at someone who hasn’t a chance to beat him (though Broner’s want of ring generalship makes him a lesser example of such mismatchmaking than most of his a-side coworkers).

Writing of which, the upcoming fight schedule is abysmal. Prizefighting is become a pursuit drained of its spontaneity. What limited suspense remains is the suspense born of a question whether the favorite will keepaway his way to a dull decision, or apply himself and take his hopeless opponent’s consciousness, or in taking the defenseless man’s consciousness, render him a candidate for emergency medical treatment right on the blue mat itself. It is one thing to see two evenly matched athletes war to an attrition that leaves one ruined evermore. It is something else entirely when that sort of thing results from matchmaking that ensures nothing competitive happens from the opening bell.

The PBC deserves much of the culpability for this current schedule, yes, but it is not alone. Aside from Saul Alvarez’s match with Miguel Cotto, and perhaps Timothy Bradley’s match with Brandon Rios, is there a single upcoming main event this fall in which the b-side’s trainer or manager, even, expects his charge to compete? (And if you’re thinking David Lemieux right now, you’re one of those folks an American circusbarker once said is born every minute).

Back to boxing as metaphor, then, and the small network that governs prizefighting and employs what complexity all networks do. The prizefighting network comprises nodes that act on the structure that contains them, changing the structure in variable ways that force all other nodes to make changes that also change the structure that contains all of them: A variable number of variables influencing other variables in varying ways at variable rates. The prizefighting network, today, is more interesting than the fights it promotes, and that is not an aesthetically favorable development.

What the PBC understands that its predecessors, and its predecessors’ collective adherence to American anticompetitive laws, too, didn’t is this: capital rewards stability more than democracy or parity or vitality – three things our oncebeloved sport had so very much more of in decades past. The PBC, by making a league of itself like the NFL or NBA, presently succeeds in suspending the free-agent model that has governed prizefighting for as long as anyone can remember: Free agents promoting free agents managed by free agents. Television, boxing’s detriment and enabler, makes possible this gambit.

A few years ago Top Rank’s wholly outmatched leader Todd duBoef feinted at an idea he called the “brand of boxing” – a vision ever doomed by labor concerns no promoter wanted to tackle (as the NFL both knows and increasingly learns anew). Apparently the PBC’s Al Haymon, at least, was listening; while duBoef and Oscar De La Hoya played what can best be described as an HBO-capture game, pleading with boxing’s largest benefactor for a monogamous relationship, Haymon set out to seduce numerous other television networks the American way – with borrowed money.

If Haymon’s ploy works it will be because he thought so much larger and moved so much quicker than his competitors (think what a big deal Bob Arum made about Pacquiao-Mosley infomercials appearing on CBS in 2011, while just 4 1/2 years later, Haymon now casually employs NBC and ESPN as his distributors). There are a few erroneous assumptions in Haymon’s model – specifically fighter talent (deteriorating, not constant) and domestic interest in the sport (deteriorating at a rate that is accelerating, not constant) – but at least one of those might be overcome by treating HBO and the promoters it employs as a farm league to develop tomorrow’s Eurasian fighters for PBC contracts. Or maybe that, too, is smallminded imagining.

What the PBC lacks in fighter development it could remedy with an acquisition of Top Rank, and what the PBC lacks in a public face it could remedy with an acquisition of Golden Boy Promotions. Realizing this, or perhaps not yet, both Top Rank and Golden Boy Promotions are now engaged in legal battles with the PBC that are, almost definitely, existential struggles for all three entities. For the next year or so, the competition and cooperation between the promotional nodes of the prizefighting network will be more dramatic and suspenseful than that network’s actual products. As consumers, we, too, shall adapt . . .

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry

Saturday at MGM Grand Garden Arena, American Floyd Mayweather decisioned American Andre Berto in a historically awful match Mayweather promised will be his last. By the late rounds, Berto, as near to an infinity-to-one underdog as pay-per-view has yet uncovered, compromised Mayweather’s attention span long enough to strike him cleanly perhaps a half-dozen times, and that was that. Berto called the fight “great” immediately after Mayweather called himself “great” immediately after another Las Vegas crowd booed itself hoarse through another final round of another Mayweather fight.

As he said himself after the absurd session with Berto: Floyd Mayweather is the best ever, just like Jim Gray – the man Showtime employs to hector punchdrunk fighters. Hell, in honor of the moment, we should go a bit further: Floyd Mayweather is bester than Jim Gray – who’s not even average. In fact, in a competition between the two record holders, Floyd for being the nth fighter to win 49 fights in a row and Gray for being the first interviewer realtime-bounced from World Series coverage for being a jackass, it’s not unreasonable to declare Floyd altogether bestest.

Repeatedly in that postfight flirtation, Mayweather referred to his records, plural, as opposed to his record, 49-0, which is his record the same as tens of thousands of fighters have their records, 0-1 or 27-3 or 173-19-6 (108 KOs) – Sugar Ray Robinson’s, for whatever it’s worth, which is probably quite little to The Money Team, no matter Robinson’s having well more than twice as many knockouts as The Best Ever has victories – and that might have prompted Gray to ask Floyd about his other records, but never mind. Floyd has boxing records, plural, in the equivocating, prepositional, SportsCenter-sense of the word: Floyd retires as the greatest fighter, to call Las Vegas home, after relocating from Michigan, while fighting in the last 25 years, after having been taught by his father, during a troubled childhood, before winning an Olympic bronze medal, without having beaten a single great fighter in his prime.

Someday, after Floyd is forgotten, a thing that will happen with lightning rapidity in the next decade, an enterprising young sportswriter in the year 2050 or so will decide a biography of Floyd is just the thing – and by then biographies will probably be virtualreality videogames in which the reader lives the subject’s life for a day or two – and he’ll marvel at his great good fortune at being the first man to have an idea like committing some years of his life to preserving the official record of a flamboyant American athlete who wore a gaudy cap with “TBE” on it (and whose father wore a Canadian-themed “TMT” hat in his corner during the final match of his career for reasons that, however unknown and unimaginable, somehow feel wonderful). What that ambitious young author will find on digifiche at his local bibliotech is a lack of quality writing about Mayweather that is disproportionate to Mayweather’s record.

“Surely,” he’ll think, “a black man beating everybody he fought and making hundreds of millions of dollars while calling himself ‘Money’ must’ve inspired soaring prose and an insight or two about the human condition.”

Actually, no. Actually, no, not at all. There were, are, plenty of excellent writers plying the craft during Mayweather’s career, but not one of them would call anything he wrote about Mayweather his life’s best work. The passion talented writers feel for Mayweather is akin to the passion Mayweather feels when seeing a new zero on the end of his savings-account balance: a jolt of energy followed by thoughts about more substantial things.

For there is something insubstantial about Mayweather and his record and his legacy and the current incarnation of the sport he now leaves. When I endeavor to think about memorable moments from his career – as I hope, after this column, to honor his retirement by never writing about him again – very little comes to mind. I thought about it Saturday night, and had an idea, and now it is Sunday morning, and I cannot remember even that idea. Let’s go freestyle and see if it comes: He bought some cars and won some bets and didn’t knock-out anyone but Victor Ortiz and said the same thing over and over and over and – wait, yes, now I recall.

It was during his award-winning (another record!) autodocureality-thing he did for Showtime during one of his forgettable promotions, and no matter how much money he flashed or slogans he shouted or hangerson he fluffed, always, in seemingly every scene, there was someone, and quite often most everyone, asleep in the peripherary. There would be Floyd, racing hither and yon round his Big Boy Mansion, riding his Big Boy Elevator, bouncing on his Big Boy Sofa, ordering his Big Boy Burger, courting Big Boy Bieber, and inevitably, someone in the shot would be acting sleepy. You can’t buy a personality, the subtitles read, and evidently Floyd hasn’t one.

I remember this too: I interviewed Floyd once – after waiting hours in the South Texas heat for Floyd to bless us, each journalist was allowed to ask Him one question – and when I asked about the epidemic of African-American incarceration by a for-profit prison system, Floyd told me he likes to focus on the positive because it’s not a black-and-white thing. It wasn’t just a thoughtless answer to the question I actually asked him; it was a witless answer to whatever voice played in Floyd’s head while I spoke. My interview with The Best Ever ranks about 93rd or so – give or take where Saturday’s match lands on an entertainment spectrum for anyone who’s been paying to watch boxing since Mayweather turned pro.

Since Floyd Mayweather asked the public to rank him immediately after his final match, here goes: Top 10 talent, Top 25 accomplishments. The end.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry–

Just in time for Mexican Independence Day weekend comes a showdown to warm cada corazon mexicano: Floyd Mayweather, an American from Michigan, versus Andre Berto, an American from Florida who fought for Team Haiti in the Games of the XXVIII Olympiad. Mayweather-Berto lacks an ethnic angle, yes, but it is fully bereft of aesthetic interests, promising in its awfulness to be an apt farewell to Mayweather, who has scheduled his next retirement for Sept. 13.

Saturday is the final fight of Floyd Mayweather’s career, and I know it’s this week because I just brought up BoxRec and checked; so little has appeared on Twitter, my exclusive source for boxing coverage, I read a book about architecture in the last seven days and visited an art museum in Austin, to prepare for another boxing column about anything but boxing, since vilifying the efforts of the PBC anymore feels lazy but a weekly writing habit is, as my friend and colleague Norm Frauenheim long ago put it, good discipline. It brings presence, and that is ever a subject worth treating.

As Mayweather finishes his career, or says he’s about to, he turns a trick few before him have: He leaves the sport noticeably worse than he found it. He has not loved the sport for about a decade, one calculates, and he leaves the sport at least a decade from hopefulness. Whether Manny Pacquiao’s legion of Filipino converts will stick around after Pacquiao retires for his first time is doubtful, but this is not: No one who came to boxing because of Floyd Mayweather will remain a moment after he leaves.

The PBC, an outfit whose leader achieved credibility in boxing through his association with Mayweather, has improved exactly none of its charges and will not either; Mayweather is the last Mayweather because the PBC assures no one who approaches his talent will again encounter sufficient coaching or matchmaking to improve him. For whatever else he became, Floyd was a fighter raised by fighters before he was a self-aggrandizing buffoon. Today’s PBC prospects begin as athletes and become self-aggrandizing buffoons at high speed, often accelerating at a rate that denies them even summercamps as fighters.

Some words now about Mayweather’s moral deficiencies, or more appropriately, the words of others fixated on Mayweather’s moral deficiencies. Floyd Mayweather makes his living by striking other halfnaked men with his fists. Has it been so long since Charles Barkley wisely declared he was not a role model that we’re back to demanding character of athletes, even those who hammer other men’s faces (and most especially when awareness of oneself can be raised by raising awareness of Mayweather’s misbehavior)? As Jimmy Tobin, an excellent writer and thinker on and off Twitter, mentioned recently, the bandwagon for Mayweather-Berto is apparently so slight moral grandstanders feel unsafe chancing a spot on it like they did in May, lest they slip into obscurity’s cruel morass, their very important message ignored by the good people who tsk loudly at reality TV.

There’s something both reactionary and juvenile about adults’ heartfelt opinions concerning Mayweather’s domestic-abuse convictions. Americans really don’t care, and before anyone takes to his hind legs to rebut that assertion, he should ask himself how much boycotting of the Mayweather product has been done in the name of Floyd’s convictions. There’s probably nothing serendipitous or causal about the growth shared between Floyd’s checking account and criminal acts, but in the face of all evidence, arguing Mayweather’s criminality helped him amass his fortune is strikingly more reasonable than saying it was a hindrance.

And again, so what? Mayweather changed his nickname from an aesthetic concern, “Pretty Boy”, to an amoral one, “Money”, and made himself an American icon – at least in the 15 minutes’ sense of the word – reducing his dreadful promotions to shopping sprees and his dreadful prizefights to more-dreadful prizefights, and still we participated because, well, we were told his talent and fights were historic happenings. Floyd’s perspective on morality was better than his detractors’, ultimately, because it was born of the one place in his life where he was above-average, much less exceptional: the prizefighting ring – where one’s improvisations are judged instantly and one’s errors are exploited milliseconds after their detection. There is, in other words, no time in a prizefight for the obnoxious moralizing that attends coverage of Mayweather between his matches; in a prizefighting ring, life’s Prediction –> Feedback loop reduces itself to a crystalline form like this: Too many predictions make you oblivious of feedback, and then you’re unconscious, and too much reliance on feedback makes you a heavybag, and then you’re unconscious.

Mayweather’s crude antagonism of those who resent his fortune will undo his fortune soon enough, as everyone knows, and then what will linger are the aesthetic judgments adults should have levied against him all along: Floyd’s promotional schtick is, like his fighting style, insipid. No entertainer in sports history has made more money boring more people than Mayweather. Saturday’s match with Andre Berto, a man who is 0-2 against men Mayweather has already humiliated, and 0-1 (1 KO) against a man, Jesus Soto Karass, not even Mayweather had the chutzpah to make an opponent, promises to be truly awful.

In this, his next last fight, Floyd’s professionalism and pride, ironically, stand as the best arguments against making a pay-per-view purchase: Floyd is far too good to lose to Andre Berto by accident and far too proud to throw the match on purpose.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday on ESPN in a PBC main event that happened at Staples Center, Leo Santa Cruz decisioned Abner Mares. The fight was heavy with volume and light with quality, as the fighters winged blows in a blur of shoulder striking, head clashing and guard peppering. It was not a great fight but easily the PBC’s greatest fight.

There was an immediate association that happened in my mind as the bell rang on Saturday’s main event – an association strained through the Battle of Los Angeles idiocy and fact nether Mares nor Santa Cruz is very good – and it was one of small Mexican pugilists plying their wares before a gritty, blue-collar-Mexican crowd in Southern California. Where did I feel this before? It was ringside in Carson, Calif., 7 1/2 years ago, when Israel Vazquez and Rafael Marquez made the third fight of what might be called a “natural trilogy” the way a natural hat trick happens when a hockey player scores three goals in a row without another puck from another stick going in the net; Vazquez and Marquez fought each other three times in 12 months, finishing their trilogy with their very best fight. Saturday’s match did not suffer the comparison gladly.

There is something second-rate about our sport now. There has not been a better or more justifiably anticipated main event broadcasted by the PBC yet, and yet. From the opening bell of a fight that felt more like 114-114 than 117-111, the scorecard two judges and the PBC’s Teddy Atlas happened to have, Mares demonstrated he was the fighter of greater range, while Santa Cruz proved he was taller. That was it, really. Santa Cruz, the telecast told our lying eyes, was much busier and more accurate, and yet it did not feel that way. Perhaps it was expectations rendering us victims yet again.

Years ago, if any PBC viewer remembers, Santa Cruz was our next Antonio Margarito. What Shane Mosley discovered about Margarito no one before him quite had was this: Margarito could not fight going backwards and wasn’t particularly astute, either, with an opponent on his chest, in his kitchen, smoking, as the late Joe Frazier perfectly had it, where he lived. Margarito had a crossover move, bringing his right foot along with his right hand along with his right foot, closing his opponent’s front shoulder, then opening him up with a fully leveraged left hook. One who waits for Santa Cruz to perform a similar feat of footwork will grow old with anticipation.

Santa Cruz is tall and busy. He might learn to do something with his right uppercut – a few more of those Saturday might’ve shortened Mares’ evening considerably – but he has not yet, and he has not improved at all, much as the PBC telecast assured us he has. Atlas, despite his dogged repetition of every insight six and seven times, detected immediately the bizarre habit Santa Cruz has of shaking his right hand like it’s broken. He telegraphs punches, somewhat, but expresses anxiety more so. It’s the sort of habit a fighter can form in the boredom of padwork or bagwork, and it’s not Santa Cruz’s fault. But where the hell are his trainers? Do they think it’s charming or marketable or a habit they might monetize like Canelo’s fiery coif?

Atlas’ insistence Mares should be doing something with Santa Cruz’s tell, though, was a bit misplaced. Santa Cruz still had his twitching hand in a position from which he might block a left hook, especially one hurled by a fighter having to cross as much terrain to his chin as Mares did. Mares used Santa Cruz’s nervousness properly; don’t get hit with the hand he’s shaking at me.

Mares fought a better match, altogether, than two judges believed. That Santa Cruz walked to the ring accompanied by the son of manager Al Haymon’s henchbuffoon indicated Mares would need a knockout to win, and Mares, to his credit, went looking for one, insisting from the opening second of the match Santa Cruz was not in his class as a fighter. That was true, yes, but Mares, at 126 pounds, is eight pounds from his best division, and he didn’t have a punch, left hook or righthand counter, that much as dented Santa Cruz.

Just because Mares can no longer make bantamweight by no means makes him a featherweight. But Mares was the gamer man Saturday. He fired back when fired upon, he reacted better to being struck, he did not retreat unless strategy, as opposed to doubt, mandated it. Mares was much better at 118, too, than Santa Cruz is at 126.

Which was still not that good. Mares won a close but fair decision over Vic Darchinyan three years after Nonito Donaire iced the Armenian and a year after Joseph Agbeko decisioned him. Darchinyan, past his prime and a weightclass or two too heavy, nevertheless gave Mares a stern test. Mares then sneaked past Agbeko, fouling him repeatedly, and when he won their rematch, and Showtime needed a house fighter from Golden Boy Promotions to anoint, Mares was launched as a shooting duper superstar. Which he was not fit to be. Soon enough, an ancient Jhonny Gonzalez put the lie to the Mares machine, and if Gonzalez’s left hand didn’t do it, Mares’ shameless avoidance of a rematch with the belligerent old Mexican sure has.

People boo Mares, and they’re right to, but thinking lowly of Mares does not, through some law of transitivity, consign one to opining highly of Santa Cruz. That’s the bad news. The worse news is, able now to abscond with a reputation, if not a particularly meaningful piece of WBA hardware, Santa Cruz has no incentive to do anything more than make semiannual PBC defenses of his new title, his skillset deteriorating steadily until the day Al Haymon signs Guillermo Rigondeaux and harsh reality, wearing dark Cuban knuckles, raps upon Santa Cruz’s hardly won Los Angeles door.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry

Editor’s note: For part 10, please click here.

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BOGOTA, Colombia – This Andean city hasn’t Medellin’s organization or courtesy but a more amiable climate and what inherent formality nations’ capitals enjoy by default. The distance from here to Medellin, Colombia’s second most-populous city, is about 400 km, a distance whose impossibility of terrain is best illustrated like this: You can fly there in 30 minutes of airtime or drive there in about 480 minutes. The cities’ populations regard one another more like motorists than aeronauts, each describing the residents of the other city the way a Californian might describe a Russian, not an Arizonan.

Colombians are known for their eloquence, which may be why nearly every Colombian one encounters, however briefly, fancies himself a Spanish professor, correcting tiny details of pronunciation and grammar other native speakers, whether Mexican or Argentine or even Spanish, cordially overlook. That quickness to correct, though, betrays pride more than arrogance; no one’s face illuminates more grandly when hearing a stranger’s high appraisal of his country than a Colombian’s.

For nearly two decades synonymous with every ill effect of the narcotics trade, today Colombia, far surpassed in reports of narcoterrorism by Mexico, experiences an overdo cultural renaissance sure to be followed in time by what tourism tracks rumors of inexpensive exotica – something Colombia does excessively well. Nothing holds constant in a complex adaptive system, of course, so Colombia’s rebirth will eventually bring maturity and stagnation and perhaps a mortal return to whence it came, sure, but in the interim it merits celebration for what it is in the present, and that is a lovely, hospitable place to visit. And anyone who reviews the history of South America, 1510-1810, the singular depravity of the Spanish conquest, realizes without delay how miraculous are tranquil moments like the ones Colombia currently enjoys.

Touristland, the world over, is the same place: “La zona roja” in Medellin could be Las Vegas could be Puerto Vallarta. Time in Touristland, a place of ennui nearly always removed from the messy vitality of its city’s heart, if not its base, renews nothing so much as one’s commitment to not-travel where he is not conversant in the language of its people.

Whether via an iPhone app or a stereotypical and incessantly repeated plea for “anyone here speak English”, persons who travel to places whose languages they do not speak miss much of the most-edifying part of travel, and that is navigation. When you do not speak the language you go where the authorities direct you, whether those authorities are guides or signs or tourist-friendly maps. You make inane requests of locals for “someplace no tourists ever go” – as if any sane local would send a tourist to foul somewhere he goes to escape tourists. There is a visual part of travel that can be satisfied without speaking any language but English – museums and natural artifacts and monuments and such – and those shouldn’t be discounted, but the people and their quirks and their personal versions of their countries’ histories, every bit fallible as your opinion of your country’s history, are where the greatest riches are mined. These riches, too, include the natives’ true opinions of your country, not the cliched “ees bery nice, my fren” spouted mindlessly at customers, but the sort of attentive criticism that provides what contrasts compose the meaningful stock of a durable identity, often far removed from fragile patriotic delusions.

We don’t know what we don’t know, and few things are more futile than chancing the argument above: Those who travel the world with U.S. passports and a command of only English do so under the conviction they are seeing the highlights of each place they visit – nine countries in eight days! – and that conviction is both unshakeable and leavened by their financial means, invariably greater than many of their countrymen’s, as well as a large majority of Americans unfit to challenge them for being bereft of even a current passport. But this is a column that may opine as it wishes; if you have a dissenting opinion on the matter, a witty and original thought you feel compelled to share, write your own column.

About the museums in Colombia: native son Fernando Botero dominates the original works both at Museo Botero in this city and Museo de Antioquia in Medellin, as he should. To create original art after 1950, many painters abandoned form, using instead muscular color and abstraction. Botero did not. Instead, he took common subjects, many borrowed from historic pieces by everyone from Leonardo to Matisse, and made them voluptuous to make them sensuous. He complemented these voluminous subjects with the brilliant greens and oranges one encounters everywhere he looks in these mountainous cities of extraordinary biodiversity.

The irony is that Botero’s exaggerated forms are the most part of what the world imagines Colombians’ physiques to be. In Bogota and Medellin, two cities where daily commutes happen on foot and require a half hour’s climb to nearly any residential spot, this is not at all the case. Pound-for-pound, the “Rolos” and “Paisas” are some of the fittest folks you’ll encounter anywhere, their diets unpolluted by corn syrup, their lungs expanded by high altitudes, and their lower bodies sculpted by daily acts of ascent and descent. One does not encounter many handicap ramps or elevators, either, so one subsequently encounters octogenarians stomping right past him as he scales this city’s Calle 11, lungs screaming for more or at least thicker air . . .

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Editor’s note: For part 12, please click here.

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Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Editor’s note: For part nine, please click here.

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These columns are written to spiral outwards from their centers organically as possible, structures from the fabled building blocks of letters that make words that make sentences that make paragraphs, searching as they do for what architect Robert Venturi called “richness of meaning rather than clarity of meaning” in his masterwork Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture.

In that same work, Venturi expressed a preference for “messy vitality over obvious unity,” adopting, among other essentialities, nature’s by-no-means-inevitable preference for variety – imposing, as nature does, a restriction of infertility on the product of any inter-species mating nature does not favor, preventing in as amoral a process as possible the emergence of a single-species world. Remember that next time PBC machinations have you down; equilibrium is an illusion one is able to create and sustain only by tampering with the variable t (time) in whatever schoolboy formulations one chooses to impose on a world in which every one of however many cells perpetually moves at the speed of electricity.

Whatever designs Al Haymon may have, the software loop that guides every organism, Prediction –> Feedback (every 300 or so milliseconds), ensures any model that holds anything constant necessarily fails or kills its subject to succeed. To apply numerical certainty to any complex adaptive system, one must create a complex adaptive system that comprises almost solely variables, and that almost fully undermines the elegance of applying numerical certainty, doesn’t it?

Or as John H. Holland, a University of Michigan professor of psychology and electrical engineering and computer science, elegantly puts it in his book Hidden Order: “The sheer number of interactions – hundreds of millions of neurons, each undergoing thousands of simultaneous interactions in thousandths of a second – takes us well beyond any of our experience with machines. The most sophisticated computer, in comparison, seems little more than an automated abacus.”

When one considers even the least-thoughtful human mind, likely pinging its environment for simple feedback about its physical state three times every second, one comes to nearly 200,000 unique “thoughts” every waking day, which comes to about 4 billion such events in an average human life of having not a single independent thought. Do something of volition simple as weekly grocery shopping, and you’re loping towards a trillion pretty quickly, and at that point linear mathematics’ description of your life is nearer to meaningless than astounding.

For the sake of embracing what is unfathomable, apply this model to a prizefighter training himself to counter an opponent’s left hook to the body, blocked by his right elbow, with a right uppercut. The feedback from the opponent’s left hook cannot wait, potentially, 299 milliseconds in its standard loop; it must come instantly, which means the mind must monitor at all times how many receptors sending signals across how many passageways? Go just one step further and realize this: Neurons and the signals they send are not binary (so there’ll be no mere squaring of whatever unthinkable number you come to); they occur in ranges that cross thresholds.

A+B=C, yes, but sometimes C=(A+B)*1,000. And then what? “More thoughts per human life than the number of seconds in the history of the known universe”? That’s not helpful; when your model says one complex organism is, in 75 years of life, able to do something more than a measure of a 15-billion-year-old system, your model, fundamentally, is describing a state that does not resemble anything like the “reality” the rest of us create from our 200,000 daily bits of feedback. That’s not a condemnation of conventional math or science, either; it is a concession to something Albert Einstein knew about Newtonian physics and John von Neumann knew about linear mathematics: They are agreed-upon vocabularies much as they are factual descriptions.

We know almost nothing, and technology, with its acceleratory effect, makes this ever more apparent, causing us anxiously to backbend towards nature in what Irish economist W. Bryan Arthur, in his wonderful book The Nature of Technology, captures tidily like this: “Our deepest hope as humans lies in technology; but our deepest trust lies in nature.”

And that brings us spiraling back to the Catalan master Antoni Gaudí and La Sagrada Familia basilica, the master’s masterpiece, a one-off form of architecture that appears, in many of its thousands of unique spots, to have inverted nature’s process, adapting function from a search for beauty rather than creating beauty from functional adaptations. Gaudí reveled in the natural complexity of fractals and superadjacency, the gorgeous simplicity of a shape repeated till it is a snail’s shell then repeated in concrete till it is a spire. In predictive obeisance to a later observation made by American physicist Philip Anderson – “The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe” – Gaudí began from the beauty of his finished shape and worked backwards to its function.

Gaudí’s mind, like Shakespeare’s or Cervantes’, is no likelier to recur tomorrow than it was yesterday or today.

As complex adaptive systems that both comprise and compose other complex adaptive systems, our lives are constructed from countless events, every one of which is equal parts impossible and inevitable.

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Author’s note: Anyone interested in the interdisciplinary approach taken by the men cited above is enthusiastically encouraged to read M. Mitchell Waldrop’s Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos.

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Author’s note note: This column will not appear next week, allowing its author to pursue messy vitality in Colombia.

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Editor’s note: For part 11, please click here.

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Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday in Brooklyn, Philadelphia welterweight Danny “Swift” Garcia laid waste to the remnants of Brooklyn’s Paulie “Magic Man” Malignaggi in a PBC main event distributed by ESPN, home of Rosie “Amazingly Knowledgeable” Perez and Teddy “The Sandcastle” Atlas. It was not a particularly suspenseful affair, an absence of suspense being the one flaw in the PBC’s revolutionary new Inevitable Outcomes matchmaking model, but it worked just fine as a vehicle for saying goodbye to Malignaggi and hello to Garcia – the newest monster in PBC’s welterweight stable.

Garcia is an excellent fighter whose recent aversion to worldclass opposition does not wholly subvert his pre-PBC accomplishments. After going-in tough as any fighter in the world, 2011-2013, Garcia has paused to let his PBC coworkers catch up, and it’s not his fault those coworkers, having accomplished fractionally so much, have paused in synchrony.

Whatever one opines of the PBC or Al Haymon, it’s hard to fault Garcia or Malignaggi for their employment with the promotional/managerial/booking agency. Neither guy was exactly fast-tracked by other meaningful promotional entities at any time in his career. Garcia was actively cheered against by his then-promoter Oscar De La Hoya in fights against Erik Morales, Amir Khan and Lucas Matthysse, and before that Malignaggi was used by Top Rank like a subterranean detonation site in his 2006 humbling by Miguel Cotto, a pay-per-view main event that featured a ring barely larger than a Rikers Island isolation cell and a canvas spongier than what nurses might’ve used to bathe Malignaggi during his subsequent hospital stay. Whatever it might have required for Malignaggi to keep Cotto away from him nine years ago, Malignaggi didn’t have an ounce of it, and after Cotto shattered Malignaggi’s face he went to work peppergrinding the pieces. Hard as it was to like Malignaggi before that night, it was nearly impossible to believe he deserved everything Cotto did to him.

Though it was never quite clear what ingredient of Malignaggi’s showing against Cotto would go better in a mix with other elite competition, Malignaggi’s enduring appeal to New Yorkers kept him drawing crowds enough to get him another chance, one in which he managed to outbox a granitechinned South African named Lovemore Ndou and attain the IBF’s junior-welterweight title. So long as Ricky Hatton could touch 140 pounds at least 15 minutes of each year, though, nobody in the world, not even in the IBF, thought Malignaggi was the premier junior welterweight, and so, when Malignaggi had his rematch with Ndou it was on Hatton’s undercard in Manchester, and it was memorable only for Malignaggi’s airheaded idea to wear Alien braids in the ring, braids his corner had to shear from his air head, midfight.

Unsurprisingly, Hatton stopped Malignaggi on the next card they shared, and then Texan Juan Diaz decisioned Malignaggi in Texas, exactly the way Malignaggi said he would, and, well, that was an outrage. A Texan in the White House had only recently presided over the ruination of world’s economy, tempers were not subdued, and when Malignaggi whined to HBO’s cameras afterward – he’d lost the fight on two fair scorecards so he fixated on the outlier – digital outrage ensued. This was during a bumbling transitional period for American media: Having rolled its eyes at reporting on the internet for a decade, it took seriously the world wide web long enough for the rest of the country to begin rolling its eyes at reporting on the internet – a reaction that continues as unabated, today, as the slideshows that catalyze it.

The outrage over Paulie’s robbery brought a rematch in Chicago, since HBO didn’t know what to do with its investment in Malignaggi or Diaz, and Malignaggi’s vindicating unanimous decision over Diaz got him warmed-up and fed to Amir Kahn five months later in a match whose delicious absurdity retains its tanginess even, lo, these five years since it happened. Malignaggi was 0-2 (2 KOs) against excellent fighters, and 1-2 against good ones, and if he’d been from anywhere but the media capital of the world, he’d have been lucky to get a chance on ESPN’s “Friday Night Fights” – where commentator laureate Teddy Atlas doubtless would have crafted and repeated and repeated a semicoherent metaphor about relocating sandcastles on a disappearing beach, long before Saturday’s spoken-word performance. Because caricatures of Yankee fans apparently are underrepresented in prizefighting, though, Malignaggi merely upgraded promoters, from a then-Golden Boy Promotions- and now-PBC-puppet promoter to the genuine article, Richard Schaefer, who helped him get a welterweight title to lose to Adrien Broner but also a commentating job with Showtime, a then-Golden Boy Promotions- and now-PBC-puppet programmer.

Malignaggi is a bright guy, and so he surely maintained no illusions about the purpose of his last two assignments, though even he must’ve been a little taken aback by the ferocity with which Shawn Porter hornworked him in 2014. The purpose of Saturday’s appearance was to welcome Danny Garcia to the welterweight division with a knockout win over a savvy veteran, and Malignaggi satisfied the requirement ably as a grinning hostess at a Yelp-reviewed eatery in gentrified Brooklyn – it’s still early, but unless Luis Collazo jealously returns to the canvas within 27 days, there’s a fair chance Malignaggi could win August’s PBC Employee of the Month.

Whatever buffoonery Malignaggi has performed while self-promoting on social media or at media events created for social media, he is an excellent commentator and knowledgeable interview. To make a robust living as a prizefighter whose hands, even when healthy, were not very good at punching, Malignaggi had to see details better fighters missed; this made him, again, the rarest of professional athletes-cum-commentators: one whose expertise extends beyond himself. He had a very good career and will not be missed in a prizefighting ring.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

“Potential remains potent if unused.” – James Wood, “Late Bloom”

Saturday in a small theater at Palms Casino in Las Vegas, in a PBC main event televised by NBCSN, 31-year-old Kazakh cruiserweight Beibut Shumenov decisioned 36-year-old American BJ Flores by three scores of 116-112. The match was made under a single expectation: Flores will decimate Shumenov, persuading the PBC’s naive viewership he is a power-punching terror we can soon anoint PBC cruiserweight champion. That expectation was disappointed.

The fight was not a fun one to watch, though no frequent purveyor of PBC events will derive any more insight from that statement than he derived joy from Saturday’s broadcast. The telecast was poor, the commentary banal, the interviews borrowed from the pages of American Cheerleader, and the violence slight. The hardest punches by far missed by far, as the preanointed winner found a prey nothing like what he’d been promised, and the fleetfooted prey found exactly the complacent predator of his quiet preparations.

Beibut Shumenov also found the best way for an underdog to win a PBC main event: Move up so far in weight – 25 pounds in this case – you are promised to be knocked cold, and then don’t get knocked cold.

Did Shumenov get the benefit of most doubts from Saturday’s judges? Sure did. Confident as the outfit was in a Flores knockout, the PBC neither bothered flying its fighters to business-friendly locales nor imported sympathetic judges to Las Vegas. Hell, they didn’t even script their commentators’ post-introduction thoughts, resulting in Sugar Ray Leonard waving the wrong pom-poms and ratifying Steve Farhood’s unofficial scorecard, one that concurred with the official cards.

After the match, Flores rightly insisted his countenance was incredibly unmarked for a man who’d been beaten for the majority of a 36-minute confrontation. That insistence betrayed the entirety of Flores’ strategy for Shumenov: We will both stand more or less still and slug one another, and since I’ve fought as high as 218 pounds, and you’ve fought as low as 174, physics will be our judge long before those three folks at ringside. Though Flores is much more of a boxer-puncher than a purebred slugger – a major reason for his youthful conversion from heavyweight to cruiserweight – he expected to stand immediately across from a much smaller man and blast him to unconsciousness.

Flores expected to undo Shumenov very much the way Shumenov undid Tamas Kovacs in 2013, a Shumenov performance at Alamodome that was simply belligerent, one in which Shumenov’s punches were spiteful as they were fast or accurate. Bernard Hopkins, who was ringside that night in San Antonio, saw an immobile man with disproportionate confidence in his power, and wagered instantly the man’s psyche was fragile: sluggers, as men who believe deeply in their natural abilities to bring instant order to a boxing ring, no flirtation, no foreplay, no reciprocity, are boxing’s least-secure souls; their universes unravel with an acceleration unknown to the universes of volume punchers or boxers. Hopkins razed Shumenov’s identity quickly in their 2014 match, disarming him then practicing on him, and sent Shumenov right out of sluggership and the light heavyweight division.

Shumenov deserves immense credit for making that relocation; the move from flyweight to bantamweight can be done by having dessert with dinner next week, while the distance from light heavyweight to cruiserweight is vast. Though it is obviously unfair for a 201-pound man to toe the line against a Klitschko, it is nearly as hopeless for a light heavyweight to move to cruiser. Today’s heavyweights are generally gargantuan and plodding; you’d hate to be hit by one and probably shouldn’t be. Cruiserweight, though, is where the fantastic athletes who wash-out of other contact sports tend to gather. At heavyweight, you meet the former collegiate linebacker who’d rather eat his way to 250 than starve his way to 199; at cruiserweight, you meet that guy’s more-disciplined teammate – just as strong, just as athletic, and a lot faster.

That was, is, BJ Flores. But things haven’t gone according to plan.

However much I prefer other fighters’ styles, BJ is my favorite person I’ve met in 11 years of covering our beloved sport (Israel Vazquez is a close second). There is a self-deprecating streak in BJ that does not translate to television, where he appears too assured, too fidgety, and sometimes too glib. He has it all figured out and is not reticent about saying so. When that sort of self-assurance pits itself against the best prizefighters in the world and wins more often than it loses, you get Carl Froch. When it goes 31-1 without once challenging for a world title, you get more resentment from fans and pundits than you deserve.

Whatever his fighting spirit, BJ is too smart to be a great prizefighter, too filled with the sort of curiosity that seeks sympathetic angles, elegant solutions to the ugly problem of swapping blows for income; if he can get things organized properly, BJ seems to believe, he’ll be recognized as a world champion without having to beat any world champions. This mentality manifests itself in various ways and did so, Saturday: so long as he was way out of Shumenov’s range, Flores hurled rights with abandon, but a single counter from Shumenov set BJ’s quick mind to calculating risks and probabilities, in an untimely search for an elegant solution to the problem of rendering Shumenov unconscious without a proportionate amount of peril.

Flores has every tangible quality needed to be a great prizefighter. The fact he will come to his 37th birthday without once challenging a world champion, though, subverts most of it. That was not a fun sentence to write.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Last week British super middleweight Carl “The Cobra” Froch announced his retirement, ending an unusually fine contemporary prizefighting career on an unusually high note. Froch’s final instant in a prizefight was his best – spearchiseling George Groves in a full Wembley Stadium on May 31, 2014 – and if Froch needed 14 months to be certain that was so, it’s altogether forgivable.

We like best the athletes to whom we relate best, superficially, profoundly, however – those men who exhibit qualities we like in ourselves but more so. To love Froch, one didn’t have to be an arrogant bastard reveling in expressions of masculinity, no. But it sure did help.

My favorite moment of Carl Froch’s career came not in a fight but a chat with fellow Brit George Groves, whom Froch stopped twice, and came in the leadup to their aforementioned, and in Froch’s case aforereiterated and aforereiterated, rematch. It wasn’t any one word or phrase or look or gesture, the second half of their chat was rich with too many, but rather the way Froch looked inside at himself, a posture he adopts often – for no one is as enchanted by the thought of Carl Froch as Carl Froch – and followed a process like: Perhaps this guy does know something about me that eludes me, maybe I am not everything I believe I am. No, wait, what could I believe – not imagine, but actually believe – I am that I am not? I stand by my belief, I am as I say I am, and I’ll hear no more dissent.

Froch bent where Groves was rigid, Froch examined himself from Groves’ seat, considered himself in an unfamiliar light, then invested his conclusion – he’s wrong about me, and I’m right – with even greater force. Then Froch imposed himself on George Groves, and before 80,000 of his countrymen, a lamplike number summoning its genie no matter how often Froch rubs it, Froch struck Groves with the best punch of his career, reducing Groves from petulant rival to beginner origami.

In an instant Froch had a chance to end his career at its highest moment, something nearly no boxer has done in our sport’s deep history, and one feared he mighn’t – that what he calls the “fighting machine” he makes himself into might cause a sloppy thing with Julio Cesar Chavez Jr., ever a sloppy thing, or a decision loss to Gennady Golovkin (if Golovkin could take Froch’s power in the later rounds, something Golovkin’s resume does nothing to assure). Instead, Froch looked inside at himself once more, projecting the relentlessness and brutality and boredom and doubt of a championship-caliber training camp, and realized there was little in life he desired less than another experience like that.

Boxing has so very few happy endings it should fill aficionados with gratitude much as any other emotion th’t Froch left our sport with wealth and wits, accomplishment and vindication.

The third time I saw Froch fight, his painfully forgettable tilt with PBC prototype Andre Dirrell – 10 parts athlete for every one part fighter – I wrote, “(Froch) really wants to fight even if he often seems not to know how.” That desire to fight, to lower his head and swim forward winging wide punches at a rate proportionate to his fatigue, was what made Froch unique, in large part because it actually worked.

Men who have never fought, who’ve not clenched their hands in fists and punched men square in the face, often beseech others in a fight to race forward with lunatic aggression, consequences to the wind. For reasons psychology understands well as biology, though, a man in a fair fight is more frightened of having his reputation harmed than his person; embarrassment concerns him more than pain. Only fighters who’ve planned to race forward wildly, and prepared themselves for the feat, can turn the trick in hot blood. All the rest of us stall, our frustration steering us towards paralysis, to a point where we approach targethood and view another man’s aggression, another man’s attempt at our unconsciousness, that is, favorably, almost thankfully – like Oscar De La Hoya silently beseeching Manny Pacquiao to knock him out because such an end would be multiples more honorable than quitting in full consciousness like De La Hoya did in his final instant as a prizefighter.

Froch was one man who did what the inexperienced ask every prizefighter to do: No matter how tired he was, Froch pressed forward wildly, not hopelessly, in a bid to take confrontations wholly out of the organized athletic realm and into something more primal. Subsequently, even Froch’s losses ended nobly. Review his 11th round with Andre Ward, when the eventual winner of the Super Six tournament – on a once-excellent network that no longer fears embarrassment – and one of this generation’s great fighters, Ward, desperately clinches, his mouth wide open, his knees softened. The final three minutes of Froch’s only other career loss, when he got decisioned narrowly in 2010 by Mikkel Kessler during the same Super Six, a loss Froch avenged just as narrowly in 2013, are a symphony of blood and violence and will, both men leaking from deep cuts over their eyes, neither man appearing to care who gets rendered unconscious so long as someone does.

During the 3 1/2-year prime of his prizefighting career, Froch went 7-2 (2 KOs) against Jean Pascal, Jermain Taylor, Andre Dirrell, Mikkel Kessler, Arthur Abraham, Glen Johnson, Andre Ward and Lucian Bute. No man with Carl Froch’s talent did more great fighting, no contemporary prizefighter, in other words, wrung more from his natural ability. The Nottinghamshire Cobra will be missed sorely.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday at a local coffee shop I watched the PBC main event I’d already covered five days before it happened (I was off by about 3 1/2 rounds in my report). I watched on my phone as Florida welterweight Keith Thurman “knocked-out” Luis Collazo with an accidental headbutt of slow-developing effect. For the record, and since some writers are enkindled by the thought a single dollar mightn’t go to the corporations it belongs to, I did not watch a pirated stream of the PBC broadcast: I used my mother’s username and password on the WatchESPN app.

Thurman’s reaction was indeed more surprising than his victory. Thurman was going to win, regardless, and so, even if his postfight celebration was charged by relief, it also should have been tempered by a question even smartphone viewers had to ask: What the hell did Keith Thurman do to win?

Collazo, a victim of questionable decisions in previous title bouts, with Ricky Hatton and Andre Berto, took things entirely out of the judges’ unsteady hands, Saturday. Having jeopardized the scripted outcome with a body shot in round 5, after 14 minutes of skittish jousting with Thurman from a safe distance – even had they fencing foils – Collazo chose soberly his words for the ringside physician and got himself awarded a knockout loss after round 6. A loss is a loss except when it’s a partial victory, which is exactly what Saturday’s antics will become in three weeks when Luis Collazo wins the PBC’s July Employee of the Month award for his competent if not creative Saturday delivery.

My interest in this bout was minimal, knowing as we all did its preordained outcome. The enterprising and imaginative among us will tell ourselves the entire canonization of boxing’s next really really big and huge star, Keith Thurman – a telegenic man who cries on command in barbershops while his girlish locks are hardened into warrior braids – got jeopardized towards the end of the otherwise unwatchable fifth round, Saturday, when Thurman got jackknifed by a Collazo left cross to the body, but the whole enterprise of imagining how the predetermined winner might lose is quixotic, we should admit.

In this sense, boxing is no longer entertaining as professional wrestling – wherein the winner is predetermined but at least unknown to the audience. In this sense, boxing is more noble than wrestling: the PBC broadcast tells you who will win the main event in a prefight Sesame Street feature and does not deviate by subjecting its docile viewers to steel-chair hijinx or implausible disqualifications that allow the champ to retain his title.

Well, OK, point taken, but there are no steel chairs.

Let us now pause to consider the feat boxing’s next supernova incredible star performed by getting bent in half by a lefthand thrown from a southpaw. Ever ask yourself why nearly every body-shot stoppage you’ve seen comes from an orthodox puncher’s left hook (including the crossover lefthand with which southpaw Gerry Penalosa stopped Jhonny Gonzalez eight years ago)? It’s because the angle of delivery for a left cross is all wrong; the punch is too straight to find the magical, quartersize spot between the right rib and hipbone where the liver – a vital organ – peeks through a window known as “the button.” There’s an upwards twist of the left knuckles required to hit the button, too, and a southpaw’s left cross, like all crosses, finds the knuckles descending, not ascending, upon impact.

However, then, did Collazo, a man who has knocked-out considerably fewer than half his opponents, knock boxing’s next solarsystem supergiant across the visiblepain threshold? With Thurman’s help, mostly. Thurman landed his liver on Collazo’s fist about much as Collazo landed the middle knuckle of his left hand on Thurman’s liver.

But wait, you may be thinking, I thought Thurman’s defensive liabilities found their limit in the way he floats his chin whenever he throws!

First of all, dearest PBC viewer, you weren’t supposed to notice that. And second of all, what are you talking about? Keith Thurman proved he has a champion’s heart, Saturday, like the PBC broadcast told you.

A note, then, about PBC broadcasting crews: Universally they have the journalistic integrity of Billy Mays pitching GatorBlade bug bazookas at 3 AM. Their commentary works more like a celebrity endorsement of a related product – Tiger Woods swinging a Nike driver, say – than even an approximate description of what happens in the boxing ring. They each have their cultivated schtick – Sugar Ray Leonard’s smooth vacuousness; Teddy Atlas’ metaphor-strangling outrage – but none of them offers commentary to invite even the softest inference of disloyalty by their owner, Al Haymon, if ever he should watch a PBC telecast.

Writers make the increasingly necessary if enduringly ignoble transition from reporters to publicists, yes, but rarely on the pages where their journalism resides. No sooner does a writer imply his endorsement of a commercial product than his readers barnstorm the comments section with reprimanding words about conflicted interests. That boxing television, conversely, has made the transition so frictionlessly from broadcaster to publicist should help aficionados retrofit their views of the entire medium.

Here, let me get you started: When the HBO crew assured me Manny Pacquiao won nearly every minute of his 2012 fight with Timothy Bradley, supplementing its commentary with creatively chosen between-rounds-replay clips and a wildly inaccurate unofficial scorecard, did I consider as fully as perhaps I should the network’s disproportionate interest in the very outcome it described? Here’s a little more help: No, you probably didn’t.

The kicker, as it were, is that today HBO, whatever its adorable crush on Eastern Bloc fighters, stands as the last column of journalistic integrity in boxing television: It is the only American network to treat Al Haymon as an executive instead of an owner.

Over and again, the PBC concept will not end well. If it succeeds, within three years it will have used monopolistic powers to craft a rigged-outcomes product that is neither violent as MMA nor well-scripted as professional wrestling (or the NBA playoffs). If it fails, it already will have decimated the ranks of aficionados and the writers who serve them.

Ridicule Luis Collazo all you want, but he’ll always have his PBC Employee of the Month certificate. What will you have?

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry

TAMPA, Fla. – Saturday in University of South Florida’s acclaimed Sundome, Florida welterweight Keith “One Time” Thurman stopped Brooklyn’s Luis Collazo in the 11th round of PBC’s insipid ESPN debut. Official attendance in the hauntingly quiet arena was announced at: “A lot, I mean, look around.”

Thurman’s victory was not without controversy. After failing to land a clean punch on Collazo through several, 90-second durations of their fight, Thurman came alive at the midway point of the penultimate round, striking Collazo flush with a number of punches at the very instant late-sub referee Laurence Cole, caught texting on his phone in a neutral corner several times in round 5, offered the fight his undivided attention. Thurman was ahead 100-90 on all three official scorecards at the time, as expected.

The purpose of this fight was twofold: 1. Build the Thurman brand, and 1. Fill a reserved ESPN television date, and 2. Drop a Thurman ball in the Mayweather Opponent Draft Lottery, and 2. Preclude future lawsuits against the event’s advisor and hedge fund from alleging University of South Florida fell prey to a venue-squatting saltern to keep its coveted Sundome from being reserved by a regional California promoter who once used rumors of his own intention to fight in September to preclude a rival promotional outfit from using a Mexican Independence Day weekend he later filled with Marco Antonio Barrera and Robbie Peden (this column should not be used in the text of any future lawsuits that allege the Florida State Boxing Commission was complicit in a plot to bump Bengali songbird Shreya Ghoshal from her Saturday date to a performance on July 25).

As stated by the promoter of record, who, frankly, could be any one of four or five nameless entities that rent their licenses to advisor Al Haymon – who, it should be noted, deftly navigates the unenforced Ali Act by calling himself neither a manager nor a promoter: “Keith (Thurman) does not hate Shreya Ghoshal. That’s patently ridiculous. I wouldn’t rent my promoter’s license to his advisor if he did! Without getting into the specifics of ethnicities, I could basically be a Bengali – all other things being equal.”

To bring further clarity, and with any luck an end to the manufacture of this particular controversy, immediately after stopping the hapless Collazo, Thurman declared: “Dude, I love the Bengals. Some of my buddies are from Cincy. I’m gonna even get tiger trunks for my next fight.”

Collazo did his job smartly, Saturday, committed wholly to giving a one-time exciting young prospect his third dull decision since December, but Collazo’s effort to stretch Thurman into what “tepid, Gulf bathwater, coming all the way up to your shoulders” he promised before Saturday’s match was thwarted much by Thurman and the silent Sundome crowd as by the third man in the ring. Collazo, once boldly informed by a veteran San Antonio Express-News boxing scribe his 2013 victory over Alan Sanchez was “honestly, the dullest fight I think I’ve ever seen,” was circumspect about Saturday’s early stoppage.

“I’ll be back,” Collazo said. “Set your alarms and wake-up calls. I’ll be back.”

Before any more social-media outrage attends Saturday’s stoppage, #ColeAgainAgain, with citations of video evidence that shows Thurman landing merely four unanswered punches on Collazo before the match was called-off, one must consider the wording in the PBC’s recently leaked hedge-fund prospectus: “A fight can be stopped at the onset of any punch combination that sees the designated opponent (subsequently called B-SIDE) struck by any number of punches disproportionate to the mean of punches previously established in no more than three (3) rounds.”

Keith “One Time” Thurman, to the halfway point of Saturday’s 11th round, justified his cognomen, averaging about one punch landed per combination thrown in rounds 8 and 9 and 10, making his jab-jab-hook-cross combination at 1:27 of round 11 a 400-percent increase in violent activity over the established mean, validating Cole’s hurling of himself between the combatants. That Collazo did not show any outward signs of peril is both interesting and entirely beside the point, as boxing’s wounds often occur internally, long, long before they show outward manifestations.

At Friday’s weighin, Collazo trainer Willie Vargas promised: “We’re going to to hit Thurman ‘one time’ for every tattoo on Luis’ body.” Asked about his giddy forecast at Saturday’s postfight presser, Vargas replied, “I don’t know. Maybe we did. Who was counting?”

Postfight talk both inside and outside Sundome returned to a familiar question, one that sank in Tampa’s oppressively heavy air all week: Did Thurman look bad enough to get a September fight with Floyd Mayweather?

“Oh man, Keith, you looked terrible!” shouted a Haymon hypeman at the ESPN cameras just before Saturday’s official time was read. “Man, you looked awful!”

Mayweather pal Leonard Ellerbe, attending the match in behalf of his sponsor, showed customary sobriety in his assessment of any future Mayweather opponent.

“It was boring, and nobody knows why the ref stopped it,” said Ellerbe. “(But) terrible enough to fight ‘Money’ in the final match before his next retirement after he breaks that record? I really don’t know about that. Even with the competition he’s been fed, Keith’s skills are not eroded like we’d hoped.

“He can still punch a bit, can’t he?”

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

DALLAS – Four miles southeast of this city’s downtown center stands Gexa Energy Pavilion, a 20,000-seat outdoor amphitheater whose stage Friday hosted a deep roster of pioneers in a musical genre then-known as rap – as in Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” – and now known as hip-hop. For those enchanted by the seedling genre in its great years, 1985-1992, Friday was an ecstasy of nostalgia and enduring craftsmanship.

Would that welterweight Timothy Bradley’s decision victory over Jessie Vargas Saturday night in Carson, Calif., kindled such praise, but when a referee marks the first interview conducted after a sporting event of any kind, one can safely assume that event disappointed spectators. So it went with Bradley-Vargas 1, a middling affair until the final moments, when Bradley ran himself into a Vargas righthand, got buckled, staggered a bit, held on, and made it to referee Pat Russell’s chosen stopping place, which as everyone now has been told a dozen times and as many different ways, was not on the 3:00 mark.

The idea Bradley – who pedaled himself unconsciously through about 11 rounds with Ruslan Provodnikov, and managed to remain conscious, too, for a combined 36 rounds across from Manny Pacquiao and Juan Manuel Marquez – was but one blow from being stopped by a career junior welterweight with nine knockouts in 26 prizefights, in his debut at 147 pounds, is quite nearly absurd. But as neither HBO nor promoter Top Rank has an idea what to do with Bradley, still, a rematch birthed by a controversy inspired by true events is the best idea currently in the offing. One no longer pities Bradley quite deeply as he did in the aftermath of the Provodnikov match, when Bradley dutifully shortened his own life with a heroic apology for decisioning Pacquiao and thereby sabotaging in 2012 (until Marquez did it perfectly six months later, and Top Rank subsequently and effortfully resurrected Pacquiao) the Fight to Save Boxing, which did quite the opposite this May.

Bradley is not a welterweight, whatever says the thickening of his physique, and his lack of welterweight power manifests itself in two obvious ways. Firstly, in seven matches, Bradley has yet to knock-out, or even knock-down, anyone as a welterweight – despite hurling himself awkwardly enough at every opponent to ruin feet and ankles, and perform what could only be called a contortionist feat on the blue mat against Provodnikov th’t yogis, to this day, cannot replicate. And secondly, that Bradley loses his balance so often, and badly, by overcommitting to punches that barely dent or mark the men he strikes flush with them.

The move that causes Bradley the most trouble is his orphan-the-children righthand that, when it misses, finds him fully crossed-over and pointedly aware of how precariously he’s mispositioned himself. Generally, after the righthand misses, Bradley sets his eyes on the tops of his own shoes, hopes not to get hit, returns his weight to his left foot (now his back foot), and quickly uncrosses his legs. He’s an elite athlete, even among what elite athletes make their livings in prizefighting, and that athleticism, once a fundamental hindrance, most likely, a hindrance to his adoption of boxing fundamentals, is now what allows him to do well as he does.

Jessie Vargas, too, exceeded expectations, Saturday, offering a competitive opponent to Bradley, and making the final minute of the fight more interesting than its 35 predecessors. Vargas certainly did not win, and were there a feasible or even novel opponent for Bradley, victory over Vargas would be declared and boxing would move on without a rematch at the end of the year, but as there is not, Unfinished will become Business’s modifier, and a more-tentative Timothy Bradley will outbox Vargas by wide margins whenever the rematch happens.

There was a two-year stretch in which I attended three-of-four Bradley matches, in Las Vegas, and yet it didn’t cross my mind to attend Saturday’s tilt. Why not? Two reasons, again: Firstly, Timothy Bradley, while remaining a model citizen and fighter boxing would be well-advised to replicate a few hundred times, is not always enthralling to watch, and the higher his weight climbs, the more apparent this becomes. And secondly, there was Big Daddy Kane and Melle Mel and Sugarhill Gang and Doug E. Fresh and Whodini and LL Cool J – “Kings of the Mic” – to see in this city, Friday.

The term “classic hip-hop” appears now to encompass the genuinely talented part of Friday’s show, while the less-talented part of Friday’s show, Bone Thugs-n-Harmony, is from a later era discovered by trailblazers who, despite their collective greatness as performers, proved no better at spotting talent than Shane Mosley during his brief time as a Golden Boy Promotions partner. There was not a single oath spoken, sung or rapped in the opening four hours of Friday’s show, and then Bone Thugs-n-Harmony began its sloppy, pointless set, and one couldn’t escape from vulgarity – the word motherf**ker fairly creaking under the weight of a performance it now had to shoulder.

That is not some priggish commentary about family values, either; it’s an aesthetic criticism.

Today, consumers of hip-hop expect, proudly demand even, lyrics written between and a first- and third-grade reading level. It was not that way in the beginning. Big Daddy Kane’s lyrics resonate almost 30 years after one first hears them, and so do LL Cool J’s. The songs Public Enemy released before 1992 are more relevant to current events, 25 years later, than 90-percent of the garbage hip-hop has become since the fateful year Dr. Dre released “The Chronic.”

“Oh, but you don’t understand ‘the industry’ and ‘the branding’ and ‘what’s hot’ and . . .” – just stop it; no man wants to hear another man talk like a teenage girl.

In the short run, little in life finds its governance in a meritocracy, and the long run, by its very nature, rarely gets survived by what artists it promotes. May some sense of that continue to bring solace to both Timothy Bradley and Big Daddy Kane.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry

Saturday on BET, American super middleweight world champion Andre Ward made his much-needed return to boxing, stopping in the ninth round a hapless but stubborn Brit named Paul Smith, right about the time NBC served its viewers a terrible main event called “The Battle for Ohio”, from Las Vegas, that ended with welterweight Shawn Porter decisioning Adrien Broner by refreshingly wide scores. Before his match with Ward, Smith baldly missed weight and got himself beaten bloody for the indiscretion. Before their opening bell, Broner and Porter verbally antagonized one another, then spent 35 of 36 minutes hugging it out.

Adrien Broner’s defense is an atrocity. It took Marcos Maidana to indicate this a ways back, but Shawn Porter offered its definitive proof in round 1 of their Saturday scrum. After feinting Broner into a retreat – one doesn’t say Broner was feinted out of position, since, defensively, he’s never in position – Porter pursued Broner in a sort of relenting-wildman style Porter employed the entire match, and Broner, whose hands and feet obey autonomous, often-competing masters, leaped backwards and threw his arms directly upwards. When Porter’s punch landed and nearly touched the back of Broner’s head to his C1 vertebra, Broner had both white gloves overhead – in a feat of contorted defenselessness not seen in televised fighting since Marco Antonio Barrera slammed Naseem Hamed’s face on a Las Vegas turnbuckle 14 years ago.

Sensing his stick-em-up pose would not disarm Porter so much as a lackadaisical mugger, Broner immediately, and relentlessly, employed his backup plan: Unrepentant hugging. There’s a reason this worked, sapping Porter of what energy a formless volume puncher like him needs to be effective: Broner has disproportionate upperbody strength even for a welterweight (or whatever weight he now campaigns at). Porter badly wanted to punch Broner, but he was generally unable to, both because Porter is nearer to being bad at boxing than good, and because when Broner got his head and arms in a variety of grappling holds, Porter stopped churning his feet and merely tried to outwrestle Broner.

Before one criticizes Porter’s dad for not telling his son to free his hands with his feet, one pauses, in observance of both Fathers’ Day and regression to the mean, to impart: Andre Ward is just about the only athlete left in prizefighting who knows how to do this. Mediocre as his work may be with most everyone else he’s touched, trainer Virgil Hunter deserves much credit for what fantastic work he did teaching Ward how to fight.

How good it was to see Ward back in a prizefighting ring!

Rusty? Yup. Older? Sure. Less effective punching a cruiserweight than a super-middle? Of course. Likely to lose more than three rounds to Gennady Golovkin in a 12-round fight? No way.

Ward is a serious professional. It was a relief, in this sense at least, to see a man in an exhibition match who wouldn’t foul it up with hotdoggery, sloppiness or boredom. Ward punished Paul Smith for coming in at Chavezweight in his BET debut, also BET’s boxing debut; it was indeed cathartic, however cruel and misplaced the catharsis, to watch Ward make Smith repent for the ordeal of a prefight Nipsey Hussle concert.

Saturday, Nipsey stretched the boundaries of imitative talentlessness to a point at which they’d have snapped even 20 years ago; Nipsey Hussles have always existed, but hip-hop’s natural selection – or, heavens, any selection – did not accommodate them until recently. The nature of the hip-hop business is such that new acts must be discovered for each Tuesday release, and there are not, nor have there ever been, that many talented lyricists in America. (Friday evening in Dallas, LL Cool J will headline a show that features Big Daddy Kane and Doug E. Fresh and Whodini and Sugarhill Gang, and it’s instructive to ask, before the first Nipsey apologist draws breath: Is there another iteration of the known universe in which even a creative record-label executive imagines Nipsey Hussle headlining a concert in 2045?)

If these days I read like a curmudgeon, I’ve made my peace with it. The same element, time, that led a once-sprightly optimist to curmudgeonhood, anyway, is what, in part, PBC relied on to draw ratings for its godawful Saturday show. I watched the fights with a couple Puerto Rican friends from the boxing gym, and after fast-forwarding through much of the undercard offerings – NBC helpfully juxtaposed an excellent U.S. Olympian, Errol Spence, with a dreadful one, Terrell Gausha – we all kept reminding ourselves how wonderful it was this unwatchable bore of a main event was on free television, in an unthinking application of a childhood metric. In the digital era, network television mostly means more ads and scripts written round selling things, but for a certain, later portion of the demographic PBC aims at there is still nostalgic meaning in hearing an event will be broadcasted by NBC or CBS or ABC.

Take the pros with the cons, then, say the cons, because if they’re talking about us, they’re promoting us. True that. It’s one of only two things Broner did well Saturday – along with applying a left-hooked tag to Porter’s floating chin at the top of round 12: Respect the brand. Having lost widely to a competitor who lacks most every one of his gifts, Broner was reliably, and durably, self-aggrandizing in defeat. While intellectually incapable of aping anything else Floyd Mayweather tried to teach him, Broner unwaveringly applies one idea that enriched Money May: Tariffs exacted from men who wish to see my bitch ass beat to death look the same on a spreadsheet as fees gratefully paid by admirers.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry–

Saturday in Madison Square Garden Theater, the very place Filipino Nonito Donaire’s candidacy for HBO Fighter of the New Century was subverted 3 1/2 years back by a pesky South American, Jamaican featherweight+1 Nicholas “Axe Man” Walters was unable to stretch Colombian featherweight Miguel Marriaga, much to the theater’s icy chagrin. Walters won a unanimous decision, and neither man stopped fighting or so much as clinched for nearly the full 36-minute duration, but it was not enough action, coming in the form of a 127-pound Jamaican and a Colombian featherweight, evidently, to prod New Yorkers to sustained applause.

Here’s how it went Nov. 9, 2013: Corpus Christi, Texas, was balmy and surprisingly humid for the season, American Bank Center was a dump – there was no WiFi, and the crowd lacked spirit – press row was the sort of discombobulated jumble a publicity outfit alone could conjure, and my marriage was in freefall. There were reasons aplenty for distraction, if not outright anxiety, and yet.

One begins as a boxing writer squinting at every fight, interrogating every match for its historical import and metaphorical capacity for yielding capacious metaphors – every four-rounder comprising a tiny chance at an immortality-manifesting phrase like “I saw him when he was fighting nobodies in empty arenas.” The more one sits ringside, the more his attention wanes, and something like guilt replaces the will to examine fighters’ footwork from yesteryear’s fights. Somewhere round one’s 60th fight card, though, a nearly enlightened state happens: I’m going to enjoy the undercard however I wish – watching the scorekeeper in the silly striped shirt, fantasizing about a ringcard girl, chatting with a pal I’ve not seen since last year, texting with my mother, googling the attendance record of the venue; whatever brings joy – and if something sensational happens, it will hit me with concussive force enough I’ll not be able to miss it even if I so wish.

That was Nicholas Walters. On a card that boasted Alex Saucedo, Vic Darchinyan, Mikey Garcia, Nonito Donaire and other less-talented but more-touted participants, the Jamaican featherweight happened with a concussive force too great to miss; in his U.S. debut, against Mexican Alberto Garza, Walters radiated with a violence of intention and act uncommon even among prizefighters. His form was rough, his punches were wild, but for simple force and desire, Walters was unmatchable that night.

I’m biased about Walters, then, and I could not care less if it offends.

He missed weight Friday, and it hurt. Part of the appeal of a Walters, like an Antonio Margarito before him, is the size advantage he brings to confrontations – and that appeal is immediately nullified by unfairness if he does not find a way, whatever way, to touch the contracted weight for at least a moment or two before bounding three or four weight classes upwards in 24 hours. Saturday Walters stood across from a career featherweight in Marriaga, a man who has fought nothing but 126 pounders for six years, and Walters looked enormous.

Walters is too big to be a featherweight, unless he returns to fighting thrice annually, and chews solely ice chips four weeks every year, and that is a real problem because Walters’ technique is a passport-snatching type, one that will not allow his power to travel to other weightclasses, and without the power to terrorize his opponents, Walters has very, very little.

His reflexes are about average, which might not be an issue except for his reliance on them; Walters thinks he is much quicker than he actually is, and a lot of this autoöverestimation comes from amateur experiences enough to anticipate the nature of others’ attacks, his parries triggered by anticipation more than reaction – particularly evident and perilous in round 1 Saturday, when Walters repeatedly sent his right guard out to defend Marriaga’s jab even before the Colombian knew he would throw it.

Walters straightens noticeably when he throws, making the target of his head blink and rise like a cartoon thought bubble with an idea, and despite his physical disadvantages Marriaga saw this and exploited it several times in the opening half of the fight. Walters’ defense is quite poor, too. He regularly employs the shell tactic of lowering his lead hand, and almost as regularly neglects to tuck his chin fully behind his lead shoulder; Walters’ defense is not so much a shell as an invitation.

What makes all this work, though, is the Axe Man righthand Walter wields. It is offense-as-defense in the very best sense: Before an opponent commits to a combination, he asks – and in Marriaga’s case, noticeably asks – “What if this does not knock that guy stiff?” The force of Walters’ overhand right is enough to alter others’ offensive calculations, which very nearly fits a workable definition for great defense.

No featherweight should be hit with Walters’ righthand, not Marriaga, not Vasyl Lomachenko, not God shrunken in a 126-pound form. The consequence of Walters’ righthand removed Marriaga’s desire to throw punches Saturday; yes, Walters’ body blows reduced the force of Marriaga’s punches, but it was the possibility of getting spearchiseled by that righthand that kept Marriaga from even wanting to bother.

No prizefight is gentle, but Saturday’s affair – while conclusively better than the New York crowd opined – was not withering enough to entitle Walters another 2/3-year rest. If he takes a couple weeks off, but not a month, then heads into camp for a Lomachenko match, there’s reason to think he can distill himself to 126 one last time. Walters-Lomachenko is the sort of palate-cleansing affair our beloved sport sorely needs in 2015.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry–

“It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books – setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them.” – Jorge Luis Borges

SAN ANTONIO – The Alamodome, just east of this downtown area’s center, has hosted prizefights both great and consequential since its grand opening in 1993. Unfortunately its most recent event will be remembered only in the latter tally.

Saturday, before a partisan-Mexican crowd of 63,392, one which publicists insist smashed seven unique attendance records, Mexican Saul “Canelo” Alvarez laid ruin to Puerto Rican middleweight champion Miguel Cotto, thrashing Cotto, who weighed in on the contracted dot of 154 1/4 pounds, for 9 1/2 of their 11 rounds together before Texas referee Laurence Cole, in an uncharacteristic and unappreciated (by Alamodome attendees), act of insight and empathy, waved a stop to the match at 1:00 of round 11, making Alvarez the first man to contest and win both the WBC’s world junior middleweight and middleweight championships in the same match. Stubbornly scheduled to coincide with Cinco De Mayo weekend, even if the calendar rendered it impossible, Saturday’s Siete De Mayo fiesta was more a cynical ethnic cashout than a party.

“I fight for the people,” Alvarez said immediately afterwards. “Because without the people, there are no people.”

“Miguel Cotto tried to win,” said Cotto.

The miracle was not so much in the fight’s happening, although that was unusual in a year already bad enough to divide two into prizefighting’s committed fanbase yet again, but that it was competitive for long as it lasted. Cotto, effectively retired since battering marvelously the crippled Argentine formally known as Maravilla almost two years ago – and the ‘almost’ is essential, we know, since Cotto employed his now infamous “Point Per Day from Puerto Rican Parade” clause, insisting Alvarez pay a significant penalty for scheduling the superfight in Mayo, not Junio – made a better showing than many forecasters feared when the fight’s contract finally was published during the weighin.

Cotto promoter Roc Nation, a still-novice outfit captained by Big Daddy Kane’s longtime hypeman, has brought none of the innovation promised its semifull Barclay’s Center houses, proving with rapper Jay-Z’s tepid success th’t rapper 50 Cent’s abject failure in the very same gambit was not an anomaly but a trendsetter: Hip-hop artists, evidently, are multiples better at selling hustler epics to suburban teens than combative mismatches to urban adults. Or perhaps that’s a touch unfair to Roc Nation: It did, after all, invent for its Canelo-Cotto weighin a contract-unveiling gamechanger in which the terms of a fight – weightclass, purse, trunk colors, trim, glove size, referee, drugtesting policy, and even permitted punch combinations – remained variables unknown to ticketbuyers until DJ Truth 1 revealed them Friday while Alvarez and Cotto loitered near the scale.

Oddsmakers, themselves doubleblinded as ticketbuyers till Friday’s afternoon announcement, quickly installed Alvarez a 4-1 favorite, upon learning last-minute negotiations by promoter Oscar De La Hoya and cable broadcaster HBO restored Canelo’s left hook to the permitted-use column from which it was struck deliberately by Miguel Cotto’s own pink pen Thursday evening. Writing of HBO, the network’s palpable relief was felt from New York to Lone Star State when the match’s opening line came in well below the unwritten threshold (5-1) determining a match’s fitness for pay-per-view.

“It’s not complicated,” explained an HBO programmer who requested anonymity: “If there’s less than five times the chance our favorite will beat his opponent, take out your wallet. ‘Championship Boxing,’ our flagship program, is for less-competitive matches, obviously, though our 10-1 sweetspot is considerably lower, still, than Showtime’s. Once a fight goes off at 15- or 20-1, we’re going to lean ‘Boxing After Dark’ unless it’s (Gennady) Golovkin.”

Cotto trainer Freddie Roach, ubiquitous as a popup ad since the fight was signed, whenever it was signed, prepared his charge for a seemingly slower version of Alvarez, as Alvarez had little issue finding the Puerto Rican from about the second round to the match’s merciful end in the 11th. Alvarez, the naturally larger man, succeeded where others failed before him, successfully hooking with the hooker in a way 2015 Cotto victim Daniel Geale did not, starting a left hook to the head each time Cotto started a left hook to the body, and twice topspinning Cotto in a way not seen since Manny Pacquiao cleaned the Puerto Rican’s clock in 2009.

There are no sixth chapters in prizefighting, and Cotto’s inability to imperil Canelo even once in their 34 minutes together Saturday portended the end of a career marked by popularity more than greatness. Had Cotto retired immediately after Pacquiao stopped him, or Floyd Mayweather or Austin Trout outclassed him, his legacy might have included as much goodwill as it lacked decisive victories over great fighters in their primes, but the rapacity of Cotto’s cashgrab since 2012 – excepting only his match with Sergio Martinez, since Martinez and his handlers and New York’s athletic commission and HBO are more culpable for a one-legged man’s assault than its perpetrator – has cooled what warm feelings aficionados long reserved for the Puerto Rican.

Cotto’s surly disposition and spartan interview style conclusively wore better on a doomed warrior than a finicky diva.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry

Editor’s note: For part eight, please click here.

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CARLSBAD, NM – This town is an overpriced outpost on the border of two western states, a dilapidated homebase of sorts for those who might venture to Guadalupe Peak, 8,000 feet in the air, or Carlsbad Caverns, 1,000 feet below ground. It is the nature of adventures they should feature the unknown, and if the unknown were but a roster of pleasant surprises, why, it would be the already-known.

Portrait of a column that nearly was not written:

A half hour lost to suffering through Amir Khan’s latest match, Friday, a glance at HBO’s upcoming fight schedule, Saturday, and Sunday a six-hour drive across terrain unchanging as it is forbidding, a particularly unappealing hotel in a particularly unappealing town, and nothing to do but eat poor barbecue or survey the Wal-Mart parking lot – not the best of Sundays but possibly the worst of them. It brings a sensation like nostalgia’s bullying twin, a reminder what hopelessness Sunday afternoons can hold if you’re not careful with them, if you’re not in a place where forward lamentations are forbidden or gnawing past-tense conditionals do not know to look.

There are oranges and yellows and reds everywhere here, and a washedout blue sky, too, but these are colors, one ought remember, one enjoys in shade or from shade. Blazing-on-blazing, instead, are what the colors of New Mexico are and portend in June.

Hopelessness in the sense of being without hope, being near enough to a moment to caren’t a whit for the future, where hope resides, is a very good thing; hopelessness in the sense of being through a checklist of reasons to go on drawing breath, to be past experiences and disappointments enough to think it probable the future will be worse than this, however bad this is, is a very bad thing. This city has a hopelessness to it in the worse sense of the word. Maybe that changes as you read this (for it certainly does not change as I write it); if you’re reading this on Monday, there’s a good chance I am somewhere near the top of Texas, the peak of Guadalupe Mountains National Park, 55 miles southwest of here, hiking alone in the wilderness, part of an act of faith that goes: Hiking may not get better, but life gets better because of solitude and nature.

It’s an ongoing embrace of the unknown, the necessary ingredient in adventure – what justifies a man’s life. Adventure is duly celebrated in every culture, but a caveat exists that explains the upwards spiral adventuring catalyzes: The more one converts the unknown to the known, markedly, the more one’s tolerance for the known diminishes. It’s another quirk that argues modestly against any perceivable universal order whatever; it’s the reason “mysterious ways” retains such a philosophically seductive sheen.

The 450-mile westwards drive from San Antonio is blessedly open and devoid of the petty competitiveness one finds on most interstates across the fruited plain, the way motorists cluster tightly, surrounded by miles of open space, angling to deny strangers the satisfaction of a spot in the imaginary future area they plan to occupy. Texas has lots of guns and lots of road-rage, and blossoming billboards about road-rage, and if one were to think arming the populace would decrease the likelihood of strangers confronting one another, well, he would be wrong. Arming the populace invariably grows the self in self-protection more than the protection, expanding the perimeter of offense and probably the perception of offense, too.

Writing of which, some might be offended to have come all this way to a boxing column only to encounter a pining-away about flat western spaces and traffic patterns and Sundays. Very well.

Friday British welterweight Amir Khan decisioned American Chris Algieri in a match that was, like most things PBC, somewhat better than feared. British fans are loyal fans – frankly, they are like Mexicans without a fraction the talent pool – and their loyalty is continually tested and occasionally rewarded by Khan, good a representative of this era as any. Khan does not win his career’s biggest fights, or perhaps the fights he loses that he is supposed to win retroactively gain in stature, but he provides suspense because his chin is so poor that it distracts from his footwork, which otherwise would be glaringly awful.

However many trainers he’s had, Khan has never had stricken from his repertoire a sideways-skipping escape that looks frightened no matter the juncture of a fight in which it appears. It is incredible that Algieri, a man who barely survived Ruslan Provodnikov at 140 pounds and lost every minute to little Manny Pacquiao in November, at times looked aggressive and imposing as Antonio Margarito against Khan. Algieri thinks and listens in a way Khan never does, and when he goes in the hard way he emerges from it much better than Khan, too.

“So little from so much” – that ought to be the tagline in September if it turns out Khan looked badly enough Friday to win the Floyd Mayweather retirement-match lottery. Since Algieri couldn’t miss Khan with wildman rights in the opening five rounds, it stands to reason Mayweather might possibly, conditionally, conceivably, tentatively, haltingly go for a knockout to close his career. The Brits would have to acquire from scalpers 15,000 of the MGM Grand’s tickets, with the remaining 1,000 split between celebrity comps and Mayweather fans, but why not?

Enough of this. I’d rather be in Barcelona . . .

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Editor’s Note: For part 10, please click here.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry–

Editor’s note: For part seven, please click here.

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San Antonio Museum of Art currently features a retrospective exhibition of works by American painter Jamie Wyeth, son of Andrew. There is real talent in his paintings. Innovation, too. In a series of works that has seagulls depicting the seven deadly sins, Wyeth uses watercolor paint thickened with honey – a trick Wyeth attributes to his time working in Andy Warhol’s Factory – painted on cardboard. The gulls are ravenous, wild, and terrifying if one imagines himself prey. Wyeth also uses every part of a brush, his fingers, and even his tongue to make a large, gulls-and-waste-disposal piece called “Inferno” for its fire and hellish air.

Innovation without talent produces little but anxiety, and fortunately Wyeth has plenty of talent, even if not so plentifully as his dad did. Would that boxing had fractionally so much talent as innovation, lately.

This sport is increasingly difficult to write about. Last week’s performance by Nicaraguan Roman “Chocolatito” Gonzalez, unfortunately, served like nothing so much as a reminder how much better and easier it was to write about prizefighting a decade ago. About a decade before that, of course, the newspapers abandoned the sport shortly after the larger American public did, another marvelous example of the free market’s creative destruction, but part of the reason writers let it happen – and writers did have some control over the matter – was because there was less to write well about.

The writer is not yet born who can write compellingly about a subject for which he feels no passion, and fleshings-out of box scores and television ratings and polls fool only undiscerning readers, and boxing now accelerates its descent into a place about which no smart being can feel passion. There’s habit, of course, but last week’s end of ESPN’s relentlessly mediocre “Friday Night Fights” stamps an epitaph on that. ESPN always had the budget to outbid HBO and Showtime put together – look what it pays for “Monday Night Football” and “Sunday Night Baseball” – but chose, instead, to treat boxing as a shamefilled filler between collegiate softball games, doing less than Telefutura, much less than Telefutura, to advance interest in our beloved sport.

Manager Al Haymon saw an incredible resource being resolutely squandered and moved on it. Bless him for that. Al Haymon will now fill ESPN, over time, with Just For Men-quality matchmaking. Damn him for this.

One has to care exponentially more about Olympic medals and British boxing than I do to watch garbage like James DeGale versus Andre Dirrell, regardless of whichever network televised it Saturday. Dirrell, whom writer Steve Kim nicknamed “Dirreadful” back when boxing was fun to cover, has been unwatchable for years, and Saturday was by no means his opus – he did get floored a couple times, after all. No, Dirrell’s opus was the opening act of his agent-provocateur role in Showtime’s “Super Six” tournament way back when. Before he refused to fight Andre Ward because Ward would beat him, before he “Matrix-ed” his way into defenselessness and then unconsciousness with Arthur Abraham, Dirrell set a precedent for insipidness against Carl Froch. It will be a long time before a muscular, 168-pound man shows a greater commitment to conflict avoidance than Dirrell showed against Froch in 2009.

Dirrell was the blueprint for an Al Haymon fighter, even before most knew who Haymon was: Telegenic, athletic, a lion in a mismatch – look at that handspeed! – and a pussycat in a fair fight.

Haymon now uses venture capital to corner boxing on American public airwaves, a strategy that, if successful, will end boxing writing, but his approach has one oft-overlooked flaw: Haymon does not appear to like seeing men fight even a little. Never mind the existential resistance to Haymon’s plot from an outfit like Golden Boy Promotions (and never ever mind the token rebuttals from Haymon’s puppet promoters), the meaningful resistance to Haymon’s plot is right here: People who like to watch boxing don’t enjoy the fights Haymon makes.

Aficionados, a romantic and tragically flawed bunch, play an imaginative game with ourselves, perhaps the best escape: We dismiss the most obvious explanation for each happening in our sport and replace it with ideas that are daft. We dismiss what is obvious – Haymon hoodwinked a number of cable guys then moved on to hedgefund managers, without attracting one new fan to boxing – and replace it with a savvy plot to attract with bad fighting Americans who don’t even like good fighting. “Better than feared” is not a growth strategy in a market so tiny that fewer than one-percent of American households even know to have fear.

There is no faking inspiration, regardless of special effects and dramatic lighting, and there is nothing inspiring about Haymon’s stable of fighters feinting at one another, especially if matches continue to happen at an hour not even boxing fans are yet drunk. Haymon’s personal finances will do fine – he’s now the patron saint of every entrepreneur who salivated simultaneously at combat sports and Wall Street but couldn’t think how to marry them – but his brand is no more likely to endure than writers’ collective interest in boxing . . .

*

Editor’s note: For part nine, please click here.

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Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
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By Bart Barry-

SAN ANTONIO – While hiking Saturday morning I came across my first in-action dung beetle, a needly faced creature pushing a smooth cylinder of cow excrement along a path beside the Medina River. If you do not think a dung beetle is among nature’s most extraordinary creatures, keep reading. Saturday evening, a nearly as remarkable Nicaraguan flyweight named Roman “Chocolatito” Gonzalez made his debut on American premium cable. These occurrences are only connected by coincidence, and diminutive stature, perhaps loosely, but as both are interesting in their way, please be indulgent.

The male dung beetle pushes his ball, one that can weigh 250 times what he does, backwards, with his hind legs, while walking on his front legs. He pushes extraordinary distances in search of both a mate and a final resting place. Perspective: To match the physicality of the dung beetle’s feat, a man would have to push an M31 tank with his feet while walking on his hands from here to El Paso, only to have every female he encounters ignore him entirely to inspect his tank and calculate the likelihood her offspring could survive in it. There’s good reason ancient peoples deified the dung beetle.

Roman Gonzalez (43-0, 37 KOs), meanwhile, is the real thing, and it is good to see him embraced by HBO – a network with nothing to gain, really, by exposing its subscribers to a man with championships at minimumweight, light flyweight and flyweight, a man who is yet to fight within 40 pounds of what the average American woman weighed in 2014. At 5-foot-3, Gonzalez won his first world title weighing 104 1/2 pounds; he is tiny. Too, he is perfect in form as anyone currently plying the craft of prizefighting.

He’ll never capture America’s imagination the way Floyd Mayweather has, in part because Gonzalez is nearly impossible to dislike. Watch his opponents’ treatment of him after each knockout: They feel sincere affection for him, and he feels sincere affection for them, hugging and bowing and smiling graciously in a way heavyweights never do. Part of that, also coincidentally, returns to a counterintuitive boxing ratio in which the possible consequences of a fight are inversely proportionate to the possible consequences of each punch.

Gonzalez strikes with disproportionate force for a man who weighs 111 pounds, yes, but Wladimir Klitschko strikes with disproportionately more consequence even than his disparity in size with Gonzalez anticipates: A punch from Klitschko is much more than three times as likely to render you unconscious. Which, ironically, makes a fight with Klitschko much safer, in a survivability sense, than a fight with Gonzalez. A single blow whose concussion renders you instantly unconscious is not healthy, of course, but you’d rather that than 150 punches from Gonzalez.

There’s one other incredible advantage the heavyweight champion of the world has over any minimumweight champion: His punches travel distances enough that any member of the laity can observe them at full-speed. Not so with a Gonzalez fight. Gonzalez and Edgar Sosa, Saturday night, were so very much closer, and their motions so very much quicker, in part for traveling shorter distances, in part for having to propel so much less mass at one another, that even a knowledgeable observer could hardly hope not to lose something with peripheral vision.

One needs the fovea to watch Gonzalez, and as the fovea’s scope is notoriously small, one must choose, when television does not choose for him, whether to observe the feet or the hands. The hands are where the consequences are, and Gonzalez pronates masterfully at the ends of his punches, but if you’ve never watched Gonzalez’s footwork, or had the privilege of watching Lee Wylie’s explanation of it, treat yourself to a replay of Saturday with your eyes set on the canvas.

Gonzalez has now replaced Mexican Juan Manuel Marquez as the fighter whose style every trainer in the world should instill in every child he teaches to box. Gonzalez is offensively minded, technically precise, and defensively responsible. Of the three best fighters in the world today – Floyd Mayweather, Gonzalez and Guillermo Rigondeaux – Gonzalez is the one who looks for the knockout every time every bell rings. His attacks are fundamentally correct to a point of being nearly impersonal; where Mayweather seeks to solve an opponent and Rigondeaux gets bored enough to rehearse combinations flagrantly before throwing them, Gonzalez applies a template. Mayweather and Rigondeaux query their massive databases for opponent patterns, finding matches for neutralization, first, before applying offensive templates. Gonzalez, conversely, applies his offensive template in the faith it instantly will make every opponent almost the same.

One other enormous aesthetic difference between Gonzalez and Mayweather: The referee rarely enters the broadcaster’s frame during a Gonzalez fight, while he is ubiquitous whenever Money is in the ring. Half of Gonzalez’s rare clinches do not even require the referee to break them: “We came too close together just now, brother, but no worries, let’s take a step back and resume the milling.”

There was harmony in Saturday’s HBO broadcast, pairing Gonzalez and Kazakh middleweight titlist Gennady Golovkin, even if the order was backwards. Boxing is never a meritocracy till a bell rings, and one hopes Golovkin was impressed enough by Saturday’s opening act to glance through Gonzalez’s record: world championships in three different weight classes, a man fighting larger men rather than calling for littler ones, a prizefighter seeking new challenges in a quest to improve. Gonzalez is six years younger than Golovkin and has seven more knockouts, and somehow, no one is ever “afraid” to fight Gonzalez.

When Willie Monroe Jr. becomes your last fearless man, it’s time to fashion a new marketing slogan.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry

HOUSTON – Minute Maid Park, home of the Astros, made a fine fight venue, even, or perhaps especially, when its retractable roof winked at its anxious media section, water dropping from the sky, papers rising from the table, before shutting once more just before the main event. Mexican Saul “Canelo” Alvarez then knocked Texan James Kirkland stiff in the last minute of round 3. And fans who’d been fed, by that late hour, 10 hours of inedible slop, left overjoyed by the spectacle because, whatever Floyd and Manny may opine, positively nothing beats a knockout.

The end came in slow motion at ringside, the better for savoring it. Alvarez set his eyes and head exaggeratedly low, fixing them on Kirkland’s chest – because, as the old timers know, it’s one head’s length from the breastbone to the chin – and then he took his time cocking the righthand. Kirkland, reflexes impaired, already nigh drunk from blows to his skull, picked-up the punch an instant late, exactly as Alvarez intended. Kirkland dropped his hands to the very spot Alvarez’s eyes set. Then Kirkland realized he’d fallen for a feint and hoped without hope he might chasten Alvarez’s aggression with a lunatic lefthook counter. But Kirkland had time only to get the punch started and complement the aesthetics of Alvarez’s perfectly structured right by flailspinning over Alvarez’s properly lowered head, winning for Alvarez Knockout of the Year even if we’re not yet to the ides of May.

It was a right remedy for the disaster of May 2, and it was right th’t a Mexican brought it to us. It was a right remedy, too, for Alvarez’s own terrible showing against Mayweather some time ago.

It brightens the spirit to think Mexicans might have a genuine article, finally, in Alvarez, a man who, if he’s never quite the world’s best prizefighter, is now Mexico’s best prizefighter, not merely its most popular. Popularity, as Edward Norton’s accomplished character in “Birdman” so aptly puts it, is the slutty little cousin of prestige, and while Alvarez has never wanted for popularity, a debt owed more to Mexican daytime television and haircolor than fistic accomplishments, he now has prestige, an order of merit greater because it’s how the meritocracy of boxing would order it.

Alvarez may not yet deserve 30,000 fans in Houston or 40,000 in San Antonio, not when Mayweather and Pacquiao gather half that many at MGM Grand, but the Mexicans gathered in Houston on Saturday absolutely deserved the fight, and ending, Alvarez gave them. Beleaguered as they have been with Son of the Legend, the Legend’s disaster of a son – and the Legend, self-oblivious a sporting legend as you’ll find, was in lock-Tio-Julio-in-the-basement broadcaster mode from ringside Saturday – the Mexicans, boxing’s one reliable demographic in sickness and in health, finally can embrace Alvarez with a clean collective conscience, setting aside Juan Manuel Marquez’s enduring and caustic criticism of Alvarez: one more resentful riff from Mexico’s best prizefighter of the last generation, and best resenter too.

Alvarez does not yet show a spot of resentment, nor should he, and that is a fine thing. Son of the Legend, setter of an entitlement-to-accomplishment ratio that may never be surpassed, came into the sport already resenting every interview his duties caused him to suffer ungladly. In this respect, Alvarez, when compared to Son of the Legend, is a consummate professional. But again, that phrase, “when compared to Son of the Legend, is a consummate professional”, is now elastic enough to accommodate everything from the housekeeping staff at Sheraton Four Points to the waistband of Junior’s next pair of raspberry-pink cotton briefs.

I have interviewed Canelo on the phone twice, and both times were marked by their courtesy and professionalism. Of a culture that values time differently than ours does, Alvarez was the exception to Mexican prizefighters: He called at the appointed time, to the minute, and was entirely cheerful and unassuming. His answers were unremarkable, since child stars in any culture come deprived of what challenging experiences make many adults at least initially captivating, but as that is a thing he cannot control, and as it is ungracious, after all, to blame dullards for their condition, I recall him fondly for his punctuality. And for one other reason: Asked in Spanish if he sees nostalgia, a cognate that works equally well in both languages, in the eyes of his expatriated countrymen when he attends publicity events in, say, Texas, Canelo’s voice rose, and his sincerity gleamed off the edges of a rare, unrehearsed answer:

“Those men, to see them after they work, those men, those . . . If solely you knew how hard they work. Those men are heroic to me.”

Dullard or otherwise, Alvarez has character, and he fights with character. Every other Money Team retread misuses the word “fearless” – attrition hunters who gambol away from opponents till they’ve reduced them, via boredom or exhaustion, to targets, and then roar their imitation of bravery – but Canelo’s selection of opponents has shown no fear whatever. Glance through the rankings of his division and find someone you think could beat him whom he’s avoided.

Austin’s James Kirkland may not have been in top condition, and may not have sold a fraction the tickets in Houston he’d have sold in San Antonio, either, but he brought real violence from a real junior middleweight, Saturday, and Alvarez did not wilt even slightly. Alvarez treated Kirkland like a heavybag for practicing creative combinations on, even while Kirkland bulled and leaned and whacked, in rounds 1 and 2, and Alvarez had the balls to throw a dozen right-uppercut counters, too, exposing his head fully to Kirkland’s left hand.

Alvarez gave a fitting performance to our sport’s fittest fans.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry