By Bart Barry–

Saturday at MGM Grand Garden Arena, in the best fight of May 2015, so far, American Floyd “Money” Mayweather easily decisioned Filipino Manny “Pacman” Pacquiao, and more importantly, he made $100 million. Official scores went: 116-112, 116-112 and 118-110. Only one judge got right a match in which Pacquiao won two rounds, Mayweather possibly lost two rounds, and the rest were not close.

If there is a happy take-away from Saturday for our beloved sport, it is no better than this: Realizing, for once, the average pay-per-viewer drunkenly echolocates boxing telecasts like a bat – forming a picture in his mind as much from what he hears as what fills his eyes – the cocommentating crew from cable networks HBO and Showtime checked-and-balanced itself to an objective broadcast that presented the fight in its lopsided lack of glory, engendering no claims of scandal.

If historians return to Mayweather-Pacquiao someday, though its ultimate irrelevance is probable, it will be to mark a very talented athlete’s final vengeance on a sport he’d grown to hate deeply. There will be a montage of essential moments in this marking: Mayweather gloomily glancing down on Pacquiao’s forehead at the Friday weighin, Mayweather standing directly in front of Pacquiao with his gloves at his waist, Mayweather skipping frantically away in round 12, and Mayweather standing on a ringpost to yell at a large assemblage of people who realized they’d been had again – and this time, worst of all, by five years of their own imaginings.

Manny Pacquiao deserves no praise for his Saturday effort. He made no adjustments. He took entire rounds off. And he gracelessly claimed he won the fight afterwards and further subverted what esteem aficionados held for him, hours later, by attributing his listlessness to a shoulder injury – as if he’d not used that same shoulder to raise his arms jubilantly overhead at the Friday weighin. Coach Freddie, whose termination is likely in promoter Top Rank’s third Manny remake (since already it’s apparent the injured-shoulder gambit smells too desperate), deserves even less praise than Pacquiao does; he trained his charge for a fighter with no more dimensions than Antonio Margarito showed. Sure, Mayweather was much faster at evading counters than Roach was on the handpads, and for an injured fighter Pacquiao certainly hurled that counter right hook, didn’t he, but ultimately Mayweather used the playbook Juan Manuel Marquez wrote in 42 rounds against Pacquiao to expose exactly how little Roach actually taught Pacquiao in their vaunted educational sessions together.

Commentator Jim Lampley was right in his midfight allusion to Marquez-Pacquiao 3, the match whose second half saw Pacquiao hopelessly swim at Marquez, taking five steps where Marquez needed two, and thoughts of Marquez returned, too, in round 9 when Mayweather caught Pacquiao pure with a right cross the much larger man did not plant on, and it was a reminder why, whoever will be recalled as the greater fighter, Marquez will remain the more beloved one for showing a form of courage with which Mayweather is yet to familiarize himself.

How enormous must Mayweather have looked to Pacquiao in that opening round? Seven-feet and about 250 pounds, probably, as Mayweather’s chin was farther from Pacquiao’s anxious fists as any chin ever has been. Unsurprisingly, Paulie Malignaggi, already our generation’s best commentator, seated beside Lennox Lewis, easily its worst, was the one to distill the fight to its quintessence: Mayweather fought at his desired time and distance, and Pacquiao did not.

In round 4 Pacquiao finally caught Mayweather with a punch, countering him with a left cross the same way Marcos Maidana countered him with a right hand in September, and Mayweather put his hands up, retreated and felt what Manny had for him. Which was not much. Pacquiao fought “intelligently” and retreated himself, back to the middle of the ring, so as not to expend energy carelessly. Imagine that: Pacquiao calculated he had a better chance of outsmarting Mayweather than outworking him. It was a reminder, along with Mayweather’s considerable size advantage, of the second part that made this fight a mismatch the day it was signed: Pacquiao, since his 2010 fight with Margarito, is fractionally active as laymen think he is. Pacquiao lost a 2012 decision to Timothy Bradley because he was inactive and inaccurate. He opted for frantic activity in his fourth match with Marquez and got iced. Mismatches with punching bags got split by a rematch with Bradley in which Pacquiao, promised the benefit of every scoring doubt, fought no more than 90 seconds of each round. A kinder and wiser Pacquiao is what aficionados have been served for 4 1/2 years now.

The only chance Pacquiao had or would ever have against Mayweather is if science somehow took the wildcat demon who shredded Erik Morales nine years ago and added 20 pounds of muscle to his frame without slowing him a wink. An impossible thing, in other words, Pacquiao ever had a chance against Mayweather, and every single reader of this column knew it the night Marquez left Pacquiao in a heap, and then we chose to suspend our disbelief because a boxing promoter is good at nothing so much as legerdemain, waving crazily a Chris Algieri doll in his right hand while palming the two-headed Marquez coin in his left.

Those who surround Floyd Mayweather know he cannot imagine boxing in his absence; for Mayweather, the sport of boxing ends the day he retires. Because of Mayweather, few of us will have the presence or means to argue with him when that day comes. Against the future of boxing, then, I’ll take Mayweather: UD-49.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry–

Saturday at MGM Grand Garden Arena, before a crowd likely to comprise not one person reading this column, American Floyd Mayweather finally will fight Filipino Manny Pacquiao. The time for manufactured enthusiasm is upon us, for tossing oneself wholly into the futility of shouting in print towards a volume to rival the industrial din of Time Warner and CBS and Walt Disney Company. To wit:

MAYWEATHER WILL WIN THIS FIGHT!!!

At long last, the event anticipated to break revenue records we’re told we care so deeply about arrives on our video-display devices – so order live today! Boxing promoters or managers or advisors, or whichever new euphemism they next hide beneath, are the direct descendants of yestercentury’s circus barker; they believe in an inexhaustible supply of nitwits to whom they can provide the tricky service of relieving one of his wallet, and they fail disproportionately more often than they succeed. But they will not fail Saturday, provided Saturday’s one-off cashgrab is the end of their tabulations.

There’s no way to calculate, immediately, the sum of resentment to be felt among boxing’s comparatively tiny band of loyal supporters – the ones who wasted money on Mayweather-Baldomir, or paid to be in Cowboys Stadium for Pacquiao-Clottey and its egregiously priced parking – but it will be an increasingly easy number to derive in the next five years, as local gyms continue to shutter and ticketsales at local shows continue to follow. Attendance for Saturday represents a proper perspective from which to consider the coming resentment; priced to ensure no rightminded aficionado attends, tickets that, bizarrely even for boxing, were not available till a few days ago betray the organizers’ organizing vision: the biggest boxing matches, made-by-television spectacles, someday soon will happen in broadcasters’ very studios.

Logistics are the reason the largest American boxing outlets cite when asked why they couldn’t broadcast live from, say, Wembley Stadium, where 80,000 Brits gathered to watch Carl Froch in 2014. Putting fights directly in studios should solve that problem. Promoters do not promote any longer in any event; they organize and book and contract vendors of every kind to do all the jobs promoters once did, though boxing was admittedly a touch late to the outsourcing trend, and the inaccessibility of Pacquiao-Mayweather would be collectively maddening if boxing fans did not, as one clever wag on Twitter put it, have Stockholm Syndrome.

That does little, however, to explain MGM Grand’s tolerance for the consequences of a rivalry between promoter Bob Arum and adviser Al Haymon in something so great and complicated as the historic gouging of sportsfans; why the hell is MGM Grand overpaying for this spectacle if not to bring folks to its slot machines? And because of the boxoffice delay, rest assured there will be fewer handles pulled along the Strip this week. Whatever inflated earnings reports crash down on aficionados’ bowed heads in the next month – the pay-per-view number has already been set over 3 million, and anyone who’s been interested in boxing for more than the last month, no more than 500,000 Americans in a nation of 300 million, knows no match has ever officially missed its predicted number; missed numbers do not get announced – rest assured total revenue should have been more.

A week after Pacquiao-Mayweather, Mexican Saul “Canelo” Alvarez will fight Texan James Kirkland at Minute Maid Park in Houston, and will do so before a crowd that should be about three times MGM Grand’s crowd.

“But oh,” cries a passel of aspiring businessmen from their parents’ couches, “they won’t make as much money!”

First of all, why the hell are you so excited about strangers making money?

Second of all, three times as many aficionados and potential aficionados will have a chance to see a major event in a sport you care about, which is better for your sport in every single way.

Third of all, when you cheer against your own self-interests, you don’t look wise or even pragmatic – no matter how expertly you cock the brim of your TMT hat – you look like a damn sucker.

Writing of which, there is a good chance Floyd Mayweather will win 10 or 11 rounds Saturday night. He is much larger than Manny Pacquiao, he has the back of a middleweight, however noble his perfectly ineffective 2010 crusade against PEDs proved, and Pacquiao has not been anywhere near the storm at 147 pounds he was at 130. Pacquiao is better than every opponent Mayweather has dared to fight, yes, and Pacquiao will hit Mayweather with more left hands than the sum of Mayweather opponents since Oscar De La Hoya, but there is a very good chance they will not affect Mayweather very much at all. The recent appointment of Kenny Bayless as Saturday’s referee, too, ensures Mayweather will be allowed to hold to a point of tackling Pacquiao if he’s so compelled, and Pacquiao has never been mistaken for Roberto Duran on the inside, anyway.

Is there a chance Pacquiao’s extraordinary conditioning and unique punching angles will cause fatigue enough to bring the bitch out of Mayweather? Actually, no, not really; whatever Mayweather supporters and everyone else may think, Floyd Mayweather is all fighter when he has to be. Much like Pacquiao’s match with De La Hoya 6 1/2 years ago, this fight will be incredibly intriguing for a round or two – though not $100 worth of intriguing. Much unlike Pacquiao’s 2008 match with De La Hoya, the things Pacquiao will need to do to cause an opponent’s slumpshouldered retreat to his own corner will not be things Pacquiao can do.

I’ll take Mayweather, UD-12.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

FORT WORTH, Texas – This is not the city where Terence Crawford fought Saturday. But it is part of an enormous thing called Metroplex, a collection of cities that comprises Dallas and Arlington, where Crawford did fight, a 50-mile expanse whose population, if counted as one, would tally 6.5 million souls, sitting just behind New York City and well ahead of Los Angeles among the nation’s largest. I stay at the western end whenever I visit Metroplex because it affords more culture-per-square foot than anywhere I’ve found.

There is a symbiotic relationship shared by truth and beauty; beautiful lies are gaudy by comparison, and an ugly truth is at best tolerated, not celebrated, by a person of any aesthetic taste. Terence Crawford has a beautiful way for being truthful, and Lucas Matthysse and Ruslan Provodnikov have truthful ways for being beautiful, and The Kimbell Art Museum, located 17 miles west of Arlington, the city on whose University of Texas campus Crawford untied Puerto Rican Thomas Dulorme on Saturday before Matthysse decisioned Provodnikov on HBO, has such truth and beauty in its architecture and collection one quickly forgives himself for stretching a metaphor that mayn’t even exist.

For years the front of architect Louis I. Kahn’s masterwork went unseen, as construction equipment obscured everything in pursuit of contemporary Italian master Renzo Piano’s pursuit of a Kahn tribute – the second time Piano has made such a thing, and as the first time, Houston’s Menil Collection, succeeded so completely it established Piano as a modern master, the Italian did it again – but with last year’s opening of the Piano Pavilion, across a plaza from The Kimbell, the lovely waterfalls and marble-lined treeways of Kahn’s entrance are available now to the public at every moment of every day, and the nearly priceless collection that resides beneath The Kimbell’s signature half-circles, topping concrete tops that treat water as light, spilling it from narrow grooves, are available to the public during business hours without a penny’s charge.

In all the great state of Texas, The Kimbell comes closest to duplicating Europe’s genius for gorgeous public spaces. That word above, priceless, is pricey anymore – overused as it is by salesmen on every used-up lot. But it is nearer to fitting than cliche when it modifies what The Kimbell comprises; works by Leonardo and Michelangelo and Caravaggio and most every Renaissance master whose name you begrudgingly memorized for that enormous art-history class in the assembly hall where the dullard professor dimmed the lights for her terrible cave-paintings slideshow that dimmed your lights instants later.

Cut the lights, indeed, Terence.

The only word that bubbles to the top for a careful observer of Crawford is composure. Crawford gives entire rounds to his studious ideal. He sees no occasion for studying tape of his opponents, one assumes, because he reads them and calibrates so well in the moment. Crawford has now fought top professionals and found no scenario among them for which he cannot improvise. He is much more like a prime Andre Ward, lately, than Andre Ward is.

Crawford does everything well, and he does everything well in an assured way any opponent must find sapping if not spiritually crippling. Crawford missed Dulorme wide in the opening rounds with his hard punches and found him only with touches, even when spanking the impetuous Puerto Rican with a righthand lead. A left hook to Dulorme’s body towards the end of round 3 changed the match, and Crawford and Dulorme each sensed it, and especially Crawford did.

Crawford, like Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao before him, is a natural jewel excavated and polished by promoter Top Rank and its singular capacity for cultivating prizefighters as attractions and achievers. (If you doubt that, ask the lads at Premier Boxing Champions how their Son of the Legend investment looks right now.)

Crawford waited till Dulorme, whose chin is much more reliable when wagging than absorbing – “Sugar Chin” as Crawford’s most colorful trainer, Brian McIntyre, called the Puerto Rican – got too close or too confident or simply forgetful, and Crawford jab-feinted Dulorme’s guard out of position then snapped his head leftwards with a hook and rightwards with a cross, the same elegant 3-2 combo with which Carl Froch cut the lights at Wembley last year, and everything after that was but a chance to inspect Crawford’s poise like he inspected Dulorme’s vulnerabilities, until KO-6.

Nobody who was ringside in this city got to watch what followed in New York on the HBO broadcast, though trust every one of us found the replay on our hotels’ dials Sunday morning. Such sanity in the violence Matthysse and Provodnikov subjected one another to; despite the real damage they did to one another’s bodies and brains in 36 minutes of combat, they embraced like once-separated brothers before the 12th round, and if it were a 15-round fight, there’s plenty of chance the victor would have been the Russian rather than the Argentine. But Matthysse has more class than Provodnikov, if just a wee bit less relentlessness, and Matthysse won Saturday’s tilt the way a prizefighter, a professional combatant, should do it.

If Crawford and Matthysse should fight next, and of course they should, HBO’s junior welterweight champion will be a much better one than PBC’s.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

ARLINGTON, Texas – It is said a fighter becomes 20-percent better upon winning a world title. Undefeated junior welterweight champion Terence “Bud” Crawford appears to have gained an additional 20-percent by winning 2014 fighter of the year.

Saturday at College Park Center, before a crowd that compensated with passion for what it lacked in density, Crawford (26-0, 18 KOs) showed his trademark composure while waiting for Puerto Rican challenger Thomas Dulorme (22-2, 14 KOs) to overestimate his own talent, conditioning or chin. At nearly the midway moment of the 12-round match, Dulorme did just that, Crawford caught him with a signature combination, and at 1:51 of round 6, the match was over.

“That’s why he’s fighter of the year!” cheered promoter Bob Arum.

“I had a great training camp,” Crawford said afterward. “I was ready for anything he gave me tonight. It was just a matter of time. I feel very strong in this weight division.”

The match began tentatively. Neither man landed many meaningful punches in the first two rounds, and if there were a surprise it was how widely Crawford’s misses went – how easily Dulorme timed him and pulled back from peril – and how otherwise inactive the Nebraskan appeared, contenting himself with waiting for Dulorme to make errors that did not come initially.

A Crawford left hook to the body in round 3, though, began a transformation of the fight’s complexion.

Showmanship and closing rounds effectively gave Crawford whatever scoring advantage he enjoyed after four – as Dulorme got increasingly hesitant the more demonstratively confident Crawford acted.

“He did exactly what we wanted him to do,” said Crawford’s trainer, Brian McIntyre. “We knew (Dulorme) was going to gas out. He’s too tight, he gasses out.

“We call him ‘Sugar Chin’.”

At the beginning of round 6, Crawford landed a left hook, right cross combination, 3-2, that ruined Dulorme. Three knockdowns followed, as Crawford calmly laid waste to the man in front of him.

There may be more popular fighters in the world right now, but it is doubtful there are better or more complete ones.

ISMAIL MUWENDO VS. ROLANDO CHINEA
When two undefeated prospects face-off, brutal affairs often result. That was the case in Saturday’s co-main event, when Uganda’s Ismail Muwendo (17-0, 12 KOs) and Pennsylvania’s Rolando Chinea (10-1-1, 6 KOs) traded fists for eight rounds that were not even as their majority decision for Muwendo indicated: 76-76, 78-74, 79-73.

In the opening rounds, the Ugandan’s speed and reflexes appeared to overwhelm the Pennsylvanian; but for some quick body work in round 2, Chinea looked like a young man tapping away at a grown man. As the fight progressed, Muwendo began to raze him, opening a cut over Chinea’s left eye in round 4, one that garnered a ringside physician’s appraisal before round 5 began.

Chinea’s subsequent idea was a good one – smother the Ugandan and keep him from building forward momentum – but ultimately Chinea did not have the power or accuracy to dissuade Muwendo’s onslaught.

After taking a beating in round 5 that made his corner tell him to win big in the next, with the implication they’d not allow another round if he didn’t, Chinea went out and absorbed blows enough to tire Muwendo a bit in round 6.

Ultimately, Chinea surprised most in attendance by not just making it to the final bell but winning the eighth round on any honest scorecard.

UNDERCARD
The evening’s final undercard bout saw San Antonio welterweight Benjamin “Da Blaxican” Whitaker (9-1, 2 KOs) provide a stiffer-than-expected test for undefeated Kosovar Skender Halili (8-1, 8 KOs), blemishing Halili’s record with a unanimous decision judges scored 80-72, 78-74, 79-73 for the San Antonian. Whitaker’s speed gave Halili trouble from the opening bell, and Whitaker’s clever combinations and willingness to trade on even terms at unexpected moments, too, troubled the undefeated Kosovar. Halili showed a lack of power that belied his sparkly record, failing to dent Whitaker the times he did connect with his chin.

Saturday’s third match, a tilt between undefeated Russian cruiserweight Medzhid Bektemirov (16-0, 13 KOs) – a physically strong man’s whose total lack of urgency is offset by broadcaster HBO’s recent fascination with all things former-Soviet Bloc – and Ghanaian Michael Gbenga (16-19, 16 KOs), ended in a wide unanimous decision for the Russian by official scores of 80-72, 80-72 and 79-73. Menacing as Bektemirov may look, he failed to imperil Gbenga even once, in 24 minutes of stalking, scowling and launching long, slow left-hook leads.

Before that, Michigan super middleweight Anthony Barnes (8-0, 6 KOs), a man who wears Kronk on his trunks but fancies himself a small and slow Muhammad Ali, easily decisioned Arlington’s own Martinez Porter (3-4-4, 1 KO) by unanimous scores of 59-55, 59-55 and 58-56. Wheeling to his left and throwing few meaningful punches, Barnes benefited from an opponent with poor offense and porous defense. A good closing round, in which Barnes landed a smattering of right crosses, improved their otherwise lackluster affair.

Saturday’s first bout, a middleweight scrap betwixt Texans, Dallas’ Mike Tufariello (4-2-2, 4 KOs) and Schertz’s Eddie Tigs (1-5-3), was the sort of honest effort one expects from otherwise hopeless local fighters on an undercard. Though neither man has much of a future in the sport, it was heartwarming to see two men epitomizing the verb “to fight” – an increasingly rare occurrence. The match ended in a questionable draw, with all three judges scoring 38-38, and Tigs having dropped Tufariello in round 1 – a knockdown omitted from all three judges’ tallies, somehow – and then having dropped the two middle rounds on official cards.

Opening bell rang on a cavernous College Park Center at 5:45 local time.

By Bart Barry–

Saturday brings a cleansing of the palate, doesn’t it, a reminder of a painfully missed time when you watched boxing because you couldn’t imagine a better use of your energy – not because you felt obligated, as a longtime fan, to support your sport’s return to public airwaves because, apparently, leaving public airwaves was what doomed our sport, even while its return to public airwaves appears far more damning now than its absence did even five years ago.

The word is relief. That is what this weekend brings, a chance to return to the dated ideal of a promoter making real fights because he is accountable to scribe critics. There’s redundancy there, yes, redundancy worth visiting for a spell. Criticism does not exist on television, only in print. The ephemeral, emotional, silly nature of television lends itself directly to promotion, to publicity, to fads, to effects that draw the eye, distract the eye, capitalize on the plague of man’s anxiety: television’s energy, like a teenage girl’s, derives its potency from a fear something better is happening in her absence. Television attracts its audience with a promise that its absence assures regret, and then, its audience drawn, television busies itself with imparting the essential nature of the spectacle, this very moment, the most or greatest of its kind, however absurd the statistics it needs cite, until the apogee of its program’s arc passes, and then it returns to promising the next spectacle cannot stand to be missed by anyone who does not want the crunching anxiety of its absence, and so on.

Elders called it the “boob tube” and did not miss. What now happens to our sport on network television is both potent and inevitable, and every print journalist that covers it cannibalizes what remains of our craft – in a bent more concessionary than saboteur.

Saturday, blessedly, brings no more slickly produced mediocrity from the imagination of an otherworldly figure, a manager advisor who, it may well turn out, hates the sport of boxing to his very marrow, like we’ve grown accustomed to treating in what serious tones we once reserved for actual championship contests conducted by actual champions, and that is not a criticism of Danny Garcia who, for all the middlingness that has attended his last 13 months in the game, a series of spectacles gaudy as his trunks, did things the right, hard way, way back when his promoter wanted him to lose every time he laced up gloves to stretch a fat old legend and a virginal amateur prodigy representing some coveted demographic or other.

Saturday’s co-main event from Arlington, Texas, may not be much of a fight, ultimately, but it will feature 2014’s best fighter plying his wares away from his beloved Nebraska. It is a return of sorts for Terence Crawford to the place he first asserted himself on the undercard of an ill-conceived crowning ceremony for Mikey Garcia, if you remember him, a 2013 Dallas spectacle for which Garcia did not bother acknowledging the weight limit, iced Juan Manuel Lopez, and looked decidedly second-rate when set against the warmup act: Crawford doing everything right. Saturday’s telecast will follow Crawford, the world’s best lightweight, with the world’s most entertaining junior welterweights, Argentine Lucas Matthysse and Russian Ruslan Provodnikov, in the sort of fight that will meet even exalted expectations for violence while being shorter than anticipated, very much the way Brandon Rios’ first tilt with Mike Alvarado did.

Good as Matthysse is, there is a real likelihood he’s not sturdy as Provodnikov; Matthysse has shown greater fragility in his best fights than Provodnikov has. The Russian will go directly at Matthysse, who will return fists with what rage and resentment he can still muster, and each man will endeavor to break his opponent’s spirit without a consideration for his own well-being, exactly the sort of contest the word “fight” still connotes to anyone not associated with the business of shiny-packaged prizefighting, nothing sanitized or Premier about it, serving the primal purpose boxing fulfills if it is worth considering, and no, generally it is not worth considering anymore, not with fractionally the frequency its consideration merited even a few years back, whatever television tells you.

The contemporary sportsfan, hoodwinked by men with MBAs and laptops, believes he should play manager, himself, to express best his affection for what athletes please him best: It’s OK my favorite athlete is not very good at his chosen profession, see, because he’s the best today, and television tells me the best today is the best of all time, and never mind that, cretin, because my athlete is much richer than yesterday’s best athlete who, regardless of what readily available video may suggest, could never beat my favorite athlete because he didn’t have swagger. This is a welcomed infantilization of American sportsfans, or perhaps it’s an international trend – heaven knows soccer fans are no beacons of adulthood – to distract potential customers with what’s sparkly, and it’s enjoying an excellent run.

Terence Crawford should be watched and enjoyed Saturday because he is legitimate talent properly cultivated by promoter Top Rank who builds fighters very much better than anyone else, and Provodnikov and Matthysse should be watched because of the honesty they represent and the perspective such honesty lends the poverty of its peers’ performances. From Siberia and Patagonia, respectively, Provodnikov and Matthysse exhibit a sort of strength that must be bred in men over millennia of sober struggle against a vicious and arbitrary world that endeavors at every turn to eliminate them. Neither man expects another man can hurt him – not uncommon among males in their physical primes. That neither Provodnikov nor Matthysse cares for the probability another man can hurt him, though, that neither man – even unto unconsciousness – has an algorithm for processing instant evidence to the contrary, that, is what makes them special.

Their match, too, will be special. I’ll take Provodnikov, KO-9.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry–

“If you’re gonna write about boxing, you need facts and grittiness and maybe even some awkward bad writing. It can’t be perfect. It can’t be ethereal. It can’t be self-contained. It can’t be its own art. It has to be bled into by the fighting itself.

“But only the defeat is permanent in boxing. And I guess the point of the book is to ask, could it really ever be any other way?

“Again and again and again and again and again and again and again.

“Until you can’t ask it anymore because you’re fucking tired of it.”

So states Gabe Oppenheim in the introduction of his book “Boxing in Philadelphia” (Rowman & Littlefield; $45.00), and if he fails to meet that standard it is only for a lack of awkwardness in his “bad writing” – an element his book noticeably lacks. Oppenheim treats boxing often as a metaphor, as writers often do with boxing, but Oppenheim does it on boxing’s terms, more fairly, more roughly, than most writers who treat boxing – as opposed to boxers who later try their bruised hands with sentences – in an effective way that feels like he wrote the first drafts too smoothly then went back and scuffed them with truth.

Oppenheim alludes to something like this, as well, in his introduction:

“It’s not just that boxers grows suspicious when a clearly out-of-place white college student tries to enter their gym to talk to them; it’s that I, too, grow suspicious of myself, not wanting to take advantage of anyone, to exploit people’s real lives.”

There’s wisdom in that sentence, written well about a form of suspicion that confronts anyone empathetic enough to write well and arrogant enough to choose boxing for a subject. We all go through it initially – in the olden days, many were assigned a boxing beat by an editor at a newspaper that no longer exists (replaced by Associated Press stories, and slideshows), and had that as an exculpating reason for wandering in a gym where they clearly did not belong – because anyone who does not go through it does not write well about our sport, regardless of readership size or class.

My pathway through suspicion was headgear and gloves, being just athletic and large enough to prevent permanent damage, and a shortcut like this: Once a man has put his knuckles on you, he trusts you because he knows you’re available for him to do it again if need be, and he knows he didn’t give you more than 2/3 of his power, whatever your closed eye and bleeding mouth say of it.

Oppenheim’s pathway through suspicion was an aged former trainer, Mr. Pat, and many, many hours. After the quality of the prose and the depth of admiration the author feels for his subjects, commitment is what resonates most about this book. To write a book like this about lesser-known figures in a lesser city requires much, much more than would a book about Joe Frazier and Bernard Hopkins’ favorite Philly cheesesteak spot or Oscar De La Hoya’s escape from East Los Angeles; those men’s stories are well-trod and research material is ample, and researching – now known as googling – is far easier than confronting the rejection of a fighter’s suspicion or a trainer’s unreturned phone calls or a possemember’s idiotic snickering.

Oppenheim faced these discomfiting forms of rejection and wrote about them, most clearly in his treatment of Meldrick Taylor, the Olympic gold medalist who came a fabled two seconds from beating Mexican Julio Cesar Chavez in his prime – something no man officially did (though of course we know how that Pernell Whitaker fight actually went, three years after Chavez broke Taylor). Taylor’s sorry condition is well known today, and both he and those close to him are understandably reticent about it, a matter Oppenheim writes creatively round, drawing instead connective tissue between Taylor and the then-decaying city that raised him.

“‘Awtheysaynottoomanykidouttometheywrotebadthingsaboutme –
‘theamanamesaidIwaswashedup,’ Taylor slurs and mumbles without pause,” writes Oppenheim, in an innovative attempt at drawing a literary map of punch-drunkenness.

Oppenheim also follows closely the careers of two contemporary Philadelphia prospects, Teon Kennedy and Mike Jones, both of whose careers effectively ended on a Manny Pacquiao undercard, June 9, 2012, when Guillermo Rigondeaux dropped Kennedy five times in as many rounds, and Randall Bailey brought 15,000 spectators to a collective start by stretching Jones with a chastening right uppercut.

“It’s an inevitable fact about most jobs that increased success leads to increased stability,” Oppenheim writes about the trajectories Kennedy’s and Jones’ careers followed. “In boxing, on the other hand, success breeds irregularity.”

Oppenheim notes with a touch of irony the fighting city of Philadelphia’s two celebrated prospects, Jones and Kennedy, did not emerge as champions the way Danny Garcia – not exactly Puerto Rican, not quite Philly – somehow managed to do. There’s something touchingly Philadelphian about that development, too; as anyone who’s attended a sporting contest of any kind in Philly can tell you, those folks love to make a lot of noise when they’re completely wrong.

“Boxing in Philadelphia” ends on a slightly false note of optimism about both the city and the fight game. While Philadelphia tries to replicate other cities’ purported urban renaissances – think: hipster lofts in abandoned warehouses – boxing now accelerates towards a day, arriving before 2020, when its sole promoter owns the media that covers his events; if boxing thrives again, it will be as professional wrestling in gloves. And on that day, Oppenheim’s book will be deservedly considered one of the last good books written about our sport.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry–

Saturday, Showtime’s preternaturally gifted Gary Russell Jr., an Al Haymon fighter, knocked-out the hardest puncher in Mexican history, Jhonny Gonzalez, on Showtime, a Haymon-affiliated network, to seize from Gonzalez the Showtime featherweight title Gonzalez took from Showtime’s Abner Mares a few years back. Whatever the depth of boxing’s featherweight division, and whatever Russell’s postfight protestations, Showtime’s featherweight division now finds itself bereft of fitting challengers for Russell’s crown – and Showtime viewers are admonished, therefore, to raise Russell’s fragile left hand against every hypothetical opponent from here to Nicholas Walters.

Unfortunately there is nothing new or more hyperbolic to say of Showtime’s Gary Russell Jr. than was already said by HBO’s crew 4 1/2 years and nine fights ago. Back then Russell’s membership on USA Boxing’s woeful 2008 Olympic team was viewed with greater skepticism than it is today; time and Deontay Wilder’s semisuccess, and the still-worse showing by USA Boxing in 2012, all, made shouting “2008 Olympian” somehow more positive Saturday on Showtime than it did when Russell began underachieving on HBO, who honored what remained, then, of its journalistic integrity by noting Russell did not even compete in the 2008 Olympic Games.

While it would be impossible to mark the day on which HBO completed its transition from broadcaster to promoter, historians might find riches worth mining in a review of a Boxing After Dark telecast on Sept. 3, 2011, one that featured an Andre Berto-rehab assignment in its main event and Gary Russell Jr.’s HBO debut in an eight-rounder on its undercard:

“Gary Russell Jr. is an ex-cep-tional talent!” cheered Max Kellerman before the opening bell even rang. “I think, Roy (Jones), he’s a gold-medal-caliber talent.”

“I hear his hands are almost as fast as mine used to be,” Jones answered, rhetorically, with what autobiographical modesty marked his every broadcast. “He’s got to be a gold-medal talent.”

In round 2 Kellerman strayed dangerously close to insubordination when, in an attempt to define Russell as both a supreme offensive force and a supreme defensive one, he ran afoul of Jones’ definition of a “boxer” – which Jones promptly made indistinguishable from other styles, specifically the difference between a “boxer” and a “boxer!”

“Signs of a great fighter, son,” added Jones in round 4. “Great hand-speed. Great power. Great defense. (Russell) has the total package.”

Comically, Kellerman then explained the hardest challenge to come for Russell’s people would be resisting temptations to move Russell too fast – since he was so outclassing the guys a lesser prospect would face at this point in his career. Caught under the spell of his own salesmanship, then, Kellerman asked Jones if room even remained for Russell to improve.

As the end of the fight neared, and Russell had failed even marginally to imperil someone named Leonilo Miranda, Kellerman looked ahead rosily:

“It’s not so much of a stretch to imagine (Russell) and Nonito Donaire in the winners bracket of a super fight at 130 pounds – two, three years down the line.”

Almost.

Four and a half years down the line, Russell finally won a title from an ancient Jhonny Gonzalez on the same day Donaire steamrolled someone named William Prado, off-television, somewhere in the Philippines.

While Russell seems like a good guy with talent, and certainly his managerial shop has produced lesser items in recent years, the fact remains no one should be excited about Russell, and excepting only those who are paid to act excited about Russell, no one genuinely is. Russell landed one great punch Saturday, a counter whose power derived mostly from Gonzalez’s sloppy aggression in the closing instants of round 3, and the rest of the stoppage came via Russell’s venomous flailing in round 4, Gonzalez’s despondency, and referee Tony Weeks’ mercy.

When Russell lacks power, generally, it is because he is afflicted with something like front-foot-itis, a condition that plagued the 2008 U.S. Olympic Team. Russell often loads weight on his front foot as an anxious habit more than a strategic consideration, in a vestigial tick from his time in USA Boxing, when all the sweet science was reduced to reflexes and conditioning. Trained by men who idolized Roy Jones Jr., in 2008 Team USA believed in leaning forward, triggering an opponent’s jab, and then yanking back on one’s chin and weight while snapping a counter hook at one’s trapped opponent. Of course, when these counter hooks did not land, or got simply blocked, there was nothing for the American Olympian to do but retreat, bounce, and reset his weight over his front foot.

The medal count that year confirmed the approach’s sagacity.

Saturday’s most interesting revelation, though, came in the celebration of Jhonny Gonzalez’s now-extraordinary power, a concussive force he did not have until his first-round elimination of Showtime’s Abner Mares in 2013. Before then, Gonzalez was another sturdy Mexican, whose career and life, likely, were shortened by Israel Vazquez in 2006.

I was ringside for five Gonzalez fights, in Jhonny’s actual prime, and not once do I recall anyone talking about his historic power. He had good technique and made entertaining fights, and had a great nickname, “Jhonny”, but if anyone had said at the time Gonzalez packed more relative power than, say, Rafael Marquez – an assertion Showtime implied by implying trainer Nacho Beristain labeled Gonzalez as Beristain’s hardest-hitting champion ever – he’d have been laughed right off the writers’ table at Desert Diamond Casino.

The game certainly has changed. Back then, a cable network like Showtime would call an advisor like Al Haymon a “power broker.” Today, they call him “Boss.”

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry–

Editor’s note: For part 6, please click here.

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BURNET, Texas – We begin here, again, with a thought experiment of sorts, before hiking to a roadside memorial in the state Terence Crawford will visit next month, honoring Catalan masterpieces the whole way:

A tiger bursts through your door in the next instant. You react, in less than a second, far less than a second, the identical way I react, your father reacts, your worst enemy reacts. Ponder for a moment the miracle of that: Your mind takes whatever binary-like signals your eyes send it, unscrambles them in an image, queries its database – not equal to a purple balloon, not equal to a canister of whipped cream, not equal to a passenger train, not equal to an overfed chipmunk – identifies imminent peril, as opposed to banal inconvenience or pending ecstasy, and sends a non-negotiable signal to your central nervous system. In merely thousandths of a second.

Is it any wonder an entity so preternaturally capable as your mind will find tedious whatever repetitive tasks you feed it for 40 hours this week?

It wasn’t till the last fifth of my Saturday hike I came upon the sign above. What strikes hardest is its longing for connection, for touching a person who no longer exists, for having a tiny but permanent portal into the excruciating immediacy of one’s loss – to oblige one to visit what likely is a death site, beside, as it is, a winding rural highway with both a 55 mph speed limit and orange cautionary signs spaced unevenly, every half mile or so, advising of turns and bends in a plethora of alternately squiggly lines, and counseling motorists to reduce their speed by as much as 25 mph from the limit. Consider that: a roadway with a speed limit of 55 th’t one shouldn’t drive faster than 30.

There was unexpected innovation at the makeshift memorial, too; the plastic-crystal crucifix back-left of the altar had a small solar panel to collect sunrays during daylight and illuminate a cross-shaped skeleton within its structure at night. It speaks to the care that birthed the creation, the surrender its keeper gave to it: “I have lost my son. I shall take as much time as this requires. It may not be perfect, but what remained of me will be emptied in this when it is finished.”

I came upon the memorial in the fourth hour of a seven-mile hike through Inks Lake State Park’s enchanting stretch of pink granite, dark water and gnarly pecan trees, a hike that, as is its purpose, was an exploration of presence, acceleration and something that attempts to approximate the ancient Greek concept of kairos – a time, in the sense of a decisive moment, that brings a sensation of timelessness. The Greeks were no closer to understanding the phenomenon of the human mind than we are today, but they were wise enough to confess, through their juxtaposition of kronos and kairos, measurable time and something effectively infinite, th’t there was something they could paw-at and stumble upon and sense, or imagine, but never master for being unmeasurable and uncontrollable.

There are few serious belief systems that do not include the existence of something the human mind cannot measure consciously – in the sense of being able to report upon – and the factions of this belief, factions that rarely make war on one another (wars happen between people of same factions, ironically), appear to reduce to: Those who believe timelessness resides outside the human mind, in a deified form, and those who believe the mind invents it. Both are forms of faith, if we’re being honest, and the non-believer is often flummoxed by an inventory of all he perceives followed by something like “meaningless and chaotic, really?” as the believer is confounded by an assertion, Bishop Berkeley’s practically, you never awoke last night and everything you are perceiving at this moment, to include a “boxing” column telling you about timelessness and hiking in Texas, written by a person who never existed outside your imagination, is but a dream.

Oh where were we? Terrance “Bud” Crawford, that’s right.

As some of you may already know, and I am happy to confess I did not until Sunday morning, last year’s BWAA Fighter of the Year is coming to Texas in a month’s time, fighting on a University of Texas campus in Arlington on April 18. Crawford is one of the few fighters plying the craft today who merits travel – which distinguishes him completely from the man who will share headlines on the digital continuum that same evening, “Son of the Legend” Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. It is not enough to impart I will drive more than four hours northwards to honor Crawford’s spirit and achievement; I would not watch Chavez’s next fight if it were being push-streamed by 15rounds.com to a phone cradled in the cleavage of my favorite porn actress.

What does any of this have to do with the Catalan master Antoni Gaudi? A pursuit of beauty in the form of spires, columns if you will, leavened by an ecstatic willingness to fail so long as one gets it true – not right, no, not right: True. What art does that makes it functional as meditation or prayer or alpine skiing or fighting or even hiking in Inks Lake State Park is allow its participants a brief interaction with their sense of timelessness, a blessed respite from our learned accountancy of the seconds-hand on Life’s clock . . .

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

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Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry–

SAN ANTONIO – If you’re reading this column, it is highly probable you watched on HBO Russian Sergey “Krusher” Kovalev’s Saturday reduction of Jean Pascal from a ferocious spectacle of athleticism to a man stumbling across the canvas like an enthusiastic toddler determined to crawl no longer. There’s also a fair chance you watched Thursday’s HBO Latino undercard, one that featured Ukrainian Vyacheslav Shabranskyy violently dismantling Fabiano Pena, in this city’s Freeman Coliseum.

The matches had a symmetry that was unmissable: The fighter initially taught by men raised in the Soviet system threw with better precision and more proper conviction every punch in the boxing lexicon than the more-athletic man across from him. Both Pascal and Pena were undone methodically – right cross to the head, left hook to the body, right uppercut to the head, right hook to the body, left hook to the head, left jab to the head, left jab to the body, right cross to the head – with attacks that predicted their targets’ movements in a way the targets could not hope to predict their attackers’, and both Pascal and Pena reacted the same way: launching blind haymakers that did little but intensify the luridity of the beatings they were to receive.

Shabranskyy caused Pena to quit on his stool after five rounds. Kovalev made decent men ask how Pascal was allowed from his stool for the eighth.

There is a stiff-leggedness to the attack of fighters taught by men raised in the Soviet system, and it makes them temporarily vulnerable when attacking more-athletic prizefighters. It is why former-Soviet fighters pulverize opponents, grinding their wills like pepper across the ring’s blue leaf, rather than blitzing them and bringing unconsciousness in a lone punch.

For all the hyperbole that attends Kazakh Gennady Golovkin’s knockout ratio – one part quality of opposition for every two parts quality of punching – Golovkin is nothing like Mike Tyson was. Golovkin’s knockouts are pulverizations, not detonations. Sergey Kovalev’s knockouts come the same way, and if the day ever comes Golovkin confronts an opponent even half as good as a 49-year-old Bernard Hopkins, one like Andre Ward, expect no knockout victories for GGG.

The Soviet system, though created for amateur events, relies on deriving power nearly as much from the motion of another man’s body as the torque from one’s own punches. What is now noted with increased frequency is that Kovalev punches on-time more than hard; he runs you into punches and sets his knuckles on you at the very moment they will devastate most. Almost nothing like this is taught in American boxing.

The American style is one that hopes to reduce an opponent to a heavybag, somehow, on which combinations may be exhibited. It is a style with fewer dimensions than the Soviet system’s, in part because it is a style that relies more heavily on athleticism. What makes Americans like Bernard Hopkins or Floyd Mayweather or Andre Ward great as they are is not their athleticism but a transitional capacity, defense to offense, that is a product of diverting themselves for thousands of hours across from men they were able to solve and create upon, and that they had creative impulses, much more than a product of great teaching (the reason their teachers never manage to build, from scratch, similar successes – at least with nothing like the frequency of, say, Mexican Nacho Beristain).

There is an excellent ESPN documentary, “30 for 30: Of Miracles and Men,” recently released to Netflix and treating the Soviet hockey team that lost to Team USA in 1980, and the extraordinary approach to hockey the Soviets created in an incredibly short time. Just as the Soviet boxing approach relied on an opponent’s improvement of one’s punches, the Soviet hockey system fixated on the activities of the four men who did not have the puck, not the one who did. The Soviets took hockey, most selfless of North American professional sports, and without even knowing quite how North Americans played the game, created a transcendent form of selflessness – with an obvious assist from communism – in which every man on the ice felt as much euphoria at the scoring of a goal as the man from whose stick the puck was shot.

Such a holistic approach is not possible in a contract system that pays every player according to his individual contributions – it’s why your eyes roll when an athlete sets a career mark for points or home runs or touchdowns and then risibly tells the camera getting a win in game 9 of the nearly endless season was more important to him – because, to borrow from Vince Lombardi, if individual achievement isn’t everything in professional sports, why keep stats? With players signed to non-negotiable 25-year contracts in a system that would banish a sports agent to the gulag, the Soviets were able to create a system in which the team organism provided not just sustenance to its components but also identity.

This system, of course, suffocated its participants, too, and appears more romantic to a Western individual today, probably, than any survivor of the Soviet system in Eastern Europe – but it remains nevertheless instructive as an alternate approach to a somewhat calcified system. Certainly the NHL game, once a forum that emphasized the imposition of one’s will, with slapshots and physicality, more than finesse, with crisp passing and offensive intricacy, looks considerably more Soviet in 2015, a quarter-century after the Soviet Union’s collapse, than it did in 1975.

It is worth pondering, then, if the recent success of former-Soviet fighters – and its brazen promotion by HBO – will not help American boxing improve from its current emphasis on conditioning and athleticism to a more-holistic emphasis on melding enough with one’s opponent to make him a co-conspirator in his own demise – in a way better captured by the verb to swirl than to disrupt.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

SAN ANTONIO – A sparse crowd gathered Thursday night at Freeman Coliseum, located beside the stadium in which the world champion Spurs play, and the small turnout was an unfortunate turn, as the evening’s main event, undefeated Mexican junior lightweight Fernando Vargas versus Australian Will Tomlinson, a match broadcast on HBO Latino, deserved a much larger crowd.

Vargas (22-0-1, 16 KOs) stopped Tomlinson (23-2-1, 13 KOs) early in the eighth round of a fight that proved the Mexican’s class and the Australian’s mettle.

After two fantastic rounds of near-even exchanges the Mexican probably got the better of, in round 3 an accidental collision of heads opened an abrasion on Vargas’ face that partially salvaged the round for Tomlinson, who was otherwise beaten with impunity. In the fourth, Tomlinson, who was now bleeding more than Vargas, stayed upright mainly on the virtue of his roughhousing tactics.

Vargas’ onslaught continued unabated, even mixing-in left hooks to the body that nearly found their mark on Tomlinson’s liver. A Vargas left in the fifth found its mark and brought a visible wince from the remarkably sturdy Australian. Vargas’ savage pursuit continued through the seventh round, the conclusion of which saw a number of officials gather in the Australian’s corner to ensure he was fit to continue.

He wasn’t.

A minute into round 8, Vargas finally dropped Tomlinson and the match concluded.

FABIANO PENA VS. VYACHESLAV SHABRANSKYY
Thursday’s co-main event was a mismatch from the opening round when undefeated Ukrainian light heavyweight Vyacheslav Shabranskyy (13-0, 11 KOs) conducted target practice on plainly overmatched Philadelphian Fabiano Pena (11-1-1, 8 KOs) until Pena’s corner stopped the beatdown after five rounds, giving Shabranskyy another knockout win.

Better at every facet of boxing than Pena, in round 1 Shabranskyy hit Pena with nearly every punch in the boxing lexicon, and from a variety of levels, too, reducing Pena to hurling blind overhand rights in a sign of early desperation. After having every advance thwarted by his taller opponent’s jab, in round 3, Pena began taking stutter-stepped lunges at Shabranskyy. While bringing a rise from the crowd, these lunges appeared to take no effect on the Ukrainian who beat his hopeless opponent to quitting on his stool.

Shabranskyy appears to have every tool, and with HBO Sports’ recent fixation on all things Eastern European, there’s a very good chance the Ukrainian will soon find himself promoted beyond HBO Latino.

YAMAGUCHI FALCAO VS. RAYMOND TERRY
When undefeated Brazilian southpaw Yamaguchi Falcao (4-0, 2 KOs) and undefeated Philadelphia southpaw Raymond Terry (3-1, 2 KOs) made the evening’s final undercard fight, it looked evenly matched on the bout sheet. But it sure wasn’t even in the ring.

After swarming Terry from the opening bell with overhand punches and hooks of every kind, Falcao dropped Terry in the first minute and knocked him unconscious at 1:27. No 10-count was needed, and only one southpaw was still undefeated.

ARMANDO CARDENAS VS. MARCO ANTONIO SOLIS
The evening’s fourth bout, a six-round scrap between undefeated Texas welterweights, San Antionio’s lanky Armando Cardenas (7-0, 4 KOs) and Austin’s Marco Antonio Solis (3-1, 1 KO), began impressively for Cardenas – who dropped Solis on the second punch he landed – and then flattened out a bit, as the width of Cardenas’ punches and the durability of Solis’ chin slowed the action. After knocking the guard from Solis’ mouth in round 3, Cardenas showed hints of fatigue in the fourth and fifth before having both his chin and heart tested by Solis in the sixth.

Cardenas passed all tests, and won by unanimous decision scores of 59-54, 58-55 and 58-55. For a very tall fighter, though, Cardenas showed an alarming tendency to get hit with uppercuts – a trait he’ll need to remedy before improving his competition further.

By Bart Barry–

SAN ANTONIO – Tuesday at Aztec Theater, the oldest theater in this old city, Saul “Canelo” Alvarez and James Kirkland announced their May 9 fight in Houston. Saturday at MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Keith Thurman decisioned Robert Guerrero. In between those two middling affairs, Showtime announced plans to honor its televised trilogy of Israel Vazquez and Rafael Marquez – a trilogy unlikely to be matched in quality or ferocity even by a 2025 highlight reel called “Premier Boxing Champions: The First 10 Years.”

What Alvarez and Thurman have in common is above-average talent and a poor era; they are b-level fighters elevated to millions-dollar purses through some balance of mediocre opposition and needy fans. Alvarez is better tested and more beloved and unlikely to improve, while Thurman is more athletic, even while his power has moved with inverse proportionality to his opposition. What Vazquez and Marquez were, and made together, is another thing entirely.

There’s an inauthenticity to the televised experience, today, that wasn’t nearly so pronounced a part of our sport in previous decades. Boxing writers’ lamentations about television are well-noted and quite old, of course, and this isn’t intended to be so much another tired protest of the inevitable as a commentary on what’s worsened.

Boxing long preserved a griminess, a degree of filth, other sports lost generations before; boxing retained a sense of the unexpected in a way that made other sports appear overwrought and scripted. There was ever a touch of irony to this – with spectators accusing boxing results of being fixed, which they often were, even while phantom rules violations in the NBA and NFL influenced just as dramatically who became those sports’ champions. Television was a guest at boxing events, or at least telecasts felt like they were conducted by guests; proper boxing matches had a sense of inevitability to them, an implication this grievance would be settled, regardless of witness, at this time, on this evening, and television cameras just happened to be there.

Saturday’s NBC debut, instead, had other sports’ feel: We are here because television invited us, and do you know how great is the reach of public airwaves? and have you seen our incredible commentating team? and would you please have a listen to our soundtrack? If it did not feel quite scripted, it neither felt like a collection of brawls that were going to happen even if television cameras went dark. Aficionados are noticeably insecure about public acceptance of our sport, too, and that marked social-media depictions of a few good rounds in an otherwise poor night of NBC boxing with the usual trimming: Don’t you see, everybody, this is why you should love boxing as much as we do!

Tuesday’s press conference, or media event, as they’re now called since “press” – derived from printing press – no longer has any meaningful place at these clubland mashups where seats labeled Deadline Media get occupied early by women with enormous promotional posters and boys with eager black sharpies, and the deejay stands both closer to fighters and with a better chance of interrogating them than anyone carrying something antiquated as a notebook or pen, had promoters beseeching the partisan-Mexican South Texas crowd to show the world Texans were the very best fans by driving 200 miles to Houston in May to purchase the promoters’ product. Oscar De La Hoya was there, looking jittery as he’s appeared since warming up to fire Richard Schaefer (who must’ve watched Saturday’s NBC telecast and realized, much like HBO’s Kery Davis before him, he was disposable to Al Haymon as print media is), and of course Saul Alvarez and James Kirkland were there too.

Evermore, De La Hoya appears a refreshingly outdated model; he likes or appreciates the press and adheres to the olden-day rules of being unbothered by gliding through 20 minutes of frictionless inquiries so long as his inquisitors are equally unbothered by 20 minutes of countlessly refried cliches. There was a time De La Hoya was unique in the sport for his lack of sincerity. De La Hoya is no more sincere today than he was then, but our beloved sport now plumbs such depths of insincerity a De La Hoya sighting has all the charm of a throwback jersey; at least Oscar cares enough to smile and wave and remind us he was a great fighter who did fight other great fighters.

As an antidote to all that, last week Showtime announced it would commemorate the best trilogy to improve is airwaves, when it replayed Israel Vazquez versus Rafael Marquez. There appears nowhere on our horizon the likelihood of another such trilogy. The quality and violence of the combat shared between those two Mexican prizefighters, their willingness to avenge both defeats and victories, at a withering pace – they fought three times in 363 days (just after Vazquez stopped Jhonny Gonzalez in a particularly brutal affair) – is so far from what we have now it is barely believable Vazquez-Marquez 3 happened only seven years ago.

Then, as now, many in our ranks were discontent with boxing’s trajectory. Try not to imagine how bad things will need to go for us someday to look back longingly at Thurman-Guerrero.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry–

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

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But how will this influence resolve itself?

Three of the most influential artists of the 20th century – Pablo Picasso and Joan Miro and Salvador Dali – grew up in Catalonia, wandering through Barcelona looking upwards at the architectural masterpieces of Antoni Gaudi, edifices that, in their sublime eccentricities, gave the artists permission. That is perhaps what is most essential in any consideration of influence: Good artists encourage imitation, but the greatest give permission.

Find an aspiring American writer who has read Ernest Hemingway and not endeavored, at once, to ape his style. It rarely succeeds but presents a valuable exercise of sorts for long as it is tried. To read the last 100 or so pages of Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” or Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick”, though, is to attain a permission slip; in his closing philosophical treatise on world history and its actors, an awkward and fully unpredictable turn at the end of a work of fiction, Tolstoy permits his successors to intervene in the course of their narratives wherever creative impulse dictates; in the unorthodox arc of Melville’s whalechase, its steady acceleration till very nearly the last sentence, Melville permits his successors to toy with the shape of what stories they recount, breaking with the linearity young novelists now infer from cinema.

A visit to Museu Picasso de Barcelona shows the importance of influence, of Picasso’s journey as a young artist from wishing to imitate Francisco Goya to interpreting Bartolome Esteban Murillo to his frequent returns, through 50 years, to Diego Velazquez, returns that culminated in his many renditions of Velazquez’s “Las Meninas” – probably the greatest masterpiece of Spain, a country that measures its masterpieces in kilometers. But everywhere within Picasso’s work, finally, is the first influence, Gaudi, and the permission Picasso gathered from wandering among the unpredictable and impractical masterworks of Gaudi – the way Barcelona’s celebration of Gaudi influences, via what permission it gives, any artist who wanders its streets. It is a permission one might interpret like: Pursue beauty, however construed, and worry not where the pursuit takes you.

There is an important influence that happens now in boxing, and it may be better than expected for fighters, while it lasts, and much worse for aficionados. Floyd Mayweather, when he encourages stylistic imitation, leads nowhere friendly for his successors, exactly as Roy Jones and Muhammad Ali did before him, and Mayweather’s influence is large: Spend a year asking young fighters whom their favorite active fighter is, and regardless of your phrasing, those fighters invariably will answer a question like “what contemporary prizefighter who shares your ethnicity or physical attributes have you heard made the most money last year?”

As Ali launched a generation of fighters shuffling sideways with their hands senselessly low, Mayweather now encourages a generation of fighters – most lacking his reflexes, many lacking his chin, all lacking his foundational footwork – to make an ‘L’ with their right elbows and left forearms while tilting sideways. However well it worked as a career extender for Mayweather, once his navigating to higher classes voided what substantial power he showed at lightweight, it is a terrible way to teach a youngster to box on his first day.

Stylistically, then, Mayweather’s influence has not benefitted his successors. Philosophically, though, Mayweather’s influence may be a better one than usually considered. In creating an odious character popular culture alternately finds repugnant and wonderful, in being nimble enough to piss-off Americans with means, anew and afresh every six months, Mayweather has made sums of money disproportionate to what peril attends his prizefights. That a professional fighter found a way to become exceedingly rich for what he does outside the ring more than what he does within it, in a way spectators find perverse as retired fighters find it envious, ensures Mayweather’s influence for many years to come.

No fighter in history has finagled a reward-to-risk ratio like Mayweather’s, and when one considers the age of our sport, that is a feat. Even May 2, the toughest match of Mayweather’s career, is more hypothetical risk, as usual, than real: Whatever miracles mark the career of Manny Pacquiao, this fact remains: In 5 1/2 years as a welterweight, Pacquiao has never knocked-out a 147-pound man (Miguel Cotto was 145 when Pacquiao stopped him in their 12th round together).

The peril that adorns May 2, then, is not physical so much as reputational; is there some way Pacquiao can give Mayweather his first professional loss? That’s something, sure, but it’s disproportionately less than Mayweather’s projected purse should require. Disappointed as most aficionados will be the morning of May 3, when, hungover, they realize they were duped again, this time, more painfully still, duped by a fight they wasted years demanding, there is a small part within most of us that feels sympathy, ugliness really, for the hundreds of fighters we’ve watched sacrifice their wits for $200 a round.

Setting aside empty rhetorical devices like “honor” or “legacy” or “pride” – political words whose employment routinely precedes a sinister manipulation of some sort – what Mayweather has done for himself, and thus far himself alone, is reset the price-to-entertainment balance dramatically in a fighter’s favor. If this were to become a sustainable thing, it would not be the worst development in our sport’s generally sordid history. It will not be a sustainable thing, most likely, regardless of whatever May 2 ends up meaning in the year 2025 (probably very, very little), but it’s a fun exercise, nevertheless, and a doorway to the nature of influence, a thing boxing shares with all arts.

No, Mayweather is not Gaudi – though the late Andy Warhol surely would have delighted himself with portraits of “Money May” – but then, neither was Picasso or Miro or Dali . . .

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

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Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry–

The announcement came sometime Thursday, or maybe Tuesday, the announcement there would be an announcement coming soon from a professional athlete about a future sporting event. It was a reminder how unserious our time is that adults awaited such silliness, but there we were, men who are otherwise grandfathers, fathers, professionals, role models, even, collectively saying, “Whatever the petulant demands, just satisfy them, please, so we can have our event, finally.”

Now we will, May 2 at MGM Grand, when American welterweight Floyd Mayweather fights Filipino Manny Pacquiao.

It’s OK to be happy about this development. Boxing, like perhaps no other sport in the world, makes curmudgeons of its fanbase. All begin by reading bitter men unimpressed by any development in the sport, and all promise themselves they will not become like those men; I’ll stop following it long before I become cynical as those guys, one thinks.

But shortsighted greed – to which boxing’s failures universally reduce – eventually affects in some profound and detrimental way a fighter who enchants a new follower of our sport, and his innocence and hopefulness gradually gives way to distrust and an unseemly pride in knowing things. None of us is immune to this; some of us express more loudly our distaste with what machinations subvert generally our sport and specifically its fighters and fans, but all of us experience it.

Winston Churchill accurately reported about those of us in the States: “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing – after they’ve tried everything else.” Floyd Mayweather, in announcing he will fight Manny Pacquiao five years and two Pacquiao losses after he was supposed to, has satisfied Churchill’s report once more, agreeing to do the right thing, finally, because he is, quite frankly, out of palatable options – after he’s tried everything else.

One imagines CBS CEO Leslie Moonves, who is wealthy where Mayweather is rich, said he was done seeing his child network, Showtime, embarrassed by Mayweather. With each new fight in the Mayweather contract bringing less money than his 2013 match with Mexican Saul Alvarez, the onus on Mayweather to make a larger prefight spectacle grew, until in September Mayweather produced his way to a potsmoking harem and human dogfighting circuit, captured by Moonves’ cameras, then went before a government commission and said it was all fake, edited to inaccuracy by Moonves’ staff.

Whatever it might have cost CBS to break its ill-advised Showtime contract with Mayweather, CBS’ revenues in 2014 were $13.81 billion – that’s 13, followed by 81, followed by seven zeros – which is enough to pay Mayweather $120 million, every fight, for 115 fights, and precluding Mayweather from accelerating the erosion of CBS’ journalistic brand would have been worth whatever pennies it cost the corporation.

For a chuckle, though, do imagine the conversation promoter Bob Arum, age 83, and Moonves, 65, had about what nonfinancial terms of the contract were most important to Mayweather: That he, and no one else, be allowed to announce the fight, via crappy digital image on a social network. Like adults patiently watching a child open birthday presents before they head back to work, Moonves and Arum must have marveled at the euphoria such a trinket brought the little tyke.

Immediately after Mayweather’s historic announcement, the heads of the sports departments at Showtime and HBO held a joint call and bubbled with what enthusiasm generally attends the salvaging of one’s job. “This is the biggest boxing event of all time,” said the president of HBO Sports, in an ahistorical attempt, one hopes, to target the same teenage demographic Mayweather’s announcement did. Or maybe Mayweather insisted on scripting HBO’s announcement, too – he is an executive producer at Showtime, after all – and desperate to return its status from official network of the Soviet Bloc farm leagues to “Heart and Soul of Boxing”, HBO had little choice but do as it was told.

The hyperbole above will be justified in one way, though: Mayweather-Pacquiao will feature prognostications from more and more-uninformed sportsfans than any fight in history. And here’s why: Every time biggest boxing events of all time happened in the past, be they Lewis-Tyson or Frazier-Ali 1 or Louis-Schmeling 2, boxing had at least a small place in America’s consciousness. Persons accidentally saw a fight on “Wide World of Sports” or read about a local kid in the newspaper, at least, before sallying forth with an opinion.

There’s a fair chance last weekend 10 million Americans hatched fully formed opinions, opinions they are now eager to share, having watched no boxing since Lewis beat-down Tyson 13 years ago.

“Money is the best ever, like his hat says . . .”

“Manny fights with a mandate from God . . .”

“It’s like that time at Wrestlemania when Hogan and Savage . . .”

Fact is, this is the second-best time for this fight to happen, from an aficionado’s perspective. The best time, of course, was immediately after Pacquiao dashed through Miguel Cotto, the man Mayweather retired to avoid in 2008, when Mayweather-Pacquiao might have happened in Cowboys Stadium and launched a historic trilogy our grandchildren would talk about. After 2009, Mayweather took six fights intended not to imperil him in the slightest, and he was right five times, until Argentine Marcos Maidana repeatedly hit him with skyhook rights in 2014 and revealed Mayweather is either badly overtraining himself or much older in the legs than his string of sponsored sparring sessions anticipated.

Pacquiao took the opposite route, coincidentally, being chased in 2010 by the monstrous Antonio Margarito – whom Mayweather bought-out a contract to avoid in 2006 – being decisioned by Timothy Bradley and being iced by Juan Manuel Marquez, before making farcical matches in remote places with hopeless underdogs in 2013 and 2014. In other words, Pacquiao might be recuperated enough, and Mayweather might be worn enough, now, to make their May match a good one.

Or maybe not. Vegas knows boxing much better than America at large, and Vegas has Mayweather a comfortable favorite – watching, as Vegas did, the absurd size disparity between Mayweather and Marquez in their 2009 sparring session, and knowing, as Vegas does, Pacquiao is much closer in physical stature to his nemesis Marquez than he is to Mayweather.

Pacquiao will land left crosses on Mayweather, just as Marquez landed right crosses, but will they have any memorable effect? That is a question worth answering that will be answered in May. Rejoice.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry–

Editor’s note: For part 4, please click here.

*

It is a question of competence much as intent.

That is where boxing now stumbles in an exaggerated way that defies expectations more than most things in America do anymore. Whether the larger part of this country was ever competent is a question for fantasy, not history, but it is not uncommon now for the world to accept American incompetence, raising awareness of it till the printing press rolls and the dollars fan out. Today, payoffs are what we do better than we do anything: We shower problems with money till they resolve themselves or drown in our largesse.

Do not mistake that, either, for a form of contemporary competence. It is not. We own the world’s reserve currency because of what the Europeans, Russians and Japanese did to one another in the last century, and what we helped do to them once we finally participated in their carnage. Whatever autohagiographies America’s private sector pens to itself about itself, there is nothing essential being done here, and there hasn’t in 50 years. Most of the technology required to read this column, whether on your phone or laptop or PC, came from the Department of Defense, or at least financing from the Department of Defense – whose primary purpose is to kill others, or threaten to kill others, before others can kill Americans.

Your technology came from the public sector. The shiny, white-plastic cover with a glowing piece of fruit in its middle? That’s the private sector.

Probably this system is unsustainable, but that hardly passes for an indictment. Whenever it ends, our system has already proved more resilient than expected. There’s solace in that.

Most people are bad at most things, and Americans are no different, whatever exceptionalism we attribute to ourselves. We are outfitted with extraordinarily overgrown minds that conjure up 10,000 inane patterns for every workable one, and if you doubt that, and you have a biological impulse to do so, of course, ask yourself what activity in your day might impress another species on Earth. There’s efficient acquisition of food, and reproduction. After that, the list thins.

We invent goals and reward ourselves for their accomplishment, in a way all other creatures must regard with something between amusement and fright. If an announcement were made tomorrow Homo sapiens is a virus devouring its host, not a predator, would it surprise you?

There’s precedent for being bad at most things: The human mind does not abide repetitive tasks. No sooner is the mind asked to concentrate on the same thought more than five or so times, and it wanders elsewhere, pulling any one of the six or seven fully developed cinematic storylines playing at all times on its edges to center stage, and the repetitive task immediately begins to suffer in its execution. It’s a large reason computers fascinate us; even more than their speed, their competence at repetitive tasks strikes us as supernatural. Computers do not have our creativity, and will not, but they have a sort of concentrated presence we struggle to fathom even while watching it.

A moment after we successfully complete some task a half-dozen times, we declare mastery in a quietly triumphant way, fold our hands behind our heads, and begin rummaging about for a new task. Mastery, meanwhile, requires thousands of repetitions, hundreds of hours of aching boredom, and finally informed risk-taking that brings some new efficiency. But who wants to dedicate his life to something trite as all that when he can do badly a thousand trite things every year?

What has happened with Mayweather and Pacquiao negotiations, playing vacuum to the oxygen of interest in our sport, reduces, once more, to competence. The fighters themselves, whatever leverage they fancy they have, are both destined for what punchy bankruptcy awaits men who make a career doing what they do. The heads of participating television networks, whose compensation is, in the contemporary corporate tradition, proportionate to the amount of culpability they will accept in a case of failure – a failure American corporations now dedicate more resources to obfuscating than research or development – have been plainly hoodwinked by the fighters’ handlers and now dodder about, having serious conversations about infomercials and announcing crews.

Realize this, if you realize nothing else: These are the concerns of a cabal looking to trick consumers one time.

Nobody involved in any of this expects a good fight that births a three-part franchise, a historic trilogy that brings a billion dollars to be split four or five ways, for if they did, all of this could have been resolved with a profit-sharing agreement years ago. No, these enervating, incompetent negotiations are about wringing all that can be got from the desiccated towel of American interest in prizefighting. “History repeats itself!” will sing philistines in a chorus that implies this has all happened before and boxing survived it. But history only repeats itself until it doesn’t, and it doesn’t-repeat itself far more frequently than it repeats itself.

There is no reason, then, to be assured boxing will survive the final consequences of 2010-2015. And so, we bear witness . . .

*

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

*

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry–

Editor’s note: For part 3, please click here.

*

Another week comes to pass in the decisive erosion of public interest in our sport. Those curious about The Fight to Save Boxing do not migrate elsewhere within – they do not, anymore, find a minimumweight master or junior middleweight from a few towns over and redirect their gazes; they migrate away. Intention in these matters cannot be read easily as action, so there’s this to impart, once more: If manager Al Haymon detested boxing and wished to see it abolished from the public consciousness before the year 2025, would he alter a single act he has taken in the last three years?

Nearly every active fighter worth watching between 140 and 160 pounds, right now, awaits a resolution of some sort on The Fight to Save Boxing – even Mexican Saul “Canelo” Alvarez, who has the youthful defiance and fanbase to do as he wishes, and a promoter with little left to lose, doesn’t dare schedule his next match on a weekend commemorating his people’s successful default on their loan from the French, lest an African American and Filipino prefer Mexicans’ pay-per-view buys for themselves.

Mayweather and Haymon and promoter Bob Arum are empowered by our collective imaginations and very little more. Whatever monetary estimates Haymon or Arum feed the media – giving reporters two or three numbers, and letting those aces decide whether to separate them with ‘+’ or ‘x’ or assign them as exponents – not a penny of that money will make its way to you, so stop caring about it. Without the obfuscating factor of gross sales, which, regardless of what today’s economists tell you, are not the same as gross items produced, the match that now issues ransom notes to an entire industry comprises a past-his-prime welterweight who needed two fights last year to defeat Marcos Maidana conclusively and a past-his-prime welterweight reduced in his last match to fighting a Stony Brook nutritionist in China.

Alvarez and De La Hoya, in other words, should announce Alvarez vs. Austin’s James Kirkland at Alamodome on May 2, already, open the bidding to whichever television network wishes to cover it, knowing Mexican television will do so happily, and give Haymon and Arum and HBO and Showtime an option: Watch their superfight’s revenues subverted by the exodus of boxing’s last reliable fanbase, Mexican – or did you think a man unoriginal as Mayweather covets Cinco de Mayo and El 16 de Septiembre because his schedule as Showtime executive producer is otherwise full? – or pay De La Hoya and Alvarez and Kirkland a large sum of step-aside money. A large sum of very poor previous choices now limits De La Hoya’s mobility, sure, but he works for Alvarez, needing Canelo far far more than Canelo needs him, and however much his foundering company now needs to be peaceful with Arum and Haymon, if De La Hoya loses Canelo, he becomes a regional promoter with a magazine.

Canelo’s chutzpah and self-assurance are not justified by anything he does in the ring, no, but who cares? Mexicans know he’s the best they can do right now, and so does he, and he’s right, and so are they, to be enkindled by an American and a Filipino taking hostage a calendar entry fully meaningless but for what significance Mexicans assign it.

Goodness, this column has veered too deeply into meaninglessness. Woody Allen’s “Vicky Cristina Barcelona”, frankly, is the righteous subject of today’s spire, because it is tangible and excellent, not ephemeral and unneeded, and because it stars Spanish actor Javier Bardem, about whom I’ve written enthusiastically before. Back then, though, I was more confined by convention than I am now; we were only one year into negotiations for Mayweather-Pacquiao, and there was still interest enough in boxing for talented young writers to believe covering our sport might some day provide a sustainably supplemental sort of income, even if the days of making a living from it were expired, and so the sentences were shorter and crisper and often isolated in paragraphs of their own.

That can still be done.

The point of this series, though, is to obey no conventions whatever, a betrayal of the conventional wisdom that betrayed a generation of young sportswriters, and so we return to Javier Bardem and his wonderful portrayal of Juan Antonio, a Catalan painter desperately and violently enamored of Maria Elena, a desperately and violently enchanting Catalan painter played expertly by Spanish actress Penelope Cruz – expertly enough to win an Oscar. So rich is the movie that neither the name of Bardem’s character nor Cruz’s appears in its title – as those names belong to a grounded American tourist, Vicky, played by British actress Rebecca Hall, and seduced first by Juan Antonio, and Cristina, a flighty American tourist played by American actress Scarlett Johansson, and seduced second by Juan Antonio and then Maria Elena. The story’s arc is gentle, its narration relying on the word balmy, its writing excellent, and its acting superb; whatever wealth of ill will some Americans now bring to Woody Allen’s work, it is hard for anyone to watch “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” and not enjoy it.

The title, and its reference to the movie’s third and most important character, is revelatory. Like the city it portrays in beautiful and soft colors, the movie’s title is nonsensical, and the city of Barcelona, cooler than any city more famous, follows no conventions, either, because of its inspiration, Antoni Gaudi.

Perquè el Barcelona és la ciutat de Gaudí . . .

*

Editor’s note: For part 5, please click here.

*

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry–

SAN ANTONIO – This column was supposed to be about a live theatrical performance by Mike Tyson, a review of sorts from ringside by a writer who lives above the historic Majestic Theatre, downtown, and attends most Broadway-musical productions that visit. “Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth” was scheduled for Saturday night in the Lila Cockrell Theatre, a 2,000-seat venue attached to this city’s large and expanding convention center. A boxing-trainer friend would stop by, and we would amble 10 minutes along the River Walk to the edge of HemisFair Park, home of the Tower of the Americas and the 1968 World’s Fair.

Instead, Thursday night brought an announcement there would be no Mike Tyson. Sluggish ticket sales were cited. It’s no wonder. There aren’t five of us in this city who write regularly about the sport, and few of us knew about Tyson’s performance till Monday evening at Cowboys Dancehall, where Leija-Battah Promotions presented a main event that would prove Rocky Juarez’s last – and yes, these things share a thread.

Between Monday’s card, which Tyson did not attend, and Saturday’s scheduled performance, the excellent and deservedly celebrated musical “Chicago” began a six-show run at Majestic, with the uniquely talented Mexican actress Bianca Marroquin shining in the role of Roxie Hart. To watch Marroquin act and sing and dance, and somehow project subtle gestures hundreds of feet – and this, along with the live nature of stage acting, is what makes it a craft of such greater depth and refinement than anything that happens on a movie set’s 41st take before the tightly cropped frame of an HD camera – was to be blessed with an entirely too-infrequent reminder about talent: It is inarguable.

If ever you find yourself preceding an assertion of some artist’s talent with the words “really” or “actually” you should treat those adverbs as alarms: You don’t mean what you’re about to say, you are not convinced, and you hope to argue your way into a faith in that artist’s talent while stiffening that hope into a conviction by way of others’ affirmation.

On a stage filled with touring professionals, most in the same costume, Marroquin was the figure one’s eyes immediately found, often without seeking her. The foundation of her stage presence – and this is what acting shares with all other arts – happened in the layers with which she entertained. This is something that transcends mere range, which is a flat spectrum that delineates how many distinct characters an actor can portray; Marroquin’s presence was created by the number of emotions she portrayed at the very same time. Much of that is excellent writing, even more of it is a character, Roxie Hart, about to celebrate her 40th year of performance – and what richness the geology of creativity produces in a character subjected to time and pressure by talented actors’ interpretations of her – but the execution of a transcendent performance, finally, belongs to the stage actor alone, an artist talented and textured enough to invent pleasant surprises between scripted lines.

These notes about talent and texture and transcendence refer directly backwards to Houstonian Rocky Juarez, who announced his retirement immediately after losing lopsidedly Monday night on the northeastern outskirts of this city. It is rare, anymore, almost miraculous, unfortunately, that a prizefighter, or any professional athlete, can summarize his career coherently, but Rocky did it over the PA system, Monday, closing a short goodbye speech thusly:

“I had a great run. And I tried, I tried. I love you guys. Thank you.”

“And I tried, I tried” – those words capture perfectly the often-frustrating arc of Juarez’s run as a world-title challenger. In 2005, Juarez lost a very close decision to Humberto Soto for an interim world title. Nine months later, he beat an underprepared Marco Antonio Barrera, only to hear a questionable draw decision announced, only to see it later changed by the California State Athletic Commission to a split-decision for Barrera. Four months after that, Juarez was undressed by Barrera in their rematch. Fourteen months later, Juarez went to Tucson to challenge the master Juan Manuel Marquez for the title Marquez took from Barrera, and Marquez beat him soundly. Fifteen months after that, Juarez drew with Chris John before losing another rematch decision seven months later. A three-year losing streak ensued until Golden Boy Promotions brought Juarez to this city late in 2012 to lose to Antonio Escalante – but Juarez ruined Escalante in eight rounds.

Juarez did not quite have talent enough for a transcendent performance; his silver medal at the 2000 Olympic Games played as his career’s metaphor well as his farewell address captured his profoundly honest efforts as a prizefighter.

Mike Tyson had transcendent talent and only partially squandered it with the many poor choices he made during his adolescence, prizefighting career and retirement. His cancellation of a performance in San Antonio will not be tallied among these – it’s doubtful Tyson even knew he was supposed to be in Texas last week – but it will work as a tidy reminder how ephemeral comebacks in boxing are.

In 2013, HBO put the full might of its marketing programs behind Tyson’s next comeback, stage performer, and boxing writers dutifully wrote ad copy for “Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth” in time for HBO’s presentation of director Spike Lee’s cinematic adaptation of Tyson’s soliloquy. Tyson, too, was a boxing promoter, we learned, and bringing his charismatic self wrapped in a feelgood bow to that enterprise.

Now it is 2015, and Mike Tyson just cancelled a show because the public has lost interest.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

SAN ANTONIO – Rocky Juarez spent his career being an honest prizefighter who never quite found within himself a transcendent performance when the occasion demanded one. Monday’s match was no exception, and Juarez’s retirement, announced immediately afterwards, was no surprise.

Fighting in the main event of a good card at Cowboys Dancehall, Houston’s Juarez (30-11-1, 21 KOs) dropped a lopsided and unanimous decision to Mexican featherweight Robinson Castellanos (21-10, 13 KOs) by scores of 118-106, 118-106 and 118-107.

“I wanted to announce my retirement today,” Juarez said over the PA system while still in the ring. “This will be my best time to announce that – here, in my home state, in front of my family and friends.

“I had a great run, and I tried, I tried. I love you guys. Thank you.”

After an opening pair of uneventful rounds, rounds in which the significantly shorter and older Juarez could not close distance easily as he might have in bygone years, the Houstonian began to impose himself in the third, bodying the larger Castellanos and driving him several times to the ropes, where Juarez had a few chances to score.

In round 4, Juarez’s age began to tell more than his experience, though, and with his balance compromised by older legs, Juarez began to have trouble timing his lanky opponent. Round 5 saw Juarez overcommit to a left hook, spin in a trance, and lose his footing. Juarez’s slip was incorrectly ruled a knockdown. Solace, though, came in the form of a large cut over the outside of Castellanos’ right eye.

The sixth round was an excellent one, with each man having to be shown to the doctor to verify the dangers of cuts sustained over his eyes. The seventh was more of what its predecessor comprised, with Juarez getting a close-quarters firefight, whether he wanted one or not.

In the eighth, Castellanos’ punches continued to tell, with a series of right uppercuts moving Juarez backwards involuntarily for the first time in the fight. The ninth was another brutal affair, with Castellanos’ face beginning to swell and bleed disproportionately more than Juarez’s.

With both men worn and exhausted going into the championship rounds, the pace slackened slightly in the 11th. Juarez’s short and crisp punches lost most of their snap, and Castellanos’ long and looping right hands becoming wider and wilder.

The final round was not kind to the aged warrior Juarez. Despite, or perhaps because of, a characteristically honest effort throughout, Juarez’s legs abandoned him in the 12th, dropping him on the canvas thrice – as much from exhaustion as punishment. Juarez rose all three times and rallied to fight Castellanos off him in the closing seconds, but it was little more than a moral victory for Juarez, for whom the 12th round made a points victory mathematically impossible.

Juarez’s honest fighting style and serious approach to our beloved sport set him apart and will be sorely missed.

KEANDRE GIBSON VS. NELSON LARA
Monday’s co-main event, undefeated Nevada welterweight KeAndre Gibson (12-0-1, 5 KOs) against Nicaraguan Nelson Lara (15-7-5, 8 KOs), began like a matchup all too commonplace in prizefighting today: An athlete who hates being hit against a journeyman too slow to imperil him. As the second round began, though, the athlete opened up, the journeyman began to land, and entertainment suddenly happened.

However lopsided the official scores – three tallies of 80-72 for Gibson – the evening’s co-main was an excellent fight, and a stiff test for Gibson, who earned every round he narrowly took from Lara.

The close of the third round, the match’s most competitive minute to that point, even saw the Nicaraguan land a flurry that brought a rousing cheer from the partisan-Latino, South Texas crowd.

By round 7, with both fighters winded, Gibson began to body the smaller man, wrestling him to the ropes and going to work on him from close quarters. It may have been a tactical error, though, as Lara, finally able to make contact with Gibson whenever he wished, began, by round’s end, to get the better of their exchanges.

But Gibson worked hard through the eighth and final round, winning a fair and unanimous decision.

Gibson may look the part – with a Las Vegas pedigree and statuesque physique – but the truth is, right now, he lacks the power to get guys out of fights in early rounds. And the later his fights go, the wider his mouth opens, and the more his impressive musculature begins to hinder him.

JAVIER RODRIGUEZ VS. QUINICE WESBY
Light-hitting local favorite Javier “Pitbull” Rodriguez (12-0-1, 2 KOs) brought his undefeated record to Cowboys Dancehall, a venue at which Rodriguez always sells plenty of tickets, in Monday’s swing bout against Dallas featherweight Quinice Wesby (2-8), an awkward specimen, and Rodriguez also brought a desire to change his reputation as a light-hitter.

After measuring Wesby with left hooks through the opening four rounds of the match, Rodriguez caught Wesby with a lead left hook that put his lights clean out and required no ten-count, winning by knockout at 0:49 of round 5.

Rodriguez won every round against the overmatched Wesby, whose bizarre stance and attack, his lead hand held almost as though his arm were broken, undermined his own offense more than it affected Rodriguez’s.

While Rodriguez continues to build himself as a local attraction, and ensured even more tickets will be sold with Monday’s excellent finish, one still worries what shall come to pass if and when his competition improves, and he has to fight aggressive opponents with good chins off him.

UNDERCARD
The evening’s fourth match, San Antonio lightweight Christian Santibanez (1-3) versus Austin’s Albert Romero (2-3-1), brought a loud reaction from the previously subdued crowd, as each man plied his limited wares in an aggressive manner that complemented the other. Romero prevailed by three scores of 39-37 in a fun, competitive match.

Before that, an uninspired six-round affair happened in the super featherweight division, as Texan Arturo Esquivel (9-2, 2 KOs) and Californian Jesus Sandoval (4-5-3) pawed and slapped their way to a close match official judges nevertheless saw for Sandoval, 60-54, 60-54 and 60-54.

Monday’s opening match, a lightweight showdown between two Texans, Robstown’s Robert Vela (11-0-2, 5 KOs) and San Antonio’s Ramiro Torres (4-28-1, 2 KOs), saw through most of its four rounds no way to distinguish the undefeated fighter from the one about to experience his 28th career loss. Despite the match’s unexpected competitiveness, though, the official scores for Vela were fair, going 39-37, 39-37 and 40-36.

Opening bell rang on a semi-full Cowboys Dancehall at 7:00 PM local time.

By Bart Barry-

Ring the bell already, fool.

I’ve written so many great columns in the past. That’s why you read me. And I’m more prepared for this column than any of those. This is the column for not just readers but writers, too, because they know what hard writing looks like. It’s for the readers also, don’t misunderstand, especially readers in the 210, Alamo City – throw up the Spurs sign, y’all!

First time I covered “Mile High” Mike Alvarado, I didn’t listen to my editor, and I got too aggressive, went on and in about what an athlete he is, and then he lost to Brandon Rios, and I found a way of not admitting I was wrong. Real writers call that semantics. Haters call it hypocrisy. Whatevs, dude.

All I know is that it takes a lot to put yourself out there in print every damn Monday for readers to judge you, always with the niggling about three or four disagreeable words of a 1,000, none of the critics able to make a coherent toddler’s thought in 140 characters, not words, characters, but full of advice for a writer who brings it every time his hands bless a keyboard. Real recognize real, though, and real readers know real writers don’t need to read or worry grammartical about, like, because being a writer is something you either got inside you or don’t, and I’m a writer to the bone because I came up round real wordsmiths, eloquent folk, creative types unconstrained by deadlines.

Really, with the deadlines thing again? Fine. Here we go:

Technically my column is due on Sunday nights. Christians, you see, treat Sunday as the day of the Sabbath. My editor is on the East Coast. I’m in the 210 – for life, playa! – and there’s this time difference. And I don’t mean daylight savings, either, OK? So if it’s midnight in Alamo City, then it’s not midnight on the East Coast. Simple mistake. I’m sure lots of writers make it.

All I know is this: I’m a writer, I make sentences from words, paragraphs from sentences, pages from paragraphs, and sometimes runon sentences when prepositional phrases get mixed in later and forget to correct them, in there, go back, and I’m not saying I’m perfect because nobody’s perfect, and y’all can’t judge me.

Mail in this column like I don’t give a, um, dickens? Not me:

When even the noblest fighters begin to . . . nah. When a fighter who once frequently boasted he’d not been felled, amateurs or pros, in . . . whatever. It’s a new thing, this punching effect, and as luck would have it, being concussed can compromise ocular . . . next time. To sabotage the rudimentary how-many-fingers quiz, yell out an even multiple – seeing double! – evinces a brain unscrambled enough to know its times-tables, and reveals a bit of the roguish . . . later.

No, well going? Probably should an have outline tried. thought Even a few moments private of or. Something to who loyally my readers show came to this with the page expectation, right wrong under, write hard I could, as true, and prepared work to be all that it takes day, what! I’m a little unhappy for myself with. My editor is with for myself for way unhappy me. This very is badly. see Got it published too SOON. my mom, my sisters, people I came up with, other writers, anybody reading this! peeps in the 210,,

Can I get a word count?

Damn. There’s no way 573 makes 1,000.

*

This column was not my best work. My readers know this wasn’t the real me. They know I’ll return. I’ve got to go back to the usage dictionary. Yes, I’m angry with myself! There, I wrote it. That means y’all better not be mad with this effort or you’ll look like bullies for piling-on a man when he’s down.

Clever, eh?

Wait, I got lots more.

Where were these words, this clarity, when I was supposed to be writing an original commentary in my weekly column?

(Editor’s note: One more nasty, sarcastic or satirical comment about Bart’s writing, and I’ll block you. After what he’s given this column? Show some damn respect!)

One bad column. One column, one, where maybe I was distracted by assembling that Ikea chair I got yesterday. A column where maybe there’s a weighin this afternoon, 20 minutes away, for a Monday night card, and it’s at 1 P.M., and I’ve already got plans for tonight, and so there may not be time to give this column my everything.

I’ll be back. Next Monday. Y’all gonna see. The readers who stand by me, I give them nothing but love from the 210. The doubters ain’t gonna win this one. Hell no, I’m not about to stop writing. I’m a write till the day I die.

There’s nothing else in the world I’m good at. And I’ve got too much free time.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday in Las Vegas, undefeated American heavyweight Deontay Wilder saw his 32-fight knockout streak come to a quiet end against Bermane Stiverne. Expected to force a violent conclusion to the match, regardless of victor, Wilder instead cautiously and exhaustedly made his way to the closing bell and won a wide decision, 120-107, 119-108 and 118-109. Stiverne, who wore a title of some sort during his ringwalk, fought like a man trained and conditioned for an entirely different affair than which one his contract mandated.

And American boxing fans, in all our learned helplessness, dutifully expressed pride, surprise and admiration for our new partial titlist in the heavyweight division, saying things like: “I was really impressed with Wilder’s intelligence, prudence and temperament.”

It’s incredible to’ve been reduced to this. There was genuine interest in Wilder’s match with Stiverne, despite a half-full and probably papered MGM Grand Garden Arena, and none of that interest, not an iota of it, reduced to someone’s hankering for a show of intelligence, prudence or temperament. Not a jot. Much as boxing fans were instructed to do in November immediately after a man named “Krusher” imperiled not once a quinquagenarian in 36 minutes of trying, though, Saturday’s match, a frankly dull 12-rounder, caused us to cast about for expressions of marvel at a fight, expected to be violent and shortlived, that heard its final bell.

That result is not incredible or amazing for having such a minority of prognosticators predict it; that result is disappointing in a fundamental way. The reason no one predicted a decision victory was because American fans wanted so badly for someone new to emerge in the heavyweight division, someone American, and Wilder would be that man, decapitating the crafty Stiverne sometime between early in the fight and its opening bell. Instead, American fans’ ardor gets obtunded, once more, to protesting we didn’t expect what we got, though, really, it’s for the better, I mean what did we know, actually, in an odd sort of way, the disciplined, cerebral decision victory was truly much much better for everyone involved than the violent knockout we begged for.

Does any other sport demand from its spectators so much narrative-lugging, forgetfulness and self-loathing?

There is a large difference, though, between being disappointed in Saturday’s fight and being disappointed in Deontay Wilder. I sat ringside in Tucson for Wilder’s sixth and seventh professional matches, first round knockouts of men with a cumulative record of 4-6-2, and had anyone told me – and possibly someone did – Wilder would someday be a titlist in the heavyweight division, I would have scoffed at the suggestion, made a corruption quip, or predicted his matchmaker, whoever that might be, would go in Canastota on a first ballot. Wilder had size, a right hand, and athleticism, but otherwise he was like every other American heavyweight who tries boxing after washing-out of two or three other sports. Wilder was an athlete, ever and again, not a fighter.

That assertion stands, however much Wilder continues to exceed initial expectations. One other thing: Wilder is a charismatic guy you’re right to cheer for.

Before Wilder’s seventh prizefight, a round 1 shellacking of a lad named Travis Allen, colleague and friend Norm Frauenheim agreed to a friendly over/under bet placed at 90 seconds. While I no longer recall which way Norm went, I do recall this: When the official time got read, “one minute and thirty seconds of the first round,” we needed a tiebreaker. It seemed only just to ask Wilder’s opinion. When he visited press row, we sought his counsel, since his knockout came right on our number. Wilder looked down, pondered the question, looked up, shined his infectious smile, and said, “I would have bet the under.”

That a man with such limited boxing experience and skill has parlayed his size and athleticism to a title of some kind, in a way none of thousands of other similar such American heavyweights has managed, is wonderful for Wilder. His personal achievement should be applauded, and Wilder himself should be supported. To pretend Saturday was a victory for our struggling sport, though, is an absurdity.

Let us set our pompoms down once more, too, and reflect on how unseemly the final two minutes of Saturday’s match were when set against the first 30 seconds of postfight celebration. Wilder leaned and clinched and clung and absorbed Stiverne’s ineffective aggressiveness for most of the final 120 seconds of Saturday’s match, doing a successful imitation of a man riding a nag named Exhaustion in circles round Death’s abode. Then the final bell rang, manager Al Haymon’s flunky reported his dancing shoes to the blue mat, and Wilder came alive. As Muhammad Ali rope-a-doped George Foreman in 1974, Deontay Wilder rope-a-doped Showtime viewers in 2015. His fatigue was a ruse! He wasn’t really too weariful to stop Stiverne; he was conserving energy for a ferocious postfight microphone session. In an extraordinary display of incongruence, Wilder, who’d appeared not to take a single Stiverne punch personally in seven minutes, unleashed a wrathful display on Showtime’s innocent and defenseless cameras, whacking his own chest and roaring about his boxing ability, before turning his suddenly ungovernable rage towards press row, where he repeatedly shouted haterswards: “Who can’t box?”

One snickers to think what Wladimir Klitschko – who, on a bad night, wouldn’t need 10 rounds to ice both Stiverne and Wilder – thought of America’s savage new champion of the heavyweight division.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Editor’s note: For part 2, please click here.

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MARFA, Texas – This city sits in a little known region of our country called “Big Bend” for the curve the Rio Grande takes. There is a national park that boasts Texas’ most challenging and beloved hiking trail to the top of the Chisos Mountains, but the basin of the Chisos is a 2 1/2 hour drive, despite being only three towns over. Texas is secluded or lonely, depending what one makes of solitude, and rugged.

Marfa is the town 20th century minimalist sculptor Donald Judd chose for the creation and display of his work. While he divided his time between Texas and New York, he prized the light and vastness of the American Southwest, and today Marfa is both a town and a Judd museum of sorts.

Donald Judd was more than indifferent to art museums; he was hostile to them. He recognized the de facto mediocrity of anything done by a committee, an arrangement in which, by definition, consensus is more important than quality – where the lowliest members win by filibuster, and the one or two talented members either acquiesce from exhaustion or resign immediately. Judd did not trust either the curatorial process, and he sure as hell did not trust the light in which his works would be displayed.

Judd’s academic work at Columbia University was in philosophy, not art, and his promiscuity of literary taste – he read both widely and deeply – gave him an iconoclastic bent not appreciated by the artistic community, which in its tastes and associations reliably followed and follows the academy’s definition for diversity: People who look different and think the same. Judd, contrarily, understood the scandalous diversity of unfettered human thought. He read in English, Spanish and German, one notes from the volumes on the pinewood shelves he had made for his library, and perhaps a dialect of sorts, too: Catalan.

There was in Mr. Judd’s library a disproportionate emphasis on Barcelona, City of Gaudi.

Judd wrote widely, more than 600 articles of artistic criticism, and made acquiantenceships and often friendships with his subjects. He called his own forays in painting “sophomoric” and soon abandoned the medium altogether, moving from painting’s illusion of three-dimensionality to the actual third dimension via mixed media and the minimalist sculptures for which he would gain recognition and celebrity and a fortune.

Judd was right not to trust museums. Seen in museums, held in isolation from their comrades, hung on a wall among complicated paintings or stood on a floor among other busy creations, Judd’s simple shapes and flawless lines can look ironic, lazy and dull. Seen within edifices he selected for their light and spatial properties, seen in other words, in the exact single spot on earth Judd intended his works to be seen, Judd’s minimalist sculptures are another thing altogether. They glow. One looks forward to each new roomful of them. Bathed in natural light that descends at the artist’s chosen angle, these metal boxes and fibonacci progressions invigorate the spirit with their perfection.

Judd did not make mistakes, and in this way, like his works, he was unnatural in his creative process. Every room among the many properties Judd acquired in this small Texas town – population 2,500, 200 miles east of El Paso, 400 miles west of San Antonio – whether a studio or gallery or architectural workspace, contains somewhere a bed, as if to conquer nature’s most subversive tactic: fatigue.

Judd broke with a foundation he created over touring works of his he felt were permanently installed and not to be moved. He believed passionately an artist is responsible for the space in which his pieces are seen as he is responsible for the quality of the pieces themselves. It is maniacal, probably, but it is also great – and when given the choice between sublime experiences born of mania and mediocre experiences born of soundness, one should choose the former, or choose to stay in his hotel room watching television (the latter).

Juan Manuel Marquez – that is who came to mind as I stood in Judd’s library, squinting to see if there might be a column to make of the experience. Marquez, because summoning in cold blood an offensive precision and perfection of attack is not natural – whereas flinching and feinting and desperately endeavoring to avoid an attack from man or beast is exceedingly natural, however efficiently performed. And also the creation of a specific space in which one might exhibit his work, a space that shapes the art made for it, over time, more than any single work in the space itself, and this idea of Judd’s is large and flexible enough to comprise everything from an airplane-hangar-cum-museum to a prizefighting career to a single prizefight to a column ostensibly dedicated to prizefighting’s celebration: Take as much care with creating a space for your work as your work itself.

No one who comes to Marfa or visits Chinati Foundation comes away from the experience thinking: If only Judd had cared a little more, this would be perfect. Notice, too, no commentator questions the precision of Marquez’s punch placement or where he chooses to invest his offensive output in the early parts of a prizefight, creating, as it were, a space in which his finishing blows might find greatest effect – because “Dinamita” is a historic closer.

And as this space, too, continues to grow in directions senseless as they are satisfying, each contribution must find its own way . . .

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Editor’s note: For Part 4, click here.

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Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Editor’s note: For part 1, please click here.

*

The week that began in February, ended in March and became the pinnacle of HBO boxing’s viewership feats in 2014 did not fool any of its participants or witnesses and still hasn’t. The ratings phenom who is Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. is not phenomenal at all when his numbers are put against nearly any other televised athletic competition, and his rematch with Bryan Vera in March was treated with contempt by most aficionados who treated it at all.

Then there was its choice of venue, a city in Texas – most despised of all boxing states by pundits who do not reside here. Chavez returned to Texas, place of lost drug tests and delayed weighins and scorekeepers decried by Paulie Malignaggi, to ensure he was given benefits of the doubt California and Nevada occasionally show dereliction in granting Son of the Legend, but this time he didn’t much need them.

There was a doubt in no one’s mind but Vera’s and maybe Ronnie Shields’ that a semiserious Chavez would beat Vera convincingly, and what suspense remained after the weighin expired with Chavez’s tardy arrival at the arena, as there were rising doubts at ringside he would bother being in his dressing room at his HBO- or commission-appointed time. Chavez does not care a whit about American television; he knows the herculean efforts made to keep him off premium-cable airwaves during the early part of his career, he knows his ratings happen in spite of HBO’s coverage of him and not because of it, he knows fully half his American audience watches solely in the hopes his ass gets beaten nearly to death, and he knows 90 percent of the other half of his viewers do so out of abiding loyalty to the Legend, not Son of.

Chavez Jr. is a millionaire despite his worst efforts, and he is just aware enough to be tickled by it. If you need a reason to like the kid, try this: He’s made absurdity his business partner.

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The week that began in February, ended in March and became the pinnacle of HBO boxing’s viewership feats in 2014 gave the IABWA an occasion for its first meeting of the year. The association, such as it is, was born of Kelsey McCarson’s perennial rejection by the BWAA’s membership committee, and it was born of camaraderie, not protest; the folks who run the BWAA are for the most part good and decent, and Kelsey is good and decent, and if the two sides ever had aligned it would have been happier for both but much sadder for Kelsey’s followers on Twitter who so enjoy Kelsey’s satirical criticisms of the true boxing writers association.

We are all better and funnier than our public faces, and this holds particularly true for boxing writers – a group of talented and often hurt people describing other talented and hurt people hurting people.

There may be no better place than ringside, whether in Michigan or Colorado or Arizona, but in San Antonio, the next best place is McNay Art Museum, The McNay, where I took my friend and houseguest David Greisman hours before Chavez-Vera 2. David liked the pieces by Picasso, Matisse, Renoir and Mondrian well enough, but none of them resonated with him quite nearly like lines from his beloved E. E. Cummings do.

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The week that began in February, ended in March and became the pinnacle of HBO boxing’s viewership feats in 2014 saw more of Russian light heavyweight titlist Sergey Kovalev than one anticipated. He was at a Doubletree mixer with promoters and managers and HBO handlers, he was at a special-access dinner at A—-r, he was ringside at Alamodome, and he was at Mi Tierra restaurant after Chavez finished beating Vera. He wore a full beard and showed a Russian interpretation of a trait once attributed to American President Richard Nixon: His smile and his face did not appear to be in the same place at the same time.

Kovalev sold menace, mostly, and the more menacing for failing to be in any coherent way friendly while publicly playing a friendly person. That he was later unable to beat Bernard Hopkins to unconsciousness tarnished his menacing image more than anyone now admits and few will realize for the next two or three years of relentless HBO promotion, and the contortions Kovalev’s absence of menace in November bent aficionados into would be amusing were they not tragic:

“No, no, a knockout, what? No! I wanted to see Kovalev cautiously outpoint a man about to turn 50. I wasn’t sure he could do it, and man, when he did, it made my year!”

Right, guys.

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The week that began in February, ended in March and became the pinnacle of HBO boxing’s viewership feats in 2014 was seen by most who gathered round the Alamodome for the Friday weighin as the starter’s pistol for another decent year to come. Had you asked any of them if they believed the next evening’s match would be viewed by more HBO subscribers than another, to a person, they would have chuckled or said no or chuckled and said no. It was a testament to 2014’s overarching badness that in almost 300 days of trying, HBO made not one, more-enticing offering to its subscribers than Chavez-Vera 2.

The incongruent wardrobe of my return to television beneath a shower of ferocious South Texas sunlight brought to mind an old Chris Rock bit about a Sir Mix-A-Lot video in which the rapper wears a mink coat at a Seattle carwash where everyone else dances in bikinis. But never mind that.

People look to experts for authority. I was authoritative.

And just about perfectly wrong from beginning to end.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

The week that began in February, ended in March and became the pinnacle of HBO boxing’s viewership feats in 2014 began on a Thursday with dinner at La Gloria restaurant in the Pearl Brewery complex of the northern part of downtown San Antonio, a dinner that marked the first of the year’s biannual meetings of the Irish-American Boxing Writers Association and concluded with a trip to the airport to retrieve a perennial winner of awards from the Boxing Writers Association of America.

Those 7,323 of us gathered at cavernous old Alamodome on March 1 were wholly unaware we were witnessing HBO history when Mexican “Son of the Legend” Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. beat up Austin’s Bryan Vera in a super middleweight match legally conducted below the 168-pound limit, but we were. It was that rarest-of-all historic event: One forgotten entirely for nine months by its witnesses. Not until HBO announced a few weeks back no boxing broadcast of this lamentable year surpassed in viewership Chavez’s sole match of 2014 did we, its witnesses, realize our great good fortune.

Those who might otherwise conflate the words historic and historical, take note: Chavez Jr.-Vera 2 was historic because every time Son of the Legend dons the gloves, something “famous or important in history, or potentially so” – and do mind that last clause – happens, and it was historical because HBO’s announcing not one of its boxing broadcasts in the final 297 days of the year had more viewers marked on HBO’s enduring record that Chavez Jr.-Vera 2 was indeed “of or concerning history.”

Forget not, either, this historic and historical broadcast featured Mexican Orlando Salido’s relentless assault on the protective cup of an undefeated Ukrainian, Vasyl Lomachenko, who, it turned out, was fighting for a title in only his second professional match that was actually his eighth.

There was a prefight promoter meet-and-greet followed by a special-access dinner that Friday, too, with Sergey Kovalev, the Russian light heavyweight who would decision while barely imperiling a 49 5/6-year-old Bernard Hopkins in November.

Friday’s weigh-in, the most suspenseful part of Chavez-Vera 2, found a hardworking friend of mine, and co-founder of the IABWA, who now has more readers on Bleacher Report than all my other hardworking friends put together, Kelsey McCarson, filming a preview of Saturday’s matches, a preview I happily participated in, looking stupendous enough to gain international acclaim as a boxing fashionista.

And yet, the best part of the weekend that brought HBO’s most-viewed boxing broadcast of 2014 was my houseguest and fellow Monday columnist, and perennial BWAA-award recipient, David Greisman.

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The week that began in February, ended in March and became the pinnacle of HBO boxing’s viewership feats in 2014 personally marked an enduring departure from considering seriously coverage of our beloved sport, though that marking went initially unmarked.

It was born of lost access: Nine years, 450 weekly columns, 83 ringside fight reports, 28 articles for The Ring magazine and website, and nine writing awards from the BWAA, all, were replaced in 2014 by a simpleton’s rating system that sat me far enough from the ring to make accurate reporting impossible, hundreds of feet farther from the ring than ever I had been previously, including my first credential in 2005, when my readership comprised fewer than 10 friends and familiars. The nature of boxing credentials, ever impenetrably arbitrary, met in 2014 the budding trend of diminishing ringside seats and an automaton’s reliance on site-traffic ratings – which might begin a meritocracy if such things were not open to such naked manipulation, #PacquiaoWillFightMayweather – and brought our sport ever closer to the promoters’ nirvana of promoters’ employees exclusively covering promoters’ events, with a definition for promoters expanded to include cable-television networks, as it should be evermore.

There were fairminded concerns for Bryan Vera’s health, when the remarkably unserious Chavez who nevertheless missed Vera with hardly one punch in their first match arrived at Friday’s weighin for their rematch a half pound below a limit he ate right through in 2013, but those concerns were only slightly well-placed. Trainer Ronnie Shields praised himself for revising mightily the style Vera arrived in Shields’ Houston with – and Vera’s own postfight allusions to needing to become a smarter fighter did not belie Shields’ praise for Shields’ work – but Vera’s defense was porous, still, in San Antonio, porous as it was in California months before, though Vera’s pride and chin were stout as ever, thankfully for aficionados who did not wish to see Vera’s candle snuffed by Chavez.

Coincidentally, the wisest act I took the entire weekend was snuffing in a booth at The Esquire a Friday evening PED debate between David and Kelsey, rescuing Kelsey’s wife and me from hours more of a topic no more likely to find resolution in 2014 than it was in 2013 or 2012 or 2011 or 2010.

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The week that began in February, ended in March and became the pinnacle of HBO boxing’s viewership feats in 2014 marked the beginning of the end of Son of the Legend’s affiliation with promoter Top Rank, though no one imagined it possible in San Antonio.

Instead, gathered members of the media were fed a report Chavez Jr. was offered by Bob Arum, earlier on fightday, a match with Kazakh middleweight titlist, and HBO junior middleweight and middleweight and super middleweight champion, Gennady “GGG” Golovkin. Chavez, who has sparred enough with Golovkin to know two things – Golovkin would likely win a decision, and Golovkin’s made-for/by-television power is unlikely to travel to 168 pounds with him – chose to request via his new manager a pay increase, promptly and publicly and loudly rejected by Arum, before Chavez signed with his other new manager, Al Haymon.

At the Kovalev meet-and-greet before the special-access Kovalev dinner, I handed the Russian’s Russian manager a copy of an issue of The Ring magazine that featured my 1,800-word treatment of his fighter, and he regarded it with as much interest as a lion looking at buttered popcorn.

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Editor’s note: Part 2 will be posted next Monday.

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Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Editor’s note: Part 1 can be found here.

*

Every kid under the age of 25 on the Metro de Madrid has Sergio Martinez’s haircut, and while none is likely imitating Martinez so much as imitating Martinez’s influences, whoever they are, an hour on the Madrid metro – with aspiring supermodels, male and female, all practicing their vacuous look, that unique fixture of Homo sapiens, the ability to will oneself into a countenance that appears too stupid to formulate an emotion even – reminds any interested onlooker boxing could have done many times worse than we did with Martinez. He may not be missed, but we should still be grateful we had him.

That brings us, somehow, to Muhammad Ali, a man who at 72 was admitted recently to an undisclosed hospital to be treated for pneumonia. No worries, says Ali’s spokesman – as apparently Ali’s malady was caught early, and besides, how serious can pneumonia be? For a man who has suffered Ali’s afflictions, pneumonia is quite serious indeed, and aficionados should expect Sunday’s rosey prognosis to worsen steadily in the days to come, and if not this time round than certainly in the next year or so.

This will not be pleasant. In the days or weeks or months to come, expect every man with a right hand he can raise and make in the shape of a fist to come forward, in as public a manner as possible, to tell us his affiliation with “The Champ.” The tributes will be universally embellished and self-important, a million or more tales subtitled “My Time with The Greatest,” without one telling us anything we do not already know about Ali. From this legacy-borrowing stampede, expect one knight to rise on rear legs and make a social-media scene about Ali’s marital infidelities, known and otherwise, and watch with awe as, just that quickly, the myriad of Twitter feminists, female and male, pivot from Cosby Watch to leave their lasting mark, finally, by undermining the world’s memory of an icon.

They’ll not leave a mark because they never really do; their audience’s collective attention span can be measured in minutes, not decades, and some new tragedy or travesty will have their anxiety redirected in a fortnight or less.

What will remain months and years and decades after the souvenir gatherers are gone is Ali’s legacy with us, the dwindling number of persons who care about prizefighting with any measurable frequency, and Ali’s legacy with us will begin with 7-2 (4 KOs), Ali’s record against prime versions of Sonny Liston, Joe Frazier, Ken Norton and George Foreman. Unlike those who might tomorrow sue posterity for greatness when their careers soon conclude, Ali fought four great prizefighters an aggregate of nine times. He made real fights with other great men, yanking his legacy from the hypothetical realm in which today’s largest draw resides, with his empty blather about alphabetized sides and alphabetized titles, dotingly broadcasted via shameless interviews no one believes any longer.

In a different astonishing interview last week, the president of HBO Sports told The Ring he is “thrilled” with his network’s coverage of boxing in 2014. Evidently, it is difficult for him to imagine how his network could do better with our sport in 2015, and well it ought be: Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. versus Bryan Vera II in San Antonio, a Boxing After Dark undercard match in nearly any other year, or a Latin Fury headliner, set a mark of viewership-enormity HBO managed not to surpass in nine subsequent months of trying. Incredibly, not even Gennady Golovkin’s record-breaking performance in Carson, Calif., the one where Golovkin devastated the fragile psyche of that guy who lost to Chavez Jr. in 2012, could unseat “Son of the Legend” from his brink-pink throne, or lift the cannabis wreath from his head.

While Chavez may not fight again for a while – a common benefit of signing with Al Haymon – HBO should hurry its cameras to Verona, NY, next month, as Vera, one half of HBO’s Broadcast of 2014, will be in action with Willie Monroe Jr., and anyone who doubts more “thrilling” things will be in store lacks the imagination to run HBO Sports.

It’s all spires now, friends, and some of them come with crossing bridges: “Son of the Legend” would be continuing his reign of terror over the middleweight division, entering the ring to giggles, proudly wearing round his bunching waist the WBC’s gaudy, cream-of-green strap at catchweights from 170 pounds to 200, today, were it not for Sergio Martinez, who did a favor to whatever seriousness remains about our sport when, in 2012, Martinez stood on his shot knee and fought Chavez off him. We now know Chavez would have whupped the broken Martinez in a rematch, and with a genuine ticketseller and viewerseducer like “Son of the Legend” in its stable, why, HBO might not have shown what noteworthy imagination it has employed discovering Gennady Golovkin.

However poorly the network now broadcasts boxing, it makes good documentaries, for the most part, and last week’s premiere of “Tapia” was not an exception to a record that is no longer quite exceptional as it was. The story of Johnny Tapia is familiar to all aficionados, of course, but “Tapia” is somewhat predictable even for those unfamiliar with his story; the documentary follows an arc one recognizes every step of the way, and the hero’s demise is preordained as his ascent. It is not a causal observation, though, to say the movie’s most intensely watchable parts comprise footage from Tapia’s championship career.

It is quite possible, in fact, the highlights from Tapia’s matches with Danny Romero and Paulie Ayala mark the highest-quality, competitive fighting seen on HBO in 2014 – with all due respect, of course, to Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. . . .

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Editor’s note: For Part 3, click here.

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Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry–

BARCELONA – At the metaphorical center of this autonomous place on the Mediterranean Sea, an ostensibly Spanish city much nearer France than Madrid, stands La Sagrada Familia basilica, masterwork of its city’s greatest architect, Antoni Gaudí i Cornet, known the world over as Gaudí, a man whose patronymic bears a curious resemblance to the derisive modifier “gaudy.” His edifice has been under continual construction for 132 years, and today cranes fly hundreds of feet in the air all round its untouchable spires, attesting to a full hardhat crew whose business-hours labor ceases but once monthly, for the sole Catholic mass the basilica hosts.

There appears no coherent plan for the cathedral though construction is slated to complete, supposedly, in 15 years; La Sagrada Familia simply grows higher and more unique and more astounding with each passing generation of Catalans set to work on it – unified by one theme: a pursuit of beauty. If it has proved a wondrous, unpredictable approach to the church’s many columns, it shall prove itself as an idea, here, too, in this single and singular column.

So begins Column without end, a series that shall continue until it doesn’t and shall happen whenever boxing supplies inadequate material or ample material inadequate for sagacious commentary or, frankly, any commentary whatever. There were five or more boxing matches Saturday on two cards in the United States, televised simultaneously once more by America’s two premium cable networks, both cards came from Las Vegas, Twitter reported, and excepting only Timothy Bradley’s characteristically fine effort, none warrants the commentary its network might insist it does.

It never should have entered the charters of HBO or Showtime to develop talent on their airwaves – if promoters are good for anything, and but for Top Rank, they probably are not – it might be the development of fighters, the making of them ready, that is, for a chance on HBO or Showtime. That makes me sound old fashioned, I know, a fossil clinging to some sentimental sediment, some sediment of sentiment, about the the very word “premium” – one that in its adjectival case remains, in dictionaries if not as a modifier for cable networks, denotative of exceptional quality or greater value, but tiresomely often is left by our premium boxing providers as a noun that denotes a prize, bonus, or award given them in the form of an absurdly large monthly bill. Instead, HBO has put itself deeply in the talent-development business, calling its picks for future stars and then making them so, or anyway insisting it has, while Showtime has lost its way altogether.

It is neither channel’s fault boxing gyms are shuttered or shuttering in American cities where they long thrived, but it is both networks’ faults a fraction of one percent of prizefighters have been so grossly enriched by network money they devastated boxing’s ecosystem in a way a generation’s repairs will, or would, not remedy. Ever and again and however often it must be repeated: The consumer’s role is not to justify vendors’ misdeeds, and a boxing aficionado neither should endeavor to justify the era’s two best men not-fighting each other nor waste a moment’s energy absorbing any press release, either by the press or its owners, seeking to explain what boxing historians will rightly conclude was unpardonable, blemishing into perpetuity the legacies of Floyd Mayweather, Bob Arum, Manny Pacquiao, HBO Sports and Showtime. In that order.

If Saturday Amir Khan made himself Mayweather’s likely May opponent, a fight Saul “Canelo” Alvarez would be well-advised to join Miguel Cotto in confronting headon, it excites no one’s soul but Kahn’s, and yet, a select bunch of knowledgeable folks has long asserted Kahn’s style should trouble Mayweather’s more than anyone else’s, including Pacquiao’s. Kahn has no chin, true, but he is deep enough in his career, now, to know that and skir anyone who would test it, as Mayweather’s accuracy could not help but do, and when was the last time an opponent strategized to fight Floyd in flight from the power of “Money”? Kahn’s footwork is skittish, amateurish in a way proportionate to the peril he senses, but Mayweather is well past his physical prime, and if he somehow convinces manager Al Haymon to allow him a fight away from MGM Grand, in London, say, where someone other than Haymon controls the ticket-spraying nozzle on the secondary market, a profoundly unlikely event, Mayweather might not receive by default the scoring of any round in which he is not felled outright, and that could conceivably make for an intriguing three or four rounds relative to contemporary prizefighting’s eroded baseline.

None of this will happen, of course – did Amir Khan just fill Wembley Stadium to decision Devon Alexander? would Mayweather consider making a fight outside the compliant jurisdiction of his handpicked athletic commission? is Justin Bieber enough of a royalist to return to his pal’s side as a pawn on the other side of the pond? – but it cannot be wrong to make a lunge for 15 seconds of SEO celebrity by driving traffic to this column via “Wembley” and “Bieber”, can it?

Oh, enough – this city is too marvelous, funky, offset and unique to burden its dateline with another syllable about any of the prizefighters whose names appear above (except maybe Bradley’s).

La Sagrada Familia basilica, during the sun’s 90-minute descent to the horizon, when its light hits the enormous and numerous expanses of stained glass that adorn the basilica’s facade, and its tons of stone columns suddenly become skybound popsicles, limegreen and watermelonred and orangeorange, is unlike any other place one might experience and the very thing for which a word like “sublime” was coined. When one sees its nearly endless spires from inside, its glorious and absurd crucificial adornment that makes the slain Christ appear in parachute to the altar, and how its glass transforms the metal of its organs’ pipes to iridescence, one experiences gratitude more than another emotion. One becomes thankful he is experiencing it, thankful for what optimism it induces: There may be more experiences like this to come, and I can find them . . .

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Editor’s note: Part 2 can be found here.

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Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday at CenturyLink Center in Omaha, Nebraskan lightweight champion Terence Crawford decisioned Mexican Raymundo Beltran lopsidedly, 119-109 and 118-110 and 119-109, in a match that was not large as its superlatives but demonstrated Crawford should stay at lightweight, which he won’t, Beltran was overrated, which no rater will admit, and Crawford should be 2014’s fighter of the year, an award that instead will go to a Russian who decisioned a 49-year-old last month.

In this, the final month of this, one hell of a dreadful year for our beloved sport, there are clear factions established among aficionados, anymore, and these factions predict with unfortunate accuracy the way each HBO main event will be seen. There are the sturdy optimists, identifiable by their collective disgust, creatively and diversely expressed; and there are the evangelists, using to describe today’s middling fare what words once adorned feats by Marvelous Marvin Hagler and Roberto Duran – and almost always with a financial incentive for imposing such overwrought modifiers.

The sturdy optimists saw Saturday on HBO two mediocre featherweights followed by one good lightweight and one very good lightweight. The sturdy optimists, who are optimistic for their refusal to call a counterfeit the true coin, saw nothing great happen. The evangelists, contrarily, saw the possible future of Puerto Rico prizefighting score a questionable draw with a Russian fighter – and if this year taught us little more, it taught us a former-Soviet-bloc fighter has amazingness as his birthright – followed by a future great with every tool establishing lightweight lineality against a very good contender (who should be champion!) before 12,000 Nebraskans, which is an astounding number when one considers it is 30-percent more fans than Gennady Golovkin’s record breaker of a ticketselling feat comprised in October.

The less written about undefeated Russian featherweight Evgeny Gradovich and undefeated Puerto Rican Jayson Velez’s remaining undefeated against one another, the better – as each man would be better served fighting the other man six more times than getting axed by Jamaican Nicholas Walters, and so let’s just wait for their third rematch before returning to them.

Terence Crawford is much better than most of his peers, both better at fighting than they are and better at interesting the townspeople of his native city in prizefighting, and promoter Top Rank deserves credit for working to build Crawford as an attraction in Omaha, a city not identifiable by anyone as interested in boxing till recently. Crawford’s large ticket sales in his hometown are surprising as the paucity of tickets he would sell in Las Vegas if he took his show on the road, which he oughtn’t do.

Crawford needs offensive-minded opponents to entertain best, and the more offensively basic and defensively suspect such athletic men are when they move forward, the better. Raymundo Beltran, a Mexican who fights out of Arizona and California, often as a sparring partner to the stars, was nearly right for Crawford’s style as Yuriorkis Gamboa was for Crawford’s ascension-making performance in June. Beltran fought gamely but ultimately succumbed to a sparring-partner ethic that makes meaningful effort, and the good work it gives one’s customer, nearly valuable as victory. When Beltran whacked away at Ricky Burns a couple Septembers ago, he used his Mexican suspicion of others’ acclaim to test the Scotsman and find him wanting, before treating Burns like an impostor. Saturday Beltran began with the same Mexican suspicion, one that grows in another man’s hometown, serendipitously enough for Mexican prizefighters and aficionados, to test Crawford, and land what was a jarring righthand in round 3.

But this time the man across from Beltran was a customer, not an impostor, and it remanded Beltran to nine rounds of hard labor and meaningful effort and what satisfaction and acclaim he received immediately afterwards despite losing 10 rounds unanimously. So dismal has boxing become that Crawford’s sporadic efforts to knock-out Beltran in rounds 11 and 12 met with near breathlessness from HBO’s broadcasting crew, as if endeavoring to land the decisive blow on a man whom you’ve outclassed for a solid half hour is a new and abstract form of courageousness. Alas. Evangelists are not culpable for lapses in quality control; their job is enthusiasm, not discernment, and their craft is craftily wording homages and tributes to whomever gets placed before them, not choosing those men.

Now Terence Crawford, who has the skills, potentially, to be a great lightweight but lacks the physical strength to be more than a good junior welterweight and a mediocre welterweight is summoned to 140 pounds, which is unfortunate because he fought Saturday at 153 pounds and did not carry in either fist power enough to stretch a man who began his career at 126. Barring nifty matchmaking, Crawford may well have scored his career’s last meaningful knockout in the very year aficionados happened to get excited about him, a phenomenon becoming too common in prizefighting to be called phenomenal.

It is hard to imagine Sergey Kovalev’s decisioning of a 49-year-old Bernard Hopkins evinces greater merit than Crawford’s three decisive victories over men in the primes of their careers, but as Kovalev’s decisive victory happened in front of more American boxing writers than the aggregate of Crawford’s three victories, well, one needn’t be a pessimist to know which way the nod will go, as the optimists look middle-distance, detached, and the evangelists make sure someone is looking at them for a quiet fist pump.

*

Editor’s note: After a one-week Spanish hiatus, Bart Barry’s column will return on Dec. 15.

By Bart Barry–

FORT WORTH, Texas – The understated perfection of architect Louis I. Kahn’s soft marble masterpiece, Kimbell Art Museum, known round the world as The Kimbell, is so palpable one cannot fathom hoarding its charms, if architectural charms were somehow hoardable, and feels a compulsion to share. Long a fan of friend and mentor Thomas Hauser’s accounts of meals enjoyed between his mother and sundry boxing personalities, I thought to have my own mother, with whom I shared The Kimbell’s charms Saturday, participate in this column in a sort of “Watching Pacquiao-Algieri with Mom” bent. I am evidently incapable with coordinating as this piece shall prove itself with the third-person.

Saturday Manny Pacquiao made an inspired sparring session in gray Macao or Macau, in the same country, China, whose capital is either Peking or Beijing, with Long Island junior welterweight Chris Algieri, a match Pacquiao won by a football-like points spread, dropping Algieri numerous times upon his metalblue trunks and allowing Algieri a chance to win the fight not once. Even before receipts are counted this event should be called plainly what it was for its hundreds of thousands of viewers: a failure.

But I was sound asleep by the time Manny Pacquiao began his long-awaited ringwalk through the cheering throngs of Cotai Arena. My laptop, whose volume I muted for the third undercard scrap, due mostly to my bottomless indifference for the future of Chinese boxing under Freddie Roach’s tutelage, flashed what high-definition images TopRank.tv sent its way, I do not doubt, as my mom, sporadically awake through the main event, later confirmed, in a faux if empathetic enthusiasm for her son’s favorite sport, “Pacquiao won!” But I saw none of it. I do not recall so much as stirring from my hardwon slumber, despite a Friday payment of $59 to Top Rank, to see the event for which I’d paid such a stipend because, truth be told, I paid that stipend for little but plausible deniability to you, dear reader, when I was unable to write intelligibly of the last meaningful fight of 2014, this, the most meaningless year of boxing I’ve yet covered.

And I will not cover three such years in-a-row.

Sometime after midnight, when I awoke to a shinyblue announcement from TopRank.tv my event had ended, I panicked for all of a second. Then my fright subsided, as I realized a column about not-watching Pacquiao-Algieri, at this point, likely would be more entertaining than watching Pacquiao-Algieri proved. Once panic subsided, again instantly since little written about this sport, anymore, would be consequential if you were paying to read it – which, coincidentally, you are not – I found a videostream on YouTube of a guy recording on his cell camera the very same TopRank.tv feed I purchased and used to remedy my hypothetical insomnia, as well as the hypothetical insomnia of my hypothetical children and their hypothetical children and so on for three generations more (if Twitter accounts of Pacquiao-Algieri are believed), and that stream, grainy and skipping, showed me what needed showing, which was very much not much at all.

Mark me down with the other naifs who believed Algieri might have a solution for Pacquiao, long and skittish as Algieri was, able with leftward wheeling as he was, and was a little surprised the Long Islander won nary an exchange, while losing quite a few rounds by more than his gentlemanly one point. Nothing about big-league kickboxing, as it turned out, prepared Algieri for big-league boxing, and what disparate rhythms and sophisticated traps a man of Pacquiao’s extraordinary experience and accomplishments might access in milliseconds in any ringside emergency – nothing of whose sort Algieri managed to create.

Disrupted. That was how Algieri looked on a video stream just as disrupted by whatever guerilla band succeeded several times in hijacking the internet server in whichever agrarian wasteland my anonymous YouTube postfight broadcaster uploaded his stream from; watching a master prizefighter like Juan Manuel Marquez time and occasionally neutralize Pacquiao, watching a fantastic athlete like Timothy Bradley survive Pacquiao’s onslaught after being rendered stationary, both, likely convinced Chris Algieri, who, in a nod to his entire generation thus far, has a greater competence for self-belief than another activity, his athleticism, for being greater than Marquez’s, and his boxing acumen, for being greater than Bradley’s, would help him jigsaw a puzzle Pacquiao couldn’t possibly piece together.

But Algieri and his witling chief second both had it all wrong, as we all now know. Pacquiao, even at this advanced stage of his career, is still a better athlete than Bradley; Pacquiao, even when reduced to savagery, is still nearly good a technician as Marquez (even if his tactics are not transferable or teachable as the Mexican’s). Algieri is not nearly the athlete Bradley is, and no better of a technician, and Algieri is not nearly the technician Marquez is, and no better of an athlete. Algieri is a C+ prizefighter who found a perfect stylistic mesh with Ruslan Provodnikov, a Siberian with A+ power and C- everything else, finagled it to a million-dollar payday and now will recede into supporting roles on HBO and then Showtime and eventually ESPN, however much sorrowful howling or barking or squeaking Algieri’s beloved fellow Stony Brook Seawolves make when they experience their grief at losing a smug nutritionist from the pack.

Oh, what could have been is not, and meanwhile, and frankly, who cares if Pacquiao ever does fight Floyd Mayweather? Regardless how good a match the men subsequently make now, it will serve mostly as a reminder how very much was squandered by all parties in the five-year hellbroth boxing’s powerbrokers began brewing of our beloved sport in the moments that followed Pacquiao’s 2009 stoppage of Miguel Cotto. Lots can change in five years, anyway, and let me provide further proof:

In 2009, like many another boxing writer, I might have reached for the easily grasped and metaphorical cliche of Pacquiao-Algieri putting me to sleep. But it’s now 2014, and my commitment to journalism is deepened. I am a participatory journalist, in the spirit of George Plimpton or Hunter S. Thompson, and Saturday night, as it pertains to the dull affair of Pacquiao-Algieri at least, I went full-gonzo.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry

Saturday at the Venetian in Macau, Filipino Manny Pacquiao will defend his welterweight title against New Yorker Chris Algieri, a junior welterweight titlist. It is a fight somewhat intriguing because, while few aficionados imagine the match will be close, a number disagree on its likely victor.

Perspective plays a larger role than usual in determining where an aficionado finds himself on the question of Chris Algieri’s chances against Manny Pacquiao, prefight. Looking through one end of the telescope, Algieri is fully outclassed by the prizefighter after whom this era likely will be named, a man who, in going 6-2-1 (3 KOs) against the combination of Marco Antonio Barrera and Erik Morales and Juan Manuel Marquez, each a hall of famer in his prime when he fought Pacquiao, set a mark unrivaled by anyone currently plying the craft.

It is not stated often enough: Manny Pacquiao made nine matches with the best fighters in his and their best weightclasses, and six of them were rematches.

Much of what has transpired in Pacquiao’s career since his second match with Marquez, in 2008, is noteworthy for its remarkable promotion – by Bob Arum and HBO – and matchmaking by Top Rank’s brain trust. Pacquiao has grown his weight and stature by decisioning larger, slower, betterfed men than those whom he blitzed at 126 and 130 pounds. Recently Freddie Roach expressed equal parts awe and annoyance with his charge having gone to welterweight for a special-attraction purse against Oscar De La Hoya at the end of 2008, and then having been returned there nine more times.

Roach is mocking and scornful, edgier than usual, too, when he broaches the issue of Algieri’s advantage over Pacquiao in height and reach, and nutritional scholarship and culinary acumen, perhaps because Roach’s other charge, Ruslan Provodnikov, in losing a narrow decision to Algieri in June, became the New Yorker’s career springboard. Roach refuses to sing along with a promotional chorus that implies Pacquiao is new to fighting men longer than he is; forgotten to many aficionados, though fewer who were ringside at Cowboys Stadium four years ago this week, was the absurd physical superiority Antonio Margarito enjoyed against Pacquiao, the absurd chemical state into which Margarito placed himself with ephedrine and caffeine before making his ringwalk, and the absurd language Pacquiao employed in an abandoned concrete corner of Cowboys Stadium afterwards, saying Margarito hurt him badly enough with a body punch Pacquiao was lucky to have lived.

And no, Pacquiao has never been the same fighter since that match with Margarito. And no, Algieri has nowhere near Margarito’s physicality or championship experience.

The Manny Pacquiao who annihilated Ricky Hatton in 2009 would go through Chris Algieri and every male resident of his dad’s Long Island home in fewer than three rounds. That Pacquiao was, to employ trainer Nacho Beristain’s memorable phrase, “a wildcat” – and an indefatigable one at that. But the Pacquiao we last saw in April is a markedly different creature.

Five years removed from his last knockout victory, two years removed from his last knockout loss, Pacquiao now keeps a running scorecard in his head while he fights, ensuring no motion is wasted once a round is won. He’s still a man only the era’s purest offensive technician, Juan Manuel Marquez, should dare an even-terms exchange with, but he’s no longer a man who preys on timid opponents.

Algieri will be happy to use tactical timidity against Pacquiao, since not-fighting Pacquiao will discomfit Manny considerably. Algieri, as anyone near boxing is well past tired of hearing, is not a typical boxing story – though if he were the product of Harlem homelessness and a stepdad who abused him and a saintly retired cop who ran a gym in the basement of a church where he taught Chris to throw the old one-two, of course, we’d still hear he’s not the typical boxing story. It’s publicist twaddle.

Like most everything about boxing, Algieri’s likability is inversely proportionate to his distance from a ring; when he’s fighting offensive forces like Provodnikov or Pacquiao he’s quite likable, and when he’s appearing on heavily edited HBO infomercials he’s likable enough, and when he’s posting his meals and topless selfies and inspirational bromides on Twitter he is a douchebag – as the kids are saying it these days. What he has that should make him different from other of Pacquiao’s considerably better and consistently vanquished opponents, though, is a sense of entitled superiority Pacquiao may not be able to dent.

Pacquiao glides through life today, looking only forward, in a way few others can or have – though Arnold Schwarzenegger comes to mind as an analogous example. But Algieri still would not trade places with the Filipino. When Algieri says spending time round Pacquiao during their kickoff media tour convinced him he belongs in such company, there’s the faintest hint of disappointment in Algieri’s voice: I thought I would have my identity challenged enough to learn things about myself and others I didn’t already know, but, well, it turned out I was prepared for all this already, and Manny’s a good guy, I like him, and Freddie, too, honestly, even if he doesn’t like me.

Some of that really may be attributable to nutrition; coming of age when and where he did, Algieri’s access to what nutrients grow potent brains was likely greater than young Pacquiao’s and young Roach’s combined. Much of it is classifiable for the time being as luck; how certain experiences order certain person’s lives in unique ways. Little of it is attributable to what hard work and dedication American autobiographers fetishize; notice how infrequently someone like Pacquiao references his own work ethic – for coming from a place where working hard and being dedicated earn you about an extra $1/day.

Pacquiao should win Saturday, and not merely because no judge who wishes to enjoy his Sunday in Macau would score a close round for the New Yorker. Pacquiao should win Saturday, and neither fighter’s current career or life trajectories will be altered by it in the slightest.

Bart Barry can be reach via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

The most unexpected thing shared by guys who hit hardest is rarely how hard they hit or the speed of their attack. No, what surprises most about those guys is the nimbleness with which they take a backwards step the first three or four times you try to attack and smother them, their balletic willingness to move away from you in a tactical retreat and geometric adjustment that puts you at the end point of their punches. Where it hurts the most.

It was that willingness and ability with a backwards step or two, Saturday night in Atlantic City, that allowed Russian light heavyweight titlist Sergey “The Krusher” Kovalev to toss a shutout at American titlist Bernard “The Alien” Hopkins, in a unification match official scorekeepers had 120-106, 120-107 and 120-107.

Kovalev-Hopkins was, is, our sport’s fight of the year. Not its best fight, no, much nearer its worst, in fact, but the fight that best represented the state of our sport in 2014, the year a man nearing his 50th birthday challenged and imperiled himself more than any of our standard bearers in their primes. Sergey Kovalev, an elite-level fighter, was unable to knock-out Bernard Hopkins, despite trying to do so sporadically in the fight and sustainedly in its closing minutes. Hopkins is extraordinary, yes, but any path to alien extraordinariness is eased when one’s era is so fantastically ordinary.

There is a heaviness and a dullness, an ache more than a pang, about treating Saturday’s light heavyweight unification match. Postfight, the highest tribute paid its winner, a 31-year-old known as “Krusher,” was that he was disciplined in his pursuit of a 49-year-old man, that he did not do anything rash like throw a hundred punches every round or run his fellow titlist into retirement, that he demonstrated prudence in becoming the unified world champion of a storied division. So it goes this year: Prudence against a man Hopkins’ age is a blazon of excellence.

Is that revisionist? Yes, but only slightly. There was a healthy percentage of knowledgeable boxing folks, myself included, who thought Hopkins might beat Kovalev, when Saturday’s opening bell rang. But those ideas disappeared, went wanting in full, fewer than 60 seconds later. Following something like the strategy he followed against Kelly Pavlik, flying at a younger man with an unexpected aggressiveness he expected to have a disruptive effect, Hopkins wheeled and crossed-over, trying to hit Kovalev on his second or third step. But Kovalev was three steps out of Hopkins’ range before Hopkins’ back foot completed its odyssey to front. Hopkins moved – in Larry Merchant’s memorable phrase – like a man “in amber.”

It was a moment of instant sadness. That quickly, the air became full of worry those viewing the match were about to see a man well past his physical prime assaulted to unconsciousness or worse by someone 18 years his junior. Nearly worse still was the possibility a man so exaggeratedly beyond his physical prime might somehow become a unified world champion, through force of wiles, yes, but even more through opponent incompetence.

“I feel bad for watching this, jeez” – that was the first comment I heard after the opening bell, Saturday, in a roomful of knowledgeable boxing people, the majority of whom still attend boxing gyms regularly, and it was said by an astute observer who gave Hopkins a chance to win the match only a minute before.

It was that sort of start for Hopkins. He got dropped by a counter righthand thrown by Kovalev as the Russian hopped backwards in round 1. Hopkins rose and looked at the canvas, a tick of embarrassment more than a try at fooling referee David Fields, a man unknown to viewers as what three judges got assigned to the main event, and concluded the round, and the round after that, with a look that was more frightened than concentrated or studious.

Under John David Jackson’s tutelage, Kovalev took Hopkins’ strategy away from him, by quickly giving Hopkins a thought he’d not seriously had before – I could get hurt very badly tonight – and then using that disruption to keep Hopkins from ever executing anything the way he wished to. There were 10 or 15 seconds, in a fight comprising 2,160 of them, when Hopkins made an offensive maneuver that went according to plan, catching Kovalev with a left hook here and counter right there, but those punches had no effect on Kovalev, save provocation.

When Hopkins got Kovalev with a punch that stung, the Russian went after Hopkins, making him fight at a pace, and with a series of consequences, Hopkins wanted no part of. Kovalev succeeded, mostly, by taking Hopkins more seriously than any opponent Kovalev faced before, by giving Hopkins’ power considerably more leeway than it merited, and by mixing his flurries with enough inactivity that Hopkins never recognized a rhythmic pattern enough to do anything disruptive himself.

The fight’s final round was almost good enough to make folks forget how dreadful its 11 predecessors were, as Hopkins fought to win something much more important to him, by then, than his fight with Kovalev; Hopkins fought the final round to win a right to choose his retirement date. Had Hopkins, whose head got snapped in a bunch of directions by Kovalev’s fists in round 12, been dropped awkwardly or severed from his consciousness long enough to get a doctor in the ring, nothing about Hopkins’ pending retirement would have been voluntary.

Athletic commissions, even those representing poleis desperate for revenue as Atlantic City’s, would have banded together and helped Hopkins out of the sport, on terms other than his own. Journalists, too, might have followed Carlos Acevedo’s admonishment and asked how a PED-free athlete could improve after his 35th birthday in an era dominated by PED-using athletes.

Instead, by fighting fully the most-feared prizefighter in his division, and absorbing dramatically that man’s best punches, Hopkins won for himself a chance to announce his retirement at a leisurely pace. One hopes that pace nevertheless ends before 2014 does.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry–

SAN MARCOS, Texas – Three miles southwest of Texas State University is a mostly waterless stretch of terrain called Purgatory Creek Natural Area, a verdant place complete with trails named after Dante, Ripheus, Ovid and Beatrice, for those with an Italian literary bent.

Saturday at Boardwalk Hall in the American purgatory of Atlantic City, light heavyweight Bernard Hopkins and Russian Sergey Kovalev will make the most meaningful fight of 2014.

The above sentences are related, though how they are will not be apparent for a while to come.

What also may come is the day boxing makes a concerted – in the sense of coordinated – attempt to win back what fans it lost in the first half of the second decade of this 21st century, a time of fan exodus that began in the early weeks of 2010, the first time the world’s best and second-best practitioners refused to make a contest with one another despite occupying the same weightclass. A day of fans’ collective return to our sport, however, is of no consequence right now because boxing faces a nigh existential crisis this year of aficionado departures.

The casual fans are long gone, shuffling steadily if quietly away under a rainstorm of “good riddance!” from purists who didn’t know any better, and the consequences of their departure and ways they will be missed is not entirely knowable yet but guessable certainly. To indulge a hunt for those consequences, though, is an indulgence indeed in 2014 – the year our sport became so easy to abandon. This is not a crisis that will find remedy from a new television deal or browbeating about boxing’s redounding popularity in Dublin and Dubai and Dunkirk and Dongguan; boxing gyms are empty in all but a few cities in the U.S., a country that once dominated the sport and now anxiously hopes its next Olympic gold medal comes only a dozen years after its last.

This crisis finds illustration of the most ambiguous sort on Saturday, when a 175-pound American who is months from his 50th birthday makes a title-unification match with a talented Russian who is 31 years-old but still young enough to be his opponent’s son.

About a year ago, Sergey Kovalev’s first American trainer, Don Turner, said the difference between Kovalev and Hopkins was the Russian is “mean” where the American is “cunning.” Whatever the efforts at image revision – Snuggly Sergey Bedside with Wife / Speedbag Sergey Ringside with HBO – Kovalev remains the only prizefighter anyone can remember increasing his knockout percentage after causing another man’s death in a boxing ring. He smiles so much in interviews because he’s been told to do so, and because he hasn’t more than a kindergartner’s grasp of English, and because he doesn’t care what you are asking anyway. In a sport comprising exclusively men willing to hurt another man for a paycheck, there’s a good argument to be made Kovalev is the exact last man you’d wish to meet in the dark alley of badness’ proverbs.

And yet, Bernard Hopkins, a man willing to give a safety-first effort to the unlikeliest opponents, initiated a match with Kovalev, at the very moment it appeared Hopkins might have made the same dollars fighting the more limited, if possibly insane, Haitian titlist Adonis Stevenson. In an era of men burnishing their credentials as Most Avoided by avoiding bigger men, Hopkins rushes at them, men like Antonio Tarver, Chad Dawson and Kovalev, all considerably larger on their 30th birthdays than Hopkins was in 1995.

While ever a delight to himself, Hopkins is a blossoming embarrassment for most of his prizefighting countrymen, showing at age 49 a willingness to fail, and be badly injured, few of today’s best American fighters have shown since their bouts got computer-matched in the amateurs. Hopkins is not charming as he thinks he is, nor eloquent, but his willingness to fail in speech – giving answers unknowable to their questions, being open and vulnerable in ways he later pretends were calculated – when married to his extraordinary courage and self-belief, makes him uniquely heroic.

He is uniquely present in a prizefighting ring, too, and this is why he came to mind during a hike along Dante’s rocky Purgatory Creek trail. Undulating coffee-dark paths covered in bleached stones and white shards of much larger bleached stones are unpleasant for any who traverse them but particularly unpleasant for those obdurate enough to traverse them in “barefoot” attire – thin rubber soles and mesh. There’s a trick to it, though: If one concentrates on solely two things as he marches, breathing through his nose and looking no more than a yard before him, accelerating till anxiety and doubt haven’t time nor room, he is able to navigate nearly any surface quickly and painlessly.

It’s a mental-alignment exercise that surpasses self-belief and approaches faith; when the mind’s processor has unfettered access to the input of its eyes and the output and input of its feet, when decisions are rendered so fast they mimic reactions, when every algorithm is executed instantly and its result immediately then forgotten, one is able to move with astounding rapidity and never misstep. (This breathing trick works at excessive speeds in traffic, too, but you didn’t read that here.) It mimics a state athletes often, and often erroneously, call “the zone” because its results surpass what workaday feats can be accomplished with mere concentration – it is instead a form of mindlessness leavened by wisdom enough to keep the mind out its own way.

Hopkins finds this place and disrupts others’ pursuits of it. His reflexes are absurdly well-preserved, yes, but the access he grants himself to a mental database of other men’s physical patterns permits him to find matches so quickly, and unman others so fully, it approaches clairvoyance.

Fatigue can undermine Hopkins’ sense of presence like any other man’s, though, and fatiguing Hopkins is Kovalev’s best chance of winning Saturday. If Kovalev has trained for a 30-round fight and is willing to hit Hopkins anywhere at all a hundred times every round, without discouragement, Kovalev should win. Otherwise, Bernard Hopkins will be Fighter of the Decade, 2010-2020.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

HOUSTON – Saturday this city’s largest art museum previewed for its members a fall exhibition, “Monet and the Seine,” that is unimpressive. Composed of middling efforts by the French Impressionist master, canvases from sundry places, some painted in cottoncandy hues and some deeply indebted to others’ influences and one so pedestrian Monet himself misdated it, this exhibition is wisely hidden across the street from Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s impressive permanent collection and the much better exhibition space and exhibition, “The Age of Impressionism,” through which the museum began its year.

Very much can be gathered about a master on a bad day, and seeing Monet’s lesser interpretations of his favorite French river serves to emphasize the transcendence of his best treatments of water, and water lilies – confirming his mastery absolutely. The disappointing exhibition and what mood it spawned, though, did, as it happened, mark an appropriate place for contemplating the coverage of Gennady “GGG” Golovkin’s recent victory over Marco Antonio Rubio and inevitable February victory over Martin Murray.

My colleague and friend Norm Frauenheim once wrote: Undefeated is untested. This evaluative approach appealed then and appeals still for a couple reasons: First, it delays declarations of greatness about modern fighters for a very long time indeed, and second, it encourages prizefighters to take increasingly larger risks before they can be called great.

In many senses this city, largest in Texas and fourth-largest in the country, was undefeated in my mind going into the weekend. But with the disappointment of its Monet exhibition, other disappointments began to arrive in the form of questions: Why does such a wealthy metropolis have grass growing in the middle of its surface streets and roads patchy enough to make a drive to its Museum District akin to off-roading? Why do bearded 130-pound boys who drive expensive German automobiles on those unkempt roads initiate collisions with much larger men in supermarkets? How can so many people in the Gulf’s velvety October air be so plainly miserable? Why is nearly every good downtown restaurant closed on Sundays?

Challenges beget defeats. Defeats beget more challenges.

While a heavyweight prizefighter, conceivably, could run through all competition and remain undefeated through a great career – one in particular springs to mind – it is nearly impossible for any smaller man. By remaining in weight classes long since scrubbed by himself or others, a prizefighter may have a profitable career, he may even make it in the hall of fame, but he will not be invited in conversations about all-timers by historians from generations after his own.

This thought came to mind a couple Saturdays ago while watching the Kazakh middleweight titlist Golovkin, whose entire career has happened at 160 pounds, dismantle another challenger, the Mexican Rubio this time, without a prayer of beating him. The straining by Golovkin’s print and television publicists to crown GGG a ticketseller was unseemly. HBO viewers were told of Golovkin’s record sales – in excess of 9,000! – at the former Home Depot Center tennis stadium in Carson, Calif., now named StubHub Center, and incredibly enough, Oscar De La Hoya was trotted out as an also-ran in the breathless comparisons. A little perspective: De La Hoya did not fight in the tennis stadium but rather the immense soccer stadium beside it – you may have seen it as an absence during the telecast, when HBO’s aerial view of the tennis stadium’s beacon revealed a sizable black hole on the left that made the tennis stadium a sparkly boutonniere on the lapel of a dark suit jacket – a venue at which, immediately after his loss to Floyd Mayweather, De La Hoya sold 300-percent as many tickets as Golovkin just did.

While we’re on the subject of De La Hoya, let’s treat briefly the “Golden Boy’s” career as a range of weightclasses to which he’d migrated by the time he was Golovkin’s age: lightweight, junior welterweight, welterweight, junior middleweight, middleweight – representing a 25-pound increase. Say what you will of De La Hoya’s sincerity and business acumen, but he challenged himself a hell of a lot more by his 32nd birthday than Golovkin has. Other comparisons? Sure. Roy Jones Jr. had covered three weight classes by the time he was Golovkin’s age: middleweight, super middleweight and light heavyweight – representing 15 pounds – and fans were so disgusted by Jones’ cashing HBO checks without challenging himself they staged a “Roycott.” Floyd Mayweather Jr., before his 32nd birthday, had gone from junior lightweight to junior middleweight, representing 24 pounds, and aficionados remain furious about the fights he did not make.

It says here if GGG were a flashy black prizefighter or pretty Latino, and not a Central Asian with a face easily confused for a suburban schoolboy’s in America, yesterday’s Roycotters would demand his next match be with the winner of November’s Bernard Hopkins-Sergey Kovalev match, not Martin Murray.

How dare you, sir, imply any of this Golovkin media mania has ethnic underpinnings!

You must be kidding.

Golovkin appears to be an exceptional talent, yes, but his promoters are beginning to protest too much about a dearth of viable opponents. While most of the men who spent their careers at welterweight and junior middleweight are understandably hesitant about being bludgeoned by a larger man for short money, one increasingly wonders what precludes Golovkin from moving to higher weight classes, what precludes his making an exceptional match with, say, super middleweight Carl Froch?

Because Froch, too, is afraid of . . . don’t even complete that sentence. Froch’s willingness to fight is beyond doubt, and if he becomes unwilling to make a match with Golovkin it will be for one reason only: money. This is the sort of problem HBO is uniquely empowered to solve. Instead of showing 1 1/2-percent of American households a 60-to-one mismatch wrapped in a hyperbolic banner about bringing 9,000 (of 16 million) folks in Greater Los Angeles to a tennis stadium, within months of Froch putting nearly nine times that many fans in a London soccer stadium, HBO ought to use what leverage it still has to make Froch an offer he likes, and show us how Golovkin acquits himself in a test.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry