By Bart Barry–

HOUSTON – Saturday at Carson, Calif.’s StubHub Center, a great fight venue with a moronic name, Jamaican featherweight Nicholas “Axe Man” Walters hacked former world champion Nonito “Filipino Flash” Donaire to a stump, in the co-main, and stopped him at the end of round 6. It was a case of dessert served before dinner, increasingly common in boxing’s kitchen, as HBO’s main event offered all the competitiveness its 60-to-1 odds promised.

I forewent the trip to California – no fight in which a man hasn’t a chance, not even one that features Gennady “GGG” Golovkin, warrants a flight – and instead sat beside the stage at Houston Improv, where Chicago comedian Corey Holcomb played to a full house.

No regrets here.

“One of the significant fighters, of the last several years, in the lighter weight classes, Nonito Donaire.” That is how HBO commentator Max Kellerman described Donaire a few minutes after the Axe Man felled him without even a “Timber!” Kellerman, straining at his harness not to employ HBO’s stock quotient of hyperbole – Walters, as a Spanish-speaking Jamaican featherweight, is not, after all, nearly so marketable as a middleweight from Kazakhstan – might near as easily been describing his network: “One of the significant broadcasters, of the last few decades, within pay-cable’s limited reach” or prizefighting: “One of the significant sports, of the last 25 years, among Americans’ third-tier diversions.”

It’s instructive how a fighter HBO nearly made its flagship guy just two years ago was now merely significant for a short time among smaller men. It’s an accurate appraisal by Kellerman, exactly right for once; it is both a proper read of what Donaire is and was and, retroactively at least, a proper read of the import HBO’s blessing now carries.

Fortunately for Nicholas Walters, he is not an HBO-blessed fighter. He is a man who chopped his way from Arena Roberto Duran in Panama City, in 2012, to brutal knockout wins over two very good veteran sluggers, Donaire and Vic Darchinyan. What makes Walters’ story special is not that he arrived on American cable fully formed, Gennady Golovkin did that as well, but rather that his full form was tested decisively and immediately: Darchinyan and Donaire represent a quality-of-opponent, in Walters’ two HBO appearances, Golovkin has not approached in thrice that many.

Walters is the son of a prizefighter, and that pedigree tells. Saturday he got overconfident, emboldened so much by his own power he forgot Donaire once separated effortlessly very brave men from their consciousnesses, and he got clipped in round 2 by Donaire’s deservedly celebrated left hook. It hurt Walters and spun him, and had there been another 30 seconds to go in the second, there’s no telling how things might have gone. But given a minute to recuperate, Walters’ incredible conditioning – born of an island, like the Dominican Republic, whose residents’ miraculous feats of athleticism are becoming, ahem, commonplace – Walters resembled no one so much as Floyd Mayweather against Shane Mosely: Hands up, prudence restored, forward marching behind a textbook jab.

Walters’ jab is extraordinarily long, fast, accurate and concussing. Donaire, whose own reflexes are enviable, saw Walters’ jab happening and countered over it successfully in the earliest rounds. By the fourth, though, after he got dropped by the same rear-hand uppercut Walters also dropped Darchinyan with, Donaire couldn’t counter Walters’ jab – because Walters’ jab disrupted Donaire’s equilibrium in a way that obviated reflex. Without a jab or reliable right, Donaire was reduced to his old digs in Left Hook City. Walters anchored his right guard to his cheek, waited for Donaire to put his life behind a left hook, pulled away from that hook, and then dropped an axe blade on Donaire’s left temple. And that was that.

Donaire, now a featherweight, admitted quite frankly afterwards he wanted no part of Walters’ offering, and since he neither wants to be denuded a second time at super bantamweight by Guillermo Rigondeaux, Nonito is effectively retired, even while he sharpens his pencil, arranges his T-square and readies a protractor for his return to boxing’s ubiquitous drawing board. More interesting, though, was a prefight description of Nonito’s reconciliation with Dad, when both men, according to Nonito, were being “alphas,” and Nonito implored himself to be a man, be strong, be a man, before sobbing uncontrollably once his dad departed.

It was a reminder of a certain debility of spirit about Donaire that long made others a little uncomfortable around him: He was a very good athlete who learned to be a fighter, which of course is different from a man who knows only one way. Or perhaps the point is better made as a question: Do you think Sergey Kovalev gives himself silent peptalks about being a man?

There’s a certain harmony a man has when he enjoys being who he is, and it’s a harmony often more noticeable in its absence, in the dissonance, for example, one senses from Donaire. I was reminded of this Saturday as I watched comedian Corey Holcomb ply his craft. There he sat on Houston Improv’s small stage, in an admittedly ridiculous and sparkly outfit he called “when an old (man) tries to dress young,” entirely relaxed, under the spell of himself, being wildly offensive before an evenly mixed crowd of men and women. Holcomb began with jokes about abortion clinics and moved to jokes about other women – “side pieces,” in the vernacular the comic shares with Paulie Malignaggi – and the illegitimate children that often result, whom Holcomb called “side babies.” It was a routine designed to offend, and performed to appear theatrically oblivious of what offense it caused.

As each of Holcomb’s jokes met with equal parts ribald laughter and hateful silence, Holcomb, with wide eyes and an angelic face, mockingly imitated a man who realized he’d just gone too far – and then went much farther still. An hour of watching Holcomb from ringside, as it were, convinces one of nothing so much as the power a man possesses when he withstands the derision of others, when he is intoxicated enough by himself to alter others’ rejections of him.

It is a different sort of fortitude than what Nicholas Walters showed Saturday, but it is of a piece, a harmony, the way Walters and Holcomb’s type of self-belief forces others to harmonize with them.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

Photo by Chris Farina / Top Rank

By Bart Barry–

Saturday at StubHub Center in Carson, Calif., in a co-main event broadcast by HBO and certain to be more entertaining than what follows it, Jamaican featherweight titlist Nicholas “The Axe Man” Walters will fight “Filipino Flash” Nonito Donaire in a WBA unification match – being that both men already have WBA featherweight titles.

Much as happened two summers ago in Dallas, when Terence Crawford looked decisively the better prizefighter at what was intended by HBO to be a Mikey Garcia showcase, 11 months ago in Corpus Christi, at what was intended to be the first steps on a path to rejuvenation for Nonito Donaire, after the birth of his child got him unswaddled by Guillermo Rigondeaux, the evening’s most impressive performance was not in the main event or even part of HBO’s broadcast. Instead, that night, in a climate that managed, still, to be sticky in November, the man who impressed most at American Bank Center was a Panama-trained Jamaican in his U.S. debut.

Nicholas “Axe Man” Walters did everything a little bit harder than expected, three matches before the main event, from swinging his invisible axe during introductions to punching Mexican Alberto Garza to smiling through his menacing postfight celebration. In a surprise bit of enthusiasm, promoter Bob Arum nodded excitedly on the apron afterward, even calling down to pressrow: “He hits hard!”

That the Axe Man does. He is long for a 126-pounder, too, quite long, and he is both more awkward and more skilled than his occasional gangliness betrays. He turns his punches over with ferocity and the tall man’s advantage of keeping his chin far from perilousness even as he imperils opponents. Vic Darchinyan, a much better technician than once believed, could not swim his way to Walters’ chin in four rounds of trying in May and finally rushed at last resorts and got knocked silly by Walters who, if he catches you turning into a punch, as he caught Darchinyan, has outage power.

Walters is marvelously well schooled, too, in a way subverted by his knockout ratio and his ringside prop, a carvedwood axe; against the southpaw Darchinyan, Walters used the length of his legs still more than the length of his arms to neutralize Darchinyan’s charges, causing Darchinyan’s feet to get tangled on his second and third step, two of every three passes. It was the type of cagey, veteran stuff one does not expect the first time he sees a man in a televised fight, which made it extra enjoyable.

Saturday Walters will fight Nonito Donaire in the co-main of what appears a good card at StubHub Center in Carson, Calif. Donaire is something of a symbol for HBO 3.0, the failed startup that happened after Ross Greenburg was sent looking for other opportunities at Showtime. Before the network realized there were fighters raised in the Soviet system and not named Klitschko, before Gennady Golovkin and Sergey Kovalev carried HBO’s 2014 Fall Calendar, in other words, the network casted about for someone it could prematurely declare great and put in non-pay-per-view showcase matches, and Top Rank happily fed it a prodigal son named Nonito.

Goodness but HBO had to lug this kid about: Nonito loves fashion, Nonito is Filipino – like Manny! – Nonito knocked out “The Raging Bull” with one punch, Nonito is PED free, Nonito is the fighter of the year because Nonito does not take PEDs! Before it all felt like such a dreadful ruse, aficionados stared intently at their screens, ready for Nonito’s greatness to knock them sideways in a flash of (Filipino) light, and instead got Nonito making an unwatchable mess with Argentine survivor Omar Narvaez in 2011, Nonito hurting his hand against Wilfredo Vazquez Jr, Nonito hopping about like an enkindled finch against Jeffrey Mathebula, Nonito dropping Toshiaki “Is Japanese for Cash-Out” Nishioka, and finally Nonito whupping Jorge Arce into his first retirement – to finish 2012.

Declared that year’s best fighter, and in retrospect it should have been a sign of all the badness to come that beating four guys with an aggregate of 14 career losses got a guy declared Fighter of the Year, Donaire talked a whole lot about becoming a father before his April 2013 match with the Cuban master Guillermo Rigondeaux, and then Rigondeaux handled Donaire so thoroughly that, in an instant, the boxing community collectively sighed, congratulated Nonito on fatherhood, and redirected the lot of its premature-greatness rhapsody towards Mikey Garcia.

Whatever came of Mikey anyway, you’re wondering, and the answer shall be revealed someday, one imagines. Why don’t we hear about that kid anymore, you’re also wondering, and that answer can be revealed directly: Gennady “GGG” Golovkin!

With all of Nonito’s charm, though interestingly never a whisper about VADA testing, and none of Mikey’s Oxnardian rebelliousness, Golovkin has supplanted both Nonito and Mikey as the prizefighter most likely to endanger a commentator’s descriptions with hyperbole overdose. And get this: Golovkin is older than both Donaire and Garcia, despite being discovered after them.

Golovkin is also dining on Mexican, Saturday, in HBO’s main event, when Marco Antonio Rubio, a man beaten soundly by “Son of the Legend” Julio Cesar Chavez Jr 32 months ago, will be brought to Golovkin’s table in Carson missing only an apple in his mouth. Far more sporting than anything to come in the ring during the main event will be the straining that goes on at ringside, as HBO’s promotional crew tries to convince viewers Rubio, the very same guy stretched in one round by Kofi Jantuah 10 years ago, has a granitic chin, moments before GGG performs the impossible feat of scoring an eighth-round corner stoppage on the unstoppable Mexican.

Saturday’s broadcast will illustrate elegantly the difference between an athletic contest and a promotional spectacle, with Walters and Donaire providing the former.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

Photo by Chris Farina / Top Rank

By Bart Barry–

DEL RIO, Texas – A few miles south of here begins the Mexican state of Coahuila, and about 40 miles north of here begins Devil’s River State Natural Area, and if you’re wondering which is more hospitable, it is Mexico – by far. There are lovely places whose brochures promise romantic getaways, and then there are mere getaways, places in America where one is likely to be found only by accident and a man on a burro. Devil’s River is the latter.

About 800 miles southwest of here, though decidedly in the same biotic region, Mexican Jhonny “Jhonny” Gonzalez beat down countryman Jorge “El Travieso” Arce, Saturday, causing referee Johnny Callas to wave the match off at 2:43 of round 11, in Arce’s home pueblo of Los Mochis, Sinaloa. Gonzalez, aficionados will recall even if Showtime programmers will not, stretched Showtime-developed titlist Abner Mares in one round, 14 months ago, and evidently got banned from the network for doing so.

Gonzalez-Arce was certain to be a better match than what last brought Arce to American premium cable, when Travieso was served hot to Nonito Donaire 22 months ago on an HBO platter, but Showtime, whose boxing coverage is in a shambles, televised instead another eyesore, this time from a casino in Connecticut, where a slate of shabby Al Haymon-managed fighters were plying their limited wares. Arce, who retired after Donaire iced him in 2012, returned, according to Arce, to win another title in another weight class, and while that might still hold meaning in noble and proud if benighted Mexico, here in the U.S. we measure greatness by a more-sophisticated metric: How many networks have you razed?

Word came last week, on a media shuttle no less, undefeated manager Al “The Annihilator” Haymon, having torn apart HBO in a six-year knockout and having destroyed Showtime in half that mark, has called-out NBC Sports Network, despite its eponymous relationship with a non-cable broadcaster, in a match that promises to include more offensive brilliance from today’s best technician. The Annihilator’s paucity of ruth raises this interesting question: If a pacifist who hated our sport set out to exterminate boxing’s American fanbase, and was willing to spend millions of his own dollars to do it, could that man turn the trick any better than The Annihilator? The match’s outcome is fun, if ultimately futile, for our generation to ponder the way previous generations pondered, say, Muhammad Ali vs. Rocky Marciano.

Meanwhile in Mexico, a country whose broadcasters are still blessedly out of The Annihilator’s reach, or too far below his weightclass, wonderful fighters still conduct wonderful fights, and yes, both Jhonny and El Travieso are wonderful fighters even if their Saturday match was not quite wonderful. Arce who, for being a fighter’s fighter, is more beloved by his opponents than just about anyone fighting today, continues to search for a chance to do to someone else what Michael Carbajal, in “Manitas de Piedra’s” 53rd and final career match, did to Arce 15 years ago. Alas, Arce had his Carbajal moment in 2011 against undefeated super bantamweight titlist Wilfredo Vazquez Jr, but Arce, at age 32, could not take yes for an answer.

Following fellow Mexican Juan Manuel Marquez’s example, Arce has grown himself a Body-by-Memo physique that features the shoulders of a statuesque middleweight and legs of a flyweight, a fitness choice that, for all its rejuvenating enhancements, makes Arce top-heavy as Marquez, causing him to fold over his lead knee whenever he throws in combination. Long known for the brawling style that immortalized him against Hussein Hussein in 2005, Arce actually has never wanted for ring IQ; you don’t get to Las Vegas as a 112-pound Sinaloan with mere toughness, because toughness is guaranteed in Sinaloa, a Mexican state of 2.8 million souls in which there is but one Jorge “El Travieso” Arce.

Toughness is guaranteed by a number of factors that mainly reduce to climate and topography. Once a shallow sea millennia ago, the North American region that ripples out from Sonora Desert comprises some of the Western Hemisphere’s more forbidding terrain. Traipsing towards, then away from, then back towards Devil’s River, Saturday, reminded me of nothing so much as marching barefoot over a rocky beach with a 25-degree incline and cacti needling you every third step. The beauty round such pristine spots is usually called “rugged” – a code word indicating every hour of pleasure must be accompanied by three of unpleasantness. All clichés spring from original truths, and clichés about the West and individualism are no exception; Saturday, 37,000 acres of Devil’s River State Natural Area were inhabited by fewer than a dozen persons, all day, and that ensures hundreds of minutes of solitude for anyone willful enough to wander unaccompanied through the expanse – and another 120 minutes of lacerating solitude for anyone dimwitted enough to misread a map and blaze his own trail through miles of thornbushes.

Jhonny Gonzalez, hailing from Mexico City though born in the more rural state of Hidalgo, is a prizefighter whose ruggedness is tempered by intelligence; Saturday he engaged Arce when the shorter man needed engaging and kept him at range the rest of the match. A man who truly likes to fight and truly knows how, Gonzalez struck Arce with perfectly placed and fully released hooks enough to drop Arce on the blue mat – complemented by a white “Playboy” bunny logo – three times, including a punctuating blow at the end of round 3, when Arce went for the knockout, his or Gonzalez’s, ¡que sea!, exactly as he did against Donaire, with a nearly identical result.

Saturday was a good way for Arce to end his career, as good as he’s likely to get anymore, but as ruggedness is not a synonym for wisdom, El Travieso surely will fight on.

Bart Barry can be found on Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Another game changer happened Tuesday. It came with a series of email announcements and a conference call and probably a press conference, somewhere, too, so big the news this time. It was an official notice Mexican junior middleweight Saul “Canelo” Alvarez changed American cable networks.

If boxing historians return to this announcement someday, it will be to ask themselves why they returned to it.

Each purportedly seismic disruption to boxing’s landscape portends nothing but the worse for aficionados and fighters, boxing’s forgotten tribes, yet in a learned-helplessness sort of way, we ponder plethoras of possibilities and their consequences for our favorite active fighters – the few of us who still have such things. These massive upheavals in boxing began when Manny Pacquiao enjoyed a one-dreadful-night sabbatical from HBO sometime in the last few years, donned yellow gloves to fight world poverty, eradicated world poverty, and returned triumphantly to HBO, where he won a dubious decision over Juan Manuel Marquez, in red gloves, lost a decision to Timothy Bradley, then got dangled by Marquez above the unknowable plane betwixt life and death. Not long after that, another earthquake struck, and Floyd Mayweather and Al Haymon left HBO and took Richard Schaefer with them, during the conveniently forgotten years when Golden Boy Promotions’ Oscar De La Hoya was unavailable for comment.

Actually, all this may have happened in a different order or concurrently, or something, but none of it today is consequential enough to recall its exact sequence.

Tuesday, though, Tuesday! This was the big news boxing needed, when a redhaired Mexican-television creation changed from Showtime to HBO, or well, he returned, actually, to the network that manufactured him as an American attraction, such as he is – have we got an official number for Alvarez-Lara yet? – before he, perhaps unwittingly, changed American networks before his fight with Austin Trout. Why all this emphasis on American television networks? Because Alvarez isn’t beholden to them or De La Hoya or anyone else in this country: Cinnamon takes his orders from Mexican television, or at least he did till Grupo Televisa, Latin America’s largest mass-media company, watched his fight with Floyd Mayweather, realized, whatever else he was, Canelo was not a future legend of Mexican prizefighting, and filed unflattering reports that caused Alvarez to leave that network, too, and shop his services to TV Azteca.

¡O, impetuous youth! Had it not been for the unrelenting coverage, and soap-operatic scripting, of Grupo Televisa, a network powerful enough to get Alvarez an invitation to meet President Enrique Pena Nieto, husband of Angelica Rivera, a retired Televisa soap-opera actress, Alvarez might not have ascended highly as Julio “Baby Face” Garcia. What’s that, you never heard of him? Baby Face Garcia was a Mexican welterweight prodigy with a record of 40-2 (33 KOs) before his 20th birthday. His promoter dissolved into a blob, Garcia affixed that blob on his midsection, and before his 27th birthday Baby Face was an anonymous middleweight losing as often as he won in locales like Guanajuato’s Domo De La Feria and Michoacan’s Auditorio del Bicentenario – neither of which is Spanish for “MGM Grand Garden Arena.”

But Canelo is going to attack Miguel Cotto in the superfight of 2015! Prizefighting has come to this, hasn’t it? A Puerto Rican welterweight beaten to submission by Manny Pacquiao in 2009, decisioned lopsidedly by Mayweather in 2012, decisioned lopsidedly by Trout in 2012, and rejuvenated by the concoction of a new trainer and a broken-legged Argentine in June is about to make next year’s most-anticipated fight with a Mexican who won about 1/36 his match with Mayweather a year ago, beat Alfredo Angulo about convincingly as James De La Rosa just did, and squeezed past Erislandy Lara in an eyesore.

Show that to the rascals who say boxing is dead!

Marco Antonio Barrera told us this would happen, remember. A few months before his career’s penultimate match, a 2010 tilt with Adailton De Jesus in San Antonio, Barrera said the consequences of prizefighting’s being off Mexican public airwaves for a decade, because of one more depredating privatization scheme in the world, were en route and would be profound. Prizefighting off Mexican airwaves drained interest and the talent pool from Mexican gyms. It also coiled the spring of Mexicans’ undying interest in the sport. Once prizefighting returned to Mexico’s public airwaves, the people jubilantly sprung about in search of future greats. Barrera and Erik Morales subsequently attempted unserious comebacks, and Juan Manuel Marquez underwent a historic physical transformation.

TV Azteca, meanwhile, aligned itself with a goofball scion of legend Julio Cesar Chavez, and Televisa lassoed itself a redhaired horseman from Jalisco. HBO made icons of Pacquiao and Mayweather then watched with incompetent disbelief when they refused to fight each other, and Showtime placed its faith in HBO commentators and actually tried to anoint Adrien Broner. Now bereft of ideas, Showtime desperately empowers advisor Al Haymon to decimate its reputation, and HBO turns to a 32-year-old Kazakhstani middleweight whose greatest professional accomplishment, in 10 years of prizefighting, is a third-round stoppage of Daniel Geale – and Marvelous Marvin Hagler retired at age 33.

Like a downtrodden minimum-wage worker told by his millionaire master to be grateful he even has a second job to take public transportation to, though, an aficionado today feels gratitude merely at the news boxing will be televised at all this autumn, and anxiously awaits his next press conference announcement – when he ought to be yanking his cable box directly out the wall.

Bart Barry can be found on Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry–

SAN ANTONIO – Saturday night I attended “Jazz’SAlive,” a two-day, free-admission jazz festival in the newly restored Travis Park, which abuts St. Mark’s, the gothic-revival Episcopal church where Lyndon Baines Johnson married Claudia Alta Taylor 80 years ago. As always, the event happened two weeks before the lovely weather arrives, reducing crowds still more than the festival’s recent reduction in marquee names. There are few better places to be present and watch the mind play than a jazz festival, though, and so there I was, sitting on a shinyblack park bench between entrepreneurs and homeless men, reminiscing about how I got here.

And there was boxing. It was Manny Pacquiao against Jorge Solis at Alamodome, in April 2007, a staybusy affair during Pacquiao’s first, and unsuccessful, congressional campaign, that introduced me to a spot thrice as tropical, lush and verdant as I previously considered Texas might be. This town, birthplace of mentor and friend Norm Frauenheim who told me a few weeks before Pacquiao-Solis “you’re going to like that city,” became and remains my favorite place I’ve lived.

If you are reading this, you know fewer than one percent the fights you’ve seen are fights coworkers or uninterested familiars inquired about before they happened. You also know the best fights you’ve seen live are fights those same coworkers and familiars, the sorts of men who would pose for a selfie beside a fighter at a fundraiser, fist raised in an ironical nod to something they saw in an old b&w photo or to irony itself, so meta-ironical the lads, would neither know by name nor endure for what 40 minutes their complete viewing requires on YouTube. But they know you like boxing, and they’ve heard of Floyd Mayweather or Oscar De La Hoya or Mike Tyson or the one guy their dads used to watch back whenever whenever in the living room on Friday or Saturday night, whichever has the hour’s more nostalgic ring, and they wonder if you’re going to be in Vegas Baby! or The Garden or Staples for what they will call The Big Fight.

It happened often enough to me – and the frequency with which one hears these questions is directly proportionate to his dayjob’s figurative distance from prizefighting – I devised an easy way of justifying my travel plans, or at least explaining them away, in two questions: 1. Will it be a good fight? and 2. Is it somewhere I wish to visit? I must be able to answer in the affirmative one of those to consider making the trip, and I must have an immediately apparent conflict to not-make the trip if I answer affirmatively both.

The credentials scrum being what it is on the East Coast, the credentials scrum is often a conflict feasible enough to forego the boundless aggravation of playing tourist in Pennsylvania, New Jersey or New York. Most of the fights to which I have access and believe worthy their travel and expense, then, happen in Las Vegas, naturally, with Southern California placing a distant third behind Texas locales in Houston or Dallas. Las Vegas is not a place I have ever wished to visit, which allows me to judge Vegas superfights dispassionately, which allows me to forgo every Mayweather tilt and what Pacquiao matches are made for revenue and spectacle, not legacy, be they against De La Hoya or Ricky Hatton.

Generally, in a nod to my enduring love of novelty, a city’s best chance of being somewhere I wish to visit is being somewhere I’ve not visited. That brought me to Detroit Metropolitan Airport in Jan. 2011, and a Friday night rave with two young surgeons, too, before Timothy Bradley unmanned Devon Alexander, the man who went on to beat Marcos Maidana so thoroughly Maidana set his mind on an immediate retirement 39 months before he fought Mayweather. It sent me to Oakland two years ago to see Andre Ward ruin Chad Dawson in what may well have been the last meaningful fight of “S.O.G.’s” career. It sent me to Colorado last year to see architect Daniel Libeskind’s groundbreaking Denver Art Museum, its titanium cladding brilliant in the hyper-definition of mile-high air, and the Rocky Mountains, and Ruslan Provodnikov’s lambasting of Mike Alvarado. It brought me here, my adopted hometown in South Texas, 7 1/2 years ago for a Pacquiao fight more easily forgotten than the ease with which Cristian Mijares undressed Jorge Arce on the undercard, and an attorney from the ACLU I met in a coffeeshop across the street from where this is being written.

Boxing was more fun back then; promoters were still crooked and local commissions were still corrupt and managers still maximized purses and minimized risk, because the consumer is a television executive, not a boxing fan, but there was a spirit of chance governing events, a palpable chance an event’s power brokers had sliced things too fine in negotiations and favorites might lose or fall prey to unpredictable things. There was more of the sacred unknown back then, before dryasdust operators like Richard Schaefer and Al Haymon merged and acquired.

Like most things meaningful in life, like most permanent changes, the end of all this fun did not come with a blazon of trumpets or clash of cymbals. Historians will blame the Mayweather-Pacquiao saga, and we’ll go along with them – not because it’s necessarily true but because the culpable parties deserve lasting scorn – though the unwinding was present even before then, it was present the week Pacquiao battered Miguel Cotto in Las Vegas and fired the starter’s pistol on a half-decade of publicly failed negotiations.

What justifies travel is the joy of spontaneity. No spectacle is more spontaneous, less predictable, than what Juan Manuel Marquez did to Pacquiao in 2012 or Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. did to Sergio Martinez a few months before that. No elements of these trips were more memorable than what spontaneous connections formed with former strangers, away from hotel lobbies, away from conference rooms, away from promoters, away from scripted gatherings of all kinds. Away and away.

Bart Barry can be found on Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry–

Saturday at MGM Grand Garden Arena in a rematch few aficionados demanded, fewer still watched, and fewer yet found entertaining as its predecessor, American welterweight and super welterweight titlist Floyd “Money” Mayweather unanimously decisioned Argentine Marcos “El Chino” Maidana. After promising to prove himself to himself, not you, by stretching Maidana, Mayweather finished the fight circling shamelessly away from his limited, winded opponent, citing numbed fingers in his left hand. Maidana, who cares no more if he’s called a dirty fighter than called an Argentine, apparently crushed Floyd’s fingers in his mouth during an eighth-round clinch.

The entire “Mayhem” spectacle was subdued in a way Mayweather fights have not been since the Carlos Baldomir farce of 2006, and one briefly wondered during the ringwalk, when Mayweather was accompanied by his two mountainous bodyguards instead of musical mascots, if early revenue projections might have slashed the budget for Team Money Team; or if perhaps Floyd, having publicly provoked men professionally obligated to take every provocation in petulant and personal a way as possible, couldn’t find a Canadian castrato or Southern stereotype brave enough to accompany him in public; or if, most charitably, Floyd was determined to be determined and have his fate determined by himself alone. The last interpretation is the best interpretation, one hoped and hopes, and Floyd’s stark entrance was a stark reminder how incredibly lonely a boxing ring can be.

One doesn’t get to the championship level of this hurting business without being able to read other mens’ bodies fluently, and Floyd’s capacity for processing every tick and twitch is among his greatest predatory assets. But mirrors are strange things, and Floyd, publicly vulnerable even when he wishes not to be, is no longer reflexive or interested enough to be impenetrable while he penetrates others’ weaknesses. It didn’t take a minute of Saturday’s fight to see Floyd’s legs were, in a word, soggy; though his footwork remained impeccable, he moved round the canvas like it was memory foam over the ring’s plywood base, not an inch of padding. He was skittish as his movements were laborious, and one now wonders what might have happened if an enhanced Maidana answered the opening bell, rushing him disrespectfully as he rushed Adrien Broner 10 months ago.

Floyd was waiting for that, yes, but he was waiting for it their first fight, too, and it made precious little difference. No one likes to be struck in the face, but it hurts Floyd doubly for denting both his face and deep pride at once. Like any champion prizefighter, Floyd’s opening tactic is requesting his opponent’s metaphorical signature on a tacit contract that reads: “You may strike me here and here, but not there.” Floyd is all fighter, and he expects to be hit. On his terms. Maidana, with his skyhook right and his frequently thrown forearms and elbows, violated a contract Floyd had far more accomplished fighters like Oscar De La Hoya and Shane Mosley and Miguel Cotto sign. Worse yet, when Floyd, enkindled by the Argentine caveman’s impertinence, sought to castigate El Chino, he did not at 147 pounds have the power or accuracy to imperil the Argentine and as always had to worry about his brittle right hand in the event he did land it flush on anything but Maidana’s lightswitch.

Every other round, when Floyd’s age and (over)training regimen made him rest, he looked singularly uncomfortable. He was not enjoying himself before or during or after his rematch with Maidana, especially when an unfortunately close shot of his postfight interview showed Floyd’s swollen and misshapen lips quivering involuntarily. Maidana, face clean after 36 minutes of sanctioned assault by Mayweather’s fists as it was during his ringwalk, showed Showtime’s buffoonish inquisitor exactly the respect Jim Gray deserved, irreverently lying to him in Spanish, in a reminder it would be nearly impossible for a Spanish-only Argentine to care less what a c-level American journalist from a b-side American cable network opined of his forthrightness or general mien.

Commentator Paulie Malignaggi was the only one who caught the face-smothering tactic Mayweather employed in order to wedge the fingers of his left hand between Maidana’s eager teeth. Malignaggi caught Mayweather doing it to Maidana the same way Malignaggi caught Mayweather doing it to Saul Alvarez a year ago; being suffocated sucks, and that’s the reason Canelo fired his right fist at Mayweather’s cup and Maidana chomped down.

One foul begets another, this is fighting after all, and much as Maidana’s impertinence flummoxed Mayweather for a minute or so, you knew immediately Floyd would not refuse to fight on so long as referee Kenny Bayless took his stern warning like a good supplicant. Floyd’s point was not made to Maidana – there was no reaching El Chino, after all – but to Bayless who, true to form and expectations, ensured the rematch comprised a ratio of athleticism-to-menace more favorable to Floyd than Tony Weeks’ unforgivably permissible performance did in May.

Provided Manny Pacquiao does not look too good in his upcoming match with Chris Algieri, a probable thing, that, as Algieri has some tools to make Pacquiao’s night a long one, Floyd’s advisor should begin negotiations with Pacquiao’s team, secretly, and use Floyd’s diminished reflexes, and both men’s diminished drawing power, to find something close enough to common ground to get signatures on at least one of Don King’s old blank contracts. Fill it in later, once casual fans find inspiration enough to care again about the last fight they wanted to see, and finally make a match that hasn’t looked this likely to entertain in five years.

Floyd will win – forget not how steadily Pacquiao declined after his night in Cowboys Stadium with Antonio Margarito four years ago – but there’s no shame in admitting this much: There were a few moments during Saturday’s match, when Marcos Maidana feinted an old Floyd Mayweather to the ropes and hit him with everything he threw, we all might have taken Pacquiao, even money.

Bart Barry can be found on Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry–

Saturday at MGM Grand, over which a 20-story Manny Pacquiao banner likely will not drape, American welterweight Floyd “Money” Mayweather will make a rematch with Argentine Marcos “El Chino” Maidana as part of Mexican Independence Day festivities. Mayweather will seek the definitive victory that eluded him Cinco de Mayo weekend. The fight will happen on Sept. 13 in part because nothing cries ¡Viva México! quite so proudly as an American fighting an Argentine in a casino’s sanitized climes.

Consensus among aficionados is that Mayweather won their first tilt while being beaten upon most satisfactorily, beaten upon in a way that can bend a career trajectory and eventually enable more realistic record comparisons with prizefighters of greater accomplishment. Those who would dissent with official scorecards, though, raise an interesting thought experiment: What if the fight had been scored like Maidana was the prohibitive favorite, not Mayweather, with a full 25-percent anchored to ring generalship?

What is most alarming about the latest installments of Showtime infomercials, alarming at least for the rematch’s box-office revenues, is how, with fewer dramatic scores and gasping narration, and frumpy Warren Buffett in lieu of spacey Roger Mayweather, Floyd is no longer odious at all. He wishes to be. Like an aged magician trying to conjure one more white bunny out the black hat for a birthday party whose kids have seen the trick nine times without promised cake or ice cream, Floyd inadvertently loops back on himself, often in the same clip: I don’t have to talk about how great I am, because I am the greatest and nobody is better than me, because I don’t have to talk about how great I am.

Made to look like a witling on social media by a scorned rapper pal, Floyd can no longer shout smug witticisms at an upturned camera; now YouTubers get Professor Mayweather, fatigued in yellowing light, offering a discourse on how little he cares what anyone says, shortly before securing his yoga mat in a perimeter of hundred-dollar bills. Hip-hop culture, such as it has been for 20 years now, is more synonymous with thespians teaching suburban kids how to appear menacing than anything militant or self-assured, or even clever, and Floyd has long, and oddly, wished to supplant the genuinely macho thing he does for a living with a ruined art form’s hamfisted thuggery. Still, has any public figure in even this meretricious age performed so many hours of heartfelt insecurity as the “Money” documentaries, invented by HBO and aped by Showtime, drive Mayweather to?

A living, breathing antonym for the word contentment, Mayweather has unflinchingly shown how much cannot be bought with so much money. After years of giving neither strippers nor a fiancée nor a harem of ageing women a dot of genuine enthusiasm, in Episode 2 Mayweather spiritlessly drives his squadron of luxury automobiles to his boxing gym – wherein he joyfully watches other men smash one another for the duration of a sadistic, 31-minute round. An embellished $500 million in career earnings, the Big Boy Mansion, an apartment’s worth of footwear, nine employees just to count rope skips, $10 million in sports cars – and the only time the man flashes the feral grin of his true nature is when watching a spectacle men perform round the world, free of charge, outside a hundred thousand bars every Friday night.

Is it any wonder someone grounded as Marcos “El Chino” Maidana does not respect Mayweather? One gathers from watching the men at choreographed “media” events Maidana looks Mayweather’s way and thinks: I’ll never box like him, I’ll never have a fraction his money, but, che, I’m so much happier than he is that, pues, oh well.

Expectations are unusually low for this event – not only does one hear nary a peep from his peers about the fight, but an unknown middleweight vacating a meaningless belt, midweek, stole its headlines, and an incredible Friday morning performance by a different Latin American, Nicaragua’s Roman “Chocolatito” Gonzalez, assured aficionados would have better things to discuss last weekend – and they might yet be missed. The feeling is that Maidana had his best possible fight against Mayweather in May, and Mayweather ultimately made adjustments enough to prevail, and so, whither something finer?

Worse yet, Maidana appears to believe an abundance of desperation was his greatest flaw last time, a belief both his trainer and his trainer’s trainer rushed to disabuse him of, and a pensive Maidana standing unperturbed across from a 37-year-old Mayweather, one whose brittle hands have fairly stiffened but one opponent in 8 1/2 years, make for a pay-per-view spectacle almost certain to leave Mayweather’s endearingly thrifty new advisor Warren Buffett feeling cheated. While referee Kenny Bayless is quite good and generally not officious, he was recently selected to atone for Tony Weeks’ disobedience in May, allowing Maidana to punch Mayweather several times after Mayweather specifically told him not to, and Bayless knows better than to ignore what prefight instructions he’ll be given in Mayweather’s dressing room.

Expect a far more sanitized thing, one that resembles a sporting event more than a fight, immediately after Maidana’s first skyhook righthand caresses the back of Mayweather’s head, Saturday. Barring a delightful surprise, the circus barking will commence round Round 9, comparing Mayweather to whichever great comes to mind, asking in a solemn tone if there’s anyone left for Mayweather to face, without pausing to ask how this legend who needed 24 rounds to win definitively against Marcos Maidana might have done in a Montreal ring with Roberto Duran.

It matters little, alas. Floyd Mayweather is now the ringmaster of boxing’s dilapidated big top.

Bart Barry can be found on Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry–

FORT WORTH, Texas – There was a fight card in my hometown Saturday night, and I didn’t hesitate for a tick to forego it and make holiday plans to spend the weekend hundreds of miles away looking at buildings, yes buildings. In fact, hesitate is the wrong verb altogether because it implies choice, a pause over two competing courses of action before pursuing the victor’s. That is not what happened.

Early last week, in the throes of architecture critic Martin Filler’s gorgeous prose – and one cannot appreciate the written word without marveling at passages in Filler’s “Makers of Modern Architecture,” regardless of a literary appreciator’s appreciation for edifices – it struck me I’d not visited the Renzo Piano Pavilion at the properly acclaimed Kimbell Art Museum, and like that I contacted an art-appreciating friend, arranged accommodations at her place and decided the four-hour drive was better made early Saturday morning than late Friday night, the better to avoid a stretch of I-35 that Austin makes a parking lot during daylight hours. Not till two mornings later when a press release arrived from the publicist for the event whose press conference I attended the previous Saturday was my memory agitated sufficiently to make a choice of the weekend’s itinerary, and by then the made-choice was 50 hours old.

As I write this, I haven’t an inkling the results of Saturday’s local card because the local daily did not cover it either, remanding its senior columnist, a ringside veteran of thousands of matches during twentysomeodd years of covering boxing, to a college football game or Champions Tour qualifier or somesuch. If he didn’t argue his case with an unsympathetic editor it is either because he’s lost so many like arguments in the withering years since Cowboys Stadium was becoming/unbecoming prizefighting’s new home, or because, more likely yet, the local daily no longer has an editor with whom to argue.

The local card brought little interest because, whatever the sincerity its participants and supporters, my hometown has connoisseurship enough to know what’s what. Since health concerns removed the late Joe Souza from San Fernando gym, downtown, no talent finds proper development there: Kids who even a decade earlier might have learned to move forward behind a jab now throw an impotent, skittish left hook from weight improperly set on the front foot, and the one local man whose name is synonymous with the sport expends more of his time with promoting and whitecollar aerobics, pursuits with a chance of profitability, than developing our limited talent pool. In fact, his outfit returned Saul “Canelo” Alvarez to the city proper, Sunday, for a snapchat about being famous for a festival called People En Español – or so my inbox reported while I composed this.

The same inbox last week reported our sport’s next savior, Kazakhstani middleweight titlist Gennady “GGG” Golovkin, will invade Carson, Calif.’s StubHub Center to survive what promises to be a dauntless test from the journeyman Mexican a fully drained and barely trained Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. spitefully battered 31 months ago, in my hometown, and that press release got dutifully succeeded by news Golovkin mania has grown feral enough for an unconfirmed, but voluptuous, thousand tickets to be gobbled up by the most voracious of California’s 38 million residents. A “record” apparently.

More and more I find myself appreciating Bernard Hopkins, a fighter I stopped liking about 13 years ago, and the manly way he is about to put life and limb at risk with a Russian-speaker who finds what tests ever evade Comrade Golovkin, and I like myself for adoring Hopkins once more, and I know my flagging interest in prizefighting is but a symptom of what ailment may seat a 50-year-old atop our sport’s pinnacle.

So it was away to this steer town, underrated a place of aesthetic greatness as I know, and a visit to the limitless grandeur of this masterpiece by Louis Kahn – second only to Frank Lloyd Wright among American architects of the 20th century – known as the Kimbell. Great events are great writing’s uniquely reliable origin, and so, from Martin Filler:

“The interiors of the Kimbell, washed with a pearlescent natural light that gives its arching vaults an ethereal presence, is as close as we are likely to come in modern times to an architecture of the infinite.”

This free-admission museum, Michelangelo here, Caravaggio there, in November got complemented by contemporary architecture’s great Italian innovator, Renzo Piano, with a pavilion that honors Kahn’s brutalist vision, exposed concrete softened by light, and a large number of translucent panels that bathe its auditorium and galleries in a light not quite Kahnian but better than most. At a robustly charming talk he gave in my hometown a year ago, Filler lamented what photos he’d seen of Piano’s latest work – “they say the camera does not lie, and in this case it does not lie nearly enough” – before completing his Texas tour in Fort Worth and later recanting in a review of the pavilion that called it, at least, “far from the disaster feared.”

Because art inevitably meanders moneywards, Texas, with its oceanlike expanse of frackable dinosaur remains, hosts much much more than a fiftieth this country’s greatest art and architecture, a place where even Dallas, a stereotype-monger’s fantasy of luxury cars and gaudily dressed women and hermaphroditic boys, redeems itself with a museum by Algur Meadows and a bridge by Santiago Calatrava and a masterwork, Nasher Sculpture Center, by Piano (whose other masterwork, The Menil Collection, stands in Houston). My hometown slouches not, either, and the closing of its museum’s wonderful Henri Matisse exhibition, Saturday, will find me there and not in Laredo to see Juan “Baby Bull” Diaz continue an increasingly uninspired comeback.

When boxing historian’s apply their finish to this era, they must note: We did not leave prizefighting, my friends, before prizefighting left us.

Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com

By Bart Barry–

The temperature in the parking lot is a reminder just how badly abused is the word “sweltering” by Americans anywhere above of the 30th parallel, a plane deeper than most of the Deep South. Heavy with wet, the heat does not sap or wilt or hang or haunt but envelops, and then saps and wilts and hangs and haunts.

Outside Club Cabana, a mixed-ethnic locale that began as a Latin revue and will be this afternoon too but whose seal-brown wood door sports a sign prohibiting what hats and baggy shirts anticipate Lil’ Money, not Banda Ensalada de Frutas, a few hangerson lull with a fewer fighters, and no, there is never a doubt, even before eyes innocent of pugilism, which man in a group of four pays bills by experiencing and causing pain with other men. That toughguy American author – who wrote like this, and this is how he wrote – called bullfighters’ eyes cold and dead, because of death, one inferred, and that marks their difference with prizefighters’ eyes, whether debuting or in a fiftieth match. Prizefighters’ eyes can be lifeless during fightweek, casualties of weightmaking’s demon fraternity, Dehydration & Starvation, but their eyes sparkle during combat, and keep sparkling for days to come, unless they get rolled white or shuttered.

The slovenly dressed moons that revolve round prizefighters use transitive verbs like hospitalize and kill. Prizefighters do not. Do unto others and have done unto you, they silently observe – the Silverish Rule. Children of chaotic circumstances, usually, they crave a purchased respite from violence and borrow the language of their moons’ vicarious achievements during fightweek to increase future purses because folks who’ve not experienced death’s ultimate monotony dote on its metaphors, and often buy ringside tickets.

“I don’t know what hap – oh wait, is this on?” says a handsome man in his twenties, accoutered in black guayabera, black slacks, black socks, black loafers. “OK, I’ll run the podium, then, if Marcus cain’t make it.”

At the far wing of the polyester-skirted dais’ 15-chair span sits Ronnie “Excuses” Velazquez, a sweetheart chap who learned to box in the army and is dogged as anyone, dogged in a way his 0-3 (2 KOs) record belies radically enough to make doggedness an antonym for wisdom. Ronnie’s nom de guerre was not chosen but given him by an exasperated gymworker who mistook in Ronnie’s smiling reasons a passel of pretexts instead of honest embarrassment about his impossible predicament of single fatherhood, working 60 weekly hours while making a go at prizefighting – kids’ mother still in Afghanistan. Mother, not mom, because of the divorce.

Six days out, Ronnie’s scheduled opponent has him by two weightclasses, and while the promoter promises the contracted weight is different from the billing weight and Ronnie suspends disbelief acrobatically, they both know the contract means nothing because a member of the state commission has a son and two prospects on the card, and Ronnie’s pride will put him in that Saturday ring to buy his kids’ school clothes. They would rather handmedowns than fatherlessness, so it goes unsaid.

“This guy is what I like to call ‘a warrior’,” says the emcee promoter. “He’s had tough, tough losses. Everyone said he shoulda’won two. Thing is, I told him, ‘This is what you do to take it to the next level, eh?’ Margarita over there, before we kicked-off this presser, Margarita, y’know, the owner of this fine place, she told me, ‘I don’t ever want one of my sons to have to fight a monster like that Velazquez cabrón!’ I couldn’t believe it. That’s what a warrior he is.”

When his rambunctious seven-year-old gets too rowdy, Ronnie corrals him by the shoulders in the gentlest way for a father to turn the feat. For quelling his masculine rage publically and legally and violently, and for once being the target of his father’s drunken lunacy, “Excuses” handles his children too softly by half.

“I wish it was at a lower weight,” Ronnie says during his time with the handheld mic. “It is what it is, I guess.”

The local daily’s tireless, tired veteran navigates the conference’s midway point under a spell of indifference – Is the reason why you don’t cover my son because you hate the Mexicans? / I love about you how writed mijo, because you are great writer! / You ain’t got a clue on boxing, pinche joto! / Best writer in the whole country, I saying to everybody, right here – and arrives beside a fellow writer anonymous enough to wear a nametag and lanyard. The two chat, oblivious of what happens onstage, about the moribund periodical industry and their shared interest, trending moribund itself, until the charismatic young promoter in Riverwalk-foodservice attire gives the veteran reporter a special shoutout from the podium for the promotional article he expects in Monday’s edition.

The main-event fighter, an undefeated lightweight from the local-gym scene who invites a donnybrook even from novices, says his fight will be a great one, thanks everyone, and plays to the promoter’s implication his opponent didn’t make the gathering because fear, not traffic, deterred him.

“Everybody else got here,” says the promoter. “Anyways, I need to say a quick thank you to Ropa Increíble, one of our sponsors and the best place to get school uniforms or custom-logo tees. Also Mil Corazones Auto – on the corner of Reyes and Durango, beside the Washateria. And my moms, of course, for making this all possible, because without her, sin mi mama, I would not be here!”

In a lightless spot just behind where the dining room becomes the club stands the local welterweight who was to be next week’s co-main until he got spearchiseled earlier in the month by a Lithuanian, TKO-5. The other guy wore those Everlast gloves Mayweather said Maidana couldn’t wear, and they shouldn’t be legal because they felt like he was getting hit with bare knuckles, and the other guy was really strong. Now his medical suspension reads: 60 days.

“Can’t wait to get back in,” he says. “I feel sorry for my next opponent.”

Bart Barry can be found on Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry–

A couple years ago, apropos of violence and documentaries and Pablo Picasso, too, a writer whose work I admire mentioned in a correspondence with me that when he blurred his eyes at an Italian photojournalist’s treatment of pornography he “could arrange a fight image.” The idea has not left me. This column, then, will not treat one Brit’s counterpunching triumph over a poorly balanced American slugger Saturday – so plan accordingly.

There is a primal urgency in prizefighting, or even its tamer athletic stepbrother, boxing, rivaled by little but sex. Outlier fetishists embroider both, of course, but purveyors of prizefighting take greatest offense generally at the same juncture purveyors of pornography do: When the participants don’t understand what their viewership is about. Even Floyd Mayweather, who, but for awkward moments every decade or so when an opponent makes him do or endure something primal, understands what of his sport appeals mostly, sates many of his fans with shows of feral spending power they mistake for a compensatory sexual potency that offsets what violence he plans to not-offer during fightnight.

Not long after corresponding with my friend about blurring one’s vision, a lifetime’s practice of directionless reading brought me, as well, to the Kama Sutra, Hinduism’s unabashed exploration of human sexual behavior, a tome that preceded by millennia the West’s abominable rewrites and will survive them by millennia. In the well-reported pages of this quite clinical book come passages about the intimacy of shared breathing – which is not shared breath so much as shared rhythm, a voluntary matching between two persons of the rate at which they perform survival’s first act. Eastern disciplines, of course, emphasize breathing in a way Western religions do not, placing immediately the human mind upon a dot that is the present tense, balanced preciously between endless beams of past and future, and an incredible bond can be formed almost instantly between two persons who consciously match one another’s breath.

The best prizefighters learn their opponent’s breathing patterns – matching them initially, the better to learn them, and rendering both men predictable to one another, for a time – before using the voluntary alteration of this involuntary exercise to become devastatingly unpredictable. At our sport’s highest levels, timing an opponent’s inhalation is about the only way to drive one’s left knuckles in his liver, and may help answer for some the riddle of why two blows to the exact same spot on a man’s body often take such disparate effects.

My friend’s idea about blurring one’s eyes also approaches other possibilities, such as the voyeurism inherent in sports viewership, a possibility that, at one of its extremes, reduces to the loony belief a man’s anonymous witness to an event may affect its outcome; because of some woolly form of what social psychology calls confirmation bias someone in Dallas becomes convinced the headband he wears on gameday sends positive energy to Cowboys starters taking the field in San Francisco (and in his defense, good luck falsifying that). This idea returns us, fitfully though not anxiously, to the mindless dot of present time, and what exhilaration can happen there.

I am too detached to be a good and loyal fan; it is a rare moment of watching sports in a stadium seat or through television’s distorting lens that I am lost in a moment, that I am present, in other words, and careful about what is going on. I looked enviously out my apartment window the third Sunday night in June as a hundred thousand of my fellow San Antonians spontaneously alighted on downtown to be present with one another in a celebratory communion that marked what 13 men, strangers to all but a few, did together with an orange ball a few miles away. Some of that is cultural, of course; San Antonio is 63-percent Latino, and Latinos embrace communal participation much the way other ethnicities in America celebrate individualism, both rugged and antidepressant-induced. But some of it is also about having a predisposition for being present, neither lamenting nor contriving, and being unconscious in the best sense of the word: devoid of self-awareness.

There was, however, a moment that brought me to this quite unexpectedly, and brought nearly 20,000 of my fellow participants to it at the same instant, and that was the 1:33 mark of the 12th round of Sergio Martinez versus Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. on Sept. 15, 2012, at Thomas & Mack Center, when Chavez winged a left hook that buckled Martinez and began the most suspenseful 80 seconds I have experienced in sports. It remains a standard because of the mindlessness it impelled in me and so many others, and between this column and “The Ring” magazine, I have written about that moment no fewer than seven times. The intimacy of the experience Martinez and Chavez shared, I have found, is never captured so effectively as when doused with allusions to sex, when drowned in the brutal language of fucking, when a blurring happens to the images our memories recall.

Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com

By Bart Barry-

SAN ANTONIO – This city’s largest art museum, SAMA, is now in the throes of a three-month exhibition, “Matisse: Life in Color,” that is exceptional by any museum’s standard of quality and particularly exceptional by this one’s. Frenchman Henri Matisse, a painter and sculptor and printmaker and papercutter and architect who resides in the top five of any critic’s pound-for-pound list of 20th-century artists, as a metaphor has nary a tangential relationship with anything to happen in boxing since June.

Not that he needs another recommendation.

If a distinction might be drawn between Matisse and those who run our beloved sport, and one will need be drawn if any of what follows is to happen, it is this: The more expert one is at visual arts generally and painting specifically, the more impressive Matisse becomes; while the more one learns about boxing today, the less impressed he is by those who do it, manage it, promote it, broadcast it and write about it.

There is a startling economy to each thing Matisse depicts, a fixation on minimizing the number of times his implement need touch its medium to depaint a full expression of the human form. Between the larger canvas works and bronze statues at SAMA’s exhibition hang sketches Matisse did, often of subjects later depicted in nearby canvases, sketches in which Matisse worked to decipher the boundaries of his expression. Many charcoal drawings, necessarily black and gray on white, say “There! it can be done without color, all those patterns and shapes kept distinct, and so, I may fill it with whatever colors I wish.”

There is a learned fixation, as well, on luminosity, a play upon the realization a human eye has but three cones for discerning color but a hundred thousand neurons for contour, and therefore, whatever decorative value it provides, color is a thing our ancestors did without for quite some time (and no sooner did we sense color but our brains devised a filtration system for removing it from most light sources). So long as the contours of a treatment resemble a human face, Matisse demonstrated, it matters nothing if the beard is turquoise, the chin is tangerine or the hair is flaming purple; we see the world in black and white, and our eyes answer their most essential binary inquiry – human face Y/N? – many milliseconds faster than computers ever may.

Matisse, and here he followed Claude Monet, got at an idea best expressed like vision-as-narrative, a concession, or perhaps proclamation, we very much see what we are looking for and then remember nary a fraction of it – a form of honest rendering, to revise an American courthouse oath, which goes: The truth, never the whole truth, but nothing but the truth. When one remembers any Matisse painting an hour after seeing it, he remembers its colors, radiant and voluminous; first in the mind of both tyrant and tyro comes always the incredible breadth of Matisse’s inspired palette. And yet, and yet.

It is the solid blacks and whites, and grays between, that allow delineation enough in what signals our brains collect from our eyes to allow the colors to remain intact, and not make of them what muddiness should logically come of such swirling, competing hues. No one remembers Matisse’s black outlines, absorbed from Post-Impressionist predecessors and specifically Paul Gauguin’s studies of Cloisonnism, a way of making oil on canvas mimic stained-glass windows’ authority, that wrap most of Matisse’s objects, or the flat white paint that dots so many such objects, or all the matte-gray mirrors one sees, when he returns home and tries to remember his favorite piece, because Matisse mastered the narrative of human sight taught him by Renaissance masters like Rembrandt and Diego Velazquez, and then surpassed their understanding, inverting the harmony of their form, goaded doubtlessly by his cobber and competitor Pablo Picasso, and seeing what the human mind might sense through its retina, communicate to its brain, and retain in its memory.

But Matisse absorbed the masters’ craft before he subverted it, a thing lost on all but the very best athletes, managers, promoters, broadcasters and writers of our beloved sport, today: Every kid with reflexes thinks to carry his hands below his view, every new manager thinks he’s the first to read Dale Carnegie’s 77-year-old bestseller or any of its 77,777 knockoffs, every upstart promoter is certain he knows the city better than what dozen failures preceded him, every broadcaster discounts his viewers’ perceptiveness, and every young writer suspects no one before him dabbled promiscuously in first-person pronouns or exclamation marks.

In the Matisse works that now hang at SAMA, one sees most prominently an homage, irreverent, yes, but an homage nonetheless, to the 17th-century Dutch master Jan Vermeer. Matisse was on to the Dutchman’s every trick – academics today might argue whether Vermeer traced his subjects from the projected image of a camera obscura, but Matisse knew it straight away – and gently ribbed the master with fisheye distensions of planes introduced by a light source from the left, covered either by a curtain or open window. Matisse knew from a blessed combination of maturity (his 35th birthday preceded his originality) and deep observation what his influences were about and where to place the detour of his genius.

From empty local gyms to bankrupted managers, impotent promoters, plunging viewership and impecunious scribes, today the woes of our sport’s woeful state, contrarily, reduce often to a stubborn obliviousness of what preceded us.

*

Author’s note: The photo above is of Matisse’s “Interior, Flowers and Parakeets” – a featured work in San Antonio Museum of Art’s current exhibition.

Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com

By Bart Barry-

Saturday in Atlantic City in another hideous but portentous mismatch on HBO, Russian light heavyweight titlist Sergey “Krusher” Kovalev raced through a helpless Australian named Blake Caparello, stumbling out the block and getting flashdropped in round 1 before spearchiseling his way to a TKO-2 result whose time was irrelevant and preordained. For the first time in Kovalev’s career as an HBO fighter, though, Saturday’s portentous match actually portended something, as word came last week Kovalev will fight Bernard “The Alien” Hopkins in November.

Bless Bernard Hopkins for making this fight.

Bless Kovalev, too, and Kovalev’s handlers, too too, and HBO and Oscar De La Hoya – whose canning of Richard Schaefer allowed others to begin imagining something like this – and even Showtime, whose subversion of HBO’s plans for a Kovalev match with Adonis Stevenson ignited, finally, a fire beneath the throne at HBO Sports. Barring a similar act of audacity by Gennady Golovkin’s handlers, Kovalev-Hopkins is now the most-anticipated fight of 2014.

There is a very real chance Bernard Hopkins will beat Sergey Kovalev, and whereas it might once, even recently, have brought a foreboding that went “what the hell kind of professional sport gets dominated by a 50-year-old?” the fact becomes ever clearer this probably is the worthiest era in our sport’s history for a stamp in crimson dye that reads: DOMINATED BY A 50-YEAR-OLD. Why the change of heart? In signing to fight Kovalev, remorseless and mean-spirited as any contemporary practitioner of fisticuffs, Hopkins demonstrated a willingness to imperil himself for greatness’ sake that none of his young inferiors possesses.

Hopkins now acts both as a counterargument to Gennady Golovkin’s small army of apologists who just can’t seem to find a fitting opponent anywhere they look, and a large black asterisk historians’ minds must set beside Floyd Mayweather’s name: *Did not fight his era’s best.

Notice what did not precede last week’s delightful announcement. No mention of Machiavellian advisors, no bickering about purse splits on message boards, no talk of one man’s cowardice matching the other’s stupidity, no insiders’ analysis of why promoters are obdurately opposed to what is best for their sport, and most blessedly of all, no midnight conference call to announce people not-fighting.

Two thoughts on why Hopkins may beat a genuinely frightening dude in his prime – frightening because who but Kovalev in the annals of boxing tragedy increased his knockout percentage after killing a man in the ring? – and apply with an alien precision his looniest stroke yet to this era: 1. Something Kovalev’s first U.S. trainer said, and 2. Kelly Pavlik.

Going in reverse order, and for those old enough to remember, Pavlik, in 2008, was the undefeated, undisputed, lineal middleweight champion of the world, having done it the right way, stretching the man, Jermain Taylor, who beat the man, Bernard Hopkins, who, by 2008, was a sprightly 43 year-old super middleweight six months removed from being outclassed by Welshman Joe Calzaghe. Pavlik was expected to overwhelm Hopkins the way volume punchers tend to overwhelm boxers, especially volume punchers possessed of a right cross like Pavlik’s. Suddenly Hopkins was not a boxer or counterpuncher, though, but a slugger, leaping at Pavlik in the opening round with left-hook leads to the Ohioan’s durable liver.

It was impossible Pavlik had trained for such an attack from a man who’d managed to take an athletic actionfigure like Taylor in 2005 and make with him 72 minutes of defensive awfulness not to be surpassed in dullness until Erislandy Lara fights Erislandy Lara. With those Hopkins left hands, though, went the trajectory of Pavlik’s right cross. Whatever ailments and dissipation Pavlik suffered immediately before he threw hands with Hopkins, his cross never flew right because Hopkins lowered Pavlik’s elbow six reflexive inches in the opening three minutes. Hopkins will do something similarly unexpected to Kovalev in their opening stanza, something neither the Russian nor his American trainer John David Jackson prepares for, and how Kovalev adjusts, what sort of plan-B game Kovalev possesses, will determine the match’s outcome.

Beside Jackson in Kovalev’s corner in November will be Don Turner, one of the few remaining sages in our sport and the man into whose North Carolina gym Kovalev strolled years ago.

“(Sergey) doesn’t hit that hard,” Turner told me in September. “He hits you on-time. When you hit a guy on-time, you’re punching him twice as hard as you naturally would.”

Here then, in the form of a question, lies the enormous challenge rushing at Kovalev: Who has ever hit Bernard Hopkins on-time? Kovalev runs opponents into his power, cocking a right cross with a left hook that was cocked by a right cross. He is a volume puncher with menacing force and radioactive meanness. But Hopkins has fought dozens such men. Whom that Kovalev has fought begins to approximate Hopkins in craft, experience or wiles?

But as a friend of mine said Saturday night, crashing together metaphors in the way men do in relaxed conversation after witnessing barbaric spectacles: “So long as you don’t look in Medusa’s eyes, Father Time stays undefeated.”

If Kovalev does not bite on Hopkins’ prefight lures, and here language barrier shall serve the Russian well, he can set a pace Hopkins cannot possibly abide a few months before his 50th birthday, and if that happens, the beating Kovalev bestows on “The Alien” will be otherworldly. But there remains a very real chance it will not happen, and if it doesn’t and Hopkins somehow beats Kovalev, may this period henceforth and universally be known as the Hopkins Era.

Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com

By Bart Barry-

“Geale had the best credentials of anyone that’s gotten in the ring with him. Geale is a former two-time titlist.” – Gennady Golovkin’s promoter Tom Loeffler, July 26.

Saturday at Madison Square Garden, 32-year-old Kazakhstani middleweight titlist Gennady “GGG” Golovkin stopped Australian challenger Daniel Geale at 2:47 of round 3. It was another attraction-building event televised by HBO, a portentous sort of happening intended to entice viewers with the chance one of Golovkin’s next three or four matches might come against enticing, or at least appropriate, competition – even if a $60 pay-per-view tariff must be levied upon subscribers to see it.

Daniel Geale fought like a self-taught hobbyist, Saturday, a man who wanted out of his contract during introductions and was unheard of in the United States for good reason until last week, when aficionados who know better began exercising their minds with the calisthenics of thought-experiment, proving they possessed dexterity enough to imagine a means by which Geale might vanquish Golovkin. Geale was, after all, the guy some Americans watched via buggy videostream in 2012 decision Felix Sturm, a middleweight titlist still better known by Americans for being wronged during a De La Hoya-Hopkins infomercial 10 years ago than anything he achieved afterwards.

There is some simple calculus in matchmaking, to complement its much more difficult intuiting, and that is: Volume punchers solve boxers who solve power punchers who solve volume punchers. That’s an indirect way of saying a volume-punching guy like Geale – who unloaded his best righthand on an onrushing Golovkin in round 3, and landed it flush, and didn’t so much as compromise the trajectory of Golovkin’s own righthand, an already started one stiff enough to land Geale on a blue mat from which the Aussie rose with seven beats to go in a 10-count he then stretched to a standing 4-count before quitting on his feet with a spiritless shake of the head – was a better showcase for Golovkin than even cynics anticipated.

Here’s a direct way of putting it: Daniel Geale hadn’t a prayer against Gennady Golovkin. Much of that is Golovkin’s fantastic professionalism, a professionalism supporter and dissenter alike would dearly like to see tested by a worthy adversary, more overdue for Golovkin now than any HBO fighter since Andre Berto, but a goodish amount of it is also due to matchmaking and Geale-promoter Gary Shaw’s noteworthy penchant for getting no-hopers on HBO.

If there was a first noteworthy moment in Saturday’s main event, it came in the final seconds of round 1, when Golovkin measured Geale with straight rights. What made it noteworthy was Golovkin’s fearlessness across from Geale, a fearlessness that allowed Golovkin to paw and tap with a right glove extended fully from his chin even while he remained in an orthodox stance. Youngsters are taught to time and punish opponents who hang their jabs, returning their lead heads at half the rate they deploy them, but how often does a prizefighter in a title match have the chutzpah to hang a cross, and leave it there?

That it took fewer than 170 seconds for Golovkin to realize Geale’s freshest haymaker mightn’t imperil him speaks to matchmaking, finally, more than another element. Once the man across from you is incapable of hurting you, he becomes a target, not an opponent, and while reducing challengers to such marks a champion’s greatness, having opponents ready-reduced in round 1 is a mark of attraction-building more than matchmaking.

Talk now turns to a Madison Square Garden superfight between career welterweight and new middleweight champion Miguel Cotto and Golovkin, which, conducted at a catchweight between 155 and 155 1/4 pounds, would be compelling. Such a fight, though, loses its attraction by 30 percent with every pound that happens above 155 – still, technically, middleweight – since the men’s styles are similar enough to reduce their competition to one of size, and Golovkin would be considerably larger. Cotto, of course, graduated beyond the Daniel Geales of the world almost 10 years ago, when he stopped Randall Bailey (26-2, 24 KOs) in 2004, and Cotto is only 18 months older than Golovkin – which ought to help statisticians recalibrate the meaningfulness of Golovkin’s 90-percent knockout ratio.

If the best match for Golovkin is at junior middleweight with the middleweight champion of the world, or at middleweight with a man enjoying a career rebirth round 154 pounds, so be it, but can we please cool the silly banter about GGG’s willingness to fight great men at 168? Golovkin has fought exactly two times above middleweight, when he defeated Amar Amari and Malik Dziarra in 2008, and to say his Saturday untethering of Daniel Geale qualifies him for a match with Carl Froch or Andre Ward at super middleweight is, frankly, inappropriate.

The same night in 2009 Ward unmanned Mikkel Kessler, a favorite to win the Super Six tournament, Golovkin laid waste to Mikhail Makarov in Makarov’s 11th prizefight. Two weeks before Froch gave Lucian Bute his first career loss, in 2012, Golovkin stamped Makoto Fuchigami’s record with its seventh. The question, then, is not if Ward and Froch would each be 30-0 against the 30 men Golovkin has faced but instead: Would either Ward or Froch have less than a 100-percent knockout ratio?

A hundred victories over Daniel Geale do not approach one victory over Andre Ward, and a thrashing of little Miguel Cotto, asked by many to retire 4 1/2 years ago when Manny Pacquiao whupped him, does not approach so much as a decision victory over Carl Froch. It’s long past time for Golovkin’s handlers to do something bold.

Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com

By Bart Barry-

Saturday begins an eight-day Soviet-boxing siege on HBO.

No, you’re right, “siege” is more than a bit over the top, and the Soviet Union survives today only in the American minds of Cold Warriors and millionaire defense-contracting executives, and what politicians and media outlets they employ, but those clicks count much as others in online-traffic ratings, so let’s let it roll. This siege, in the form of warmongering by Kazakhstani middleweight titlist Gennady “GGG” Golovkin and Russian light heavyweight titlist Sergey “Krusher” Kovalev, will be conducted in Manhattan and Atlantic City, respectively, and will mark an act of belligerence perpetrated not on America but our Australian allies, in the form of New South Wales middleweight Daniel Geale and Victoria light heavyweight Blake Caparello. HBO will be promoting, er, reporting, from the front.

Far as manias go, this Russian invasion of our sport is a bit short of maniacal. More frustrating still, it does not appear either its participants’ faults, exactly, that our current era produces so little in the way of meaningful opponents for network-anointed lions to feast upon. Spotchecking the records of the Aussie dishes undergoing preparations for Golovkin and Kovalev, one finds bland fare not to be improved with spice or garnish. This is their time, Geale and Caparello, which sounds like a name for a tandem of hardhitting talkshow hosts more than hard hitters, and while they are not prepared for GGG and Krusher, they are ready as they’ll ever be – that inane little cliché anxiety drives persons to use just before they confront an obstacle fated to be insurmountable: When you ask someone’s fitness for a task and he says he is “ready as I’ll ever be,” hedge your bets, because the only acceptable answer is “yes.”

That’s the answer you’d draw from Golovkin or Kovalev, in part because the word accounts for no less than 10 percent their working English vocabularies, which is a refreshing twist that ought delight their comrades in the former Soviet Union much the way Julio Cesar Chavez and Felix Trinidad delighted their Spanish-language followers by sticking to the mother tongue, regardless how it enkindled publicists and whatever mousy-faced retread anticipated Showtime’s Jim Gray. The pressure is ever on athletes who ply their craft in the United States to speak English, a nearsighted demand that misses the point nearly every time it’s made, since these men are not interested in assimilation – they aren’t allowed in this country for it, either – but rather performance; they are here to provide a spectacle experts assert an American could not. That is particularly true of Golovkin and Kovalev, two men whom American Andre Ward would beat if he still fought, but since he no longer does, P1 visas are granted the former Soviets because, in a twist Chavez fans can appreciate, they are willing to do the sort of work Americans won’t.

The plea for more words in English is trite and misplaced because having a man speak to you in sounds connected to no moral force for him or you is just noise better communicated with Golovkin’s disarming smile or Kovalev’s menacing everything. Let that remind us, too, ever and again, the only thing one should value of a fighter as an individual is what he does between the ropes and bells. If you are flummoxed by an athlete not speaking your language because you think he’d make a great role model for your son if only your son might feel a native-language connection, your perspective is wanting.

These men, to paraphrase Charles Barkley, whose 1993 Nike commercial set a candor standard never since approached, are paid to bludgeon with their fists half-naked men to unconsciousness; some of that dwells in all of us, yes, being as we are the descendants of those willing to brain man or beast for food, but we’re all better served by keeping such impulses in vicariousness’ fantastic arena. The profession of hurting other men chooses and is chosen by a special sort of athlete, a neanderthal type better captured by Kovalev’s resting posture, still coiled, than Golovkin’s goodnatured grin, the sort of man a father instinctively knows will protect his daughter as a wife till the day she needs protection from him, and no amount of heuristics or memorized English phrases will bring aficionados any nearer the reality of a man like that than what that man does during 36 minutes of sanctioned violence thrice a year.

Or has the last decade of Manny Pacquiao saying “happy” helped you cultivate a deep, meaningful connection with the Filipino’s soul?

On paper, Geale looks the better, more tested sacrifice, he hasn’t taken an opponent’s consciousness in four years but still, and Caparello looks like Kovalev’s least-hopeful HBO opponent yet. Kovalev’s fights are no longer about anything meaningful as anticipating the next match bound to anticipate the next anticipatory match for an anticipation-filled match with the guy who left HBO, but they’re nigh tolerable as Golovkin’s because, for reasons that might reduce to simple publicity, Kovalev’s prizefighting image floats upon a hyperbolic cloud fractionally puffy as Golovkin’s. Not in recent memory, or distant, has a fighter won so many hypothetical battles in the minds of experts while winning so few actual ones.

The “most feared” label is by nature fraudulent – right, Erislandy? – and most commonly evinces a promoter unwilling to pay opponents a fair wage. Odds would say every Floyd Mayweather opponent hospitably entertains the high probability he will lose to Mayweather, and yet never do we hear Mayweather called “most feared” because opponents win career-best paydays by losing to him.

Either HBO’s parsimony is impeding Golovkin and Kovalev’s fighting appropriate opponents, or else neither man is interested in climbing weight classes till he comes to someone who wrongly views him as a sure-thing. Regardless, both men, victims of circumstance perhaps, now make haste solely for footnote status in the Manny & Money Era.

Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com

By Bart Barry-

When Mexican Saul “Canelo” Alvarez fought countryman Alfredo Angulo in March, I attended a viewing party at the home of a Puerto Rican boxing trainer who, despite no rooting ethnic interest whatever, found his home filled by seven other Puerto Rican aficionados. Saturday, when Alvarez decisioned Cuban southpaw Erislandy Lara at MGM Grand, by a split decision that might have gone to either fighter fairly, I attended a viewing party at the home of that same boxing trainer, and this time we were two. Total.

Puerto Rico’s proximity to Cuba cannot explain such clairvoyance, alone, but might begin to tell why otherwise committed aficionados decided to mend fences with their spouses, Saturday, rather than give an hour of one evening to an Erislandy Lara match. Lara is indeed as near to unwatchable as a main-event fighter dare be, and if my friend’s house may act as an informal revenue predictor, Alvarez, though he may not have deserved Saturday’s decision, does deserve begrudging respect for enduring a fight with Lara for what inevitably will be a cut in pay.

It became once more apparent sometime in the early part of Saturday’s match Saul Alvarez is exactly what we believed he was during a reign of terror he began in 2010 on the oddly, albeit timelessly, named Queer Street, against Miguel Cotto’s resentful older brother, a thoroughbred’s gallop through pasty competition done at a canter, plodding as Alvarez occasionally was against foes unremarkable as Matthew Hatton and Ryan Rhodes. Three years ago Alvarez appeared a b-level fighter with a great marketing team and surprising poise. The marketing team has fallen-off a bit, after a hell of a run, but Alvarez is otherwise very much a b-level fighter with remarkable poise.

More than any quality that served him Saturday was Alvarez’s self-belief. Perhaps Erislandy Lara is not a puncher serious as other men Alvarez has faced, though he can’t be far behind, but Alvarez was unyielding in his self-belief, wandering wantonly at Lara’s fists regardless of their accuracy. Likely that was the fulcrum upon which the judges’ decision got leveraged: The fighters’ reactions to each other’s punches.

When Alvarez got pasted with a stiff left cross or impaled himself on Lara’s jab, he immediately shuffled his feet and sped forward like a kid trying to impress a prospective coach with hustle on his first day of tryouts. When Lara got kissed by so much as the soughing breeze caused by Alvarez’s right fist flying harmlessly overhead, he jogged the perimeter of the ring like Barry Bonds rounding second after dunking a ball in McCovey Cove. It was absurd the joy Lara brought himself by not getting hit, the way an avoided blow pacified him and revealed his curious fighting character, one to take no umbrage with another man’s attempt to decapitate him; were it not ostensibly a savage happening for which Americans paid $60-per-view, a full day’s wages in many cases, Saturday’s fight would have been a spectacle of Christian forgiveness to rival any Papal Mass.

Lara’s abundance of ruth and want of vengefulness, finally, was the reason most aficionados’ eyes were dry over Saturday’s conceivably unfair decision, and why Lara’s postfight corner comprised a full tally of those in the world who desire Alvarez-Lara 2. Spare us, Lord, please! the misery of ever again enduring a match like that one, and if that means somehow bestowing a fortune so vast upon Erislandy Lara he does not don boxing gloves once more, why, may Thy will be done!

Canelo Alvarez would be an asterisk in a better era, a picture of profitable precocity whose carrot coif would not have won him a match with the era’s best, Floyd Mayweather – though, of course, in a better era, Mayweather himself might struggle to be in the Top 5. And no, there isn’t a prizefighting era in which Erislandy Lara’s pacifism would have been welcomed.

In a different if not better era, a Soviet era in which Moscow paid Cuba sugar prices justifiable only if Fidel were an alchemist converting cane to nukes, Lara might have remained a career amateur in the Cuban system and found his lifestyle suitable enough not to defect, amassing four or five gold medals. Lara’s mastery of amateur tactics is unrivaled: In the last century of American sport, only golf’s Bobby Jones perhaps accomplished more as an amateur against professionals than Lara has.

Alvarez may be limited but he has more dimensions than Lara, a man with seemingly no transitional capacity, defense to offense. How different an outcome might Saturday have brought if Lara had seen his opponent’s misses as occasions for retribution, not revelry? Several times early in the fight, Lara stood under his feet, delivered a crisp 1-2 to Alvarez’s ever predictably placed head, and then, as Alvarez began his impress-the-coach shuffle, Lara launched a homerun trot for reasons even a defensive specialist like Pernell Whitaker would not have fathomed. In those instants, Alvarez, hands low, freckled neck freshly stiffened by clean shots, wanted no part whatever of more contact from Lara, who, had he followed with even a measuring jab after those 1-2s, might have taken the fight, 10 rounds to 2 at least, on two scorecards, while earning a draw from judge Levi Martinez, reliably scoring another match for the promoter’s favorite color, red corner or blue.

It’s what makes Mayweather a special prizefighter where Lara is a special amateur; Mayweather showed Alvarez a new rhythm each round, keeping the fearless if not perspicacious Mexican unbalanced throughout, preventing the very sort of belligerence Alvarez showed in the final five minutes of Saturday’s match, flying at Lara like a man confident no more than two punches would come in succession, punches he didn’t mind swallowing in behalf of what loyally loud countrymen dutifully filled MGM Grand.

That Alvarez made a choice for violence Lara did not is reason enough to see a close fight Canelo’s way, keeping him boxing’s third most-reliable draw in this soggy era. Erislandy Lara, meanwhile, can content himself with remaining one of the greatest amateurs of this era or any other.

Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com

By Bart Barry-

Saturday at Las Vegas’ MGM Grand, home of Floyd Mayweather’s entranceway shrine, Mexican Saul “Canelo” Alvarez will make a pay-per-view match with Cuban Erislandy “The American Dream” Lara to determine who will be considered the world’s best junior middleweight until Mayweather returns to the division. Those who consider themselves insiders are, in many cases, expecting an overrated Alvarez to lose to what they believe is an underrated Cuban boxer-puncher.

Were official sportsbook Boxing Betting Odds right about Alvarez?”

Erislandy Lara has gotten extended mileage out of his and trainer Ronnie Shields’ claims of others’ avoidance. He is aesthetically displeasing, often in the very worst way of sloppy retreat, hopping sideways in shows of inefficiency to make Amir Khan’s head shake, while he is possessed of wiles enough to make his unconsciousness in a prizefighting ring unlikely. He approached the dais after Alvarez’s last fight, a sanctioned assault of Alfredo Angulo in March, with the trepidatious look of a man pushed from the wings by a stagehand longer on enthusiasm than prudence. Alvarez fielded him nearly with pity, sensing almost immediately Lara was driven by others, not restrained, confidently patted his shoulder, and told Lara to wait his turn.

Their encounter bore the markings of a nervous little guy in a struggling beard sent on a dare by his gamer buddies to game a supermodel on the arm of the bar’s largest and most masculine presence; the podium was the lass and Lara the nervous suitor. After a quiet and somewhat rambling bit of Cuban Spanish from Lara, Alvarez relieved his command and asked who wanted to see them fight, laughed at most of the room’s silence, then asked two of those who spoke up if they, too, were Cubans. Then Alvarez dismissed Lara, as if empathetically.

Some weeks later, with Alvarez wanting back on pay-per-view soon, and his U.S. promoter privately unraveling towards a soon-to-be-public firing of its CEO, Alvarez-Lara got announced, a match Lara’s true believers believe will justify years of their man’s contending he is the game’s most-avoided prizefighter, a match that may prove an aesthetic disaster, but may not, and will be Alvarez’s to lose – either via brutal stoppage or sympathetic judging by some who know a healthy Las Vegas economy is a burden no Cuban’s popularity should be asked to support.

There will be very few Lara supporters at Saturday’s match because most Lara fans are committed to misanthropy more than boxing. In Lara they see a soulmate spoiler of sorts, a man who makes their contrary impulses dance like disco lights in a kaleidoscope. Alvarez is the sort of person a Lara fan never expected to fight their guy. For having been ushered to stardom via haircolor and Mexican daytime television – and Mexicans’ rapacious desire to claim prizefighting’s best as their own – “Canelo” is the anti-Lara, a man whose image surgepumps lighter fluid on the dull if ever-breathing embers of resentment from which many casual boxing fans, and even some serious ones, draw their animating force.

Not enough is yet known about the fiscal health of Alvarez’s U.S. handler, Golden Boy Promotions, or even if it has been acting legally as Alvarez’s promoter – a Florida courthouse will begin sorting this out in October, when All Star Boxing, headed by one of the more charismatic promoters our sport boasts, Tuto Zabala, sees the fruition of a lawsuit it initiated in 2011 – to comment intelligently on the outfit’s future. There is doubt, though.

While Golden Boy Promotions’ deposed executive Richard Schaefer is arguably the least-charismatic promoter our sport boasts, or boasted anyway, he built a robust company while answering to about as zany a boss as any serious professional ever did. In and out of rehab and surely suffering worse and deeper troubles than ever had their day in the tabloids, Oscar De La Hoya disappeared frequently, appeared sporadically, and rarely said an insightful or particularly coherent thing while in public during much of the last half of Schaefer’s tenure.

Indications are that Schaefer did not represent De La Hoya’s best interests at all times, though a day may come when it is apparent De La Hoya’s best interests were not necessarily the same as his company’s, and while Schaefer auctioned off assets of the corporation, many possibly to manager Al Haymon, they were assets Schaefer nevertheless acquired in the first place, assets that were going to float away regardless of the promoter’s attaining some fees from them in the meantime. Floyd Mayweather may well have been a free agent, in other words, but the buffet of substandard Golden Boy Promotions fighters upon which he feasted, instead of Manny Pacquiao, was no accident and brought Golden Boy Promotions much greater revenues than it would have raised on its own, whatever conditional promises were made to attain them.

How well boxing’s second-best promoter will function in Schaefer’s absence is anyone’s guess. No knowledgeable person expects De La Hoya to have the acumen or attention span to replace Schaefer by himself. One hopes, for our sport’s longterm health, then, De La Hoya is busy interviewing potential replacements, sifting through an impressive stack of impressive resumes, at this very moment.

One hopes, yes, but one does not expect.

Where Top Rank comprises a roster of esteemed professionals and Don King Productions once comprised one of the world’s most relentlessly enormous personalities, Golden Boy Promotions comprised a rightfully famous figurehead and a savvy CEO. It no longer has a savvy CEO.

Despite himself in many cases, De La Hoya was en route to becoming something our sport lacks and truly needs: a happy ending. The tenuous partnership of De La Hoya and Saul “Canelo” Alvarez, tenuously linked, may not be any handicapper’s best place to put his money, but for now, it’s what’s on the quick sheet and deserves at least well-wishes, if not additional investment from fans.

Either way, I’ll take Alvarez, UD-12, in a match that proves Erislandy Lara is not underrated.

Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com

By Bart Barry-

After nine years of sitting ringside at Top Rank shows – my first media credential came from Lee Samuels, in April 2005 – one flatters himself to think he can discern the difference between a well-built fight and a well-built fighter, noting hallmarks of the promoter’s extraordinary eye for talent and talent for matchmaking in the differences between a well-built fight like Donaire-Montiel and a well-built fighter like Miguel Cotto. In Dallas one year ago to see Mikey Garcia continue his ascent, while actually witnessing its antithesis, I believed the best-built fighter I saw at American Airlines Center was not Garcia but an undefeated kid from Nebraska named Terence Crawford.

Saturday confirmed that opinion and ratified Crawford as one of the world’s two best lightweights (and if a fight’s probable aesthetics should require ambiguity, may it ever do so in the case of Crawford and Miguel Vazquez), when Crawford overcame undefeated Cuban Yuriorkis Gamboa’s initial superiority of reflex and craft to make a first defense of his world title the proper way: TKO-9. At Omaha’s CenturyLink Center, Crawford switched from orthodox to southpaw, socked Gamboa from most every direction, dropped him four times, and commanded referee Genaro Rodriguez’s mercy, in a performance that made aficionados everywhere suddenly invest in the Nebraskan’s fortunes.

Crawford-Gamboa was an excellent fight conducted near the height of boxing’s current powers, though not quite as much as HBO’s hyperbolic commentating crew proclaimed – so thrilled were they to be somewhere new in front of a spectacle competitive. Terence Crawford is a rarity among contemporary prizefighters: A talented fighter able to sell tickets at home though nevertheless willing to travel anywhere and make fight real fights against real fighters. He is a monument to how Top Rank alone can build a fighter when it wishes to, when it takes a nothing-much-to-lose approach and moves him properly, making sterner tests steadily, and giving him a chance to surprise himself and others when his moment comes.

If a prizefighter improves considerably by becoming a champion, Crawford just became better again by defending his belt before a hometown crowd. Whatever collectedness Crawford showed throughout the match and afterwards, however much the ferocity of Gamboa’s attack elevated Crawford’s demeanor in aficionados’ eyes from insipid to poised, there can be no doubt he was surprised and overjoyed by his performance and its result. Watch him immediately after being hoisted on his handler’s shoulders in the traditionally celebratory way; he begins with the menacing glare one sees predominately in staredowns and hip-hop clubs then surrenders his face to a wide and nearly disbelieving grin.

It was, in its way, a metaphor for the transition in demeanor our sport’s fans underwent these last 30 days: After a scowl-inducing opening five months, 2014 righted its course, if it didn’t fully redeem itself, with definitively heroic showings by Carl Froch, Chris Algieri, Vasyl Lomachenko and Terence Crawford, interrupted early by a coronation of sorts for Miguel Cotto, aficionados’ consensus pick for the veteran prizefighter most deserving of one. While a single stretch in a mediocre run would not save a programming regime in a meritocracy, in the current state of premium-cable programming it likely buys those running HBO Sports another year or so.

As if in late-arriving rebuttal to Showtime’s groundbreaking work with Chuck Giampa in 2012, HBO unveiled Saturday its own fan-battle and groggy-cam innovations, the former a feature in which, rather than feign objectivity at the outset, Max and Roy each pick an opposing fighter and comb a match’s every indecisive moment for evidence his fighter took it, while Jim scores their efforts and Steve agrees. Max selects the object of his greater overstatements in bygone fights, and Roy picks whichever guy resembles Roy. Perhaps the fan-battle innovation, then, marks not an innovation but a feedback mechanism: Any time Max tore his eyes from Gamboa’s spellbinding athleticism, Saturday, it meant Crawford did something exceptional, and each time Roy got Gamboa’s name right it was because the Cuban showed much heart, son.

The groggy-cam innovation, though, was exactly that: Effectively as Chuck Giampa once took Showtime viewers inside the mind of a judge so did HBO’s camerawork take subscribers inside the massively concussed brain of a nearly unconscious man in a championship prizefight. Viewers who delighted in HBO’s rope-obstructed shots in the opening rounds had no choice but to concede the close of Saturday’s main event was nigh intoxicating, if not intoxicated. After Gamboa rose from the blue mat and readied himself for his final act of self-immolation in round 9, HBO gave its viewers a jerky Omaha-crowd-as-Pacific-Ocean angle nonsensical as broadcasting a Tiger Woods sudden-death putt from the Goodyear Blimp.

Self-immolation was indeed the phrase that often came to mind while watching Gamboa in Saturday’s final rounds. Gamboa, who has been rendered HBO-camera-like just about every time a fight of his makes television, brought to mind the Mike Tyson whom Evander Holyfield stopped in their first match, though without a chin fractionally reliable as Tyson’s. Just as Holyfield weathered the initial onslaught of Tyson’s reflexive rage and raging reflexes, weathered it to remind Tyson who the physically stronger man was, so did Crawford get too close and then too far in his opening 12 minutes with Gamboa, determining what he might be missing in the Cuban’s all-offense-always style and what the consequences of his carelessness later might bring, before marching forward and imposing himself the way a man should in a confrontation.

Unlike Crawford, Gamboa had no means of countering a force that moved him backwards, asserting once more his claim on contemporary prizefighting’s largest delta between physical ability and ring IQ – that somewhat fuzzy quality one needn’t define precisely before knowing Crawford has much larger stores of it than Gamboa. More enticing, still, is this: Crawford utilized his IQ to make a wager worthy of prizefighting’s master gambler, Juan Manuel Marquez, choosing to absorb Gamboa’s overhand rights, from a southpaw stance, in the hopes of deploying his own arsenal with more devastating effect.

When such hopes find full satisfaction in an arena filled with one’s hometown fans, it’s OK to break character afterwards and smile widely, Terence. You’ve got lots of folks smiling.

Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com

By Bart Barry–

“Looks like in the next year or two, he is going to be a threat for any featherweight champion.”

The quote above belongs to the late Emanuel Steward, an utterance he made about three years ago while watching Gary Russell Jr. decision someone named Eric Estrada, a Chicagoan who then promptly retired with a professional record of 9-2. Russell was 16-0 at the time. Mr. Steward had a penchant for saying most every event, regardless of outcome, had gone “exactly as I thought it would” – though doubtfully even he had a twinkle in his eye sparkly, or smile endearing, enough to say such a thing about Russell’s career.

Saturday in Carson, Calif., in a fine featherweight title fight, Ukrainian Vasyl Lomachenko defeated Maryland’s Gary Russell Jr. by split scores of 116-112, 116-112 and 114-114, giving Russell his first professional defeat and Lomachenko his second professional victory.

Gary Russell Jr. did not deserve a full helping of what derision was heaped on him previously, and he proved as much Saturday. Vasyl Lomachenko deserved at least 2/3 the praise initially heaped on him, too, and he proved as much Saturday. Their fight was excellent, deserving of better treatment than their scorecards engendered, certainly, with both men acquitting themselves about as well as hoped, neither embarrassing himself, and both men’s records now becoming beacons, one hopes, boxing might follow to a better place.

More important for the future of our sport than the milquetoast armistice reached between a promoter and the shell of its rival – review the undercard of Pacquiao-Barrera II for a reminder how well such treaties served aficionados last time – are the losses that adorn the records of both Lomachenko and now Russell, two of the more talented prizefighters in a fantastic division. There’s no sense protecting either anymore, in other words, though the plan for promoter Top Rank seemed never to protect Lomachenko in the first place or else never again to serve him an overweight Mexican veteran in South Texas.

Gary Russell was more than at least one of his predecessors, Andre Berto, and likely more than the other of his predecessors, Adrien Broner – though Broner fought much better opposition en route to being undressed by Marcos Maidana than Berto saw en route to Victor Ortiz, and Russell’s dossier from the last four years makes Berto look Frochian, though Russell is likeable, not odious, so he’ll get forbearance Broner did not (and sell fewer tickets too). In Broner and Berto, aficionados recognized almost immediately profound technical flaws and felt betrayed by a pair of networks that would pretend otherwise, or not know any better despite budgets meriting they should.

With Russell there’s some difference in the sense of betrayal’s origin – there’s a sense poor management has taken a prodigy and made him somewhat ordinary by moving him inappropriately, or not at all, putting altogether too much emphasis on keeping zero down the loss side of his ledger. Russell’s manager, Al Haymon, in other words, may be something of a one-trick pony in his means of developing an attraction, and it’s a trick Floyd Mayweather Jr. taught him. In the case of Berto, the trick was a good one, truthfully: Andre Berto was able to make multiples more money by having his manager hoodwink HBO than his talent held claims on. Broner was not untalented so much as overhyped, forcing his 0 to go earlier than perhaps it needed to – but then network budgets had thinned considerably by the time Broner fought Gavin Rees, thinned anemic beside the halcyon days of Berto locking horns with a guy on a 1-3 tear like Steve Forbes in 2008.

The New Normal, and all that.

Gary Russell was announcing too many fight dates too late in his development with TBA as his opponent, and a goodish amount of the displeasure knowledgeable folks feel for Haymon’s machinations and the effect they’ve taken – precluding fights, not enabling them – got projected on Russell. That should stop now; Russell is not everything we were told he is, neither is Floyd Mayweather or any Haymon-managed fighter, but then, would Haymon be doing his job correctly if any were?

Lomachenko is a solid prizefighter who is fighting a quality of opposition that far outpaces his professional experience and surely speaks to his amateur accomplishments, age, and someone’s avarice – either his, his handlers’, or both, since promoter Bob Arum rarely sounds genuinely prouder than when he says, as he did before Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. fought Sergio Martinez, his company does not put fighters in matches for which they are unready. Lomachenko was unready for Orlando Salido, the Mexican who decisioned him just 3 1/2 months ago in San Antonio, in much the same way Gary Russell was unready for Lomachenko on Saturday. (And yes, there’s something tragicomic about a sport in which a man with a record of 24-0 is unprepared for a man with a record of 1-1, but then, like World Cup fans, fight aficionados love the sweet suffering that accompanies being a malcontent.)

Lomachenko still shows a crazy aversion to others’ body punches, hula-hooping his torso backwards with sincere fright, but he otherwise serves auspicious surprises to opponents, both in his quickness and commitment, that justify most of the confidence he has in himself. And it is to his redounding credit that he complained so little during and after his match with Salido and returned from it so quickly, too.

No longer getting others to fill their dateplanners with a farfetched combination of what potential he showed at 16 and a record built by cheap laborers like Juan Ruiz and Miguel Tamayo, Gary Russell Jr., now, can enjoy the durable sort of esteem that comes from knowing whatever he gets from 24-1 till retirement is earned, forcing him finally to tuck his chin and improve himself in ways the seven fights that directly preceded Saturday’s did not.

Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com

By Bart Barry-

Two Saturdays ago in Manhattan’s Madison Square Garden our sport bade a tempered farewell to former middleweight champion Sergio Martinez, squinting at a hobbled impostor sent hobbling to his stool by Miguel Cotto, even while recalling fondly the innovator who once, as a 154-pounder, stood brazenly, gloves on thighs, before middleweight world champion Kelly Pavlik. Saturday in Brooklyn’s Barclays Center our sport bade a fond hello to New York junior welterweight Chris Algieri, a smartly stylish innovator of his own who just unmanned boxing’s most-feared puncher, Russian Ruslan “Siberian Rocky” Provodnikov, to score 2014’s biggest upset by split-decision scores of 114-112, 114-112 and 109-117.

After weathering a one-punch knockdown and a timeout knee in Saturday’s opening round, Algieri proved himself intelligent and unflappable as a man might be in his world-title-fight debut. Perhaps no tactic employed by Algieri Saturday betrayed the cleverness of his unorthodox craft better than how he repeatedly thrust himself at the ropes each round, performing a feat of balance and leverage that would merit bonus ring-generalship points from judges, were our sport’s scorekeepers reliably able to observe from a mindset more sophisticated than “hit the damn guy!”

A man driven to the ropes by another, the way, say, Mike Alvarado was driven ropesward by Provodnikov in October, generally gets flattened against them, his feet and shoulders squared in tacit agreement his better deserves the largest conceivable target upon which to whale. But Algieri was rarely found in such a helpless posture when his back touched the ropes, ropes against which the New Yorker was rarely trapped by Provodnikov. Instead Algieri’s left leg remained well in front of his right, and his weight shifted dramatically from front to back each time he arrived within a meter of the ropes. He exploded, in other words, backwards to the ropes, employing them much as a slingshot from which he hurled himself forward, either to smother and clinch and counter Provodnikov, or to pivot more quickly away.

It was an innovative and innovatively ballsy way to fight the hardest puncher in the junior welterweight division, a man whose blows temporarily claimed Timothy Bradley’s consciousness any number of times, and in one half hour succeeded at transforming Mike Alvarado from a tatted badboy to a wincing pragmatist – a feat still eluding Colorado’s criminal-justice system in a decade of trying.

Algieri’s achievement was still more impressive when one considers Provodnikov did not have an off night. His head movement under trainer Freddie Roach’s instruction has improved steadily, and his footwork, while perhaps plodding, is nevertheless Mexican-like in its efficiency. Provodnikov was on, Saturday at Barclays Center, and did not appear dismayed or frustrated during the first defense of his WBO title. Both guys made the fights they drew up in camp, both men executed their gameplans, and Algieri was simply the better prizefighter.

He hit Provodnikov with every punch in the boxing lexicon, from uppercut counters to a left-wheeling righthand lead thrown like a jab with more than a tincture of Muhammad Ali. Algieri suspected, and quickly proved, that while the acceleration Provodnikov applies to the mass of a fist is unique among even professional punchers, Provodnikov is not physically stronger than most 140-pound prizefighters, and certainly no stronger than Algieri – part of a riddle of human musculature, flexibility and form that finds a man who can military press his body weight often incapable of hurling a football more than 20 yards using the same deltoids. Bounding off the ropes, time and again, Algieri met Provodnikov in full forward press and stopped the Russian’s momentum, and in some cases drove him backwards – and only one man was in any way able to punch while moving backwards, Saturday, and it decidedly was not the Siberian Rocky.

Every punch Provodnikov landed was ferocious, though, do not doubt; until a man has been ringside while Provodnikov is punching, until he has heard the quantitatively louder sound Provodnikov’s leather makes when it smacks flesh, he cannot appreciate quite how brutal the Russian’s attack is. Better put: Perhaps only those aficionados who have been ringside for a Provodnikov prizefight fathomed judge Max DeLuca’s dissenting 109-117 score, a card to make roseate the cheeks of even professors in the “hit the damn guy!” school of scorekeeping. Rumor is, HBO’s unofficial scorekeeper, too, awarded too many points to Provodnikov, though that faux-pas is pardonable for an entirely different reason: Steve’s job is to ratify whatever Jim and Max shout in his headset through the preceding three minutes; these days, HBO’s unofficial scoring could as easily be done from the production truck.

After the match, Algieri, as cogent a postfight interview as memory retrieves, said only the first left hand Provodnikov landed, the one that unceremoniously dropped the New Yorker on the blue mat in round 1, actually hurt him. That is nearly believable, as unflappable as Algieri appeared while fielding Provodnikov’s other clean punches, even with Algieri’s right eye closed or closing for the fight’s final 33 or so minutes. Or perhaps, in a counterintuitive twist, Algieri’s closed right eye helped him.

As demonstrated two Saturdays ago by Miguel Cotto, Roach-trained fighters are particularly adept at throwing left hooks their opponents do not detect; Sergio Martinez stubbornly believed he could see Cotto’s left-hook lead coming, even though he couldn’t, while Algieri, well aware he could peripherally detect nothing right of his nose, relied instead on what data his left eye recorded of Provodnikov’s shifting weight well before Provodnikov had his hook fully cocked, allowing Algieri to block and duck Provodnikov hooks in a way that looked perfectly magical to casual fans.

For his part, after the match Provodnikov implied Algieri ran away instead of fighting him, a curiously slanderous thing to say of a man whose knuckles just touched one’s head and body some 250 times. Such was the one-eyed Christopher Algieri’s masterful control of space and time, though, that a man who stood within arm’s length of him for a minimum of 300 instants Saturday still openly wondered where the hell Algieri had been during their fight.

Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com

By Bart Barry–

If we choose to believe all was well with Argentine southpaw Sergio “Maravilla” Martinez’s lower body when the opening bell rang on his match with Puerto Rican Miguel Cotto, Saturday, a match Martinez’s corner ended after nine rounds and a few perfunctory protests from Martinez, a match that ended with Cotto leading by three insurmountable scores of 90-77, we must also believe Martinez didn’t know Miguel Cotto had a left hook he should slip or duck.

Whatever the delta between Martinez’s expectations and Cotto’s actual speed and power, and whatever exaggerated praise we’re now prompted to give trainer Freddie Roach by the network that gave us “On Freddie Roach,” Martinez did not successfully evade 10-percent of the left hooks Cotto hurled his way in an opening round that saw the Argentine driven to the blue mat thrice. It is impossible to believe Martinez is that dumb. His handlers, though, seem to believe we are.

Saturday Sergio Martinez commenced with an apology the final postfight interview he’ll conduct after a world-championship match, offering his regrets to Argentines and Puerto Ricans and whoever else made the trip to Madison Square Garden to see him defend his lineal middleweight world championship against a smaller man who was, himself, considered done with world title fights 4 1/2 years ago. It was an uncommon start to a postfight autopsy. Jermain Taylor, the man who beat Bernard Hopkins twice to become and remain the middleweight world champion Kelly Pavlik beat twice to become and remain the middleweight world champion Sergio Martinez beat four years ago to become the middleweight world champion, certainly did not begin his interview after being stopped by Pavlik in round 7 of their 2007 championship match with an apology.

Martinez’s apology meandered about in the shady terrain between a lamentation all did not go perfectly as needed for him to remain upright and a concession he knowingly participated in, and promoted, a profitable event for which he was unfit. Telling was this: In the moment after Cotto’s first left-hook lead sent Martinez wobblehobbling across the canvas, Cotto looked surprised by the development as Martinez, who began Saturday’s match hopping senselessly leftward, the hybrid of a kangaroo and an Amir Khan, as if to present evidence that, whatever happened henceforward, he was right and right mobile when the match began.

While boxing bookmaking is a fool’s errand, did there even exist a way to calculate prefight the probability Miguel Cotto would open with a 10-6 round? That score, right there, says plenty about Martinez’s fitness to make Saturday’s fight: It says a man was knocked to the canvas three times without a referee much considering waving the match off, which says the knockdowns Cotto scored on Martinez were at least in part like the second knockdown Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. scored on Martinez, improperly ruled a slip, in the 2012 fight that unbuttoned them both.

After Saturday’s first round, the match was little more than a sadist’s ball, as Martinez’s legs were always what made him unique, and without them, with a lead right leg that looked splinted from heel to hamstring, Martinez would be unable to find a rhythm or punch trajectory worth a dash, and would have no anchored force on any punch, or subsequent acceleration on his knuckles, on the odd chance he did land one. After the second knockdown of the first round, when the lineal middleweight champion got muscled to the mat by a man in his middleweight debut, one Cotto made while weighing a few sips of sportsdrink above super welterweight, Martinez’s handsome countenance was the picture of hopelessness. If he was frustrated by the failure of one or both of his knees, he was not appalled – Martinez’s face, Saturday, said “Already?” where his face against Chavez once said “My God!”

There was something nigh fraudulent about the entirety of Cotto-Martinez, beginning with an asinine plot that went from “I must punish Miguel Cotto for not saying thank-you to the barista who served coffee at our first photo shoot” to “I sell more tickets than Sergio Martinez” before arriving at “Max, since we are both bored with this idiocy, may we interview you?” It was a middleweight championship fight contested by men whom former champion Marvelous Marvin Hagler could have beaten in a handicap match, two on one, and Bernard “The Executioner” Hopkins would have undone in one evening’s consecutive matches without ordering Richard Schaefer to fetch his alien getup in between.

But our sport retains its feelings of goodwill for both Martinez and Cotto, and well it might. Even had those who absolutely knew better, from Martinez’s trainer to his promoter to his cable network, told us of Martinez’s true condition, the high probability he’d be unable to evade Cotto for more than a minute or two, few aficionados would have begrudged “Maravilla” a pension fight against Puerto Rico’s only active ticket-seller, in Madison Square Garden the day before National Puerto Rican Day Parade 2014. The fight satisfied all matters of curiosity and suspense, and settled them quickly, and rewarded Cotto for repeatedly making since 2007 what daring matches Floyd Mayweather does not.

And to Martinez it gave a final and robust payday with his dignity diminished but still intact, an amicable goodbye in the tradition he bids farewell to others – “con un abrazo fuerte (with a big hug).”

Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com

By Bart Barry–

Saturday at London’s Wembley Stadium British super middleweight titlist Carl “The Cobra” Froch stood before 80,000 of his countrymen, and across from a particularly obstinate one named George Groves, and told them to set aside the ample achievements of a career he casually calls “unbelievable” and judge his legacy on one criterion: How he acquitted himself in what 36 minutes followed. And then in the final 20 seconds of round 9, roughly 27 minutes into a pitched rematch, Froch struck Groves with a right cross so pure that in a flash it made Froch the historic sports figure he desperately wishes to be.

Whatever aficionados opined of him Saturday morning or opine of him today, Carl Froch knows what he is about. That attribute distinguishes him much as another. It is what allowed him to take his talent to a place his athleticism did not anticipate, an athleticism that suffered no loneliness, there: Who seeing Froch for the first time across from Andre Dirrell, in their memorably awful 2009 fight, anticipated the run Froch concluded Saturday?

Froch has been for the most part unabashed about conceding his use of a sports psychologist, which is likely not his first psychologist nor his last, and that sort of disinterested observation, reportage and maintenance from another can be quite a boon for an athlete who seeks an advantage of any kind over an athletically superior opponent – especially since many if not most of the men Froch has vanquished since 2008 have been, on paper, or in a gym, or on a track, or anywhere other than a prizefighting ring, superior to him. If Froch’s self-belief is by definition absurd it is nevertheless held deeply enough to be unreachable by any punch or word.

When Froch’s identity, not his shtick but his identity, is challenged – and unlike many an American athlete, Froch is exact in his separation of identity and shtick, knowing where they overlap and where one is devoid of the other, as evidenced by his self-deprecation about using the autobiographical title “international superstar” before his November match with Groves, a touch of self-awareness Floyd Mayweather couldn’t find on Freud’s couch itself – Froch looks upon his inquisitor not with contempt so much as incredulity: If you told Carl Froch his comportment is not the finest example of such in contemporary prizefighting, he’d not give you a look reserved for the enemy so much as a three-headed extraterrestrial.

Because Froch knows what he is about he can be vulnerable in moments that strike unpredictably as his jab, he can kneel before Rachael Cordingley, the model and mother of his children, minutes after the greatest moment in his storied career and sheepishly ask her hand in marriage, and then, sitting mashed on the apron against a man he put in an oxygen mask not a half-hour before, confess even more sheepishly he’d gone and asked his “sneaky question” and that she’d said yes. That vulnerability is what makes his courage and confidence and arrogance still more fascinating, especially when presented to American ears not accustomed to the mother tongue spoken well by athletes.

That fascination came through in Paulie Malignaggi’s voice, Saturday. The man voted by the Boxing Writers Association of America 2013’s best broadcast journalist was part of a three-man Sky Sport’s telecast that offered more insight between rounds than HBO’s four-man crew offered in the month of April, and he was not timid in his praise of Froch, saying Froch had done something exceptional – an observation no doubt aided by Malignaggi’s presence in Wembley Stadium, where, coincidentally, the biggest prizefight of 2014 happened approximately a continent and an ocean away from HBO’s nearest production truck. Malignaggi is a real dude, oftentimes too real, a man whose struggles for an unshakeable identity have happened publicly – who does not remember what befell his coiffure when last Malignaggi graced a British boxing ring? – but a man whose self-belief, too, is more settled than most, and a man who captured with his words and voice what every man who watched Saturday felt: Right now, I wish I was Carl Froch.

It strains one’s imagination to think the man who fought Albert Rybacki in 2008 would be fighting before 80,000 of his countrymen six years later, and it is exactly impossible to imagine that same man in that same situation would land the punch Froch did to take his rematch with Groves, instantly, from competitive scrap to sympathetic spectacle. Who that saw Groves reduced from a man to an accordion in round 9 by Froch’s perfectly leveraged right cross did not for a second or two feel remorse for the cruelty that felled Groves, the unrelenting self-promoter?

It was not Froch’s 3-2 combo, left hook-right cross, that ended Britain’s largest post-war prizefight so perfectly, or at least not just Froch’s combo. No, it was the feint that did it, too, the threatened malice, fortified by what 3-2 combos Froch landed imprecisely in rounds 5 and 6 and 8, that froze all but Groves’ rear guard, allowing Froch to step deeply into Groves’ space and connect flush with the hardest righthand thrown by a Brit since heavyweight Lennox Lewis nearly decapitated Hasim Rahman with the same combination in 2001.

Froch should retire on that perfect punch, and he acknowledged such on Sky Sports’ telecast, conceding nothing he does for the rest of his life will surpass what he did Saturday, but he’s a fighter, all fighter, and that means his retirement timing is necessarily poor as his courage is long, and he’ll come to the late-arriving artificiality of a Las Vegas prizefighting crowd sometime before he’s done and “see my name in lights” – whatever exactly he means by that. If his options comprise a beating of Mexican Julio Cesar Chavez Jr., a rematch with American Andre Ward, or a tilt with unproven Kazakhstani middleweight Gennady Golovkin, Froch ought choose Chavez – allowing Ward the ongoing joy of semiretirement and telling Golovkin first to prove himself at least George Groves’ equal.

It matters little, ultimately, as this truism will persist: If every prizefighter were like Carl Froch, ours would be the world’s most popular sport.

Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com

By Bart Barry-

In a “Gloves Are Off” prefight conversation more entertaining than a highlight reel of every eerily scored “Face Off with Max Kellerman” episode HBO has aired, British super middleweight George Groves, dangling awkwardly in a frame hung by his opponent as a man who makes mysterious predictions profound to him alone, assured Sky Sports host Johnny Nelson of victory this Saturday in his rematch with Carl “The Cobra” Froch:

“I will knock Carl Froch out on May 31st,” said Groves, diverting briefly his eyes from staring in disbelief at Froch. “And I’ll tell you which punch I’m going to do it with – on fight week.”

“Let me guess,” said Froch in a belittling deadpan. “It’s going to be a left or a right.”

It was fine an example as any of Froch’s singularly unflappable comportment in the face of other men’s threatened aggression. Froch’s approach to insulting opponents, prefight, is more devastating for its calm and often eloquent expressions of contempt so deeply set that his heart rate doesn’t quicken even in self-amusement. Like the wrastlers of bygone years, Froch’s self-belief hails from parts unknown. It is the most essential element of what will almost assuredly be our sport’s largest event in 2014 – one made between British fighters by a British promoter in a British stadium by a British cable network, evidence, perhaps, of how much healthier our sport is when kept out American hands – an event that will sell more tickets than the aggregate of Mayweather-Maidana, Mayweather-Alvarez, Mayweather-Guerrero and Mayweather-Cotto.

Froch’s self-belief, an entity that ranges liberally in the large field between confidence and arrogance, was once merely amusing to American aficionados. In his first trip to our continent, Froch came within 14 seconds of losing to a diminished Jermain Taylor. Six months later, in a dreadful start to a wonderful concept, Froch decisioned American Andre Dirrell in the inaugural match of Showtime’s “Super Six” tournament, a snakebitten arrangement that nevertheless got both its creator, Ken Hershman, and its winner, Andre Ward, promoted to HBO, and made an international star of Froch, the colorful runner-up. Froch won a hometown decision of sorts over Dirrell by revealing the American was an athlete, not a fighter, while warming to the idea of a fight even if not knowing how properly to perform one. Froch then lost a close decision to Mikkel Kessler in Denmark, before defeating Arthur Abraham and Glen Johnson – when both were more highly considered than we may remember.

Froch’s stature and confidence grew disproportionately, making him quite likable to strong-character types: For once a man claiming to be more than appearances indicated was more than appearances indicated. Froch has proved many times more than a sum of his parts in a prizefighting ring; his reflexes are good, as is his chin, and he has power enough that no one engages him straight away or else gets iced, but his defense is porous and his footwork is ungainly and his punches’ effect appears to derive more from his belief in their effect than anything resembling effective technique.

He was outfought and given his first defeat in 2011 by Andre Ward, a transcendentally good fighter before his semiretirement as an HBO commentator, but even in that fight it was Froch, not Ward, who appeared stronger in the latter 18 minutes. Then in a twist only American cable television could devise, the winner of Showtime’s super-middleweight tournament, Ward, was unable to fight Showtime’s super-middleweight house fighter, Lucian Bute – for whom crowning a suitable opponent appeared to be the entire point of the tournament. Froch signed-up to fight Bute instead. Froch went through Bute like a roller-coaster train through a pile of shaving cream, stopping the undefeated Romanian in round 5 and denying boxing’s legion of malcontent fans one more match, Ward-Bute, they were never going to get anyway. Six months later, Froch made a homecoming to Nottinghamshire and flattened Yusaf Mack in three rounds. Then he decisioned Mikkel Kessler a year ago in their rematch in London.

Six months after that, Froch took on an undefeated Londoner who’d once acted as his sparring partner, George Groves, in a match so lightly considered in the United States it didn’t land on a network called AWE till a month before opening bell – with neither Showtime, who introduced Froch to American audiences, nor HBO, who finances Andre Ward’s semi-retirement with commentating gigs, bothering to carry it. Had more than a handful of Americans been able to see the match, they’d have seen Froch conclusively outclassed for nearly every minute of the match, getting drilled with righthands, and getting made to look fragile by righthands, in a way few would believe.

Worse yet were Froch’s punches. They appeared, in the opening two or three rounds, like open-handed cuffs. The Cobra looked like nothing so much as a man alternately slapping either end of a large watermelon while staggering drunkenly forward in a head-lowered rage. And that was before Groves put the stopwatch to Froch’s every hung jab, blasting the titlist with even more righthands, blasting him enough not only to drop and wobble him in round 1, to hurt him in a way no one had before, but also to make Froch throw the sort of push-off jab that invites an opponent’s fury and incites aficionados’ contempt. There was contempt everywhere in that ring, and finally it was contempt – that which Froch felt for the usurper Groves – that caused Froch to surge obdurately forward in round 9, catching Groves with clean shots enough to make referee Howard Foster interfere with the match and call-out a TKO victory for Froch.

The fans were displeased as Groves was, though Foster’s comportment was not dishonorable, however the honorable International Boxing Federation ruled shortly after considering what sanctioning fees it might collect for a mandatory rematch. And so we have one, a fight expected to sell 80,000 tickets and fill London’s Wembley Arena for what knowledgeable British commentators are openly calling one of the largest prizefights in the history of their island.

It appears Groves may have Froch’s number in a way reminiscent of Antonio Tarver having Roy Jones’, or in keeping with the sparring partner tradition, in the way Paul Williams had Antonio Margarito’s. Froch has even gone so far as to hint it may be his final prizefight. It won’t be, of course, but it is noteworthy nevertheless as a reminder: Sporting characters original as Froch appear so rarely on American television screens it behooves us to watch and appreciate them whenever we’re granted the access.

Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com

By Bart Barry–

Saturday at the newly reopened Forum in Inglewood, Calif., Mexican “Dinamita” Juan Manuel Marquez and Colorado’s “Mile High” Mike Alvarado engaged in a fight entertaining as any that ends with one guy besting the other by wide, unanimous scores, the way Marquez bested Alvarado. It was an engrossing if ultimately inconsequential tilt that approached today’s premium-cable-prizefight definition of transcendent: The favorite was knocked-down, and genuinely tested, if only for a round or two.

These days, even the threat of such belligerent happenings usually lands a fight on pay-per-view, and an annual calendar of five or six pay-per-view events says all that needs saying about how often competitive, elite-level fights even get threatened.

If you do not love to watch Juan Manual Marquez fight, you do not love boxing. You may have favorites whom you prefer to watch, but if boxing is what you derive your joy from, if boxing is the entity that takes your life into the present tense, that cleansing place, you love watching Marquez in a prizefight. If ethnic considerations or rivalries or the like preclude you from being enchanted by the spectacle of Marquez plying his craft, it evinces no fault of character – boxing just isn’t what you love.

Every punch with Marquez is a personal event, a thing in which he personally invests, whether landing or being landed upon. He is predatory in a way few other men are predatory; he is predatory even by a standard set by those who make their livings hurting other men in sport’s most intimate way. He is a meanspirited perfectionist, a man, one gathers, who has acquaintances more than friends and loves what few others he loves in the perfunctory way Mexican culture demands he love them. In his treatment of opponents, he has an offensive brilliance exceeded only by Mayweather’s defensive mastery, among contemporaries, and in the public personality that boxing has given him, he is Bernard Hopkins sans charisma and verbosity.

He is not surly, quite, but that is a calculation; his surliness and trainer Nacho Beristain’s tutorial surliness once landed them in Tenggarong, Kutai Kartanegara, Indonesia, eight years ago, across from Chris John, for a purse that wouldn’t cover Floyd Mayweather’s weekend earbuds budget. Marquez is now something of a Spanish-television personality, and while he cannot help but be honest when treating matters of his own fights, he otherwise does a passable impersonation of every other ESPN flummery boiler, never anticipating an upcoming fight’s inevitable dullness.

Mike Alvarado understood the stakes Saturday: If he got stretched, he was off premium cable for life; if he could stay conscious for all 36 minutes, regardless of the assault visited upon him by a master pugilist, he had a decent shot of economic realities prompting his promoter to propose him for a last profitable purpling on HBO. But Alvarado did not catch Marquez repeatedly with a jab merely because Marquez, three months from his 41st birthday, has reflexes eroded slowly by time and combat but also because Alvarado is an excellent athlete who’s never had trouble jabbing an opponent effectively.

If Alvarado’s ability to touch Marquez with nearly every jab the Coloradoan tossed Dinamita’s way was not surprising as Marcos Maidana’s recent outjabbing of Floyd Mayweather, it was nevertheless at least as surprising as a training camp strategy that treated Alvarado’s jabbing and Alvarado’s winging right crosses but evidently not Alvarado’s ever mixing those traditionally harmonious elements together. Being generous, one might assume Alvarado’s corner knew their guy would get countered savagely by Marquez if Alvarado threw more than one punch at a time, but irony happened to dictate thusly: Alvarado’s best moments were in the frantic exchanges – as they ever compose Pacquiao’s best moments with Marquez – when Marquez’s pathological need to land an exchange’s final punch left him open in a way no lead punch of any kind from any one ever would find him.

Alvarado dropped Marquez in round 9 and buckled him a few minutes later with counterpunches. Their other, earlier exchanges, though, were a bit more telling: For once, Marquez voluntarily disengaged from sustained volleys, pivoting away and ducking Alvarado’s right hands, in a way he’d not done even against the much larger Mayweather in 2009 or the much faster Pacquiao in 2004, 2008, 2011 or 2012 (or the end of 2014).

No one in boxing, perhaps no other athlete in any sport, discovers better the fissures in another man’s façade than Marquez, or calibrates the circumstances most likely to convert them to suppurating crevices. Whatever permanent damage Ruslan Provodnikov visited on Alvarado’s spirit and brain in October, this remains true: But for the instant at the end of round 8, after Alvarado pulled himself back through the ropes and onto the canvas, rose uncertainly and trudged resignedly forward, an instant that followed a gorgeous right cross from Marquez, an instant that – were it merely 14 instants larger – would have seen Alvarado’s consciousness snatched from him by prizefighting’s greatest closer, Marquez saw a resilience in Alvarado he did not expect to see, a resilience that surely left Marquez’s fists painfully tender on Sunday morning. That the man who, with a single punch, temporarily suspended Pacquiao between the living and the dead could strike Alvarado crisply and precisely and sustainedly for 12 rounds, while leaving him fit to continue in a way he was not against Provodnikov, surely was not lost on promoter Top Rank’s matchmakers.

Provodnikov will see a five-division-catchweight match with Guillermo Rigondeaux before he’ll ever be allowed near Pacquiao.

Which is fine, frankly, because the makeable match that is most desirable today is a fifth Marquez-Pacquiao fight, one that will see the men’s diminished reflexes and enhanced familiarity – and all the contempt that engenders – provide a violent and vengeful spectacle that ends with one of them unconscious, and the other vindicated evermore.

Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com

By Bart Barry–

AUSTIN, Texas – Somewhere round here, likely on currently gentrified streets once mean, James “Mandingo Warrior” Kirkland roamed and terrorized sparring partners en route to network-darling status, a falling-out or five with trainer Ann Wolfe, a prison stay, a brutal victory over Alfredo Angulo in 2011, and a brutaler victory over Glen Tapia in December. Where he is right now is a source of speculation, as usual, but this is not: Had he been present in San Antonio last week to announce a fight with Mexican Saul “Canelo” Alvarez at Alamodome, many more San Antonians would have been there as well.

One such San Antonian spent the weekend with Austin locals, instead, in the hopes of finding some evidence of cultural offerings greater than University of Texas’ Blanton Museum of Art and sanitized bars on West 6th Street. He found some, too, good contemporary- and folk-art offerings, and also a reason to reflect on what appears to be one of our sport’s greater missed-ticket-selling opportunities.

This city is not weird so much as haphazard and disorganized, a hippie enclave in a state that, since making a fortuitous discovery dinosaurs once died within its borders, has trended ever more conservative, free-market and likely to conflate luck with merit – convincing its citizenry one’s birth in a resource-rich state is evidence, somehow, of exemplary character or virtue. For every action a reaction: Austin, now enjoying a real-estate boom financed by those scrofulous knaves who brought ruin to sandy states from Florida to California, makes a fetish of embracing its eccentricities, not uncommon to college towns, and planting on its automobiles’ bumpers and townfolk’s t-shirts declarations about keeping itself weird and loving live music.

Ask most who embellish Austin’s merits to catalog this city’s cultural offerings, aside from live music, and they’ll tell you, “Live music!” It’s the sort of exhausting, end-of-boom chatter one encountered in Silicon Valley round 2001, when everyone intended to be a billionaire but no one knew how clicks-from-coffeeshops could be monetized. It’s marginally less cynical here, though, because it is a celebration of culture, such as it is, not capitalism.

To this city’s ever more gentrified climes comes West Austin Studio Tour 2014, a sprawling collection of 241 art galleries and exhibitions, for two weekends, this one and last, and it is, in its seeming disinterest, nearly an opposite of the South by Southwest festival that now makes Austin a destination for the coolest folks from all about our fruited plain. Disinterested because most artists are borrowing corners of their friends’ gallery spaces, have yet to name much less sign their works, and rarely take anything but cash or check. As one local put it: “That’s Austin. We don’t really plan things all the way through. We just sort of get them started and see what happens, you know?”

And there-across spans a bridge from one unplanning gaggle of artists to another: Wednesday afternoon, Oscar De La Hoya, whom business circumstances appear to be pushing from figurehead to manager, visited San Antonio’s historic Mercado district, about 70 miles southwest of here, to announce that the one prizefighter insiders are reasonably certain remains tied to him by promotional contract, Mexican Saul “Canelo” Alvarez, will be fighting Cuban Erislandy Lara in Las Vegas in a couple months, in an event called “Honor and Glory.” De La Hoya, freshly enthusiastic if not yet sincere, announced, in Spanish, the card was about “honor y gloria” before switching to English and explaining that honor is what men fight for, and glory.

It was vacuous and scripted, the way these things ever are – or perhaps it was the South Texas sun breaking unexpectedly through what Weather Channel’s app promised would be a cloudy day – but it sapped one’s humor and acted as a reminder of a question Alamo City insiders often ask ourselves when asked to cheerlead for Canelo: Why not James Kirkland at Alamodome? Surely Mike Battah of Leija-Battah Promotions, the man who risked a large sum of his own capital to bring Alvarez, on short notice, to San Antonio to fight an otherwise unknown New Mexican named Austin Trout 13 months ago, and then made of his opportunity one of the more groundbreakingly excellent promotions of the last decade, putting more than 40,000 people in Alamodome, expected such a debut effort would reap rewards many times greater than schlock like Fidel Maldonado against John Nater on a Monday night in February.

Battah once openly imagined 70,000-person gates for Canelo at Alamodome, regardless of opponent, and must now content himself with renting restaurant plazas on Wednesday afternoons to have the firehaired horseman of Jalisco, diminished in everyone’s eyes, make a few serious poses, promise redemption for all Mexicans from a Cuban, and tell the people of, let’s see, San Antonio, how very much he appreciates their support.

To resume his ascent after the Mayweather debacle in September, Canelo needed to do more than score a referee stoppage over a ruined countryman like Alfredo Angulo, on pay-per-view in March; and if we’re being honest, even if he’d put “El Perro” to sleep in 90 seconds, Canelo would have suffered mightily from an Argentine doing to Floyd Mayweather two months later what Mexicans verily expected Canelo would do. One shudders to think what comes of Oscar De La Hoya’s company if Lara undresses Canelo the way that, say, Winky Wright undressed Felix Trinidad in 2005.

Since, like their statesmen, American boxing promoters cannot be counted on to do the right thing till they’ve tried everything else, one might as well hope, too, that such an outcome would make the fight that makes much more ticket-selling sense than Canelo’s tilt in July will: A match with Austin’s James Kirkland at Alamodome.

Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com

By Bart Barry–

After their Saturday welterweight match at MGM Grand, American Floyd “Money” Mayweather and Argentine Marcos “El Chino” Maidana proffered a study in contrasts as they made their ways back to their respective dressing rooms beneath the Grand Garden Arena. One man, shiny-faced and unmarked, greeted a swarming mass of exuberant countrymen. The other, shuffling slightly with face partially misshapen and flanked by enormous body guards, smiled perfunctorily at those who wished him well.

Despite prevailing by majority-decision scores, Floyd Mayweather was not the shiny-faced lad with the exuberant fans.

The idea that Mayweather would not win more than five unanimous rounds against Marcos Maidana on Saturday was one that traversed few minds. The large number of folks who attended the fight or purchased it on pay-per-view did so to support a TMT franchise we’ve been told is historic. A much smaller number of buyers invested their entertainment funds in the hopes El Chino would catch Money cold, somehow, and score a Hasim Rahman-like upset. Nobody who spent money on a ticket or telecast envisioned Maidana decisioning, in Las Vegas, the guy whose head is now more ubiquitous at MGM Grand than that golden lion’s. And yet, there were rounds not even a partial observer like judge Burt Clements could find a way to give Mayweather.

The first round is the first that comes to mind; perhaps Maidana did not sprint from his corner recklessly as he bumrushed Adrien Broner in December – and if Saturday’s main event did not restore much glimmer to “About Billions,” it did embolden those critics who quietly wonder if Mexican Saul Alvarez isn’t something of a frecklefaced fraud – but once he found Mayweather was overconfident enough in the shoulder-roll defense to let the ropes stop his backwards lean, Maidana brought the contact to Mayweather in a way no one before him has.

Part of that could be diminished reflex on Mayweather’s part, though only a tiny part of it, while much of it ought be attributed to the Charmin-soft competition Mayweather has served himself since about the time he slipped past Jose Luis Castillo in 2002; those who hit hard enough to imperil Mayweather generally have not been fast enough, and those who are fast enough generally have not hit with sufficient force. Unflappable as he is, and an unaffected demeanor during physical confrontations is Mayweather’s greatest pugilistic asset, Mayweather did not expect to be hit hard on as many different spots of his head for the rest of his career as Maidana delivered him in their second 90 seconds together.

What became suddenly apparent: Nobody in a sparring session with Floyd Mayweather since Money was about 12 years-old has attempted the clockwise-bolo thing Maidana hurled his way; were it not for Maidana’s startlingly effective jab, Mayweather would not have been speaking out of turn about Maidana had he paraphrased what Evander Holyfield once said of John Ruiz – that he was the most technically incompetent opponent he faced as a pro. Maidana solved the shoulder roll not through expertise but by overthrowing his right hand like a circus-strongman hammer; it was a physical impossibility for Mayweather to get his lead shoulder high enough and his torso tilted rightwards far enough to evade a punch that, at its apex, resembled nothing so much as Kareem’s skyhook.

Trainer Robert Garcia deserves all the credit heaped on him for Maidana’s fantastic jab, well-timed and stiff and accurate as it is, but when it comes to Maidana’s sledgefisted right, Garcia has mentored the Argentine no more than a handler who unclips the leash from an attack dog already in full froth. A camera on Garcia’s face in the opening round likely would have revealed a man both surprised and delighted by what surprise in Mayweather’s demeanor and delight in Maidana’s rabidity the landing of that first righthand brought. Mayweather’s surprise was quickly compounded when, soon after Maidana began crashing into him, Money’s go-to defensive ploy, the lead-elbow-to-opponent’s-neck shimmy, received a warning from referee Tony Weeks, whom Mayweather afterwards banished unhesitatingly from ever again officiating the otherwise high-paying exhibition matches Mayweather thought Showtime signed him up for.

There was one other surprise, too, for both Mayweather and aficionados who have followed his career often begrudgingly: The left-hook lead did not work till the championship rounds. There is not an orthodox fighter in memory, and certainly not a Latino one, whom Mayweather has been unable to tag and tag early with his springing left-hook lead; even master Juan Manuel Marquez got flattened by the punch. Maidana’s guard, though, was high and tight to his cheek, and Mayweather got nothing but right glove, when he didn’t miss both wildly and uncharacteristically.

Worse yet for Mayweather’s plans of a painfree evening was how little his potshot right dissuaded Maidana, who viewed it as a hard tariff, but not a barrier to entry like other Mayweather opponents have. Maidana expected to be hit repeatedly. It was in his contract. He hoped, but likely did not expect, to hit Mayweather repeatedly. When he found Mayweather was willing to sell him a stationary target on the ropes for the price of a flush righthand or two, Maidana became an animated buyer.

Mayweather’s best adjustment was the very return-to-fundamentals Paulie Malignaggi counseled any future Maidana opponent to employ, in the April issue of The Ring magazine. Mayweather, gloves high in the fight’s final third, preceded most of his righthands with jabs; in lieu of reinventing boxing, Money May threw straight 1-2s the exact way he learned to do as a seven-year-old in Grand Rapids, Mich., and it worked exactly as his father knew it would. Floyd Mayweather proved Saturday, as he did against Miguel Cotto in 2012, that, at his core, he is all fighter. Even his Friday protest of Maidana’s gloves was, at its inception at least, a legitimate nod to boxing’s history of illegitimate glove-tampering; what alarmed Mayweather first of all was how “broken-in” Maidana’s custom-made gloves felt.

And Sunday morning, undoubtedly, Floyd Mayweather awoke to a feeling of body-wide trauma that has led other accomplished prizefighters to pursue business ventures elsewhere.

Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com

By Bart Barry–

Saturday American Floyd “Money” Mayweather will fight once more at MGM Grand, this time with Argentine Marcos “El Chino” Maidana, in a welterweight title match the prestigious WBA has honored with “Super World” status, defying courageously those haters who argued for its belt to bear an “Average World” or “Lopsided World” appellation. Mayweather, who doesn’t care what anyone thinks, probably wouldn’t have paid their fees for anything less than a shot at “Super World” supremacy. How serendipitous.

If a Buddhist monk who spends his days meditating in a burlap coverall tells you he doesn’t care what others think, you might believe him. But if ever a man who spends tens of millions of dollars on conspicuous displays of his wealth tells you he doesn’t, check your wallet. Recently Robin Leach came out of retirement – surely he doesn’t need the money, because everyone who comes out of retirement never needs the money, just a rekindled love of the game – to walk us through the Big Boy Mansion in the 15th or so vacuous homage to Floyd Mayweather’s residence, showing us the million-dollar automobiles Mayweather drives alternately to a boxing gym and fastfood eatery, and the bedizened jewels Mayweather wears over white t-shirts.

It was another tired move from a tired franchise in a tired sport. Most of the off-television coverage of Saturday’s match has treated the prohibitive ratio oddsmakers assign the fight, declaring in a short declarative sentence not unlike that last one that Marcos Maidana hasn’t a jot of a chance of beating Floyd Mayweather. Those guys know their craft, and they understand probability better than Mayweather’s companions do, and they see no reason Maidana should beat Mayweather, and they are correct, there really isn’t a reason to expect anything that resembles a competitive main event Saturday. If you’re reading this, though, you’re part of the reliable half-million or so Americans our industry needs to buy every fight, and for your loyalty you deserve some reason to watch better than what pap Showtime infomercials offer.

Floyd Mayweather has to be in control of everything to be comfortable. Raised in what might euphemistically be called an unstable household, Mayweather imposes order wherever he can and does not relinquish it. He is perhaps the greatest handicapper of opponents boxing has ever seen, never endangering himself in a real fight against a real opponent when it can possibly be avoided. If Mayweather did not know about Antonio Margarito’s propensity for liberal hand-wrapping techniques in 2006, Mayweather absolutely knew something was off about him and wanted no part of a guy who was that big, somehow made 147 pounds for a few minutes of every year, and was incapable of discouragement.

Mayweather got the hell out of his contract with promoter Top Rank, in retrospect the best business decision made by a boxer in a generation, and fought Margarito’s wornout sparring partner Carlos Baldomir instead, because the Argentine surprised everyone and beat Zab Judah, three months before Mayweather did (don’t ask), and then changed his name to “Money” from “Pretty Boy” – a somewhat lamentable choice, as Mayweather has more beauty in person than cameras credit him, and money is, well, an idea so mundane it’s what every American dad spends 40 weekly hours making.

When he’s on, “Chino” Maidana does an excellent imitation of a fighter who is not in control. His footwork is a jumbled mess, his right hand is more like a club than a piston, his left hand is thrown with many times more commitment than technique, and his defense is poor enough that, after 38 prizefights and many more amateur bouts, his dad felt compelled to interrupt a televised barbecue and tell Chino to employ head movement. Odds are, that’s not the way to beat Mayweather – odds are, once more, pronouncedly that way. But in about the only reasonably unfiltered answer Mayweather gave his conference-call audience last week, “Money” did mention Emanuel Burton-Augustus as his toughest opponent, and Burton/Augustus was an old-time opponent who understood the value of dropping a competitive fight to a hometown favorite, quite often a more lucrative way to make a living than Maidana’s approach of whupping someone like Victor Ortiz in Staples Center, and imagine for a second the skill it takes to travel the country losing competitive fights without imperiling yourself unnecessarily. It also takes a lad who’s a bit off-kilter, and Burton-Augustus was surely that.

Maidana’s style was not built to solve the Mayweather style – Maidana’s style was built only to pulverize whatever object, animate or otherwise, came in its way – but it might have the ancillary effect of discomfiting Mayweather enough to make him entertain us for a brief respite, at least entertain us more than the aggregate of Mayweather’s last two opponents, Ghostly Canelo, managed to do. When I asked Paulie Malignaggi a few months ago how you fight a guy like Maidana, Malignaggi said you do nothing you didn’t learn in your first six months in a boxing gym. You go back to basics till you’re boring yourself.

Mayweather knows to do this; unlike the impostor buffoon Maidana traumatized in December, Mayweather comes right out of his cutiepie defense the second he’s touched for real. In their 2010 match, Shane Mosley dropped a right hand on Mayweather that made Money’s knees clap, and what did Mayweather do next? He set his hands high, went forward behind his jab, and applied pressure, like they teach on your first day in a gym.

Mayweather has much better footwork than the men whom Maidana has beaten up, and he’s physically stronger, too. He knows Maidana can be discouraged, and he will locate, before the bell sounds for round 4, the guy who dropped every minute to a 147-pound Devon Alexander and barely outboxed at 140 an unretired version of Erik Morales knocked-out twice by Manny Pacquiao five years earlier at super featherweight.

As ever, if this fight goes nine minutes without Mayweather being hurt badly, it will not be competitive. I’ll take Mayweather, UD-12, then, and hope for the sake of this increasingly moribund sport and its committed fans to be entirely wrong.

Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com

By Bart Barry–

What if Michael Jordan came back tomorrow, at age 51, and won an NBA championship with, say, the Washington Wizards for whom he last played in 2003? It would be a massive event, an orgy of media celebration as one of the world’s most famous athletes, nay, men, returned to a field of glory and dominated at an age that was absurd. But once the orgy got tired and broke up and media folk went their separate ways, showing the promiscuity of spirit for which they are notorious, what would it say about professional basketball that a man in his sixth decade was able to dominate the best professionals in their 20s?

Now imagine for a second that Jordan never did retire in 2003 but rather finagled from that lousy Wizards team a four-corners offense, and as part of an ownership group selected referees prone to ignoring the shot clock, and won his 2014 championship in five games by an average score of 38-36. Would kids still wish to “Be like Mike” or would they perhaps decide football players were cooler, and spend a generation in cleats instead of Jordans?

Saturday in Washington D.C., 49-year-old American Bernard “The Alien” Hopkins decisioned 30-year-old Kazakhstani light heavyweight titlist Beibut Shumenov in a match uncompetitive enough to bring heaps of dudgeon upon the lone judge who narrowly scored the match for Shumenov – in a nod to this fact much as another: Boxing aficionados are a cantankerous lot, and they like writers who tickle their lesser impulses, and also because tributes to agelessness are, almost invariably, insipid.

Through three rounds Saturday’s match was unwatchable as any Hopkins fight. Whatever else Shumenov was in his title-winning San Antonio match in December, and he was not particularly active, he was fearless. He had a willingness to stand wherever his opponent’s punches were bound to land, arms spread, chest bared in willing reception, and blast his way through them. Shumenov was not a picture of athleticism or class, perhaps, but he was verily a picture of self-belief. Hopkins removed that from him almost instantly and instead of seeing the dangerous puncher Texans watched flatten Tamas Kovacs, a man whose 23-0 dossier was, in retrospect, filled with hot air enough to fuel at least two questions of a Hopkins interview, fans in Washington D.C. got treated to an entirely untested man who did not belong near even a WBA light heavyweight title of the Eastern Bloc, much less the world.

Hopkins’ style remains defensively flawless – he has righted what balance issues sprung up years back against men of faster reflex and activity, and his skills as a handicapper, too, have kept pace, ensuring nobody busy or quick need apply for the privilege of standing across from him. Hopkins still flashes a silent dissent that takes men’s fingers off their triggers, and make no mistake about this either: Hopkins still punches hard and accurately enough to dissuade even men previously mistaken for portraits of fearlessness.

Boxing is not a dying sport in the sense of an entity that has a terminal condition – as anyone who reads about our sport knows already. Most arguments for boxing’s health treat either this certainty, that the spectacle of men swapping blows in a primal reenactment of what was done for finite resources millennia ago will not cease in our lifetimes and draw always paying spectators, or else fetishize the iota of one percent of licensed prizefighters still making massive fortunes from duping the public semiannually with large promotional budgets, special effects, roadtours, conference calls and a medium, television, ever compelled by itself to sell its customers reheated products they’ve already purchased.

It’s all missing widely a point quieter debate fails rarely to unearth: Ours is a sport fantastically diminished. Every number, from subscribers to media-day galas to earnings to punch stats, is open to wildeyed interpretation or misunderstanding in the name of profit, in the short-term or long-. What cannot be faked but easily confirmed in the urban area of any city in the United States, though, is this: There is a fraction the interest in boxing among kids today as there was even a generation ago. The gyms are not filling the way they always did before, and if your city is blessed with a full gym here or there, you can be assured your city once hosted five more than it does right now. Every local initiative to get kids in boxing begins with a wealthy donor and an employed politician and so much hope, and every local initiative quietly loses its impetus for one reason or another and is forgotten.

There is a desire among many to conflate probability and possibility, and so now is the time we excavate a gym here or there in an urban area that hasn’t hosted a fight and hasn’t a commission to confirm it, hold that concept aloft and give fullthroat to it as if its unverified existence disproves the very thing we all know already. And those that stick around to hear this conflation get convinced anew, inevitably, but their number dwindles each time.

Bernard Hopkins’ longevity and wondrous agelessness is good a monument as any to this. Were Michael Jordan still able to ply his Washington Wizards craftsmanship and win titles, outclassing LeBron James and friends in championship games, the NBA would know there was something dreadfully wrong with its product, would know how embarrassingly it appeared to those just discovering the physics of its nature, cylinders and shots and nets and reflexes and vertical leaps and the like, and would know better than to project images of half-filled arenas on the public’s consciousness as if all were just wonderful.

No, there will never be another Bernard Hopkins.

Bart Barry can be reached via bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com

By Bart Barry-

LAS VEGAS – Having scored the first match between American Timothy Bradley and Filipino Manny Pacquiao the wrong way from ringside, I found myself situated in a spot from which scoring was impossible at the rematch. With the back wall as my headrest, peering at the ring from a seat meters above the ceiling camera and a full level above a concourse kiosk advertising binocular rentals, I saw Pacquiao and Bradley approximate the choreography of modern dance, which approximates the behavior of molecules in an excited state: colliding, racing apart, reversing course, colliding again, racing apart.

Pacquiao won a fair and unanimous decision at MGM Grand Garden Arena, Saturday, in a match more competitive than great, a balletic sort of confrontation that required a 12th round headbutt to make either guy’s face look as a prizefighter’s should. Neither guy landed cleanly a fraction his power punches, and the match was marked more by hollowed-out suspense than building drama.

Manny Pacquiao and Timothy Bradley fought like grade-A natural athletes, tested and stamped Certified. For the first time in years, a spectator could watch a championship prizefight and assume from the data his eyes sent him, instead of what haranguing an agency or promoter or reporter did him, the two men making combat were not using performance-enhancing drugs. They appeared slow, inaccurate and generally winded much of the night. Gone was the Filipino wildcat who haunted trainer Nacho Beristain’s preparatory ruminations, and likely still haunts Erik Morales’ conscious thoughts. In his stead was a comparatively docile veteran who didn’t miss openings presented him when he went for them, and generally did not go for them.

Round 2 was the best Pacquiao and Bradley had made in their first 42 minutes of trying and better than anything they made in their next half hour. It was final evidence Pacquiao no longer has a three-minute round in him and evidence, too, that for whatever reason – and overtraining cannot be ruled out – Timothy Bradley cannot go a hard 36 minutes either; Bradley’s strategy was about conditioning, all about making Pacquiao fight more frantically than he wanted to, tossing punches at a pace unfamiliar to any version of Pacquiao over 130 pounds. It was the very thing, too, and Bradley sensed it and went for it, bringing what he once called “the dog” out, snarling and nipping, never imperiling exactly, but leveraging punches with his all body to make the other guy wilt.

If Pacquiao did not wilt, in rounds 3 and 4 he did wonder why the hell he had to keep doing this violent thing, and why he’ll have to do it for the foreseeable future, and where his fortune went. That happened after Pacquiao finally found Bradley in round 2 with his signature jab-feint-jab-cross combination, the one with which he felled everyone from Marco Antonio Barrera to Juan Manuel Marquez, and multiple times each, too, and Bradley did what everyone will now do in retaliation: Set his weight on his back foot and wing his right hand in a baseball pitcher’s homage to Marquez. The punch didn’t land, not till the fourth, but it made Pacquiao stop and ponder things in a way he never did in his prime.

The gambit worked too well for Bradley, and for the next seven or so minutes he threw his right hand with an enthusiasm so reckless it surely was a missed right in round 4, or early in round 5, that caused his calf muscle to sever and lump beneath him. Afterwards Bradley insisted his plunged activity level was not a matter of conditioning, and that is at least partially believable – although one must imagine how it saps a man’s stamina and fighting spirit to have to stop punches that hit only air. Stopping one’s own punches, after all, is a contingency for which no man trains; to replicate its effect, a trainer would have to yank a heavy bag entirely out his charge’s way on the final punch of each combination.

It took Pacquiao about six minutes – or 5:30 longer than it once might have – to realize Bradley was diminished. Pacquiao may not have thrown a punch in the opening minute of round 6. Round 11 brought justifiable boos from a slightly exasperated MGM Grand crowd, an acknowledgement Bradley no longer had the wherewithal to make a fight with Pacquiao, and Pacquiao was evidently scoring rounds in his head, locking in early leads and protecting them from a guy uninterested in taking them away.

The 12th was a competitive stanza between two good guys who like one another and like competing and really like the paychecks pay-per-view matches bring them but do not see any particular reason to endanger others unnecessarily. Each threw hard punches and hoped for a knockout, but finally it was a relenting sort of Timothy Bradley that Devon Alexander would have appreciated greatly, and a kindhearted sort of Manny Pacquiao that Erik Morales would have treated terribly. That brought a postfight scene long on words like “competitive” and short on words like “great” because, frankly, nobody believed Saturday’s match determined the world’s best welterweight.

As everyone at MGM Grand got reminded constantly all week, the world’s best welterweight is Floyd Mayweather, and he has a shrine window in the front entrance of MGM Grand to prove it. Mayweather’s countenance was ubiquitous during Pacquiao fight week – as promoter Bob Arum reminded everyone, in a show of indefatigability his main-event fighters could not emulate – and that is more than partially attributable to the casino’s sorrowful financial state; walking round and looking for postfight dining, one suspected that for a nominal fee the casino would have hung “Steve Wynn Wants You” posters with the hometown entrepreneur, and MGM competitor, pointing his finger in top-hat and tails.

Mayweather’s group took advantage of MGM’s finances in a move that was tacky, sure. But then, what in Vegas isn’t?

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Editor’s note: The photo above is part of an extraordinary tapestry sewn by the Canadian artist Sola Fiedler and exhibited at Trifecta Gallery in the 18b Las Vegas Arts District.

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Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com

By Bart Barry–

Saturday at MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas, not Macao, undefeated American welterweight Timothy Bradley will make a rematch of his 2012 fight with Filipino Manny Pacquiao, one sure to provide scoring quandaries, and what bad-faith and acrimony our beloved sport attaches to such. A shame, that, since Bradley and Pacquiao are generally good-faith guys.

Whatever his faith, Bradley, a former champion at 140 pounds, has yet to fight his best at welterweight. He made the best match seen in quite a long time at welterweight about 13 months ago, against the ruinous “Siberian Rocky” Ruslan Provodnikov, a grotesquerie of volition from which Bradley is unlikely ever to recover fully, followed by a busier-is-better decision victory over Mexican master Juan Manuel Marquez in October. Not yet has Bradley shown anything like the identity-snatching form he employed against Joel Casamayor, Lamont Peterson, Nate Campbell, Kendall Holt or Junior Witter – the British junior welterweight titlist Bradley dropped and decisioned in Nottinghamshire in 2008, launching “Desert Storm’s” unanticipated championship reign.

With few exceptions, every man at the elite level of sport is an overachiever – certainly Pacquiao and Marquez are – but Bradley appears to have done more with his talents than nearly anyone has. What is his signature fighting style? The man who at 140 pounds flashed righthand leads to corral opponents towards the ropes, and then, in a nod to Joe Frazier, another undersized overachiever, smoked where those men lived, has done nothing of the sort in his move to welterweight, a move whose stylistic understatement was anticipated by a lackluster 2010 welterweight debut against Argentine Luis Carlos Abregu. Bradley’s identity at welterweight is that he finds a way to win, but if you took even a Bradley partisan and told him to teach a youngster the Bradley Style, he’d lack the clarity of objective a request for the Pacquiao Style or Marquez Style would surely summon.

Bradley does not naturally place his head in an auspicious place for avoiding other men’s punches; with no opponent was this more obvious than Provodnikov, a puncher who, for all his primitive merits, consistently placed his head out of the sights of Bradley’s gloves while throwing much better leveraged punches. Bradley was, that evening, the better athlete, and a miracle of conditioning and resolve too, but he was not the better fighter – not even close. He was not the better fighter, either, against Marquez in October, though little shame might be extracted of that.

Ringside for both, I saw Marquez decision Bradley, 116-114, similarly to the way I saw Bradley decision Pacquiao, 116-115. We return to the scene of the robbery, then. I was one of three credentialed media ringside for Bradley-Pacquiao who scored the match the way the official judges did. I was uncertain of my scorecard as the judges’ collective verdict was; I marked five rounds as either/or affairs, and the judges were unanimous about fewer than half the rounds. My scorecard was, as ever, fallible, and it is important to impart, once more, the reason: A writer honored with a ringside credential should honor that honor by scoring truthfully, not “correctly” – seeking to record what he senses, not what he predicts others will sense.

It was and remains memorable to me how little import persons assigned my immediate admission of fallibility; saying my scorecard was a truthful if imperfect representation of what I saw from row H was wholly inadequate, since anything but capitulation was intolerable to those who knew what they saw on television; somehow, to a surprisingly large but unsurprisingly unseemly mass, unless I joined the other 100 guys in the Pacquiao column, the browbeating shouldn’t cease. Among other mildly amusing pastimes, the experience of others’ reactions to my Bradley-Pacquiao scorecard launched me on a hobbyist’s investigation of the science of optics, one that quickly led away from high-definition television and towards camera obscuras, camera lucidas and fiber optics though not before uncovering this: A boxing broadcast’s most powerful filter is not its audio commentary or unofficial scorecard but what 30-second replays it shows between rounds.

Less than a 10th of the round is repeated for a viewing audience programmed by the medium to believe whatever is repeated is what is priority. The punch you thought you saw the other guy land at the 47-second mark of the round apparently wasn’t essential as the punch landed by the A-side guy in the final 19 seconds, else why isn’t it being repeated? And the antidote to an awareness of such influence is no antidote at all: Assuming nefarious intent and scoring against it makes a tally no more objective than otherwise.

Saturday’s match will likely be another hard-scoring affair. The erosion of Pacquiao’s reflexes continues apace, yes, but Bradley’s recent stylistic conversion, and his newfound expectation that he’ll receive the benefit of every scoring doubt, at least from official judges, tend to diminish Bradley’s activity at the exact moment it should increase, and this is bound eventually to be a problem for him – and quite possibly a problem, come Saturday, when official judges look to score close rounds for Pacquiao because, well, who wants to be part of another investigation?

Wait a tick, way back at the beginning of that ran-on monstrosity, didn’t you mention an erosion in Pacquiao’s reflexes, which would seem to indicate you missed Mastery in Macao when Pacquiao proved to himself and trainer of the year Freddie Roach he was all the way back? For a championship-caliber prizefighter, finding Brandon Rios with a combination rates in difficulty between a heavybag and the red-brick façade of what boxing gym houses it; nothing Pacquiao did in Macao indicated he was better than the man decisioned by Bradley 22 months ago in Las Vegas – and no matter what one opines of that decision, he must concede this: Pacquiao was outhustled and outhit in the 12th round by a man who was immobile enough to require wheelchair assistance a half hour later. And since then, Pacquiao was the B-side of what HBO analyst Max Kellerman, in a nod to his medium’s penchant for understatement, called “arguably the greatest one-punch knockout in the history of boxing!” And yet.

I’ll take Pacquiao, MD-12, in a fight Bradley wins, and judge Glenn Trowbridge nevertheless scores 119-109 for the Filipino.

Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com

By Bart Barry

Quick, off the top of your head, name the contracted terms of Sugar Ray Robinson’s rematch with Jake LaMotta in 1943. No? OK, how about the purse split between Marvelous Marvin Hagler and Thomas Hearns for “The War” in 1985? Not springing to mind. What about the name of Israel Vazquez’s advisor during cable-network negotiations for his second fight with Rafael Marquez?

It’s hard to recall such trivia because, contrary to today’s coverage of our beloved sport, history rightly consigns these details to its dustbin, recalling only the swapping of punches. And it does not remember at all fights that were never made – hell, not even a YouTube search can find Floyd Mayweather’s matches with Kostya Tszyu or Antonio Margarito.

Saturday, Russian light heavyweight titlist Sergey “Krusher” Kovalev stopped someone named Cedric Agnew in forgettable fashion to set-up a long-longed-for fight with fellow titlist Adonis Stevenson, one Kovalev and Stevenson’s network, HBO, dedicated quite a lot of its subscribers’ time to setting-up – except that shortly before Kovalev’s match, subscribers learned Stevenson was no longer with HBO, rendering them suckers for caring a whit about Kovalev’s meaningless tilts with Agnew and someone else named Ismayl Sillah, or Stevenson’s 13 forgettable rounds with, let’s see, Tony Bellew and Tavoris Cloud.

As 2014 continues along, matters become incrementally more futile. If an aficionado took every fight worth seeing this year and added them together, he would have trouble paying for a month’s subscription to HBO or Showtime, and no chance of justifying both, much less both and a gaggle of overpriced pay-per-view offerings. Everything is marketed to him like it is portentous; nothing is meaningful in and of itself, but each thing might be consequential someday in a where-were-you-when sort of way.

HBO has taken two Russian-speaking prizefighters, Sergey Kovalev and Gennady Golovkin, and promised its subscribers historic things from them, creating hours of highlight reels in lieu of paying meaningful opposition to fight them. After losing Floyd Mayweather, the network locked-in Andre Ward as its pound-for-pound superstar, giving him a microphone without requiring that he fight. It marketed Nonito Donaire in all his portentous finery only to see him lose the first meaningful fight of his HBO tenure, only to have no apparent opposition for Donaire’s vanquisher, only to transition to Mikey Garcia – as settled along a path as the network’s Next Nonito as any fighter currently plying his wares.

Maybe Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. is not serious about his craft as Ward or Donaire, but he does a lot more fighting than they do, and he does it in matches that sell tickets and happen on HBO. That’s scheduled to change, though, as it appears Chavez may fight Golovkin on pay-per-view in the summertime, in a fight with no right whatever to an additional tariff: Chavez is 0-1 against world class opposition, and Golovkin has yet to face any. In a serious era, Chavez-Golovkin would make a fantastic Boxing After Dark main event and a passable World Championship Boxing offering, and so it takes tremendous chutzpah to threaten beleaguered subscribers, the long-suffering fools who’ve sat through meaningless Golovkin match after meaningless Chavez match, seasoned in Golovkin’s case with hysterical allusions to all-time greats before Golovkin has proved himself even an all-time good, with tollgated access to their match.

Last week’s machinations with Adonis Stevenson’s migration to Showtime, after a pair of preparatory Stevenson fights on HBO to prepare us for more preparatory fights on HBO, since HBO hadn’t the budget to cajole Stevenson’s signature onto a contract with Sergey Kovalev – a possibility too absurd to consider – are relevant to Golovkin and Chavez, and Mikey Garcia and Andre Ward and Guillermo Rigondeaux and a roster of hitherto anonymous lads whose greatest collective attribute is being unmarketable enough not to interest Al Haymon, for this reason: HBO’s want of credibility now subverts its marketing of every fight and fighter.

Kovalev appears to be an excellent puncher whose offense may be susceptible to a touch on his chin, but he’s fighting in a division Roy Jones Jr. dominated in bygone days, and even Krusher’s kinfolk might have a konniption at komparisons between Kovalev and Jones. When Jones fought meaningless matches, that is, at least subscribers knew they were seeing a once-in-a-generation talent icing unknowns, instead of a man who may or may not be better than a hard-punching Haitian journeyman unhinged when unhooked from his canary-yellow bra-cape.

Kovalev-Stevenson was the fight aficionados most wished to see in 2014, and it was wholly makeable, and HBO deserves all the blame for not making it; it shall be remembered as the greatest failure of the current regime and possibly its last. So much of the promotion of Kovalev’s fight with Agnew focused on Kovalev’s fight with Stevenson that not-overlooking Agnew was the advice served to what journalists attended Kocktails with the Krusher in San Antonio a month ago, when Kovalev was in town for Chavez-Vera II and answering questions, sort of, in his rich Russian brogue.

Kovalev is a large man, an alpha male, who should have no trouble being moved to cruiserweight, if Andre Ward cannot be enticed out of semi-retirement to fight him, but Kovalev probably will not go anywhere, or fight Ward, because, you know, promotional issues and purses and all the complications of making a prizefight, ideas so legally entangled and algorithmically indecipherable no member of the laity should expect to understand them. No member of the laity should be expected to understand them, regardless of complexity, because they make not a whit of difference to the experience for which any audience member at any spectacle pays.

There is nothing Adonis Stevenson will do on Showtime that will have him remembered long enough to show up on a Canastota ballot after he retires – he chose currency over legacy, and his accountant will have to render ultimate judgment on him because boxing historians shan’t be bothered. By agreeing to fight the Ismayl Sillahs and Cedric Agnews of the world, Kovalev now unwittingly ambles a similar path to well-paid obscurity, or however one says “if it makes dollars it makes sense” in Russian. If Krusher hopes to be remembered at all, he’ll have to do something far more audacious than Saturday’s offering.

Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com