SAN ANTONIO – Mexican Saul “Canelo” Alvarez is a better fighter than he appears on television, which is an ironical development given how desperately two television broadcasters, one in the U.S., one in Mexico, now crave his success. He is also better with fans and interviewers, more comfortable, more himself, if no better looking, than many stoic Mexican champions are. These are fine, important things, since Saturday at Alamodome ensured he is our sport’s future, being, as he is, the best young representative from boxing’s most reliable fanbase.

One didn’t need to be a Canelo partisan to see him win a close, clear victory over New Mexico’s Austin Trout in their junior middleweight title-unification match, Saturday, a victory judges unanimously saw Alvarez’s way: 115-112, 116-111 and 118-109. My scorecard concurred, 115-114, marking rounds 5, 6, 8, 10 and 12 for Trout, rounds 1 and 4 even, and rounds 2, 3, 7, 9 and 11 for Alvarez – with round 7 going 10-8 in his favor. Additionally, I marked with an asterisk rounds 2, 3, 5, 11 and 12, as those close enough to engender goodfaith debate.

All calculus aside, my sense of the fight at ringside was that Alvarez was its winner, the man who most successfully manifested what the verb “to fight” both connotes and denotes. What is not adequately transmitted about Alvarez by television – why, once more, attending fights bests watching them through self-interested and -deluding filters – is the ferocity of his attack. He has none of the workaday commitment his countrymen typically apply to their punches, blows that hurt for being efficiently leveraged by professional fighters whose bodyweights are properly balanced over feet that are flat.

Alvarez punches to hurt his opponent in a personal way; he wants every blow to tell with a wince or whimper or welt from or on its recipient – and Alvarez flies his body at another’s in a flash of violence quickly as he returns it to a more observant mien. He sells-out with his right hand; from the opening of Saturday’s fight, long before he had Trout’s measure or any expectation he’d not be countered and then imperiled by Trout’s counter, Alvarez threw righthands recklessly, whether as straight crosses or looping hybrid hooks, while Trout threw a fleeing jab, one meant as a tasting, sampling thing, something from which he could hurriedly extract himself when it did not land – and it did not land, not fractionally often as anyone, especially Trout, thought it would.

If Alvarez’s ferocity was the evening’s best surprise, his elusiveness was runner-up. It was striking how few of Trout’s strikes got closer than near him. In the kaleidoscope of lights and colors and angles and commentary that is a televised prizefight, much of what appears a clean punch verily is not. From my ringside notes, about a round scored for Trout: “Round 5: Trout is being outclassed by Canelo. In that round Canelo didn’t land enough to win, but Trout didn’t land hardly anything either. Trout cannot seem to find Canelo.”

Thursday night Austin Trout visited San Fernando Gymnasium, downtown, for a light workout. He was very good at what he did but not great. He did mitts work at a pedestrian rate, not hitting particularly hard, not committing particularly full, not catching the center of the mitt with more than two-thirds his punches. Were he a baseball pitcher, Trout would barely miss corners, get behind in counts, and then serve a juicy fastball over the plate.

He was gracious, of course, gracious as the reputation that preceded him: After 40 minutes of shadowboxing, mitts and skipping rope, his handlers had the San Fernando faithful – mostly local boxers and their families (the workout was not public or announced) – line up at the base of the steps, make their ways to the ring, and have their pictures taken with the champ. Trout had a smile or hug or softly said pleasantry for each, even if not one bore a resemblance to him, even if every one planned to cheer Alvarez’s passionate pursuit of his unconsciousness in 48 hours.

Trout is not special as Alvarez, and that would be so even if Trout had somehow finagled a decision Saturday. When I glanced at the tally of my scorecard, I was glad to see Alvarez was the victor, because that is how the fight felt from ringside. Alvarez made the consequential choices in the fight, whether the choices that preceded his hurled righthands, or the choice to retreat to the ropes and audition for a Mayweather fight unlikely to materialize.

Or perhaps it was not an audition at all but evidence of his fatigue; it is a sapping strategy Alvarez applied Saturday, harder than pressure fighting, for its backward steps, harder than defensive boxing, for the contractions that happen an instant before throwing righthands and the exertion of stopping them when they miss. Alvarez relaxes much as possible for his style of combat, one wishing to inflict pain with every blow, he throws three punches – jab, cross and right uppercut – more efficiently than his peers, but still he gets visibly fatigued at regular intervals of a 36-minute fight, giving an opponent at least six of them through inactivity.

I have now borne eyewitness to Canelo Mania, yes, but I still do not understand it; Alvarez feels more like a 20,000-seat prizefighter than the nearly 40,000 he filled at Alamodome. He is a more suspenseful fighter in person than he appears on television, though, and more than a novel complexion, much more, which assuages a fear serious people had about him. If he is our sport’s future, he is not a bad future to have.

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

SAN ANTONIO – Saul “Canelo” Alvarez was supposed to be a heavy-footed stalker who would either grind Austin “No Doubt” Trout in the canvas with a left hook, or never close space enough to make a challenge. That was what aficionados said before the fight. That was what Trout prepared for in training camp.

How wrong they were – all of us.

Saturday at Alamodome, before a partisan-Mexican crowd of nearly 40,000, Mexico’s Alvarez (42-0-1, 30 KOs) decisioned New Mexico’s Trout (26-1, 14 KOs) by unanimous scores of 115-112, 116-111 and 118-109 to become the unified junior middleweight champion of the world. The 15rounds.com ringside scorecard concurred with the official decision, though by a narrower margin: 115-114.

“Austin was a very difficult fighter, but I was smart,” Alvarez said afterward. “And as the fight went on, I figured out how to fight him.”

There was a ferocity to Alvarez’s punches, particularly the commitment with which he threw his right hand, that was too much for Trout’s counters. From the opening round onwards, Trout was unable to catch Alvarez with nearly as many or as much as he needed to.

“I connected with my right and my jab,” Alvarez said. “My jab was perfect.”

Alvarez, the heavy-handed Mexican, was actually more elusive than Trout, the slippery American.

“He shocked us tonight,” Trout conceded. “I was prepared for a totally different fighter.”

The quiet-spoken Trout, who made the fight close as it was with his persistence more than any other trait, appeared to have taken Alvarez more lightly than he should have. Trout’s prefight preparation assumed that so long as he did not needlessly engage Alvarez inside, he’d be able to catch the heavyfooted Mexican on the way in. That was not the case at all, as Alvarez often outjabbed Trout, and the jabs Alvarez landed were very much more than the flicking, swatting, sampling efforts Trout employed for most of the match.

“He boxed a lot better than I thought,” Trout said. “He moved a lot better than I thought.”

The fight’s opening five rounds featured nothing decisive and lots of close scoring. Alvarez’s punches, consistently, were the harder blows, but he was not nearly active as Trout, who often threw at triple Alvarez’s rate.

The sixth round marked what may have been Alvarez’s only tactical error, as he made the first of a number of choices to be elusive rather than aggressive, allowing Trout finally to measure him and land more successfully than he had to that point. Round 6, subsequently, was the first round Trout won cleanly.

“I learned a lot from this fight,” Alvarez said. “It was a great experience for me.”

The seventh round changed everything and ultimately supplied the Alvarez point that decided the match for the Mexican on the 15rounds.com scorecard. Showing a willingness to sell-out with the right hand in his 1-2 combination, Alvarez stepped forward and blasted Trout with a straight right that dropped him in the opening minute of round 7. That 10-8 round made the scoring difference.

Alvarez then rested as much as he fought in the rounds that followed, showing himself a fighter capable of 30 minutes of constant pressure in a 36-minute fight. He protected his lead properly, though, winning on all three cards.

“I take my loss like a man,” Trout said. “The better man won tonight.”

Asked afterwards if he wished to fight Floyd Mayweather, Alvarez was unequivocal.

“Obviously,” he said. “Of course I want Mayweather next.”

He will need to prepare himself for 36 fully concentrated minutes, if that fight ever comes to fruition.

OMAR FIGUEROA VS. ABNER COTTO
The co-main event was not the ticket-seller, and it’s a good thing too.

Local Texas favorite Omar Figueroa (21-0-1, 17 KOs), a lightweight titlist from Weslaco, a bordertown just east of McAllen, made startlingly quick work of outmatched Puerto Rican Abner Cotto (16-1, 7 KOs) in Saturday’s co-main event, stopping Cotto at 2:57 of round 1, with a lefthand to the body that dropped Cotto for the second time in as many minutes and caused him to remain on his knees.

“I could tell my body shots hurt him,” said Figueroa immediately afterward. “I was just waiting for my next opportunity.”

At Friday’s weighin, co-main event co-promoter Miguel Cotto arrived in a casual black getup and remained seated at the back of the stage, acknowledging almost no one. If he had an inkling how to sell his nascent promotional company to the public of South Texas, he didn’t show it. Saturday his namesake displayed the same capacity for prizefighting.

JERMALL CHARLO VS. ORLANDO LORA
Prognostications for Saturday’s penultimate match went: Houston super welterweight Jermall Charlo, who has class but not much pop, will outclass fully Mexican Orlando Lora, who is tough and applies pressure. Prognostications were ultimately wrong – Charlo stopped Lora fairly early – though whether because of Charlo’s improved power or Lora’s increased fragility remains unknown.

Charlo outboxed Lora for every minute of their match, but Lora seemed willing and able to absorb the abuse, at least, which brought sighs of displeasure and surprise from the filled-in Alamodome crowd, when Lora quit on his stool after round 4, awarding Charlo a victory that will go in the books: KO-5.

Charlo continues to build momentum in his career, boxing under Houston trainer Ronnie Shields and improving his physique in each match by applying an innovative and scientific approach to conditioning.

TERRELL GAUSHA VS. WILLIAM WATERS
U.S. Olympians are not supposed to suffer first-round knockdowns to novices with losing records, but that’s exactly what Cleveland super middleweight Terrell Gausha did in the first round of Saturday’s sixth match, catching an overhand right flush on the chin and dropping like he was shot.

Gausha (4-0, 2 KOs) was fortunate, the back of his head caught the ropes on the way down, and he did not suffer the doubly concussive effect of having his brain bounced on the canvas. Still, he was dazed. Gausha rose, collected himself and boxed to a narrow four-round unanimous-decision victory – 38-37, three times – over Alabaman William “The Outlaw” Waters (2-4, 2 KOs), a decision the half-capacity Texas crowd booed loudly.

As many different styles as Gausha had to see en route to representing his country in the Olympics, it was remarkable how often Waters caught him with clean power punches.

RAUL MARTINEZ VS. OMAR GONZALEZ
If it was a surprise to see San Antonio’s two-time world title challenger Raul “Cobrita” Martinez in a four-rounder against an unknown opponent near the bottom of Saturday’s undercard, it was quite a bit more than a surprise to see Martinez bloodied, dropped and beaten by Omar “Bad Boy” Gonzales.

In a four-round match judges scored 39-36, 38-37 and 37-38 for Gonzales (6-8, 1 KO), both San Antonians fought well and hard, but Gonzales was just a little better in a number of exchanges with Martinez (29-3, 17 KOs), who appeared to struggle with balance issues from the opening minute. An accidental collision of heads in round 3 opened a significant cut near Martinez’s left eye, likely buzzing him.

That must be the reason, or at least it will be the explanation, for Martinez’s being dropped on the blue mat in round 4 by a well-placed left-cross counter from the southpaw “Bad Boy,” who then had Martinez nearly down again in the match’s closing seconds.

When the fair split decision in Gonzales’s favor was read, Gonzales celebrated euphorically, and Martinez looked dazedly about, still apparently unsure of his bearings.

UNDERCARD
Saturday’s third match saw Mexican super bantamweight Andres Gutierrez (26-0-1, 22 KOs) brutalize fellow Mexican, and now-worn novelty, Salvador Sanchez III (30-6-3, 18 KOs), stopping him at 1:25 of round 5. Sanchez should no longer be asked to compete against elite fighters, no matter how catchy his deceased uncle’s name.

In other action, Houston featherweight Miguel Flores (11-0, 6 KOs) decisioned Texan Guadalupe De Leon. Tijuana super flyweight Ivan Morales (21-0, 13 KOs) decisioned Chihuahua’s Raul Hidalgo (17-8, 13 KOs). And Philadelphia middleweight Julian Williams (12-0-1, 7 KOs) stopped overmatched Californian Dashon Johnson (14-11-3, 5 KOs) at 1:43 of round 3.

Opening bell rang on a sparsely populated Alamodome at 4:37 PM local time.

SAN ANTONIO – At the corner of San Saba and Commerce Streets, in the middle of whose closed intersection the weighin for “Canelo Vs. Trout” was held, an enormous screenprint of Saul Alvarez stood beneath a signpost on which flew a promotional banner for a local art museum’s exhibition, one called “Real / Surreal.” An appropriate touch, that, as it is exactly the question about Alvarado aficionados will have answered in Saturday’s main event.

Friday afternoon under a bright sun, in the confines of an otherwise unseasonably pleasant outdoor plaza in this city’s Market Square quadrant, at an event attended by the Mayor, his U.S. Congressman brother, and copromoters and formal rivals Oscar De La Hoya and Jesse James Leija, Mexican Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (41-0-1, 30 KOs) and American Austin “No Doubt” Trout (26-0, 14 KOs) made weight for their Saturday junior middleweight title-unification match.

Alvarez, his skin powder white with fire-brick freckles, made 153 1/2. Trout, much darker complected, his chest and shoulders tattooed in gray art and script, made 153 1/4. Both appeared in excellent fighting trim, with Trout the talller man.

Every ticket for Saturday’s contest has been sold for a week at least. Promoters announced a crowd of about 40,000 is expected at Alamodome. What has been dubbed “Canelo Mania” has Alamo City in its trance, as a barely proven 22-year-old Mexican with features so red, Irish really, he is called “Cinnamon,” has sold more tickets to a domestic boxing event than anyone since Manny Pacquiao at Cowboys Stadium in 2010, despite facing much lesser opposition.

That will change Saturday. In Austin Trout, Alvarez will find himself matched with an undefeated 27 year-old prizefigher every bit as good as he is, likely better. Trout decisioned Puerto Rican Miguel Cotto in December, and Alvarez has yet to accomplish anything that merits comparison with Cotto’s achievements. Alvarez, though, has a youthful vigor Cotto had beaten out of him by Mexican Antonio Margarito and the aforementioned Pacquiao years before he met Trout.

Alvarez is the ticket-selling favorite in this historic, once-Spanish, once-Mexican city. But Trout is accustomed to fighting before unfriendly crowds, having beaten Cotto in Madison Square Garden, Mexican David Lopez in Mexico, and Alvarez’s brother Rigoberto in La Familia Alvarez’s home state of Jalisco. Both men exhude graciousness and poise, though Alvarez’s poise is more easily understood and come-by given the adoration shown him wherever he goes. Trout is unlikely to be undone by Saturday’s large, partisan-Mexican crowd.

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Doors will open at Alamodome at 4:00 PM local time. As a Fiesta carnival occupies Alamodome’s parking lot, no parking will be available at Alamodome for Saturday’s match. This city’s VIA Metropolitan Transit will run busses from five park-and-ride spots, and ticketholders are encouraged to visit the VIA website for more details.

15rounds.com will have full ringside coverage.

FORT WORTH, Texas – The hardest part about this thing we do is not, as novelist Philip Roth once put it, that everything must be written about, but that everything can be. Such a thought visited, Saturday, while sitting near a stage on which Natalie Merchant performed. I forwent a trip to New York City and a boxing-writers dinner and a prizefight, Guillermo Rigondeaux versus Nonito Donaire, that interested me, to see Merchant, tickets to whose concert I purchased months before Donaire fought Jorge Arce in Houston.

Nothing about the previous week’s trip to Ireland haunted me much as this concert did, because I pledged before boarding an Aer Lingus flight nothing about Ireland would find its way in this column. With the year’s largest consequential fight thus far, Mexican Saul “Canelo” Alvarez versus New Mexican Austin “No Doubt” Trout, happening Saturday at Alamodome in San Antonio, though, connections had to be made because that is how columns work, and the connection between Merchant and Alvarez was, and is, grace.

Grace is not a word one freely associates with Mexican prizefighters, or prizefighters of any ethnicity, but in the swirl of impressions that happened Saturday in the Bass Performance Hall of this underestimated city’s Symphony Orchestra, “grace” was the very word that came to mind because of what happened at the press conference announcing Canelo vs. Trout one month ago at Alamodome, San Antonio’s signature edifice that will hold more than 30,000 people Saturday because Alvarez is that popular and Texas, frankly, is the one American state so interested in our sport.

After the usual things were said in the usual way by the usual people – one of the wonders of streaming video: today, no editor expects deadline coverage of such banality – there were side interviews ready to commence for television and television and television, and a local reporter or two, adjusting in no way the hands of what clock tells us what media matters. Before those loopy questions might be asked loopingly, to be televised in loops, though, Alvarez, dressed in a shiny battleship-gray suit and matching tie on synthetic black background, was brought to the stagefront’s extended tongue, to greet admirers for a moment or two of that spirited miming known as Connection with the Fans. But Alvarez began to sign anything handed him with any implement handed him, and while promoter Oscar De La Hoya shyly flapped a wing fans-ward, from a studiously selected perch 15 feet back of the scavengers, Alvarez signed and signed.

Thrice that I counted, Alvarez was asked to stop signing things and attend to the promotionally essential matter of television cameras. And thrice that I counted, he dismissed the request with hardly an acknowledgement – “You want me to be a ticket-seller in los estados unidos, ¿no?” – inconveniencing himself with not two syllables of explanation. Before he finished signing gloves and shirts and posters and programs and hats, numerous items for numerous folks, to tell television cameras he feels strong and is excited to be in, let’s see, San Antonio?, yes, San Antonio, he smilingly saluted the hoi polloi, hundreds strong, smaller and browner and towing a child or two, kept from him by a flat aluminum barricade, promising to sign their items, too, before he left.

What special effects Alvarez brings are natural, meaning authentic, and he appears to realize it: To date, his red hair and freckled complexion have distinguished him most from the large ranks of his countrymen’s prizefighters; Juan Manuel Marquez, for example, still could not sell 30,000 tickets in San Antonio three weeks before opening bell – and no, meritocracy has nothing to do with this, and yes, every ticket is sold: The Alamodome box office had nary an offering Friday morning. And meritocracy returns us to Saturday’s concert.

Natalie Merchant was the lead vocalist for 10,000 Maniacs before her 18th birthday, and possessed two platinum and four gold records before she turned 30, and has grown increasingly obscure since. She will turn 50 this year; her hair is timberwolf grey, not silver, her flat, once-almost-pretty features are overripe, and despite her confessed efforts she has acquired a pound of girth for every year since the 1992 MTV Unplugged performance that likely marked the last time anyone reading this saw or thought of her, if then. She was more effortful, Saturday, than her writing and singing imply; there were more clenched fists, more appeals for audience patience, and more autobiographical exposition than even her best song, “Tell Yourself” – one at whose singing she failed thrice, turning her back to the audience and sobbing, finally – anticipates.

Thirty minutes before, she found a very young boy in the audience, there with his mother and dressed in a dark suit not unlike Canelo’s, and gave him a signed copy of her book of collected children’s poetry, asking if this were his first concert, and when he said it was, Merchant offered:

“You will be proud to be able to say this was your first concert. In 25 years, a whole lot of people are going to be pretending Justin Bieber was not their first concert, and you won’t have to.”

It said much about how Merchant views her place in the canon of popular music, and it has some application to Canelo Alvarez for this obvious reason: He is the nearest thing prizefighting now has to Justin Bieber. His popularity dwarfs his achievement. His popularity dwarfs his potential for achievement, too; if we’re being honest, there is exactly no chance Alvarez will retire more accomplished than Juan Manuel Marquez, but he may outgross him many times over.

Today Saturday’s fight is not about Austin Trout at all, which is why this column has not been either. It says here, though, by the reading of the judges’ last scorecard this weekend, most accounts will treat Trout in the bitter way boxing’s habitués increasingly do everything: “Another robbery!” “Texas-sized Larceny!” “Someone Been Fishin’ in Trout’s Pond!”

I’ll take Alvarez, then, SD-12, in a fight honest hands score for Trout, 8-3-1.

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

Shortly after prevailing by an unlikely decision in his rematch with California’s Brandon Rios, Colorado’s “Mile High” Mike Alvarado told Rios, a man in the throes of a disorderly, hyperactive, inattentive reaction to his career’s first loss, their third match, a rubber match clumsily promised already by one insatiable bit player, must happen in Alvarado’s hometown – since their first match was made in Rios’ homestate and their rematch was made on a neutral field in Las Vegas. Rios concurred because it is an excellent idea.

Ideas, in the form of pattern adjustments and round-robbing, were in abundance from Alvarado, Saturday, as he decisioned Brandon Rios by unanimous scores of 115-113, 115-113 and 114-113 at Mandalay Bay. My scorecard concurred, 115-114, marking rounds 1, 3, 4, 8, 10 and 12 for Alvarado, rounds 6 and 9 even, and rounds 2, 5, 7 and 11 for Rios – with round 2 going 10-8 in the Californian’s favor.

Mike Alvarado is a better athlete than Brandon Rios, which is not to imply Rios is not a good athlete, because one does not go fractionally far as Rios has in professional athletics without athleticism aplenty. But Alvarado is an especially good athlete: a person who understands the grammar of body movement, where one places a conjunctive foot to move an adverbial shoulder while revising the sentences of another man’s body.

Alvarado was able to make Rios look, at times, formulaic. Rios had an algorithm of maneuvers to apply, and when his IF statement did not yield an expected result he looped through it again, hoping to execute his THEN, having written no ELSE. In round 2, the punch Rios did not expect to flatten Alvarado, his jab – “¡Mucho pinche jab!” as Robert Garcia would succinctly beseech – set Alvarado on drunken pins. The moment held all the cancelled anticipation anticipated by what holes lightened Alvarado’s face and neck: This was a cashout affair because Alvarado was not nearly recovered from their first match, and finance alone returned him to a ring with Rios so near his last undoing.

But in less than a round, Alvarado struck Rios with a force that very much surprised Rios, who registered and moved with Alvarado’s right fist, before catching it in such a ripe spot that instantly nothing behaved below his waist as it should. While Rios grins reflexively and widely at pain – a valuable tick at the championship level, where contests can swing on the discouragement wrought in another man by imperviousness to his assault – there was no grin goofy or inappropriate enough to cover what Rios’ locked-picked-locked-picked knees showed Alvarado and the judges. Those knees told Alvarado he possessed the power to delay Rios for instants enough to prevent the suffocating, drowning feeling Rios’ pressure requires to succeed.

What Alvarado did with those instants makes him a better athlete, though not a better fighter, than Brandon Rios. Alvarado found space between the moments, and in that space he made creative physical choices greater than Rios’. He threw punches at varying speeds and levels of force, knowing Rios would parry a gradually uncoiling left with the same exertion he showed a fully committed right. Therein lay the adjustment no one believed Alvarado had time, discipline or cunning to complete: He kept his left hand much higher than he’d done in October, and he replied to Rios’ right with a right of his own.

Alvarado’s strategy posited two things about the righthand Rios used to ice him in their first match: One, if Alvarado could take even 30 percent off it, whether through compromised trajectory or partial deflection, he could withstand its impact; and two, the instant after Rios felt the knuckles of his right fist sink in Alvarado was the moment he was least careful about returning his head to safety. Alvarado absorbed Rios’ right then matched it right back, and he did it from the opening round. If Alvarado was no longer macho enough to trade uncovered righthands with Rios, no longer anxious to play naked lumberjack at the “Bam Bam” tree, he graduated from training camp convinced a lightweight titlist in his second career match at 140 pounds, whatever his Cro-Magnon reputation, could not play sponge to 40 or so such punches in a half hour.

Alvarado was right and Rios relented enough, which is to say barely. Once Rios considered braking –evident each time Alvarado skipped at Rios with a bowled uppercut Rios blocked every time but did not charge through – Alvarado was able to practice accomplished salesmanship, fleeing Rios for the opening 150 seconds of rounds 9 and 10, before landing punches enough to convince all three judges Alvarado took those decisively important scoring rounds, rounds Rios will return to, on tape and in memory, when he makes a case to himself Alvarado did not win their rematch. There was this irony in Rios’ reaction to those late, round, and late-round, punches from Alvarado: Rios’ greatest defensive strength, an incredible plasticity born of fantastic composure, caused his pliant neck to let its top snack backwards, crediting Alvarado’s clean shots with more force than they merited.

Still, the fight was very close, and while none of the three cards was wrong, Duane Ford’s tally, 114-113, was probably rightest of all.

Remember when Top Rank’s rematch between Miguel Cotto and Antonio Margarito was jeopardized for Madison Square Garden by Margarito’s blindness? The venue that topped the promoter’s list of replacements – or was rumored to replace it before Cotto’s understandable reticence made Bob Arum disconnect his own conference call – was Denver’s Pepsi Center. Denver has long boasted one of boxing’s beloved matchmakers, Don Smith, and now boasts one of its beloved fighters, Mike Alvarado. Pepsi Center for Alvarado-Rios III is a lovely idea.

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Author’s note: This column will take next week off, returning April 15.

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

Saturday, California’s Brandon “Bam Bam” Rios will make a rematch with Colorado’s “Mile High” Mike Alvarado of the second-best fight of 2012, a relentless engagement Rios won in round 7 when California referee Pat Russell ruled Alvarado was too defenseless to continue at Carson, Calif.’s Home Depot Center in October. Rios-Alvarado II will happen at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas.

There is a feel of the cash-out to this rematch. It is too soon for Mike Alvarado to review his October mistakes, imagine theoretical corrections, apply theory to his gym routines, bend and memorize his muscles to new positions, then practice these new positions till they bore him. There is not time enough for an athlete who was not stopped brutally in his last fight to do this or time enough for an athlete of sound mind and body to do it, and so imagine for a moment how inadequately timed is Alvarado – who was solved conclusively by Rios in the middle part of their sixth round together barely five months ago and was then wounded in February in what Alvarado’s manager told Rick Reeno was a minor affair, calling what HBO’s camera made look like the shimmering claw-work of a mountain lion on Alvarado’s right cheek, chin and neck, “just a few scratches.”

Such abrasions are not likely to impede Alvarado, Saturday – however perilously close to vital parts of his neck Alvarado’s wounds happened, a fighter with a properly tucked chin shouldn’t have those wounds reopened by another man’s leathered fists – but it is unlikely Alvarado has been able to focus on much more than how those marks sting when perspiration glides its salt-depositing way across them.

Colorado boxing is a realm unto itself; there have not been many world champions from the Centennial State, but one of boxing’s most colorful and well-liked characters, matchmaker Don Smith, resides up that way and one afternoon recounted stories aplenty – liberally punctuating them with his delightfully autobiographical clause, “it is alleged” – of what happened in a place where regulations were wanting: bareknuckle scraps, toughman competitions, tag-team boxing. Out of remnants from that brannigan emerged a prodigious wrestler-cum-boxer named Mike Alvarado, nine years ago.

Alvarado is considered a toughman of his own now, a complement to Brandon Rios’ prehistoric fighting style, but he was not that when he began, and he was not that when promoter Top Rank had him featured on Telefutura years ago. Today, large holes in his résumé, face and neck betray Alvarado’s penchant for unsanctioned combat, which is why the cash-out comes, though without much of the nefariousness the term often connotes. Alvarado knows where his career is at this moment, and exactly how unlikely a Las Vegas main event, broadcast by HBO, was, 20 months ago when he won an IBF Latino title on a Denver softball field adjacent to a functioning railway.

Local shows like that one offer narrow vistas and few escape routes. Smalltown cards in the West are caldrons of reinvention and assumed identities, places where full rosters of flunkies nobody has ever heard of stomp their ways to VIP seats from harried local promoters whose favorite phrase is “Never heard of him!” Commission officials, overdressed and ubiquitous till a call for judgment or actionable information goes out, preen in the provincial authority common to small provinces. The packs that prey near ringside look nothing like what one sees in Las Vegas; however much his attendance at Marquez-Pacquiao IV may have enchanted Mitt Romney, if he gained fifty pounds of fat, three pounds of ink, a pound of beard, and a Harley-Davidson jacket, he still would not make it far enough to be wanded by an offduty cop at such a card’s improvised entrance, much less to his unfolded aluminum chair, beige or grey, with its same seat number handprinted on at least three other VIP tickets.

One does not come out an environment like this and ask for a tuneup or postponement, which is why Alvarado did not ask for either, and neither probably would have been granted him by a sage promoter with no way of knowing how free or healthy Alvarado might be in June. Saturday’s fight is unlikely to be good as its predecessor, which saw Rios undertake a brutal 17-minute apprenticeship from which he emerged with coordinates for a hellish spot heavyweight Ray Mercer once coined “Righthand City” – right before depositing Tommy “The Duke” Morrison there for an unforgettable 1991 exile.

Rios knows Alvarado has no workable solution for his right hand, and Rios knows Alvarado knows it as well, and that should bring the suspenseful round or three that opens their rematch Saturday, when Rios tries to cut Alvarado’s consciousness in two minutes and finds Alvarado, for whatever haplessness he showed in rounds 6 and 7 of their first fight, remains dangerous as any man Rios has fought, until he is softened by a hundred or more punches. One hopes Alvarado spent training camp fixated on other men’s right shoulders and thoughts of Rios’ right deltoid as it twitches the instant before he launches a right cross, or, better still, that Alvarado abandoned his low-lead-hand approach totally – though that seems too rich an account for Hope to settle.

It would be a wonderful thing for Alvarado and prizefighting if Rios were careless enough to hurl himself square on an Alvarado counter, early, wonderful for the spectacle that would ensue and the possibility these savages would make a rubber match, but probability does not favor it. So I’ll take Rios, KO-6, while wishing both men only the very best.

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

American welterweight Timothy Bradley was knocked-out at 2:33 of round 1 by Russian Ruslan Provodnikov, Saturday at Home Depot Center in Carson, Calif. Bradley began a right cross at the moment Provodnikov did, and while Bradley’s grazed harmlessly past, Provodnikov’s struck flush. Bradley buckled, fell forward, clutched Provodnikov round the yellow letters on the seat of his trunks, then fell to his knees and black gloves. Bradley rose, backpedaled, fell, rolled over, and rose again with the lunatic smile a man wears when no signal his brain sends down the spinal cord is obeyed by his lower body.

If consciousness is an awareness by the mind of itself and the world, Bradley was not conscious for most of the 33 minutes of fighting that followed. But in what variable moments of consciousness he experienced, Bradley sent communiques enough to the learned muscles of his body to decision Provodnikov by unanimous scores of 114-113, 114-113 and 115-112 and retain the WBO welterweight belt he took from Manny Pacquiao in June. Treated to valorous a display as an athlete can make, the sparse Home Depot Center crowd booed loudly the judges’ deciding in favor of the champion.

And there was Timothy Bradley, bouncing in his corner before the decision, trying to make a spirited sight of his readiness and fitness, showing Provodnikov he was not tired but anxious to come out and make war in the final round, except that the final round had come and gone minutes before, and Bradley seemed to have no idea of it. He was not in his right mind. If you told Bradley on Sunday morning he fought valiantly, did his level best, but finally got knocked-out by a well-fisted Russian who wore him to a nub at the end, Bradley would have had to go find his belt, if he even remembered where he put it, to be sure you were wrong.

Bradley is frailer than his detractors know. In 2011, I spoke with him in the Southwest hangar of the Detroit Metro Airport seven hours after he beat Devon Alexander, and the first thought I had as he shuffled anonymously along the gleaming tile hallway, taking tiny steps, no entourage in tow, his left eye shuttered, his face small and dark, was: “God, he looks fragile.”

The same could be said of him as he sat in a wheelchair beneath the MGM Grand dais last year after going more rounds with Manny Pacquiao than Oscar De La Hoya did, or Ricky Hatton did, or Miguel Cotto did – this must not be forgotten – and after the greatest moment of his career, one an entire industry then conspired ghoulishly to snatch from him. The same could be said of Bradley on Saturday night as he stood wideyed and confused, genuineness and goodness still shining through concussion’s miasma, and admitted he did not recall what he said three seconds before.

Timothy Bradley gives more than he has to every fight; he is ill-equipped for the combat he makes. He is a man with one knockout victory in six years who went for the knockout repeatedly, Saturday, against an opponent who’d rendered him senseless in their first three minutes together. Ruslan Provodnikov showed Bradley’s large flaws: He does not move his head until he is on an opponent’s chest, his balance is often not good as he believes, and his power at welterweight is a fraction his confidence in it. Bradley fights rather like what he is: a man whose teachers believed conditioning was more important than defense.

In the final 15 seconds of round 6, Bradley and Provodnikov threw 56 punches at one another, in as feral a display of desire and conditioning as can be seen in a prizefighting ring. Provodnikov threw many of his punches head-down and landed many more than Bradley did, head-up. Bradley needed to see Provodnikov to punch him, and that was difficult with his eyes scattering like brown marbles in sockets of polished obsidian. Provodnikov knew without having to look where Bradley’s chin would be, which allowed him, at various remarkable moments Saturday, to move his head well out of Bradley’s range as he put his wonderfully leveraged right fist in the geometrical center of Bradley’s face.

But promoter Top Rank is not yet rid of its Bradley problem, and Bradley’s flowering resentment, and how history will judge its catalyst, is to be a problem indeed. When Bradley went down in the final seconds of round 1 then got up, fell backwards, and landed on his shoulder at an angle obtuse enough to separate it, I thought of what Top Rank’s peerless matchmaker once said after an early undercard match when a local favorite got dropped by an unknown: “Nothing surprises me.” Provodnikov did exactly what was expected of him, and if he did not permanently alter the trajectory of Bradley’s career, Saturday, he likely will in the rematch Bradley will have to make long before he is given the payday he was promised if he beat Pacquiao, which he did.

We booed Bradley afterwards, again, in his home state this time, despite his making combat for a half hour his brain was too scrambled to record – booed him because three professional judges agreed he won another close fight. Bradley may forgive us, though he should not, but he will not forget, and he should not. He is a greater man than he is a fighter, and he deserves better judges than what we are.

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

Saturday Timothy Bradley, inactive since decisioning Manny Pacquiao nine months ago, will return from exile to defend against Russia’s Ruslan Provodnikov the burnt-maroon WBO welterweight belt Bradley took from Pacquiao in June. Provodnikov, with three more knockouts in his 23 prizefights than Bradley has in 29, might well be the wrong style for Bradley, slugger to volume puncher, but wrong styles is where Bradley has found himself since inciting the wrath of a public still naïve enough in 2012 to believe Pacquiao, if he could just keep getting decisions, might meet Floyd Mayweather in the Fight to Save Boxing.

Bradley has appeared on a conference call and a television show recently, as part of his promotional duties, and done a fairly good imitation of the late Joe Frazier declaring forgiveness for Muhammad Ali – which is to say Bradley is unconvincing when he says he is done thinking about what happened to him, and his career, and his family, after he decisioned Pacquiao. He isn’t, and he should not be.

What will they say about what we said about Timothy Bradley? That’s a question to ask ourselves the next time television convinces us to pile on the performance of an athlete like Bradley, the next time we are drafted like pawns in a network’s or promoter’s army of self-interest and profitability, the next time we are convinced something like our proper identities is staked on how well we proclaim the favored man in a superfight was wronged by public servants with nothing to gain by his wronging.

“There is a difference when you view it live and when you view it on TV,” Bradley said on Tuesday’s conference call. “Completely different.”

Completely right. One needn’t bore into the untrustworthy properties of projected images – though one is welcome to, if it will help – to understand how very different, how very unreal, the experience of watching a fight on television is, with its jiggering cameras, close no far no close no from the back oops he moved to the front no not the ref show the face no back up back up change the angle, and its self-interested commentators and self-referential, and self-reverential, scoring and wildly distorting choice of replays.

Each time television must choose between more realistic and more entertaining, it chooses the latter, yet its celebrants assure themselves it chooses the former – till in a crescendo of absurdity they demand actual participants and actual observers actually present at an actual event, not an image projected through myriad filters, review the filtered projection to find truth. If only Van Eyck and Leonardo could see this spectacle, the way the lenses they used for making glorious illusions have supplanted persons’ faith in eyewitnesses, how heartily they would chuckle.

Some bored postgrad might someday arrange an experiment like this: Project a piece of gray slate on a high-definition television and ask a subject seated in a dark, empty, silent room whether the color is nearer blue or purple, and record his answer. Then set headphones on his ears and ask him again after exposing him to this:

“Big blue everywhere! Blue, blue, blue. Another big blue! This is a historic show of blueness.”

“Now I know a few people out there might be saying ‘purple,’ but I just don’t see it.”

“Reminds me of some of the blues I use. Some of them blue-on-blues, son!”

“I have it scored: blue, blue, blue. Look, it’s a pure blue. Not a sky blue or a robin’s egg blue. It’s as blue as the bluest blue you’ll ever see. Three to nothing – all blue!”

It was the week that followed Bradley’s decisioning Pacquiao in June historians will find offensive. The way the proudest moment of a good man’s career was whitewashed by an entire industry, shouting down dissenters and boarding a promoter’s self-profiting vehicle beneath a streaming banner that read: “No need for a rematch, because we already know who really won!” Bradley is right not to forgive them, he is right to admit his devilish side still finds schadenfreude in Juan Manuel Marquez’s unequivocal leveling of Pacquiao six months later.

Bradley is what they used to call “good people”; he is dignified, serious, friendly and confident. He did not fight his best that night against Pacquiao, and he would win a rematch – which is why none was offered, or will be – because Pacquiao would be watched with different sets of eyes, this time noticing his footwork was sloppy and tangled as he swam over and around Bradley and connected solidly with fewer than one in five punches, a sloppiness made manifest by diminished reflexes, a diminishment that later made openings enough to make Marquez, the master gambler, bet his eternal soul on a right hand no amount of promotional prestidigitation can now undo.

There’s a dramatic documentary here for ESPN to produce in 10 or 15 years, one that will say that although Pacquiao clearly lost the second half of his third fight with Marquez, folks still wanted to believe they saw him do things he simply did not do against Bradley, projecting an image of the man who blitzed Marco Antonio Barrera and Erik Morales onto the one across from Tim Bradley seven months after Marquez asked stylistic questions Pacquiao could no longer answer.

“What they did to my son was wrong,” Ray Bradley, Tim’s father, will intone in a deep, stern voice. “He was undefeated, 28 and 0, and the worst he did was make a close fight with the world’s number one? They had no right.”

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

SAN ANTONIO – While there is no promotional formula for rising from small and local shows to large and national ones, there is perhaps a timeline: suddenly. The incremental approach that works well in most of life’s worthwhile doings does not work nearly so well in prizefighting promotion, as so many other good ideas do not work nearly so well in prizefighting promotion – wherein shortsightedness rarely finds its match in anything but cupidity. “Go large, be bold, and expect to lose” is probably good a slogan as any, and Leija-Battah Promotions certainly understands those first two.

Saturday at Our Lady of the Lake University, Leija-Battah Promotions held its final sparring session before a championship match it will make, both as promoter and challenger, on April 20, when Mexican Saul “Canelo” Alvarez fights New Mexican Austin “No Doubt” Trout at Alamodome, in the biggest consequential fight of the first half of 2013.

Is this city ready? That is a question Saturday answered incompletely. The main event certainly was not ready, or anything local promoters had control over. Golden Boy Promotions was to blame for Omar Figueroa unmanning someone named Henry Aurad in a few punches, but only insofar as a promoter overextended with television dates and fighters can be. There’s an underexplored conundrum here, one that having too large a stable, usually required by too many television commitments, can bring. It’s a thing storied matchmaker Don Chargin shared: You run out of opponents. When you have too many good fighters and they must be kept active against fighters other than your other good fighters, when your responsibility is to build fighters, not fights, appropriate opposition goes missing.

Golden Boy Promotions now finds itself often putting men like Henry Aurad on television. Top Rank, in its overstocked past, did this lots, too, but Top Rank has stropped itself in the last four months – one is tempted to hear the starter’s pistol the night Juan Manuel Marquez recalled Top Rank’s signature brand though the downsizing began months earlier – and is on the verge of having its least-active Q1 in memory.

Our Lady of the Lake University’s gymnasium was filled Saturday. OLLU is a small, old, lovely place a couple miles west – just to the Mexican side – of this city’s downtown. Any town has its ethnic enclaves, and while this one is probably the most Mexican of our country’s largest, the west side of San Antonio is even more Mexican than other parts with their enclaves of Chicanos or African-Americans or German-Americans.

Founded nearly 120 years ago by the Sisters of the Congregation of Divine Providence, a French order of Catholic nuns, OLLU is a school with a campus that is small but precious and home of its city’s most picturesque steeple, reminding students, or boxing aficionados as the case may be, their host is not secular. Catholicism is arguably a cultural artifact for Mexicans more than a religious one; the reevaluation of the Church the Irish, among others, now undergo is a thing Mexicans underwent in the late 1920s, when President Plutarco Elias Calles fired what might euphemistically be called a starter’s pistol of his own. Mexican Catholicism is a rich and irreverent species of Catholicism; its cultural tendency towards faith is leavened by a deeper indigenous recollection of how the faith was delivered by steel-bearing Spaniards the new God mysteriously chose as His emissaries.

OLLU is a local-knowledge spot Leija-Battah Promotions chose for a small show because it is a local promoter that understands the city in which it promotes because it is run by residents of the city. This month marks a year since Jesse James Leija, still a trainer and former prizefighter much more than a promoter, and Mike Battah, a local businessman, formed Leija-Battah Promotions and presented a Top Rank show that featured Kelly Pavlik in a corner of Alamodome called Illusions Theater.

Other shows followed, and while announced gates were encouraging, other elements were not. After Alamodome, there was a show at a dancehall followed by a pro-am at Alamodome, followed by a Freeman Coliseum show and a late-December card in an assembly hall. Throughout, there were rumblings of Leija-Battah wanting to bring Saul “Canelo” Alvarez to San Antonio. When Saturday’s show got announced in January with Henry Aurad in the main event of a card at a university wellness and activity center, though, well.

Then last week brought news Canelo was in fact en route, and not as a showcase talent against a designated opponent – the way Manny Pacquiao visited this city in 2007 and Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. came in 2010 and 2012 – but in a legitimate title-unification match against a fellow champ with good a chance of winning as losing, if every scorecard were in an honest hand. Alvarez will fight Trout on the third evening of Fiesta, this city’s annual and colorful 10-day celebration of Texas independence – contextualized regularly by San Antonians as “our Mardi Gras,” which means plenty, from a live-gate perspective, when one considers Alamo City has about 400 percent New Orleans’ population.

Will Alvarez-Trout break the record set at Alamodome by Pernell Whitaker and Julio Cesar Chavez Sr. 20 years ago this September? No, but an attendance number above 25,000 is not out of the question. And when did those words last appear in a sentence about American-venue boxing outside Lone Star State?

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

SAN ANTONIO – When your main event is a joke, the undercard better be filled with punch-lines. Fortunately for Golden Boy Promotions and its local partner, Leija-Battah Promotions, the undercard, and the local talent that staffed it, had lots of punches in both straight and bent lines, redeeming a main event between an undefeated Texan and a man unfit for a swing bout.

Saturday at Our Lady of the Lake Gym, on a gorgeous campus in the western part of this city’s downtown area, Texas junior welterweight Omar Figueroa (20-0-1, 16 KOs), of Weslaco, leaped out his corner and obliterated frightened Floridian Henry Aurad (14-7-1, 11 KOs), dropping him once in the first half minute and stopping him decisively with an overhand right at 0:47 of round 1.

Aurad stood in the opponent corner, blue, before the match commenced, looking unprepared, spacey and nervous. If bystanders noticed this, you can bet Figueroa did. The Texan raced out his corner and assaulted Aurad, who appeared not to have any plan at all for fighting a man with 15 knockouts in 19 fights. Quickly enough, Aurad was on the canvas, rising on unconvinced legs and escaping a few seconds longer.

Figueroa’s right hand closed all exits a moment later, though, and the main event was through before it could earnestly begin.

JERMALL CHARLO VS. GILBERT VENEGAS
Houston junior middleweight Jermall Charlo (12-0, 8 KOs) made short work of fellow Texan Gilbert Venegas (12-9-3, 8 KOs), of Eagle Pass, stopping the overmatched lad at 0:24 of round 3, in the evening’s co-main event.

From the opening bell the disparity in height between the lanky Charlo and his opponent was dramatic; the fighters appeared to be from different sports more than different weight classes. Venegas did what he was able, applying pressure enough to land a left hook to the body and a right hand in each round, but against Charlo he hadn’t a chance.

Charlo did everything better than Venegas, using his enormous height and reach advantage properly, outjabbing Venegas through the fight’s full six minutes and landing crisp right hands. Charlo’s power has occasionally been questioned by aficionados, but against an opponent he dwarfed, there was little doubt what Charlo’s right cross possessed for a man at whom he could punch downwards, and who was there to be hit with it.

The two in Charlo’s 1-2 was ferocious against Venegas, dropping him for the fabled 10 1/2 count at the open of round 3.

ERROL SPENCE VS. LUIS TORRES
2012 U.S. Olympian “The Truth” Errol Spence (4-0, 3 KOs), of Dallas, decisioned local junior middleweight Luis Torres (4-3-3, 1 KO) by unanimous scores of 40-36, 40-36 and 40-36, in Saturday’s antepenultimate fight. While Spence was never imperiled by the San Antonian, he was touched more often by right hands than was expected.

Spence has a number of areas that will need steady improvement if he is to fulfill the high expectations that greet Olympians’ arrivals in the professional ranks. Spence often pushes-off with the jab more than he thrusts it, punching to get away rather than initiate attack. He throws the left cross from his southpaw stance in an almost premeditated way, appearing to put the punch behind the jab in obedience to a plan more than a moment. And finally, as evidenced by Torres being felled not once despite absorbing numerous power shots, Spence may not hit hard as hoped.

Nevertheless, Spence did what needed doing Saturday, outboxing Torres for every instant of their four rounds together.

JAIRO CASTANEDA VS. CHRISTIAN SANTIBANEZ
The night’s best match was its swing bout before the main event, when two San Antonio junior welterweights, Jairo Castaneda (2-0, 1 KO) and Christian Santibanez (0-1), fought each other like neighbors, or brothers, and relented not once in their 12 minutes of combat that Castaneda won by unanimous scores of 39-36, 39-36 and 38-37.

The otherwise even bout was decided, in largest part, by a counter right cross with which Castaneda felled Santibanez in round 2, clipping Santibanez on the way in and marking a 10-8 round that proved helpful. Santibanez, though, showing much composure in his professional debut, fought Castaneda better after being knocked down than he’d fought him before it happened. Neither man relented, and both fought with the familiarity that convinces a man the person opposite him is not his superior.

This match, along with others that featured local fighters like Emanuel Ledezma, Felipe Castaneda, Joseph Rodriguez and Kenton Sippio-Cook, filled Our Lady of the Lake University Gym with a capacity and energetic crowd. Leija-Battah Promotions, in its first year of work, has shown an inventiveness and insider knowledge every promotional startup claims but few actually possess. Its largest test will come next month, when it presents Saul Alvarez vs. Austin Trout at Alamodome.

DALLAS – While the aficionados who peruse this column were dutifully enduring a first collaboration of Mayweather Promotions and Showtime, Saturday, one that worked better as prophesy than entertainment, after they’d already endured a week of contemplating another network switch certain to change the world once more – this time Floyd Mayweather following Manny Pacquiao to Showtime, or have we forgotten? – I was at American Airlines Center to see a hockey game between the Dallas Stars and San Jose Sharks.

The game was not very good, just as Mayweather’s May 4 welterweight fight with 2009 featherweight titlist Robert Guerrero will not be, but it did hold a moment at 8:21 of period 2, an instant of mutual malice satisfactorily resolved, that reminded me how rarely prizefighting brings such catharses anymore. The moment featured a face Mayweather flashes when he throws a punch with which he means to hurt, a contorted countenance that reminds you he is a fighter, a face both Sharks forward Joe Thornton and Stars forward Jamie Benn flashed as their fists and bodies crashed together, and that is what I will treat here.

Saturday’s epiphany: Ferocity of spectacle is what I have missed – a confrontation taken personally, the desire to hurt another man overcoming any fear of being embarrassed before 18,000 strangers. Thornton and Benn’s squaring-off brought a unique drama caused by two quite large professional athletes, neither of whom fights for a living but both of whom know how because one would not otherwise make his living the way they do. It held a tension most every prizefight will lack in 2013: Someone could be badly hurt quite suddenly, and neither man seems to care.

It was a ferocious face Joe Thornton wore as he went after Benn. Thornton, in his prime, now passed, was talented a player as the league had; at 6-foot-4, he moved as a much smaller man, with what balance and grace is expected of a centerman, though with four inches and 20 pounds more than tradition wears at the position. But his desire was questioned in Boston, where he was first pick of the 1997 draft, and then San Jose, where he has been captain for years.

Thornton’s is a finesse game of imaginative passing and awareness of the ice surface, done with what can feel like a complacent smirk; despite 328 career goals, he does not shoot often enough, and despite weighing at least 230 pounds – 235 according to Dropyourgloves.com – he rarely runs his body hard into another’s. In skates and full equipment Saturday, though, Thornton was a 6-foot-7, 240-pound man, nearly a Klitschko brother, under a burst of what sudden rage both Klitschkos avoid with a craftsman’s determination.

I was in row H, seven from the glass, in the zone where hostilities initiated. While any sport is best appreciated by its former practitioners, hockey is more decisively this way than others; because of its speed, and because of how poorly American cameramen, raised on football or baseball or basketball, anticipate plays, ever trailing the action or overcorrecting initial tardinesses, hockey – as separate from the bloodiest elements of its reputation – is rarely appreciated properly by those who’ve not played it. That is seldom a problem above the snow line, and never a problem in Canada, but things can get dicey in Texas.

Skating past, Benn speared Thornton in the groin, the soft fleshy part of the inner thigh where there is no protection, and Thornton reciprocated by chopping the blade of his stick precisely on the inch or so of Benn’s forearm that lay unprotected by the top glove and bottom elbow pad. A wrinkle happened across the ice, a surge in the game’s electrical grid; while most eyes in American Airlines Center followed the puck 20 feet away, those who played the game looked at Thornton and Benn in the instant before Thornton dropped his left glove and Benn shouted, “Let’s go!”

Thornton gently maneuvered one of the Stars defenseman out his way and began checking tape on his right wrist, to ensure his elbow pad did not slide downwards and soften any blow he landed. Benn glided backwards, ungloved hands at his side. The combatants began a large circle, the crowd took its feet with a ghoulish and shouted glee, and the officials backed away to allow space for a resolution. Thornton and Benn negotiated an agreement to remove their helmets, promising neither would break his hand on anything but the other’s bared skull.

Chinstraps undone and hats demurely removed and ceremoniously placed on the ice, the men raised their uncovered knuckles, squared up, circled once, Thornton took a deep breath, and they leaped at each other. The moment was packed to bursting with what chaotic rage the word “fight” should conjure. On a frictionless surface, each moved at the other much faster than two prizefighters would do.

“A fight is a fight” – those were what words happened in my mind. Whatever else these men were – masters in the balletic discipline of balancing on four razor’s edges at 25 miles per hour, careful teammates, loyal friends, fathers, sons – they were savages in the moment, rushing at one another in nearly formless rage, faces honestly contorted by the evil of wanting to hurt another man very badly. These were not, it must be reiterated, goons or enforcers putting on a rally-the-boys spectacle for violence-lusting Texans; these were skill players (Benn had a goal and an assist Saturday) under the spell of a genuine fury, the sort a man feels when he is wronged to requiring satisfaction.

The fight quickly devolved into the exhausting place hockey fights do, with Thornton holding Benn’s jersey with his left fist, yanking him into the jab, and landing a considerable right cross or two to Benn’s left temple – punches that pained both Sunday morning. Benn found Thornton with a right hand as well before both spun to their stockinged kneepads. By prizefighting standards, it was a mere brawl, a donnybrook, a wild-swinging matter of personal grievance with only fractional punching skill employed, which is what brought a catharsis prizefighting will too often lack in 2013.

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

This is how Saturday ended after Adrien “The Problem” Broner defeated Gavin Rees by corner stoppage in the fifth round.

Max Kellerman: “You beat the hell out of him, would you like to see, and comment, some?”
The Problem: “I mean, everybody knows sex sells. I’m pretty. I want to keep seeing myself on TV.”

Max Kellerman: “And then in round 5?”
The Problem: “Man, I cooked him. He was underwater like a neckbone.”

Max Kellerman: “What’s your best shot?”
The Problem: “Um, my best shot is when I take a picture. Somebody take a picture of me.”

Very good writing happened last week, with Adrien Broner as its subject. Much of it, though, thinned as it progressed, both gaining and losing animus as it applied itself to the chore of Broner’s excavation. Some of it craftily ended with a shrug, other of it marched towards a preordained conclusion, a tariff for what exhaustive access brought an exhausted broadcast, Saturday, once Broner finally did the one thing he is good at, which is fighting. His prefight appearances on camera betrayed a boredom with his own shtick, a boredom arrived at him prematurely as forehead wrinkles. His previous events were preceded and succeeded, immediately, by a self-consumption that betrayed either lunacy or immaturity. If it was lunacy, “The Problem” is cured; if it was immaturity, he is now aged. Broner is not fascinated by Broner any longer – which is one attribute of Floyd Mayweather’s, a genuinely childlike enthusiasm at his own voice amplifying clichés, Broner has not borrowed.

It is not possible a person adept at interpreting the rhythms of other men’s physiques as Broner is does not sense his inquisitors’ growing boredom, and the audience boredom it anticipates. Sycophants’ overwrought mirth convinces no one, finally, and sends natural showmen to the reservoir of their own emotions. But in this sense Broner is akin to the retreaded recording characters hip-hop cynically grinded out after Dr. Dre’s solo album in 1992, guys who rapped, effectively, about how much they wanted to be like other, better guys, rappers passable in the compulsory round – rims, guns, hoes – but bereft of material for the freestyle round, the meaningful one, and ignorant of how much stock even the naivest listener placed in an element of discovery.

Broner, too, confronts an audience conundrum hip-hop’s now-anonymous laggards did not. The Mayweather shtick of which Broner is already tired was not created for aficionados; it was invented years later to capture a millionth pay-per viewer. Mayweather already had aficionados’ esteem, begrudging as it was – for retiring in only his 18th prizefight Genaro Hernandez, for dropping Diego Corrales five times, for granting Jose Luis Castillo an immediate rematch – when he later invented “Money May,” a rapacious character designed to capture revenue by fulfilling stereotypes to provoke strong reactions, beggaring what shallow plots action movies provide.

Aficionados do not go for this. They generally compose an older, smarter set enchanted by violent competition, not special effects. They make ethnic identifications but care little for biography because their identities are settled, and because they’ve been force-fed the same “boxing saved him from the streets” script often enough to know fewer than one in a 100 kids from the streets can fight a lick – rendering such biographical tidbits useless to someone thoughtfully hoping to understanding an athlete whose prowess he admires.

Mayweather had a supporting cast Broner does not yet have; a crazy dad, a crazier uncle, charismatic and accomplished opponents like Oscar De La Hoya and Ricky Hatton, and an innovative set of producers at HBO who knew more about creating documentaries than they didn’t know about boxing. Broner has a hairbrush.

He also has a hell of an idea what he is doing in a boxing ring, and while he is not quite the beast he appeared across from tiny Gavin Rees, he is good a fighter as the world has under 147 pounds. He changes men, professional fighting men, from aggressors to targets. By round 4, Saturday, he made Rees do the very thing Antonio Demarco did in his own fourth round with Broner in November: Nervously rest his head someplace Broner’s right fist couldn’t help but find it. As noticed by analyst Lee Wylie, whose deconstructions of boxing’s language are consistently excellent, Broner’s left hook, whether leading or checking, is now among the most formidable punches in prizefighting. It makes rugged men look for refuge inside it – Demarco set his head against Broner’s right glove, Rees occasionally tried Broner’s left elbow – which is the place Broner wants them, and from which he snuffs their fighting spirits.

There is nothing Broner does so well as fight, and he should stop permitting others to ask him to do more than that. Broner is now told, by folks too inexperienced to know better, he should capture aficionados with a formula invented for casual fans, to whose heights a prizefighter does not build without a sturdy and committed foundation. Thoughtless as his detractors may imagine him, Broner does sense this. The very reflex that tells him to rock away from an opponent’s right hand in the first round but step into the same punch in the fourth is one that told him to end things Saturday just as Max Kellerman crashed their postfight interview into a monitor of highlighted knockdowns. Everything about Kellerman’s comportment told Broner the episode was a flop, and better to end it. He didn’t, and discomfited sighs everywhere else were the result.

It is time for an imagined slight of some kind to make Broner stop talking. The best thing Mayweather did after the way he finished the FaceLube spokesman, in 2011, was refuse to talk about it, subsequently bending a sucker punch into a dark bit of strategizing. To the myriad of things Broner borrows from Mayweather, he should now add silence.

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

HOUSTON – At this city’s Museum of Fine Arts is a historic exhibition called “Portrait of Spain” that is historic, in part, because of the decimated Spanish economy that encouraged Museo Nacional del Prado to begin lending to American museums a trove of masterworks created for 17th century royalty and expected not to leave their homeland. While the reason to attend such an exhibition is to see, outside Madrid, six-foot-high works by Diego Velazquez, an artist Spain would argue remains the world’s greatest portraitist, the Velazquez works may not be the exhibition’s most awesome.

In our sport’s cancelled first quarter of 2013, it appears a better pursuit to examine our recollections of masterworks abstractly and apply what abstractions result than try the intellectual’s feat of elevating lesser events and their participants to prove it can be done. Let us consider, then, prodigy, like Adrien Broner’s and Floyd Mayweather’s, and prodigy-cum-mastery, like Muhammad Ali’s, in an age marked by its postmodernism – an architectural example of which, this city’s RepublicBank Center, adorns the page.

It is the embroidery on the stockings one is most likely to miss, whether gazing briefly at Antonio De Pereda’s “The relief of Genoa by the second Marquis of Santa Cruz” or studying it for hours at MFAH’s current exhibition. Of the many colorful figures in the enormous work (it is 9 1/2 feet high and 12 feet wide), six wear stockings that are visible and feature embroidery. It is a detail that belies the age of its artist – for Pereda was only 24 when he created it. In the masterpiece’s center, where the doge’s red velvet gown reflects the marquis’ steel breastplate that is itself reflective of the doge’s gown, one finds evidence of what tricks Pereda already knew, tricks enough to be invited to contribute to a Hall of Realms that would feature Velazquez himself. Pereda probably never surpassed, in four decades of trying, what he did at age 24.

Therein lies a lesson about prodigy: It is wrong to assume about it a steady rate of acceleration, though we invariably do – “If he is capable of this at such a young age, imagine what the future holds!” Prodigy rarely works like that. While most every master, of whatever craft, begins as a prodigy, very few prodigies grow to become masters, and more frustratingly still, many of them fail even to surpass their later-arriving peers whose rate of acceleration is both lower and more constant.

HBO’s Max Kellerman alluded to something like this during the telecast of Adrien Broner’s last match, an eight-round going-through of Antonio Demarco in November; most of the signature matches in a master’s career happen well past his physical prime, as the prime is a perishable thing. The greatest Muhammad Ali the world saw, according to Howard Cosell, was the 24-year-old who stopped Cleveland Williams in three rounds in a now-defunct concept called Astrodome that stands, still, six miles south of where this is written, and yet, who that recounts the achievements of Ali’s career thinks to include that Williams fight in his first 10 citations?

There is not yet evidence Adrien Broner’s talent may not be a prodigious one that grows into mastery, and no such evidence is expected Saturday when he defends his lightweight title against Gavin Rees, a 32-year-old Welshman making his maiden voyage across the pond for his 40th prizefight – which is another way of imparting that Rees is a designated opponent for Broner. Expect dancing and showmanship from Broner and zealous overselling by HBO who, in case it went unnoticed, has no real pay-per-view fixture to replace what revenue is now lost to Manny Pacquiao and will be lost soon to Floyd Mayweather.

Broner promotes himself as an eventual replacement for Mayweather, and while that is possible, it is unlikely, as Broner, who has most of Mayweather’s talent and maturity, is about to be asked to support an economy at a much, much younger age than Mayweather was when he assumed half the burden from Oscar De La Hoya and shared it four years with Pacquiao. The mistakes Mayweather made between his 24th birthday (Broner’s will come in July) and his fight with De La Hoya were many and also comparatively unnoticed because Mayweather’s then-promoter, Top Rank, had other assets in its portfolio, including De La Hoya himself. Broner, managed by Al Haymon and sublet to Golden Boy Promotions, hasn’t the same luxury of obscurity Mayweather had – and everything one needs to know about Broner’s emotional IQ can be learned by asking “The Problem” if he thinks obscurity and luxury may coexist.

There is worse news for those who would profit by Broner’s ascendency, though, and it is the judgment on imitation passed by this, our postmodern age. If one seeks to be a blatant imitation of another, he’d best do it ironically – à la Hector Camacho Jr. – and even then expect harsh reviews and, more importantly to anyone who’d try such a gambit, diminished returns. Postmodernism, as an aesthetic philosophy, allows junk to be praised so long as it is original but shows little mercy to others’ ideas reworked even carefully or faithfully.

There appears little that is careful or particularly faithful in Broner’s rework of Mayweather’s invention, and so, unless one thinks a talking hairbrush on free social media is the way to a million pay-per viewers, it is time to hope someone discovers originality within Broner by subjecting his prodigious talent to transcendent competition – which Broner, through no fault of his own, will not find at 135 pounds or even 140, if we’re being honest.

Unbeknownst to them, a growing number of people’s future paychecks depend on Broner’s willingness to do something startling, like leap from lightweight to welterweight, right now, while he is in his prime, that fleeting thing.

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

On a bench beside the black metal steps to an elevated ring sits a semitransparent and well-gnawed gumshield with a lemon-yellow frontispiece and several layers of blood and slobber that film its ridges. It balances too perfectly atop a bloodstained handtowel atop a mildewed t-shirt.

“What’s this, Fortino?” says a tall Mexican with a black goatee, prickly but straight, and a gentle handshake.

“Quinteros left it,” says the manager.

“Quinteros?” says the tall Mexican. “It’s not his, is it?”

The manager’s smooth brown face, taupe in the basement’s dim light, unfolds in a smile. “It’s Quinteros’. He left everything – mouthguard, shirt, headgear – and took off.”

“It was his turn, eh?”

“Seth made a little altar on the bench.”

“Pinche Seth.”

*

“Do you think nine pounds is too much?” he asks the older guy sitting next to him on the periwinkle paint of the wooden bench, its ankle-level scars splintered and glowing yellow.

“That’s not so much the way to think about it, I don’t think,” the older guy says, still in his navy sweatshirt from the trip southwards, his white Everlast boots coffee brown on the edges where the outsides of his feet sometimes fold over their treads. “Nine pounds for me would be, what, three-, four-percent difference?”

He hopes the lovely boy doesn’t do the arithmetic and learn how much he weighs, or shame him for lowballing.

“But for me, it’s a much bigger difference?” the younger guy says.

“Isn’t it?”

“I sparred with a guy who was 117 earlier.”

“How’d it go?”

“I felt slow. He felt big.”

“That how much he weighed?” the older guy says, and he looks at the kid’s thick dark hair and delicate features and wants to ask why he puts himself through it. “What’re you at?”

“A hundred this afternoon.”

“Why’re you jumping rope six rounds after your workout?”

“You think I should?”

“I think you should pick up 12 pounds for next year’s Gloves,” the older guy says. “Or lobby that writer guy to lobby for a men’s light flyweight.”

*

“You know Saturday’s my birthday?” the kid says, trotting over to fist bump the gym’s oldest practitioner, a writer nobody at the gym reads but the manager abides because while he never wins trophies for the gym he brings souvenirs from Vegas, and makes fun of himself.

“How old?” the writer says.

“I’ll be ten.”

“Perfect for the 2020 Olympics, I tell him,” says the kid’s dad, who once trained under Joe Souza but is now the age of the writer. “Where are those going to be held?”

The writer shrugs.

“I’ll be ten,” the kid says, and he studies the writer.

“Hey, man,” the writer says, and he pokes Manny Pacquiao’s face on the kid’s black t-shirt. “I already got you your present.”

“I’m having cake, here, Friday,” the kid says.

“He’s lobbying for another t-shirt,” the writer says to the kid’s dad, and both men laugh.

“So much for the surprise party,” the kid’s dad says, and he self-consciously plucks the black cotton twill of his polo shirt off his belly. “Try keeping a secret round here.”

*

“So I told him, ‘Padre, we need a big cooler for beer,’” says a man who walks with a cane, cannot raise either hand above his head, and supervises whenever Fortino goes upstairs to watch gals do roller derby. “Once Padre got us that, we had no trouble getting Special Forces in to protect us.”

“The fog of war, huh?” says a tall Puerto Rican trainer, a handsome barber who does saintly work with kids on weeknights after nine hours of cutting heads till six.

“Not yet, not yet,” says the assistant manager, and he chuckles theatrically. “That was ’65. It wasn’t too bad yet.”

“Hold on, I gotta take this,” the trainer says, and he raises a blackberry to his ear and uh-huhs till lowering the phone and glaring at its face.

“Lady troubles?” the assistant manager says. “Oh man, after the war, I started with the city, this is before SAWS –”

“A mugroso barcode reader,” says the Puerto Rican. “My wife found a sticker on the floormat of the ride last week. It says nothing about nothing, right? Just a barcode.”

“Uh huh,” says the assistant manager. “Uh oh.”

“My wife’s friend, like some forensics master, tells her they make apps that read’em. My wife downloads the stupid app, and it’s for flowers.”

*

“What’s up with southpaw?” says a portly Texan who will start with USAA’s mortgage department in March.

“Just trying it out,” says an 18 year-old, Jesus, whose worried grandmother paid for his move from Santa Paula, Calif., in December. “The left isn’t there, but the right hook, man?”

“Excellent?”

“Excellent!”

“If I could do what you do standing regular –”

“But you can’t,” Jesus says. “So leave it to the ones who can.”

Both laugh.

“I like to consider myself as ambidextrous,” says Jesus.

“You spar southpaw yet?”

“Next week.”

“We’ll see if Life considers you ‘as ambidextrous,’ then.”

*

“I’m proud of you, mija,” says the gym’s oldest trainer to a voluptuous Mexican girl in a shaved head, olive sports bra and black sweatpants. “That’s what you got to do every night here.”

“Thanks, Coach,” she says. “I no getting tired.”

“Because you’re using the big muscles.”

“It felt much more hard.”

“Remember that on the hook, OK,” he says, and he rises from the back steps where his charge sits, a brown roll of flesh above the band of her sweats. “Picture like your hitting the bag with the inside of your left hip, first.”

“I go now?”

“Yes, mija,” he says. “Everything OK with your tía?”

“Más o menos,” she says, and she raises her right hand, thumb over pinky, pinky over thumb. “She feels it.”

The old trainer rises after she’s gone, straightens his black ball cap – “Army Strong” in shiny gold script – slaps a wrinkle off the right thigh of his slate-grey slacks, and raises his right hand.

“Taking off?” calls the manager.

“Have a good night, Fortino.”

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

The opening minute of Saturday’s main event on Showtime, Argentine junior welterweight titlist Lucas Matthysse versus American Mike Dallas, showed such a disparity of speed, the Argentine in black so much slower than the American in silver, one could be forgiven sliding from the edge of his chair to its back – the better for observing 12 rounds of violence. But 86 seconds later Matthysse knocked Dallas inanimate with a right hand, and whatever other thoughts traffic in a cluttered mind got canceled as if they were Dallas’ own cache.

Surely none were what thoughts filled Dallas’ mind immediately before the blue glove on Matthysse’s right fist did, but in case any doubts persist, here is onesuch that happened during Matthysse’s ringwalk: Can the works of South American artist Fernando Botero improve our understanding of South American prizefighter Lucas Mathysse?

In the tears he wept immediately after knocking-out Mike Dallas at 2:26 of round 1, Matthysse betrayed a set of emotions more complicated than what American sports fans usually must decipher. They were not anything like the clichéd tears-of-joy from which millions of Americans will drink Sunday, immediately following the Super Bowl, when any one of 20 or 30 cameras will keep chasing athletes’ countenances till someone on the winning team is found to emote for America, and “put in perspective” for us how profoundly meaningful these 21 weeks of games and thousands of hours of commercials have been.

In Matthysse’s tears was something nearer ambivalence; the act of rendering another man unconscious is cathartic, but if catharses comprised joy alone, we’d call them joyful outbursts and not catharses. Matthysse’s authenticity was particularly telling when set against his interviewer’s callousness and cynicism. Matthysse ingested an amino-acid pill of some kind before his round of work with Dallas, and admitted to washing it down with (yerba) mate – a South American tea made from dried leaves and considered the national drink of Argentina – assuring his interviewer it was the same concoction he took before every fight, failing nary a drug test along the way.

Matthysse’s answer, and the way it disarmed the requisite postfight controversy on which this interviewer now bases his career, such as it is, brought a palpable deflation to what followed, even as what followed was an examination of the human condition that is the very reason a sport brutal and grotesque as ours shows the endurance it does. Imagine what might have come of an inquiry simple as: “What other than victory is making you cry, Lucas?” Or would the minute-long detour such complexity might bring hinder too overtly Showtime’s next promotional skit?

When he is considered at all by American museum-goers, Colombian artist Fernando Botero is treated as a descendent of 20th-century Mexicans – Rivera’s shapes, Kahlo’s colors – with a flair for Warhol’s poster-making digestibility, and a bent for depicting obesity. It is a facile analysis, of course, but it does the trick for persons generally less interested in looking at art than being seen looking at art. Botero, conversely, began by doing something that almost could be called a caricature of what Pablo Picasso saw while standing before Diego Velazquez: “The purpose of my style is to exalt the volumes, not only because that enlarges the area in which I can apply more color, but also because it conveys the sensuality, the exuberance, the profusion of the form I am searching for.”

Botero did it, though, without Picasso’s willingness to exploit others’ gifts for irony – for saying “oh yes, I see so many bulls’ faces hidden in ‘Guernica’!” while meaning something quite the opposite. In his own words, Botero is after sensuality and exuberance, of colored voluptuousness before sexuality, and he discovered that compressing his subjects, making them squatter – though rarely fatter – allowed him to make what Nobel Laureate Mario Vargas Llosa calls Botero’s “sumptuous abundance.”

A South American compressing forms and making exuberance is exactly what happened Saturday. What Matthysse threw at Dallas was a standard enough counter – catch the jab, release the right hand over it – but Matthysse’s power compressed the form and made it something else entirely. There was composition there, as well; it was a more educated move than Matthysse’s detractors, who see wild swings and little head movement, credit him with. A moment after being hit by Dallas’ first double jab, which arrived almost too quickly, Matthysse posited Dallas was not returning his left fist to his chin before throwing the second punch. Matthysse, then, considerably slower of hand than Dallas, did not need to punch with Dallas so much as place his right hand in the space between Dallas’ two jabs. He did that, and Dallas went stiff and landed on his face and stayed there.

In his essay “A Painter of Lost and Angry Pictures” curator David Elliott writes: “If Botero has often been intent on emphasizing the aesthetic attributes of his works, these cannot be isolated from their content which, while avoiding sentimentality or nostalgia, is often intensely emotional.”

And so it is for Matthysse as well. As he showed after rendering Mike Dallas unconscious, Matthysse is not machine-like as his supporters believe. He is, in his way, sumptuous; there is a vulnerability to him, be it in his body art or absence of postfight machismo, that reaches women before it reaches men – or didn’t you hear the pitch of cheers for Matthysse as he made his way to the ring? Matthysse, like his countryman and occasional sparring partner Sergio Martinez, is an entirely more complicated animal than the profitably cardboard figures of obliging American athletes. The difference between a South American like Matthysse and an American like, say, Adrien Broner is the difference between a Botero and a Warhol.

***

Author’s note: Special thanks to Art Services International, whose excellent collection of essays in its catalog “The Baroque World of Fernando Botero” proved helpful.

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

We came to the moment for which we assembled, Saturday, the telling collection of intervals, two predecessors succeeded by the aptly named championship rounds, the young contender, having had the bridge of his nose crushed by the top of the other man’s head, would have to beat back the old champ, making him quit or at least relent enough to bring a satisfyingly definitive conclusion. Instead, his test sheet confidently filled, our prodigy strode to the room’s front and handed it to the proctor, and the proctor nodded sagely, took the crisp leaf from the student, turned, slipped it in the shredder beside his desk, and said: “That’s an A, champ!”

American Mikey Garcia dropped Mexican Orlando Salido four times in the opening four rounds of their Saturday fight for Salido’s WBO featherweight title – tempting, briefly, a line like “Trampler KO-4.” Noticeably, Garcia did not drop Salido again after round 4, though he staggered him a few times, notably in the sixth, after which, at the halfway point of the match, Garcia’s trainer and older brother, Robert, beseeched his charge to knock Salido out before any shenanigans ensued. A couple rounds later, shenanigans ensued when Salido landed a long right hand then brought his head crashing into Garcia’s relocated nose, breaking it. A ringside physician was hastily summoned and convinced noses are not broken in prizefighting, and the match was complicitly waived-off, giving Garcia a technical decision, Salido’s maroon belt and enough exculpation to keep an asterisk out of his biography – even if the young man never protested.

Likely, Mikey Garcia would have passed Salido’s inquisition well enough, but then, likelier still, Sergio Martinez would have made a quite different spectacle from the one he made in his final 90 seconds with Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. in September, no? The pair of minutes that followed Salido’s splintering Garcia’s cartilage, belaboring his breathing for what was to come and at least fraying the edges of Garcia’s composure, held in them a chance to learn everything left to know about Garcia, but instead left aficionados ignorant of Garcia’s capacity for adversity as we were when the night began.

Saturday’s main event also did nothing to help televised boxing’s mounting credibility problem. Without Larry Merchant to check enthusiasms any longer, HBO’s journalistic role has succumbed to its promotional one, and Showtime – whose Al Bernstein has nearly Merchant’s credibility but whose dissent is a negative thing (it is found in what he doesn’t say about a fight or fighter) – has rapturously embraced the role of “in association with” promoting.

This was what Saturday’s co-main brought on HBO, when, instead of forcing guest commentator Andre Ward to say what he doubtlessly noticed with wide eyes – that limited little Gabriel Rosado couldn’t miss Gennady Godzilla Golovkin with right uppercuts, as many as four in a row – viewers were treated to “middleweight Mike Tyson” comparisons, as if Rosado were a fraction of the light middleweight Michael Spinks was a light heavyweight, as if Tyson needed a corner stoppage after 20 1/2 minutes to finish Spinks rather than 91 seconds. Or is that analogy too much? It is too much, alas, and perhaps less appropriate than Shakespeare, so we’ll have some:

“As on the finger of a thronèd queen
The basest jewel will be well esteemed,
So are those errors that in thee are seen
To truths translated and for true things deemed.”

It is a sense that now overcomes viewers of the showcase events that have in the past composed an unseemly number of HBO matches: Regardless of what the a-side guy does, it will be celebrated. When Mikey Garcia (or Floyd Mayweather) retreats to the ropes, lands a potshot, clinches, and begins canvassing the canvas for a referee, it is at best evidence of the opponent’s inability to get anything done, and at worst a slightly boring but tolerable bit of strategizing by a master boxer. Which is fine, probably, so long as violent endings or accomplished opponents are en route.

But as Golovkin nears his 31st birthday, the best name on his resume remains Kassim Ouma, 2-5 in the 4 1/2 years before Golovkin got him; and while Garcia was probably going to beat Salido comfortably and possibly going to stop him, well. There was nothing to celebrate Saturday, and it does future celebrations no favors to force a celebration over what proved unsatisfying. These things need to happen organically, lest we get cases like Andre Berto or Victor Ortiz or James Kirkland, which seem, somehow, to check fans’ future enthusiasm fractionally much as they multiply their inevitable discontent.

Mikey Garcia is absolutely one of boxing’s best prospective attractions, and Golovkin is almost as likely the beast he appears in the gyms of Big Bear, Calif. But until Garcia is made uncomfortable by an opponent, or allowed, as the case may be, to continue with an opponent whose foul tactics render him uncomfortable, should anyone be sure? And while Golovkin probably is the robotic tenderizer of men’s flesh he appeared while walloping a 154-pounder with five losses – a man, it may be helpful to remember, whom Alfredo Angulo finished in less than a third of Golovkin’s time, at junior middleweight – must the coronation commence already, because it behooves ratings at boxing’s flagship network to manufacture and market new faces to viewers?

No and no – those are the answers, but since no one likes a scold, here’s a better note: Saturday’s three-fight card from New York was an excellent matchmaking start to HBO’s 2013, bereft of what cynicism we’ve seen from the network in bygone days; the main event featured two fighters from one promoter, yes, but Salido was universally believed a stern test for Garcia and proved to be, or would have. Neither fighter in the co-main belonged to the main-event’s promoter, and that too was excellent. There is quality control afoot at HBO, and since the on-air talent is going to sell instead of report to viewers whatever happens in front of them, this is something welcome as it is overdue.

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

The June day Manny Pacquiao lost to Timothy Bradley began with a media breakfast in the airy, open interior of Wolfgang Puck Bar and Grill at MGM Grand, where the company generally outpaces the fare and certainly did that morning. Most of the writers you know were there, along with Harold Lederman and other HBO employees. All were gathered to meet a touted middleweight from Kazakhstan scheduled to fight a Russian, Dmitry Pirog, returning from a banishment he gained in 2010 by unmanning Danny “Golden Child” Jacobs.

Gennady Golovkin’s English that morning was limited mainly to “nice” and “happy” and a disarming smile he directed at his trainer, Abel Sanchez, who said several times his charge brought historic gifts of power and class. And experienced, serious writers, elders of the craft, did not joke about Golovkin’s bemusing interview either, serious as they were about what sources said about him.

Saturday Golovkin will make his second appearance on HBO, and his fifth defense of the WBA’s middleweight belt, against Philadelphia junior middleweight Gabriel Rosado, on a card they share with Mikey Garcia and Orlando Salido who will make a battle for the WBO featherweight title that makes even xerostomic curmudgeons salivate. Of the four fighters, Golovkin must win in a surprisingly spectacular way, which will be tricky because expectations of him are quite high. There’ll be no fooling aficionados this time, in other words, no trotting-out a short-notice Pole with an unpronounceable first name like Grzegorz Proksa then feigning shock or delight when Golovkin brings ruin to a very difficult opponent you’d never heard of.

Aficionados have heard of Gabriel Rosado, have seen him fight, and know he was knocked sideways by Alfredo Angulo 3 1/2 years ago at 154 pounds. Rosado benefits from geography, excellent promotion and doing the right thing, challenging for a middleweight title at 160 pounds, but none of those convinces anyone worth convincing he is more than a showcase opponent for Golovkin.

Golovkin is apparently boxing’s new most-avoided fighter, which is another way of saying his talent in the ring is disproportionate to his talent in the box office. Other fighters who wore this moniker – Antonio Margarito and Paul Williams – proved much less fearsome once they found a way to sell tickets, or in Williams’ case, HBO purses. Golovkin is rather friendly if not yet eloquent, but unlike Latino fighters about which the same can be said, Golovkin suffers a want of Kazakhstani journalists and ticket-buying enclaves; he may soon win fans with merit, but he is unlikely to do so with ethnic interest, or else his HBO debut in September would have been in New York, NY – like Saturday’s card – not Verona, NY.

Golovkin has HBO’s interest, though, and that is often more lucrative than interesting boxing fans. Golovkin’s debut on the network featured at times embarrassingly effusive praise from the usual suspects, abetted by fans’ general ignorance of who Proksa was. There will be no like abetment with Rosado, who has fought on NBC Sports Network, and whose limitations are well catalogued. That is why Golovkin must do better than look good, win an eventual stoppage or hope HBO’s promotional machinery can overwhelm viewers; Golovkin must do something that startles a universal consensus into declaring whoever wins Martinez-Chavez II must face him next.

Mikey Garcia will be under less performance pressure Saturday, if by performance pressure one means a need to be entertaining, not merely victorious. Garcia can afford to follow an adage-cum-cliché that goes “Win tonight, look good next time” because there is no known way to beat Orlando Salido without getting hit by him. Garcia, invincible looking till his last performance, has defense that is not impregnable and speed that is not invisible and can be both hit and defended. But that’s about the most that can be done with him, and one is made wretched by its doing. Salido can be hit, he is especially vulnerable to left hooks as he throws them, but he also tosses a blindman’s overhand right developed, in his career’s 53 prizefights, to punish the whimsy of fellow Latinos ether lazy to bring their jabs home or premature to cock their hooks.

The promotional idea Saturday is to test Garcia and get him a first world title. Garcia is ready; he may even have been ready more than two years ago when he undid Cornelius Lock at Laredo Energy Arena in an IBF featherweight eliminator. He will be tested in a new and thorough way by Salido, unless Salido’s two fights with Juan Manuel Lopez, and rigorous schedule, have aged him more than expected, which is possible. Promoter Top Rank would not have made this match with Salido – one of its signature trial horses – if it did not think Garcia was ready, but how much of that readiness is attributable to Garcia’s prowess and how much to Salido’s reduction remains to be seen.

Salido knows his role, or at least fights like a man who suspects his role and resents it. Every gainfully employed trial horse believes he can win; Salido is an uncommon case of one who does win, or at least scares the hell out of what thoroughbreds he races. Salido does a lot of things wrong, like touch his gloves before attacks, but Garcia will find striking Salido is the easiest part of fighting him. What happens when Salido soldiers through those strikes to blast Garcia with shots of his own will read for us Garcia’s fortune.

Saturday Golovkin will probably make the more spectacular fight, he has the opponent for it, but if Garcia is able to stop Salido, he will have redoubled aficionados’ belief in his potential in a way Golovkin’s opponent will almost certainly forbid the Kazakhstani from doing.

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

“The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror.” – Edmund Burke, “A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Part Two,” 1757

It is the horror that concerns me. Horror, after all, is what the 18th-century Irishman uniquely identified – an ingredient of astonishment that might otherwise escape us. Horror is what I unknowingly wished to get at the morning after Argentine Sergio Martinez nearly succumbed to his 12th-round sacking by Mexican Julio Cesar Chavez Jr., Sept. 15 at University of Nevada, Las Vegas’ Thomas & Mack Center: “a burst of something so chemically pure the body hates it, an intensity unendurable for more than a few seconds.”

That was the sensation I experienced in the final 90 seconds, or at least the moment of those seconds that started when Martinez, the world’s middleweight champion, collapsed between the ropes, straightened himself, then got pounded rightwards to the mat. There was a sensation of horror, a sensation that something torturous was afoot, and that its consequences would resonate. Without a rooting interest per se (it was my seventh Chavez fight, having first interviewed him in the concourse of America West Arena seven years before; it was my first Martinez fight, having first enjoyed a conversation with him in July, one that treated, in part, Martinez’s delight with John Kennedy Toole’s novel “A Confederacy of Dunces” and its relish of absurdity), I was decidedly more horrified by Chavez’s felling Martinez midway through their final round than any of the 300 flush blows with which Martinez’s black leather striped Chavez’s face and body.

Chavez was not the match’s thinker, not by any stretch, and perhaps that’s why. Throughout, Chavez concerned himself only with striking or blocking while trusting pedigree to guide him through a geometry of the ring others need years to master but Chavez absorbed as a boy spying on his dominant father; Chavez was not setting traps, disproving theories or making inquiries of any Martinez attribute save weakness. Martinez, meanwhile, analyzed every set of Chavez stimuli at every moment, checking it against its immediate predecessor and its forming template, a means of combat more enervating for a person of Chavez’s temperament than even the Argentine’s relentlessly pumping legs and bobbing, uncovered chin would be for someone of Chavez’s flaccid conditioning.

There were several things that happened in round 10, the gravity of whose consequences went at first unnoticed: An accidental banging of heads to which Chavez reacted theatrically and Martinez more subtlety, and when Chavez pushed the back of Martinez’s neck till he dropped him on all fours. I recorded both in my notes but didn’t assign either sufficient import. The headbutt opened a gash inside Martinez’s scalp line, and if it did that, it dazed him, too, setting his magnificent brain misfiring. But the way Martinez had to lift himself from the mat was more significant still: It revealed his fatigue.

There is something naturally stressful about being chased by a larger man, especially one intellectually incapable of dissuasion or discouragement, but each movement Martinez’s legs made till that instant they’d made through training camp, and their fatigue was a slow-mounting thing. Rising from his knees, though, put Martinez’s legs in a unique enough position to shock him with how much strength had fled, and his jaw dropped in a large O that remained through the explosive finish.

“But pain is always inflicted by a power in some way superior, because we never submit to pain willingly. So that strength, violence, pain, and terror, are ideas that rush in upon the mind together.”

Here again Burke instructs us. However devastating Martinez’s blows to Chavez’s head were, no matter their longterm consequences, Chavez’s punches were more dramatic to behold, because they more evidently pained the smaller man, causing a submission Martinez did not expect, did not in any conscious way allow for – more macho than his rivals know – but, in empathy, must have imagined. There was an imposition of will in the final round, when Chavez succeeded, mostly, in brutalizing a man 15 or so pounds smaller, and it followed the moment Martinez came off his stool in misplaced triumph, gloves raised as if the ordeal were over, and Chavez lumbered off his stool like a man not even keeping a tally of lashes, rounds or punches – a tormentor in his own timezone, one devoid of urgency, a man who a round earlier had to silence his ferocious father’s barking from behind by saying over his left shoulder, “ya, ya, ya (enough, enough, enough).” For paternal prodding and its impatience with spectacle, actually, were all that agitated Chavez the whole evening.

“Beauty in distress is much the most affecting beauty.”

In Part Three of his classical treatment of aesthetics, Burke explored the linguistic ploy every culture uses of making the beautiful diminutive and the ugly large. Chavez, in the moment of the 12th round he spun Martinez for a second time to his knees and elbows on the mat, remains ogre-like in my mind, careless, insatiable, enormous, ugly. Martinez, I see, reduced to tininess, preciousness – enfeebled and distressed. He would swell to normal size a half minute later, with the paddled apron’s signal of 10 seconds, but those moments of Martinez’s diminishment and fragility hold within them, for me, the door to another chamber of prizefighting’s palatial appeal.

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

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

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The moment Mexican Juan Manuel Marquez took Filipino Manny Pacquiao’s consciousness with a right cross on Dec. 8, chemistry was everywhere, and that won’t be forgotten. Arguments that it wasn’t, explanations that rely on genetics or diets or work ethics, begin their analyses, necessarily, in recent training camps – like a biography whose first page treats this morning’s breakfast.

To see little Juan Manuel Marquez, aged 36, running in the green mountains of Mexico, jerking volcanic rocks overhead and imbibing his own amber urine before a “welterweight” match with Floyd Mayweather in 2009 allowed no doubt of Marquez’s dedication, however much his physique resembled cinnamon candlewax more than sandstone. Whence Marquez’s enhanced build, at age 39, then: new genes? a switch from beef to chickpeas? better form on the military press? The change is a chemical one. That is not the indictment of Marquez’s character it may appear; many disinterested observers believe whatever science Marquez employed in his fourth fight with Pacquiao was science employed against Marquez in at least their last three. If a natural athlete fought a chemically enhanced one on even terms then switched to a regimen of chemicals, in other words, KO-6 is exactly the result oddsmakers might predict.

A week later, Donaire unveiled in Houston, conversely, the sort of long body athletes wore a generation ago. Donaire was finely conditioned, fit, and his natural reflexes were sensational, but he did not have what bodybuilders call vascularity – crinkled veins protruding in many places but most tellingly along the center of the biceps.

How much sports fans care about the PED debate, though, is best measured by an inverse of their enthusiasm for the NFL, in which 300-pound players have improved their presence 53,200-percent since 1970.

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The moment Mexican Juan Manuel Marquez took Filipino Manny Pacquiao’s consciousness with a right cross on Dec. 8, Marquez made a generation of Mexican fans hopeful again, after it’d watched its best figures undone by Pacquiao, an offensive force whose historic ferocity was belied by its happy manifestation – smiles en route to the ring, jaunty bounces during attack, gloves thrust encouragingly above the head whenever any opponent scored him.

Marquez did to Pacquiao what no one else was able: Make him ignore trainer Freddie Roach. Once Marquez felled him with that sweeping right hand in round 3, he had Pacquiao in a place of carelessness, mindlessness even, where, so long as Marquez could withstand what rage he ignited, Pacquiao was bound to make mistakes both men knew he made bounding in, mistakes Roach was powerless to forbid. Even after Pacquiao’s best round, the fifth, Roach portentously, uncharacteristically, shouted over the chaotic din of his charge’s corner: “Manny, move your head!” If instead Roach had shouted on his way up the stairs in the last second of the sixth “Juan, my guy doesn’t move his head,” it could have been no clearer to Marquez, a predator already crooking his right elbow at just the angle to stick a middle knuckle square on Pacquiao’s face.

Donaire and Arce, six days later, smiled and laughed and hugged one another through their weighin. Ethnic pedigrees assured the folks gathered before a black-canvas backdrop at PlazAmericas Mall Saturday’s fight would be violent, but there was so little contempt to display, or hide, it was one more reminder how different was the rivalry at green-and-gold MGM Grand the week before.

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The moment Mexican Juan Manuel Marquez took Filipino Manny Pacquiao’s consciousness with a right cross on Dec. 8 was a reminder, too, that Marquez traveled to the Philippines after their second fight to interrupt those islands’ celebration of their hero’s triumph and plead with Pacquiao for a rubber match. When that match did not come, Marquez made 2009’s fight of the year against Juan Diaz in Houston’s Toyota Center.

That was a reminder of the unfriendly terrain Marquez trod to become his country’s most celebrated prizefighter, what obscurity the generation’s greatest counterpuncher endured while his fellow countrymen, Erik Morales and Marco Antonio Barrera, made their country’s most famous trilogy. The way Marquez solved Pacquiao all by himself from the seat of his white and red-striped trunks in 2004, frantically querying a database of openings and counters for some arrangement resembling the Filipino’s unorthodox attack enough to let the experimentation begin, experimentation that would evolve from hooking at the shoulder to ducking the left cross to skipping out of range to countering, finally – experimentation Marquez performed alone because, while Nacho Beristain could tell him what punch to throw and why, he could not tell Marquez when to throw it because at the championship level boxing moves too fast, with consequences too wicked, to trust any perception but one’s own.

After he retired Arce a week after Marquez left aficionados wondering if Pacquiao would fight another day, Donaire did what he could to remind folks he’d brought Filipinos solace. He had, after all, stretched a Mexican. But that Mexican was not Marquez, and he was not Pacquiao.

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The moment Mexican Juan Manuel Marquez took Filipino Manny Pacquiao’s consciousness with a right cross on Dec. 8, Marquez brought vindication to himself, of course, but also to Mexican and Mexican-American fathers in the U.S. who told their kids, no matter the success of Pacquiao’s southpaw attack or the celebrity of Mayweather’s low lead hand, Marquez’s was the form they must emulate. He was not fast as those other guys, just as they weren’t, but he was perfect. His quiet mastery of a grim craft held within it, too, insights about their immigrant culture, just as what spite he showed men he combated imparted forgotten details about the conquest of New Spain.

This will be the year Nonito Donaire is remembered for escaping the long shadow of Manny Pacquiao, both for what Donaire did, and for the way Marquez shortened that shadow in Las Vegas.

For hosting our sport’s best fight and best fighter, in two different cities, the week that began Dec. 8 was 2012’s most excellent.

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

The moment Mexican Juan Manuel Marquez took Filipino Manny Pacquiao’s consciousness with a right cross on Dec. 8 brought a series of instants affecting as can be experienced in professional sport. One of those instants brought a deep, royal blue sense of Marquez’s vindication, reminiscent in its way of Antonio Margarito’s victory over Miguel Cotto at MGM Grand in 2008. Reminiscent, conjecture says, in a few ways.

There was a difference between the two moments, though, a difference uncaptured by television, that boasting, refracting medium that lies to congregants flatteringly enough they later find no irony in remanding events’ eyewitnesses to tapes of what television told them to see. Television, that extraordinary phenomenon, continues to affect boxing more than it covers it.

The difference between Marquez and Margarito lay in their reactions. Margarito, who had longer to process Cotto’s demise, was euphoric, dropping to his knees, blessing himself, spinning joyfully in his cornermen’s arms. Marquez was not surprised as anyone else. He’d the benefit of feeling the punch on his right knuckle, of course, but it was not entirely that. He was not containing a euphoria as he paced with his black gloves on the red waistband of his trunks, inching nearer Pacquiao to admire what he’d done, or when he ran across the ring – to a neutral corner, mind you – and mounted a turnbuckle to savor his vindication; he was acting out a conqueror’s script.

What happened on television was a single camera that showed Pacquiao regaining consciousness sooner than what happened at ringside, where split screens above the ring showed Marquez fixated on a proper celebration, ensuring his white Rexona sponsor’s cap was straightened, while Pacquiao’s wife sobbed, silently screamed and tried to swim to her facedown husband, promoter Bob Arum consoling her while looking inconsolable. It happened much slower at ringside; there was no one shouting about keystones or anticipating fifth fights: there was confusion marinated in fright, tempered by a need to record what transpired.

But memory is a funny thing, and what I remember best from those moments is Marquez’s unflinching seizure of them, while the Filipino journalist on my right worried Pacquiao might never stir. It was a confirmation of this: Were Marquez offered a choice in the last moment of the sixth round, told if he threw that right hand it might kill Pacquiao but if he didn’t he might lose another close decision, Marquez would throw the punch. Whatever other prizefighters tell you about themselves during promotions, know this: A willingness to kill in the ring makes Marquez unique.

Six days later in Houston, the mood was much lighter. It was the weighin for an inconsequential coronation: a crowning of Filipino Nonito Donaire as 2012’s fighter of the year, and a crowning payday for Mexican Jorge Arce. Donaire was a safer athlete to cover than Marquez.

Arce did some chemical experimentation in camp to make his upper body more muscular, in the laboratory of Marquez’s own scientist, but at worse, one suspected, the enhanced physique might extend Arce’s consciousness a round. The left hook Donaire doused Arce’s spirit with at Toyota Center was comparatively merciful. Arce went down, but there was little fright, as one sensed Donaire would drop on his knees and administer CPR if his friend were in genuine peril.

Somehow, strangely, illogically, knowing a man rendered another unconscious in an act of temporarily suspended affection, as Donaire did Arce, made it feel safer than what congealed indifference Marquez showed Pacquiao’s plight in Las Vegas.

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The moment Mexican Juan Manuel Marquez took Filipino Manny Pacquiao’s consciousness with a right cross on Dec. 8 made their tetralogy a unique event in boxing history. In its asymmetry – Pacquiao dropped Marquez five times but will be remembered as the rivalry’s collapsed form on the blue mat – and its excellence, it entered our sport’s annals as something that may be approached or someday bettered but never matched: a rivalry whose first three fights were excellent enough to merit a fourth but inferior to the fourth.

What happened in the seven days that began Dec. 8th was unique and excellent, too, in this way: The fight of the year and the fighter of the year happened in a week together but 1,500 miles apart. Marquez-Pacquiao IV will be remembered as 2012’s best fight because of its superior composition of three elements, violence and craft and consequence – the winner was covered in his own blood when he made his opponent sleep with the same counter right hand he landed the round before, spinning Pacquiao sideways in the fifth, and with that right hand in round 6 Marquez brought the conclusion of an era.

Nonito Donaire will be declared 2012’s best prizefighter because of a superior composition of these three elements: Activity, craft and consequence. Donaire fought twice as often as his peers, and he fought actual opponents in actual weight classes, gaming none of them with the scale, and by subjecting himself to VADA testing he put the lie to most athletes’ claims and exerted pressure on everyone including his own team.

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The moment Mexican Juan Manuel Marquez took Filipino Manny Pacquiao’s consciousness with a right cross on Dec. 8, Marquez had been the slower man in the fourth fight as he’d been in the first and second and third. He was able to offset Pacquiao’s unique attack with “inteligencia” – a word Marquez uttered in every interview he conducted after their second fight before their third after their third and before their fourth.

Marquez and his trainer Nacho Beristain welcomed the more conventional Pacquiao they saw in fight three; so long as Pacquiao’s punches came from familiar angles, no matter their speed or forcefulness, Marquez and Beristain did not fear them for the same reason a major league hitter does not fear a 120-mph fastball twice thrown over the plate at belt level. One doesn’t get in the major leagues without being able to hit a fastball, no matter its velocity, and one doesn’t get out of a Mexico City gym without being able to sustain any punch he sees coming.

The scariest moment of Dec. 8, then, was not the Pacquiao left hand that knocked Marquez onto the knuckles of his left glove but instead the crazily executed, left-foot-off-the-mat, right-hand chop Pacquiao landed a few seconds after he put Marquez on the canvas. That was the punch that stiffened Marquez’s right leg and sent him in frantic retreat till the ropes’ touching his back made him swing at Pacquiao savagely because that is what Marquez does when cornered.

After the fight there was an odd little moment when Marquez and Beristain, no sore winners they, alternately led the MGM Grand media center in a rendition of “Happy Birthday” for Bob Arum and a heartfelt hug for the elderly promoter and rival whom Beristain flatly accused of ruining the sport while they shared a Mandalay Bay dais after Pacquiao-Marquez II in 2008.

Arum’s appearance, six days later, at a Houston mall, where he briefly posed for pictures with Donaire and Arce, was perfunctory – like everyone else’s.

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Editor’s note: Part 2 will be posted Wednesday.

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

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

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The night American Timothy Bradley decisioned Manny Pacquiao to become only the second man to beat the Filipino in 13 years, Bradley offered a review of Pacquiao’s recent stamina needs and a preview, truthfully, of what would have befallen him against Marquez had Pacquiao remained conscious after the sixth round of their fourth match. Pacquiao’d deteriorated steadily, not greatly, since stopping Miguel Cotto at the end of 2009, and while Bradley, a junior welterweight champion, did not do well as expected in his career’s second fight at 147 pounds, he was not imperiled by the first three or four punches in any combination Pacquiao threw. Only in the congressman’s maniacal and red-gloved flurries, regressions as well to an earlier form, did Bradley sometimes wither.

Accustomed as they were to Pacquiao’s stunning men considerably larger, consenting ringside observers missed in November what poor footwork accompanied Pacquiao’s fatigue against Marquez – how many more steps he took to make late rounds close – and did not notice, subsequently, how few of Pacquiao’s punches, acrobatic things thrown by a man overshooting his target in a wraparound compromise between power and agility, affected Bradley, once felled in the opening round of a 140-pound title defense.

Next Saturday all the hallmarks of Chavez Jr.’s character deficiencies were on display when, sluggish and cramped from acute weightloss before his middleweight title match with Lee, Junior played punchingbag to the light-hitting Irishman till regaining his mobility in round 3, a mobility Sergio Martinez would not let him find till the 34th minute of their middleweight championship match three months later.

That Chavez Jr. wanted character was unknown to no one. That Chavez Jr. moved from mascot to contender was unsurprising to no one. Anyone later jolted by footage of Chavez’s unconventional roadwork, in pink, or uncovered choice of supplements, in green, was not previously attentive to Chavez, and was not to blame for that choice either.

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The night American Timothy Bradley decisioned Manny Pacquiao to become only the second man to beat the Filipino in 13 years, both men said decent things about the other afterwards. Whatever their differences of opinion about the judges’ verdict, Bradley was appreciative of the opportunity Pacquiao afforded him and Pacquiao was unbothered by the honest if not particularly ferocious match Bradley gave him – along with another payday, four parts reward for each part risk. Pacquiao did not stomp from the ring to conduct a naked interview in his dressing room the way Marquez did after their third fight, he did not call for an investigation, he did not ask his promoter to petition local politicians or pester them haplessly about the outcome. (He didn’t need to.) Instead Pacquiao smiled gently, took questions generously and said pleasant things about his host city in a way that reminded some media-center habitués how differently, sheepishly, he’d behaved after his official victory over Marquez in November.

Writing a report for the AP is a feat of organization more than creativity: 250 words five minutes after the close, 500 words 10 minutes after that, 700-800 words within a half hour of the event’s conclusion. The very promotional outfit that joined a loud chorus of those who’d like to know what three credentialed idiots scored Bradley-Pacquiao for the winner, Saturday at ringside, then passed my name to an AP editor on Tuesday – in case anyone wonders why writers have a preference for Top Rank.

Chavez-Lee was nothing historic, but it led to 2012’s most suspenseful 90 seconds, 89 days and 11 rounds later.

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The night American Timothy Bradley decisioned Manny Pacquiao to become only the second man to beat the Filipino in 13 years tore from our discourse its diaphanous veil of civility. Emboldened by the very consensus they rabidly sought, persons gathered ostensibly for a sporting event turned into boisterous misanthropes, people who got along with no one who had not seen things exactly as they did. Businesses, too, said someone had to be sacrificed to ensure the drawing power of boxing’s best prizefighter was not lost, and that someone was Timothy Bradley. If Bradley and his people did not realize it at the moment, they surely won a fair inkling when the following week’s replay was accompanied by a talkshow feature called “The Smoking Gun” that introduced viewers to the delightful spectacle of a televised fight sans vocal track, while proving none of its conspiratorial implications.

What Chavez showed shortly after that spectacle was chin and a willingness to prove it against the onslaught of a lesser puncher’s blows. It was, again, a preview: Chavez for all his want of character would not hesitate to rise from his stool after 11 hopeless rounds in which he was struck by more than 300 of the world middleweight champion’s punches. He was a spoiled brat and a flake, in June as in September, but not a punk.

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The night American Timothy Bradley decisioned Manny Pacquiao to become only the second man to beat the Filipino in 13 years was the last time Bradley fought in 2012. Pacquiao would forsake the rematch Bradley promised him because, again, everyone knew he’d won, and choose instead a higher-paying match with a nemesis that put him on ice.

Chavez fought Lee as no one in Kronk’s yellow and red accoutrement had, gladly conceding skill and reflex to the Irishman if it meant a chance to hit often as he was hit-by. Lee did not fight again in 2012, and instead, four months later, helped bury Manny Steward, a man who in their time together was much more than a trainer crushed by what happened in Sun Bowl Stadium.

From the result of Bradley-Pacquiao to its subsequent fallout and what charms El Paso held as host of Chavez-Lee, I remember the week that began the night of June 9 as 2012’s most interesting.

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

The night American Timothy Bradley decisioned Manny Pacquiao to become only the second man to beat the Filipino in 13 years concluded a week of diminished electricity at MGM Grand, one with considerably less voltage in Las Vegas than previous Pacquiao fight weeks. Bradley fans didn’t travel from Palm Springs, Calif., or if they did composed such a small band their presence was less noticeable in Nevada than Michigan 16 months before. The disappointment of another Pacquiao fight that didn’t include Mayweather, this one a month after another Mayweather fight that didn’t include Pacquiao, and a malaise born of testing requests and accusations and midnight conference calls, draped itself soggily over a fight no one requested.

The reevaluation of Pacquiao’s two-year run had yet to begin, too many and too much invested in calling Pacquiao undiminished, but may examine someday the explanatory narratives of four fights – “Calf cramps”; “Marquez ever a stylistic problem”; “Everyone knows he beat Bradley”; “Lucky punch in a fight he was winning” – and see them for what they are: crestfallen pitches in lieu of sober analyses.

What startled in the week that began with Pacquiao’s loss to Bradley on June 9 was a public need for consensus, insecure as it was intense. No doubt was brooked. When a search for conspiracy uncovered nothing – calculus itself couldn’t conduct three crooked judges disagreeing on six rounds of a championship fight they meant to fix for an unpopular underdog – the volume got raised: Those with dissenting tallies for Bradley-Pacquiao probably never watched a fight in their lives! Except that what three credentialed media sat ringside and joined two official judges in scoring the fight for Bradley had been ringside for at least 1,000 fights between us.

Then it was time to ignore the result. Postfight promises of an immediate rematch, the timeworn remedy for any championship lost in controversy, were undone by the following Thursday in hot, dusty El Paso: Even Bradley knew he lost, and so why rematch?

Two days later Mexican Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. beat up Irish Andy Lee in Sun Bowl Stadium, and a September match with Sergio Martinez got announced. El Paso surprised and impressed its visitors.

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The night American Timothy Bradley decisioned Manny Pacquiao to become only the second man to beat the Filipino in 13 years, there was reflexive disbelief in the MGM Grand media center afterwards, disbelief that fed on itself and colored its reporting. Maybe Pacquiao did lose to Juan Manuel Marquez in November, the concessions went, but if that decision was Pacquiao’s and the congressman looked better tonight, why, this was a robbery.

Bradley, in a black hat with teal lettering, afterwards took questions from a wheelchair, one or both feet and ankles rendering him gimpy early and late in a fight whose championship rounds he won officially 5-1. It was a point lost on most, distractedly searching as they were by then for any unobvious explanation, that Bradley, hobbled by bad feet and ankles, had not merely survived a 15-minute onslaught from the world’s best prizefighter but unanimously beaten him in their final three minutes together.

Weeks before, El Paso, a west Texas city that tried to lure tourists with museums instead of golf courses, was declared too dangerous by an operator in Austin to host a prizefight with alcohol vending so near Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua. There were snipers on the roof at University of Texas El Paso’s football stadium when Chavez Jr. made his ringwalk, after Mayor John Cook sang the national anthem.

The Associated Press did not have a boxing writer in the vicinity. I wrote the Chavez-Lee story for them, with lots of help from a local crime reporter on hand to cover sightings of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera’s familiars or misbehaving soldiers. There was none of either, and our crime reporter instead collected vulgar and masculine quotes from Julio Cesar Chavez Sr. about his son’s next opponent, quotes the AP did not use.

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The night American Timothy Bradley decisioned Manny Pacquiao to become only the second man to beat the Filipino in 13 years, Bradley was a 28 year-old prizefighter with a record of 29-0, a winner with a spectacular obsidian physique who beat every man he was matched against, occasionally rising from the blue mat to do it. He was an excellent ambassador for the sport, politely asserting he did not feel he robbed Pacquiao or was party to a robbery of Pacquiao, and in so doing committed a sin as yet unpardonable to most: He did not declare Pacquiao the match’s victor and apologize in behalf of the judges.

A fight, the winner of whose rounds three professional scorers did not agree about 50 percent of the time, was declared the clearest victory, for its official loser, by folks universally quick to cite a conclusion reached by the groupthinking employees of a cable network whose fortunes rose and fell with what revenue Pacquiao could generate in a match against Mayweather. For those previously inexperienced with it, the onslaught of drunken outrage that happened across the internet, multiples larger than anything expressed by writers at ringside, was jarring – herd animals risen on their hind legs and hoarse with boasts of objectivity.

El Paso, with a free art museum empty of visitors but full of masterworks – Canaletto, Ribera, Murillo, Zuburan and Van Dyck – was such a pleasant and quiet departure from what Las Vegas had been, underpromising and overdelivering in a manner the Strip could never understand, that answering what few polite emails floated like lovely debris atop a flood of digital spite was an apropos way to pass time in the comfortable lobby of Double Tree El Paso Downtown.

In the opening round of his fight with Chavez Jr. at Sun Bowl that Saturday, Irishman Andy Lee outboxed the Mexican so very easily, following the late Manny Steward’s blueprint so exactly, it was indeed a surprise to see Chavez, who in a preview of his September match with Sergio Martinez did not land a meaningful punch in four minutes, suddenly taunt Lee, plow through his punches, and arrogantly stalk him.

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Editor’s note: Part 2 will be posted Wednesday.

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

HOUSTON – Three miles southwest of Toyota Center, where junior featherweight world champion Nonito Donaire took Mexican Jorge Arce’s consciousness with a third-round left hook Saturday, there stands a complex of interesting buildings that collectively house the works of the Menil Collection, a free-admission museum comprising the lifetimes’ worth of collecting done by John and Dominique de Menil. The works are modern or tribal, and the main building itself, a masterpiece by Italian architect Renzo Piano, treats natural light like liquid poured gently from above, not wind for blocking.

What is most gratifying about the Menil Collection is its continuity. Nearby stands this city’s more famous collection – Museum of Fine Arts, Houston – an enormous labyrinth of periods and painters complemented by a wonderful sculpture garden, but a collection that, when contrasted with what the De Menils did, shows itself a product of committee collecting, board approvals and consensus. It lacks, that is, private collectors’ blessed tyrannies of vision. We return to this below.

But first “Filipino Flash” Nonito Donaire. He met informed expectations, Saturday, earning his fourth title defense of 2012, fighting at roughly twice the rate of what other nine prizefighters compose Chuck Giampa’s List, and making a sturdy case for himself as fighter of the year. Donaire, though, as yet inspires few strong feelings. He is exceptionally good at what he does, and now does an important thing by voluntarily subjecting himself to year-round PED testing, and he is a gracious ambassador for our sport, and he provided the Philippines a wee bit of solace by knocking out a Mexican a week after a Mexican disconnected Manny Pacquiao from his senses, but to write more than that is trying too hard.

Because victories come so easily to Donaire, aficionados wonder at his authenticity. But he continues to make deposits of goodwill in an escrow account for the day when a competitive challenger – an Abner Mares or Guillermo Rigondeaux – roughs him up and makes him climb off the mat. On that day, when aficionados can be sure he is more than a product of great matchmaking, there will be a flood of good things written and said about the run he’s had since driving Vic Darchinyan to Judah Street in 2007.

Darchinyan’s name, actually, was in the air last week, as it was what kept folks from climbing aboard the Nonito train and bringing it in full to Houston Station. After the way Darchinyan outclassed a 29-year-old Arce almost four years ago, it was hard to take Arce seriously as an opponent for one of the world’s five best prizefighters at the end of 2012. But good for Arce anyway, earning a last paycheck in the nearest way our sport comes to a pension plan. Arce retired immediately after Donaire knocked him flat, and let us hope retired is how Arce remains.

That’s a doubtful proposition. Arce cited a promise to his children, which means that in 18 months, when he’s bored with life and a calendar that is blank for the next 45 or so years, he might just go hang out at the gym and bring one of his children along. A week of that, and a fight on televisión in Los Mochis, and that child will invariably say, “Dad, why don’t you fight any more?” Promise revoked, Arce will return in a new weight class with a new trainer and a new focus and determination and freshness and strength and whatever the Spanish word is for “cliché,” and unpleasant spectacles will ensue.

In the meantime, we owe him a debt of gratitude for being entertaining without being boorish, for laughing at his own special effects – black cowboy hat, red lollipop, dancing horse – and for somehow finding a way to make a body that does not look at all fat at 150 pounds shrink, for an hour or two, into one that weighs 108 or 112 or 115 or 118 or 122. Arce won world titles in each of those five divisions.

His younger brother Francisco, not as talented but just as desirous of blood, fought in Phoenix 7 1/2 years ago, and Arce was there to show support, and almost no one knew it. Even dressed in black jeans, Arce, who was then between flyweight bloodlettings with Hussein Hussein, looked to be about five weight classes above 112 pounds, and not puffy at all. No one was sure it was him till his craggy front teeth pushed out a smile and it could be no one but “El Travieso (The Naughty One)” – a born showman at the precipice of celebrity. Twenty-one months later Cristian Mijares, a fellow Mexican, undressed Arce in San Antonio, and Arce’s decline was begun. Bless Arce, though, for being engaging and inventive enough still to finagle himself on an HBO main event 5 1/2 years later.

HBO is good a place as any to end this. Saturday night it bade farewell to Larry Merchant, its masterful commentator and voice of reason. Merchant has offered a good meter for at least a decade: With few exceptions, a boxing fan’s intelligence, maturity and sobriety can be measured in proportion to his appreciation for Merchant. The kids and circus barkers never did like Larry much; he didn’t go in for their fashion-conscious hype (a redundancy, that). Because he came out of the written word, ever a more sacred place than television, he understood the meaning of his and others’ utterances. He felt no need to end sentences with unwarranted exclamation marks. He took righteous and rightful umbrage with pacifistic athletes who gouged his employer for millions.

Merchant’s tastes and eloquence are a continuity now out of place at HBO, where on-air consensus-building, often to a point of hectoring, has replaced thoughtful dialogue and meaningful dissent. Farewell, then, Mr. Merchant. You were too good for them anyway.

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

HOUSTON – The Toyota Center undercard ended on a decisive note with impressive Oklahoma City welterweight prospect Alex “El Cholo” Saucedo beating down Utah opponent Eddie Cordova, assaulting him repeatedly with a left uppercut-right cross combination made famous by Mexican Juan Manuel Marquez. Saucedo (7-0, 5 KOs) whacked the outmatched Cordova (3-4-1, 1 KO) to the corner early in round 3 and stopped him at 2:14 of the same, remaining among promoter Top Rank’s very best prospects.

Victor Terrazas, a well-regarded Mexican featherweight contender, ended up in a tougher scrap than anticipated in the penultimate match of Saturday’s undercard, decisioning Californian Juan Ruiz by split-decision scores of 74-78, 78-74 and 79-73. Terrazas (35-2-20 KOs) had Ruiz (23-12, 7 KOs) outclassed but not outhustled, as Ruiz continually lowered his head and charged into Terrazas who at times seemed confounded by the task of keeping Ruiz off him, while boxing well at others.

Saturday’s last undercard match before the international television broadcast began featured Mexican welterweight Daniel Sandoval (30-2, 29 KOs) and awkward, buffoonish Texan Larry Smith (10-14, 6 KOs) in a six-round match that saw one man punch and the other clown around. Sandoval was the puncher and prevailed by unanimous decision scores of 60-54, 59-55 and 60-54, despite showing far less power than his record anticipated.

Lightweight Jose Felix Jr. did his Mexican hometown of Los Mochis proud in the fifth fight of Saturday’s undercard at Toyota Center. After spending a few rounds measuring his opponent, Bahamian Meachor Major (20-6-1, 17 KOs), Felix Jr. timed the slippery boxer leaning too far forward on the way in, clipped him with a left-hook lead, and hurt him badly enough to win by TKO at 2:23 of round 3.

Saul Rodriguez, a California super featherweight trained by Robert Garcia, had no trouble with Mexican Pablo Brates, in their four-round match. Rodriguez (8-0-1, 5 KOs) found Brates (2-5-1, 1 KO) with most every punch he threw, and despite being hit hard a few times himself, won each round by wide margins.

Saturday’s third fight, a six-round match between undefeated Houstonian Cedric Agnew (25-0, 13 KOs) and oft-defeated Mexican Alfredo Contreras (11-15-3, 4 KOs), a match that saw Agnew land numerous flush shots – and eat a few as well – ended with a wide decision for Agnew: 58-56, 60-54, and 59-55. Contreras, who hails from main-event fighter Jorge Arce’s hometown of Los Mochis, was entirely outclassed but managed to entertain throughout, raising questions about Agnew’s power.

Before that, in a four-round fight between Connecticut super bantamweight Tremaine Williams (5-0, 2 KOs) and Texas’ Rafael Casias (4-6), Williams held on to win a unanimous decision, 39-36 and 39-36 and 40-37, despite fading slightly in the final round.

Saturday’s card began with a four-round super welterweight match between California’s Sukhrab Shidaev (4-0, 2 KOs) and Texan Jose Trevino (1-7-1, 1 KO), a match that Shidaev won by knockout at 1:39 of round 3.

Opening bell rang on an empty Toyota Center at 5:15 PM local time.

LAS VEGAS – The keyboard of this laptop is covered in papery brown pistachio skins and shell dust. There’s a black plastic bag of Wonderful Pistachios just to the left, one of hundreds placed along press row before Saturday’s card, in what passes for swag in this eroding business. Wonderful Pistachios were Filipino congressman Manny Pacquiao’s latest marketing hustle, the tasty green nuts he whacked from a speedbag swivel hook in countless loops on the screen above Saturday’s ring.

There’s no occasion for reading creatively yet, the metaphor is right here: After what Juan Manuel Marquez did to him in the final second of the sixth round of their fourth fight, Pacquiao’s career is now in as many pieces, and filled with as much promise, as the pistachios that coat this keyboard. “Marquez KO 6” – their fight’s official line – hardly approaches it. Pacquiao will fight on, partially out of pride, partially out of financial necessity, but mostly because he’s the one person who was in MGM Grand Garden Arena that holds no recollection of what was done to him Saturday.

It was Juan Manuel Marquez’s night, the crowning act of vindication in a late career marked by its spiteful pursuit, but the entire spectacle felt more like a treatment of Manny Pacquiao. The comatose posture on the apron, his head under the bottom rope, his body perfectly still, his hands folded passively and unnaturally beneath him – testifying to a brain’s communication severed well before it could recognize, much less send notification, his face was in a freefall to cover each of the 66 inches between his metallic blue boots and raven hair.

Folded is how Pacquiao looked, tidied up and put away, resting peacefully in an oblivious place that might be sweet were it not for the vehicle that transported him there, and were it not for the masses of instantly aghast witnesses – some soon appalled, others quickly euphoric, but all initially aghast because it is nigh impossible for a person not to start at the sight of his own put temporarily in a place so like death.

There was not a seat on press row from which anything but Pacquiao’s back could be seen. One heard the clapper signal 10 seconds and began the countdown to round’s end. Surely a few scribes, and cornermen, lowered their heads to begin all the thoughts and activities that happen in the in-between minutes of championship prizefights. Pacquiao had won the round and was about to be up two points on all three judges’ scorecards – identical after five – at the midway point of a fight already featuring two knockdowns and more brutality than its trilogy of predecessors, as neither man desired judges’ opining this time, each stating plainly beforehand he preferred exactly the unconsciousness Pacquiao got to another official decision.

The very maneuver Pacquiao used to fell Marquez three times in the first round of their first match in 2004 – feinted left-hand lead, backwards hop, forwards leap, committed left hand – brought the violent end of their tetralogy. For Marquez made an adjustment that betrayed his newfound confidence in a right hand that was ever accurate but is now prodigious. Marquez used a leftwards spin to thwart Pacquiao’s signature combo in the concluding 11 rounds of their first match, a left-hook lead to Pacquiao’s right shoulder to thwart it in their second match, and a feint of his own in their rubber match; but Saturday brought a seeing-eye right hand Marquez threw because for the first time in his career’s 125 minutes and 59 seconds of fighting Pacquiao, Marquez, boxing’s best gambler, a natural-born predator, calculated the risk ratio favored him.

Pacquiao did not sense it at all; he leaped in with the left-hand lead because he knew the worst that would come was a trip over Marquez’s front shoulder, and the best that might come was a definitive end to their rivalry – shutting “Dinamita’s” crybaby mouth for the rest of their days. Pacquiao did not walk into Marquez’s right hand or even run into it. Pacquiao bounded at it, got his upper vertebrae contracted by it, his chin forced backwards while the rest of him surged forwards, and ruined by it.

There was something different about Marquez’s right hand Saturday. What made Saturday’s first knockdown so stunning in round 3, when a looping right hand from Marquez, one that traveled in an arc enough for Pacquiao to track it, knocked Pacquiao straight backwards, was that everyone watched it arrive, including Pacquiao. The punch disrupted the competitors’ pattern; it arrived either quicker or harder than anything Pacquaio’d been hit with in 13 years. And before Saturday, was Marquez known for wearing one-punch chloroform on his right glove at welterweight?

There will be allegations aplenty this week about Marquez’s historic transformation from balletic 125-pound counterpuncher to 143-pound powerpunching freak, delts bulged and lats shredded and biceps pronouncedly vascular, a transformation that came, absurdly and audaciously, after his 38th birthday, and so, two thoughts: Juan Manuel Marquez did not cheat – his negative drug test will confirm that – but the recipe for his strength and conditioning coach’s cocktail of supplements should be confiscated under a clause that reads: “Whatever chemistry transforms a professional athlete’s body the way yours did must not be tolerated henceforth.”

This too: If Marquez knew next week would bring a positive PED test but not erase from memory his moment of vindication, his instant of euphoria at seeing dissolved the man he believes delayed his proper coronation for almost a decade, a recorded sensation of Pacquiao’s head giving way like a pillow to the middle knuckle of his right fist, followed by a snapshot of Pacquiao’s limp motionless body folded on the blue apron right beside the white ‘k’ in Top Rank, Marquez would take it, so help him God, he would.

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

LAS VEGAS – The definitive end of the Manny Pacquiao Era came Saturday. It came in an act of sudden, precise violence. And it came from the right fist of Pacquiao’s nemesis, Mexican Juan Manuel Marquez.

In the sixth round of their fourth fight, in the closing second of it in fact, Marquez used Pacquiao’s feint as his trigger, planted his weight, and threw a short right hand with years of frustration behind it. The punch landed purely, forced Pacquiao’s chin to his right collarbone, and rendered the Filipino entirely unconscious before he landed face-first on the apron. No 10-count was necessary.

The official time of Marquez’s victory and vindication was 2:59 of round 6.

Everything about Saturday’s match was different from its predecessor conducted 13 months ago. This time, Marquez (55-6-1, 40 KOs) was the larger, stronger, more powerful man. Pacquiao (54-5-2, 38 KOs) was still the match’s quicker and busier fighter, but he was no longer its hunter.

After a pair of very even opening rounds, the third saw Marquez lean leftwards and catch Pacquiao with a looping right hand Pacquiao appeared to see but was surprised by nonetheless. Pacquiao dropped directly to the mat, in a stunning moment entirely unanticipated by anything seen from him in a decade of superfights. Pacquiao rose, however, and fought the still-cautious Marquez off him.

Marquez was still cautious for a reason. After another even round in the fourth, Pacquiao blitzed Marquez in the fifth, dropping him with a straight left, thrown from Pacquiao’s southpaw stance, that stunned Marquez but did not truly hurt him. It affected Pacquiao more than Marquez, actually, emboldening him towards recklessness. After nearly three minutes of attacking Marquez in the sixth, on his way to a two-point lead on all three judges’ scorecards, Pacquiao showed Marquez his signature move one time too many.

Pacquiao feinted the left cross, took a hop back, and then leaped at Marquez, hands-down. Marquez, his back on the ropes, dropped his head underneath Pacquiao’s left hand, and threw his right at Pacquiao’s chin. And in an instant, the Manny Pacquiao Era was ended.

YURIORKIS GAMBOA VS. MICHAEL FARENAS
The plan was this: His promoter, rapper 50 Cent, would drop from the ceiling, and then Yuriokoris Gamboa would drop his opponent directly on the canvas. “Fiddy” did his part.

Saturday’s co-main event, a far more competitive affair than anticipated, or perhaps desired, saw Cuban Yuriorkis Gamboa (22-0, 16 KOs) win a wide unanimous decision over Filipino Michael Farenas (33-4-4, 26 KOs) in a match that was not without suspense. Scores went 117-109, 118-108 and 117-108, all for Gamboa, who despite landing more than 550 punches was unable to stop Farenas and had to rise from the mat in round 9 to prevail.

After a first stanza that saw Gamboa’s superior reflexes and movement dominate, the second found Gamboa staggered by a pair of left crosses from the southpaw Farenas. Those punches from the Filipino, though, did little more than incite Gamboa – who felled Farenas in the final seconds of the stanza.

Round 3 found more aggression from Gamboa, but also some unexpected fortitude and defiance from Farenas, who both weathered Gamboa’s attack and staggered Gamboa again in the fourth with looped left hands, for which Gamboa seemed to have no comprehensive plan. Gamboa, whose attention span is short as his talent is long, often got himself struck by punches a lesser talented man – one who relied more on fundamentals than reflex – might have ducked or blocked.

After a sixth round that saw cuts over Farenas’ eyes deepen and bleed enough for a ringside doctor to give him a full examination before the seventh, Gamboa tore out his corner and tried to end the fight sensationally. After 45 second of ferocious combat, though, when a weakened Farenas was nevertheless still standing and trading, Gamboa’s activity dropped considerably, and while he did enough to win subsequent rounds, his willingness to chase a knockout more or less disappeared.

When it returned in the ninth, it nearly cost Gamboa the ‘0’ on his record, as the Cuban, sensing a knockout was near, walked himself directly into a counter left hand that dropped him on the blue mat. Gamboa rose on wobbly legs and held on tight for much of the next two minutes.

After an uneventful 10th and 11th, both men exchanged occasionally in the 12th but otherwise shuffled to the finish line, satisfied with not being felled again – even if it meant not felling the other man.

MIGUEL VAZQUEZ VS. MERCITO GESTA
It was a title match between an experienced but dull champion and an exciting but inexperienced challenger, and the champion owned it. Most every minute of it.

In the penultimate fight of Saturday’s undercard, Mexican Miguel Vazquez (25-3, 19 KOs) easily defended his IBF lightweight title, decisioning Filipino Mercito Gesta (26-1-1, 14 KOs) by unanimous scores of 117-111, 119-109 and 118-110. It may not have been that close.

After an opening round that saw Vazquez look characteristically slippery while Gesta did little to press an attack, the second and third saw Vazquez too quick, busy and awkward for Gesta. Vazquez would attack Gesta, and have certain success, and then Gesta, after patiently waiting, would decide it was his turn. By the time Gesta began his attack, though, Vazquez would be gone.

The next four rounds saw more of the same, as Gesta, for all his vaunted explosiveness against lesser opponents, simply did not have a solution for the problems an experienced champion like Vazquez proposed to him. Gesta threw ominous left hooks aplenty from his southpaw stance, but Vazquez picked them up scientifically, staying at the end of his quite long reach, and ensured he was either spinning away or ducking well beneath their plane by the time they went whipping past.

In round 8, Vazquez added a dull new wrinkle to his attack, staying at range till Gesta dropped his guard, and then rushing in with both hands, landing a clean punch or two, and tying Gesta up. Gesta appeared not to have the wherewithal or desire to fight his way out of the awkward Mexican’s awkward clinches, and the next three rounds passed without incident or emotion.

The final round passed exactly as its 11 predecessors had, with Vazquez, a professional counterpuncher and winner, if not entertainer, boxing, moving, clinching and confusing his way to another successful title defense.

JAVIER FORTUNA VS. PATRICK HYLAND
It was a battle of undefeated fighters, and while neither guy wanted to lose, neither guy wanted to win much either. The partisan-Mexican crowd that half-filled the arena did not appreciate it.

In the first televised match of Saturday’s pay-per-view telecast, Dominican featherweight Javier Fortuna (21-0, 15 KOs) decisioned limited Irishman Patrick Hyland (27-1, 12 KOs) by unanimous scores of 118-110, 116-112 and 115-113. Fortuna, who appeared a little unstable both at Friday’s weighin and points of Saturday’s fight, fell on his back in celebration upon hearing the decision.

The fight began badly, and after two dreadful rounds that saw neither man engage and Fortuna in hands-down retreat, a lowblow made things briefly interesting and Fortuna briefly more offensive in the third. That brief display of offense by Fortuna was more than enough for Hyland to put his own fists away and spend two rounds focused on defense, blocking and ducking, and generally not punching.

In round 7, after 18 minutes of routine booing from the Garden Arena crowd, Hyland appeared to close space slightly and land a few decent right hands on the southpaw Dominican. The eighth brought increased fatigue to both men, which brought actual infighting and enough action for the crowd to cease its hectoring, if not increase its cheers.

The ninth saw a pair of unintentional fouls send Fortuna reeling to a neutral corner, followed by the entire fight’s best minute of sustained combat, as each man briefly took the other’s punches personally before returning to less-belligerent form. The 10th had the less-talented Hyland appearing to want to fight, and the more-talented Fortuna demonstratively displeased with anything that wasn’t clean punching.

The championship rounds passed uneventfully, with neither man daring to do anything daring, as the championship being contested was only the WBA interim featherweight title after all.

UNDERCARD
Saturday’s swing bout, a four-round scrap between local featherweight Alexis Hernandez (3-1, 1 KO) and New Mexican Jazzma Hogue (2-4-1) did not last long and did not look pretty, with Hernandez prevailing by TKO at 2:20 of round 1.

Before that, U.S. Olympian Jose Ramirez (1-0, 1 KO), a lightweight from California, made his professional debut against designated victim Corey Siegwarth (2-2, 1 KO) of Colorado. Charging out his corner and swarming Siegwarth from the opening bell, Ramirez moved well and threw punches in combination while showing good defense, stopping Siegwarth at 2:05 of round 1. As many clean punches as Ramirez needed to finish Siegwarth, time will tell how much power he has brought with him to the pro ranks.

Saturday’s second match saw Filipino featherweight Dodie Boy Penalosa (10-0, 10 KOs) stop Floridian Jesus Lule-Raya (2-2) suddenly and violently at 1:12 of round 2. Undefeated as he is, and with his victories coming the way they do, it will be interesting to see how Penalosa’s coming improvement in competition goes.

The evening began with a surprisingly two-sided affair between Filipino super featherweight Ernie Sanchez (14-3, 5 KOs) and Philadelphian Coy Evans (10-2-1, 2 KOs). Both men were hurt early in the fight, with Evans being sent to the mat by a right hand from Sanchez, but neither succumbed to the other’s numerous but light punches, and Sanchez prevailed by unanimous decision: 78-73, 78-73 and 77-74.

Opening bell rang on an empty MGM Grand Garden Arena at 4:06 PM local time.

LAS VEGAS – It was not particularly eventful, far as these things go – two muscular men stripped to their underwear, stepped on a scale, had their weights read, dismounted, and posed shirtless for photographers beneath the stage – but it was not entirely without event. Mike Tyson saw to that.

Friday afternoon at MGM Grand Garden Arena, Filipino welterweight Manny Pacquiao and his career nemesis, Mexican Juan Manuel Marquez, each made weight for their Saturday fight, a match that will complete a storied tetralogy in the very venue where it began.

Pacquiao made the welterweight limit of 147 pounds. Marquez came in three pounds below at 143.

“It’s going to be a war,” Marquez said immediately afterwards. “It’s going to be a war.”

If the fight will be the battle Marquez promised, he is the man who appears to have the heavier artillery this time. As part of a controversial strength and conditioning regimen conducted in Mexico with a controversial strength and conditioning coach, Marquez has added a significant quotient of muscle in his recent training camps and removed fat while doing it – a feat once believed nigh impossible for a man approaching his 40th birthday, as Marquez now does.

It is an edge Marquez, 0-2-1 in his three matches with Pacquiao, believes will mark the necessary “grain” of difference he needs.

“I would like to pray for all the families affected by the storm in the Philippines,” said Pacquiao, after making weight, replying to a question about a natural disaster that struck his native land this month. “I am dedicating this fight to them.”

Pacquiao, who looked very good, if not muscular as Marquez, Friday, has downplayed his opponent’s noteworthy growth in the last 15 months, answering questions about Marquez’s size with appeals to larger men Pacquiao has fought, and bigger punchers, too.

That may be, but did any of them have a history of hitting Pacquiao often or accurately as Marquez does?

“Not the biggest fight, possibly,” Marquez said of Saturday’s fourth match with Pacquiao and its place in his career. “The most important.”

Asked if, as a congressman in the Philippines, he still had the “fire in his belly” required to beat up a prizefighter gifted, dedicated and fixated on victory as Marquez is, Pacquiao was terse but adamant.

“Yes, sir,” he said.

Friday’s weighin, while not the fire-marshal-bar-the-doors affair previous Pacquiao weighins have been, was well-attended by what sounded like a partisan-Mexican crowd. Also in attendance was world middleweight champion Sergio Martinez, who kept a characteristically low profile.

Keeping a characteristically higher profile was former world heavyweight champion Mike Tyson, in town, and in MGM Grand, to promote and perform “Mike Tyson Cares: Giving Kids a Fighting Chance,” a show Tyson will host at MGM Grand’s Tabu Ultra Lounge, Friday night.

Tyson, whose euphoria at being on stage for a superfight weighin was pronounced, as evidenced by his constant smile and interaction with undercard fighters throughout, spent only a moment center-stage, waving and bowing to loud applause, then saying: “And make sure you come out!”

Doors for “Pacquiao-Marquez 4,” an eight-match card, will open at 3:00 PM local time, with opening bell scheduled to ring at 3:45. The four-fight pay-per-view televised portion of the card will begin at 6:00 PM. 15rounds.com will have full ringside coverage.

I did not expect to look forward to this week’s fourth match between Filipino Manny Pacquiao and Mexican Juan Manuel Marquez. I submitted my credential request, booked my flight to Las Vegas and reserved my hotel room for Dec. 8 under a spell of grim determination, not euphoria; this would make a tetralogy of the rivalry for which this era of prizefighting will be remembered, and I should witness it if I am able. I am now excited, though, because of an unlikely source – the third episode of HBO’s “24/7” program – and its subversion of a usually reliable imperviousness to hype. We’ll return.

What is likeliest to happen Saturday is another close fight, but one Pacquiao rightfully wins with hustle, followed by a set of scorecards that give Marquez a comfortable decision. Pacquiao has lost his novelty in Las Vegas, and while Marquez ever had little, the Mexican has at least gone to the trouble of reengineering his body in a Vegas-like way, erecting in just 15 months a breathtaking spectacle nature will raze in five years (or at least by the time Marquez arrrives in Canastota). That and previous scoring shenanigans make Marquez, for once, a more appealing figure in Las Vegas than Pacquiao.

In his exhaustive reevaluation of art history, British writer Paul Johnson opines of this week’s host city: “Nothing in Las Vegas is built to last except the roulette wheels. It is a city which, architecturally, is always in the immediate present, never in the past or future. It is Ephemeropolis.” In Johnson’s sense, neither Pacquiao nor Marquez is very much an Ephemeropolis fighter. Both have, in their ways, endeavored to be more permanent figures than Las Vegas generally appreciates; their careers cannot be divided in chapters named after trainers the way Oscar De La Hoya’s can be, they haven’t the shamelessness or salesmanship of American heavyweights, and they both lack Floyd Mayweather’s capacity for reinvention. Both are for the most part beneficiaries of a meritocracy, and while each now comes to the logical ends of his meriting millions of dollars to fight, both have, with very few exceptions, deserved the fortunes they’ve amassed as entertainers who combat honestly the men put in front of them.

If you did not see Saturday’s episode of HBO’s “24/7” program, if after the preceding week’s absurd Filipino donut-vending and Mexican jumpy-jump partying, you vowed never to watch another moment of the “24/7” franchise, you are, of course, forgiven, though also surprisingly unfortunate. Saturday’s episode was an unpredicted return to what camp footage made the series’ 2007 introduction compelling. It wasn’t choreographed handpad tricks and portentous stretching, either, but actual punching in combination, with the camera acting more as reporter than novelist.

Saturday’s episode did an uncharacteristically good job of examining the relationships between the fighters and their monkish trainers, with Freddie Roach admitting and then recanting that Pacquiao has become the boss of his camps, a degree of control, one can extrapolate, inversely proportionate to the quality of Pacquiao’s fighting since his 2009 stoppage of Miguel Cotto. More interesting still was a very short clip of Nacho Beristain giving Marquez, whom Beristain has trained for more than 20 years and made this generation’s master of efficient motion, a direct instruction:

“Throw right uppercut, hook, straight right,” Beristain said, and then he raised his finger as an instructor. “But parallel, Juan, the shoulders, principally (when throwing) the hook.”

There was no question who was the boss so long as Marquez wore gloves, a supplicant position in which Marquez voluntarily and fully places himself and Pacquiao once did more than he does today. Roach, by episode’s end, committed to restoring balance in his gym, but one could see Pacquiao’s annoyance with interruptions of his private rhythm and strategizing. Roach, in an enthusiastic pursuit of wealth and celebrity, has seen his relationship with Pacquiao revised while taking on charges like Julio Cesar Chavez Jr., unwilling to submit long to privation, and Amir Khan, unable to succeed with any punch-to-hurt curriculum, such that aficionados, and Roach himself, now openly question Roach’s primacy among trainers.

While there is little doubt Roach understands what Pacquiao must do to beat Marquez well as Beristain does, there does not appear a same technical fluency between Roach and Pacquiao as between Beristain and Marquez. Some of that is inevitable, with Roach and Pacquiao not sharing a native language like Beristain and Marquez do, but much of it is this: Roach did not teach Pacquiao how to box; he took a physical prodigy and improved him. Beristain, conversely, can query from his mind’s database the exact image of a teenage Marquez learning where to put his feet on the blue mat, and phrase precisely a problem whose solving will have Marquez position Marquez how Beristain wishes him.

Expect little new from either man Saturday. Though Pacquiao’s reflexes and conditioning will not be what they were in 2009 they will remain superior enough to outbusy Marquez if he so chooses, and that is Pacquiao’s best way of winning a third decision, on an objective scorecard. Marquez will be exactly what he was in fights I, II and III, and if he repeats his performance from 13 months ago, it says here, he’ll win comfortably on official scorecards. The only possibility for novelty this match holds is if Marquez, now physically enhanced enough to redden all faces at the Nevada State Athletic Commission, hurts Pacquiao. There is no better closer in boxing than Marquez – and a tetralogy that ended with Pacquiao felled thrice would be historic in its symmetry first of all.

That is too unlikely. So I’ll take Pacquiao, this time, in a fight the judges score for Marquez.

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

Television, a medium silly as it is ubiquitous, tells very few truths and perhaps none disinterestedly. In keeping with its current place in sports, boxing, as a gathering of only free agents, is, on television, a less-disinterested place than most. Praise any bubble of truth, then, that somehow rises through television’s thick, shifting filters and brings a spectacle honest as Oscar De La Hoya’s face. Whatever he is as a promoter, De La Hoya very apparently loves to see men punch one another, and his face, 25 feet back from the ring, visible between the ropes, center of the screen for most Golden Boy Promotions telecasts, is, anymore, the most honest television commentator boxing has.

De La Hoya’s face on Saturday, while Robert Guerrero was beating Andre Berto 116-110 and 116-110 and 116-110 in Ontario, Calif., in an interim title match on HBO, was often a picture of euphoria. De La Hoya’s face spoke to a couple happenings: His fighter, Guerrero, was not genuinely imperiled for a moment of the match (doubters should find contrasting footage of De La Hoya’s face during Johnathon Banks’ Nov. 17 dismantling of Seth Mitchell), and the fight itself was a spectacle of punching performed by two men who knew how – which anyone reading this ought love as much as De La Hoya helplessly does.

The most important discovery Saturday brought was that Andre Berto, a career welterweight, was unable to hurt Robert Guerrero, who, recently as last year a lightweight and recently as 2009 a super featherweight, took Berto’s flush right uppercuts, thrown with what appeared to be perfect leverage and ferocious intent, much better than he took Selcuk Aydin’s same punches in July. Is Guerrero that much tougher than he looked just four months ago, or is Berto, after a suspension for PED use, not the force, or not capable of summoning the force, he was or once did?

If Saturday’s excellent fight lacked suspense at times, and it did no matter the assiduous sales pitch tossed HBO viewers’ ways, it was because Guerrero never once appeared out of control or discomfited by Berto. Guerrero’s lead eye closed, as did both of Berto’s, but that wasn’t the ordeal it might have been if either guy had space enough to throw a full combination from proper range in the fight’s final nine minutes. One detected genuine panic in Guerrero’s bearing during his July match with Aydin, whom Guerrero held for desperation more than strategy, but that panicked bearing never materialized against Berto, regardless of how many Berto uppercuts put the top of Guerrero’s head nearly between his shoulder blades.

Saturday Guerrero settled accounts with aficionados who long ago tired of his promoter and publicists. Guerrero won a fight much more than a boxing match. And for that referee Lou Moret deserves a spot of praise. That he had limited control of the fighters from the opening bell to well past the match’s closing is much the reason Saturday’s fight was much better than anticipated; Moret appeared to be from a very old school, with a founding text that instructs if a man wishes to make a million dollars fighting another man, he should not be protected from that other man if it can be helped.

An officious referee would have broken the fighters each time they locked arms, likely precluding one, if not both, Berto’s slumps to the blue canvas, and issuing another round of invitations to future athletes-cum-prizefighters to believe, as Berto does, every event of pugilism is a showcase of his athleticism in which a superior athlete’s personal injury can be attributed only to governance gone missing. After beginning the match in a crisis of identity crisis – “My Mayweather is better than Broner’s!” – Berto occasionally bodied Guerrero in rounds 3 and 4 to create separation enough to pull his right fist back towards his own chest and strike Guerrero behind the ear several times along the way, a trick that brought few complaints from Guerrero and not much of a warning from Moret. But Guerrero adjusted to it, kept his chin pressed to Berto’s collarbone while marching him backwards, and in round 5 those punches behind Guerrero’s left ear became punches to the center of Guerrero’s brainstem, a patently illegal place to put them – as Berto, Guerrero, Moret, and everyone else knew.

This gave Berto his desired opening: the referee was against him! – an inanity championed by Berto’s cheering squad on the HBO broadcast team and voiced by Berto in a postfight interview Guerrero gracelessly but gratefully interrupted to remind viewers they’d just seen neither the fight of the century nor a very even match but actually one unanimously scored 116-110 in which Robert Guerrero beat Andre Berto’s ass.

If you came to Saturday’s fight without a rooting interest, because neither guy is fractionally compelling as the heroic images force-fed to boxing fans about both – hurricane relief worker, cancer survivor spouse, victim of chemistry – you left the fight thinking much more highly of Guerrero than Berto, since Guerrero, from the very first minute, wanted to fight a hell of a lot more than Berto did, which, as Lou Moret’s inaction reminded us, is what the men signed up for, an obligation no less meaningful for the numerous instances lesser entertainers find ways round it.

Maybe it marks a change. When one considers the way Miguel Cotto was allowed to pin Floyd Mayweather to the ropes in May, the way Andre Ward was able to brutalize Chad Dawson in and out of clinches in September, the way Abner Mares obstinately purpled Anselmo Moreno’s beltline three weeks ago, and the way Guerrero was able to hold and hit Berto Saturday, one detects a possible pattern wherein the aggressor of a match is given more leeway than its superior athlete appreciates. If this is the pendulum reversing course and beginning its descent, let it swing, friends, let it swing.

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

Saturday at Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City Adrien Broner fought the man aficionados asked him to fight, WBC lightweight champion Antonio DeMarco, a southpaw Tijuanense known to possess chin and heart and strength more than speed, and soundly whupped him. Broner did not flee DeMarco, clinch DeMarco or endeavor to outpoint DeMarco. Broner beat DeMarco down in a way not even the late Edwin Valero could, stopping DeMarco at 1:49 of round 8 – four minutes sooner than Valero did. It was 2012’s most important statement, for assuring Broner’s blossoming fanbase it will not look instantly foolish and Broner’s entrenched critics their assessments need adjusting.

A grim realization now settles: Adrien Broner is boxing’s foreseeable future. He is the anointed one, and unlike others prematurely blessed – Amir Khan and Victor Ortiz leap to mind, though Seth Mitchell is more timely an example – he will persuade even begrudging adults he’s deserving of what young enthusiasm now cloaks him like a sparkly pink robe, aglitter with sequins, he donned Saturday, to complement what pink gloves both fighters had to wear to show solidarity with a breast-cancer-awareness industry whose Month began Oct. 1 but now stretches past Thanksgiving*.

Broner reduced a very tough champion, a man whose garish green belt was earned as an underdog, which anymore might be the only way a belt’s merit can be trusted, to a shuffling, plodding, broken spirit. That is no criticism of Antonio DeMarco, whose tactical mistakes, time will show, were not mistakes at all – even as his supporters surely wonder why DeMarco set his chin on Broner’s right fist in the fourth round, eliminating his one advantage, height, to continually collect five flush shots in exchange for a pair of glazing ones. DeMarco went there for safety’s sake after he tasted Broner’s counter left hook and decided it was not worth suffering on his way to the table, and after he tasted Broner’s right-cross lead and decided if right hands had to be consumed, better to eat them at short range where even Broner, despite his excellent leveraging, would be unable to load them with what sauce he’d spread at full extension.

When his fans thought DeMarco was warming up, after Broner retreated to the ropes and collected left hands in round 3, DeMarco was realizing the whole enterprise faced long odds if not abject hopelessness (that would come in the fifth) and decided to get on Broner’s chest and see if luck mightn’t intervene. It sure as hell did not. Demarco accepted right uppercuts, or planned to accept them at least, in an expectation that in landing Broner would lower his fist enough to be open to a counter, or in missing thrust his right elbow far enough from his lowest rib to permit DeMarco some body work. The calculation was wrong, Broner is too conscientious of an opponent’s strengths to forget to protect himself, but flawed more because Broner’s right uppercut, now the best punch in the lightweight division, jarred DeMarco and moved him entirely off-course, forcing him to reset and put his chin back in Broner’s power alley, to try all over again.

Broner was able to take a Mexican with a granitic chin and make him think about safety by landing accurate and hard punches, and therein lies the secret to Broner’s staying power, and it is not his fast hands: Broner throws every punch hard, and he is able to throw every punch hard because he is extraordinarily well conditioned because something more than hairbrushing happens in his training camps, though confessing it might drop a gaggle of followers from the @AdrienBroner account.

The Mayweather defense, a shell of sorts Cincinnati’s Broner employs that has nothing to do with Philly, only works if the potshots that lead it are stinging blows. Anyone who’s spent time in boxing gyms since Floyd Mayweather decisioned Oscar De La Hoya – the day Mayweather replaced Roy Jones as the model for gifted athletes told they can make a fortune in boxing – has seen what devastation results if the right hand, cross or uppercut, shooting from behind the cocked left shoulder and low lead glove, fails to stun.

DeMarco did land some punches, and Broner walked through them. That’s important because it goes to what makes Broner, if not enticing, at least palatable to serious persons who are otherwise seriously repulsed by his shtick, one informed by a philosophy Broner annunciated in an interview with Larry Merchant, an octogenarian who wrote well about our sport before Broner’s father was born, to whom Broner explained the problem with contemporary prizefighting is that most of its fighters are “just boxing” – which likely came as a revelation to Merchant and other aficionados who foolishly contend the problem with prizefighting is that its practitioners aren’t “just boxing” fractionally often as their predecessors did.

Now there will be other supposedly tough opponents proposed for Broner by well-intentioned and hopeful folks desperate to avert another five years like the last five, when prizefighting’s best talent named himself “Money” then acted accordingly, but it’s of no use. Broner can clean out the lightweight division if he so chooses or go to 140 pounds and do the same – though fans are forgiven their transaction fees this week if they transfer the remaining balance of their DeMarco investment into a Brandon Rios account.

Those of us bound to be dragged dustily behind the Broner bandwagon have a single request that oughtn’t be too unbearable but likely will be: Make the fights, three a year, people ask of you, Adrien; for the longterm health of the sport and your place in its annals, remove the most important fights from hypothetical’s seductively painless grasp, as you did Saturday. Do that, and in time you’ll surpass Mayweather.

*Readers interested in the troublesome implications of having such an industry are encouraged to view “Pink Ribbons, Inc.”

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