SAN ANTONIO – I can see Alamodome from my window. It’s a mile southeast of where I sit, and its southwestern spire is visible between Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center and Tower of the Americas. Alamodome’s history is interesting in a way that enkindles barbershop dialogues. Indulge me a bit.

Before he became the 10th secretary of Housing and Urban Development – and inadvertently fired the starter’s pistol on policies that brought economic ruin 15 years later – Henry Cisneros was a mayor enchanted by the idea of professional football in Alamo City. Build a stadium, his thinking went, and the NFL will come.

The city built Alamodome, but professional football never came (unless one counts the Saints’ 2005 refugee appearance after Hurricane Katrina). The local branch of University of Texas began its inaugural football season last fall, and Alamodome will have an Arena Football League team later this year. But you get the picture.

Saturday, happily enough, Alamodome will return to doing what it does well as any stadium in the country: host prizefighting. Two upcoming stars – one by inheritance, the other ingenuity – will headline the card. Nonito Donaire, the ingenious one, will make his super bantamweight debut against Wilfredo Vazquez Jr. And Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. will defend a middleweight title against Marco Antonio Rubio, using the patronym that set an attendance record at Alamodome five months after it opened in 1993.

Or perhaps Chavez-Rubio will be 2012’s best fight. Nobody knows how these things go. This city certainly does not and even if it did would be reticent to say so. That’s part of San Antonio’s special character. Its downtown area is an intriguing, maddening, wonderful snarl of Mexican culture and German industriousness – the sort of place that can provoke a comfortable type of marvel.

If you’re in town for fightweek, spend some time off the well-worn track. You’ll get a chance to see the Alamo, fear not; the weigh-in will happen in front of the place once known as Misión San Antonio de Valero, Friday. But there are four other founding Spanish missions within five miles of the Alamo, and each is a picturesque history unto itself.

If you travel with any sort of frequency, you’ve no doubt before made this proclamation: “I want to go someplace tourists never go!” Here’s a suggestion, then. Once you finish dutifully marching the commercial loop of River Walk, head west to the part of San Antonio River that locals use. Make a right and go north. You’ll find yourself beneath the country’s seventh-most populous city, surprised by its tranquility. Under each bridge you’ll see a unique installation by a local artist. Eventually you’ll come to historic Pearl Brewery where you can catch a ride home on a river taxi.

You’ll be back in your hotel with time for a nap before Saturday’s card. Get to Alamodome before 6:00 PM, though. Adam Lopez, our city’s best amateur, will make his professional debut on the undercard, beginning an adventure that will try to fill the prizefighting void Jesse James Leija left when he stopped fighting and started training. There’s another good place to visit, actually: Leija’s Championfit Gym is five miles up San Pedro Avenue and worth the drive.

The portion of the card televised by HBO – the first major event of the year – should be a pleasant departure from what the words “HBO Boxing” have come to connote with aficionados recently.

Nonito Donaire is what baseball scouts call a five-tool player. He is very large for a 122-pound fighter. He has speed, technique, and power in both hands. He must have a chin, too, though he rarely needs it.

That might change Saturday. Wilfredo Vazquez Jr. comes to fight. He is not large, quick or confident as Donaire, but he is the son of a Puerto Rican super bantamweight who made some history of his own in this city when, in 1995, he upset WBA world champion Orlando Canizales. Vazquez Sr. will be in his son’s corner, exactly where he was when Vazquez Jr. made one of 2011’s best fights against Jorge Arce. Expect Donaire to win, but expect him, also, to know he was in a fight.

Whither the main event? It will be entertaining because Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. makes entertaining matches. He is not a natural like his father, but he is better than you think. He is technically adequate and improving under trainer Freddie Roach. He understands how combat works from having watched his father do it during the 10 years of Chavez Sr.’s prime. And best of all, Chavez Jr. gets pissed off when he’s hit.

Marco Antonio Rubio should test Chavez early the way John Duddy did in Alamodome 17 months ago. Round the gyms down here, folks give Rubio a chance. That’s good; it’s what they’re supposed to do. We all did it with Duddy, Sebastian Zbik and Peter Manfredo. These were serious men, remember, more serious than Chavez anyway, we assumed, and they’d test his whiskers and balls. And they did, too.

And Chavez passed, too. Rubio’s talent is likely a day beyond its expiration date. His reflexes, canniness and desire to win probably went sour in 2011, but we don’t know it yet and won’t till Chavez opens the carton and takes a sniff. Chavez doesn’t know it either, and at the kick-off press conference he seemed unusually peevish about Rubio’s calling him out. Rubio is a fellow Mexican fighting before a partisan-Mexican crowd, too, so you never do know. But it says here Top Rank’s master matchmaker would never have Chavez postpone a reckoning with world middleweight champion Sergio Martinez to lose a fight with Marco Rubio.

Let’s end here: If you’re staying downtown this week and wish to visit a legendary local spot, come by San Fernando Gym any weeknight and honor the memory of the late Joe Souza.

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

Pontiac’s Business district wasn’t. Early on a Saturday afternoon nothing was open. I parked the Kia well off the curb of a sidestreet, confident there would be no traffic to impede, and ambled up and down Saginaw and Pike Streets. There were what appeared to be panhandlers, but as they shuffled along, in lieu of risking their bare hands in the cold, they shrugged and frowned. Why the hell bother? A few of the buildings in the Business District had silhouettes of their last occupants’ names on them, but most had been bare long enough to be unhaunted.

There was no place to eat, and after the previous evening’s Coney dog it felt unsporting to sit in the Marriott bar with the boxing folks, discussing yet again who would win this mythical matchup or that. A mile of driving brought me to Chili Bowl. The establishment sat 12 within the concrete blocks of its yellow façade. Chili Bowl was in its 59th year of business. Its interior featured pictures and newspaper writeups. Its put-a-good-face-on-itness brought the queasy sort of sympathy one feels for a person oblivious of his plight – though its grillman was in no way oblivious.

I sat at the counter, read “Theatre of Fish” – a travelogue cum history of Newfoundland – and wondered at John Gimlette’s talent. The book was accessible for another writer, it wasn’t untouchable as “At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig” had been, but it was remarkable enough in its styling to send an aspirant to places both cold and forgotten, in search of adventures to recount.

In the Courtyard elevator, I chanced on Timothy Bradley’s Mexican father-in-law. Bradley’s suegro was delightful. Somewhere between the lobby and floor 3, though, Spanish failed us; a language born in the Mediterranean lacked sufficient words for “snow” and “frigid” and “hopelessly blanketed” to imply what we both wished to say about Pontiac. So we gave each other the “alli se va” smile, a Mexican salute these days, and offered wishes of good fortune.

The next elevator was not so amiable. Tucked off a corner of a hidden staircase at Silverdome preceded by a tiny sign reading Credential Pickup, the service elevator that brought a few of us and a security-guard escort to the back entrance of the kitchen was a reminder how little preparation had been done after the kick-off press conference. Nobody knew where anything was. The security guide said as much; his first time in the building was yesterday.

I strode round the mezzanine, hoping to find a souvenir t-shirt that would someday prove I’d attended the last prizefight ever held in Pontiac. There were more makeshift barriers along the unlighted hallway than vendors and fight fans. Nary a poster or commemorative plastic cup could be found. There would be no evidence of “The Super Fight.” But that was no harbinger; it was not so mysteriously worded. It was boxing speaking in a short, declarative sentence: Nobody gave a fuck.

There was a single staircase open from the mezzanine to the floor of a venue that once accommodated 93,000 wrestling fans. On the other side of the curtain were parked eight trailers and a medium-sized yellow crane, with room enough for 10 other such combos. Inside the curtain were plenty of available seats.

The temperature along press row never rose above 55 degrees. Silverdome, despite its long-lost pretensions, was not outfitted with a heating system that could warm so many empty acres, and there weren’t live bodies enough to lend a hand. Writers paused before the laptops that illuminated their red cheeks to dab at runny noses. Many filed copy that night in winter coats.

None of our winter coats, though, rivaled Cornelius “K9” Bundrage’s. The IBF light middleweight champion in exile patrolled the aisles in a black getup with copious amounts of fur. If you’d never before met Bundrage – and thanks to his promoter, few of us had – he was a great surprise. Bundrage handed out media kits about himself that should have said: “I’m from Detroit, my promoter is Don King, we are 30 miles from Detroit, at a Don King show, and I am not on this card, FYI.”

I sat beside a handsome, friendly guy from HBO. Through the night, he received a number of other handsome, friendly visitors from HBO. The network covered itself doggedly; it surrounded the story of HBO and reported the hell out of it.

The main event ended with a cut caused by an accidental headbutt. Devon Alexander, by all accounts a role model and good guy, had not fought well, and the word “quitter” got whispered along press row. The words “dirty fighter,” too, plagued the main event’s victor, Timothy Bradley.

I don’t know what Bradley or Alexander said at the postfight press conference, because propelled by an unexpected burst of disgust, I quit my search for the service elevator after 10 minutes, marched up a blocked staircase and began throwing my shoulder against doors till one opened. I was five steps in the snow before I realized I was perhaps a half mile from where I’d parked the Kia. And the door clicked behind me a moment before I learned an eight-foot chainlink fence stood between me and the parking lot. With the help of a snow bank, I scaled the fence, hurled my laptop case at a 12-inch cushion of white and stomped a lap round Silverdome in a tanglefooted dance called Good Riddance.

Five hours later, I walked the Southwest Airlines terminal of Detroit’s Metro Airport. Not far behind me was Timothy Bradley, fully anonymous. His face was a swollen mess because the headbutts had gone both ways. It was not yet dawn, and the new unified champion of the 140-pound division was flying home to California on a discount carrier. Were you surprised when Bradley later forwent a fight with Amir Khan – a match he would have won – to escape his promoter?

I wrote my Monday column in an empty kiosk of Southwest’s Nashville terminal because there were no direct flights from Detroit to San Antonio. I wrote with abandon, pissed off, letting the words fly. Sometimes that works. Other times it’s dreadful. This time it worked.

Editor’s note: For Part 1, please click here

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

This week brings an ignominious anniversary for our beloved sport. Sunday will mark a year since “The Super Fight” – Timothy Bradley versus Devon Alexander – happened in Pontiac, Mich. The fight itself was inconsequential; neither man has done anything in the junior welterweight division since. But the consequences for HBO Sports were noteworthy, and perhaps more importantly, it still feels as though there is more to impart about the event, its city and arena, and Detroit.

A week or so before “The Super Fight,” sources learned Showtime would broadcast Manny Pacquiao’s next match. HBO had lost Pacquiao. The brass at HBO, who’d ignored the toy department for much of the preceding half-decade, suddenly went on notice. Their antennae went up. And with those antennae erect and tingling, “The Super Fight” went off in an abandoned airport hangar of a building in a depressed city.

What follows is a brief memoir of snow, dilapidated edifices, hidden service elevators, endless concrete expanses, a hopped chainlink fence, more snow, and an encounter in the Southwest terminal of Metro Airport. It will include some boxing.

*

About 10 days before “The Super Fight,” circumstances converged to make my trip possible. I procured a weird tangle of crisscrossed flights and rental car accommodations and wrote a preview of Bradley-Alexander that included a first-person conclusion assuring readers I would be there to see it. In the two days that followed, a goodish number of persons whose minds I admire called or wrote to ask me what the hell I was doing. I had two reasons for my trip to Pontiac in January: To honor Timothy Bradley – who was and remains one of my favorite active fighters – and to see if Detroit could be bad as accounts said it was.

My rental car was a Kia that when loaded with my laptop case and travel bag weighed perhaps a hundred pounds more than I did. The Kia and I set off for Pontiac in quickly accumulating snow. I had learned to drive in snow as a native New Englander, but in the 18 years since my departure for the Southwest I had not improved at the craft. The car slid all over the road, occasionally even working the oncoming side of where the yellow line would be found in April.

Friday morning I arrived on the outskirts of what my phone’s GPS said was Pontiac and surveyed the local FM dial in search of local flavor. One Motown station featured The Supremes followed by a familiar cackle and faux interview in which promoter Don King rattled off a handful of other Detroit-founded groups and invited locals to come to Silverdome tomorrow night for a super fight.

There was King, later that afternoon, in a private club on the end of Silverdome opposite where the ring would be constructed for Saturday’s fight. Or was the ring already constructed? A few of us gathered at the enormous glass wall where the weigh-in was held, and we peered and squinted at what could have been a black pocket square floating in a gray blazer. That was the curtain that both hid Saturday’s ring and marked the nearest point of Saturday’s converted arena – across hundreds of yards of empty concrete. Boxing’s chutzpah is at times extraordinary; who else would prod a hibernating venue to life then cordon off 90 percent of it?

King was alive if tired. When you speak with him he violates personal space till you realize how enormous a man he is. Your ears fit between his eyebrows, and his voice shakes your hair and scarf. He knew you would be there because you appreciate what is great in this sport, nay this land, and it thrills him the love he has for you, my brother, because as Shakespeare said, in his grandiloquence of verbositous garrulity, “If she say I am not fourteen pence on the score for sheer fisticuffs, score me up for the lyingest knave in Michigan!”

Promoter Gary Shaw, shorter and paler and rounder, was there too. A study of contrasts, King and Shaw. King is twice himself in person as he is on television, while Shaw is half. Shaw is softspoken and reasonable and willing to explain his talent lies in logistics more than spectacle. In his prime, King would have treated Shaw as an employee – Alan Hopper as publicist, Shaw as matchmaker – but King was by then far from his prime as he could be and still renew a promoter’s license.

Friday night brought an ill-advised drive to Detroit proper, a few bars, a rave, and an early morning Coney dog at the second-best Coney dog eatery in the city because the very best was being used that night as a set for some cop show starring Tony Soprano’s tequila-sipping protégé. The night is a not a blur for the reasons you think. It is a blur because of what followed: Somewhere just north of 8 Mile Road on I-75, when my phone’s battery died with its GPS and the falling snow became a white wall seen from the driver’s side window as my Kia went sideways toward Pontiac, I became suddenly aware of how easy it would be to get lost, run out of gas and not be found till springtime.

And like that I was lost. Snow was accumulated on the freeway signs. The sky was a dark pillow gently shaking one feather-like flake after the next. I had been driving 30 miles per hour for an hour but knew I had not gone 30 miles. The entire episode was not frightful in its actuality – I located the Marriott village in Pontiac before the gas light went out – but frightful in its manufacturing. A terrible time to have an imagination.

Saturday morning I went looking for downtown Pontiac.

***

Editor’s note: Part 2 will be published on Wednesday, Feb. 1.

SAN ANTONIO – Another deadline comes and goes in the silly saga of whether the two best fighters in our sport in 2009 will fight one another in 2012. It’s all bad faith now. A promoter goes to the Philippines to present his fighter four options no fan asked for. A fighter gets on Twitter to make a faux demand he didn’t make years ago, when it might have mattered.

If there is solace to be found in the tired spectacle this time round, it’s how comparatively little folks care. The truth of the Great Recession now touches every American. Quibbles between millionaires about purse splits don’t have the traction they did years ago. The parties are no closer to making this fight than last time, but at least there was no midnight conference call.

Casual fans have given up on the Fight That Would Have Saved Boxing. When they ask about it these days, it’s to change the subject rather than make an honest inquiry. They hear you talking about Andre Ward or Sergio Martinez, men they wouldn’t recognize if watching a Ward-Martinez fight, and interrupt you to say: “What I want to know is when are Mayweather and Pacquiao gonna fight!” You start to explain the latest cramp in negotiations. Then you find no one listens; hey, what do you think of Tebow Mania?

Promoter Bob Arum appears, now, to be the party who does not want the fight to happen while he wrestles with lesser evils: Do I dislike Golden Boy Promotions enough to guarantee Mayweather a gargantuan purse and make the fight without them, or do I dislike Mayweather enough to deny him the fight his resume needs? The likely answer is: Arum dislikes more whomever he just spoke to.

People round boxing no longer believe Floyd Mayweather is afraid to lose to the guy they saw fight Juan Manuel Marquez in November. In a better world for Mayweather, that would be enough; he won the fight without having to make it. One senses, though, Mayweather’s financial situation is precarious enough he’ll soon need the Pacquiao purse.

Boycott both of them, then, and to hell with it!

No, not so fast. There is an interesting balance that must be struck, especially as it pertains to Arum. His company, Top Rank, is the country’s preeminent promoter. It is an excellent outfit that makes its fighters and employees available. Top Rank does the best kick-off press conference in the business.

That’s what went through my head a couple Tuesdays ago at Alamodome. We were gathered before a very large stage and sound system for an otherwise intimate affair. The field behind us was being transformed from Alamo Bowl host to All-American Bowl host. If you looked far enough northwards and used your imagination, you could see where the black curtain would hang for February’s HBO “World Championship Boxing” fight card.

Arum was there. Hall of fame matchmaker Bruce Trampler was there. Trainer Freddie Roach was there. HBO’s Peter Nelson was there. Puerto Rican great Wilfredo Vazquez Sr. was there. Future great Nonito Donaire was there. And yet, we all waited for Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. – still known as “Son of the Legend.”

Chavez was the reason for our gathering, whatever we might opine of him. In three Saturdays, Chavez will headline 2012’s first big fight card, in this city. Unbeknownst to him, probably, he’ll begin quite a stretch for Texas boxing, one that will see a Showtime card 150 miles southeast of here, in Corpus Christi, a couple weeks later, and then an even bigger HBO card 200 miles east of here, in Houston, a few weeks after that. But it all starts with Chavez.

That is a sentence difficult to write as it is to read.

Chavez’s fanbase is gaining some authenticity, though. Chavez is fighting bigger, better, darker men, little by little, while projecting more of the spoiled-rich-kid resentment ridiculed by those who do not understand it despite its historical ferocity and effectiveness.

It’s a funny thing, ticket sales. Nobody I’ve ever spoken to – in what is becoming a tradition of covering Chavez Jr. fights – ever names him as a favorite fighter. Most Mexicans pay homage to the patronym while humoring the epigone. And yet.

Sitting on the same side of the podium as Chavez was Nonito Donaire, who appears to have every tool. Donaire will make an exciting fight with Wilfredo Vazquez Jr. on the same night Chavez fights fellow Mexican Marco Antonio Rubio. Donaire is enormous even for his new weight class. He is well-spoken. He gives every appearance of sincerity. He’s not classically handsome, but he has a great sense of style. He’s an incredibly talented prizefighter. And yet.

Chavez is the main event here on Feb. 4, not Donaire. They will fight in Lone Star State because Chavez sells more tickets here than Donaire would in the Bay Area (and because Texas is a right-to-work state, with all that implies).

Which brings us to the mystery of ticket selling. It’s easier, at times, to celebrate those who sell tickets than to explain those who do not. Donaire is an offensive force of the first rate who’s made a habit of winning his biggest fights by knockout. He also has the best promoter in the United States. And yet.

If it were tenable, one might suggest, the premium networks, HBO and Showtime, ought to offer licensing fees that are a percentage – whatever percentage – of a fight’s paid gate. This wouldn’t change the networks’ rosters of fighters, necessarily; it would change the compensation systems they use.

Where would that leave Nonito Donaire? Hard to say. But it’s also a good yellow light for aficionados looking to cure boxing. Ridding ourselves of corrupt sanctioning bodies, alone, won’t do it. But it may also not be simple as rewarding ticket sellers.

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

There is no such thing as an objective scorecard in boxing. Using that assumption, let’s take a look at – wait, what’s that? No consensus on the point above. Shucks. Let’s work it over a bit, then, break it in and see if we can use it later.

Where do you look while scoring a fight? “In the neutral plane exactly between the combatants, following each punch from its entry into the unoccupied space to its conclusion.” In that case, maybe you are capable of rendering an objective scorecard. It’s not too practical, though, is it?

Official scorekeepers are just about the only people situated at a prizefight in a place that allows them perfectly neutral eyes and minds. If a person is on press row, he is already too far from the fight and necessarily watching a panorama of sorts that features both fighters in a shifting focus that depends on whatever narrative steers it. If a person is watching on television, he is subjected to a number of narratives, both his own and others’, that affect the very texture of what his mind does with the images his eyes send it.

Do official scorekeepers unfailingly employ their unique position to render perfectly objective tallies? Well. These are people with opinions and narratives of their own, and considerations more than the rest of us. That is, if a Clark County Justice of the Peace can be persuaded by economic considerations to delay a prizefighter’s sentence, as Melissa Saragosa did in the case of Floyd Mayweather Jr., Friday, do believe an athletic commission official is more persuadable still.

This is not written to or about official scorekeepers, though. This is for a more important observer: the boxing aficionado. Our beloved sport needs this person to be a thinker, not a knower, and a constant skeptic, checking his own objectivity as often and vigorously as he checks others’.

American boxing fans, like Americans in general, can be well-divided into thinkers and knowers, with an unseemly majority being knowers – folks who pursue consensus more than discovery. You are familiar with such people; every argument comprises an obscure anecdote recently heard and devolves into personal challenges. Most conversations are Shakespearean in nature, as the parties talk past one another, speechifying more than inquiring. Rarely is a phrase like “I’m not sure” or “That might change my mind” or “I hadn’t considered it” uttered.

Thinkers tend to make better company. They have postmodern moments when the very gears of language grind and consensus on something slight as the word “apple” might seem impossible, but they serve the valuable function of undermining others’ certainty. And if there is a lesson to be mined from the Great Recession it is likely that certainty benefits very few of us.

More pertinent to the boxing aficionado’s experience, though, is this: Most of what you know about boxing is probably wrong anyway. There is consensus, of course, lots of it. There are opinion shapers. But those of us in that racket are often as unwitting a group of pawns as can be found in any field. Boxing is a stew of dissembling free agents, seasoned by short-sighted greed. The truth is not out there, Agent Mulder; the only trustworthy place in boxing is between its ropes.

How we look at what happens between the ropes, then, is probably the most important skill we can cultivate as interested observers. We bring filters galore to the act, yes. (Who among us isn’t predisposed to cheering for a fighter who looks like we do?) We should be skeptical of those filters, going in.

There may be no better act of skepticism in the observation of boxing than scoring a round even, 10-10. It is a way of saying you did not know who would win the round when it began, you approached your task of observation innocent of narrative, and neither combatant did enough to convince you someone won the round by its end. That’s not indecisive; it’s skeptical. It’s also a heck of a sight better than knowing who won the round, before reviewing the round a week later and knowing the other guy won the round, and then reviewing the round a year later and knowing that either guy may have won the round.

Maybe your peers on press row will call you irresolute. Maybe your friends gathered round the television will think you inept at the manly art of deciding. But you may also find the stress of awaiting discovery is not bad as the stress of contorting yourself into consensus.

What the hell does that mean?

Round 1 of Pacquiao-Marquez III should suffice as an example. The thinker began the round saying, “Neither guy will win this round unless someone decisively wins this round.” And he marked the round even, 10-10, when he found himself entirely unconvinced by the fight’s opening three minutes.

The knower, his mind already rent with the pressure of having to pick a winner, came to his seat under the spell of a narrative that likely went: Manny Pacquiao will win this fight, maybe by knockout, and most every act Pacquiao takes will bring him closer to this outcome. Did the knower score round 1 for Pacquiao? Not necessarily. He may well have seen his narrative confirmed; Pacquiao’s lack of aggressiveness evincing a calculated measurement of Juan Manuel Marquez. Or he may have found his narrative disproved and decided Marquez’s remaining upright and unmarked was reason to give Marquez the round.

Point is, no aficionado should watch the first round of any fight burdened by a need to score it for either fighter. Most opening rounds in most championship prizefights are uneventful, even affairs.

I believe this to be true, but I might be wrong.

Greater authority returns next week.

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

SAN ANTONIO – Mexican middleweight titlist Julio Cesar Chavez Jr., known as much for his father’s exploits as his own, is fully aware of what made him famous. He knows he is known for his father’s achievements in boxing more than his own, and he knows he’s known it for a long time too.

Difference is, he no longer accepts, with a frown and a shrug, others’ pointing it out.

Tuesday at Alamodome, Chavez (44-0-1, 31 KOs), in town to announce his Feb. 4 title defense against fellow Mexican Marco Antonio Rubio (53-5-1, 46 KOs) – as part of an HBO “Boxing After Dark” card that will also feature “Filipino Flash” Nonito Donaire (27-1, 18 KOs) and Puerto Rico’s Wilfredo Vazquez Jr. (21-1-1, 18 KOs) in a super bantamweight title match – was at times nonchalant and at times animated, and a little frustrated throughout.

“First they told me that I have to fight Rubio because he is the (WBC) mandatory (challenger),” Chavez said in his native Spanish, in response to a question about his rumored reluctance to fight recognized middleweight world champion Sergio Martinez. “And Rubio says that I will never make that fight because I fear him. I agree to that fight, and now they say that I fear Martinez.

“I fear no one!”

The increased aggressiveness in Chavez’s tone Tuesday marked a frustration born of his last visit to this city in June 2010, a visit that saw him decision John Duddy at Alamodome in an excellent fight Chavez considered a gateway of sorts.

“The night against Duddy was the best of my career,” Chavez said. “I proved that I can be known for more than just the name of my father.”

A title-winning effort, and HBO debut, followed 12 months later, with a match against Sebastian Zbik. Five months after that, Chavez returned to Texas and stopped Peter Manfredo in Houston. Immediately following Chavez’s November win over Manfredo, though, Sergio Martinez stood silently at the postfight press conference, asking lots of questions by his presence alone.

“They want to make money with my name and my fame,” Chavez said of those fighters who have called for a match with him. “Of course I am frustrated.”

For his part, Marco Antonio Rubio was more anxious to right previous wrongs than take Chavez’s name or celebrity.

“We are going to try to correct many errors that we have made in this career,” Rubio said in Spanish, from the press-conference podium.

Rubio’s promoter, Mexican Osvaldo Kuchle, went a few steps further.

“I’ve heard fans say, ‘Maybe Rubio is just here for a payday. Maybe Rubio’s going to take a dive,’” Kuchle said from a press-conference stage overlooking the Alamodome football field that on Saturday will host the 2012 U.S. Army All-American Bowl. “No, this is a fight that is cultural.”

If super bantamweights Nonito Donaire and Wilfredo Vazquez Jr., who both preceded Chavez and Rubio to the podium, were not animated or frustrated as their co-headliners, they were decidedly more charismatic and respectful to one another.

“You become an elite by fighting elite fighters,” Vazquez said in Spanish, before turning to face his February opponent. “Men like Mr. Nonito Donaire.”

“He’s a good person, a great guy, but I know that he comes to fight,” Donaire said about Vazquez, when Donaire’s turn at the dais came. “This is what makes boxing great: Two guys that respect each other but go out there to tear each other’s heads off.”

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

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

***

The day Manny Pacquiao and Juan Manuel Marquez fought their rubber match in November 2011, Las Vegas gazed upon its empty MGM Grand Garden Arena for most of the undercard matches because that is what it does. Friday weigh-ins are for serious fans. Saturday nights sadly are not.

Pacquiao fought Marquez a third time for several reasons. Marquez had traversed the Philippines immediately after their second match, one whose official decision went to Pacquiao and unofficial decision went mostly to Marquez, chiding the Filipino hero, and Pacquiao wanted to end that for posterity’s sake. The other idea was that Marquez, an all-time great featherweight-cum-lightweight, would, at welterweight, make an excellent scalp to toss on the table when negotiations for Pacquiao-Mayweather returned: Not only is Manny a bigger pay-per-view draw, but he obliterated Marquez the way Mayweather could not.

Marquez’s class and pride were such that nobody would blow through him. Not at 126 pounds, not at 143. Pacquiao was a whirligig of oddly canted aggressiveness, one that loudly struck opponents from angles that surprised other prizefighters and made commentators ecstatic. Marquez had no such flair but greater audacity. Where Pacquiao threw jab, jab, leaping cross, Marquez threw uppercut leads, moving forward, in world championship prizefights – just about the ballsiest thing a man can do.

Marquez’s greatness as a counterpuncher, the quality that made his violent defeat essential to the Pacquiao résumé, was too large, finally, and cast shadows on the subject it was there to brighten.

*

The day Manny Pacquiao and Juan Manuel Marquez fought their rubber match in November 2011, Las Vegas shined and sparkled with its usual charm and timeless (clock-less) efficiency. Put everyone off schedule, the city plotted, then charge them to catch up.

Pacquiao had not improved a fraction so much as his publicists declared. A coming documentary about his trainer put a burden on Pacquiao’s technical improvement. If, after all, Pacquiao were but a hyperagressive southpaw who won with activity more than class, any monuments erected to his and his trainer’s greatness would come under scrutiny. Deeply interested parties, then, declared Pacquiao’s technical imperfections innovative, rather than call them what they were: a regression to form.

By the ninth round of his rubber match with Marquez, Pacquiao was aware of his technical inadequacy. He fooled Marquez less this time than the previous two because Marquez promised his trainer he would not look for a knockout and wander into what maniacal exchanges Pacquiao always won. If Pacquiao won his third fight with Marquez, he did it the brute’s way and was simply busier.

A compliant and unimaginative print media paused for a moment at what it saw in rounds 7-11, got the judges’ confirmation all was actually well, and went back to his its prefight narrative. Maybe Marquez did better than expected, perhaps the fight could be called a draw, but, ah, for not closing the show, Marquez did not deserve to win.

No one was fooled, but deadlines were not missed either.

*

The day Manny Pacquiao and Juan Manuel Marquez fought their rubber match in November 2011, Las Vegas assured the country it was not in hard a place as Detroit or New Orleans, the country’s other two depressed cities. Vegas was back, baby! Look at the room prices.

The American economy was rebounding, too. Perhaps growth was illusory, maybe underemployment was nearing record levels, but the job creators were getting some of their wealth back, and that would trickle down to the rest of America eventually. Yes, idiot, it would; didn’t you know anything about economics?

The media area at MGM Grand Garden Arena had the usual dynamic. The first five rows of tables were a cutthroat assembly of the names everyone knew, with most working on deadlines, their laptop monitors guarded closely as poker hands. Then came the girlfriends of Spanish- and Tagalog-language network executives. In the back were the online and magazine writers whose names you didn’t know. They were the most convivial bunch – happy to help one another with the result of the fourth undercard bout or a recollection of that time, somewhere in Mexico, the press had to stand and hold their seats overhead because cups of beer and urine rained on them.

Some of the guys in the back had scored the second half of the fight a whitewash for Marquez and were happy for the Mexican great, happy he might finally have his due, whatever the consequences. Those guys wore stunned, betrayed looks as they shuffled off to the postfight press conference where Pacquiao would have time for only two questions because it was getting late.

*

The day Manny Pacquiao and Juan Manuel Marquez fought their rubber match in November 2011, Las Vegas did the existential dance entrepreneurs often do, promising things were good as they’d ever been, might even be better, sales were up – while expecting others to cheer its fortune-seeking with the same enthusiasm it did.

Nacho Beristain told Marquez he had the fight won during the championship rounds for a couple reasons. As a sculptor of 16 world champions Beristain knew what his eyes told him and hadn’t a doubt his man was winning. And Beristain knew with mathematical certainty Marquez would have been 2-0 against Pacquiao were it not for those four knockdowns in their first two tilts, and then there would have been no reason for a rubber match, or the Pacquiao legend.

After the initial disgust of the 116-112 card wore off and we settled into writing our fight reports, the photocopied scorecard tallies got handed out. When it was revealed Judge Glenn Trowbridge saw Marquez win the 12th round but not the eighth, ninth, 10th or 11th, a secondary, harder-to-dismiss disgust set in.

*

The day Manny Pacquiao and Juan Manuel Marquez fought their rubber match in November 2011, Las Vegas marched on. “See you in May!” it said, with a big grin.

The umbrage passed. Pacquiao lost a few fans. His myth lost genuine and serious-minded advocates, the sort of men who write history. Marquez gained a few fans and returned to Mexico, assured in his greatness. The umbrage passed.

I was in Houston the following week to cover Julio Cesar Chavez’s son and had already forgotten a large part of what happened at 2011’s biggest fight.

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

The day Manny Pacquiao and Juan Manuel Marquez fought their rubber match in November 2011, Las Vegas was in recovery. The city tried to pull itself from the depressed conditions every cabbie was willing to describe during trips to McCarran Airport, in 2009 and 2010. Vegas’ new line was taxi traffic; record-setting or record-tying or something.

Pacquiao-Marquez III was about money and “Money.” The first governs everything in prizefighting, as the second, Floyd “Money” Mayweather, once explained to Shane Mosley. Pacquiao, always quick with his fist when signing contracts as punching, was a market unto himself, hawking defunct tablet computers, imported veggies and iTunes singles. And Pacquiao-Mayweather (whose promotion Pacquiao-Marquez III would help) would be the most important fight in a century or two when it happened.

The media was in a frenzy of Pacquiao celebration, spurred and lashed by promoter Bob Arum, for whom Pacquiao was the final masterpiece of a historic sales career.

The masterpiece underwent a withering inspection, though, and came out lusterless and resented.

Or so I remember it.

*

The day Manny Pacquiao and Juan Manuel Marquez fought their rubber match in November 2011, Las Vegas readied to host an event with the reflexive trickery it has patented: Big events go to Las Vegas because Las Vegas hosts only big events.

With the world economy still receding, prizefighting watched its pay-per-view receipts plummet. There were two or three major events every year that yielded considerably less revenue than the 10 smaller events that happened five years before. It meant even the sport’s two biggest promotional outfits were now humbled in their wares if not their oratory.

Pacquiao would blow through Marquez, the older, smaller, slower opponent whom he’d already officially beaten and drawn with, and after stopping Marquez violently and abruptly – something Money May did not do while dominating Marquez in 2009 – Pacquiao would redeem the sport and his handlers’ coffers, with The Fight to Save Boxing, then approaching its third year of marination.

The print media picked Pacquiao overwhelmingly enough to wonder not if Marquez could win or even remain conscious but if Marquez could escape Pacquiao’s ferocity with any remnants of his health intact. And by night’s end, when the ring announcer read “and still champion!” and Pacquiao raised his hands, we all felt a little sheepish and disgusted.

*

The day Manny Pacquiao and Juan Manuel Marquez fought their rubber match in November 2011, Las Vegas said it was coming back, of course, but was it really? Strolls through the basement mall of MGM Grand substantiated none of the rosy reports one heard in the restaurants above.

There were dark tones beneath the rubber match, and they began to glow. Manny Pacquiao, accused of using performance-enhancing drugs, agreed unconditionally to prefight testing if Money May demanded it for their match, the one to come after Pacquiao blew through Marquez. Or Pacquiao didn’t agree. No one was clear about this. The facts changed hourly. Obfuscating insiders fed reports to websites that copied, pasted and published anything emailed their way. Then Juan Manuel Marquez revealed a theretofore-concealed sense of irony and hired a former PED distributor as his strength coach. And he sure wasn’t smaller when he hit the scale at the weigh-in, that tired prefight event used to promote the next day’s match to those unable to afford a pre-sold/post-scalped ticket for Saturday. There, the only memorable thing was a line from a fellow scribe who treated the week’s PED controversy and concluded: “Hell, they’re all probably on something, so I say, ‘Smoke’em if you got’em!’”

So many questions. How would Pacquiao fare against Mayweather when they fought after Pacquiao ruined Marquez? Would Mayweather, frightened by the way Pacquiao blitzed Marquez, find a new reason not to make the fight? Would Pacquiao retire from boxing before becoming president of the Philippines?

And then in the hour after the fight: Did any knowledgeable spectator still think Pacquiao could win more than a round against Money May, if The Fight that Might Have Saved Boxing ever did happen?

Thanks a bunch, Juan Manuel.

*

The day Manny Pacquiao and Juan Manuel Marquez fought their rubber match in November 2011, Las Vegas felt a little tired. Such straining had been done so hopelessly for so many months, a churning through so many new valets and carving-station chefs. Was it still any use?

Pacquiao approached his third fight with an unusual savageness. He wanted to stop Marquez and all the witless banter about Marquez winning one if not both of their previous matches. Pacquiao went to work on the handpads and heavybags at Freddie Roach’s Wild Card Boxing Club in a way that left Roach and others taken aback. This one was personal for Manny.

Many kilometers south, in Mexico City, Marquez mostly did what he always did. It was a system that worked fine. His trainer, Nacho Beristain, prophesied that this new, refined Pacquiao, this two-handed puncher with improved footwork and a right hook perilous as his left cross, was, if anything, an easier mark for Marquez – for being predictable. If Beristain was fearful, or even aware, of the ferociousness Pacquiao planned for his charge, Beristain did an excellent imitation of a trainer who was not.

In round 6 of their third match, Marquez began to undress Pacquiao before a full MGM Grand Garden Arena. He revealed the masterful job Pacquiao’s promoter had done of building the Pacquiao brand against increasingly bigger and more shop-worn opponents. Pacquiao had seen no one with Marquez’s understanding of another man in combat since the last time he fought Marquez. That was no accident. Making a third fight with Marquez sure as hell was.

We were assembled at our press tables to help lift Pacquiao-Mayweather from longshot to inevitability in the days after Pacquiao leveled Marquez. But after what Marquez did to Pacquiao, we quietly awaited justice, however unpalatable. When the 116-112 scorecard came in, we accepted Marquez’s victory and spent five or so seconds plotting our sport’s next step.

When “and still champion” followed the 116-112 scorecard, most of us shook our heads, and the rest muttered “bullshit.”

***

Editor’s note: Part 2 will be published on Jan. 2.

On a perfect evening in the ring, a night when American Andre Ward and Englishman Carl Froch both were able to make their very best fight, Ward would win. The only circumstance under which Froch could prevail, then, is an off-night for Ward. Froch realized this Saturday, and it razed his spirit. It meant no matter his willfulness or tenacity, he was not the world’s best super middleweight.

Such broken-spiritedness tempered by stubborn professionalism is what Froch showed the waning moments of his match with Ward at Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City, Saturday, in the championship of the Super Six World Boxing Classic. Ward prevailed, of course, by unanimous scores of 118-110, 115-113 and 115-113.

My card concurred with the judges’: 117-113. I scored rounds 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7 and 12 for Ward. I scored rounds 5, 9 and 11 for Froch. And I had rounds 7 and 10 even.

Ward won the fight. Nothing said this more eloquently than Froch’s face when the final bell sounded. Froch was a beaten, disappointed, proud man who had been given the opportunity he’d awaited his entire career and learned he was not great as he’d hoped. That two judges had the fight decided by a single round was just, insofar as the round went Ward’s way. Three scores of 115-113 for Ward would have been no problem; a draw or decision for Froch would have been unfortunate.

“I was actually surprised by how slow Froch was,” Ward said after the fight.

There are lots of old sayings in boxing, clichés we call “sayings” to spare their speakers, and one is that you cannot teach speed. But you can teach a fighter to offset another’s speed – as Juan Manuel Marquez thrice proved against Manny Pacquiao – with practice, timing and introspection. Yes, introspection. You cannot teach a fighter to offset another’s speed till he admits the other man is faster.

Such an admission Froch’s camp never drew from their man in training camp. Froch, who calls himself “The Cobra,” did not believe Ward, with his shorter frame, could get his left fist to Froch’s face quickly as Froch could do the same to Ward. It was a miscalculation born of Froch’s hubris, hubris that has taken him much farther in prizefighting than any but his familiars predicted.

That Ward realized he was faster than Froch for every instant of the match’s opening nine minutes cannot be disputed. What Ward chose to do with that advantage, though, is what makes him unique among undefeated American fighters. Ward went inside. Leading 3-0 after the first quarter, Ward went for Froch’s heart. He put himself on Froch’s chest and tried to break the larger man’s body the way he’d already cracked his spirit. It didn’t work – Froch was still there with three rounds to go, and gaining speed too – but it was a hell of a noble idea on Ward’s part.

Did Ward tire late because he lacked conditioning? No. Ward tired in the closing rounds because Steve Smoger did a job that should be shown at referee clinics round the world. Referee Smoger watched Ward and Froch tangle their limbs in the match’s opening seconds and didn’t break them. He stood well back and said resolve your differences like men and prizefighters.

There was something splendid about Smoger’s inactivity. His silence told Ward and Froch that if they were to lunge at one another gracelessly and tie themselves in a knot, he would not be the one to work their ways out of it. The choice then became: Expend energy pulling your arms from between the opponent’s elbow and ribcage, or catch his head and shoulder and free fist in your face.

In the fight’s opening half, Froch was discomfited by Smoger’s inactivity, drooping his arms behind Ward’s back, looking frantically over and round Ward’s bobbing head. In the later rounds, it was Ward, unable to retreat or set traps behind a late-arriving southpaw stance, who wanted Smoger’s help. But Smoger did not intervene, and Ward had to earn his victory by winning the final round. As it should be.

“He was too close,” Froch said about Ward’s attack. “Or he was too far out of range.”

If Froch’s countenance in the moment of the final bell was the fight’s most eloquent commentary, that line above is a close runner-up. It is the very definition of championship prizefighting. Ward made Froch uncomfortable by doing nothing how Froch wanted him to, for 36 minutes, on the largest stage of his career.

Perhaps Ward is not inspiring to an impoverished nation the way Pacquiao is. Certainly Ward is not provocative as Floyd Mayweather. But if the path to greatness is a long and anfractuous one, Ward has yet to step off it. In a moment of quiet contemplation, that is, can you think of a fighter who is likely to have a greater body of work in the next decade than Andre Ward?

Ah, but Boardwalk Hall was damn quiet while your future legend practiced on Froch! Yes, how unfortunate. It allowed cynics to look at Ward-Froch, a consequential fight between highly regarded tacticians in an empty American arena, and see an ironical bookend to a year that began in Pontiac Silverdome. If Ward-Froch deserves a pass, it is because the match was a made-by-television event.

But the Super Six is over, and Showtime, as the super middleweight division’s de facto sanctioning body, needs to set a new course. A venue for Andre Ward versus Canada’s Lucian Bute, a fight the network is now obliged to make, should be chosen thusly: Whoever bids the lowest licensing-fee-to-live-gate ratio. Tie promoters’ compensation to their ability to make live crowds, and see what happens.

Prizefighting is not the Super Bowl. The idea of neutral venues has proved asinine. Ward-Bute must happen in Oakland or Montreal, not Atlantic City or Las Vegas.

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

There is a conditional clause still in place on the Boxing Writers Association of America’s 2011 ballot for Fighter of the Year. It reads: “Winner Ward-Froch.” That box already has my checkmark. If Andre Ward beats Carl Froch Saturday, he will be the 2011 Fighter of the Year. If Froch prevails, he will win the honor. If there’s a draw, I’ll vote for both of them.

The BWAA does not have a Fighter of the Last Two Years category, but if it did, the winner of Froch-Ward would deserve that honor too.

Whichever man wins Saturday at Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City – to claim Showtime’s inaugural Super Six World Boxing Classic championship – will have done something unprecedented among modern prizefighters at the championship level. He will have spent two years in the same weight class with five equals and outlasted each of them. The winner of Ward-Froch will have accomplished more in the years 2009-2011 than Manny Pacquiao and Floyd Mayweather combined.

That is something to consider when the eulogistic throat-clearing grows this week. As every treatment of Saturday’s final begins with “After two years of cancellations and postponements and withdrawals, when the ill-conceived Super Six finally, finally, finally crowns a winner . . .” you’ll be well advised to ignore it. Anyone who watches Saturday already knows the Super Six’s history and is familiar with the misfortunes that visited the tournament. He also knows the two men fighting for its title are original members who’ve outlasted all comers.

It demeans what Froch and Ward have done to dwell on those who made questionable withdrawals from the Super Six. Those three men – the Americans Jermain Taylor and Andre Dirrell, and the Dane Mikkel Kessler – are all either back in the prizefighting ring or planning a return. Their withdrawals, then, should be treated as simple eliminations.

Since neither of the replacement fighters brought in on short notice made his way to the finals, we needn’t dwell either on Jamaican Glen Johnson or American Allan Green.

That leaves Armenian Arthur Abraham, whose legacy as an indestructible force suffered mightily in his matches with Froch and Ward. For having made it to every match he was assigned, though, Abraham retains the respect of aficionados who appreciate what durability he showed.

Durability, after all, proved to be the tournament’s most important quality. At the beginning of the Super Six, who thought England’s Carl “The Cobra” Froch would be a finalist? And whatever handful of Brits that was got halved after Froch’s odd victory over Dirrell. Yet, here he is – unbowed if still unheralded.

While the more heralded Brit Amir Khan, to choose a timely example, was beating up light-hitting Paulie Malignaggi and running from Marcos Maidana, Froch chased the reluctant Dirrell and made one of the best fights of 2010 with Kessler – a scrap brutal enough to eliminate Kessler from the Super Six. While Khan was blowing through someone named Paul McCloskey and a spent Zab Judah, Froch outboxed Abraham and outworked Johnson. And while Khan was making his tangle-footed retreat from an 8-1 underdog named Lamont Peterson on Saturday, Froch was readying to go chest-to-chest with a fighter every bit special as he is.

For American Andre “S.O.G. (Son of God)” Ward is now a proven-to-be-special entity. Or as Ward recently put it, “I won an Olympic gold medal and am undefeated in 23 fights as a professional, so we must be doing something right.”

Compare that dignity to the brashness young Floyd Mayweather, an Olympic bronze medalist, exhibited in 2000, when he was 23-0. Within that delta, actually, lies part of the charm of Saturday’s fight: It does not play to stereotypes.

Froch, the light-skinned European, is the flamboyant one in Saturday’s match. He is the man likely to drop his hands and show-up an opponent. Froch is the one who does not hesitate to discuss his hypothetical greatness.

Ward, meanwhile, the black American from Oakland, is the soft-spoken, serious man in Saturday’s finals. He cares little how he looks while winning. Ward is the one who employs measured language, comporting himself as a picture of accountability.

This was clearest in Showtime’s recent “Staredown” program. Though unoriginal in a copyright-infringement kind of way, “Staredown” nevertheless proved much better than the recent HBO spectacle of a Puerto Rican speaking English to a Mexican. For being in their native language at least, Froch and Ward offered revelatory tidbits and were much better than cliché-tossing avatars.

Ward surprised Froch by candidly saying he was hurt in his seventh professional fight by Darnell Boone, a man whose name Froch could not recall but Ward quickly did. Froch then surprised Ward by agreeing that having one’s chin compared to granite – as Froch’s now is – is often the result of poor choices.

Then Froch inadvertently predicted the likely outcome of Saturday’s match.

“I’m telling you now, categorically, you cannot render me unconscious,” Froch said. “I can knock you out with either hand.”

Both men believe that. Ward is quite certain Froch can knock him out. He also knows a knockout of Froch is improbable. And that is why Ward will probably win the Super Six championship.

Ward will not relent. He will not come off Froch’s chest. He will not rely on a punch to change the fight’s path but hundreds of punches. He will not be prone to mental lapses – like what Froch suffered after staggering Kessler – and he will not wonder if his attire befits the world’s best super middleweight, the way such considerations seem occasionally to wrap gauze round Froch’s otherwise clear thinking.

There’s no telling how this match will end. Everything everyone has predicted about this tournament has been wrong often enough for every prognosticator to be humbled.

That written, I’ll take Ward, SD-12, and be certain Saturday’s winner is Fighter of the Last Two Years.

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

The narrative of Cotto-Margarito II will say Miguel Cotto, inspired by tens of thousands of his countrymen within Madison Square Garden, gained a richly satisfying vengeance on Mexican Antonio Margarito in 2011, confirming everything he believed about Margarito’s criminality in their 2008 match and restoring Puerto Rican pride across the land. Ah, sweet revenge.

That narrative will have plenty of technical accuracies but will be, in its general fabric, something quite different from what happened. It will extirpate the anxious moments fans, and Cotto, endured through the match and sue posterity to change its semi-satisfying conclusion for what great imagery is conjured by: Cotto, TKO-10.

That was the official mark Saturday. After Margarito’s surgically repaired right eye swelled shut in the middle part of the fight, a ringside physician could abide no more of its closure before round 10 and waved the match off, one Cotto was winning by wide margins on all three official scorecards. Cotto was relieved and content. Margarito was defiant. It was a result whose satisfaction will grow with the years, one imagines, because right now it’s less than Cotto’s fans hoped for.

Before anyone rebuts that assertion, straining his voice to declare full satisfaction, he should ask himself: On Friday afternoon, if someone told me Margarito would be smiling and whooping at Cotto in Saturday’s final round, before giving an obstinate postfight interview and leaving the ring under his own power, would I have told that person “Completely satisfied in every way, thank you”?

How this fight is remembered, though, does tell us something about the way a known result affects subsequent reviews. For three years, knowing Cotto ultimately succumbed to Margarito in the 11th round of their first meeting, we have watched the precise combinations Cotto landed in that fight’s opening 15 minutes and told ourselves they were not effective as they appeared. Margarito walked through them; look, he’s nodding and smiling the whole way! And knowing the probability Margarito had hardening pads over his middle knuckles, we have also imagined Margarito’s every awkward right cross as ruinous to Cotto’s head and heart.

When we revisit Saturday’s rematch, we’ll play a similar trick on ourselves, admiring Cotto’s precise combinations, and forgetting the tension we felt as Cotto opened his eyes and bleeding mouth, wide, in the sixth round and hurriedly retreated the length of the canvas, post to post.

If the absence of a plaster-like substance on Margarito’s knuckles made a difference, its difference was not large as Cotto’s change in tactics. Though he never did manage to show Margarito a well-leveraged left hook to the body, not once in their 20 rounds together really, Cotto did do one thing much better in the rematch: He got on Margarito’s chest.

Margarito is a wild-swinging confusion of long limbs when he is comfortable and significantly less than that when he is not. Cotto’s trainer, Pedro Diaz, caught this while studying tapes of Margarito’s match with Shane Mosley and told Cotto to put his forehead under Margarito’s chin and push him backwards to the ropes – off of which Margarito fights worse than a novice. Cotto was able to lean on Margarito and endure the Mexican’s cuffing right hands, because without a running start Margarito doesn’t hit very hard at all.

Or maybe the knuckle pads were the difference. Ask someone who was at ringside.

At the risk of offending egalitarian sensibilities, sensibilities that tell an American his perspective is usually better than anyone else’s, it’s worth mentioning that a guy at ringside always has a better bead on a fight than a guy at home. There are elements to home viewing that are superior, yes – sometimes you’re even able to hear between-rounds corner instructions over network sales pitches – but you do not have the same feel for a fight that you would at ringside.

The punches sound different, with television microphones somehow flattening their acoustics and making them all equal. The crowd is an altered entity. From ringside, you are able to see the arena and all its moving parts in a panorama that, while noisy, lends you a deeper perspective on the event’s mood. The benefits of being in a press box are often overstated, but the benefits of being within 75 feet of gloved combat cannot be.

Does this mean every ringside scorecard is correct? No. There’s a herding element to ringside scoring – the way consensus-seekers fan out among press-row tables, telling you others’ scores before asking your own – that compromises what is later published. But when a ringside writer tells you his general sense of a result or crowd, give him the benefit of every doubt, no matter what you saw through television’s narrowing eye.

The ringside consensus seems to be that Saturday night was a joy for Puerto Rican fans who turned out to see Cotto gain vengeance. Is it possible a deep sense of relief is being misinterpreted as euphoria? It is. If Miguel Cotto didn’t think Antonio Margarito’s punches were nearly so hard this time as they were in their first fight, he did a hell of an impersonation of a guy who did.

But then, there is something about a larger man with a maniacal grin on his face and cornrows chasing after you that will always be unsettling – Margarito racingracngracing after Cotto, whooping, his feet a messwards back, his overright hand throwing, his heading bob a target, his up leftercut sailing.

There is something equally undoing, though, in Cotto’s cold precision, left hands followed by rights, all landing flush till victory.

So goes the seasoning of memories that shape a narrative hardening into fact.

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

Saturday’s rematch between Mexican Antonio Margarito and Puerto Rican Miguel Cotto is about revenge. It is not about establishing primacy at the kooky catchweight of 153 pounds or resolving some residual doubt from their first encounter. It is about satisfying the bloodlust Puerto Ricans feel because of the ruin Margarito brought to their guy’s career in 2008.

Once you admit this fight appeals to nothing but a sense of vengeance, you can suspend other moral considerations. And once that’s done, all the Margarito-Cotto II pieces fall happily into place.

Tuesday afternoon the New York State Athletic Commission tossed a fig leaf of plausible deniability over a few of the other moral considerations that might otherwise flash us from Madison Square Garden during Saturday night’s pay-per-view event. After a sympathetic doctor was finally located to underwrite the condition of Margarito’s surgically repaired right eye and/or orbital bone, deniability was established: If Margarito is blinded by Cotto, why, it will be an accident like any other – the very sort of thing every fighter risks whenever he dons gloves.

At this moment (as opposed to the heartfelt recriminations sure to come if tragedy strikes), does anyone besides Margarito’s wife care if the worst happens to Margarito? No. Not even Margarito cares. Frankly, he’s about to make a pretty rational decision; he’s risking the sight in one eye to make millions of dollars. Who among us wouldn’t do the same in this economy?

Margarito should not be in this fight. After a plaster-like substance was found on pads placed over his knuckles before a 2009 match with Shane Mosley, Margarito was stretched by Mosley and banned from the sport. He earned a pay-per-view fight with Manny Pacquiao 22 months later by acquiring a phony light middleweight title and being a Mexican expected to draw countrymen to Cowboys Stadium, where he was summarily undone by a man structurally not 2/3 his size. He earned Saturday’s fight by having two surgeries.

Margarito’s only real qualification for facing Cotto is the ire he now causes Puerto Ricans. That ire comes from the universally held suspicion Margarito used the very same pads against Cotto he was about to use against Mosley. If you were in MGM Grand Garden Arena on July 26, 2008 and happened to look at the screen above the ring and see Cotto’s misshapen face, it was probably the first image that came in your mind when, five months later, you learned what happened in Margarito’s dressing room before his fight with Mosley.

If that is conjecture, it is conjecture of the most damning sort, something no amount of pettifogging by Margarito’s lawyers can undo. Witnesses to Margarito-Cotto I know what they saw, know how much it meant to them at the time, pro or con, and know what Margarito did to their memories is unforgivable.

Cotto has not been the same since his match with Margarito. He says he was criminally assaulted in their first fight. Whatever else Cotto might be, he is decidedly not a salesman; he would rather see Margarito in jail than across a boxing ring from him.

Because this fight is about Puerto Rican vengeance, it could not logically happen anywhere but Madison Square Garden, Cotto’s home field. When the NYSAC began its bluster routine a couple weeks back, there was talk about other venues in other states. But this fight was destined for New York or bust.

How do we know that? Miguel Cotto told us.

In an ill-advised Tuesday conference call, an event to have Cotto tell us only that he felt strong, Cotto was asked about the still-festering controversy concerning his fight’s venue. Cotto knew of no controversy; if the NYSAC didn’t license Margarito, Cotto would not fight him. Promoter Bob Arum then declared his own conference call “really not appropriate” and told his publicist to end it.

Which brings us to a note about media access: Beware of promoters bearing scoops.

Two weeks ago, during Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. fightweek festivities in Houston, a reporter from a prominent magazine misunderstood the access Arum granted him. He wrote about alternate Margarito-Cotto II venues in states far-flung as Colorado and Mississippi. He was aflutter with possible venue changes and proud to breakfast with Arum. But his only real role was to be Arum’s megaphone as the wily old promoter applied pressure to the politically appointed folks hovering round the NYSAC’s licensing decision.

One of the ironies of Margarito’s post-Mosley career is that Arum has been more comfortable playing villain than Margarito has. Margarito wears the dark glasses and makes fun of Cotto’s whining, sure, but it’s obvious to anyone who knows Margarito that he desperately wants to be liked, not hated. Margarito’s transformation from the beloved figure he was after beating Cotto to the infamous character he now plays makes as much sense to him as those agility drills he does on HBO’s “24/7” program, and twice as much sense as whatever he’s supposed to be accomplishing with that slip rope they keep stringing across the ring posts.

Margarito’s role Saturday is to be easy for Cotto to hit. Sans hardening agent on his middle knuckles, it is unlikely Margarito will punch with force enough to stop Cotto a second time. Cotto would certainly like to beat Margarito or even stop him – it would confirm everything Cotto believes happened to his career – but it is not what is most important to him.

What is most important to Cotto is not being stopped by Margarito a second time. Do not expect, then, some frenzied and grudge-induced attack in the center of the ring. Expect Cotto to move and box like a man who does not want to find his legs gone in round 9, would very much like to win, and hopes he might do to Margarito what Mosley did.

Expect, in other words, revenge served cold: Cotto, UD-12.

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

HOUSTON – And there was Sergio Martinez lurking stage left, both taller and thinner than he appears on television. He was at the postfight press conference on the second floor of Reliant Center to supervise, not make trouble. Martinez’s class prohibited him from upstaging Julio Cesar Chavez Jr., calling him out or demanding his garish WBC belt back.

Martinez did not have an entourage, certainly no one stunning as the phalanx of tight-dressed chicas that followed Chavez in the converted media center. What Martinez did have, though, was presence and a star’s piercing confidence. “I would knock him out,” Martinez said quietly in his native Spanish, when asked what would happen in a match with Chavez. “Yes, he’s improved, I see a little difference in his speed, but I would knock him out, don’t you think?”

So it tends to go for Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. Even after a fight Chavez’s promoter called “the best performance by Julio that I’ve seen,” Chavez struggled for respect when his turn at the microphone came. Two seats to the left was his father, Mexico prizefighting’s greatest living practitioner. Twenty feet from Dad was the world’s middleweight champion. About all Chavez could muster in the moment was a “¡soy muy contento!” he repeated so often even his sycophantic advisor Fernando Beltran teased him.

Chavez is not ready for Martinez – the one thing everyone agreed on after Chavez’s fantastic stoppage of Rhode Islander Peter Manfredo Jr. at 1:52 of round 5, Saturday – but he’s a hell of a lot closer to being ready for elite middleweights than anyone predicted he might be eight, or even three, years ago.

After fewer than 15 minutes in a ring with Chavez, Manfredo, who announced his retirement after Saturday’s match, sounded a whole lot like John Duddy 17 months ago in a postfight press conference at Alamodome, exactly 200 miles west of here.

“You never got me down, Ray!” Manfredo said in a passable homage to Robert De Niro’s Jake LaMotta in “Raging Bull.” Then he said, “I’m happy for (Chavez), proud of him. And you should be proud of him, too.”

Everything about Chavez was better than the last time he fought. Everything about Chavez was better, then, than the time before that. And the time before that marked Chavez’s first camp with trainer Freddie Roach. If Roach’s ever-improving-Pacquiao narrative suffered some exposure by Juan Manuel Marquez two Saturdays ago, his ever-improving-Chavez narrative held up just fine in East Texas.

Chavez now has a man’s body. Nowhere was this clearer than on the Reliant Arena media credential, a laminated green card that featured a goofy-bearded Chavez wearing the small shoulders and bird’s breast of an adolescent. Saturday’s version, conversely, was clean-shaven and muscular.

Chavez throws his jab with greater meaning and effect now than he did in 2009. His right guard flies off his cheek, yes, but that just opens him to counter crosses. And what follows each time Chavez gets tagged by a right hand makes excellent theater.

Chavez is more introspective than you think. He knows you have snickered about him for eight years. He senses that American writers have glanced at his resume and joked about the war he made on the Big Ten.

He has taken all this in what sporting good spirit the world’s privileged class shows the rest of us. In public, Chavez is self-deprecating and respectful.

And then you hit him. He takes that sort of thing far more personally than an average prizefighter. It verily pisses him off, and he goes after you with a special fury members of his class reserve for aspiring usurpers. These days, too, Chavez’s right hand is wicked enough to put down an uprising.

That right hand, and the wholly improved footwork that sets it up, represent layers Chavez has added to his self-portrait. And great portraits are all about layers.

Nowhere is that clearer in this ever-muggy city than at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston – a couple miles northeast of Reliant Arena, beside the campus of Rice University. Through February, MFAH is running a Dutch and Flemish Masterworks exhibition that features, among other acts of genius, Rembrandt’s “Portrait of Aechje Claesdr” – a well-preserved work that first showed 17th century connoisseurs young Rembrandt Van Rijn’s singular talent.

The Flemish Master approach to painting that Rembrandt learned, perfected and improved relies on the use of seven layers. Each layer – from ink cartooning to umber underlayer to finishing palette – is applied to enhance what follows. The miracle of this approach – for if miracles exist, a miracle it surely is – comes in time’s thinning effect on oil paint. Over centuries, the oils used by the Flemish Masters have lost some of their body, allowing each painting’s underlayers to shine through. Rembrandt’s paintings, then, glow with colors more brilliantly now than when he applied them almost 500 years ago. Go ahead and think of anything we’re doing today about which that will be said in the year 2650.

One imagines Sergio Martinez would be fascinated by this approach more readily than Chavez. Martinez is closer to a master prizefighter, and more cerebral. His brilliance of motion and physical self-awareness, too, dwarf Chavez’s.

But Chavez’s apprenticeship in this brutal game has been striking. As his trainer hastens to note, Chavez understands the shape and nature of a boxing ring better than his resume predicts. Chavez has neither his father’s nor Martinez’s economy of motion, but he has confidence complemented by a willingness to engage those who offend him.

“This game has taught me how to be a strong-minded individual,” said a retiring Peter Manfredo, after Chavez stopped him Saturday. “But my kids won’t even look at (boxing). I won’t even order the pay-per-view for them.”

Chavez’s dad chose differently. Boxing continues to be entertained by that choice.

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

HOUSTON – Mexican Julio Cesar Chavez may never win fighter of the year, but if the Boxing Writers Association of America gave out a Most Improved Fighter award, Chavez would likely be a perennial finalist.

Saturday night at Reliant Arena in a WBC middleweight title fight broadcast on HBO’s “Boxing After Dark” program, Chavez (44-0-1-1, 32 KOs) outworked, outboxed and ultimately outslugged Rhode Islander Peter Manfredo Jr. (37-7, 20 KOs), stopping him at 1:52 of round 5.

After a fairly even open, one that saw Chavez employ a snapping left jab that was not part of his arsenal when his career began eight years ago, in round 2, Chavez began to show improved footwork to complement his improved physique, gliding away from Manfredo and landing left hooks and right crosses. The third round saw Chavez drop his hands and nudge backwards, luring Manfredo towards him then lacing him with right-hand leads.

After having his best round in the fourth, Manfredo came out his corner in the fifth and began to pressure an uncharacteristically relaxed Chavez. At the midway point of the round, Manfredo caught Chavez with a right cross that knocked the sweat of the young Mexican’s head. That effective aggressiveness proved to be a mistake by Manfredo.

A moment later, an angered Chavez launched a right hand that straightened Manfredo up and made him blink. And in the time it took to complete those blinks, Chavez swarmed Manfredo, causing referee Lawrence Cole to rush to Manfredo’s rescue and wave the match off after 30 seconds of sustained abuse.

Afterwards, an inspired Chavez, watched by recognized middleweight world champion Sergio Martinez from ringside, said, “I want to fight the best.”

Manfredo, who said before the fight that he would retire if he lost, looked and sounded dismayed in a postfight interview that was likely the last of his career.

JOSE PINZON VS. LARRY SMITH
If Mexican Jose Pinzon expected to look good against a guy who goes by the cognomen “Too Slow,” he ended up as disappointed as the evening’s partisan-Mexican crowd.

In Saturday’s final undercard bout, one that proved a weak appetizer for what was to follow, Pinzon (21-2-1, 13 KOs) applied a workmanlike pace to Dallas super welterweight Larry Smith (10-8, 7 KOs) and grinded out a win all three official judges scored 79-72 in his favor.

To a chorus of his countrymen’s boos, Pinzon moved forward and engaged Smith, even when it appeared neither man was much interested in a confrontation. Throwing tentative left hooks at Smith’s high and tight guard, Pinzon stayed busy enough to deserve his victory if not fans’ adoration.

LUCKY BOY OMOTOSO VS. LANARDO TYNER
Detroit welterweight Lanardo “Pain Server” Tyner is one of boxing’s rarest sorts: A trashtalker who has a chin and is unafraid to prove it. He fights with a smile and other antics and wins over the crowd, regardless of his matches’ final tallies.

Saturday’s performance – a fight he ultimately lost to undefeated Nigerian Lucky Boy Omotoso (20-0, 17 KOs) by unanimous scores of 79-73, 79-73 and 78-74 – was no exception for Tyner (25-5-2, 15 KOs), who had even former world champion Roy Jones Jr. laughing from his ringside seat.

Tyner employed hip rolls instead of shoulder rolls and collected some hellish right crosses from the longer and sharper Nigerian. But Tyner also entertained the Houston crowd, ensuring he’ll be back for future undercard performances.

ALEX SAUCEDO VS. CEDRIC SHEPPARD
Professional debuts can be tricky things, especially when they happen in a rival state that shares a border with one’s own. Oklahoma welterweight Alex Saucedo, though, made his look easy.

Saucedo (1-0, 1 KO) kept a measured pace till he saw openings against Austin’s Cedric Sheppard (0-2), and once those openings were found, Saucedo attacked and stopped the Texan at 2:28 of round 1.

MICKEY BEY VS. HECTOR VELAZQUEZ
Cleveland’s Mickey Bey may have Floyd Mayweather Jr.’s dad in his corner, but he sure doesn’t have Mayweather’s defense.

Matched against Tijuana lightweight Hector Velazquez (51-17-3-1, 35 KOs) in Saturday’s fifth fight, Bey (18-0-1, 9 KOs) kept his lead hand low and his leaping left hooks predictable but still managed to prevail by unanimous decision scores of 76-75, 78-73 and 77-74. The Reliant Arena crowd was animated in its disapproval of the official result.

Velazquez caught a wild-cocked Bey left hook with a well-timed hook of his own in the second minute of round 2, sending the undefeated Ohioan to the blue mat, from which Bey rose at a count of seven to weather the next 60 seconds of Velazquez’s assault. From there on, Bey kept his distance and got through a fight that could easily have been scored for Velazquez.

IVAN OTERO VS. GINO ESCAMILLA
In a well-contested and close four-round featherweight match between two Texans, undefeated local favorite Ivan Otero (7-0, 1 KO) and Laredo’s Gino Escamilla (5-11-1, 2 KOs), Houston’s Otero prevailed, much to the crowd’s delight, by majority decision scores of 38-38, 39-37 and 40-36.

A score of 38-38 might have been a bit too close and 40-36 was absolutely too wide, but the light-hitting Otero made an entertaining match with Escamilla, ensuring future appearances for him in this city.

JOSHUA CLOTTEY VS. CALVIN GREEN
Ghanaian Joshua “Grand Master” Clottey (36-4-0-1, 22 KOs) used the nickname “Hitter” for most of his career. He changed to “Grand Master” shortly before his abortive 2010 scrap with Manny Pacquiao in Cowboys Stadium. Saturday, he returned “Hitter” form against Texas super welterweight Calvin Green (21-7-1, 13 KOs), blasting him out with a left-hook lead at 1:56 of round 2.

Texas fans who’d last seen Clottey playing timid turtle behind a shell defense against Pacquiao had to be surprised by the more aggressive fighter they saw Saturday. Clottey was all business, attaining his first victory since 2008 in impressive fashion.

LUIS ZARAZUA VS. RICARDO AVILA
In a four-round battle of Texas featherweights, Edinburg’s Luis Zarazua (2-0, 1 KO) had former champion Jesus “El Matador” Chavez in his corner. That was appropriate, because against San Antonio’s outmatched Ricardo Avila (1-6), Zarazua was all bull, charging Avila relentlessly and winning a unanimous decision all three judges scored 40-36.

From the opening 30 seconds – a half minute Avila was lucky to finish on his feet – Zarazua established a superiority of class and power, blitzing Avila with left hooks galore to the body and a few to the protective cup, even dropping Avila with a low blow in round 2. But Avila displayed a noteworthy chin and heart, winging right crosses and somehow enduring to the match’s closing bell.

MARCUS JOHNSON VS. WILLIAM BAILEY
Saturday’s action began with a six-round light heavyweight match between undefeated Texas boxer-puncher “Too Much” Marcus Johnson (21-0, 15 KOs) and California brawler William Bailey (10-13, 4 KOs), a match Johnson won easily by unanimous decision scores of 60-53, 60-53 and 60-52.

After establishing his superiority of reflex early, Johnson caught Bailey with enough force to knock his mouthpiece out in the fourth round. The referee then allowed Bailey to bend and drag his glove across the blue mat in an effort to retrieve the fallen mouthpiece. Technically, it was a knockdown, but since little that Bailey did in Saturday’s opener was technical, no one stood on formality. The remaining two rounds were a formality of their own, as Bailey cruised to an easy victory.

Opening bell rang on an echo-filled Reliant Arena at 6:16 PM local time. Saturday’s attendance was estimated at 5,000.

LAS VEGAS – After a frustrated but triumphant Juan Manuel Marquez addressed a large crowd in the MGM Grand media center Saturday, a chastened Freddie Roach came to the dais without Manny Pacquiao. The many-times Trainer of the Year said he needed to do his job better and that Marquez – and Floyd Mayweather – would always pose trouble for his charge. A while later, Pacquiao showed up with a white bandage over his right eye.

Promoter Bob Arum introduced Pacquiao and then, citing the late hour, of all things, declared there was time for only two questions – about a tenth of what Marquez had fielded. There were no ballads to be sung, no postfight Pacquiao concert to announce. Instead, Pacquiao gave a meandering answer about the difficulty of meeting high expectations, one that ended with these words:

“The fight is not that happy.”

Well said. In the third, and least, match of the trilogy they concluded Saturday, Pacquiao and Marquez did not have the frantic exchanges that made their first two fights so rich. Instead, they made a match that demonstrated Marquez’s superiority of class and Pacquiao’s superiority of energy. It was a suspenseful but undramatic spectacle Marquez won, whatever the judges said about it.

Majority-decision, Pacquiao: 114-114, 115-113 and 116-112. That was the official verdict.

My ringside scorecard disagreed: 117-113, Marquez. I had rounds 2, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11 for Marquez. Rounds 3, 4 and 6 went to Pacquiao. I had rounds 1 and 12 even. Frankly, I had Marquez undressing Pacquiao in the second half of the fight. I also marked four rounds – the third, fourth, sixth and seventh – close enough to be even. Make of that what you will.

The way scorekeeper Glenn Trowbridge arrived at his 116-112 tally deserves a spot of consideration. Trowbridge had Pacquiao sweeping rounds 8, 9, 10 and 11. Then he saw Marquez win the 12th. What Trowbridge saw Marquez do in the fight’s final three minutes that Marquez did not do in the 12 that preceded them is anyone’s guess.

Here’s mine: Trowbridge goofed. That 12th round scored for Marquez is a resounding oops – a way of compensating for an 8-3 tally in a close fight. There’s likely nothing nefarious here; a ringside scorekeeper simply got overtaken by the moment and judged badly. Life goes on.

Marquez said about as much after the fight. He said he was not sure he would bother continuing to be a prizefighter. He said he knew he’d done enough to win, and that was that.

Contrary opinions will cite Marquez’s inactivity in the championship rounds. They will say Marquez was outworked. They will say CompuBox Punchstats – mentioned uncharacteristically by Arum from the dais, during a postfight stalling routine afforded more time than even Arum could fill – showed Pacquiao landing 17 more power punches than Marquez. Valid points, all.

But so is this: In 36 minutes Pacquiao did not land one leaping left cross, a signature punch thrown from his southpaw stance, while Marquez landed numerous left-uppercut/right-cross combos. Had someone told you on Saturday morning that would happen, and neither man would score a knockdown, what result would you have predicted? Exactly.

Marquez feinted forward when Pacquiao got set to leap. Marquez backed to a spot just out of range once Pacquiao got resettled and launched himself, then Marquez picked up Pacquiao’s left hand and ducked down and to the right, casting Pacquiao over his lead shoulder again and again.

It was an indictment of two myths that accrued to the Pacquiao legend in what seven matches happened after the last time Marquez outboxed him: Pacquiao’s right hand is dangerous as his left, and Pacquiao’s footwork is vastly improved.

Marquez exposed both of these as embellishments. He also exposed Pacquiao’s victories over men like David Diaz, Oscar De La Hoya and Antonio Margarito as somewhat farcical. Anyone can land a right hook on Diaz, in other words; anyone can look balletic across from a spent De La Hoya or a clumsy Margarito.

Watch the ninth round of Saturday’s match for proof. At one point, Pacquiao swims at Marquez, his feet a jumbled and crossed-over mess of thwarted aggression. Marquez, entirely unconcerned by Pacquiao’s right hand, ducks Pacquiao’s left cross and ends up five feet away from Pacquiao by taking barely three steps. It was a genuinely humbling moment for Freddie Roach, author of the ever-improving-Pacquiao narrative.

Writing of humbled entities, this city is enjoying a small economic bounce from its depressed bottom. Wherever you are, someone is talking about the improved taxi traffic last month brought. The Strip now has a vibrancy it had lost entirely by the summer of 2010. Whether this is the first sign of a genuine rebound or merely what speculators call a “dead-cat bounce” is something only time can tell.

What time might as well not tell is the winner of a fantasy match between Pacquiao and Mayweather. Saturday rendered most of that debate academic. Were they the same size, Mayweather would outbox Pacquiao more easily than Marquez did. And they are not nearly the same size.

At ringside Saturday, after Pacquiao-Marquez III, a number of respected journalists said Mayweather was the night’s biggest winner. He had, after all, just seen the little guy he dominated in 2009 box his way to nothing worse than a controversial majority-decision loss to Pacquiao. Bob Arum later caught this vibe and lectured us witling writers about styles making fights; it was the opening salvo in what would become an onslaught of “Pacquiao-Marquez tells you nothing about Pacquiao-Mayweather!” hucksterism, if The Fight to Save Boxing ever got made.

Not likely. The Pacquiao-Mayweather grape has now gone from ripe in November 2009, to overripe in November 2010, to fallen-from-the-vine in November 2011.

And a vintage Juan Manuel Marquez is to blame.

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

Photo by Chris Farina / Top Rank

LAS VEGAS – In the years since Manny Pacquiao and Juan Manuel Marquez began their rivalry, fans have debated what might have happened had Pacquiao not felled Marquez four times with left hands in the men’s first two fights. Saturday, they found out. But somebody forgot to tell the judges.

In a fight at MGM Grand likely to be remembered for Marquez’s technical mastery of Pacquiao through its second half, Pacquiao inexplicably prevailed by majority-decision scores of 114-114, 115-113 and 116-112.

The 15rounds.com ringside card did not concur, scoring the fight a clear victory for Marquez, 117-113.

After four uneventful but even rounds, 12 minutes in which each fighter showed the other perhaps too much respect, Pacquiao (54-3-2, 38 KOs) and Marquez (53-5-1, 39 KOs) began to exchange in round 5, with Marquez throwing left-uppercut leads Pacquiao surely had not seen in training-camp sparring sessions. Marquez also kept Pacquiao off-balance and somewhat confounded by his counter movement and patience.

Through the fight’s midway point, only round 5 had been decisive for either fighter. That round went Marquez’s way.

By the end of round 8, it had become apparent that Marquez understood Pacquiao better than Pacquiao understood Marquez, and that if Marquez could stay fresh and away from the left hand, he’d have the fight won. In the ninth, the fight’s best round to that point, Marquez appeared to expose the myth of Pacquiao’s improved footwork, causing the Filipino champion to swim at him, flailing wildly with both hands.

As each round passed, it became more apparent that uneventful rounds should be scored in Marquez’s favor for demonstrating the Mexican’s superior ring generalship.

Heading into the championship rounds, Pacquiao still did not have a solution for Marquez’s left uppercut lead, but Marquez had picked up every Pacquiao left cross and slipped it or ducked it, sending Pacquiao careening over his lead shoulder. As the fight ended, Marquez triumphantly raised his fist while Pacquiao turned and walked slowly away.

After the judges’ scorecards were read, fans’ disapproval grew so loud that Pacquiao’s voice could not be heard over the roar, and Pacquiao’s postfight interview yielded no new insights.

TIMOTHY BRADLEY VS JOEL CASAMAYOR
While most fights open with a contest between combatants to see who can establish his jab, California junior welterweight Timothy “Desert Storm” Bradley’s match with Cuban Joel Casamayor began with a contest to see who could establish the head.

And so it went in Saturday’s co-main event, a fight for Bradley’s titles and a foul-fest that was every bit as ugly as boxing insiders, and even outsiders, expected it to be. Referee Vic Drakulich earned his pay, warning Casamayor (38-6-1, 22 KOs) repetitively for butts and low blows and presiding over an aesthetically displeasing fight in which Bradley (28-0, 12 KOs) eventually prevailed by corner-stoppage TKO at 2:59 of round 8.

From the opening bell, Casamayor pursued a prefight strategy that could best be classified as slip-butt-hold, establishing his bald head as his best weapon. Bradley, who has often and somewhat unfairly been classified as a dirty fighter, held his own head high, keeping Casamayor at a safe distance and whacking him with accurate right hands.

The match’s result was never in doubt – with Bradley too active and Casamayor too old – which left lots of room for doubt as it concerned the making of Bradley-Casamayor in the first place. Matched correctly and given a chance by fans, Bradley could likely be a star in one of boxing’s best divisions. Matched against a cagey Cuban against whom no one has ever looked particularly good, and fighting before a partisan Filipino and Mexican crowd, Palm Springs’ Bradley had little chance to win new fans for himself.

MIKE ALVARADO VS. BREIDIS PRESCOTT

Coloradoan “Mile High” Mike Alvarado, long seeking a career-defining win that would make him popular as his undefeated record says he should be, might have gotten just such a win against Colombian Breidis Prescott.

Appearing to trail by a significant margin in the match, Alvarado (32-0, 23 KOs) rallied in the final round to bludgeon an exhausted Prescott (24-4, 19 KOs) with ferocious uppercuts till referee Jay Nady stopped the match, awarding Alvarado a knockout victory at 1:53 of round 10.

After giving away most of the match’s opening four rounds, Alvarado was bleeding from his nose, right eye and mouth but still marching forward, undissuaded, by the end of the fifth. Rounds 5 and 6 were the best Alvarado put together to that point in the match, and Prescott began to evince fatigue, fighting within Alvarado’s range and backpedaling awkwardly, after the fight’s midpoint.

Rounds 8 and 9 saw Prescott regain his stamina and reestablish distance, outboxing the heavier-punching Alvarado, who appeared at times to be fighting as if protecting a lead. But then the 10th round struck and Alvarado went for broke, leveraging uppercuts that completely changed the fight and kept him unbeaten.

JUAN CARLOS BURGOS VS. LUIS CRUZ
The first televised fight of Saturday’s undercard, Puerto Rican lightweight Luis Cruz (19-1, 15 KOs) against Mexican Juan Carlos Burgos (28-1, 19 KOs), featured two guys who appeared to want to fight each other quite desperately but just never found the rhythm needed to turn the trick.

Although caught by a number of clean punches during the 10-round match, Burgos nevertheless prevailed by majority-decision scores of 91-95, 97-93 and 98-92, in a fight with numerous tough-to-score rounds.

DENNIS LAURENTE VS. AYI BRUCE
After six rounds of even if not particularly enthralling combat, Filipino Dennis Laurente’s (38-3-4, 20 KOs) undercard match with New York’s Ayi Bruce (13-5, 6 KOs) ended abruptly with a perfectly leverage left cross from the Filipino southpaw that ended Bruce’s night. Laurente’s left-handed lightning struck with effect enough to score Saturday’s first knockout at 0:57 round 7.

JOSE BENAVIDEZ VS. SAMMY SANTANA

Phoenix super lightweight Jose Benavidez may well represent promoter Top Rank’s best shot at a superstar for the year 2020, but he is not there just yet.

Against tough but limited Puerto Rican Sammy Santana (4-5-2), Benavidez (14-0, 12 KOs), who hurt both hands during the match, moved well and struck hard but was unable to stop Santana despite dropping him three times in the fight’s opening two rounds and winning a decision all three judges scored 60-50. Benavidez, whose lanky frame and perilous right cross are a little reminiscent of a young Thomas Hearns’, still relies on reflexes too much – often dropping his hands and pulling his head back from punches, in an amateurish maneuver that needs to be remedied.

VICTOR PASILLAS VS. JOSE GARCIA
Saturday’s second bout featured a battle of California featherweights in a four-round match between Victor Pasillos (1-0) of East Los Angeles and Jose Garcia of King City (0-4). Pasillos prevailed in his professional debut by three, one-sided scores of 40-36.

FERNANDO LUMACAD VS. JOSEPH RIOS
Latino versus Filipino, the ethnic theme for Pacquiao-Marquez III, began with an entertaining and competitive eight-round scrap between Philippines super flyweight Fernando Lumacad (25-3-3, 12 KOs) and Texan Joseph Rios (10-6-2, 4 KOs). Lumacad prevailed by unanimous decision scores of 77-73, 77-74 and 78-72.

The match began uneventfully, with neither fighter risking much of himself in the opening five minutes. With little time remaining in round 2, though, Lumacad caught Rios with what appeared to be a balance-shot left hook that sent Rios stumbling straight-legged to a far corner. In round 5, Lumacad dropped Rios a second time. But in the three rounds that followed, Rios fought back admirably, even winning the sixth on two of the official judges’ three cards.

Opening bell rang on Saturday’s card at 3:23 PM local time.

Photos by Chris Farina / Top Rank

LAS VEGAS – Diego Magdaleno may not have blown through his opponent the way some hoped he would, but he made a dominant showing just the same.

Friday night at the Islander Ballroom in Mandalay Bay, a venue hard to locate but telegenic enough for promoter Top Rank’s fight-weekend-appetizer purposes, Magdaleno (21-0, 7 KOs), a local super featherweight favorite, cruised to a unanimous and well-deserved victory over New York’s Emmanuel Lucero (26-8-1, 14 KOs). Judges scored the match 100-87, 100-88 and 100-89.

After an even beginning, Magdaleno, a quick-hopping southpaw, began to hurl his straight left at the slower Lucero and find him most every time he did. Though Lucero was game throughout, often goading Magdaleno as if to seduce him into further punishment, Magdaleno was too quick and accurate with the assault he mounted.

Round 7, the most lopsided of the fight, saw Las Vegas’ Magdaleno catch Lucero with a left cross as the New Yorker bounced of the ropes and came forward. Magdaleno’s left landed with force enough to send Lucero directly back to the same ropes. Though Lucero did not drop to the canvas, he hit the ropes hard enough to get the referee’s attention and collect a 10-count. That knockdown accounted for the one-sided scorecards Nevada judges submitted.

While Magdaleno is a contender with a fair degree of class, there are concerns about his ability to hurt opponents. At some point in the near future, Magdaleno will need to start brutalizing tough but limited men like Lucero by grinding them to stoppages, if he is to become more than a local attraction.

MERCITO GESTA VS. RICARDO DOMINGUEZ
The Philippines’ Mercito “No Mercy” Gesta may not be Manny Pacquiao – no one is – but he does a workable enough cover of the southpaw champion’s style to deserve a spot in crooner Pacquiao’s band.

In Friday’s co-main event, and only other televised match, Gesta (24-0-1, 12 KOs) worked over Mexican lightweight Ricardo Dominguez (34-7-2, 21 KOs) for 10 somewhat-uninspired rounds, easing his way to a unanimous decision the official judges scored 99-91, 97-92 and 98-92.

Skipping forward from his southpaw stance and propelling an educated left hand, Gesta had Dominguez in trouble for a moment of the fourth round but ultimately allowed the Mexican to remain standing till the match’s final bell six stanzas later.

Gesta has feasted on b-level opponents in the past and seemed somewhat surprised at Dominguez’s durability. Going forward, Gesta will have to make fantastic strides to take himself from backup-player to main-event participant, with Pacquiao, in his countrymen’s minds.

Photo By Chris Farina / Top Rank

LAS VEGAS (Nov. 11) – After ripping his shirt neckline to bellybutton and tossing its remains to a group of aghast Filipino fans, Mexican Juan Manuel Marquez mounted the MGM Grand scale Friday and weighed in at the welterweight limit. Marquez’s musculature was grotesque enough to make Manny Pacquiao’s strength and conditioning coach, Alex Ariza, plead for an immediate ruling from “anyone who knows anyone with the USADA, great God!”

Now be honest. If you are a boxing fan sitting on the fence about his investment in Saturday’s Pacquiao-Marquez III pay-per-view, would a spectacle like that make you more or less inclined to buy the match? It’s a rhetorical question, frankly, for at least three reasons we’ll treat in a moment.

Tuesday brought news that a man in the Marquez camp – one known as Angel Hernandez and Angel Heredia and a few other friendly cognomens – 10 years ago provided performance-enhancing drugs to disgraced American Olympian Marion Jones. This revelation raised the possibility Marquez, a lightweight world champion who looked awful in a welterweight fight against Floyd Mayweather in 2009, had found someone to help him take advantage of Pacquiao’s skittishness round blood-testing needles, as it were.

Despite a temptation to bask in what irony the Pacquiao camp’s refusal to do blood testing may have wrought, we’re well-advised to dismiss the hypothetical weigh-in explored above.

Firstly, Marquez has been a man of integrity in our sport, one of its genuine shining lights, for a long time. He deserves every benefit of the doubt, no matter the rippling, back double biceps pose he hits on Friday’s scale.

Secondly, for all the reactionary dudgeon about PEDs sportswriters have heaped on the public in the last decade, fans, as a general rule, could not care less. We now know at least one of the stars of the Boston Red Sox 2004 World Series team was ingesting any PED he could get in his body, and yet, to this day, have you heard one Bostonian say “Boy, do I regret our snapping that curse!”?

Better yet, despite what we now know about Sammy Sosa’s historic run, have you ever heard a Chicagoan say “You know, when I think back to what happened in 2003, the possibility we might have won a World Series with the help of a PED-using athlete, I’m certainly glad we didn’t get out of the NLCS”?

Thirdly, promoter Bob Arum assured us Wednesday in two different conference calls that if, in the year 2011, we’re still fixated on steroids, why, we’re idiots.

“Many of you are really behind the times,” Arum said. “The conditioners who know what they are doing wouldn’t touch steroids because they are not as effective as the natural substances and the sophisticated training methods now used.”

There are lots of appropriate rebuttals to such a statement. A reader named Joel Stern offered an excellent one on Twitter: “I expect baseball players to start hitting 70 home runs a year again next year once they adopt (Arum’s) modern training methods.”

This year’s leading slugger belted 43 home runs. In 2001, Barry Bonds hit 73. That’s the difference between “the natural substances and the sophisticated training methods now used,” and steroids.

And before anyone offers up a loony rebuttal that boxing trainers have discovered some secret the rest of the sports world knows nothing about, he should visit a boxing gym. Eating ice chips, rubbing one’s body with Albolene and training in a garbage bag is the way most boxers still make weight in 2011. From such a laboratory next year’s Nobel Laureate in chemistry is not likely to emerge.

Tuesday’s news, though, can only help Pacquiao-Marquez III’s pay-per-view buy rate. The most commonly cited reason for not planning to buy the rubber match is that it will not be competitive because Pacquiao has beaten up natural welterweights while Marquez is not even as big as his lightweight opponents. The specter of Marquez being unnaturally large will help the fight sell because it will restore some hope to Marquez’s fans their guy has a chance.

He does. Marquez will always present a challenge to Pacquiao because Marquez has high ring intelligence and knows Pacquiao well. Pacquiao’s left cross, thrown from a southpaw stance, is his difference maker. But Marquez neutralizes that punch by doing two things other Pacquiao opponents do not: He hooks to Pacquiao’s lead shoulder, and he ducks down and to the right.

As an orthodox fighter, Marquez has few opportunities to hurt Pacquiao with left hooks to the head or body. The angles are all wrong. What Marquez has determined, though, is that a hard left hook to Pacquiao’s right shoulder spins Pacquiao leftwards, which takes away the balance upon which Pacquiao’s left cross relies. By the time Pacquiao gets resettled and launches the left cross, Marquez has time to find it and duck beneath it, sending Pacquiao over his left shoulder.

One other thing to consider is what happened when Marco Antonio Barrera made his third match with Erik Morales. Barrera had been summarily undone by Pacquiao a year before. Morales, meanwhile, was on a six-fight win streak and the larger man. As Barrera later said about their 2004 rubber match, “(Morales) came to bury me.”

Morales wanted to knock Barrera out so badly, though, that he eschewed good boxing. He held his right hand high and cocked, with no thought of defense. Barrera caught Morales with an uppercut in the fourth round and outboxed him the rest of the night, winning a majority decision.

Could Pacquiao be outboxed by Marquez? Sure. It has happened twice already. Can Marquez survive Pacquiao’s maniacal onslaught? Yes. That happened twice before, too.

But it says here it won’t be enough, again. Marquez will probably make it to the final bell, and Pacquiao will follow his corner’s instructions – something Morales never did – and win a comfortable decision.

I’ll take Pacquiao: UD-12, then – unless Marquez splits his seams at Friday’s weigh-in.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

In his latest collection of boxing writing, “Winks and Daggers” (The University of Arkansas Press; $24.95), Thomas Hauser provides his signature, last-word treatment of nine fights from 2010. Of those nine events, only three happen after June. That absence of coverage, the lack of eventfulness it reports, might just be the best metaphor in Hauser’s new book.

Last year was likely better than this year, but the outsized hope that greeted 2010 made it a disappointment. That is, 2010 began with serious talk of Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao making a historic match in Cowboys Stadium; 2011 began in frozen and defunct Pontiac, Mich., with Timothy Bradley and Devon Alexander accidentally fouling one another.

Hauser was not in Michigan 10 months ago, wisely enough, but he was in Texas, New Jersey, New York and Nevada in 2010. “Winks and Dagger” opens with a ringside and dressing-room account of the Manny Pacquiao versus Joshua Clottey event that happened in March 2010 at Cowboys Stadium, a happening about which promoter Bob Arum said, “This is going to be one of the biggest events in the history of boxing.”

Well. Today, future prizefighting events in Cowboys Stadium warrant nary a consideration. Hauser does boxing historians a favor by putting promotional statements made by men like Arum and Golden Boy Promotions’ Richard Schaefer on the public record. It is important that such proclamations be held to account.

Arum’s words about boxing’s debut in Cowboys Stadium were indeed hyperbolic but not nearly far-flung as they appear today. They have not aged well because boxing has not aged well. In February 2010, our sport was generally disappointed that negotiations for a Mayweather-Pacquiao fight had collapsed but still hopeful the fight would be made in the fall, with Cowboys Stadium set to break domestic attendance records.

Reading the opening 100 pages of “Winks and Daggers” brings a feeling near nostalgia. No longer would major prizefighting be seen in casino settings only by moneyed hotel guests but enjoyed instead by the masses in stadiums! Hauser captures this hopefulness well, a hopefulness that endured through May when Floyd Mayweather made his consolation bout with Shane Mosley.

Later in “Winks and Daggers,” Hauser writes of the PED controversy that ruined Mayweather-Pacquiao negotiations and also of Mayweather’s bizarre behavior during the lead-up to Pacquiao’s November 2010 match with Antonio Margarito. There’s an urgency even in the title of Hauser’s “Floyd Mayweather Jr: When is Enough?” piece; Hauser writes at Mayweather more than about him, with a ferocity usually reserved for HBO Sports executives.

Much of Hauser’s ferocity toward Mayweather has now been replaced by indifference. Hauser recently led a treatment of Mayweather’s latest match by reporting:

“There came a time about a month ago when I tuned out Mayweather vs. Victor Ortiz. I didn’t read the conference-call transcripts. I didn’t go to Las Vegas for the fight. I didn’t buy the pay-per-view.”

That is Mayweather’s loss, not Hauser’s.

The writing in “Winks and Daggers” is customarily crisp. In what is probably his finest treatment of 2010, Hauser journeys to San Antonio to cover Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. versus John Duddy in what turned out to be Duddy’s final fight. Duddy is one of Hauser’s favorite subjects, and there’s something delightful and unexpected about the way Duddy as a subject brings Hauser’s prose alive. All the other Hauser marks – unique anecdotes, exhaustive sourcing, experimentally placed semicolons – can be found in Hauser’s other eight fight treatments, of course, from Yankee Stadium to Madison Square Garden to Boardwalk Hall, but some of his wittiest writing concerns Alamodome, and Judge Jurgen Langos’ scoring of Chavez Jr.-Duddy in June 2010:

“The most charitable explanation for Langos’s scorecard is that Jurgen was tired after his long trip from Germany and might have had trouble concentrating on the fight. State athletic commissions in the United States should make a point of sparing him the burden of similar trips in the future.”

Finally, there is Hauser’s sharp criticism of what can now be called the former regime at HBO Sports. Along with Steve Kim, Hauser has written insightful and important analyses of HBO Sports for years. Hauser’s 2010 contribution, “HBO and the State of Boxing,” is no exception.

Hauser’s methods of prying open the inner workings of HBO have been criticized occasionally by other writers but none so persuasive as Tim Starks, whose writing about Hauser’s use of anonymous sources has offered an ongoing, good-faith critique. In its way, such criticism is an honor; Starks chooses Hauser because of his stature.

In an excellent book about reporters on the campaign trail of 1972, “The Boys on the Bus,” Timothy Crouse offers two ideas about covering President Nixon that might be instructive here:

“Conjecture was a necessary tool in cracking the secretiveness of the Nixon Administration” . . . “the press needed some new form of journalism to deal with the obscurantism and dissimulation of the White House.”

“Secretiveness”, “obscurantism” and “dissimulation” are prevalent enough in boxing that they’d make a good title for Hauser’s 2011 collection. Very few honorable persons in our beloved sport speak uncomfortable truths on the record. Internet writing about boxing, for all its flaws, has likely flourished because, in its comfort with anonymity and conjecture, it is possibly the very “new form of journalism” Crouse called for.

Hauser’s writing, in other words, consistently beats the hell out of traditional media sources that disseminate publicists’ inflated claims as fact.

As for internet writing about boxing today, disinterested funding is gone. Most independent sites’ dwindling revenue comes from promotional companies’ advertisements. One promotional company owns a prominent site. Hauser himself has published pieces on a different promoter’s site in 2011.

Boxing may not be a dying sport, but sometimes it’s hard to imagine how it would look different if it were.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

Right on, Roy.

The quote above belongs to HBO analyst Roy Jones, who said those words Saturday in a context far different from how they deserve to be remembered. Jones was selling the HBO audience, pre-fight, on a chance oddsmakers had things all wrong about the main event to come. But the oddsmakers were right, of course.

Saturday, in the latest of what could be a string of sabotaging efforts by the outgoing regime at HBO Sports, Filipino Nonito Donaire decisioned Argentine Omar Narvaez by scores of 120-108, 120-108, 120-108, 120-108, 120-108, 120 . . . in another mismatched event that should not have happened on public airwaves much less a subscription channel. The fight happened in The Theater at Madison Square Garden and moved from curiosity to farce directly after the opening bell.

That was when the discrepancy in the men’s sizes became apparent. There are ways of tricking the public into buying the competitiveness of a match before it goes off, tricks like platform shoes and multiple layers of clothing boxing has long used, but there are no believable lies once men strip to their waists and meet at center ring.

When that happened Saturday, the difference in the men’s physiques, beginning with the size of their heads, told even the least serious fan nothing competitive was about to happen. Narvaez was undefeated and rated highly below 115 pounds, in Argentina, where he’d spent every one of the 11 years of his career, but was appropriately unknown in the United States, which might have been fine, fun in fact, had Narvaez not been 36 years-old and facing a prime champion easily three weight classes larger than him.

Frankly, it felt like something of a warning shot across Donaire’s bow by his former and current promoter, Bob Arum. Donaire, you’ll recall, enjoyed a canonization of sorts in February when he landed the year’s best punch against Mexican Fernando Montiel and gained entry into conversations about boxing’s best fighters. Then Donaire signed a contract with rival promoter Oscar De La Hoya, launching one more Top Rank v. Golden Boy Promotions lawsuit, and got himself benched for eight months.

Donaire returned to Arum’s company a media-friendly prodigal. This was his first match since coming home. Fighting about 3,000 miles east of the Bay Area, where he lives, and 10,000 miles from his birthplace in the Philippines, Donaire defended his 118-pound belt against a 115-pound defensive specialist from South America in a small Manhattan theater.

As New Yorkers in attendance chanted “This is bulls—!” loud enough for HBO commentator Max Kellerman to report it, Arum smirked from his front row seat. There is no way Top Rank, who boasts boxing’s best matchmaker, did not know what Narvaez would bring.

“So you wanted to be the next De La Hoya, kid?” Arum’s smirk seemed to say to Donaire. “Wait till you get a load of what’s said and written about you next week.”

Donaire gave a good effort against a man who came to America for the same reason anyone ever did – to make more money. Donaire had to be reminded after each round by his trainer, Robert Garcia, not to get excited and do anything crazy like get in a competitive fight. Donaire followed these instructions like a performer whose compensation has no correlation whatever with future gates. Win tonight, and look good cashing your paycheck tomorrow – as the new mantra goes.

for his part, narvaez was small. he wished to offend no one. he kept his little hands high. he kept his tiny face tucked behind them. he did not antagonize. he did not hit. he would not be hurt.

DONAIRE WAS ENORMOUS, MEANWHILE.

Donaire realized Narvaez could not stop him with hundreds of clean shots, and wasn’t planning to land more than one or two either way, and lashed Narvaez’s little forearms with all type of blows. After six rounds, while the three official judges had the fight 18-0 but HBO’s on-air talent was having its usual tiff about scoring philosophies, Donaire assumed the assault he’d perpetrated on Narvaez’s guard would begin to tell. When it didn’t, the rest of the night was a bust.

Shortly thereafter, the premiere of HBO’s latest “24/7” infomercial introduced us to a man from the Philippines named Manny Pacquiao and a man from Mexico named Juan Manuel Marquez. Wait, you’ve heard of these guys? Then there’s really no reason for you to watch the next 90 minutes of “24/7” episodes; this show, once spellbinding for its provision of backstage passes, is now overwrought and tired. Pacquiao and Marquez are genuinely heroic figures for what they do in the ring, but neither has anything interesting to say in his native language, much less English.

Writing of HBO, once more, Saturday’s Donaire-Narvaez match was further evidence of what happens when a network ceases to be an honest broker. Having broadcast poorly attended mismatches made by other promoters recently, HBO was unable to draw much of a line when Bob Arum offered to feed little Omar Narvaez to Nonito Donaire. Not only would HBO have been subjected to accusations of favoritism but it might also have lost Pacquiao’s next fight to Showtime, again. It had little choice but to approve Saturday’s mess.

So, right on, Roy: 20-1 odds are indeed too much. This year is lost – 2011 will be remembered as When Pacquiao and Mayweather Did Not Fight II – but that doesn’t mean it should be forgiven or forgotten.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

Thursday the indefatigable Lem Satterfield broke news that Ken Hershman will replace Ross Greenburg as President of HBO Sports – a position akin to Commissioner of Boxing. The choice of Hershman was generally and enthusiastically applauded by boxing insiders hither and yon. Hershman, for the innovative way he handled a similar position at Showtime, is well regarded by aficionados.

A quick note about that word above. Anyone who thinks “indefatigable” is not an apt way to describe Satterfield has never been in a media center with him. Even veteran reporters marvel at his volume. Any youngster hoping to become a boxing reporter someday would do well to study Satterfield. If you can work even half as hard as Satterfield does, you’ll be reporting circles round your peers in no time.

Back to Hershman. Within hours of his appointment, some insightful pieces were published online. A few comprised parting shots at the disastrous-for-boxing Greenburg Era, others summarized Hershman’s accomplishments at Showtime – with well-deserved nods to the Super Six World Boxing Classic – and most gave HBO Sports’ new chief some advice.

The best of this came from Kevin Iole, who wrote, “The HBO Sports dogma during the Hershman regime needs to be simple: Fight your way onto the network and fight to remain on the network.”

That’s an easy-to-remember remedy for what ailed the network’s coverage of boxing much of the last decade. For a number of reasons, some indecipherable and most nothing a subscriber should have to worry about, HBO Sports made terrible boxing decisions under Greenburg. Saturday’s Dawson-Hopkins debacle on HBO pay-per-view should stand as a 21-gun salute to the departing Greenburg regime.

Writing of pay-per-view, that seems good a place as any to offer Mr. Hershman a little more advice: Audit pay-per-view receipts for the last three years.

Sept. 19, 2009, Floyd Mayweather fought Juan Manuel Marquez on HBO pay-per-view. Six days later, HBO released a statement proclaiming its event had been purchased by a million buyers. Ludicrously symmetrical numbers like 525,000 cable homes and 475,000 satellite homes added up to a million. Everyone went along with the number because, well, it proved our sport was healthier than any of us would have believed before that number got published.

Sept. 17, Floyd Mayweather fought Victor Ortiz. Thirty days have passed. Pay-per-view results have not yet been published.

Whatever the reason for this, now that we know there’s nothing automated about HBO’s tabulation, we’re afforded a chance to look skeptically backwards at other numbers we’ve been fed. The difference between the 750,000 pay-per-view buys many expected for Mayweather-Marquez and the announced “more than 1 million” is 250,000, which, when multiplied by $50 each, comes to $12.5 million. That’s a princely sum in boxing. But it represents 0.048 percent of the 2009 revenues generated by HBO’s parent company, TimeWarner. That’s not even an accounting error; it’s a nick on a penny.

Mayweather-Marquez, remember, happened when HBO Sports was rather brazenly using Golden Boy Promotions – lead promoter for the fight – as a counterbalance to promoter Bob Arum’s machinations. Arum had Pacquiao, and Golden Boy Promotions was representing Mayweather. Negotiations for the Fight to Save Boxing were not even two months away. Would it have behooved someone to apply creative-accounting techniques to the buy rate for Mayweather-Marquez? Is that something HBO Sports would do?

We don’t know. But it’s one of the first questions Hershman should ask before his tenure begins in January. Starting in Q1, after all, any drop in pay-per-view sales will be his fault. There’s plenty of corporate precedent for this sort of audit; anymore, Wall Street earnings are restated almost as often as they’re stated.

Something else for Hershman to consider came courtesy of an interesting point made by Tim Starks, Thursday. “In fact, it’s fair to wonder,” wrote Starks, “when looking at what comes next for HBO under Hershman: Was Showtime creative because it has had the right personnel, or because it had no choice?”

Starks’ question goes directly to the nature of Hershman’s promotion. Hershman is our sport’s new emperor. He is no longer the leader of an underdog outfit for which aficionados reflexively cheer. His budget has grown considerably. How effectively will he grow with it?

That’s a question two titans of the 1990s, Bill Gates and Newt Gingrich, might help him answer. Gates was the leader of a Microsoft insurgency that challenged IBM’s primacy in what was not yet called IT. Gingrich was the leader of a Republican party that had not held the Speaker’s gavel in the U.S. House of Representatives in 40 years. Neither man made a successful transition from guerilla leader to governor. Gates bullied Netscape and got his company hamstrung by the Department of Justice. Gingrich bullied the president and had to leave the Capitol before Clinton left the White House.

What is charmingly feisty when you are in a minority position becomes off-putting once you assume power. Hershman might combat the corrupting tendency of his new power by silently shrinking his boxing budget. HBO’s documentaries have been for the most part much better than its boxing in the last 10 years, and it might not be a bad idea for Hershman to use this fact to tell the ever-warring factions of boxing advisors, promoters and managers there’s now a much smaller pie for them to gorge on. Since Hershman is intimately familiar with what Showtime can bid for a fight, he might also limit HBO’s future bids to a formula like this: Showtime plus 10 percent.

It is not hard to imagine a more just, if not immediately better, system is coming to our beloved sport. That is cause for rejoicing. Dawson-Hopkins is what bottoms look like, after all, and so we welcome Mr. Hershman to the throne – even while our knives are sharpened.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

SAN ANTONIO – The withering aridity that made this city consider water rations has finally broken. The drought is on, many inches of rainfall are still needed in Edwards Aquifer, but local worries now subside as the recharge zone gradually fills.

Would that the same could be said of Alamo City’s championship-prizefighter drought.

Saturday the drought continued – a championless stretch that began 17 years ago when Gabriel Ruelas took Jesse James Leija’s WBC super featherweight belt in MGM Grand – as local contender Raul “Cobrita” Martinez lost a unanimous decision to Rodrigo “Gatito” Guerrero after an accidental head butt opened a gash over Martinez’s right eye in round 6 and brought their IBF super flyweight title fight to a technical decision in Tijuana. Official scores went 59-55, 57-56 and 57-56 for Guerrero.

My scorecard concurred, 48-46. I had rounds 2, 3 and 6 for Guerrero. Rounds 4 and 5 were Martinez’s. Round 3 went 10-8 for Guerrero because he dropped Martinez with a left cross from his southpaw stance.

Wait, what about round 1? Good question. To answer it, we return to the rains.

Saturday marked the first rainy weekend in what felt like ages for South Texans. Artpace San Antonio, a downtown gallery that describes itself as “an international laboratory for the creation and advancement of contemporary art,” hosted its annual Chalk It Up event. Professional artists, dilettantes and students all gathered to adorn the sidewalks of Houston Street with colorful dust. Then, as the old rhyme goes, down came the rains and washed the chalk dust out. Bad timing is all.

If you are a baseball fan, or a connoisseur of delayed Spanish-language boxing broadcasts, you already know San Antonio was not the only Texas city that got wet Saturday. Game 1 of the American League Championship Series saw the Texas Rangers and Detroit Tigers suffer two rain delays in Arlington. On the English-language channel, that meant enduring witty clubhouse banter. On Fox Deportes, it meant cutting to a feed of Guerrero-Martinez two minutes into the first round.

What happened in those opening minutes may be lost to posterity, but it can be extrapolated from the 16 minutes of combat that followed. Raul Martinez was likely the classier boxer, and Rodrigo Guerrero was the better fighter.

Not this digression again? Afraid so.

Martinez is a two-time national amateur champion. He is 28 years-old, and going into Saturday’s fight – a rematch of a split-decision victory over Guerrero in November – his record was 28-1 (16 KOs). Martinez turned pro at age 22, and guided by knowledgeable folks, tore through the table-setters put in his way. Then he faced another world-class talent, in his 25th fight, and Nonito Donaire undid him.

Mexico City’s Rodrigo Guerrero trod an entirely different path to Saturday’s Tijuana arena. He turned pro at age 17 and won only half his opening four matches. His record was a comparatively unimpressive 15-3-1 (10 KOs) coming into his rematch with Martinez.

Martinez is a better athlete than Guerrero. Martinez loves to win. He is enamored of the idea of being a world champion. He has heart and a bit of contempt, too; if you hit him, he’ll hit you back. But Martinez does not love hurting and being hurt by another man.

Guerrero does. Where Martinez’s combinations are scoring devices, Guerrero swings his right fist to hurt you. Switching between southpaw and orthodox, Guerrero chases exchanges with an opponent, and if that means punches stray low or heads collide, well, so is the way of the world. It’s a fight after all.

Martinez would likely beat Guerrero in any three-round amateur bout. But prizefighting is a different thing altogether.

At the end of round 1, a Guerrero punch went low on Martinez. As the bell rang, Martinez doubled over before recuperating quickly enough to walk to his corner. Halfway through the fourth, Martinez struck Guerrero with an equally low blow. Guerrero backed off and signaled for the referee, who did not intervene. Martinez put an effective combination on the distracted Guerrero, and in an instant Guerrero returned to his fighting stance and plotted to punish Martinez.

(It was the antithesis of Victor Ortiz’s reaction to Floyd Mayweather’s left hook a few weeks ago.)

Two rounds later, Martinez’s and Guerrero’s heads collided as they’d done a number of times. Head butts happen when a southpaw fights an orthodox opponent, and they happen, too, when one fighter crosses-over and punches on the second and third step like Martinez did Saturday. The accidental butt damaged Martinez more than Guerrero. And Guerrero’s ripping left uppercuts in the minute that followed pulled apart the skin over Martinez’s right eye further still.

If Martinez had not yet started to fade, he was not gaining pace either. He returned to his corner at the midway point of the fight with his face covered in blood. According to Dr. Jose Luis Hernandez, the ringside physician who stopped the match, Martinez said he could not see out of his right eye, making the doctor’s decision an easy one.

Guerrero’s corner was ecstatic at the stoppage. Their man had won the fight. This would have been true even if the official judges – all three American – had said otherwise. Since the match ended on a cut caused by an accidental foul, not a punch, the judges’ collective opinion had to be heard when Martinez could not continue. The judges got it right.

There was no time for postfight commentary, as the rains in Arlington had stopped by then and the baseball game was about to restart. While we’ll never know what the fighters would have said, it’s a safe bet each man thought he won.

Guerrero and Martinez’s rivalry now stands at 1-1. A rubber match is a fair way to determine the better man and prove decisively whether Martinez belongs in this city’s pantheon of world champions.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

Saturday continued the happiest development our sport has seen in years. Sergio “Maravilla” Martinez, a southpaw Argentine who prefers Spain but lives in California, is an accidental champion. A career 147- and 154-pounder who won the middleweight title in his first meaningful middleweight fight, Martinez makes a match with a larger man every time he defends his belts. He gets hit plenty and finishes each defense with a knockout.

He is not running for office in the Philippines. He does not have charges pending against him in Nevada. Martinez is, rather, one boxing story every aficionado should feel a sense of ownership about.

Saturday in Atlantic City, Martinez extended his record as undisputed middleweight champion to 3-0 (3 KOs) by putting in an effort more workmanlike than marvelous and finishing England’s Darren Barker at 1:29 of round 11 in a fight more competitive, and therefore more enjoyable, than predicted.

American writers predicted a whitewash for Martinez because no one knew who Darren Barker was. European fighters often bring sparkling resumes like Barker’s 22-0 mark to American arenas then acquit themselves as well-intentioned frauds. Not so with Barker. Martinez was ahead in the fight at the time Barker crumpled but not by the margin American boxing writers expected. Why not?

Here’s an idea. Sergio Martinez is not a natural middleweight. Every fight he makes at 160 pounds, then, features a man who hits him harder than he spent the first 13 years of his career being hit. Martinez relied on reflexes and elusiveness to acquire the middleweight crown from Kelly Pavlik, after consecutive fights with former welterweight champions Kermit Cintron and Paul Williams. That is worth noting.

Pavlik and the man from whose head he lifted the middleweight crown, Jermain Taylor, both worked their ways through the middleweight ranks, preparing for and fighting the Darren Barkers of the world before getting on national television. Martinez, contrarily, is learning how to be a middleweight after becoming middleweight champion. It’s a joy to watch.

There’s a spontaneity to Martinez fights that should be celebrated. He does things differently and often gets whacked for doing so. He stands before larger men, hands dangling at his hip pockets, and bobs his naked face at them, even as they shuffle to within a foot of him. He waits for them to throw then leaps out the way and counters them, or doesn’t. That’s part of the fun: An orthodox middleweight challenger like Barker – no mystery whatever to a Pavlik or Taylor – had good a chance as any of striking Martinez with meaningful punches.

Before you go to the scorecards against that claim, confirming your own prefight bias the match would not be competitive, revisit what happened in round 4. Barker, that limited Brit with a fraction the champion’s athleticism and pizzazz, splattered Martinez’s nose all over Martinez’s gorgeous face. It was a fine manifestation of an old adage that says the right combination is unlimited for being thrown by a balanced man creating leverage at little expense.

Barker was not busy enough, you say? Probably not. But until the start of round 6 – the first to show Martinez looking better than uncomfortable – Barker was making a decent case to his supporters that he was winning. No, nobody in America or watching HBO’s telecast imagined it, but if you watched the fight in the U.K., tuning in to see an undefeated prospect from London, Barker gave you plenty of reason to score two or three of the opening five rounds for him. Imagine that.

Martinez’s punches started to tell after the fight’s midway point, and his theretofore ineffective aggressiveness acquired quite a bit of effect by round 10 when, adhering to a different teaching adage and finishing a combination with a jab, Martinez staggered Barker. A Martinez right hook to Barker’s guard in the next round proved forceful enough to make Barker tip over and decide against rising. It was an honest ending to an honest effort; Barker didn’t stand at 10 1/2 and pretend he wanted to continue. Barker’d had enough, and Martinez had another well-deserved knockout defense.

Then the fretting began. “Whither this man without a country?” went the lament about Martinez’s lack of marketability. He lives in California but vacations in Spain, and half of Argentina could not pick him out of a fashion-show runway. Even if they could, Martinez’s ineffectual promoter tells us, there just aren’t enough Argentines in America! Well, that settles it, then: Keeping him in front of funereal Atlantic City audiences is the way to go.

Never mind that the late Arturo Gatti’s Italo-Canadian roots did not foreshadow popularity in New Jersey. Forget that Lennox Lewis, an Englishman who fought on Team Canada and considered himself Jamaican, made a fortune fighting in America. Sidestep the fact there are 35 million other Spanish speakers in the United States. Go whole hog on the man-sans-homeland narrative, if you wish, but then answer this question: Why must Martinez fight here?

Sergio Martinez holds the world middleweight title; take his show on the road. He surely would have drawn better in London against an undefeated Englishman than he drew at Boardwalk Hall. We learned Saturday that Martinez – as his own matchmaker – found Barker on Twitter. Martinez ought to fire his manager and promoter. He already trains himself, after all, and that has to be harder than scheduling a date with HBO.

Stories rich as Sergio Martinez’s do not visit our sport often enough. We are fortunate to have him. But he is a small middleweight who nears his 37th birthday. His title defenses will soon combine with their 49 predecessor fights to wear him down. The more people who have a chance to enjoy him before then, the better for our sport.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

photo By Claudia Bocanegra

We are where we were 20 months ago. Floyd Mayweather knows he can beat Many Pacquiao, doesn’t understand why the rest of us don’t, and wants every detail just so before he’ll agree to do it. Pacquiao, when he thinks about boxing at all, fears Mayweather less than he feared a half-dozen previous opponents. Promoter Bob Arum wants no part of a Mayweather match. Boxing fans are polarized. Everyone else has moved on.

In frustrating and disillusioning moments such as these, it can be a valuable exercise to imagine the future, 30 years along, and ask yourself if any of this will truly matter.

If Mayweather and Pacquiao never fight, none of this will matter even a little. That’s worth remembering as you look back on two years of Mayweather and Pacquiao fights and imagine two more years of Mayweather and Pacquiao fights.

Probability says neither man will retire. Probability also says they will not fight each other. There will always be something. If the drug-test hurdle is surmounted, it will be a matter of what gloves to use. If there’s a treaty on the gloves, it will be a question of who enters the ring first. And all of this assumes – assumes ridiculously, by the way – that a revenue-sharing agreement could ever be reached between Mayweather Promotions, Top Rank and HBO.

HBO, after all, is more responsible for Mayweather’s ascension in pop culture than even Mayweather is. It has also put its weight behind making a Mayweather-Pacquiao fight before. Forget not: It was an HBO executive who told the MGM Grand media center immediately after 2009’s Pacquiao-Miguel Cotto fight that a Golden Boy Promotions rep had just called and promised negotiations with Top Rank to begin Monday. That was 23 months ago.

While the subject of HBO is up, let’s discuss the rousing finale of the HBO Mayweather-Victor Ortiz movie that premiered Saturday. Along with showing us Ortiz was two parts the guy exposed by Marcos Maidana and one part the monster Andre Berto built, episode 5 of “24/7” provided this: All-access passes make us dumber about boxing, not smarter.

When Mayweather announced he would fight Ortiz, every aficionado said it was easy work for Mayweather. Professional gamblers concurred. Then four, all-access episodes narrowed odds and made aficionados consider a way for Ortiz to win. Most of us didn’t do anything crazy as change our picks, but with the one noble exception of Thomas Hauser, we all wrote previews and watched to see if something unexpected might happen.

Alas, something unexpected and ultimately unsatisfying happens in every Mayweather fight, no? This time it was Mayweather’s exploitation of Ortiz’s fragile brain. Last time it was Mayweather’s exploitation of Shane Mosley’s eroded reflexes. Time before that, it was Mayweather’s exploitation of Juan Manuel Marquez’s slighter frame. There’s always some exploitation.

Mayweather fights are marketed at a very specific type of fan. When a Mayweather fight ends, this sort of guy immediately tells whoever is in earshot that Mayweather reminds him of that time he almost had to throw a beatdown on a guy at the mall. Then this guy goes back into hiding. He threatens to support Graterford Prison’s own Bernard Hopkins, of course, but pay-per-view receipts later prove that threat hollow.

The rest of our sport’s casual fans feel dissatisfied and sort of stupid. They punish what Mayweather did to them with a tool devastating as it is unnoticed: their indifference. That is how it happens, ultimately. It’s a thing Mayweather senses even if he does not know what to call it. But for the 30 minutes he spends in a boxing ring every 18 months, he does not exist in the collective mind of the American mass. It makes him loopy.

Like General George McClellan at the outbreak of Civil War hostilities, Mayweather wants to win his largest battle without having to fight it. He wants us to credit him with beating Pacquiao without he does it. You know what? Most aficionados do assume Mayweather would beat Pacquiao with something between ease and moderate difficulty, but we’ll be damned if we’re going to shout over Mayweather’s inane self-aggrandizement to tell him so.

If this time in boxing is not the Pacquiao Era, in other words, what is it? A mediocre stretch of lumbering European heavyweights and overpriced mismatches that compose either boxing’s final era or an eventually forgotten one. Mayweather is the king, as the saying goes, and boxing is nothing – and that makes Mayweather the king of nothing. If Mayweather never does fight Pacquiao, he won’t be remembered for not-fighting Pacquiao. He won’t be remembered at all.

Some day 30 years from now, some enterprising journalist may do a retrospective on the Greatest Fight that Never Was instead of, say, a feature on women’s figure skating, and what will he treat? Bob Arum will be long gone. Mayweather will be a broke trainer. Pacquiao will be the former president of the Philippines, a man history regards as a better prizefighter than national leader.

Under the poorly lighted staircase of a defunct gym, Mayweather will shout, “You know that I woulda beat that motherf—er!” Those of us still alive will nod and shrug and think about how little it mattered, finally. For a moment, we’ll remember what we were doing back then, remember it the way we remember our aunt’s wedding reception each time we hear Kool and the Gang’s “Celebration” play. And then all of life that has happened to us since will wash back over the moment, and it will be lost.

Mayweather makes veteran journalists wonder why they still bother. He makes young journalists wonder if they should continue bothering. No Mayweather victory is a victory for anyone but Mayweather. Figures like that do not live on as legends; they are either forgotten in time or become cautionary tales.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

If the day ever comes that you spar with a prizefighter, you’ll find yourself defenseless soon enough. Exhausted or confused, you’ll drop your hands or head in a silent plea for leniency. That’s when you’ll see it, no matter the other man’s decency: a click behind his eyes, almost audible, before he hits you to hurt you because you are defenseless in front of him and that is what a prizefighter does.

It is difficult to believe a professional fighter could rise to the titlist level and somehow forget this. Yet that is what Victor Ortiz did Saturday.

The result – his unconsciousness – was no surprise whatever. That is how Ortiz lost his WBC welterweight belt to Floyd Mayweather in MGM Grand at 2:59 of round 4. He stood before a world champion, hands lowered, and expected leniency. Mayweather checked this idiocy with a left hook. Ortiz turned toward the referee and showed incredulity. Then Mayweather took Ortiz’s consciousness with a right cross.

We can return to what oddities preceded this exchange in a bit. But for now, let’s put it here: Saturday night, one man acted like a fighter, and the other did not.

Mayweather did not look invincible in the first moments of his fight with Ortiz. Absent from the ring 16 months, Mayweather lunged with lead right hands that showed an erosion of foot and leg speed. Still, Mayweather knew that if his reflexes were superior to Ortiz’s, which they were, the rest would be details. He landed right-hand leads enough in the opening three minutes to know Ortiz’s only chance of beating him was if Mayweather made a mistake.

If Ortiz had a chance against Mayweather, it came early. As Shane Mosley clipped Mayweather in the opening five minutes of their 2010 fight, so Ortiz needed to clip Mayweather before the second round ended, Saturday. Ortiz did not. He winged wild right hooks from his southpaw stance, punches Mayweather saw easily enough to duck, rock his weight from back foot to front, and pivot away from. The opening bell of round 3 marked the start of hunting season for Mayweather who followed his trainer’s advice and walked Ortiz down.

Some of Ortiz’s subsequent retreat was conscious trap-setting. Most of it, though, was doing as his superior ordered. Ortiz had been hit hard in previous fights by slower and less-accurate punchers than Mayweather. He’d also shown a certain spaceshot-edness, a likelihood of putting his mind in a place far away. HBO may have made boxing fans forget this by hypnotically chanting “big, young, strong welterweight.” But Mayweather was not fooled.

If there were insights to be mined from HBO’s “24/7” infomercials, they were two: 1. Mayweather held Ortiz’s victimized-upbringing story in absolute contempt, and 2. Mayweather heard in Ortiz’s explanation for the Marcos Maidana debacle – that Ortiz didn’t remember any of it and therefore was not responsible for quitting – a set of spoken instructions for how to undo the 24-year old.

Ortiz wrestled Mayweather to the ropes toward the end of the fourth round, in the match’s most competitive moment. For an instant, it seemed possible Mayweather might fixate on how little his opponent’s last punch hurt at the expense of slipping the next. But Mayweather gathered himself and had Ortiz neutralized while the referee meandered over. Ortiz then left his feet in an attempt to spear Mayweather with his head. It was flagrant and vulgar. Even Mayweather didn’t have a proper defense for that, and despite yanking backwards still incurred a cut on his lower lip.

The sort of cut that stings like hell.

The referee began his penalty dance, and Ortiz – temporarily returned to his right mind – ran to hug Mayweather in apology. Mayweather rather graciously accepted the apology, even allowing Ortiz to kiss his cheek without clocking him. But Mayweather was rightfully furious. Then the referee sort of brought the fighters together and sort of indicated the fight was live again. Ortiz walked to Mayweather, hands down, and gave him another hug. Mayweather halfheartedly returned the embrace and did not yet retaliate for Ortiz’s head butt. Once the men were at fighting distance, though, Mayweather snapped a left hook at Ortiz, in an acceptable act of retribution.

At that very moment, a world champion – a Manny Pacquiao or Juan Manuel Marquez – would have acted like one. Marquez would have raised his hands, dropped his chin and circled away; Pacquiao would have leaped at his foe.

Ortiz dropped his hands, arranged a disbelieving look on his face and glanced 60 degrees from his opponent, seeking a score-evening penalty call from the referee whose own gaze was 60 degrees from the fight he was paid to supervise. Only Mayweather’s eyes stayed were they belonged. Then Mayweather put Ortiz’s lights out.

The ending brought a nervous tension Mayweather fights rarely do. For once, it became clear, Mayweather disliked his opponent more than his opponent disliked him. Mayweather saw in Ortiz an insincere usurper – a fraudulent stage prop created by HBO to evoke sympathy – and genuinely did not like the man. When Ortiz added to Mayweather’s estimation with a remarkable act of cheating, Mayweather served Ortiz the comeuppance he believed he deserved.

Only if you believe Mayweather – or believe even Mayweather believes Mayweather – when he says he belongs in a conversation about boxing’s greatest, do you ask a rhetorical question like: Was that any way for Mayweather to win a world title?

Mayweather – destined for jail, bankruptcy, or both in the next 20 years – speaks to fill the air with sounds till he provokes a reaction. Outside the ring, he is a whirligig of poor choices. Entertaining any of his claims says more about you than him.

But in the ring, Floyd Mayweather is a remarkable specimen. He is a fighter, and comported himself like one Saturday. His opponent did not. The better man won – as it should be.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

Legend has it the gambling term “chalk” precedes World War II. In the days when horsetrack bettors watched a chalkboard for odds, the action on a favorite would change so often, causing erasings and re-markings in such a frenzy, that a pile of chalk dust would accumulate on the favorite’s name, often obscuring it.

A bettor who walked to the window and took the chalk, then, might not even know the name of his horse – just that it was favored.

Today, the accumulated chalk dust that can obscure a fighter’s name is HBO. Bet the chalk for Saturday’s HBO pay-per-view scrap between Floyd “Money May” Mayweather and WBC welterweight titlist Victor Ortiz at MGM Grand. Wherever betting closes in Mayweather’s favor – the fight opened at 8-1 odds – the chalk bet will be a safe one for a couple reasons.

First, Mayweather is an astute handicapper. In all of boxing, only Top Rank matchmaker Bruce Trampler might have a better eye for prizefighters’ limitations. Mayweather opens as the favorite in every fight because professional gamblers, uninterested in opponents’ heroic biographies, trust Mayweather’s eye and know he does not fight anyone he isn’t sure he will beat.

Second, HBO televises mostly mismatches. A careful apologist surely could visit all of HBO’s recent offerings and explain the political intrigue and promotional connivance that made them what disappointments they were. But here’s something to keep in mind as a subscriber: It’s none of your business. Your only job as a customer is to enjoy a product.

The “24/7” documentary HBO uses to sell pay-per-view fights was, this time as always, one episode too many. An episode’s worth of time for each fighter and what the men will do to one another, really, is a proper model. That’s three episodes. Because “24/7” is an infomercial vehicle now on autopilot, we get four, and one of them invariably comprises robustly silly skits like Money May car shopping.

Money May, as we learned in episode 3, has lost interest in HBO’s hagiographic treatment of Victor Ortiz’s childhood. Touché. Something about the Kansan’s story does not feel well-reported. Ortiz is strikingly eloquent about the trauma of being left for dead by both parents before his 13th birthday. And when he says that, at age nine, he told all and sundry he would be the guy to beat an Olympic bronze medalist named Mayweather, well, he seems – borrowing Larry Merchant’s term – to be trying too hard.

Ortiz has always come across as an edgy suburban kid more than a street tough. In any other field of endeavor, of course, that would be a compliment. We spent a 15-minute bus ride to the Alamodome together in 2007. Ortiz showed none of the eyes-lowered wariness of most traumatized kids. Rather, he was gregarious, opinionated and bright. If he was merely eight years, then, from living on the streets, his transformation was indeed miraculous.

But if a product of wholesale poverty – pecuniary, spiritual, intellectual – is what you’re after, look no further than Money May’s made-for-TV chat session with American soldiers in the latest “24/7” installment. Racing through his mansion with a laptop, hyperactive enough to outpace the boundaries of his home’s wireless network, twice, Money May showed $30,000/year heroes his collection of meretricious toys. It was a concise report on American values.

If Victor Ortiz were to read what is written about him above, he would likely reply, “Whatever, dude, I don’t care if you believe me or not.” Mayweather, meanwhile, would go into a righteous fit, the reflexive lunacy of a man wrongly accused. Mayweather the businessman against Ortiz the trauma survivor, then, has all the congruity of a Shakespearean bed-switching caper.

So, we can agree the subplots for this event are mostly if not entirely contrived, but what about the fight itself?

It should not be close. Some of us may have forgotten the look on Ortiz’s face when he quit against Marcos Maidana in 2009, but rest assured Mayweather has not. That Victor Ortiz, and not the beast who decisioned Andre Berto in April, is the guy Mayweather expects to face Saturday.

Ortiz, who has learned from his handler Oscar De La Hoya the media is only useful as a lapdog, criticizes those who criticize him. He explains that we do not understand how much fire he has inside him, and he is likely correct. But Ortiz has yet to show Ricky Hatton’s fire in the ring, and we saw how Mayweather extinguished that.

But Ortiz is so much bigger than Hatton was!

Actually, Ortiz has exactly as many fights at welterweight as Hatton had when he was stopped by Mayweather four years ago. Ortiz has 1/7 as many fights at welterweight as Mayweather. Ortiz will bring exactly no power advantage to Saturday’s fight.

That leaves his awkwardness and youth. He is a southpaw, and he has 24 years to Mayweather’s 34. If aficionados agree Ortiz would have no chance against a prime Mayweather, their reason for purchasing Saturday’s show must be: Mayweather is no longer in his prime.

That may be. Certainly, the day Mayweather’s reflexes dull, nobody in his entourage will be the wiser. Mayweather’s trainer and uncle, at age 50, isn’t likely to catch his charge slipping with handpad tricks, and Roger Mayweather remains Floyd’s only chance at an honest appraisal.

For all his childishness, though, Floyd Mayweather might just be a genius of physical motion. If he had detected an erosion in training camp, he likely would have spent “24/7” taunting Ortiz instead of buying cars.

Alas, we’re supposed to be selling this fight in the hopes that next year will bring a fight to save boxing – “The World Awaited” – and so it behooves us to proclaim this match will be more than another tune-up for Mayweather. OK, then, probably . . .

Sorry, couldn’t do it. The chalk is right. I’ll take Mayweather: KO-10.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

As a philosophy major in the mid 1990s, I never had a chance to do an internship. A decade’s worth of hindsight now tells me I should have been a communications major. Since everyone’s going back to school these days – “financial aid” rings so much sweeter than “unemployment” – I spent Saturday imagining myself an intern . . .

LOL, what a night for us! Meet the new boss same as the old boss, like my supervisor says. Social media had so many predictions about where this network was going a few months ago when the boss said he’d be pursuing other opportunities, everyone freaked out for absolutely no reason. “Easy, killah,” I told my buddies. You hear stuff in the halls, but nobody’s changing anything really. We had more credentials for Saturday than Beau Rivage had security and concessions staff. One pal, I think he’s salaried or freelance or hourly or whatever, he told us it was like this in Michigan in January. Some big football stadium. He said they actually parked trailers on the floor where the fight was supposed to happen. To save money and material on black curtains, they just plopped the ring in the far corner. Genius. So, Saturday, there were some problems with taking our brand to the next level. We had that young kid in the eight-rounder, the Olympian that Papa, like, hinted might have been a victim of politics. Wasn’t too clear on that. Didn’t ask questions about it because, dude, it ain’t my place. While I’m on the subject: Just because it isn’t my place doesn’t mean it isn’t yours. Fans like you are what give us these amazing opportunities. Your feedback is so very important to us. Be sure to log-on to our message board and express your feelings. And if you can, y’know, log-on from a number of different devices (so their IP addresses register as unique hits), that’s even better! Make your voices be heard. Antihero, that was totally the angle for Berto. Kid can’t sell tickets because Haitians don’t care about boxing. Plan was to repackage him innovatively. Build him up as a guy who didn’t know he couldn’t draw a stick figure at the box office. He was brash. That was the keyword we focus-grouped. “Brash” scares older people, reminds them of flash mobs and stuff. We were going to make him brash, and the viewers would hate him for his not knowing they hated him. And then, just like that, the youngest 1/3 of our viewers would make him their favorite and just go sick with talk of skillz. But dude messed it up. He’s been in two awesome fights. Now we have to start over. And don’t even get me going about Max! What was that crap he pulled during his closing soliloquy? He basically sold out the shop. He told the viewers – sorry, “our guests” – that we know they know about Berto’s advisor. He implied our guests might consciously choose to cheer against a guy like Berto because they resent his advisor. Thanks, Max. We gave him the red light on that one. He got the message. You see the way he went away from that point? We zoomed him out anyway. That let Papa know to take the mic back. Max is an awesome guy, but sometimes he’s too smart for himself. Then it was Money time. It’s not like we scheduled a Berto fight just to lead-in to Money time, but that’s probably what we did. Like they’d tell an intern about that? My supervisor did watch me a lot more while we watched “24/7” than “Boxing After Dark.” He thinks I still live at home with my parents, which I don’t. Well, in the summer I do, but I’m back in the dorm this week, so I don’t know how he thinks convincing me to convince my dad to buy the pay-per-view is such a brilliant strategy. (Nobody in that Campus Survival class told us our bosses would always be dumber than us.) You see some of that mic work on the Money shots? That was me. Some of it, I’m not trying to brag. I was there for the scene with 50 Cent, Money’s BFF. I told my director I thought it was like Money and 50 had rehearsed the phone call with the money stacks. He asked me if it wasn’t twice as delicious to imagine they hadn’t. Still don’t get that. My buddy was there in Money’s home theater when Money kept yelling at him, at my buddy with the boom arm, to tell him who trains harder. My buddy, like, totally shrugged at Money, but he kept yelling at him. He said it took 17 shots to get the right feel. Then my buddy told our supervisor, “Floyd’s a douche.” That’s how I got my shot. Dude, 50 Cent looked mad uncomfortable during those scenes! Goodbye, cred. I haven’t been over to the Ortiz camp, though I tried to cold-call his dad and schedule a surprise training-camp visit (epic fail), but I hear Oscar totally dissed every word Oscar’s ever said in a Mayweather promotion. Maybe he’s working his program? Going to the convenience store to get Roger a sandwich wasn’t fun as it looked but still cool. I got a text from a chick whose internship took her to the VMAs a week ago. I replied: “I’m with Roger Mayweather right now … 2nd place is still a winner LMAO.” But those midnight runs are a bitch, I won’t lie. Money runs for about 45 minutes. He talks the whole time. We get 38 seconds of usable footage. You do the math. Oh well, I have to be in class on Tuesday. My amazing summer is over, yo. But I had to share. Ur welcome.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

A friend visited me from Mexico last week. Between trips to Austin and strolls along the San Antonio River, we had occasion to watch a number of old Marco Antonio Barrera fights – the Junior Jones debacles and the classic trilogy with Erik Morales. But it was the first Manny Pacquiao fight that filled me with a dull sense of foreboding about November.

What does Barrera have to do with November? Probably not much unless Top Rank needs undercard filler. What Barrera tells us about Pacquiao’s waning interest in combat, though, might be plenty instructive as we begin to look forward to Pacquiao’s third fight with Juan Manuel Marquez.

First, a note or two about what it was like to be an average boxing fan in Mexico for the last decade. My friend lives in Tampico, Tamaulipas, a city located about 300 miles south of the U.S. border. In the 1940s, he boxed in amateur events as a boy in the Mexican state of Veracruz. He loves boxing at least as much as you do.

But until last week, he had never seen Barrera-Morales I, II or III. Those fights, you see, were on pay channels, and a municipal employee in Tamaulipas’ fifth-largest city didn’t earn a salary large enough to justify such an expense. That meant, in some way, boxing stopped commanding his interest. There were the old days, nostalgia for such scrappers as Rodolfo “Chango” Casanova, sure, but with its accessibility issues, boxing moved to a distant second behind soccer.

That is now changed. Boxing is everywhere on Mexican public airwaves again. But the lost decade of Mexican prizefighting, and its consequences for the quality of product coming out of Mexico today – read: Canelo and Junior – is worth an annual reconsideration or two by American fight fans looking at bandwagons to jump.

The Barrera that fought Morales in February of 2000 has never been seen again. He would go on to teach Naseem Hamed how to box in 2001 and decision Morales in their 2002 rematch, but he would never fight with the abandon he showed in his first match with “El Terrible.”

Seventeen months after winning a first decision over Morales, Barrera would come to San Antonio and get fully undone by a young Filipino prodigy nicknamed Pac Man. With trainer Freddie Roach whispering in his ear about Texas judges – with the ghost of Chavez-Whitaker still haunting the Alamodome scorer’s table (and yes, trivia buffs, Gale Van Hoy was an official judge for Barrera-Pacquiao I) – Pacquiao would make no mistakes in his championship rounds with Barrera.

Fresh as an insolent child after 30 minutes of combat, Pacquiao would hunt and raze Barrera. Beginning in the ninth round, Barrera would glide, retreat and engage only when imperiled. And Pacquiao’s ferocious fighting spirit would not stop imperiling the champion till Barrera’s corner stopped the match.

Four years later, in a fight that marked a temporary rapprochement between Top Rank and Golden Boy Promotions, Barrera challenged Pacquiao to a rematch Barrera had no thought of winning. Barrera cashed himself out, gliding and retreating for 36 minutes, engaging only when imperiled and announcing a retirement immediately afterwards.

And Pacquiao let him. Fighting as the favorite in Las Vegas, Pacquiao had no fears of crooked Lone Star scorecards. He did enough to win each round. Drained from making 130 pounds for the last time, Pacquiao did a 12-round dance with Barrera that looked like nothing so much as a business transaction.

What happens, then, if that Manny Pacquiao meets the wrong Juan Manuel Marquez on Nov. 12 at MGM Grand?

To this point, worries about Pacquiao-Marquez III have all treated Marquez’s health. Marquez, great as he is, does not belong in a fight one ounce above the lightweight limit of 135 pounds. Pacquiao is an established, if ever-light, welterweight. Their rubber match will happen at 144, where Pacquiao seems most comfortable.

Marquez has shown us that he, too, is capable of a business transaction. Told by his trainer and longtime manager Nacho Beristain not to fight Floyd Mayweather at welterweight in 2009, Marquez did it anyway to gain a career payday. Dropped early in the match, Marquez fought hard enough to frighten the ever-cautious Mayweather from pursuing a knockout in the half hour that followed. Mayweather could not knock out Marquez, in other words, because he hated the thought of a hellacious exchange.

After losing most every round to Mayweather, though, Marquez showed no regret. On the contrary, he stated plainly that he had nothing about which to feel shame. He’d challenged a much larger man, remained on his feet and cashed a much larger check.

Since then, Manny Pacquiao has shown, in fights with Joshua Clottey and Shane Mosley, that if an opponent is hellbent on not-fighting, Pacquiao won’t force him to do it. The likely beneficiary of every close round, Pacquiao now stays busy, picks his moments, flurries and leaps out, and collects decision victories and immense paydays.

What happens, then, if that Pacquiao squares off with that Marquez? Two words, actually: Uh oh.

We’re readying the boxing rally caps, I know – the now-annual rite of Pacquiao-Mayweather-fight promises will soon spill forth as if on a timer – but it might be helpful to remember this. Whatever happens from here, however easily Mayweather decisions Victor Ortiz in a few weeks, however easily Pacquiao decisions Marquez two months after that, Pacquiao-Mayweather will never again hold the promise it held at the end of 2009.

The Fight to Save Boxing, 2012 vintage, is an event already corrupted by greed and shortsightedness. Let us hope nothing happens in November to cause further erosion of interest.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

Photo by Chris Farina / Top Rank

“Blood, Steel and Canvas: The Asian Odyssey of a Fighter” by Craig Alan Wilson (Diversion Books; $4.99) is a spare and enjoyable e-book that uses boxing as a celebration of life instead of using life as an excuse to box. It radiates with a light-hearted warmth that many books about our beloved sport lack.

Here are its major themes: disliking corporate law, relocating to the Philippines, learning to box, enduring a coup d’état, returning to Washington D.C., suffering colitis, surviving colon cancer, running a marathon, moving to Thailand, boxing in famous Thai venues, and becoming a father.

*

Much of this book’s best writing has nothing whatever to do with boxing, though. Its commentaries on Yale undergrad work, Harvard Law School and the clerkships and striving that follow set a refreshing pace.

The boxing writing, too, is often crisp and well-reported, and its treatments of the sport’s rudiments are graceful. You may already know what hand pads are, but Wilson’s presentation of them is still a pleasant surprise. And there’s no doubting his love for the sport.

But what delights most about this book is its author’s self-deprecation. Whether examining the discomforts of wearing an ileostomy pouch – effectively carrying one’s intestine externally – or being staggered by a superior while sparring, “Blood, Steel and Canvas” happily chides itself and its first-person narrator.

*

“Long stints in the library and my Type-A personality had propelled me to the pinnacle,” writes Wilson, “but as I labored into the night and on weekends, canceling dates and eating Chinese take-out dinners at my desk, I came to an eye-opening conclusion: success sucks.”

Deprived of a life around people from whom he could learn things worth knowing and wary of an expanding waistline, Wilson chose to begin his boxing adventure in the Philippines of all places. Boxing, for all its self-induced hardships, was better for him than at least one other discipline.

“The logical move, forswearing chocolate, I would not even contemplate,” Wilson writes, “so I resolved to lose weight by taking up exercise, a novel proposition that ultimately led me to the Elorde Sports Center.”

This boxing journey took Wilson from the Philippines back to Washington D.C. and ultimately to Thailand, where he still lives, and a gym that complemented his self-deprecating style.

“At first the Sot Chitrlada [gym] professionals treated me with kid gloves, but as the months went by and my zest for combat became apparent, they abandoned the Mr. Nice Guy approach and went full steam ahead,” he writes. “(I outweighed most of them by at least twenty pounds; otherwise this book would have been published posthumously.)”

*

Among Wilson’s well-explored subtler themes, its underlayers, is the nature of life as an ex-pat. He has plenty to contribute on this subject, and his observations are insightful ones. Of those American ex-pats who reside in Thailand but make no effort to learn its language, he writes:

“Not only is their refusal hypocritical, but it is counter-productive, as they miss out on one of the real joys of expatriate life, experiencing and being a part of the local culture.”

If “Blood, Steal and Canvas” has a weakness, though, it comes in an unexpected spot. While reporting or expounding, Wilson writes good sentences that, to borrow his term, “effervesce”; but when he switches to motivational-speaker mode, his prose takes on a salesy hue; he reaches in the self-help cereal box and pulls out toys that can feel clichéd:

“A cancer diagnosis does not mean that your life has hit a brick wall. Pardon the expression, but you have to roll with the punches.”

Wilson knows better than to do this and subsequently takes things into his “gloves” – instead of his hands – and occasionally precedes what he knows to be a cliché with a plea for pardon like the one above.

*

All is indeed pardonable because Wilson otherwise makes so many good choices throughout his book’s 121 pages.

“At the end, I held up my gloves and nodded to show that I wanted to continue,” he writes of his first knockout defeat. “The referee looked in my eyes and watched as I rocked on my feet. Putting his arm around me, he escorted me back to my corner. The bout was over. Secretly I did not mind.”

When in another boxing book have you read a last sentence honest as that one?

“Through boxing I gained self-confidence,” writes Wilson. “I discovered that I could take care of myself, not just in the sense of the adolescent’s ‘let’s settle this outside’ mentality, but – much more important – in the belated realization that I need not be scared of what others might think.”

And a fear of humiliation is undoubtedly one that haunts a fighter more than pain or injury.

*

There is another curious decision Wilson must have made, and it merits mention. A boxing book that dedicates most of its opening 1/3 to Manila never once makes itself about Manny Pacquiao. “Blood, Steel and Canvas” is its author’s memoir, and if Wilson didn’t meet Pacquiao while he was in Manila, he also didn’t meet boys who “had Pacquiao’s hunger” or “threw a left cross like Pacquiao” or any of the other Pacquiao-isms a marketing team would have added.

A choice like that deserves a comment like this: You will learn more about what made Pacquiao what he is today in the first 40 pages of Wilson’s book than in anything you read this November.

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Through its author’s willingness to tread lightly with life’s most serious subjects – cancer, law, combat, failure and fatherhood – “Blood, Steel and Canvas” provides a quick and valuable experience.

“I am not a great lawyer,” concludes Wilson. “I have not enjoyed the professional renown and monetary rewards that have flowed to many of my classmates.”

Perhaps not. But by living an interesting life and writing a book about it, Wilson has done us a service.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

That quote belongs to Showtime commentator Al Bernstein. Its subject is Nevada referee Russell Mora. Bernstein made the comment between rounds 11 and 12, when a replay showed Mora had called a lowblow a clean punch – a mistake he’d made numerous times during a championship fight he officiated and Showtime televised. Bernstein is not known for hyperbole; if anything he leans too far towards equanimity.

Immediately after the fight Showtime personality Jim Gray – yes, that Jim Gray – began his postfight interviews with Russell Mora instead of the match’s winner or vanquished champion. Gray indicated to Mora that Mora changed the very result of the match. Strong words indeed.

What Showtime’s talent said about Mora’s performance is worth treating, but first some details. The match was Mexico’s Abner Mares against Ghana’s Joseph King Kong Agbeko. It was the final of Showtime’s short but delayed Bantamweight Tournament. It was also for the IBF title, which belonged to Agbeko. Mares won by majority decision scores of 113-113, 115-111 and 115-111.

My scorecard concurred. I had it 115-113 for Mares. I gave the Mexican rounds 1, 3, 6, 7 and 11. I had the Ghanaian winning rounds 2, 4, 8, 10 and 12. I had rounds 5 and 9 even. And with Russell Mora’s help, rounds 1 and 11 went to Mares by two points, 10-8.

There were two knockdowns that were not actually. Mares benefitted from both. Does that make Mares a rotten kid or second-tier fighter who is only competitive at the championship level when it’s two-against-one? Not at all. It just makes the result of Saturday’s match sufficiently wrong to be disregarded by aficionados, and such disregard is punishment enough.

It’s what will happen to Referee Mora, fear not. Boxing has never been a very large community. Today it is a tiny and shrinking one. With the help of modern communication tools, it is a community capable of suffocating state commissions into complying with its will. This sort of thing can turn to bullying but generally hasn’t in boxing. Of course Texas’ Gale Van Hoy – about whose future judging efforts some fans still want email alerts – might disagree.

Don’t hold Mora against Mares. The young Mexican bantamweight earned that first knockdown by looking better in his opening two minutes against Agbeko than anyone has. Mares was sharp and tight. Agbeko was wild and unbalanced. When Agbeko planted to throw an odd-angled punch and his feet splayed, it wasn’t on account of anything Mares did in that preceding instant. But you know what? Mares had done enough in the preceding 120 instants to make a knockdown seem plausible.

Russell Mora was not looking at the combatants’ feet. He wasn’t much looking at their gloves either. His eyes were on the combatants’ heads. These are likely his mechanics; he watches the heads – where most action happens – and relies on peripheral vision and feel (as a former Golden Gloves state champion) to take care of the rest.

These mechanics explain why, time and again Saturday, Mora’s primary concern was Agbeko’s pressing on the back of Mares’ neck, not where Mares’ left fist went. The Showtime crew, meanwhile, sat well beneath the action and saw each lowblow as if thrown in slow motion. Welcome to perspective.

Mares is not necessarily a dirty fighter. He is a fighter who commits to throwing lots of left hooks to the body. And if you throw lots of those punches at a moving target, you land lowblows.

How? Because the left hook to the body is not a punch thrown on a flat plane. In order to find an opponent’s liver, many things must go right at the moment of impact. Along with your opponent’s breathing rhythm being on inhale, the knuckles of your left hand must be rising. You can do this one of two ways: 1. Throw a flat punch with an upwards twist at the end, or 2. Throw an uppercut-hook hybrid that begins low and ends high.

Mares chooses the latter option. He starts many of his left hooks low and relies on an opponent to stay still at least until the punch is above the belt line. Mares does not seem to realize this: His postfight justification for lowblows – that his opponent often moves away – was exactly backwards.

The fight’s most offensive punch, the cherrypicker Mares threw in round 11 – a punch that dramatically improved the fast-fading Mexican’s fortunes – was an act of miscalculation. Mares started the punch too low and too close. He wanted to throw an uppercut to the forward-bent Agbeko’s abdomen. Mares missed his target by about 10 inches. We know this because the top of Agbeko’s glove was at the belt line, and Mares’ glove landed beneath the bottom of Agbeko’s glove, way below its intended target. Mares deserved a one-point penalty, one he would have agreed with later.

Referee Mora, eyes fixated on the fighters’ heads, blew the call – awarding Mares an extra point when Agbeko took a knee, rather than deducting one. This caused a four-point swing in round 11. In missing an important call, Mora directly altered a championship fight’s outcome. He’s not fit to referee another major fight for some time. That’s sanction enough.

How to otherwise remedy the injustice done Agbeko? That part’s simple.

Showtime, by virtue of its tournament, is the de facto promoter of the bantamweight division. Mares and Agbeko, two fighters who owe what exposure they’ve had to the network – their promoters, after all, couldn’t fill a nightclub at Hard Rock Hotel – will do what Showtime tells them to. Instead of lobbying the IBF or writing protest letters to the Nevada State Athletic Commission, Agbeko’s people need only send Showtime a tape of its on-air talent.

The credibility of Showtime’s tournament has been comprised. Showtime will remedy this by ordering an immediate rematch.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry