By now you’ve read the press release about my Monday column, the one that was to be a workaday review of Kelly Pavlik’s comeback match with Darryl Cunningham, written for a transcendent website that gets more daily hits than every boxing site combined. After that would come a masterwork that announced my comeback as a serious voice.

I cancelled all that, Wednesday. After Pavlik cancelled his fight and offered a telling interview to Alec Kohut on Tuesday, I had a contentious phone call with the editor of the site for which I’d intended to write my next two columns. A transcript follows.

Me (cutting in): Listen, hey, wait, I’m tired of spending hours each week fretting over what strangers will opine of my subject. I need to start thinking about me, and riffing on art museums and favorite novelists. And I’m getting that tattoo of 15rounds.com on my lower back changed to a dolphin, just so you know – with the 5 becoming a dorsal fin.

Editor: Do what you want with your body. But remember our deal.

Me: I remember it and planned to honor it. A throwaway review of a mediocre fight, something to reintroduce me to readers as a writer who can fashion a passable report without experimenting, followed by a sprawling epic about Marvin Gaye’s use of boxing to overcome drug addiction, written to the chord changes of “Inner City Blues” and featuring interviews with much of Detroit.

Editor: That was the plan.

Me: Right, and then I realized you’re using me. You’re going to use my Marvin Gaye opus to drum up a hundred more clicks then tell me to scram.

Editor: Depends on how the second column goes over. You have to prove –

Me: I’m a famous writer. If I end a sentence with a preposition or use a hyphen in lieu of a semicolon, everybody talks about it. I coauthored a book with Thomas Hauser, for goodness’ sake! People know Bart Barry.

Column: And that’s why we offered to pay you what we thought was reasonable.

Me: “Reasonable”? I know you offered David Greisman $10,000 per column. Now maybe on the East Cost or the West Coast or the Midwest, Greisman’s name means more than mine, but in South Texas, in San Antonio, the Centertown portion – Houston Street? – my name is bigger than his. He gets $10,000 per column, and I get $50. C’mon!

Editor: What are you talking about? That $10,000 number is preposterous.

Me: I know what I know. At least offer me, like, $59, or fly me to Los Angeles, where boxing occasionally happens. I’d do my column for $50 in L.A. But you’re asking me to write about a deceased Motown talent, in South Texas, for $50. It’s outrageous, pardon my French.

Editor: Your what?

Me: It’s despicable – and I don’t mean to cuss. About my invoice . . .

Editor: We have a standard way of reimbursing our writers, one you are familiar with and –

Me: I don’t do this for the money, OK? I’m not one of these knucklehead boxing writers who acquires contemporary art or manages an expensive designer-eyeglass collection. Believe me, I’m fine. And if I’m fine, and I don’t write for money, obviously I’m not going to write unless I get paid what I think I’m worth! I don’t mean to swear, but it’s illogical.

Editor: You seem worked up. Are you back on the caffeine?

Me: Really, this again? Find me one writer who so much as tweets without a mug of coffee in his fist. I’ve been honest about those few times I had too much at Starbucks and it made me incoherent. Do you have any idea how hard it is to generate words out of thin air and have others question your talent and craft?

Editor: That’s what you are paid to do. Do you how many boxing fans would love to get paid for their opinions?

Me: You know what, I’m like any other guy. When some Wal-Mart greeter goes to a job where he makes less in a day than I make in an hour, does he do it for me? No. I write for the money – money I do not need. Frankly, I don’t even care if anyone reads my Marvin Gaye masterpiece.

Editor: For which we would pay you $50.

Me: How is a writer going to make $35 for a column comparing Marco Antonio Barrera to Jane Austen, a column maybe 20 people finished, and fewer than 10 enjoyed, and then take short money for a story on Marvin Gaye?

Editor: This was supposed to be a redemptive effort for you. After your issues with editors.

Me: Every writer fights with editors. One time, one time, Frauenheim and I get in a conversation and miss the early shuttle to Cowboys Stadium, and Abrams calls, and I tell him what happened, and he says it’s not a big deal, and I say it is. The only reason people talk about that is because Bart Barry is a famous name.

Editor: This is an impasse.

Me: Look, there are knowledgeable people out there. One guy, we call him “Spandex” – he knew a guy whose grandfather met Henry Miller in Paris – and he told me I need to not just write about art museums but really bore into them, controversial stuff about minimalism.

Editor: And when readers say it’s nonsensical?

Me: Maybe if they’d get off their asses and pay a subscription fee or send an eloquent email, instead of worrying about what Bart Barry is writing, maybe then . . .

(End Transcript)

As you can see from what’s above, my side of the story, I walked away from that other gig for good reasons. We can all agree this was the best thing for my boxing-writing career. Don’t miss my next column.

Bart Barry can still be reached at bbarry@15rounds.com, where he’s still happily writing, having never once fought with his editor.

Colorado’s Mike Alvarado successfully continued his comeback Saturday. Ohio’s Kelly Pavlik will successfully continue his comeback Saturday. Top Rank continues to promote both. And American boxing aficionados who are not within driving distance of Southern California’s thriving gym scene continue to be nostalgic about better times.

Saturday’s Fox Sports Español telecast was a reminder of this. There was Alvarado, fighting in Denver at a venue called Softball Country Arena – which appeared to be a field with a set of tracks behind it where trains moseyed past. Rumor is, ticket sales went well. But Alvarado is in a much different place from where he once was.

Today he is 31-years old. He is fighting Off-Off-Broadway, to be charitable. Since his quick rise on the professional scene, one aided by Telefutura’s “Solo Boxeo” (its invaluable predecessor, not the current imposter), he has fought in cities like Cicero, Ill., Gary, Ind., and Commerce City, Colo. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

Sixty-two months ago, Alvarado fought in the co-main event of a Top Rank card in Tucson, Ariz., in a venue called Club Envy. The club itself was small, as I recall it. The parking lot was converted to a fighting venue. There were folding chairs and a chainlink fence and metal tubs of beers on the perimeter. The turnout was mediocre, as Arizona boxing was by then nine months into a cruel freeze – one our own Norm Frauenheim reports may just now be thawing.

Some of the usual characters were at Club Envy, though not as many. Phil Soto, Top Rank’s Arizona publicist, placed seat assignments on ringside tables and put me beside TheSweetScience.com’s Phil Woolever – arguably boxing writing’s most poetic soul. Woolever spoke his observations into a handheld voice recorder, and we shared a few jokes about the hot pink trunks one of the undercard combatants wore in the ring that night.

Alvarado was sharp, threw tight combinations, impressed observers with his right uppercut, and got hit plenty with right crosses. His opponent that night, Maximino “Holy Hands” Cuevas, boasted an 8-3-1 record that was headed for 10-11-1. He was there to lose and found his way out of the match with a left-eye injury after round 5.

Alvarado was disappointed the fight didn’t go longer, implying he would have been hit with fewer punches as it went on. Saturday’s junior welterweight fight against Gabriel Martinez showed that either Alvarado’s five-year-old claim was never particularly true, or he’s lost some of the fast-twitch from his reflexes. He still gets hit hard with right hands.

But he also shows the same impressive chin he showed in his youth, back when Top Rank very nearly called him a top prospect in its stable – before the arrests and private disappointments. Last June, as Top Rank spent a week in San Antonio to promote Julio Cesar Chavez Jr.’s match with John Duddy, Alvarado’s career had collided with another obstacle, and Top Rank personnel were not timid about expressing their displeasure with Alvarado.

Yet, there was Alvarado on a Top Rank broadcast Saturday – a marker we’ll return to.

Kelly Pavlik, too, has performed a sabotage of sorts on his prizefighting career, a career Top Rank’s Bob Arum once promised would eclipse in riches and acclaim Oscar De La Hoya’s. Pavlik was his hometown’s professional-sports franchise. Youngstown, Ohio, perhaps the closest thing boxing has to a sister city, rallied round its one excuse for optimism. Pavlik let the city down.

Talk to folks above the legal drinking age in Youngstown, and you’ll find most have a story or two about the hell-raising Pavlik brothers. A few weeks ago that hell-raising won national attention, as Kelly and his brother staged a sparring match to whose credentials list local police were belatedly added. Pavlik doesn’t want to talk about it. Boxing media, excepting only Michael Woods, were happy to comply with the fighter’s wishes during last week’s conference call.

You know who’s happy to talk about it, though? Guys in boxing gyms. In South Texas at least, where most heavybag habitués’ names end in an s or z, there’s a long-held suspicion Pavlik was the beneficiary of what President George W. Bush once called “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” Pavlik’s white skin lowered expectations, Pavlik sprang over the shortened hurdles, and Pavlik became far more famous than a Mexican or Puerto Rican might have for knocking-out middleweight champion Jermain Taylor.

Is this accurate? Not really. Boxing gyms are often racially fixated and cruel places, and Pavlik deserves better than the “white hope” and “middleweight drunk” titles his name now triggers.

Just the same, by now, Pavlik was supposed to be a pay-per-view mainstay, selling-out edifices like Ohio State’s Horseshoe or Cleveland Browns Stadium. Instead, Pavlik now hopes for a “walk-up” crowd in Youngstown’s Covelli Center on Friday. He’ll be fighting someone named Darryl Cunningham on Showtime’s “ShoBox” program, one whose subtitle is “The New Generation.”

Top Rank will promote that show, too. Just like Alvarado’s show Saturday. Why is this worth mentioning? Because it tells you something about the fabric of Bob Arum’s company.

Contrary to general impressions, Arum engenders loyalty by showing loyalty. He may bark at his fighters. Hell, he may even crow about them in the press. But Top Rank always answers the phone when one of its stable calls. It finds a place for tough action fighters, regardless of their private mistakes. People, it seems, like Arum more the better they know him.

If Oscar De La Hoya is the future of boxing promotion, this is a trait he should learn from his former promoter. De La Hoya has an opposite track record: He is most beloved by those who are farthest from him.

Meanwhile boxing’s own comeback remains in neutral, exactly between first gear and reverse.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

Englishman Amir Khan will never fail to look unbeatable against an opponent who considers contact optional. If you are a prizefighter who relies on once-youthful reflexes to get the better of every exchange, there’s a good chance you have no chance against Khan. He is too fast and confident. He is going to hit you, and if being hit ruins your prefight strategy, ruined you will be.

Brooklyn’s Zab Judah, older and slower and newly devoted to the Prince of Peace, was just such a man – one who wanted no part of being hit.

And so, Saturday at Mandalay Bay, Amir Khan stopped Judah at 2:47 of round 5 with a punch that hit Judah on the belly button, making Khan a unified titlist at 140 pounds. And Judah – who try, try, tried again to get the fight stopped – was left with little more than another professional paragraph that ends “, if only.”

After the fight, Khan said he believed Judah a better boxer than Timothy Bradley, the recognized champion at 140 pounds. Khan is right. If you understand the word “boxer” in the headgear-and-big-gloves, hit-and-don’t-get-hit, make’em-say-“ooh! ahh!” sense of the term, Judah is a better boxer than Bradley. But Bradley is twice the fighter Judah is.

Don’t for a second think Khan’s ability to dominate a formerly flashy prizefighter with diminished reflexes is indicative of how Khan would fare against a prime volume puncher. Khan looked unstoppable against Paulie Malignaggi. And it told you nothing about how he’d look when Marcos Maidana laid hands on him. Maybe Malignaggi was no Zab Judah, but neither was Maidana any sort of Timothy Bradley.

Frankly, it’s hard to concentrate on another disappointing match in a papered (but still sparsely occupied) arena in a depressed American city when there is a looming debt crisis.

Let’s spend some time thinking about this looming crisis, then. No, not the politics of it. That part is beneath us. Rather, let’s look at the consequences of our Treasury bonds losing their AAA rating.

Since July of 1944, America has effectively owned the world’s printing press. When the Allies met in Bretton Woods, N.H., and agreed to make the dollar the world’s reserve currency, our country was given an extraordinary economic advantage. We have not used this advantage predatorily as European history tells us we could have, no, but we’ve still taken some liberties with it. In 1971, President Nixon “temporarily” suspended the redemptions we’d promised the Allies – dollars to gold – and floated the world’s reserve currency, and every other currency along with it. In the 1980s, President Reagan used the printing press to lose a race to bankruptcy with the Soviet Union.

Today we are told to fear a takeover of the world’s economy by China – as if the yuan were poised to replace the dollar. That is unlikely. After all, it took 65 million deaths in World War II for the world to agree on a common currency.

But what if our Treasury bonds were to lose their AAA rating?

It is instructive to look at the case of American International Group (AIG) in 2008 to start answering that question. AIG, believe it or not, never exactly defaulted on its debt. Instead, it issued an incredible number of bonds to borrow money to leverage its positions. And AIG’s bondholders bought those bonds based on their AAA rating – with an agreement that if AIG were to lose its high rating, it would provide additional collateral.

When AIG’s debt was downgraded by rating agencies, it suddenly had to produce tens of billions of dollars in additional collateral to meet its obligations. Its ability to raise additional capital reflexively cancelled, AIG faced default, and our federal government – owner of the world’s printing press – intervened, covered AIG’s debt, and prevented default.

Now, imagine AIG were a country whose debt the entire world owned and who suddenly lost its AAA rating. Then imagine there was no federal government to step in and prevent default.

Welcome to the United States of America in 2011.

What happens if U.S. Treasury bonds lose their AAA rating? Nobody knows. The quality of American debt is the one constant in every economic model designed and used for the last 67 years. America is uniquely empowered by the rest of the world to print money in a crisis. It has never struck anyone that a country with this advantage would consider not using it.

Every fixed-income model used by every country relies on the U.S. Treasury bond to be a standard. If this were to change, one assumes, the algorithms on which the world’s financial models are built would trigger immediate downgrades of every entity that owns U.S. Treasury bonds.

And you thought AIG was interconnected?

If American debt loses its AAA rating, it will be ruinous to our way of life, and more ruinous to everyone else’s. Quickly enough – deprived of its standard – the credit-rating system, itself, will disappear. And without a way to know who will pay and who will default, the entirety of the global economy will congeal.

Take solace in this, though: Unlike the case of 2008, when a tiny and private band of men conspired to end the world’s economy, this time it will be elected officials of the United States that publicly raze it. A democratic solution for ending the world as we know it – which does seem fairer.

Oh, about Amir Khan? It’s hard to say. He seems to be positioning himself for a run at the winner of Mayweather-Ortiz (Mayweather) at welterweight. Timothy Bradley seems to be positioning himself for a run at Manny Pacquiao. That is, both Khan and Bradley are mapping their careers on the assumption that Pacquiao-Mayweather never happens. Hard to argue with them.

Chances are, we’ll be deprived of both Bradley-Khan and Pacquiao-Mayweather, then. Let’s hope that’s the extent of our deprivations.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

CORPUS CHRISTI, Tex. – Contrary to stereotypes about South Texas, held by the rest of the country, yes, but also other Texans, this city plays home to a superb contemporary-paint collection by local artists. Art Museum of South Texas is a jewel of sweeping modern canvases and craftily presented views of the bay on which it stands.

It is also home to work by Dorothy Hood, creator of large-scale and abstract works that challenge as much as they delight. A woman doing abstract paintings in 1960s Texas and finding enduring appreciation 150 miles from the border with Mexico: not exactly the impression of Lone Star State one gets from reading The New York Times.

A pox on the stereotypes, then!

Sing it out for South Texas, and sing it out for junior welterweights Amir Khan and Zab Judah.

Khan, a 24-year-old Englishman of Arab descent, currently holds the WBA’s version of a 140-pound title but is not his division’s king. Judah, a 33-year-old New Yorker of Brooklyn descent, has held a number of titles and routinely stretched his fans to the end of their emotional tether. The two will meet Saturday at Mandalay Bay in a match HBO will televise.

Their fight will be filled with the absence of Timothy Bradley, the junior welterweight champion last seen manhandling Devon Alexander in a deserted Pontiac Silverdome about six months ago. Bradley will still be the best 140 pounder after Khan and Judah finish a battle for mandatory-challenger status.

Bradley, it seems, has run into promotional difficulties. One didn’t have to be a cynic to suspect this the morning after his last fight. Then, Bradley strode through Southwest’s terminal at Detroit Metro Airport round 7:00 a.m. The best prizefighter in one of boxing’s best divisions not only didn’t have a first-class ticket but had to hustle to get a decent seat on a flight that rose with the sun.

Rumor is, Bradley may head to promoter Top Rank, after forgoing a chance to extend his professional relationship with Gary Shaw. Leaving a matchmaker for a promoter is a good idea. That Top Rank will know what to do with an African American from Palm Springs, Calif., though, is disputable.

What is indisputable is Bradley’s fear of Amir Khan. There is none. Whatever Bradley’s actual reason for declining a title-unification bout with Khan, fear can be dismissed. Khan’s stand-up, boxer-puncher style is custom made for Bradley. Khan is no faster than Devon Alexander and has roughly half the chin. And Bradley fearlessly gave Alexander the business till he quit in January.

Khan, though, could do Bradley quite a favor by beating Zab Judah on Saturday. Judah, in his latest incarnation at least, is more than capable of beating any of the top-5 junior welterweights. He is a wildcard and always has been.

Since his 2008 loss to Joshua Clottey – yes, the timid turtle from Cowboys Stadium – Judah has turned his life around and figured things out and adjusted his priorities and, why, every other cliché used by athletes whose talent outpaces their achievements. He’s had impressive wins against unimpressive foes and one unimpressive win against an impressive foe.

He’s also gotten a recent helping of positive press disproportionate to recent accomplishments. Most of this can be attributed to his promoter Kathy Duva, a refreshingly accessible craftsperson who treats the print media much better than many of her peers. Much of the rest of Judah’s darling treatment is attributable to the residue left by hopes appended to him years ago.

That was before Kostya Tszyu sent Judah stumbling everywhere in 2001. It was before Carlos Baldomir put him on Queer Street in 2006. It was before Floyd Mayweather solved him 90 days later. And it was before Miguel Cotto brutalized him in 2007.

Thing is, if you add Mickey Ward and Cory Spinks to the names above – Tszyu, Mayweather, Cotto and Clottey – and consider that Judah fought all of them in their primes, you come to a conclusion Judah himself has come to: He’s faced much better men than Amir Khan has. Much better men than Amir Khan is, too.

But Judah is a stereotypical front runner, one of the modern era’s greatest four-round fighters. And when the going has got tough in his career, Judah has not got going.

Khan, for his part, is considered by many the stereotype of a protected European champion. He roars like a lion when standing before overmatched opponents like Paulie Malignaggi or an old and blood-blinded Marco Antonio Barrera, but he cut a significantly different figure peddling frantically away from Marcos Maidana in December – yes, the same limited Argentine who just had a terrible time with old Erik Morales.

So what? Corpus Christi is supposed to be a warm-water, oil-rigged net for catching tourists of modest means and more-modest tastes. If you’re not standing at the end of a jetty with a fishing rod and fears of heat stroke, you’re supposed to be watching sea otters at the aquarium, marching across the USS Lexington’s 100-degree flight deck, or gobbling freezer-to-fryer seafood inside the humid belly of a concrete shark.

And yet, mere yards from that bazaar is South Texas Museum of Art. So much for stereotypes.

A prediction, then? Khan-Judah will be a fine match that either guy might win. The difference-maker, likely, will be Khan’s trainer Freddie Roach. He’s had plenty of time and case history from which to shape a strategy that will unman Judah. He may not be able to protect Khan’s chin from Judah’s quick hands, but he’s had an entire camp to teach his charge how to counter those hands.

And Judah, well, his record in big fights speaks for itself.

I’ll take Khan, SD-12.

***

A special note of thanks to local artist Miranda Gonzalez whose “Alejandro the Sea Horse” inspired the better parts of what’s above.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

Boxing insiders will forgive David Haye. Many of us have already. What he did some Saturdays ago against Wladimir Klitschko, the ballsy hustle of it, was different to us only for reasons of scale. We see the same embellishment and churlish irony from smalltime promoters each month. Supposedly, it’s part of prizefighting’s charm.

We endure it out of self-interest. If the heavyweight division could just get back on the front page of . . . well, OK, the homepage of, well, something, laymen would again talk about our sport. They’d want to read about it, too. Advertisers would return. Writers would be paid.

But what about those laymen? If you know any, they approached you this week about Klitschko-Haye because you’ve mentioned boxing to them at Starbucks. These aren’t your friends from the gym. These are the people with whom you talk about boxing, work or federal-debt-ceiling negotiations.

And what they wanted from you, believe it or not, was a little outrage. They watched Klitschko-Haye, because it was for the heavyweight championship of the world, and they were unimpressed. So, they wanted your eyes to flash or your voice to rise Monday. They wanted to hear what Haye did was unacceptable. When you explained the fight wasn’t that bad and Klitschko is very effective at what he does and Haye’s trash-talking is just the way of the world, you know what these laymen thought?

Hadn’t watched boxing in ages. Seems I haven’t missed anything.

We won’t mourn these absentee fans’ future absence because that’s what the 1990s and 2000s were for – fretting over a dwindling interest in our sport. Today, God love us, we’re defiant; those moronic ghouls, we say, they just want senseless violence and don’t even know what a counterpunch is!

There went the last three casual fans? Very well. No one here but the choir, then, so let’s preach to us.

We found comfort on Friday and Saturday – a couple reminders of why we stick with this sport no matter how little this sport cares that we do. Arizona super middleweight Jesus “El Martillo” Gonzales made a fine scrap with Mexico light heavyweight Francisco Sierra on ESPN2, Friday. And Saturday “Bam Bam” Brandon Rios made one of the finest three-round championship fights of the last 30 years, with Urbano Antillon on Showtime.

But it was all ruined by HBO. There is a temptation to think that way, sure. It was hard to watch Saturday’s fare in the aficionado’s proper order – Showtime first, HBO second – without going to bed a little downtrodden. HBO set out to rehab one of its house fighters, and he lost, and the Atlantic City judges – unaware HBO had quit on its house fighter – turned in majority-decision scorecards confirming a rehabilitation.

Paul Williams’ victory, contrary to popular sentiment, was not all that is wrong with boxing. At this point, a 100-round fight couldn’t turn that trick. Williams’ victory instead was a lesson in the corrupting effect of vesting a small group of people with disproportionate power, but if we’re going to play the boxing-as-metaphor game, we might as well find a worthier subject to treat than some Machiavellian advisor or other.

You know what? Let’s scrap the game altogether and just celebrate what Gonzales, Sierra, Rios and Antillon gave us.

Jesus Gonzales, possessed of one remarkable punch and many flaws, returned to the place where he was comprehensively undone by Jose Luis Zertuche almost six years ago. He dropped Sierra in the fourth round with a left cross he throws to the body as well as any southpaw in the game. Then he was dropped in the fifth by a Sierra right hand to the chin Gonzales leaves unguarded as any southpaw’s in the game. But Gonzales rose from the canvas to win a fair unanimous decision.

His attack consists of a bunny hop, a pair of jabs and a lunging left hand followed by backwards hops and a reset. Something like this.

Gonzales bounces, sets. He jabsjabs, then leaps. Right hand in his front pocket, chin good and high, he dives forward. The left fist uncoils perfectly from behind his left shoulder, and his wrist turns over at the instant before impact, to make a punch forceful enough to crack a human rib – a feat Gonzales achieved against Kendall Gould 50 months ago in Fountain Hills, Ariz. – the very sort of punch that would fold Andre Ward in half were it to land. The odds of that happening are long. Ward is much better than Sierra. Much better than Gonzales, too. But anyway.

Gonzales is not the future star promoter Bob Arum thought he was in 2003. But ESPN2 could do a lot worse than televising Gonzales’ next three or four fights.

Writing of Arum’s roster of future stars – the fluctuating team of a curmudgeonly coach – how about that Brandon Rios? Little was missing from his 8 1/2 minute destruction of Urbano Antillon but the finish. With Antillon dazed and stumbling away, Rios just missed a chance to run across the ring and finish him like Marvelous Marvin Hagler finished Tommy Hearns in the only better three-round fight you can think of.

This was a fight for a world lightweight title. It was a fight in which neither man gave ground. A fight that saw Antillon, felled twice and on the verge of unconsciousness, scoff at a ref’s suggestion the fight should not resume. A fight of gorgeous uppercuts and hooks and no defense for its own sake. A treat that Rios ended by catching Antillon’s left hook to the body and countering it with a right cross, twice. Poetic.

Yes, sport in general has forgotten but not forgiven David Haye. And there are fewer prospective boxing fans today than there were two weeks ago. But there are still prizefighters from the Mexican tradition out there. And in that, friends, we must find our solace.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter.com @bartbarry

In the moments after two contemporary prizefighters meet at a press conference to question each other’s class, family, sexual orientation and all the rest, each man invariably wants to beat on the other in hot blood. But by the time their fight arrives months later, each man has a higher motivation: Prevent that sonofabitch from embarrassing me in front of the world.

That is how we get what we got from David Haye and Wladimir Klitschko for the last two months. That is how we get what we got Saturday afternoon.

And what we got was not good. It was another dull half hour from Wladimir Klitschko, whose reign has been so unexceptional that we no longer blame him for its dullness. And Klitschko was the exciting part of Saturday’s production, too, beating Haye by unanimous-decision scores of 118-108, 117-109 and 116-110.

My scorecard concurred, 117-109. Its details are unimportant.

What is important, though, is a durable rule of contemporary prizefighting that rarely fails: The violence in the ring will be inversely proportionate to the violence of the promotion.

Somewhere between salesmanship and Hamlet’s line about an actress protesting too much lies the above truth. But still they hooked us with the spectacle of a palpably furious Ukrainian giant across from a cocky Brit, one who nervously predicted the men’s pending collision would cause a great, great fight.

They hooked us because of a residual or-die-trying ethic that still adheres to our sport, or better put, adheres to our imaginations when we think about our sport. Today that ethic is gone from most of prizefighting and all of the heavyweight division.

What caused its general exit from the world stage – deregulation maybe – is anyone’s guess. But everyone’s honor is now for sale, flamboyantly so.

David Haye just cashed the largest check of his career, honor be damned. He will live happily ever after this disgrace – one that began with a promise of beheadings and ended with his flopping on the canvas to draw penalties like a soccer player. Haye will sleep each night on a mattress stuffed with money and tell himself – and have young people believe that – his main purpose was making money. If that required a con, well, all the better.

What he needed to say after his shameful effort was this: “Bollocks, that guy can hit! I sat across from him at press conferences, and all I saw was an oaf I’d have no trouble whacking. But in that ring, mate, he’s a monster. He looked nine-feet tall, he did. And he’s fast, too. I tried to rush him a few times. He hit me. I realized the best chance I had of staying conscious, being in a healthy state of mind when I collected my purse, you know, was to keep him afraid of my right hand. That required me not to throw it but threaten with it. He was the better man tonight, and he’ll be the better man tomorrow. I’m sorry I crossed him.”

Instead, Haye removed his boot from his right foot and implored interviewers to look at the right toe he claimed to have broken three weeks before. It was about selling the next sham, of course. It was the first line of a pitch you’ll hear soon enough: “I went 12 rounds with the best heavyweight in the world, on a broken foot! You can be right sure the next time you see the ‘Hayemaker’ at 100 percent, some unlucky bloke is going to sleep.”

Which is why fight fans should hold men like Haye to account. Trouble is, most of the men old enough to remember honor as more than a slogan have abandoned boxing. And those who’ve replaced them find a certain postmodern charm in prizefighters’ unreliable first-person narratives. “Fighting” as a word, anymore, is a decorative tool for improving one’s prize.

None of this excuses Wladimir Klitschko. Saturday brought another serving of a delicious between-rounds show that never fails to please: Trainer Manny Steward imploring the reluctant “Dr. Steelhammer” to nail a much smaller man.

Steward, with an assist from Larry Merchant, provided frustrated HBO viewers the affirmation they needed. Steward assured us we were not alone in our disbelief: The hardest punching man in the world really would skitter round the ring before he’d fight toe-to-toe with an opponent he outweighed by 30 pounds.

Klitschko jabbed. Jabbed. Feinted and jabbed. Hooked off the feinted jab. But that’s not to say there’s anything wrong with jabbing, nothing at all, don’t misunderstand, please! Klitschko jabbed. Jabbed.

And Haye circled and looked menacing. He leaped forward and back. He impressed Roy Jones. Then he did something major that will be covered in the next paragraph.

Haye circled. He growled. He shouted inciting words at Klitschko. He promised a right hand. He then did something major that will be covered in the next paragraph.

Haye landed on his left foot. He got to the final bell and waved his right fist. Then he did something major that will be covered in the next column . . .

So it went. The fight boxing badly needed was a dud. Apologists will emphasize the conditioning each man showed. His skilled footwork or hand speed. The possibility that a lot of things could have happened. Apologists, in other words, will make a prizefight for the heavyweight championship of the world sound like the summary of a Women’s World Cup match.

In an interesting interview with RingTV.com last week, Many Steward said, “People don’t see Wladimir’s footwork. That amazes me.”

Klitschko’s footwork, though, balletic, backwards moving, tuned to the retreating commands his sharp mind sends it, is not what anyone wants to see from a baddest man on the planet. It’s not that we all don’t see Wladimir’s footwork, Mr. Steward; it’s that those of us who do are amazed by it.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

SAN ANTONIO – Fight fans looking for the next southpaw sensation to come out of the Philippines, someone to play heir to Manny Pacquiao, had best keep looking. Mark Melligan is not their man.

Friday at Freeman Coliseum, in the main event of a card broadcast on ESPN2’s “Friday Night Fights” – a program featuring boxing in 3D for the first time – Argentine welterweight Sebastian Lujan (38-5-2, 24 KOs) swarmed, swatted, slapped and ultimately starched Melligan (21-3, 14 KOs), knocking him out at 0:48 of round 9.

At the time of the stoppage, the 15rounds.com ringside scorecard had Lujan ahead 76-73.

The fight began auspiciously for Melligan, who threw tight combinations and set effective traps, repeatedly tagging Lujan with counter left uppercuts. But Lujan’s chin proved a stubborn one, and Lujan’s spirit was not persuaded by Melligan’s class.

Beginning in the fifth round, though, Melligan’s legs began to show signs of their own of persuasion. No longer were Melligan’s combinations crisp, no longer were his hooks tight. At the end of the sixth, Melligan went down for the first time – a feat he would duplicate at the end of the seventh and eighth as well. Then Melligan began the ninth round on shaky pins, Lujan swarmed him, and no 10-count was needed.

MICKEY BEY VS. ALEJANDRO RODRIGUEZ
There’s a good chance Alejandro Rodriguez still doesn’t know what the count is.

In Friday’s co-main event, a lightweight scrap scheduled for eight rounds but ending in fewer than half that many, Cleveland’s Mickey Bey (17-0-1, 9 KOs) turned an initially competitive match into a one-punch rout when he drilled Rodriguez (12-4, 6 KOs) with a gorgeous counter right cross, and then saw the fight waved-off a few seconds later at 2:10 of round 4.

Bey’s right cross actually dropped Rodriguez twice. After slipping a Rodriguez left jab, Bey connected with a right hand that – despite partially catching Rodriguez’s left shoulder – landed with force enough to put Rodriguez on the seat of his trunks. Rodriguez rose, walked towards the referee, and then stumbled into the ropes.

With his victory, Bey remained undefeated and served notice to the lightweight division that he will make a competitive match with any of its current titlists.

INAUGURAL CLASS OF SAN ANTONIO BOXING HALL OF FAME RECOGNIZED
An hour before ESPN2 went on the air, the Freeman Coliseum’s ring filled with local legends composing the inaugural class of the new San Antonio Boxing Hall of Fame.

This city’s three world champions – Jesse James Leija, John Michael Johnson and the late Robert Quiroga – joined legendary trainers Tony Ayala, Sr. and Joe Souza in the Hall’s first class. The SABHOF, a brainchild of Texas promoter Lester Bedford, will be housed within Freeman Coliseum.

UNDERCARD
Friday’s TV swing bout saw San Antonio lightweight Ivan Najera (2-0, 1 KO) make a fantastically entertaining opening round with Laredo’s Pedro Martinez (2-1) before eventually prevailing by technical knockout before the second round could begin. Martinez appeared to tear a muscle in his right forearm just as the bell rang to end round 1. He crumpled in his corner and asked to have his gloves removed, ending what might have proved to be the fight of the night, and giving Najera his first career knockout.

In the evening’s third match, local lightweight Abraham Esquivel (4-1, 1 KO) had surprisingly little trouble with fellow Texan Pedro Dominquez (2-2) , stopping him at 0:48 of round 1. Esquivel’s victory came on an unusual finishing blow – a right hook to the body – that somehow dropped Dominquez for a rolling, writhing count of 14 or so. Moments later, though, Dominquez had made a full recovery.

Before that, undefeated Dallas bantamweight Ray Ximenez, Jr. (3-0) breezed through New Mexico’s Aaron Fernandez (1-5), decisioning him by three unanimous scores of 40-34. Showing flashy if not particularly heavy hands, Ximenez twice received benefits of the referee’s doubt, winning credit for two questionable knockdowns. But there was nothing questionable about the outcome as Ximenez had Fernandez outclassed from the first bell.

Friday’s undercard began with a four-round welterweight match between two Texas welterweights – Edinburg’s Randy Fuentes (1-0) and San Antonio’s Mark Trujillo (0-2) – a fight that saw the southpaw Fuentes prevail in his pro debut by three unanimous-decision scores of 40-36.

With help from a well-publicized ticket giveaway, opening bell rang on a respectable Freeman Coliseum crowd of about 3,000 at 8:11 PM local time.

We all knew Wladimir Klitschko was a chinny smart guy who took no unnecessary shots and worried openly about what might happen if the right man put a punch on his chin. We had our suspicions, expressed openly and often in the United States where he was more of an Off-Broadway attraction than a demigod, suspicions of what form he would revert to if put back in that scary mid-career place where Sanders then Brewster found him.

Suspicions confirmed.

Saturday in Hamburg, a record number of German fight fans watched in stunned silence as Klitschko was decisively undone by a single punch from Englishman David “Hayemaker” Haye in the first minute of round 3. It took another 80 seconds of grappling and referee interference before Haye could drop Klitschko for a count of 20 – officially at 2:03 of the third – but the fight’s conclusion moved from startling to inevitable in the instant after the first right hand landed for Haye.

Exactly as Haye promised it would.

And yet the match began on such an affirming note for the fragile Klitschko. He kept his left arm fully extended during the opening round. Gone were the tension and quiet fury he’d showed HBO analyst Max Kellerman in that eerily scored promotional sitdown with Haye. Instead it was the prototypical Klitschko of other title defenses: left jab, left jab, left jab, balletic backwards leap, left jab.

Then David Haye sold his soul and took the sort of chance that marks heavyweight champions. He hurled himself at greatness and caught Klitschko flush. “Untergeht Klitschko! Untergeht Klitschko!” cried the Cosell of Cologne, over Germany’s airwaves.

Immediately afterward, as a brash and further-emboldened Haye donned his infamous beheaded-brothers t-shirt and ensured his diamond earrings were properly replaced, Klitschko spoke tentatively about any athlete being capable of a bad night, and his legacy, and a rematch.

Let’s simplify things. Wladimir, your legacy is this: A properly matched giant whose reign as heavyweight champion saw boxing’s popularity plummet. The very man, in other words, Corrie Sanders and Lamon Brewster said you were.

*

Well, that was futile, wasn’t it? To see David Haye in person is to be as surprised at his height as his sprightly tongue. The man is bigger than he looks on television. He has all the confidence needed to be heavyweight champion of the world. He looks the part. Or so we thought.

What other excuse do we have as the witlings who picked him to upset Wladimir Klitschko?

Saturday in Hamburg, a record number of German fight fans watched in cruel ecstasy as Haye collected an indecent number of blows from Wladimir “Dr. Steelhammer” Klitschko before Haye’s corner climbed in the ring and threw its white terrycloth at the Ukrainian ogre. The official time of the Klitschko TKO victory was 1:19 of round 11. But it should have come five rounds earlier.

By then it had become obvious to even a casual observer Haye was a media creation, an inflated cruiserweight with the British accent Americans traditionally mistake for learnedness and wit.

It started in the first minute of the second round, after a dull opening stanza that saw Haye pace five feet from Klitschko’s extended left arm, imitating a caged version of Lion from “The Wizard of Oz.” Then something clicked behind Haye’s eyes and he went for greatness. His head raced into a Klitschko jab that struck with unmanning force.

Three rounds later, with a softened foe before him, Klitschko began to offer right crosses, and it looked like a pro golfer bludgeoning his caddy with a three iron.

The tragic irony of the evening was that Klitschko badly wanted to knock Haye senseless – a merciful conclusion. But each time Klitschko had his finishing blow ready, Haye would feint a blow of his own, and Klitschko would leap backwards. Finally, it was Klitschko’s skittishness that turned him from gentleman to enhanced interrogator.

After the fight Klitschko offered to cover part of the cost of Haye’s time in a Hamburg hospital room, where reports indicate Haye is recovering and expected to announce his retirement from prizefighting by week’s end.

*

Which outcome will it be? There’s no telling just yet, and that means the suspense of what may unfold might entice American viewers to spend an hour of their Saturday afternoon next week to watch the first anticipated heavyweight title fight since Lewis-Tyson. This is a fight boxing badly needs.

Not because it’s consequential, mind you. It’s too late for that. Five years ago, a heavyweight title-unification match would have been reason enough to spend $50 on a pay-per-view fight broadcast from Madison Square Garden. But that was five years ago.

Today, when even aficionados forego weekly offerings from ESPN, Telefutura, Fox Deportes, and increasingly Showtime and HBO, a consequential fight is not enough. No, this match in Germany, Klitschko-Haye, must transcend itself. It must surprise us in a way that wins fans back.

Too tall an order for these men, you say?

We’re all afraid you might be right. We’re afraid Klitschko will come out and keep Haye six feet away as rounds accumulate – like Haye were a braided version of Sultan Ibragimov. Or that Haye will flex and threaten and wing unbalanced shots from a safe distance, never imperiling Klitschko.

If those things happen, it will not be the end of boxing. It will be but another eroding wave that washes away a little more of the majestic bluff boxing once occupied – taking with it another handful of people who’ll no longer notice if boxing continues or doesn’t.

David Haye has an opportunity to dam that erosion by introducing doubt to our flagship division. The best thing, really.

But best things don’t happen in boxing anymore. So I’ll take Klitschko: KO-11.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @barbarry

“Give us more of Saul ‘Canelo’ Alvarez!” we cry. There, was that enthusiastic enough? It’s part of a new scheme to explore. If we tell the networks and promoters what they want to hear as they launch new prospects, er, champions, perhaps they’ll listen to us later when we declare “enough”?

An inane suggestion! Maybe. But being optimistic about our sport right now requires a touch of buffoonery, so why not?

Mexican Saul “Cinnamon” Alvarez, better known, still, for his red hair and freckles than any punch he’s thrown, won again on Saturday in his home state of Jalisco, against an Englishman named, let’s see, um, Ryan Rhodes. Alvarez won by preordained stoppage when, about seven rounds after he’d last imperiled Rhodes, referee Hector Afu could abide no more carnage and waved the match off, giving Alvarez another knockout victory – this one coming at 0:48 of round 12.

Afterwards, Alvarez offered to fight “El Diablo” (a curious nickname for the next balding British victim he’ll be fed) if “El Diablo” is who his manager asks him to fight. HBO commentator Bob Papa listed three junior middleweights likely to bedevil Alvarez. But Papa’s suggestions won’t be taken seriously. We’ll return to that in a bit.

There’s almost a hint of the agent provocateur to HBO Sports these days. The quickest way to turn most aficionados against a young man, now, is to have HBO feature him. Perhaps, then, Ahab is at the helm, and we’re sinking all boxing to a common pool.

Thus we rolled to Tlajomulco de Zúñiga, once more, to showcase one of the few prospects Golden Boy Promotions can be said to have developed on its own. Except that it didn’t. Alvarez, though only 20 years-old and a beneficiary of counsel from the Golden Boy himself, was a 31-prizefight pro when Oscar De La Hoya’s company found him.

Enough of the negativity, alas. No more allusions to the captain of the Pequod either. It’s time to revel in what’s good about “Cinnamon” Alvarez.

He sells tickets. Hunger is the best sauce, as they say, and the Mexican populace is surely on the sauce. Prizefighting is finally back on the public airwaves, and Mexicans are drunk with expectations. A red-haired horseman from a ranch near Guadalajara is indeed a quirky choice, but, along with a child of privilege who can fight a little, it’s what’s on the menu. ¡Vámonos entonces!

Alvarez throws combinations better than many Mexican prizefighters, even great ones. He uses the left hook to set up the right cross, too, and that’s almost novel as his hair color among Mexican prizefighters. There’s an old saw that says if you can throw the third punch in a combination, you’ll land it. The trick, of course, is throwing it. Events can obstruct that third punch; your opponent can make the first or second miss, or he can counter them and make you holster the third.

To his credit, Alvarez is rarely dissuaded. He decides to go 2/3/2 at you – cross/hook/cross – and throws that third punch, the right cross, regardless of what comes. And as the saw above promises, that punch lands. Rhodes, playing the grateful visitor after the fight, attributed Alvarez’s effectiveness to Alvarez’s body punches. But it wasn’t Alvarez’s hooks to Rhodes’ body that disarmed him; it was Alvarez’s right hand.

Early in the fight, when Rhodes did a reasonable imitation of a fighter who’d done his homework, there was some switching, orthodox to southpaw, for Alvarez to contend with. Those were his most impressive moments. Alvarez picked up Rhodes’ left cross properly, slipped outside it and returned fire with a counter right cross or uppercut. The uppercut, particularly, was nifty as it was brave. Alvarez took some chances that Rhodes’ left cross was just a trap, nervously thrown as it was, and that a missed uppercut would leave Alvarez naked and freckled in the middle of Vicente Fernandez’s arena, for all his countrymen – and future opponents – to see.

With the exception of his uppercut, Alvarez throws his straight punches, jabs and crosses, much better than his crooked ones. When Alvarez throws the jab or cross, he snaps his hips correctly and stays, for the most part, on balance. His hooks, though, are wide and sloppy and, more importantly, dependent on an opponent to stabilize their thrower. A craftsman would take a hop back when Alvarez clicks into must-throw-hooks mode and catch him with counters.

A craftsman? Well, maybe for Alvarez’s 50th opponent.

Writing of which, Bob Papa created a three-man roster that included Alfredo Angulo and Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. as possibilities for Alvarez’s next opponent, after Saturday’s fight. Alvarez then threatened to fight the Devil if asked to. The first name on Papa’s list, though, was more interesting: Puerto Rican Miguel Cotto.

Cotto, you’ll remember, was believed a protected prospect – slow, if heavy, of hand – until the moment he outjabbed a still-young Shane Mosley. Alvarez seems like no other superstar so much as a slower version of Cotto. Alvarez has a little of Cotto’s stalk-you-till-I-find-you approach. Cotto is faded now, and a fight with Alvarez would be an interesting spectacle indeed.

Goodness, where did that come from? There is a better chance of Alvarez dying his hair black and running for governor of Arizona than fighting Cotto next. Papa’s suggestion, still, was a worthwhile exercise.

While his partner Roy Jones spent the night reading from the HBO/GBP script – stating over and again that Alvarez has one-punch power, even while a cumulative 513 such punches failed to render Matthew Hatton or Rhodes unconscious for an instant – Papa withdrew the glove and cast it on the floor.

Whoever the next pasty Brit to get the Alvarez-victim assignment is, remember he is not Cotto or Angulo or Chavez Jr. Now give us more Cinnamon!

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By now you’ve read reminiscences of Genaro Hernandez from men who knew him far better than I did. Some covered his matches, others worked with him in broadcasting, a few were his promoters. This, by contrast, is not an adequate eulogy but an account of three memorable encounters with “Chicanito” and what they taught me about the man and his profession.

His profession, of course, was prizefighting. And the man, a two-time world champion, succumbed to rhabdomyosarcoma, a rare form of cancer, last Tuesday, at the age of 45. Services for him will be held on Monday in East Los Angeles’ Resurrection Church at 11 AM. They are open to the public.

The day L.A. Boxing-Ahwatukee opened in Phoenix, I knew Genaro Hernandez only as the man who had lost to Floyd Mayweather nine years before. Jason Bress changed that directly. Jason was the head instructor at L.A. Boxing and a Muay Thai fighter who’d begun as a collegiate wrestler and later learned how to box from Genaro. Jason treated few men with reverence, but nobody ever said an unkind word about Genaro in front of Jason.

Later I would learn that nobody ever said an unkind word about Genaro in front of anyone, but I didn’t know it the day I met him.

That was March 31, 2007. It was L.A. Boxing-Ahwatukee’s grand opening. As a means of honoring his teacher, Jason asked Genaro to fly in from California. If you didn’t know who Genaro Hernandez was when you walked in that gym, it became quickly apparent. There was a professional on the speed bag doing things nobody had done on that bag in the gym’s first month and never did rival in the next three years of trying. Genaro was in the back of the gym, better dressed than most, hitting the bag with his elbow and head while spinning underneath it.

He had not fought professionally in nearly a decade but wasn’t a six-week training camp from being a super featherweight, despite standing 5 foot 11 inches. He happily fielded questions about most anything and gave serious answers.

Back then, the world was awaiting “The Word Awaits” because it was going to save boxing. The conventional wisdom was that Floyd Mayweather was a better fighter but a victory for Oscar De La Hoya would be better for the sport. Genaro doubted that.

“Wait, you want Oscar to win?” Genaro said. “I don’t know about that. Floyd’s real. I could text message Floyd right now, and he’d reply. Floyd’s a real person.”

If Genaro’s confidence in Mayweather’s character has not been entirely justified – though there are reports Mayweather is covering all funeral costs for the Hernandez family – his questions about De La Hoya’s character were indeed prophetic.

Fifteen months later, Jason Bress made a comeback fight in California. Though it was not a boxing match, and though he had not trained properly for it, he asked Genaro to work his corner. The match ended on an early stoppage Jason lost because of cuts.

I saw Genaro a month later in the media center at MGM Grand before Antonio Margarito’s fight with Miguel Cotto. I wandered over and shook his hand and reminded him of when and where we’d met. He cut me off, smiled, and said, “I remember you.”

I told him I’d heard Jason’s side of what happened in that comeback fight but wondered what Genaro had seen. He was dismayed at Jason’s conditioning. He said you could tell Jason did not want to fight when he complained about fouling.

“He came back to the corner and said the other guy was butting,” Genaro said, and then his face changed, and he grabbed my near shoulder and raised his left thumb. “I told him, ‘Then you take your thumb and you shove it in his eye, right to his brain! This is a fight, man.’”

I have often marveled at the chasm between how fighters are when fighting and when not fighting. These vicious men are the truest and gentlest souls I’ve met. No chasm, though, was greater than what Genaro showed me that day.

In an instant, he was in a fight, someone else’s, even, and ready to hurt another man. A moment later, he was back to his kind, debonair self. We talked a little longer, and he gave me the small handshake and large, genuine smile that was his signature.

A few months later, Jason Bress came in the gym distraught. He’d learned of Genaro’s cancer. Jason was “hard core” in the strict sense of the term. When you met him, he came off as a mean little fighter who disdained you. Then you got to know him, and he turned out to be a careful and empathetic guy. Then you really got to know him, and he was a mean little fighter who disdained you. He was hard at his core.

But he was sad the day he told us about Genaro’s cancer. Our gym had a better grasp on how things would go than the optimistic coverage Genaro’s announcement brought. Our co-owner, Allen Shellenberger, the drummer from the rock band Lit, had been diagnosed with brain cancer months before. After chemotherapy, he appeared at a June fundraiser and wasn’t the same person at all.

The final time I saw Genaro was at Mandalay Bay in July. He had aged considerably. He was no longer wiry but frail. He had little hair. He was at ringside doing a broadcast. After the fight, I tapped him on the shoulder and shook his hand. We talked about Jason Bress and that L.A. Boxing grand opening. We briefly reminded each other of a better time.

Now, Allen is gone, passed away at age 39. Jason was fired and returned to California. And now Genaro has passed on, too. That day in March of 2007 holds nothing but sadness. Boxing’s brutality does not stop at the apron.

Bart Barry can be reached at bbarry@15rounds.com

The greatest joy of Showtime’s Super Six tournament has been one of discovery – a joy that makes anything worth playing audience to. It is a different joy from what the unexpected brings. The unexpected, husband of anticipation and father of suspense, is born of wrong assumptions disproved, while discovery comes from the unknowing state that wisdom promotes.

If not-knowing how its fights would turn out has been the great joy of the Super Six, Englishman Carl Froch’s fights have been the least-knowable of all, and therefore the most joyful to watch.

That joy happened again on Saturday when Froch decisioned the ageless Jamaican-born super middleweight Glen Johnson, to retain his WBC title and win a match with Andre Ward in the finals of the Super Six. Fighting before a nonpartisan crowd in Atlantic City, Froch beat Johnson by majority-decision scores of 114-114, 116-112 and 117-111. The match was a fine one, if not quite the fight-of-the-year candidate hoped for by some.

My scorecard concurred with the judges’ ultimate decision, favoring Froch 118-112. I had rounds 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 11 and 12 for the champion. Rounds 1 and 7 went to Johnson. And I scored rounds 2 and 8 even. Had those even rounds gone to Johnson, my card still would have gone to Froch, 116-112.

It is sometimes important to separate a prizefighter’s score from his performance. Often the two are similar, but there are occasions when a fighter transcends himself without winning rounds. Saturday’s match was not one of these, but it is an interesting possibility just the same.

Though he fought gamely, and at age 42 perhaps surprisingly, Johnson made a performance that left more to be desired of its performer than Froch’s did. Johnson’s supporters, and they are legion, expect their man to expose an opponent’s fragility – both physical and mental. Johnson is a lie detector, in other words.

You may squeak out a controversial decision against Johnson, of course, but your character, whatever it is, will be denuded by Johnson’s assault. You can ask Allan Green about that.

Froch’s character, a charming combination of arrogance and chin and what his countrymen call “bottom,” passed Johnson’s test with high marks. Froch’s performance outranked Johnson’s because, of the surprises that each man brought, Froch’s were the pleasanter.

When he is on, Johnson is relentless. He cannot be dissuaded. He wishes you to engage him. He signs the volume-puncher’s oath: You will hit me, I will hit you, and we’ll see what happens. He does not relent under a rain of clean punches. He cares not a whit for his own appearance. He will wither, he figures, and so will you. It is not a style that is pretty. Johnson does not rely on reflex, or at least he does not fight with a style that does. He steps as he throws the jab. He goes at you low, weight forward, as the best volume punchers must. He wings a left hand at your body to distract you. He hurls a right hand over the top of your lowered guard. The punch hurts you because it surprises you. It surprises you because you cannot imagine such a pedestrian entrance bringing something unanticipated.

“Very strong and durable” is how Froch described Johnson after their Saturday fight. “Sort of like sparring an oak tree.”

Solid as he was against Froch, solid as he always is, Johnson is not without vulnerabilities. One, obviously, is age. The crass vigor of Froch’s youth, akin to a willingness to wager against Johnson’s conditioning – previously a lunatic’s bet – made much of the difference. Johnson would crack Froch, stunning his balance. And Froch would fix an insulted tension to his face and whack Johnson back directly, he would.

The other vulnerability of Johnson’s belongs to every volume punch: the uppercut. To apply constant pressure a fighter must wade forward and often rely on his opponent’s force to stabilize him. The best volume punchers, those of the most inevitable assaults, invariably find their weight too far forward. So long as an opponent throws jabs and crosses and hooks, though, they are safe; only the tops of their heads are exposed. But the first uppercut that grazes their chests or whistles past their ear gives even the most fearless of them pause.

Froch’s right-uppercut lead made a large difference, it did.

And if Froch was surprised by Johnson’s resilience, surely Johnson was startled when his right hands did not affect Froch hardly at all. Some of that was Froch’s conditioning. Some of it was Froch’s chin. And much of it was that Froch’s chin is the one part of his body not even Glen Johnson could find with gloved fists.

Froch does not merely lower his chin in a classic boxer’s pose. Froch sets his chin a full face behind his forehead. Even if Froch did not deflect 50 percent of every right hand with his left shoulder, it would be hard to hurt him.

Froch might not look like Americans expect a fighter to look. He might not have Joe Calzaghe’s genius of motion, either. But he has a fire-tested economy of attack that makes him special.

Still, he has no chance against Andre Ward! So we say about the upcoming finals match. So we believe. Let he who rightly picked a Super Six final of Froch versus Ward, 19 months ago, make the first certain bet against Froch, though.

Hmm, what’s that? No takers?

Well, Froch-Ward is what we’re going to have, a fitting reward for boxing fans who stuck with this tournament through its obstacle course. And the greatest thing that can be said of it is this: The final match will be joyful because its outcome is unknowable.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

Prizefighting now draws near to completing its most innovative concept in ages. Showtime’s Super Six World Boxing Classic is days from matching its finalists. It is a tournament that has fully altered the professional paths of its every participant, including the network that hatched it. Whatever pundits opine of its anfractuous path, the Super Six has satisfied the praise it initially garnered.

Last week Englishman Carl Froch, whose career might well be the one most dramatically altered, by tournament’s end, captured what has made the Super Six different and essential:

“People are seeing fights that would not have been made.”

Has any sport been undone more completely by the events it didn’t make than boxing?

Saturday at Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City, Froch will make a fight with Jamaican Glen Johnson to determine who faces Andre Ward in the Super Six final. Johnson, a late sub who earned his place by stretching Allan Green, an unfortunate sub, in November, will face one of the tournament’s original super middleweights. Froch is in the semi-final by virtue of his shutout of Arthur Abraham in November and his aesthetically displeasing points victory over Andre Dirrell in 2009.

The latter was a victory over an opponent Froch dismissed on a Thursday conference call thusly: “I’ve done more damage training myself than Andre Dirrell did.”

Dirrell is the fighter whose career will have suffered the most from this tournament. A fighter who was put in the tournament because of talent, not accomplishments, Dirrell is now in a small cadre of fighters for whom knowledgeable fans feel actual contempt.

Of the tournament’s initial participants, Jermain Taylor was retired by the tournament, Kessler was knocked out of the tournament by Ward and Froch, and Abraham was exposed as a one-dimensional strongman. But Dirrell is the only person to whom a tincture of fraud adheres.

Nothing fraudulent adheres to either of Saturday’s men. They both make honest fights. Despite the integrity of his attack, though, Johnson is somehow less knowable than Froch. Johnson is mysterious more than complicated. Froch is no mystery at all and only complicated as a question to him is dumb.

“Glen Johnson is not the sort of guy you knock out,” Froch explained Thursday, when asked if he’d be looking for a knockout. “At the top level, to go in there looking for the knockout is a little naïve or stupid.”

To ask a top-level fighter such a question, Froch implied, is a little naïve or stupid.

There is an authority in Froch’s words that comes with his British accent. Americans, whether we realize it or not, and perhaps especially when we don’t, infer great authority from British diction and word choice. Froch makes proclamations to us more than he answers our inquiries.

He is not prepared for a match; he is “ready to do the business Saturday week.” He does not underestimate his opponent, but rather says “without being cheeky at all towards Glen Johnson, he can’t beat me.”

Johnson’s English, a searching choice of words seasoned by Patois, is hesitant. Courtesy wins its highest premium. Johnson calls himself “Gentleman”; Froch calls himself “Cobra”; both men’s alter egos come through in their speech.

What also comes through, what is most important to Saturday’s fight, is a collection of qualities Froch and Johnson share: Ruggedness and politeness.

Both men understand that boxing is the one combat sport that requires an opponent’s assault. There is no championship fighter with defense so complete he will not be beaten upon by his every challenger. Thirty-six minutes across from a professional puncher is a brutal test. Froch and Johnson appreciate this and take greater umbrage with an opponent who will not punch than one who tries to separate them from consciousness.

Johnson has fought all round the world, often as a b-side, and been jobbed in numerous decisions on foreign soil. Still, he insults no opponent. Froch derides only Dirrell – the one man who didn’t hit him.

Neither man considers deriding the other. That is how you know their fight will be a fine one.

The ability to see what inverse proportionality ever exists between prefight venom and sanctioned violence is what separates aficionado from casual fan. The champions who are politest to their opponents are those that impart the greatest cruelty. They are the men who understand this question: Why get angry when you’re going to fight anyway?

The aficionado is attracted by the orderly attack to which championship prizefighters subject one another. The casual fan, meanwhile, gets giddy over buffoonery and trash-talk. The aficionado comes to boxing from his own time in gyms or other contact sports. The casual fan came on boxing the day he couldn’t find professional wrestling to watch. One demands character; the other demands characters.

Froch and Johnson promise character. There is no chance either will feign injury or shrink from conflict. Johnson will come forward and hope to find a spot on Froch’s chest to rest his forehead while he does the man bodily harm. And Froch will target Johnson’s low, charging head and try to dissuade the Jamaican forcefully as possible. Neither man expects the other to break. Each man, though, would be euphoric at leaving the other broken.

“I am fresh, fit, strong, powerful,” said Froch, Thursday. “I’ll be honest, I wish this one was 15 rounds.”

No man asks for 15 rounds with Glen Johnson. Froch might well get what he desires and not know what to do with it. Something tells you, though, that Froch wants exactly what he requests.

Those who appreciate symmetry can’t help but cheer for Froch to advance to the finals against Ward; the last two men standing of the original six, as it were. But no aficionado ever cheered against Johnson.

I’ll take Froch, UD-12, then, while cheering for both men.

Bart Barry can be reached at bbarry@15rounds.com

Apropos of my own irreverence last week, 15rounds.com’s indispensible editor Marc Abrams addressed the consequences of Saturday’s fight thusly: “A man winning the lineal light heavyweight title at 46? Yeah, I think that’s pretty (frigging) important.” I thought about that for five days and decided he was right.

It sure could have happened to a nicer guy, though. Hopkins, I mean – not Abrams.

Saturday at Montreal’s Bell Centre before a record-setting crowd of 17,750, American Bernard Hopkins became the oldest prizefighter to win a world title, when he decisioned Canadian Jean Pascal by unanimous scores of 116-112, 115-114 and 115-113.

My scorecard went 115-115. I had Hopkins ahead 88-85 after nine rounds. Then I muted the volume on HBO’s telecast and gave Pascal rounds 10, 11 and 12. Ultimately, Hopkins won rounds 3, 5, 6, 7 and 9 on my card. Pascal took rounds 1, 4 and the aforementioned final three. I had rounds 2 and 8 even.

I’m sure a card like that makes me a “hater.” But like the last time I scored a Hopkins fight, I confess that I couldn’t care less what you opine of my card. I tried to be impartial. That meant balancing the conflicting signals sent brainward from my eyes and ears.

Something is a bit less than objective when the host of a telecast allows his eyes to water with joy over a participant’s victory.

The fight did not follow the path HBO’s viewers were promised. Not quite. The plan, of course, was for Pascal to use youth and strength to manhandle Hopkins in the opening rounds. Then Hopkins’ wiles and monkish existence – and let us not forget his time at Graterford – would bring home the final eight rounds, in a boxing clinic, proving the doubters wrong, reasserting his legendary status, and establishing once and for all that quarterback Donovan McNabb is an Uncle Tom.

No, that wasn’t the script? Sometimes it’s hard to keep Hopkins’ self-promotion separate from his fights.

Hopkins has achieved legendary status by winning prizefights at a startlingly ripe age. But because of the way he’s conducted himself while doing it, Hopkins is a legend the way Victor Niederhoffer is a legend. Niederhoffer is permanently enshrined at Yale – home of the United States Squash Hall of Fame. But if he’s known to common folks at all, it is for a 24-hour liquidation of his hedge fund in 1997.

Non-boxing media congregates at Hopkins’ press conferences to see the man sabotage his legacy. His favorite strategy is to punctuate rambling non sequiturs with jarringly Spartan commentaries on race. Joe Calzaghe was a “white boy” and McNabb is “suntanned” – a not-so-crafty way of implying any black athlete from a two-parent home, without incarceration on his résumé, is not black enough.

How the black community chooses to discipline Hopkins – with longterm indifference, likely – is not boxing’s problem. Having a petulant racist as the legendary face of our sport is a different story. Kind of makes you wish we could find an error on George Foreman’s birth certificate and give him back the title of “Boxing’s Oldest Champion,” doesn’t it?

That’s really too bad. What Hopkins accomplished Saturday was more impressive than what Foreman did to Michael Moorer in 1994. Seventeen years ago, Foreman was dominated pillar to post for 29 minutes by Moorer, then lightning struck and Big George landed a 1-2 that made Moorer silly. Hopkins, on the other hand, just won at least 14 of 24 rounds over two championship-length fights against a puncher in his prime and hometown.

Pascal is not a classic boxer or slugger. The man is slop3y and He hts. you, in places th’t my not be legal while he circls & mkes circlz and leaps and fouls. Gosh bt he looks ferrotious, no, when Hs knuckles, and hed, concuss u on teh nck, sholdrs and ears!

Hopkins is precise. His motion efficient. He does not take two steps if one suffices. He strikes more than he punches. His fists go to the place he wants them. He hits you where he desires.

Pascal mde the fite a mess whn he was on. He out-bullyd Hopkins by pnch1ng him on the brainstem, and again.

Several times Hopkins stopped to complain to the referee. When he gained no favorable ruling, though, Hopkins fought. This was a better showing than what Hopkins pulled against Calzaghe, flopping shamelessly to the mat. Saturday, he was fouled by a man who wanted to fight more than he knew how. To Hopkins enduring credit, at age 46, he returned fire without regard for personal safety.

Pascal wnted his fns to sweigh the judges n hs favor. But he didnt’ do enuf to win rounds in the midddl3, holdng, hufing and pufffing.

Afterwards, Hopkins reminded us he was a legend. Ever the gracious winner, he complimented his interviewer and promised that exciting fights at age 46 were part of his master plan. Hopkins’ interviewer didn’t think to ask what part of Hopkins’ plan a 2006 retirement was.

Pascal, meanwhile, did what he did after their first fight: he agreed to the official scores and expressed gratitude.

Yeah, but he’s no legend! Well, no, he’s not and won’t be. But he is able to attract a hometown crowd 400 percent larger than Hopkins can draw. Surely someone else thinks that fact is correlated with the men’s varying levels of sportsmanship?

Pascal’s hometown is Montreal. Saturday it hosted Philadelphia’s Hopkins in its main event and Connecticut’s Chad Dawson in its co-main. Between its showings for Lucian Bute, Librado Andrade and Pascal, Montreal has perhaps garnered more credit as a fight town than it deserves.

There is a way for Montreal to achieve pound-for-pound status, though, and prove its haters wrong with a full house. Host Hopkins-Dawson.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

It should surprise no one that boxing is a plebe-year requirement at the United States Military Academy. West Point’s ultimate purpose is to prepare students to lead men into combat, and striking and being struck in the face isn’t a bad introduction to such training. It should also surprise no one that after four years of unique preparation, West Point graduates possess a unique form of character.

What may be surprising, though, is that unlike in football and basketball – where the post-grad service requirement can chase away the best recruits – West Point still produces some of the finest amateur boxers in the country. These are superstar athletes, then, whose athleticism is leavened by a sense of honor and humility not always common in our beloved sport.

Boyd Melson is a 29 year-old southpaw prizefighter with a record of 2-0 who turned pro, in part, to raise awareness about the need for spinal-cord-injury clinical trials. He fights Thursday at Roseland Ballroom in New York City. He is also a West Point graduate – Class of 2003 – who is making a unique show of character for a friend.

Her name is Christan Zaccagnino, a young woman paralyzed at age 10 in a diving accident, someone Melson met in his third year at West Point. Their friendship led to a 7 1/2-year romantic relationship that survives today as a friendship and motivation for Melson’s young prizefighting career. It has also taken them on an intriguing journey to lands far-flung as China and Jordan and enlisted their impassioned support for the nerve-conductivity work being done by Rutgers’ Dr. Wise Young.

But boxing came first.

Melson, the son of a Creole father and Israeli mother, first laced up boxing gloves at the late age of 19 as part of West Point’s physical-education requirement. Some of us spend freshman year gaming classes like epistemology and theater of the absurd; cadets learn to leverage punches and break noses. Melson did it better than his classmates.

“I was always aggressive growing up,” says Melson of his theretofore undiscovered talent for pugilism. “I liked the contact and the one-on-one element.”

Plebe year at West Point begins with an initiation known as “Beast Barracks.” Before classes begin, cadets spend their summer in a form of basic training more harrowing even than a prizefighter’s training camp.

“Beast Barracks, there’s no break,” Melson says. “In boxing, you get to take a break. Boxing is more mentally exhausting. But Beast . . . Beast just sucks. That’s the word to use. It just sucks.

“I woke up a couple times, in the middle of the night, stood and saluted. I must have been dreaming about it.

“And Beast is all you know. You just got there. It’s all you know. Four years of that?”

Later, Melson’s company entered him in a boxing tournament dominated by upperclassman. They did it for the reason upperclassman at USMA do many things.

Says Melson, “They liked putting plebes in boxing just to haze us.”

Melson startled a number of people in that tournament and caught the eye of the All-Army team’s boxing coach. After graduation, Melson would go on to win the Armed Forces Boxing Championship in 2004, 2005 and 2007. He would also be asked to return to West Point.

“They let me put Officer (Candidate School) off,” Melson says. “West Point let me come back and teach plebe boxing as a second lieutenant.”

Shoulder injuries ended Melson’s amateur career in 2007. Forced to justify a full workday, Army boxers trained thrice daily. Combined with the rigors and dehydration of making weight, that much training for that many years proved to be too much.

Melson went to work in the private sector and found things different from what he was accustomed to, as the son of a career soldier and adherent to the Cadet Honor Code.

“The biggest thing is that people say they’re going to do things and then they don’t,” Melson says. “I had to learn the code language (of corporations).”

The Honor Code is short and direct: A cadet will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do. The corporate code is short but circuitous: Please the shareholders however you may.

Melson was not the first to grapple with this transition. Without the joint regimens of boxing and West Point in his life, Melson struggled.

“It didn’t work out,” he says. “I was in a weird place.”

He worked as a personal trainer, and his romantic relationship with Christan Zaccagnino came to an end. His return to boxing, though, coincided with a return to the corporate world.

“I’m turning back into my old self now that I’ve got a regular job,” Melson says of his current sales position with Johnson & Johnson. “And Christan laughs and tells me that she told me I’d become a professional fighter. I used to tell her, ‘You’re crazy. I don’t even want to box.’”

Melson has now combined his disparate interests – boxing, spinal-cord injuries, and overall competitiveness – into a compelling package bound with a charismatic ribbon. His father is in a wheelchair. His close friend is paralyzed. And Dr. Wise Young needs funding to conduct clinical trials in the United States.

The work Dr. Young is doing occasionally gets dropped in the unpalatably political stew of stem-cell research. There are compelling arguments to be made on either side of the debate about using cells from fetuses. Those arguments, though, have no part of the cause that Boyd Melson is raising awareness for.

“These cells are coming from the umbilical cord, after birth,” says Melson. “It has nothing to do with abortions.”

According to Rutgers.edu, Dr. Young’s research has “upended concepts that spinal cord injuries (are) permanent, refocused research, and opened new vistas of hope.”

Dr. Young’s work concerns itself with cell regeneration. It’s an idea like this: Few injuries see the spinal cord fully severed. If the right kind of cells can be introduced properly, they can spark a form of healing in the spinal cord not unlike the scar tissue that forms in other organs. And patients can begin to feel sensations in previously insensate parts of their bodies.

“I don’t know what the ‘cure’ is,” says Boyd Melson of this experimental treatment. “But independence is a cure.”

If Dr. Young is able to raise funds enough to continue in this country clinical trials he’s begun in China, a breakthrough is possible in the next 10 years.

“Ten years?” says Melson. “One year! Next year. I’m betting my life on it.”

No one needs a reminder of how dangerous prizefighting can be. What can be equally daunting for a person trying to raise awareness about a medical program, though, is America’s collective attention span. We are a charitable but distractible people, in a recession. While the late Christopher Reeve – a patient of Dr. Wise’s – brought attention to the need for spinal-cord-injury research, Reeve is no longer with us, and our attention has turned to a plethora of other noble causes.

Melson will be donating his prizefighting purses to a clinical-trial fundraiser called JustADollarPlease.org. It is a novel concept put together by the mothers of children afflicted by spinal-cord injuries. Rather than requesting a million dollars from a single philanthropist, the group hopes to raise a single dollar from a million philanthropists.

An undefeated prizefighter championing the group’s cause is a major asset. But that prizefighter had best succeed in the ring. If Melson can continue winning in the junior middleweight division, his story will become an international one. If he makes lackluster showings on the blue mat, though, the merits of his cause will lose nothing, but others’ interest in it will flag; there are 0-3 prizefighters who care deeply about important causes, surely, but nobody interviews them.

“I’m very serious,” Melson says about his prizefighting career. “I love it. I train hard.”

A world championship is what Melson hopes to accomplish. He’s giving himself four years. As a cerebral southpaw, he is fondest of middleweight world champion Sergio Martinez’s style. It is an unorthodox one that relies on athleticism and timing.

“I’m trying to find my space,” Melson says of life in general right now.

The search for that space comprises three important influences. One is boxing. Another is Christan Zaccagnino. And the third will be visible this week.

“Thursday night,” says Melson, “I’ll be wearing ‘West Point ‘03’ on my trunks.”

Bart Barry can be reached at bbarry@15rounds.com

Those interested in making a contribution to the cause Boyd champions should visit JustADollarPlease.org.

There is a time of the year in professional golf when the four tournaments collectively known as “the majors” are finished, the Ryder Cup, in even years, is through, and made-for-television and -sponsor events happen. Men pair with women. Seniors play against their peers’ college sons. Celebrities abound. The PGA Tour offers its endorsement sparingly, and while tape-delayed telecasts do end up on network television, they get a fraction of the coverage afforded The Masters.

Professional golf properly refers to this time as its “silly season.”

Many Pacquiao’s career is in the throes of its own silly season. A large difference between professional golf and prizefighting is that our sport affords its silly season Masters coverage.

Saturday the silly season continued apace at MGM Grand – on Showtime pay-per-view, with additional promotional support from CBS! – as Filipino Congressman Pacquiao dominated an old and tired Shane Mosley for 12 listless rounds in a match its judges scored 120-107, 120-108, 119-108. Don’t trouble yourself with the math; it was a whitewash.

The majors of Manny Pacquiao’s career ended in his rematch with Juan Manual Marquez, 26 months ago. Pacquiao had compiled an incredible record of 5-1-1 (3 KOs) against the prime versions of Mexico’s hall of fame triumvirate – Marquez, Erik Morales and Marco Antonio Barrera.

Then the stadium concerts, made-for-television showdowns, and legislative feats began. Spectacle overwhelmed substance. One fight was about size difference with a faded veteran. Three more were about once-dangerous foes in new weight classes. Two were about Cowboys Stadium. And Saturday’s was about boxing having infomercials broadcast by a terrestrial television network.

That’s putting the “silly” in silly season.

Could Pacquiao have lost any one of his last six fights? Sure. But there’s a reason matchmaker Bruce Trampler is in Canastota. Boxing insiders figured this out a couple years ago. Oddsmakers got the gist shortly thereafter. And now even casual fans have learned their lesson. This traveling circus is out of big tops.

A year ago Shane Mosley lost 11 of 12 rounds to the world’s second-best prizefighter. In September, Mosley made a pay-per-view show so dreadful his longtime fans begged him to retire. Eight months later, without so much as a get-me-over tune-up tussle, Mosley got a chance at the world’s best prizefighter. What qualified him for this opportunity?

He left promoter Top Rank’s rival Golden Boy Promotions. To his credit, Bob Arum didn’t much pretend it was more than that. There was some initial talk about name recognition, but that quickly was replaced by press releases about Pacquiao becoming the new face of a produce company and recording a remix of some 34-year-old ballad.

Shane Mosley feigned outrage at being a 10:1 underdog. His trainer Nazim Richardson performed the street-tough shtick he learned from Bernard Hopkins. Manny Pacquiao gave the same interview he has given before every fight since learning English in 2006. And Pacquiao’s trainer Freddie Roach lent his wit and sense of irony.

Then the big story became the network broadcasting the match. Only boxing could come up with this. Imagine the NFL selling the world a Super Bowl with a tagline like “Watch it on Fox!” We were peddled a Showtime broadcasting team of Gus Johnson (no Jim Lampley), Al Bernstein (better than Max Kellerman) and Antonio Tarver (better than Roy Jones and Lennox Lewis put together). Jim Brown played hype man, and Jim Gray played, well, himself.

The opening bell rang, and Shane Mosley played himself, too. Mosley is one of boxing’s good guys. His career has been a model of what risk-taking makes athletes immortals.

And yet, if Saturday was the first time you watched boxing or Shane Mosley, on Sunday morning you woke up hating them both.

But for a career-reviving effort against Antonio Margarito in 2009, Mosley has been an imposter of his younger self since a narrow loss to Miguel Cotto 42 months ago. He has been given more opportunities than he’s earned because aficionados expect him to lose valiantly.

Those days are now over. Saturday he began the same way he finished with Mayweather. He offered a woodpecker jab to Pacquiao’s gloves. He was savvy enough to make Pacquiao miss for six minutes, but he never imperiled the southpaw Filipino.

Then Pacquiao gambled because that is what he does by feinting a jab then throwing one and finding range with a third before leaping on his piston legs and blasting Mosley with a left cross that hurt him because nothing in Mosley’s first 54 prizefights prepared him to be struck from such a weird angle by such a heavy fist.

And for the 28 minutes that followed, Mosley did his legacy no favors. Apparently the lactic acid in Pacquiao’s calves did the rest of us no favors either; Pacquiao attributed his diminished punch output and accuracy to cramping.

It mattered little. After the opening round, you knew you were in for a violent rout or a dull one. You knew the $54 you had just paid to make a handful of millionaires marginally richer had not gained you a competitive fight.

And now you cry out again for a match between Many Pacquiao and Floyd Mayweather. Do know that your voice is hoarse and barely audible, and that you’re begging for a diminished brand. The time to make Pacquiao-Mayweather was March of 2010 in Cowboys Stadium. Pacquiao had just stopped Cotto – a fighter Mayweather retired to avoid – and Mayweather had just shut-out Pacquiao’s nemesis Marquez.

Today, the demand for that fight is an ultimatum, not a plea: “Make Pacquiao-Mayweather, or find a new idiot to buy your next fight.”

Calm down, tough guy. Boxing is just going to do what it always does. It’ll take the path of least resistance to its next payday. The hunt for a new idiot is already afoot.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

There are prizefights that begin with one participant looking so confident and establishing such a superiority of craft that you wonder if this mightn’t be a genuinely unique experience in the presence of a genuinely unique talent. But then, with a comfortable lead built, the participant takes a middle round off before ultimately showing skill enough to earn a decision victory.

“The Sweetest Thing” by Mischa Merz (Seven Stories Press; $18.95) is a book very much like that sort of prizefight.

Merz, an Australian journalist and masters-division amateur champion, has no want of talent. The book’s opening pages include a wealth of well-shaped insights like this description of the women’s dressing room at Gleason’s Gym in New York City:

“. . . boxing boots stuffed in every spare bit of space, a mirror and bench designed for makeup application, pink bandanas drying off along with hand wraps, and exfoliating sponges and bottles of conditioner jostling for space. It was an object lesson in the human capacity to absorb many conflicting ideas into a complex identity . . .”

“The Sweetest Thing” introduces the sport of boxing in such a joyful first-person voice that a reader sympathizes immediately with the narrator. You do not start by cheering for Merz to trounce a rival so much as find a fight. She has traveled from the other side of the world, combed YouTube.com for footage of opponents, and put herself through the rigors of a training camp. You hope someone grants her the test she seeks.

This is a book about women’s boxing and its search for respectability, but it is not a book of sermons. For being a double outsider – an Australian woman in American boxing – Merz has an uncommon perspective. And her observations about fighting are first rate.

“People assume that pain is what a fighter fears most,” Merz writes. “But actually it isn’t. Pain is familiar and tolerable. Humiliation lurks like a hidden phantom, it can tower over you, it is mysterious and confusing. Very few fighters are willing to sacrifice their trademark style for victory.”

That is a fantastic series of sentences. It explains a great deal about why, despite fans’ and commentators’ urgings, fighters rarely toss caution windward and rush crazily at even light-hitting opponents. It is a sensation anyone who has sparred knows well; you are more willing to take abuse from a sparring partner in an empty gym than a crowded one, which sets the hands on the clock of your true fear – humiliation, not pain.

One page later Merz provides even better writing about the experience of being hit in the face, one that nature prepares none of us for. And in the next chapter – aptly named “Big Hat, No Cattle” – Merz expands on the nature of her own discomfort:

“The turmoil within comprised a potent mix of distress, humiliation, and many different and disorienting facets of existential pain, but no actual physical pain.”

All odes to the writer’s eye aside, there is no alternative path to that insight. You do not write a sentence that good unless you’ve donned headgear and sparring gloves and been struck in the face by someone who knows how.

A little bit before the halfway point of “The Sweetest Thing,” Merz’s fistic adventuring brings her to a boxer worthy of a quick detour. Melissa Roberts, a USMC boxer from New York, is a special combination of talent, ferocity, arrogance and charm.

Merz knows this in part because of renowned trainer and former world champion Anne Wolf’s familiarity with Roberts. Here’s something Merz and Wolf might not know about Roberts (though one suspects they do): In February, Roberts, now known as Melissa Parker, made one of the finest four-round fights, professional or amateur, seen in years.

Fighting in the Regional Golden Gloves tournament held at San Antonio’s Municipal Auditorium, Parker boxed a hellacious 12 minutes with 132-pound local favorite Selina Barrios, beating Barrios by a score of 3-2. The decision was disagreeable to Texans in attendance. But afterwards, Parker was friendly and confident as could be the right woman had won.

Merz’s own championship victory in a Ringside tournament, surprisingly, leads to her book’s least-pleasant chapter, a regrettable 27-page departure from the likable character found in the other 255 pages. Merz trains her prose on a transsexual competitor once named Paul but now calling herself Pauline. Merz comments relentlessly on Pauline’s oddity. As a reader, you play along, anticipating an amiable conclusion to the anecdotes. But there isn’t one. Pauline is a curiosity for curiosity’s sake, a freak, in other words, whose purpose is to illustrate boxing’s eccentricity of characters.

You suddenly stop cheering for Merz. You stop overlooking mishaps like reporting that dogs called Camacho and Hagler “were named after the two greatest welterweights of the modern era.” Or numerous references to the Wild Card Gym’s “Freddy Roach.” And you begin to wonder about the origin of Merz’s mean-spirited fixation on American obesity.

Fortunately, one chapter later, a very interesting treatment of training alongside former world champion Lucia Rijker, Merz is back in form. She returns to being a participant journalist, a narrator who won your loyalty with such descriptive gems as “spank of gloves on bags,” “affirmative action overstatement,” “compelling androgyny,” and “bland microclimate.”

The book ends on a well-written if dubious note, chronicling the unprofessionalism of a Gleason’s Gym fighter named Melissa Hernandez. After weeks of buildup and silly trashtalk Hernandez refuses to fight in a main event because she is not present to see an opponent’s hands wrapped. When some predictable palliation comes from Hernandez’s camp, Merz does her profession a service by gently ridiculing it.

“The Sweetest Thing” is an enjoyable read, finally. It is a book that will please anyone, male or female, who has become a fighter or wondered what it would be like to try.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter.com @bartbarry

LOS ANGELES – To live in this city one must be pathologically optimistic. It is a machine designed to do wondrous things but comprising 10 million self-interested parts. Every day two or more of these competing parts collide, and the machine seizes up. The trick to residing here is to identify the culpable pieces and assume that tomorrow, finally, the machine will run as planned.

It won’t. It doesn’t. That’s where the pathology comes in.

Not altogether unlike being a boxing fan. On Tuesday, Joseph Agbeko acquired a nerve condition called sciatica and cancelled his championship fight with Abner Mares – the concluding event of Showtime’s Bantamweight Tournament. That meant a fight-week upgrade, from consolation match to main event, for Vic Darchinyan and Yonnhy Perez, two men who’d fought hard but unsuccessfully in December’s semifinals.

Darchinyan was ready for primetime billing. Perez was not.

Neither was I, frankly. But on Wednesday morning, it was too late to cancel my flight. I traveled here, then, to see what else besides boxing the city had to offer.

The unique cause of each day’s traffic mess is ever in the air round here. Sometimes it’s a tanker-truck sprawled across four lanes. Other times it’s a bicycle race down the middle of the busiest surface streets in the West. Thursday afternoon it was the arrival of President Obama in pursuit of diners affording $13,000-per-plate comestibles.

Before you’re even to your rental car, then, someone’s explaining how today’s traffic event reflects nothing systemic about the city. It’s an isolated incident, and tomorrow will be different.

What actually was different was Thursday’s entertainment. After staging one of the better post-lockout NHL playoff games, on Tuesday, the Los Angeles Kings and San Jose Sharks were at it again two nights later in Staples Center. A few single-seating tickets were still available.

And the players are twice as big and thrice as fast as I remembered them from my days as a Massachusetts schoolboy hockey player in the early 1990s. The game has changed.

So has boxing – or at least the promotion thereof. Friday’s weigh-in for Darchinyan-Perez happened at the JW Marriott, part of a sprawling downtown idea called “L.A. Live.” It was two escalators and three hallways from the entrance and fit comfortably in a small conference room. There were no t-shirts for sale, no fight posters, no keychains for fans. There was, really, no reason at all to be there, which is why most of the media was not.

Did Joseph Agbeko’s sudden misfortune affect the Bantamweight Tournament’s promotion? Of course. You never want to cancel a main event, and Abner Mares is a Mexican prizefighter managed by Californians. He would have sold tickets.

Which is more than could be said for the event’s co-promoters. It was a three-way effort made by Oscar De La Hoya (absent all week), Don King (absent all week), and Gary Shaw. You might recognize two of those names, King and Shaw, from January’s “Silence at Silverdome” debacle in Pontiac, Mich.

At some level King gets a pass because he is four months from being an octogenarian and was a ticket-selling dervish in his prime. Shaw is a different story. This year his shows have come under increased scrutiny for their inability to draw fans. Shaw has a remarkable eye for talent, but he is not a promoter in the traditional sense of the word.

It has reached shameless proportions. On Saturday, about 10 minutes before Showtime went on the air, a ring announcer took the microphone and beseeched those gathered at Nokia Theatre to move into the three panels captured on television.

Three minutes after that, a venue security guard confirmed the ticket count at “about 2,000.” Even without imagining how many of those tickets were given away, the numbers are discouraging. Nokia Theatre, without seating people on its stage as it does for boxing events, holds 7,000. That is, 2/3 of Saturday’s available seats were empty.

If promoters still tried to feed their families by attracting crowds, such a turnout would be disastrous. But today, so long as a check from HBO or Showtime clears, all is well. It is not an original commentary but still a poignant one: Boxing has cultivated the seeds of its demise.

Alas, there’s always the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. That is where I spent Saturday afternoon. It is a splendid place with an exhaustive contemporary-art selection. Too, if you like the work of Pablo Picasso, and it seems Americans certainly do, “LACMA” is a good place to spend an afternoon.

A lesser place to spend an evening was waiting for Darchinyan-Perez, though the undercard was passable, and the usual delay before the televised part of the card was not more than 15 minutes.

But the main event was a dud. Even before an accidental bump of heads made blood to shoot from a spot between Jonnhy Perez’s eyebrows, causing ringside doctor Paul Wallace to stop the fight a minute into round 5, it was obvious Perez was overmatched.

Vic Darchinyan rushed out his corner to assault Perez from the opening bell; no feeling-out, no establishing the jab. Darchinyan landed that left uppercut he throws so well from his southpaw stance then brought a barrage of seeing-eye overhand lefts to Perez’s jaw, dropping the Colombian in round 2.

The match wasn’t close. All three judges had Darchinyan by the wide score of 50-44 at the fight’s conclusion.

Darchinyan is more than a bully. He is savage. He is arrogant. But he finds accomplished boxers with power punches in early rounds, and that is no mean feat. And he also fights whomever he is asked to fight.

This city, meanwhile, is a bit different than promised. But its temperate climate and friendly people make you like it more each time you visit. There are lots of reasons to come to Los Angeles, then. Sadly, boxing is not among them.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry.

LOS ANGELES – An accidental collision of heads happened as Vic “Raging Bull” Darchinyan charged Yonnhy Perez in the fifth round of their consolation-cum-main-event bout. A cut opened over Perez’s eyes, and the match was stopped and sent to the scorecards. Those were academic, though. Perez hadn’t been in the fight for one minute of its opening 13.

Saturday night at Nokia Theatre in the downtown area, Armenia’s Darchinyan (36-3-1, 27 KOs) blitzed, bullied and blasted Colombia’s Perez (20-2-1, 14 KOs), beating him by three scores of 50-44 in a fight that saw only four rounds completed and none competitive.

Darchinyan, a southpaw and former world champion originally scheduled for the consolation match of Showtime’s Bantamweight Tournament but elevated to the main event when Joseph Agbeko withdrew from his championship fight with Abner Mares, dropped Perez in the second round then measured him for left uppercuts and crosses that didn’t miss.

When an accidental collision of heads came in the fifth round, referee Jerry Cantu acknowledged the cut and motioned the fighters together. Perez, though, shook his head and walked to his corner, where ringside doctor Paul Wallace eventually stopped the match, citing “arterial bleeding.”

“The ref said, ‘Do you want to fight?’” reported Darchinyan of his opponent’s comportment, after the match. “He said, ‘No.’ He quit.”

Asked about future opponents, Darchinyan first named the man who beat him by split decision in December.

“I’d like to fight (Abner) Mares, if he’ll fight me,” said Darchinyan. “Otherwise, I’ll fight Nonito Donaire.”

Donaire remains the only man to knock Darchinyan out in his prizefighting career.

UNDERCARD
Having a name that ends in a phonetic “?-?n” may win you a following in Glendale, Calif., but it ensures nothing else in boxing, as junior lightweight Armenian Azat Hovenensian (0-1) learned in his professional debut against Mexican Juan Reyes (1-1) in the final fight of Saturday’s undercard. Hovenensian engaged throughout the match’s four rounds and absorbed a rain of blows from Reyes, who won by unanimous-decision scores of 38-37, 40-36 and 40-36.

“Figueroa versus Figueroa along Figueroa” went the theme for a junior welterweight fight between Texan Omar Figueroa (11-0-1, 8 KOs) and Puerto Rican John Figueroa (7-10-3, 3 KOs) midway through the evening’s scheduled undercard. A Figueroa won of course – in this case Omar – by second-round knockout at 2:05.

Saturday’s third bout featured two Californians and the first of what would be four fighters of Armenian background, as Glendale’s Art Hovhannisyan (13-0-1, 7 KOs) swapped blows with Richmond’s Jose Alfredo Lugo (11-16-1, 5 KOs) in an entertaining six-round junior welterweight fight. Hovhannisyan, often moving like fellow Armenian Vic Darchinyan but generally showing better balance when attacking, grinded-down Lugo for four rounds before stopping him with a right cross at 1:57 of round 5.

Before that, an inspired four-round flyweight bout between Pennsylvania’s Miguel Diaz (5-0, 3 KOs) and Californian Alejandro Solorio (4-4, 3 KOs) saw Diaz remain undefeated by dropping Solorio in round 3 and cruising to a unanimous decision all three judges scored 39-36. But Solorio, a local fighter, made things interesting in each of the bout’s 12 minutes.

Saturday’s seven-fight card began with a slow-to-develop heavyweight match between Washington, D.C.’s DaVarryl Williamson (27-6, 23 KOs) and Floridian Michael Marrone (19-3, 14 KOs). The match temporarily came alive in round 3, when Williamson landed a counter right hand that knocked Marrone to the blue mat just before the bell. Four rounds later – at 2:30 of the seventh – the fight ended in similar fashion, with Williamson prevailing by technical knockout.

Opening bell rang on a silent Nokia Theatre at 5:06 PM local time. At 7:25, a venue security guard confirmed the door’s ticket count was 2,000.

Photo by Tom Casino / Showtime

LOS ANGELES – Friday afternoon on the second floor of the never-ending JW Marriott Hotel in the middle of downtown, last-minute main-event bantamweights Armenian Vic Darchinyan and Colombian Yonnhy Perez made weight for their Saturday consolation fight. But in an existential twist, the room was filled with the absence of Agbeko.

Ghana’s Joseph Agbeko, scheduled to fight Mexico’s Abner Mares in the finals of Showtime’s Bantamweight Tournament at Nokia Theatre, was not there and will not be in action Saturday. Citing sciatica – a nerve condition of the lower back and legs – and a pain so extreme that it caused him to collapse on Tuesday, Agbeko officially withdrew from his fight with Mares, at Thursday’s final fight-week press conference.

Friday’s weigh-in sagged somewhat from the deflation caused by that announcement. Like its host edifice, the weigh-in for what is now Darchinyan-Perez was resplendent but empty. There was ring announcer Jimmy Lennon Jr. There was a pair of lasses scantily accoutered like ring-card girls. And there were Darchinyan, who weighed 117.8 pounds, and Perez, who made 117.6. But there was no Agbeko and no Mares, no Don King and no Oscar De La Hoya – who, along with Gary Shaw, co-promote the event – and those were not good omens for Saturday’s gate.

“We may have to give refunds,” said Golden Boy Promotions matchmaker Eric Gomez, Friday. “It’s up to the venue, but it’s tough when you lose a main event. Tough on the fighters, too.”

Asked how close he came to finding a replacement for Agbeko on short notice, Gomez confirmed there were hopes on Wednesday. “Very close,” said Gomez. “We tried to find an opponent that resembled Agbeko’s style. But ultimately, Abner said, ‘What if something happens?’”

While Saturday’s new main event – which features two fighters who lost in the Bantamweight Tournament semifinals in December – should nevertheless be a very entertaining spectacle, much of the enthusiasm that accompanied the start of fight-week was gone by Friday afternoon.

The weigh-in could have used the robust charisma and cackle of co-promoter Don King, but he was not in attendance.

“Don was getting on a flight on Thursday morning, and this was Wednesday night,” said publicist Alan Hopper. “And I told him, ‘No, it’s OK, you don’t have to be here.’”

The show will go on just the same. Doors are scheduled to open on Nokia Theatre at 4:00 PM local time, with the opening bell set to ring at 5:00. 15rounds.com will have full ringside coverage.

SAN ANTONIO – Saturday night as the HBO fights were getting under way, an enormous event happened here in the downtown area. Fiesta Flambeau, the annual commencement of this city’s 11-day Battle of San Jacinto celebration and our country’s largest illuminated night parade, sent brilliant floats and marching bands through the town, eliciting roars of gaiety from Texans along the route.

A parade that begins after dark in America’s seventh-largest urban area says many things about its city’s safety and sense of community. All of them good.

While this was going on, HBO showed British junior welterweight Amir Khan make an enthusiastic homecoming in Manchester’s M.E.N. Arena. A few hours later, Showtime presented Puerto Rican champion Juan Manuel Lopez in a homecoming of his own before a similarly raucous gathering at Coliseo Ruben Rodriguez.

Then there was the sobriety of Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut, where welterweight titlist Andre Berto swapped blows with Victor Ortiz – and the cheers of a few hundred paying customers soughed over the canvas like a gentle breeze on a field of blue bonnets.

For once, the attendance at these three shows was inversely proportionate to the quality of their prizefights. The Mancs went wild, as ever, for Khan’s talented-amateur routine, as he won a technical decision over someone named Paul McCloskey, after a protect-the-brand stoppage by a squeamish British doctor. The Puerto Ricans, meanwhile, expressed some robust displeasure with referee Roberto Ramirez when he decided Lopez’s fourth minute of walking unconsciousness was somehow more disagreeable than its three predecessors and raised Mexican Orlando Salido’s glove in the eighth round.

These were authentic crowds, though, whatever else they were.

There was nothing authentic about the purses or celebrity enjoyed by Andre Berto and Victor Ortiz before Saturday night. Had someone thought to follow Berto’s career four years ago and drop breadcrumbs, today he could walk that path backwards to the place HBO Sports lost its way. And Victor Ortiz reminded Oscar De La Hoya of himself, which was the main reason he was still fighting on HBO.

Much of the derision both men’s careers had merited went away Saturday. Ortiz manhandled Berto, beating him by unanimous decision in a fantastic scrap – and a tip of the cap to Norm Frauenheim, who took us to task for questioning Ortiz’s heart and character last week. Berto proved to be about what we thought he was, though after looking frightened in the opening round fought back hard and made it to the closing bell.

And that brings us – smoking, juking, feinting – to what will happen at Los Angeles’ Nokia Theater on Saturday when Ghana’s Joseph King Kong Agbeko fights Mexican Abner Mares in the finals of Showtime’s Bantamweight Tournament.

What does Agbeko-Mares have to do with Berto-Ortiz, Lopez-Salido, Khan-McCloskey or Fiesta Flambeau? Authenticity, and how we perceive it.

There was a time in our sport when shortcuts to authenticity were abetted by network television. Excite a programmer’s fixation with viewer demographics, put together a snazzy out-of-ring persona, and cash checks disproportionate to your achievements.

But as Thomas Hauser emphatically noted almost two years ago: “A television network has the power to give fighters exposure. A television network has the power to steer fighters to a particular promoter. A television network cannot (repeat, cannot) create stars.”

In its novel tournament structure, introduced with the Super Six and furthered by the Bantamweight Tournament, Showtime gave 10 lesser-celebrated prizefighters a chance to earn stardom. From the original Super Six, two fighters – Andre Ward and Carl Froch – have emerged as authentic stars. Two others, Arthur Abraham and Mikkel Kessler, have proved to be good but somewhat less than their reputations implied. Andre Dirrell is now considered suspicious if not fraudulent. And Jermain Taylor was driven into retirement.

Of the four men elevated by the Bantamweight Tournament, all have acquitted themselves according to form thus far. Armenian Vic Darchinyan was already seen as a bully with a fragile psyche who nevertheless made entertaining matches. Colombian Yonnhy Perez is a man who is capable of beating anybody when he is on, and carries a chance of being a little off each time he fights for a title.

Abner Mares surprised plenty of folks in December when he bullied the bully, roughing up Darchinyan and beating him by split decision. And Agbeko, as it turns out, might be boxing’s best-kept secret.

Joseph King Kong Agbeko – what his Ghanaian birth certificate apparently reads – comes from an East African country much better at producing world-class prizefighters than supporting them. Agbeko is soft-spoken and polite. Aside from the gorilla mask and manacles he used to wear to the ring, preceded by a leggy blonde as his moniker demanded, Agbeko is nondescript. But he is a special talent.

Agbeko does many things well. He reminds us that a low lead hand and good legwork mustn’t always make for an insipid style. He can box, slug or fight. He is a pleasure to watch. He is worth the trip from South Texas to Southern California – especially if he’s sharing a ring with Mares and a marquee with Perez and Darchinyan.

I’ll be in Los Angeles on Saturday because I believe in what Showtime is doing with the Bantamweight Tournament. I’ll not be in Las Vegas two weeks later because I am unsure what Showtime is doing with Pacquiao-Mosley. Manny Pacquiao and Shane Mosley are authentic stars, but Pacquiao-Mosley may not be an authentic superfight.

Authentic stars: Agbeko-Mares creates an opportunity to find another one. The winner of the Bantamweight Tournament will be the best 118-pound prizefighter unless Filipino Nonito Donaire demonstrates otherwise. Donaire is crazy talented, yes, but his authenticity, of one kind or another, seems to face annual crises.

Communities see through promotional noise and find authenticity where it exists.

I’ll take Agbeko, SD-12, on Saturday – and regard him as his division’s ruler until he’s beaten, and hope you all do the same.

Bart Barry can be reached at bbarry@15rounds.com

A suspicion was confirmed Saturday. No, it wasn’t the suspicion we all harbored about Erik “El Terrible” Morales’ shopworn frailty. Morales’ comportment in the main event of “Action Heroes” was first rate. Rather, the suspicion was that this new generation of fighters, while competitive and proud, is not what the last generation of fighters was.

Argentine junior welterweight Marcos Maidana whacked and plowed his way to a majority decision against Morales – Mexico’s former super bantamweight, featherweight and super featherweight world champion – at MGM Grand in a fight broadcast on HBO pay-per-view Saturday. Maidana won by scores of 116-112, 116-112 and 114-114.

My scorecard went 118-113 for Maidana. I had the Argentine winning rounds 1, 3, 4, 6, 9, 11 and 12. I had Morales winning rounds 5 and 8. I had rounds 2, 7 and 10 even. If those even rounds all went Morales’ way, as many an “Action Heroes” viewer saw them, I still had Maidana winning 7-5.

A word or two about “Action Heroes” viewers. They were, almost to a man, advocates. It was not possible to buy the card without a zealous belief in “El Terrible.” Those who’ve shown Morales their zeal through the years were rewarded Saturday, they were vindicated Saturday, and they were thrilled Saturday. But they were not objective Saturday.

All paeans to punch accuracy and effect aside, Morales had rounds in which he landed fewer than 10 meaningful blows. Maidana was not in Morales’ class but was ineffectively aggressive throughout. And if you want boxing to entertain, you present scorecards that value ineffective aggressiveness over any criterion but its effective cousin.

If there was a loser Saturday it was not Morales or Maidana – though Maidana’s terrifying mystique was eroded. Instead, the losers were a new generation of fighters in general and two prizefighters in specific.

Those two prizefighters are Victor Ortiz and Amir Khan. Ortiz wilted and quit under Maidana’s assault 22 months ago then informed Staples Center patrons he should not have to endure an assault like Maidana’s. Khan then spent six minutes shamelessly fleeing Maidana in December while successfully defending his WBA 140-pound title in a performance for which he was lauded.

How does that performance look today?

While you consider that, consider this: Erik Morales, a 34-year-old veteran of 57 prizefights who retired almost four years ago and met Maidana 14 pounds above his prime fighting weight, just acquitted himself more nobly than Khan and Ortiz combined. And he did it with one eye.

The punches with which Maidana struck Morales – the same blows that still wake Ortiz and Khan with nightmares – had nary an effect on Morales who, after having his right eye shuttered by a left uppercut in round 1, did not wobble, run or signal for a doctor in the 33 minutes that followed.

That an overweight, overaged guy unable to see a left hook for 11 rounds just beat back the most-feared puncher in boxing’s most-competitive division does not speak well of our sport’s new generation. Not well at all.

And beat him back, Morales did.

The opening round saw Maidana’s relentless and undisciplined attack land all over Morales’ body, causing HBO commentator Jim Lampley to call Morales, quite rightly, a “shell” of his former self.

Maidana raced out his corner and whacked away at Morales spinning the former champion making him look poorly balanced and fragile bruising him with huge shots and rendering his right eye useless with a ferocious inside uppercut that nearly signaled the end.

But Morales knew the storm would subside. He had been across from men just as determined and feral as Maidana. And those men had twice Maidana’s class and savvy. Morales returned fire with three-punch combinations. He watched Maidana stumble and play motorboat while breathing.

Maidana never got comfortable as he’d planned because he was unable to chase Morales bullying him hitting him making him reel and retreat or skip sideways desperately – Maidana was unable to relax because he was across from a man who was not intimidated by him in the slightest a man whose fear of being struck by Maidana dissipated with each Maidana strike.

Then Morales buckled Maidana with a naked left hook lead. Morales was too old to hit Maidana with combinations half as intricate as he’d thrown a decade ago. But Morales still forced Maidana backwards and made the Argentine’s eyes grow with surprise and worry.

Maidana deserved to win for approaching the championship rounds with more self-belief than he deserved to carry charging after Morales reminding the crafty Mexican of the seven-year difference in their ages.

But Morales’ severe arrogance was not diminished. A half hour of combat with Maidana served only to remind him of his greatness.

Who were the winners Saturday? Maidana, for having his hand raised. Morales, for burnishing his legacy at age 34 in a way he could not at age 30. Morales’ generation of fighters, generally. And Manny Pacquiao, specifically.

If you did not watch Morales in his middle rounds with Maidana and think of Pacquiao, you were not watching creatively enough. Morales threw half as many punches at Maidana, coming off the ropes, as he’d thrown at Pacquiao. And Maidana retreated, held or pushed his head under Morales’ chin. One-one-two from Morales made Maidana pause. One-one-two, one-one-two from Morales made Pacquiao bang his hands together and hurl himself on Morales like a doberman on a t-bone. Pacquiao twice slashed to the canvas, at 130 pounds, a man Maidana could not affect at 140.

Let us have no more loose talk of greatness, then, about today’s junior welterweight division. They are a good if coddled lot. They are not worthy of comparisons to men like Morales, Pacquiao, Juan Manuel Marquez or Marco Antonio Barrera.

They have dignity and heart, yes. But they do not have “dignidad y corazón” – not the way Morales used those words Saturday.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter: @bartbarry

There are some differences between writing for a boxing website like this one and writing for a sports website with a boxing page, like, say, CBSSports.com. The largest difference is the catering you do within the large chasm between an aficionado’s knowledge of our sport and a casual fan’s primary interests: violence, controversy, redemption. When you write about prizefighting for the casual fan, in other words, you often have to traffic in clichés.

The sole reason to do it, then, is for greater compensation; boxing aficionados are an ever-dwindling number of men, while casual sports fans are, apparently, a growing contingent in America. The obvious drawback is that if you have 1,000 words to work with, and 300 go towards who your subjects are and why a reader should care, there isn’t very much room left for new ideas.

Finally, this is a challenge any television series that chooses boxing as its subject will encounter. FX Network’s “Lights Out” – whose series finale happens Tuesday at 10 p.m. ET – did a passable job of it. “Lights Out” won’t have a second season, because its ratings weren’t robust, but don’t use that to infer failure.

Another sentence or two about boxing writing. The pursuit of greater compensation, anymore, is a fool’s errand. There was a time when the creation of boxing websites seduced entrepreneurially minded folks, but those days have passed. You’d have a better chance of finding an American prospect in the heavyweight division, today, than a boxing writer who’s had a pay raise since 2008.

That is why – whether your expertise lies in the throwing of hands or the crafting of sentences – a boxing writer should write for aficionados wherever he can find them. Let posterity do with that what she will.

Such a quixotic stance is not possible for a television show. It must cross-over all sorts of competing lines. It must entice folks with seemingly nothing but age and gender in common. The peril of trying to be lots of things to lots of people is that you ultimately must combine a faithful replication of your subject with the need to deliver what others – often more opinionated than serious – already expect. That sort of maneuvering leaves you little space for transcendence.

“Lights Out” has been entertaining. It has been true to our sport. Its acting has been for the most part very good. But it has also wanted for transcendent moments. To employ a fully inapt analogy, if “Lights Out” were a figure skater, it would do very well in the compulsories but leave its judges unaffected after the free-skating program.

“Lights Out” came with a number of interesting extras. Its web presence on FXNetworks.com is well-built. The mini episode “Split Decision” answers questions its episodes ask. The show came with the usual boxing stuff – fatherly trainer, prodigal younger brother, self-sacrificing wife. But it also had a refreshing cast of daughters.

Still, there was always the steep hill of a white American heavyweight champion in the year 2005 to climb. You assume this casting choice was about mainstream marketability – even while thinking you’re dirty for suggesting it.

The program’s two most intriguing performances, though, came from black actors, only one of whom is American, and neither of whom is featured on the official cast page. Reg E. Cathey, the American of the duo, played Barry K. Word, a Don King-inspired hustler who is different from other partial interpretations of King for being slighter of stature and somewhat effeminate.

Cathey’s performance as a fight promoter brings pleasant surprises. You cannot overplay King – he is too famous, too much a self-caricature, and in every way too large. Cathey’s interpretation, then, is enjoyable for its subtlety and slyness. This is also what distinguishes the acting of Holt McCallany, who plays the title character, Patrick “Lights” Leary. More about McCallany in a bit.

The largest thrill of “Lights Out,” though, was the performance of British actor Eamonn Walker, who played a disturbed, fragile trainer named Ed Romeo. Walker appeared in only two episodes, but his performance was the show’s most memorable. Regardless of whom he shared a scene with, Walker was the actor on whom you focused.

Walker has an intensity that is sometimes unrestrained. Anyone who watched HBO’s “Oz” will immediately recognize elements of Walker’s ferocious Muslim character, Kareem Said, in Ed Romeo. But where Kareem Said had few dimensions – always enraged, always eloquent, every line said with wide eyes and a clenched fist – Ed Romeo is a new character.

Ed Romeo is softer, thicker and older. He is helpless. He demands too much of his charges but offers more than he asks. Ed Romeo is not an interpretation of an actual boxing trainer. Ed Romeo is an aesthetic achievement.

As mentioned, Holt McCallany also does well. He plays a former heavyweight champion, with impressive understatement. Patrick Leary is not complicated and does not think he is. Like the best fighters he knows more than he says.

But as a program “Lights Out” was beginning to have soap-operatic departures. An alcoholic mother and her conman boyfriend showed up late in the season. A mob boss began dating Leary’s sister. Leary’s brother accidentally stabbed the champ with scissors. The deus ex machina, in other words, was starting to creak across stage. You began to worry who might show up in Episodes 14-26, if there were a Season 2.

There will not be; “Lights Out” will not be back. That does not mean the show was a failure. Would that HBO had ended “Big Love” after its novel first season.

“Lights Out” was a minor success. If there is justice in show business, all its cast will find quality future work. If you get a chance, then, watch the series finale Tuesday and see what you think. You might well find yourself checking-out the first 12 episodes on DVD in the future.

Bart Barry can be reached at bbarry@15rounds.com

It was almost four years ago this week that Mexican Jorge Solis sat in Pico de Gallo restaurant, sipping menudo. Pico de Gallo is a colorful cousin eatery to San Antonio’s famous Mexican restaurant Mi Tierra; Pico de Gallo is not quite in Market Square, not quite as well attended, not nearly as famous.

Solis was unknown that Saturday morning to other diners and wait staff. He was unremarkable in every way. He had a chance to change that anonymity 10 hours later when he fought Manny Pacquiao for a super featherweight title in Alamodome. He acquitted himself well for seven rounds, then Pacquiao saw his own blood, went maniacal and stopped him.

Solis had another chance Saturday to change prizefighting’s perception of him as a game loser, when he swapped blows with Cuban featherweight titlist Yuriorkis Gamboa in Atlantic City, in the main event of a decent HBO card. Gamboa won easily by TKO at 1:41 of round 4.

Before that, California’s Mikey Garcia stopped previously unbeaten Connecticut prospect Matt Remillard at the end of the 10th.

Back to Solis. After his knockout loss to Pacquiao, he fielded questions on a makeshift stage at the back of Alamodome. Pacquiao, then, had slashed Erik Morales to the mat in three rounds, five months before. He was not the international icon he is today, but he was five matches into the unbeaten streak that would make him a cult of personality.

The press corps for Pacquiao-Solis comprised a number of San Antonio Express-News writers, some Mexicans and lots of Filipinos. Most were curious to hear Solis describe his experience in the ring with Pacquiao and more curious still after Solis appraised Pacquiao’s power:

“With all due respect,” Solis said, “I believe my wife hits harder.”

Say this for Solis’ work as a fistic critic: He’s consistent. Saturday, after being run out the ring by Gamboa, he fielded another question about his experience with Pacquiao and was still unimpressed.

“Pacquiao doesn’t hit hard,” Solis said; “he is a machine that punches.”

For Gamboa, though, some enthusiastic praise:

“Damn!” Solis began. “(Gamboa) has a brutal punch.”

How seriously should we take Solis’ analysis? Not very. When he fought Pacquiao, Solis was an undefeated 27-year-old contender who didn’t understand the big deal about the Filipino; Solis had a touch of resentment for being the nameless b-side and third best-known Mexican on that “Blaze of Glory” card, behind Jorge Arce and Cristian Mijares.

Saturday, Solis was significantly less. His match with Gamboa was the first he’d made outside Mexico since Pacquiao. He was both grateful for being on television in the United States and aware of his limitations as a challenger.

Gamboa deserves credit nonetheless for what he did with Solis by circling him and surveying those limitations, taking his time in the first round, that is, before deciding to attack.

When it’s time Gamboa leaps. His punches are short. Well-leveraged. Chin safer than before. He commits. Without the arrogance of 2009.

Today Gamboa senses his promoter Top Rank acquired him to corner a market in the featherweight division. Gamboa’s nemesis, as it were, is Juan Manual “Juanma” Lopez, a charismatic Puerto Rican southpaw accompanied to the ring by Felix Trinidad and promoted more passionately by Top Rank. Juanma sells tickets. Gamboa does not. Juanma fights current or former world champions. Gamboa does not.

All indications Saturday were that Gamboa is an unstoppable force, one who might well tear through Juanma’s questionable chin and loose defense if Top Rank’s ever silly enough to make that fight. Don’t bet on it. While Juanma is making battles with the likes of Steven Luevano and Rafael Marquez, Gamboa is laying waste to a guy Pacquiao beat four years ago in Texas.

Writing of featherweight prospects laying waste to men in Texas, how about that Mikey Garcia? Much like Solis, until Saturday Garcia’s best-known appearance was made in Lone Star State – Laredo specifically – in a fight that saw him surprisingly undo Detroit southpaw Cornelius Lock. Unlike Solis, Garcia has a bright future.

Garcia also has a poise that can be learned but not taught, a way of managing the ring that happens when you’re around the ring from a young age, whether fighting or not, and seeing how professionals conduct themselves with gloves on. He has a sturdy chin that is equal parts conditioning, relaxation and preparedness; Garcia can take a good punch because he expects a good punch and knows knowledgeable former prizefighters like his brother and trainer Robert would not praise him if he were not from that special stock of men capable of sustaining other men’s fists in combat.

Matt Remillard hit Garcia with right crosses, Saturday. Garcia absorbed them and continued along unfazed. Garcia knew his punches hurt Remillard disproportionately more and felt little compulsion to prove it. Atlantic City had lost interest by the time Garcia found Remillard and ruined him. Garcia’s greatest offense was his unfazedness. He went forward, took punches, gave punches and broke his man’s spirit. Garcia will be only exciting as he needs to be to knock an opponent out. Boring knockouts, though, can a fine career make.

Garcia is also promoted by Top Rank, who now owns the featherweight division. Top Rank is no longer much interested in promoting shows with outfits other than itself, which is not palatable. What is worse, though, is that when it comes to the featherweight division, Top Rank is not interested in promoting shows even with itself. Bob Arum has gone to profane ends to assert what he will not do with Gamboa and Juanma – and Garcia’s people want no part of a lutte à trois either.

But fighters come with expiration dates. Ask Nonito Donaire, who recently abandoned Top Rank days after becoming a star. Top Rank has about a year left to make things happen in the featherweight division. After that, Gamboa might well look for golden opportunities elsewhere.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter: @bartbarry

Photo by Chris Farina / Top Rank

If there was a theme from last weekend – and you’re right to shake your head; there probably wasn’t – that theme might be: Trust your first reaction. Boxing threw a showcase for itself and succeeded in few ways. Those ways included a proof of Canadian fans’ loyalty and passion, a new euphemism for aficionados, and an enthusiasm for a prospect that stays well ahead of his accomplishments.

Too much happened in our sport on Friday and Saturday to ignore it, but not enough was done by any one professional to merit 1,000 words. Mishmash, fruit salad, potpourri; choose your analogy, then, and see what follows.

The weekend’s second best performer was Lucian Bute, the IBF super middleweight champion who stopped an Irishman two days after St. Patrick’s Day – which, depending on the Irishman, is either a remarkable feat or not much of a feat at all. Brian Magee was the rare Irishman who spent his people’s special day abstaining from drink and merriment. He came to win, and he made a good showing for himself till Bute’s curious left hook, thrown more like an uppercut from his southpaw stance, dropped and canceled him in the 10th round.

When he commits to his punches, Bute is a pleasure to watch. As a southpaw, he should not be able to hit you with a liver shot. The angle is all wrong for a fighter with his right foot in the lead; the trajectory of a punch thrown with the left hand is generally too straight, or too wide, to sneak its way into the spot between the bottom rib and the top of the right hip. Those few southpaws that finish an opponent with a left hook to the body – Gerry Penalosa comes to mind – usually do it by crossing-over and throwing the left hook from an orthodox stance. Not Bute.

There is a poetry to his left hook, and it stirs the French Canadien soul of Quebecers – 14,000 of whom turn out for each Bute prizefight in Montreal’s Bell Centre. So Canadian fight fans were the weekend’s best performers, again. Nobody fears how boring they could make a fight with Andre Dirrell, and can any aficionado honestly say the same about Bute?

What’s this talk of aficionados, anyway? We were promised a euphemism. Here it is: Beta testers. That’s what you were if you endeavored to watch heavyweight Vitali Klitschko defend the family’s titles against an outstanding Cuban amateur named Odlanier Solis, Saturday afternoon. It was a loser-leaves-town match between Solis and the website streaming his challenge from Germany, and officials are still hunched over a pixelated video in an effort to determine who performed worse.

Solis initially looked good as a man can in a fight with a Klitschko. He landed at least one punch for every minute he was across from Vitali. And then, while most American viewers waited for their username to be verified or their video to load or their computer to restart, Solis found himself semi-struck on the head by a punch from Klitschko.

Solis’s left leg went stiff. His right leg went soft. He collapsed in an ignominious pile – made more suspicious by Wladimir Klitschko’s wrestling his brother away from the Ali-over-Liston pose Vitali had in mind.

Trust your first reaction.

Sometime in the next few days, there will be a press release issued from a European hospital. It will cite an unnamed doctor saying that, in his 50 years of practicing medicine, the damage done to Solis’ leg in the first round is the worst he’s ever seen. It will imply you’re dishonorable for doubting the integrity of Solis and his management team.

Trust your first reaction. The way you did when Kermit Cintron leaped out the ring against Paul Williams; the way you did when reading Devon Alexander had to have the nerves over his eye stitched together after Timothy Bradley; the way you did when Ricardo Mayorga started shaking his left fist after being shaken by a left fist from Miguel Cotto. And the way you did when the first connection error popped-up while you tried to connect to Klitschko-Solis.

Press releases on that debacle are sure to follow. A website that deserves to remain nameless spent much on marketing its boxing-broadcast debut, last week. It spent a goodish sum on in-studio commentators, too, one supposes. It did not spend nearly enough on technical resources. Or maybe it did, and fight aficionados were simply slotted for the unwitting-beta-tester role.

Which brings us, limping, to the as-yet-unjustified praise prospect James Kirkland continues to collect. Some serious, knowledgeable people who’ve seen middleweight champion Sergio Martinez on television and Kirkland in the gym believe Kirkland has Martinez’s number. Possibly. But Kirkland looked a spot less than monstrous Friday night while making his post-incarceration Telefutura debut against an unknown Colombian named Jhon Berrio.

Kirkland gets hit lots. It’s part of his charm and strategy. He is certain an even exchange with any man in the world will find his power-to-chin ratio superior. The probability of Kirkland’s disproving that theorem, though, grows with his weight. At 154 pounds, Kirkland was a beast. At 160 pounds, he remains an unproven entity.

But wise moves are being made in his behalf. He is out of Austin, Tex., where he was a self-described target. He is now in Las Vegas. And he is fighting monthly. Cheer for his future success, then, for one reason: Other fighters might emulate his activity.

While you’re cheering, though, let no one make you feel stupid for being unconvinced. Let no commentator berate you into compliance. Let no craftily worded press release infect you with doubt. Because boxing hasn’t won any new fans in the last couple of years, you’ve surely been around long enough to trust your first reaction.

Bart Barry can be reached on Twitter @bartbarry

This is one of the more authentically enjoyable rides we’ve been on, isn’t it? Sergio Martinez, a man humble outside the ring as he is confident within, continues to bring pleasant surprises every time we see him. He has a naturalness to him most standout performers don’t.

Improperly packaged for most of his career and today barely promoted at all, Martinez has become the one phenomenal performer in our sport we wish to see often and are able to see often and free of additional charge. He puts a lot of people in prizefighting to shame – and what a richly deserved shame it is.

El Espectáculo de “Maravilla” kept on Saturday when Martinez went against a largely unknown but quietly heralded Ukrainian who might be named Serhiy Dzinziruk and who had made a menace of himself in Europe – as a tall, dispassionate southpaw with a jab and left cross – and dropped the previously undroppable Dzinziruk five times en route to a knockout victory at 1:43 of round 8. Martinez also retained sole consideration as the world’s middleweight champion.

The fight happened at MGM Grand in Connecticut’s Foxwoods Casino and was televised by HBO. An Argentina-born, Spain-polished Californian making a title defense against a Ukrainian resident of Germany, in Connecticut? Only a casino site fee and television contract could play backbone to that gelatinous mess.

Which almost adds to Martinez’s charm, actually. For once the innovation begins with a fighter, not his marketing. No silly press-conference antics. No vitriolic conference calls. No reheated, made-for-infomercial, hand-pad tricks. No ring entrance on a swing. No posse of buffoons wrestling Michael Buffer for the camera during introductions. Just a good-looking athlete wearing championship belts and bowing, curtain-call style, to those gathered in his name.

Followed by an artistry of motion rarely seen in boxing. No nervous feet. No Matrix-style avoidance of another’s fists. No intimidating faces at an overmatched opponent. No meaningless punches. No talking. Nothing but outstanding athleticism seasoned by its equal in confidence, presented by a man who fights whomever he is asked to fight.

It has been a long, long time, hasn’t it?

Dzinziruk was a good, undefeated fighter – another product of what was once the Soviet system that gave us champions like Vasily Jirov and the Brothers Klitschko. But that amateur perfection taught by trainers raised in the Soviet system was some of what plagued Dzinziruk, Saturday.

Across from “Maravilla” Martinez’s syrupy mobility, Dzinziruk’s thoughts were almost audible: Defend, step forward, hit by jab, hit by jab, block left cross, jab, step backwards, raise hands, step towards overhand left, throw counter right hook.

Emboldened by his co-hosts’ numerous favorable comparisons of Martinez’s style to his own, though, HBO analyst Roy Jones rose to the occasion, imagined how he might see Dzinziruk in a fight, and imparted some surprising wisdom. The best of which was his idea of Dzinziruk fighting behind Martinez; Dzinziruk, Jones explained, cannot determine what Martinez is going to do before Martinez does – for having never seen a creature like Martinez – and therefore must lead Martinez by jabbing first, if he is to have a chance.

Martinez was hittable. Martinez is hittable. He sometimes forgets an opponent has any volition of his own. Martinez mesmerizes an opponent then mesmerizes himself with his effect on that opponent.

Martinez jabbed Dzinziruk to the body. Martinez jabbed Dzinziruk to the body. Martinez jabbed Dzinziruk to the body. Martinez threw jab, cross – while changing the trajectory of his left fist to find Dzinziruk’s chin. And then Martinez took a step backwards and crouched and dropped his hands to his thighs and moved his head at short angles to study Dzinziruk while awaiting a foray he might counter before finding Dzinziruk was unable to blitz him and shifting his weight front to back to leap at Dzinziruk.

It was nothing like what a trainer would tell a kid to do in the gym. It was the creativity of a man who taught himself to box, late. It was the first successful interpretation of Roy Jones on a championship stage by any actor in the 21st century.

And it was evidence of what makes Martinez the first athlete-boxer we’ve seen who concerns himself with hitting an opponent more than not being hit by an opponent. That is, it took a dose of Latin machismo finally to give us an athlete of peerless reflexes whose priority is offensive and not some layered narrative like: I will humiliate you so you do not humiliate me.

Whatever it is that makes “Maravilla” what he is was present in round 8. After losing the better part of both the sixth and seventh, Martinez retreated with his hands low, blood coming out the side of his left eye, and moved his upper body till all was comfortably arranged.

Then he jumped forward. He hit Dzinziruk with a jab-cross combination. He did it again. Dzinziruk went down. The rest was details.

Your first instinct is to hope Martinez can make a super fight, to hope some larger canvas is available for his inspired brush. But that could be wrong.

Because life isn’t fair, Martinez will be the promotional b-side of any super fight he makes. He will be at a myriad of disadvantages from catch weights to venues to whatever else others’ handlers can think up. Better, then, that he do exactly what he is doing: fight three times a year on HBO till he’s cleaned out the middleweight division.

At 36 years-old, Martinez might not have many more chances to entertain us. But this ride will be a marvel while it lasts.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter: @bartbarry

Marco Antonio Barrera has warned us about cases like Mexican Saul “Canelo” Alvarez. No, not by name – the way Juan Manuel Marquez just did – or by specific timeframe, either. Barrera’s warnings come only by implication: boxing was off Mexico’s public airwaves for most of the last decade, and that will have consequences.

Boxing is back on Mexico’s airwaves, and the pueblo’s appetite for our sport is voracious. Mexicans see more boxing these days than Americans do; all those European cards and American undercards you need a pirated link to see are broadcast on basic cable, there. To invert Sir John Falstaff’s advice, though, Mexicans are about to start calling some counterfeits true pieces of gold.

Is “Cinnamon” Alvarez a counterfeit? We don’t know yet, and at this rate we won’t know for a long time. We got only a little closer to the truth of this horse-mounting Jalisciense with red hair and freckles, Saturday, when he battered Matthew Hatton, a determined b-grade Brit with a famous brother, and won a unanimous decision by three scores of 119-108, on HBO.

Alvarez is not exactly what Barrera warned us about, but he may be in the vanguard of the movement. When most Mexicans without satellite dishes stopped seeing boxing with any sort of regularity, Alvarez was nine years old. In Mexico, as in every other place on Earth, the children of homeowners with satellite dishes do not populate boxing’s amateur ranks. How many young Mexicans of inauspicious beginnings did not take up the sport – for want of exposure – in the 11 years Alvarez was building himself from an ethnic anomaly to a ticket-selling attraction?

How much better, in other words, were the Mexican 15-year-olds against whom Barrera and Marquez learned their craft in the 1980s?

It’s a good question. Here is a better one. What did a decade away from routine examination of fighters do to Mexico’s national afición?

There is a reasonable assumption in Mexico that the best of their countrymen are the best prizefighters in the world. To come out of Mexico in the past, a prizefighter had to survive so many tests that his mettle could not be doubted. But for the next five to 10 years, the default assumption that steels Mexicans’ support of their fighters may well be disconnected from the reality of what tests their young fighters now pass.

Take that possibility and add to it Mexicans’ spring-loaded appetite for boxing, and you get a phenomenon like Canelomania, one that puts more than 10,000 fans in an arena to see a showcase bout.

But is Alvarez’s promoter Golden Boy Promotions really doing anything differently from what rival Top Rank did with Julio Cesar Chavez Jr.?

Yes, actually. Chavez Jr. was going to be a draw whether or not he could fight even a little bit. A Mexican form of self-deception was not needed to sell Chavez Jr.; the kid’s father was the only thing that went right in Mexico in the 1990s, and Mexicans are a proud, loyal people.

Alvarez is a supposedly organic discovery, on the other hand, from a place – Tlajomulco de Zúñiga, Jalisco – most Mexicans couldn’t pronounce any more easily than they could find it on a map. Alvarez is marketed as a true piece of gold; Oscar De La Hoya says he’s never seen a 20 year-old so very developed – and that means a lot to fight fans in Mexico who still think of De La Hoya as a fighter, not a promoter.

But was Alvarez the most-developed 20 year-old you’ve ever seen, Saturday? Of course not. He realized in the first five minutes that not one Hatton punch, lucky or otherwise, could hurt him. Then he spent the next half hour stalking Hatton, with his hands and chin lowered. He wacked away at Ricky’s brother with impunity and beat him pretty good. He never dropped him, though, and Hatton was still on his toes bouncing when the 12th round began.

Alvarez has no defense to speak of. He has strong legs, but he does not bob. His footwork is simple; it’s not wrong, by any means, but neither is it complicated. His hands stray low every time he loads a punch. His head stays between opponents’ shoulders.

None of this would be a problem, one supposes, if he had break-you-in-half power. He does not. His left hooks are wide and sometimes sloppy. His uppercuts are thrown well and authoritatively, but does he have hand-speed enough to land them against elite fighters?

If they were to fight next week, James Kirkland would tear Alvarez apart. Alfredo Angulo would wear him down. Paul Williams would outland him 30 to 1. Miguel Cotto would likely finish the job his brother started 10 months ago. And Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. would outbox him. No, that’s not a typo.

¡Cálmate, cabrón! Alvarez is only 20 years-old. How can you compare his chances to such beasts as those listed above?

Fair point. Alvarez needs more seasoning, some time in the minors to hone his skills. Who could argue?

Which raises one last question. Since when is HBO our sport’s minor-league affiliate?

Sometime in the last three years – that’s the answer, if you’re scoring at home. Saturday’s telecast was fine an example as any of what HBO has become: an Oscar De La Hoya-search company that populates its undercards with Al Haymon-managed trial balloons. That’s why it is now our sport’s number two network.

Alas, that’s someone else’s problem. But Alvarez and Chavez Jr. are our problem, as aficionados, because they represent Mexican prizefighting in the near term. Until they fight one another, we shouldn’t take either too seriously. Americans already know this. Mexican fans might need a reminder:

Hasta que pelean Canelo y Junior, hay que cuidar nuestro apoyo completo.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter: @bartbarry

SAN ANTONIO – So you think you love boxing, eh, just can’t get enough of all that action and drama leavened by brutality? Yeah, well you might not love boxing much as you think. But fear not. There is a test available to certify you one way or another: A Regional Golden Gloves tournament in the city of your choosing.

I thought I loved boxing when I awoke Tuesday morning. And I confirmed I love boxing round midnight Saturday. But in between those two days stretched 22 hours, 123 amateur bouts, a fire marshal delay, fair judging, relentless sportsmanship, hopefuls’ victories and losses, the discovery of a few remarkable boxers and a new truth or two, and lots of fatigue. And some doubts about my own fidelity to our beloved sport.

The last 14 months of covering prizefighting, while not quite hopeless, have been much less than their predecessors were. Had boxing been like this when I began to write about it, I would have stopped writing about it. I’m sure I am not the only writer who’s experienced this feeling lately – though perhaps the only one to admit it publicly.

If I was not initially reluctant to cover South Texas’ 2011 Regional Golden Gloves Tournament for a combat-sports magazine, I was decidedly reluctant by the second hour of Tuesday’s opening night. Woodlawn Gym – another City of San Antonio gem on the edge of a picturesque lake – was brimming with emotional Texans. And emotional people breathe lots and sweat plenty too. The gym was suffocating. I noticed this an hour before the fire marshal did. And that began a novel delay as tournament director Skip Wilson pleaded with boxers and trainers to leave the gym and wait on the patio.

There were more than 800 people in a small gym on a Tuesday night to see friends and familiars try their sub-novice hands at our brutal sport. Imagine that. Like you, I’ve been to too many professional shows, sold to the public by well-compensated promoters, that couldn’t imagine a standing-room-only crowd.

At the end of last week’s column, I picked San Antonio Parks & Rec’s Ben Mendoza to surprise some folks in the 201-pound weight of the Sub-novice division. But after Tuesday’s fire-marshal delay, Mendoza’s bout got bumped.

The next morning, good and early, a quixotic Google search for a revised schedule brought me, accompanied by great surprise, to SAGoldenGloves.com, where a current and revised Wednesday bout sheet was already posted. At Bradley-Alexander in Silverdome last month, bout sheets were scarcer than paying fans. And yet here was an amateur tournament providing anyone with a little interest a full listing of the night’s program – eight hours before it began.

Did I mention Skip Wilson puts on a well-organized tourney?

Wednesday night Ben Mendoza, a local school teacher who trains at San Fernando Gymnasium most weeknights, completed his journey from fitness hobbyist to fighter. Seven months of conditioning in a boxing gym had done very little to indicate this would happen, honestly. Mendoza was taller, more serious and better-spoken than most of the students who attended trainer Adrian Rodriguez’s classes, sure, but he also had nervous feet and a natural reluctance to throw a left cross from his southpaw stance in sparring. And it didn’t much matter how many times Rodriguez yelled, “Ben, where’s the 2?”

Then something changed. A week before the Golden Gloves, Mendoza went hard rounds with other aspirants and won them. He started talking like a fighter and acquired a certain swagger. And he realized a straight punch thrown across the body of a 201-pound man is nothing to trifle with.

That realization came with an exclamation point Thursday night when, after winning his first bout Wednesday and finding a feature about himself in the next day’s paper – by the class of San Antonio boxing writers, John Whisler – Mendoza fired a left cross at William Ramon and damaged Ramon’s nose severely enough to win in the first minute.

Mendoza didn’t quite advance to the finals, though, as he ran into a tricky boxer-puncher named Chris Pope, Friday, and was bemused by Pope’s head movement and coiled attack. But there was little shame in that; Pope went on to decision Jose Garcia in the first match of Saturday’s Open Championship and win the Sub-novice heavyweight title.

Saturday was a treat. Where the Novice Championship was held at Woodlawn Gym on Friday – and saw James Leija, son of former world champion “Jesse” James Leija – become Sub-novice light welterweight champion after making his debut just three days before, Saturday’s Open Championship happened in the elegant World War I-era confines of Municipal Auditorium, a few blocks from the Alamo.

By then, though, most of the aforementioned friends and familiars were through with the tournament; while Municipal Auditorium had many more fans than attended the National PALs in October, Saturday’s crowd was well shy of capacity.

Those that did come out saw the United States Marine Corps, under the tutelage of coach Jesse Ravelo, dominate the Open division, with a few notable exceptions – like local stylist Benjamin Whitaker, who beat Justin Gover in a fantastic welterweight scrap.

An interesting note about USMC: About 3/4 of the Marines that were in the tournament have permanent orders that ensure boxing is their fulltime job. They are not paid for their fights. But they are paid to fight.

Don’t be surprised if one of those Marines – lightweight superstar Tommy Roque, who won the tournament’s Outstanding Boxer award – eventually does get paid for his fights. You read it here first: If he chooses not to reenlist, Roque will enjoy a solid career as a prizefighter.

And don’t be surprised, either, if one vote for 2011 Fight of the Year goes to an incredible four-round bout made by San Antonio’s Selina Barrios and USMC’s Melissa Parker. Yes, two 132-pound female amateurs just set a mark to which male prizefighters must start to aspire.

Bart Barry can be reached at bbarry@15rounds.com

Some boxing aficionados were suspicious of Nonito Donaire’s talents during the promotion of the young Filipino’s fight with Mexico’s WBC/WBO bantamweight champion Fernando Montiel. Most of these aficionados’ wrongheaded ways were righted by the Donaire left that took Montiel’s mind right away. Donaire claimed those suspicions with grace and violence.

But a few stubborn members of the aficionado ranks remain. There is but one way for Donaire to undo these men’s obduracy. And lucky for us, that way is the one Donaire says he wants to go. More about that in a bit.

Saturday night at Mandalay Bay, Donaire did no wrong – not one wrong step, slip or punch – as he razed Montiel in a fight that was supposed to be super, wasn’t, but did end in superlative fashion. Donaire stopped Montiel ultimately with a flurry of afterthought punches at 2:25 of round 2. But by then he’d changed the trajectory of his career with a left hook that surprised Montiel, and everyone else.

Even serious boxing fans were forgiven their disbelief at Saturday’s spectacle. For most of us, after all, Nonito Donaire was the guy who stretched Vic Darchinyan on Showtime 40 months ago, left promoter Gary Shaw and disappeared into promoter Top Rank’s farm system, making reportedly excellent if alliterative progress on Pinoy Power pay-per-view programs.

By 2010 Donaire was lost to the public. While specialists knew of his technical acumen, most everyone else assumed Top Rank already had its Filipino superstar in Manny Pacquiao – and one was enough. Rabid as boxing’s supporters in the Philippines were, there was only so much money to be squeezed from the world’s number 46 economy.

How well Top Rank has handled Donaire’s career is debatable. How well Top Rank has developed Donaire as a prizefighter, though, is not.

Since his one-punch flattening of Darchinyan in 2007, Donaire had fought seven times against very good if not well-known opponents, men with a cumulative record of 170-13-5, and he’d gone 7-0 (6 KOs) while doing it. But none of them had much tested him, and only one had been undefeated when Donaire got to him.

Hence the suspicions. As usual, doubts about a Top Rank fighter’s otherwise remarkable achievements are a backhanded compliment to matchmaker Bruce Trampler. There are few fighters in the world who beat other men effectively as Trampler handicaps them. Trampler makes great fighters. And his brilliance might just be that rarest thing in our beloved, embellished sport: an underestimated entity.

Which is why a few folks out there remain shy of totally convinced by what their eyes saw Saturday when Donaire obliterated a man many suspected was, at worst, the world’s second-best bantamweight.

But Montiel was a 31 year-old tactician on a 12-fight unbeaten streak, for goodness’ sake! And he knocked-out Hozumi Hasegawa in Tokyo – something our prizefighting betters assured us was without precedent in modern bantamweight history.

Well, maybe. But what some saw Saturday was the same old Fernando Montiel, the guy who looked pretty good against Pramuansak Posuwan in Boxing World Cup ’05 and then pretty bad against Jhonny Gonzalez seven months later. When that impression was married to the data from HBO’s unofficial fight-night scale, showing Montiel’s body had grown 13 percent in fewer than 30 hours, the venti cup of credibility poured for us last week had some room left at the top.

Things aren’t the way they used to be. HBO’s trustworthiness as a boxing programmer in the last five years has been publicly challenged often enough, and by sources credible enough, that no subscriber any longer assumes a fight or fighter is great because HBO says so. The on-air talent knows this and often takes an apologetic or even defensive bent in its broadcasts; only Roy Jones Jr. remains an evangelist.

But none of this undermines how good Donaire looked Saturday. From the opening minute, he was in an entirely different class from Montiel’s. Where the Mexican looked tense and doubtful, Donaire looked fluid and assured. Where Montiel threw tentative range-finding punches, Donaire uncoiled counter hooks flamboyant for their commitment so early in a championship fight.

Donaire did not go after Montiel as a world champion making a title defense on boxing-television’s largest stage; he went after him like Montiel was just another hand-picked extra in an off-Broadway pay-per-view show. Montiel may not have been everything others promised, but he was still a hell of a lot better than Donaire made him look.

And because of the way he comported himself both during and after the fight, you have to believe Donaire when he says the few jabs and tentative right hands Montiel landed in the second stanza were part of a plan. First, Donaire allowed Montiel to touch him with the left. Then, when that succeeded, Donaire allowed Montiel to hang his jab, trigger a weak right-hand from Donaire, and try a left-hook counter behind it.

Soon as Montiel was confident enough to commit to a right cross, Donaire had him unconscious on the canvas, legs and arms twitching like a beetle tipped on its shell.

And that wasn’t enough? No, not quite. There is, after all, a Bantamweight Tournament being fought on Showtime. Its champion will be decided in Los Angeles two months from now. Whether he is Joseph Agbeko or Abner Mares, that champion will have undergone a more-public test than Donaire has. Will Mares or Agbeko fair any better against Donaire than Montiel did? Maybe not. But we won’t know till they fight.

Asked for his future plans, Saturday, Donaire said exactly the right thing: “I think that I want to be undisputed in this weight class.”

If Donaire handles the winner of the Bantamweight Tournament successfully, we’ll know he is the future of boxing. If not, we’ll have to see what boxing holds for Donaire’s future.

GOLDEN GLOVES
Writing of boxing’s future, at least in South Texas, it will be on display this week in San Antonio when the city hosts its 2011 Regional Golden Gloves Tournament. Festivities begin Tuesday night at 7:30 PM in the Woodlawn Gym on Cincinnati Avenue and culminate Saturday night at the majestic Municipal Auditorium, downtown.

You want a darkhorse pick? Happily: San Antonio Parks & Rec’s Benjamin Mendoza in the sub-novice heavyweight division.

Bart Barry can be reached at bbarry@15rounds.com.

This will be about Marco Antonio Barrera’s continuing journey through prizefighting, inspired by its form. If you’re no longer interested in Barrera, this column is not for you. That cleared the room? This column is for posterity, then.

These days Barrera bears little resemblance to the proud, belligerent man who outsmarted and undressed Naseem Hamed on pay-per-view a decade ago. Instead, Barrera peddles name recognition, traffics in the past, wears too much fat on the body, and goes about his craft sloppily. But Barrera still finds a way to get by – working off his ample talent and capacity for calculation.

Can Barrera’s recent approach be duplicated with prose? Stick around, you’re about to find out.

The end of the serious part of Marco Antonio Barrera’s career came a few minutes after the end of Barrera’s WBC super featherweight championship match with Juan Manuel Marquez in 2007. Unless you understood Spanish you didn’t catch the sincerity at the end of Barrera’s post-fight interview of that fight Barrera lost. Barrera made a rhetorical question about the scorecards that unanimously went Marquez’s way: What good is it to have the best promoter if you’re not going to get the judging you want?

Why treat Barrera at all? Oh yeah. Barrera was in action Saturday as the headliner of a card conducted in an edifice on the campus of La Universidad de Guadalajara – apparently not “autonomous” as other Mexican universities. Barrera fought Jose Arias, a Columbian junior welterweight who’d gone 7-0 (7 KOs) last year alone!

Barrera, you imagine, left Barrera’s postfight interview after Barrera lost Barrera’s title to Marquez and took a firm line with Oscar De La Hoya, Barrera’s partner in Golden Boy Promotions: Get me a rematch with Manny Pacquiao, or get lost.

Barrera’s match with Pacquiao was the banner under which Barrera’s promoter called a truce with rival promoter Top Rank in the fall of 2007. It was an uneasy alliance, and not solely because Barrera turned Barrera’s rematch with Pacquiao into a retirement party – one that, given the way Pacquiao would go on to terrorize larger men, Barrera deserves a touch of retroactive praise for: Barrera glided round that ring for 36 minutes with Pacquiao, engaging only when imperiled, and proved that if you don’t wish to fight, Pacquiao won’t make you do it.

One note about Barrera’s Saturday opponent, the Columbian who scored seven knockouts in 2010: He turned 43 years-old in December. And his first fight of 2010 ended a sabbatical from prizefighting that was four months shy of 11 years.

That was two notes about Barrera’s Saturday opponent? So it was.

After the Pacquiao rematch Barrera sat at a makeshift podium in a converted Mandalay Bay conference room, and in English, said something like: I am happy with career.

Then in Spanish, Barrera said: I reserve my deepest gratitude for this beautiful sport and what it has given to Marco Antonio Barrera, and if I were to have this life to live another time, I would change not one thing.

Barrera’s goodbye to boxing was only a goodbye to Barrera’s promoter, though. The term “partner” being a malleable sort of thing in the blossoming Golden Boy Promotions empire, Barrera’s name didn’t have to be scraped from the shingle or struck from the company letterhead. Barrera had to take a year off and fight on a different continent, and that was that.

Yes, but how did it go Saturday? Honestly, Barrera looked like a fat old guy standing across from the Columbian sniper Arias who showed some brio in his ring entrance, fastening gloves to hips and sideskipping across the canvas. Barrera looked dull in Barrera’s royal-blue robe and vaseline as Barrera’d looked at the press conference Barrera’d done before Barrera’s June fight in San Antonio – which is dull as Barrera always looks while speaking in the hastily acquired English that, despite De La Hoya’s noble plans, never quite made Barrera the next Golden Boy.

Can you find Chengdu on a map of China? Barrera did, and plied Barrera’s wares at its Sichuan Gymnasium in the first fight since Barrera’s goodbye to the beautiful sport. After storming through Sammy Ventura (25-19) in the fall of 2008, Barrera went to La Universidad de Guadalajara – different edifice, same apparent lack of autonomy – in the first month of 2009 and escaped with a disqualification victory against Freudis Rojas (1-7-1).

Barrera brought a new combination to Saturday’s fight with Arias – lead left hook, right cross – and thirty seconds into the first round, Barrera loosed the opening volley of this two-punch combination on Arias, but Barrera did not get a chance to complete the combo because Arias, surprised that someone looking as Barrera did could move so quickly, was caught unawares and dropped to the mat then collected himself and made a good match of the next two minutes.

In the next round, though, Barrera spun Arias and hit him with angry right hands behind the left ear and a few spiteful left hooks that Barrera muscled much as Barrera threw them, and Arias was down for the second time in the fight, in the opening minute of the second round, and before he could make much of a contest of that round, Barrera had him staggered again and stayed on the assault till the referee stepped between the men and ensured the Jaliscienses who’d gathered to see Barrera prevail saw just that.

For the five minutes of Saturday’s fight, Barrera was big and sloppy but did enough to make a point – just like those sentences above.

Then there was that abortive thing that happened in Barrera’s match with Amir Khan in England – the coming out party for Khan’s new style under trainer Freddie Roach. A gory gash caused by an accidental headbutt that should have seen the fight stopped early continued to gush blood all about Barrera’s face till the fourth round was in the books – Barrera’s name was on Khan’s resume – and the doctor could decide, quite predictably, that enough was enough and it was time to go to the jolly good scorecards.

In San Antonio 15 months after the Khan debacle, Barrera was signed with a new promoter, Top Rank – once more feuding with Golden Boy Promotions but proud of its acquisition of De La Hoya’s first partner – and the prefight line, in English, was that Barrera had returned to the beautiful sport to become the first Mexican to win championships in four weight classes. In Spanish, of course, Barrera laughed that one off and said it was about “erasing” the Khan match and giving Mexicans a last chance to see Marco Antonio Barrera.

And that was the last time Barrera’s continuing journey made any sense whatever. Saturday, fighting on Fox Deportes – part of your local cable provider’s Español package – Barrera doubtfully made one percent the purse Barrera’d earned for Barrera’s fight with Marquez four years ago. It’s not about money, in other words; there is no cupidity in this comeback.

And it’s not about Barrera’s inability to do something else, either. Barrera is smart as any prizefighter you’ll meet. No, Barrera’s odyssey through the margins of prizefighting, anymore, appears to be about a lack of imagination. Barrera simply can’t be bothered to think of something better to do with Barrera’s time or talents.

Bart Barry can be reached at bbarry@15rounds.com

In March we journeyed to Arlington, Tex., to see Cowboys Stadium’s first prizefight, one featuring Manny Pacquiao. In November we returned to Arlington, Tex., to see Cowboys Stadium’s second prizefight, one featuring Manny Pacquiao. And in May we journey to Las Vegas to see a terrestrial network cover its first prizefight, one featuring Manny Pacquiao.

A cross-country trip to watch CBS cover an event, eh? That might be a bridge too far.

We’ll go to see a great prizefight filled with what drama and suspense have defined the Pacquiao Era, then! OK, maybe. But does anyone honestly doubt how the May 7 fight between Pacquiao and Shane Mosley will go at MGM Grand?

In the next three months, of course, some of us will create scenarios that see Mosley prevailing over Pacquiao in an upset. And bless us for it; such exercises keep the mind spry. But would any of us actually bet Mosley?

Not if he bet Antonio Margarito, Joshua Clottey, Miguel Cotto or Ricky Hatton – the last four Pacquiao opponents. None of those choices drew quite the initial derision among aficionados Mosley did, either.

But that was before CBS. As part of promoter Top Rank’s new relationship with Showtime, apparently, parent network CBS will broadcast an infomercial for Pacquiao-Mosley sometime before the fight. Good for Pacquiao. Good for Mosley. Good for Showtime. Good for Top Rank. And good for boxing.

Not so fast. This fight is not for you, the serious fan. This fight is for that elusive crossover guy boxing endeavors to seduce on a triannual basis. You know him. He asks you when Mike Tyson’s coming back while asking himself who would win a match between Clubber Lang and a prime Muhammad Ali.

Right, sure, but don’t be a curmudgeon. Remember, a rising tide lifts all boats.

But is Pacquiao-Mosley a rising tide, or merely a rising boat? Last year, Pacquiao enjoyed two of his career’s handsomest paydays. And his reluctant nemesis, Floyd Mayweather Jr., enjoyed one as well. But what good, really, did these do the sport of boxing?

Websites like this one have never been in a worse financial spot. Pacquiao may be his country’s most-famous figure, but is he actually recognizable to the 113 million American households that did not buy his last pay-per-view event? And Mayweather, for all the interest in prizefighting he supposedly brought to the black community, didn’t have an enduring enough effect to bring even 1,000 members of that community to “The Super Fight” a couple Saturdays ago.

No, friends, you are not obligated to attend Pacquiao-Mosley as part of some brand-of-boxing loyalty oath. And that’s good, too, because tickets for the fight apparently sold-out days before they went on sale.

In the spirit of your new liberty, then, how about trying something different? Like, say, the finals of Showtime’s Bantamweight Tournament on April 23 in Los Angeles’ Nokia Theatre. That card will feature two great fights: Ghana’s Joseph King Kong Agbeko versus Mexico’s Abner Mares, and Colombian Yonnhy Perez versus Armenian Vic Darchinyan. It will also establish a challenger for the winner of Nonito Donaire’s upcoming bantamweight title fight with Fernando Montiel.

And as Donaire-Montiel is a Top Rank promotion, and Top Rank is now allied with Showtime – and CBS! – there’s no reason to think the world’s best bantamweight prizefighter will not be crowned by the end of 2011.

Look, fans in the target demographic for Pacquiao-Mosley have no idea there’s a Ghanaian who once wore a gorilla mask and manacles during ringwalks. Fans who currently know Shane Mosley solely as “that guy with the same nickname as Leonard and Robinson” have no idea Mares went chest-to-chest and foul-for-foul with Darchinyan in December, and beat him. And there’s little possibility anyone desperately scouring online brokers for Pacquiao-Mosley tickets (if such a man exists) has any idea the consolation match of the Bantamweight Tournament could be better than its championship is.

Tickets will be a fraction as expensive for the Los Angeles card in April as they are for boxing’s big chance on CBS in May. And even with prices good and low, Bantamweight Tournament tickets will be in abundance.

Which leads us to the reason you can merrily play contrarian with a card promoted by Bob Arum’s Top Rank: They don’t need you. Top Rank is the infrastructural master of prizefighting promotion. Never was this clearer than after January’s trip to Silverdome – a venue that, working as a team, Don King and Gary Shaw failed to fill effectively as Top Rank filled just Cowboys Stadium’s East Side Plaza in November.

Golden Boy Promotions is the second strongest promoter out there, yes, but it’s a distant second. And their participation in the Bantamweight Tournament may not be more than tertiary. For all the praise Oscar De La Hoya and Richard Schaefer garnered four or five years ago, it has been quite a while since anyone’s appended the modifier “imaginative” to anything coming out of their shop.

And here’s something else to worry about while we get spiffed up for our big CBS debut: We aren’t ready for primetime. Underlying all our support for the recent terrestrial-network development is an assumption that if we could only get our sport force-fed to the public as, say, the NFL does, boxing would be popular as football.

Don’t be so sure. There’s a very real chance the quality of the product boxing offers – for many reasons but none so much as managers’ selecting of fighters according to television programmers’ tastes – is subpar. The fights we offer today may not be good as the ones we offered 25 years ago.

If that’s the case, four 118-pounders fighting in a 7,000-seat venue is likely the future of superfights much more than is Pacquiao-Mosley on CBS. Going to Los Angeles in May, then, is a good way to reward four deserving fighters, and maybe look like a visionary while doing it.

Bart Barry can be reached on Twitter via @bartbarry