By Bart Barry-

Saturday on ESPN+ oncedefeated Lithuanian welterweight Egidijus Kavaliauskas made a decisive and violent recovery of his mainevent match with Canada’s oncedefeated Mikael Zewski, stopping the Québécois with a fabulous round 7 uppercut from which Zewski still hadn’t recovered at the opening of round 8, when Kenny Bayless prudently stopped their match.  How much better Kavaliauskas looked across from Zewski than Bud Crawford last December was a function of how much better Crawford is than Zewski.

It was an honest effort and an honest broadcast, the very thing a $5.99 monthly subscription should purchase.  It hadn’t the nauseating hyperbole that chases our sport most everywhere it goes.  There were guys who’d each had a shot of some sort and lost to better men.  It was good middlebrow fare, boxing that sticks to your ribs, resonates very little and exacts even less.  The commentary was given by two guys who like one another and do their jobs well.  Even if neither liked the other nor was very good at commentary, fact remains a two-man booth is better than a three-.

Bernardo Osuna is something of a litmus test for aficionados; your familiarity with him is about how familiar you are with our beloved sport.  Before he joined ESPN he ran a two-man booth for Telefutura’s fantastic “Solo Boxeo” program, on which promoters Top Rank and Golden Boy built many if not most future titlists, mostly in the Southwest.

I recall sitting a few feet from him in a makeshift boxing venue, the parking lot of a Tucson nightclub, 14 or 15 years ago – an empty ambulance abandoned on a nearby sidestreet to check some regulatory box or other – while Osuna and his cohost recorded their evening’s leadin.  With only a wrinkled index card scotchtaped to the bottom of a camera for notes, Osuna nailed his first take, nonchalant, then started conversing with someone in a different language.  I remember thinking he might have the most talent on the evening’s card.  Later that night, if memory serves, Jesus Soto-Karass beat “Cool” Vince Phillips into retirement.

Osuna has an uncommon facility in two languages, as viewers might’ve heard and marveled-at, Saturday, with his calling play-by-play in English then doing on-the-fly Spanish translation between rounds.  He’s too talented for conventional broadcasting roles and woefully underutilized as a postfight interviewer.  That’s hardly his employers’ faults.  What, after all, do you do with a guy capable of national-broadcast-quality work in two languages simultaneously – lend him to the United Nations?

Then there’s Timothy Bradley, who’s still learning his craft but vulnerable and unpredictable and likable – one of not even a handful of professional athletes who might make a good friend, and the only man or woman or child Terence Crawford approaches at ringside.  Osuna and Bradley call a card like college roommates; maybe it’s not polished enough for whatever prepositionally historic thing ESPN usually broadcasts – Saturday night, apparently, the Lakers became the first NBA team, ever, to win two consecutive series, in five games, after losing the first game of each, and good God, but you bore witness to it! – but it’s exactly right for Kavaliauskas TKO-8 Zewski, a mainevent that would warrant an 11-hour undercard were it in the U.K. and a handful of Lennox Lewis comparisons to Lennox Lewis by Lennox Lewis if it were on Fox Sports.

I spent some of Saturday’s mainevent doing an examination of conscience, as it were, concerning my tolerance for Kavaliauskas-Zewski.  Would I have watched it if there weren’t a column to write the next morning?  No.  Did I remember anything about either guy before the opening bell?  No.  Did I enjoy the fight for being evenly matched?  Yes.  Did I enjoy the match because both fighters were white?  Hmm.

That’s the very part of my conscience I wished to examine (and how thrilling could the fight have been, honestly, if I used it as a barometer for my own racial bias?).  This isn’t a question of racism, as I see it; cheering for someone because he looks like you is acceptable in most cases – and the more specific, the more acceptable; “Paddy O’Sullivan is my favorite because he’s an Irish Catholic from Boston!” is more acceptable than “Bill Smith is the best because he’s white” – while cheering against someone because he doesn’t look like you is unacceptable in most cases, though, again, specificity probably matters.  There are power dynamics and a majority/minority distinction, here, too, which is why a white president of the United States stoking white grievance is reflexively more offensive than Joe Frazier saying he was taught always to cheer for Black fighters.

The purpose of this, all of this, every last molecule of this, if there’s any purpose whatever, is to know oneself better.  It’s necessary to suspend moral judgement of oneself to get very far in the exercise.  That’s what the cheer-for-someone permission slip above is about; if I’m more drawn to Kavaliauskas-Zewski than Broner-Theophane, I want to be able to acknowledge it, not in the name of eradicating the preference or reforming myself so much as having a better inventory at hand.

The deeper I thought this question through the better I felt about boxing; it’s a tangle enough of ethnic and national interests that most racist white Americans long since migrated away from our sport.  Boxing gyms, too, are some of the last diverse places in America where race can be discussed in good-faith, because as a local fighter once put it: “If you don’t like Puerto Ricans, just be honest and tell me – I’m going to punch you in the face anyway.”

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

SAN ANTONIO – Friday evening at quittin’ time came the first COVID-19 emergency notification in more than a month, and this time, blessedly enough, it came in the form of a mere reminder to stay vigilant, as this town has been in taking our daily average-new-infections rate from 1,300 to 150, a triumph of local civil obedience done much to spite state officials as obey them.  Parks are reclosed for the holiday weekend, too, as selfless discipline can carry a populace only so far when thwarted regularly by its governor and president.

Writing of blessings, for once in this pandemic era the dateline above, and the sentences that succeed it, relate to the material of their column; two local fighters shone Saturday on ESPN+, and characteristically excellent local reporting happened to treat the lasting effects of what maladies subverted in part Saturday’s defending super featherweight titlist.  Let’s start with him.

In Saturday’s mainevent at The Bubble in Las Vegas Cincinnati’s Jamel Herring survived a disqualification victory over Puerto Rico’s Jonathan Oquendo in an ugly match that asked interesting questions about what to do with a fighter who says he is unable to continue.  For make nary a mistake about it: Herring told anyone who would listen, from doctor to cornermen to ref to doctor, he was unable to continue.  He squeezed his right eye tight and heard his chief second say it was swelled shut.  He was unable to continue, he said, and his corner and corner’s doctor informed the ref.

Tony Weeks probably should have waived his hand and walked away at that instant; it’s a binary thing, isn’t it, or shouldn’t it be?  If a fighter cannot continue, consequences be damned.  What Weeks sensed and was in small part a party to was not binary.  Better put: Had someone indicated Herring’s title would be lost if the fight were stopped, does anyone doubt Herring might have been able to continue?

Before Herring or his corner wanted to declare an end to Herring’s fight, instead, Herring and his handlers wanted assurances he would be the winner.  That surely puts a bit of the “can” back in cannot continue.  On the broadcast Timothy Bradley got this immediately and found himself revulsed by it.  He wanted to say as much, in realtime, but got overruled by his host and ringside reporter.  “It’s OK, Tim!” said Joe Tessitore; the house fighter’s record, and his upcoming unification bout on ESPN, would not be jeopardized by the fight’s early stoppage.

That wasn’t at all what bothered Bradley, and he had character and conviction enough to say so a few minutes later, preceding it with some novel word play: “Real eyes real-ize.”  To his credit Andre Ward, more of a company man than Bradley, agreed with Bradley when he didn’t have to; Herring had not comported himself as a champion should, and neither former champion would say he had. 

Here’s one word to describe Herring from opening bell to closing: Fragile.  When did you ever see a defending titlist slip and fall in the opening five seconds of a prizefight?  Slick logo, new shoes, jitters, whatever – it doesn’t happen, it’s not in the game.  Even had ESPN not led with a cinematic treatment of Herring’s misfortunes and recent battle with COVID-19, any proper aficionado should’ve noticed something not-right about Herring immediately.

Oquendo, giving-up a half-foot in height, did everything he possibly could to reduce Herring’s obvious physical advantages, including leading with his head (anyone who’s sparred with one foot in a tire knows there are certain geometrical arrangements that verily favor a shorter man), but c’mon, this is Jonathan Oquendo, a guy whose lights Juanma Lopez cut in five minutes, not a Rubik’s Cube.  You call yourself a world champion, you solve Oquendo without a referee’s help.

It was that constant pleading for a referee’s help that most of all made Herring appear fragile.  Oquendo, or rather a fight in the form of Oquendo, was in Herring’s head 30 seconds after the opening bell; Herring wanted no part of punching or being punched.  Is this attributable to a wanting character on Herring’s part?  No, we can probably cross that off the list directly.  Herring has comported himself heroically enough often enough in his past to take the character-flaw option off our menu.

One only has so much defiance and will in him, though, supplies are not infinite in any man, and some of what Herring has endured in war and fatherhood have undoubtedly weakened him.  Then we introduce his recent bout with COVID-19, whose enduring physical effects we cannot yet know.  One thing we are learning about is the virus’s probable effect on the vestibular system.  As Chara Rodriguez, physical therapist and professor at the University of the Incarnate Word, puts it in the SanAntonioReport.org piece cited above:

“When people have problems with that system, vertigo, dizziness, being off-balance, falling, and a lot of fatigue are very common.”

It’s another reason why fixations on COVID-19’s mortality rates alone are so terribly shortsighted.  The taxes this virus will levy on America’s healthcare system are likely to be enduring as they are currently unknowable.

Let us not close on a note so dour, this Labor Day, but rather a note about a couple sons of this bluecollar town: Jesse “Bam” Rodriguez, an undefeated 20-year-old sensation who went through flyweight Janiel Rivera in less than a round, Saturday, and Benjamin Whitaker, who snatched junior middleweight D’Andre Smith’s 0 in a quite conclusive boxing lesson.  Rodriguez is a prodigy about whom you’ll be reading for years.  Whitaker, on the other hand, is a 36-year-old who is puro San Antonio, a hardworker who takes life as it comes at him without fury or complaint.

In what feels like a couple lifetimes ago I would see BJ every weeknight at San Fernando Gym, downtown, a couple years before he turned pro, and when he learned I lived in a highrise a few blocks away he’d say he would come stay on my couch, and I’d shout, “Only future champions stay rent-free!”  He’d smile and say that was no problem.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday on ESPN+ in Las Vegas undefeated American junior welterweight titlist Jose Ramirez went 12 successful rounds with Ukrainian technician Viktor Postol in Ramirez’s tryout to become champion Josh Taylor’s next mandatory challenger.  The scores were split.  One judge saw the match a 6-6 affair, another saw it 7-5 and a third saw it 8-4.  Ramirez did enough to win, and Postol did enough to have others complain on his behalf.

I tried to remember if I cared about Postol during his ringwalk.  It’s an important inventory, I find, now that a pandemic has turned everything upsidedown.  Promoters, after all, lie to us constantly, boldly and badly.

This gimmick about wanting to crown the first-ever unified champion, of Latin descent, in the four-belt era – the dream of every immigrant’s son in California’s Central Valley – is threadnaked, even by boxing standards, even in a pandemic.  Suffering through it began my Postol inventory.  I made no progress.  I was excited by Ramirez’s beating Maurice Hooker last year, I recalled when the highlights rolled, and promoter Top Rank is the best at making competitive matches when it wishes to be, and I’ll watch most anyone who might make a future match with a WBSS winner – so complete is my fealty to DAZN’s roundrobin concept.  I was engrossed enough in the fight a few rounds later to cease my inventory; I recalled Postol making a yawner with Bud Crawford, the first time Top Rank tried to market Bud like a pay-per-view attraction, and reminded often Postol lost a decision to WBSS winner and division champion Josh Taylor.  That was enough.

The next morning I discovered Lucas Matthysse was the reason I cared about Postol.  Six months after Matthysse executed his MAD-pact with Ruslan Provodnikov he got himself dissuaded emphatically by Postol, who just isn’t my kind of fighter.  Postol has natural gifts of size and skill and uses them to lose narrowly to his division’s best men.  He’s a light favorite of our beloved sport’s malcontents, though Saturday, blessedly enough, those guys were busy on the other end of the dial, where their patron saint, Erislandy Lara, played keepaway with a 15-1 underdog from Wakefield, Mass., where there’s plenty of fighting and very little of it good. 

Top Rank has done a fine job with Ramirez.  Spotting his limitations early Top Rank made Ramirez about biography and the genuine need his neighbors feel for a champion, fighting Ramirez in Fresno over and over and showing the promotional outfit’s adaptability.  Ramirez has done his part, too, tying himself to his community and offering the sort of autobiographical vulnerability ESPN types adore.

Obviously the network has a rooting interest in Ramirez it doesn’t have in Postol, though I caught myself wondering why there wasn’t something that might be done with Postol’s life in Ukraine, something headier than glib graphics about how many miles Postol’s flown for cancelled matches.  Disclaimer: Maybe there was a 45-minute segment on Postol’s grandfather running potato-mash moonshine out Kiev in a lowered Tatra 603 and how his scofflaw bearing subverted the relationship his grandson, Viktor, would someday have with his father, the moonshine runner’s son, before the Ramirez biopic aired on ESPN+, which apparently the poshest among us now call The Plus, but if it happened while Alfredo “Perro” Angulo made his match down the dial, I missed it.

I thought of Angulo halfway through The Plus’ mainevent, wondering how much different Ramirez was from Angulo, really, as a fighter (all indications are that, far as character goes, they’re quite different, though I spent an hour on the phone with Angulo once and found him a fragile sort with a highpitched giggle and not the psychopath American immigration officials claimed he be); both were Olympians, both are heavyhanded pressure guys, both believe in their chins’ durability much more than their opponents’.  How likely is it I’d’ve made this association were Angulo and Ramirez not fighting a few minutes apart?  Way unlikely.  This is a pandemic, though, and everyone is upsidedown right now, especially those trying hardest to pretend nothing is changed, which might be read as further cover for what a dull mainevent Saturday’s much-anticipated tilt was.

I didn’t anticipate it at all.  I included much-anticipated because Tess and Dre told me to, being, as it was, part of the road to a unification ESPN and Top Rank and Ramirez need far more than Josh Taylor does.  Taylor’s the unified champion, after all, for having unbuttoned the undefeated Russian Ivan Baranchyk in May 2019 and then unstrapped the undefeated American Regis Prograis five months later.

Taylor is the world’s best 140-pound prizefighter until someone proves otherwise.  There’s no controversy.  Would Ramirez be the world’s best 140-pound prizefighter had his handlers allowed him participate in WBSS?  Maybe.  Probably not.  Nothing Ramirez showed Saturday indicated he’d have undone Prograis, much less Taylor, and Top Rank’s evident concern about losing a ticketseller to a roundrobin format, last year, speaks to the promoter’s handicapping savvy.  The risk did not justify the reward.  At least not when there were tickets to sell, eh guys?

I don’t think I know much more about Josh Taylor than: He is from Scotland, and he won his championship the right way.  That’s plenty.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday in three mainevents that miraculously did not conflict and more miraculously concluded before midnight ESPN’s Joe Smith beat the fight out light heavyweight former titlist Eleider Alvarez, former titlist “Showtime” Shawn Porter won each of his 2,160 seconds with a German welterweight named Sebastian Formella on Fox, and Russian former heavyweight contender Alexander Povetkin put the cuss in concussion against British hopeful Dillian “The Body Snatcher” Whyte on DAZN.

Smith was the evening’s best winner, even while Povetkin was its biggest and Porter its least-surprising, at least so far as mainevents went, and whosoever has time or desire anymore to endure much more than those?  (Actually, that’s a touch disingenuous; bantamweight southpaw Robert Rodriguez has emerged as something of a bubble phenom, needing fewer than seven minutes to ice fighters with an aggregate record of 19-0-1.)  Saturday favored men who work hard without needing inspiration from without.

Pressure guys, volume guys, the undissuadable.  While Smith fetches all the bluecollared clichés Porter fights no less doggedly, even while trying to sparkle.  Povetkin doesn’t seem to care one way or the other.

He’s chinnier than publicists colored him as a young Soviet, and at 6-foot-2 almost prohibitively short for a contemporary heavyweight, but he can crack and crack proper.  I recall a local trainer telling me about Povetkin’s power, wildeyed, while standing in a tent at Camp Verde, Ariz.,13 years ago, an hour before Tommy Morrison’s MMA debut, many years before Povetkin began flunking IQ tests administered by various sanctioning-body-approved drug examiners.

I know, I know, the two guys who beat Povetkin and looked ready for a Mr. Olympia posedown were clean as whistles, of course, and you can’t possibly judge an athlete’s substance regimen by something unreliable as your own eyes and experience, but whatever put Povetkin in position for a perfect left uppercut Saturday was no more likely a banned substance than what put him on the bluemat twice a few minutes before.

Aside from the knockdowns, at 40 Povetkin didn’t look any worse – slow, robotic, predictable – than his heavyweight peers do and hardly worse than Whyte did at 32.  He looked chinny and uninspired to Whyte’s merely uninspired.

There’s a counterintuitive element of cardiovascular fitness required simply to stand across from a heavyweight, it’s damn taxing even when nothing happens, and it makes a decent argument for busyness: You’re going to be heaving for breath after three minutes of trying not to get whirligigged, anyway, so why not move round a bit and give folks a show?  Heavyweights used to do this, really, before all became lumbering headhunters.

Povetkin, for being the shorter man in his career’s biggest fights, knew better, somehow, to snatch Whyte’s body than did the Body Snatcher, and while the previous round’s crumplings on the bluemat weren’t premeditated to make Whyte overconfident they had that effect, and Povetkin’s telegraphed hook to Whyte’s body was indeed premeditated.  Whyte’s eyes followed Povetkin’s head and Whyte’s mind followed the pattern Povetkin’s earlier hooks set.  Then suddenly Povetkin’s fist was through Whyte’s chin, not after his liver, and if Whyte tells you he remembers any of the 10 minutes that followed he’s fibbing.

If Eleider Alvarez tells you he still enjoys prizefighting he’s fibbing too.  Alvarez hadn’t the tools nor will to dissuade Smith in Saturday’s best match, and Smith gobbled him up.

A few months ago I purchased a Roomba and have spent hours, fully unpredicted hours, mind you, diverting myself with its observation.  I didn’t envision writing about Carlota – that’s her name – but then I didn’t either expect to think of her while watching Joe Smith.  It’s the undiscouraged relentlessness they share.  About halfway between Carlota coming in my consciousness and Smith snatching Alvarez’s, too, I read a book by Melanie Mitchell, Complexity: A guided tour, that explores genetic algorithms, first explored by the irreplaceable John Henry Holland, and how they might be used in a self-learning program to teach a digital robot to collect cans on a virtual grid.

The simple strategy – go in a straight line till you hit a wall then pause and look around – succeeds in a way much more complicated strategies do not.  It succeeds with machines for the reason it fails with most humans: Without a need to find meaning in their universe, machines suffer never from discouragement or boredom and do not mind repeating work.  It’s how a Roomba like Carlota, who “cares” not a whit whether surfaces are sparkling or filmed with dust, outperforms humans who care deeply.  Carlota’s job is to go in straight lines till she hits a wall then turn slightly and go in another straight line and keep doing so till her power is cut; if she’s not entirely oblivious of feedback from her environment neither is she staking her identity on it.

Similarly volume punchers like Joe Smith find satisfaction in the doing much more than the effecting.  They begin with a wisely limiting strategy of doing the same thing over and over in a faith that looks nigh machine-like: If I simply hit something with my fists 30 times next round I succeed.  They are constants who rely on other men’s variability, other men’s reliance on feedback, other men’s proneness to discouragement.

Alvarez exhibited all these things, Saturday, and eventually got knocked out the ring for them.  Showtime Shawn exhibited none of these things and went 36-0 on official scorecards against a German who didn’t have a chance at a thing more than moral victory even before making his trip from Hamburg.  Porter is a pro.  He takes every opponent seriously and goes hard.  He’s the PBC fighter for whom I most often catch myself cheering.

I like him the way I liked Juan Diaz and loved Timothy Bradley; they beat over 12 rounds flashier guys who undress them in three-round sparring sessions; they don’t have off nights because they haven’t a plan B.  That makes them vulnerable to their sport’s alpha predators, yes, but they reward their supporters disproportionately to their talent.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday on Showtime undefeated former super middleweight titlist David “El Bandera Roja” Benavidez stopped Colombian ironchin Roamer Alexis Angulo with 10 rounds of abuse sustained enough to make Angulo’s corner wave the match’s completion six minutes early.  Friday afternoon Benavidez missed weight widely enough not to try making weight, losing his title yet again without losing a match.

Still it’s a joy to get back to writing about a prizefighter who thrills, howsoever baggy and loose be the circumstances and his skin.

Making weight might be a great deal more difficult for Benavidez than he lets on.  Theories of weightloss and -gain, fat and muscle, change hourly in this country, of course, and we’ll not confuse what follows for science any more than the last halfcentury of “science” on the matter should be confused for science, but rather let us entertain ourselves with a metaphor of containers.

Say you have 10 containers that at all times wish themselves full with water and have access to an abundance of water.  Now say you have 100 containers with the same access and wishes.  Now imagine that 10 full cups of water is your ideal weight.  You have but 10 cups and all are full?  Easy enough.  Just don’t add any more cups and homeostasis wins out.

Now imagine you have 100 cups and 10 full cups is still your ideal weight.  Every cup must be kept at or below 10-percent capacity, and all the cups have a wish to be full.  Allowing homeostasis its course and merely precluding a 101st cup be added is not a fraction your task, is it?  No, at every moment of every day you must find a means of thwarting 100 thirsty cups with access to an abundance of water.

This metaphor, cups as fat cells, is good an explanation as any why people who lose massive amounts of weight, as Benavidez once did, nearly always gain it back with interest.  What simpletons crow about “discipline” miss the point entirely; Benavidez once was disciplined enough to lose nearly 100 pounds, a feat well beyond the homeostasis crowd’s average member, but precluding every bite he puts in his mouth from replenishing what fat cells he accumulated years ago requires much more than skipping desserts during training camp.

This is why you hear the wonder in Benavidez’s voice as he talks about “something went wrong” in camp; he can’t believe that one dietary indiscretion three or four weeks ago had such an outsized and lasting effect; the math of his metabolism is not at all linear.

What Benavidez said after Saturday’s match is what you believe, not what he believes.  Smart kid.  He does the (linear) math of a lousy metabolism and incredible fast-twitch muscles and reads the script every varsity-level athlete with a fast metabolism would pen: I didn’t try hard enough, Coach, but I will next time.  He knows the curse of his metabolism is offset, for now, by the blessing of his athleticism, and he knows no one who hasn’t lost 100 pounds has any idea the impossibility of keeping those pounds from returning, and he’s a rich 23-year-old professional athlete, too, so he steers well away from anything like self-indulgence.  In public at least.

Trouble is, this weighty issue for Benavidez will grow only weightier as he ages.  If he’s still fighting under 200 pounds on his 30th birthday it’ll be a greater feat than anything he’s done in a prizefighting ring thus far.  He probably hasn’t the defensive chops to take his show to cruiserweight, either, and offensively gifted as he is he hasn’t power that’ll migrate successfully to 200.  He knows this, too.  It’s why he isn’t following in the footsteps of Gilberto “Zurdo” Ramirez – the other guy who shut-out Angulo – and skedaddling to light heavyweight without having fought the best men at super middleweight.  How much does anyone talk about Zurdo (40-0, 26 KOs) anymore?

Another bandera roja from Saturday’s postfight interview was just how eager Benavidez is to start over reclaiming his old place in the 168-pound division.

Benavidez: I missed weight, and I’m sorry.

Aficionados: You’re forgiven if you fight Callum Smith.

Benavidez: I know I have a long road ahead and your forgiveness will only come with time.

Aficionados: Kid, everyone makes mistakes – just make weight for your fight with Smith.

Benavidez: I’m willing to work hard to earn back your trust.

Aficionados: No need to do that if you fight Smith.

Benavidez: I’m going to start over and fight only medium-level contenders until you trust me again.

Aficionados: We trust you’ll make a great fight with Smith.

Benavidez: No immediate title shots for me until I deserve them again.

Who wins a match between The Ring’s champion and its top contender?  Hard to say.  Since winning the WBSS, Smith has been alternately inactive and unimpressive.  You’d have to favor the guy who knocked the stuffing out George Groves, though, in a match with Benavidez, if only slightly.

Benavidez didn’t learn anything in his Saturday heavybag session with Angulo but at least he got to do lots of rounds and punching.  Smith, meanwhile, spent his quarantine negotiating a fight with Canelo that didn’t come off because two geezer celebrities pulled a date-and-switch with Mexican Independence Day weekend, or because Smith priced himself out.

Good God, but there are so many eligible contenders, paydays and titlists at or around 168 pounds right now it’s awful to see the division’s two best fight but annually against the likes of John Ryder and Alexis Angulo!  Smith, as the recognized champion, no longer wishes to fight somebodies for less than millions, and Benavidez surely figures that, at age 23, he’s in no hurry.  Both may be squandering what get remembered as their physical primes.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

He fumbles on his cell, trying to recall why he deleted the ESPN+ app, or if he did, or at least when he did if he did.  No evidence on his cell ESPN ever lived there, but it must’ve back when because Google charged him for an account and so did Roku, and he’d meant to shut both off but was certain he’d left one on because getting the subscription deleted was engineered to be difficult, but why did he sign-up twice?

He returns to the PGA Championship’s official homepage, or an official-looking one anyway, who could tell or had the inclination to try, anymore, with the affiliate bullshit that felt porous and dumb in roaring times and now so much less in despairing ones.  There’s a muddled suite of ways and venues for watching professional golf’s first major of 2020.  Looks like ESPN+ is in indeed the pathway, especially if the comments below can be trusted, where middleaged men bemoan a pay service for the year’s first major championship.

Resigned to $6 a month less in his life he starts to reenable his ESPN account then recalls the headache that got him two accounts years ago and meanders in the other room where his television sits.  Roku wants him to enable ESPN+ through a code it posts on a screen that directs him to use a mobile device to reenable his account.  ESPN still has some account active, the emails from Disney come rushing in his inbox before even he gets fully reenabled, but there it is, the PGA Championship from San Francisco on a Friday afternoon looks glorious in high definition.  Which must be why the commentators must ever crow about the courses’ beauty in every telecast for hours, another manifestation of that delicious new addition to America’s vernacular: Toxic positivity.

He solely wants to see Brooks Koepka defend his title, but the tariff for access to one excellent player is, as ever, documentaries, both cinematic and realtime, of Tiger Woods’ latest whatever.  He checks the teetimes and sees Koepka scheduled to go in a half hour.

He mutes the television and replies to a work email.  Morning’s interview for a new coaching position went well.  The possibility of a maneuver, even a sideways one, makes the spirits lift and the workaday anxieties feel worth their suffering another week or two.  Sees a tweet from City of San Antonio: average COVID new cases is back below 300-per-day for the first time in a month at least, and it makes him wonder if he got ahead of himself canceling a trip to Virginia for his father’s internment at Arlington.

Koepka should be teeing-off soon, and as the defending champ he should get the largest part of the – Tiger’s on the range.  That invokes broetry recited by some halfassed method actor conjuring all that’s solemn in our national suffering and Tiger’s extraordinary selflessness and public service in playing golf to remind us what’s sacred in life.  And what’s this?

They’re wrapping the ESPN+ broadcast and inviting viewers to ESPN.  No.  No!

He’s not had cable basic enough to have ESPN for at least six months and longer than that if he’d his druthers.  He went years without a television and years after that without cable.  Now he’s returned to PGA Championship’s official page to see if he can use his digital antenna to watch the telecast on CBS.  Of course not.  ESPN has weekday rights or something.  He googles “cheapest way to watch ESPN” and sure enough Sling pops-up, Orange package.

He closes the browser on his cell and opens YouTube app and scrolls his history for a super slowmo video of Koepka’s swing:

John Salley on COVID-19, Chinese Meat Markets, Socialism, Dr. Sebi, Kobe, Jordan

Low Housing Inventory Will Change

NHL: Knockouts

Jon Favreau & Vince Vaughn 2001 interview

Spittin’ Chiclets Interviews Keith, Matthew, and Brady Tkachuk

Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain Interview (1997)

The Return Of The Muhle R41 by Kevy Shaves

Gentleman’s Nod Zaharoff – Wolf Whiskers Brush – Rex Ambassador

Hal Gill Told Us How Chugging A Beer Is The Only Way To Cheer Ryan Whitney Up

Brooks Koepka – Slow motion driver swing analysis

At last.  Koepka lays the club off a little more at the top when you see his swing slowed down, that’s a bit unexpected, and it’s worth it to reenable Sling because Sling is the only online communications company that gets it.  When someone wants a break from your service don’t harass him with surveys and promotions and reminder emails and affiliatemarketing horseshit.  Let him be.  Make reenabling his service a cinch.  Nobody does this better than Sling, he knows, because he’s cancelled and reenabled his service at least four times and felt welcomed each return.  His last confirmation email, in fact, told him Sling understood, in March, why he’d be canceling his service, what with all sports cancelled, and hoped only he’d consider a reunion if ever sports returned.  Here he is.

Now he’s spending $46 or so in one day to see Koepka defend his title.  Still cheaper than boxing, he thinks, long past balancing the money he saves on boxing, whether pay-per-views or subscription apps or travel, with what money he spends on shaving soaps and books about the science of complexity.  Just one more click before Sling puts him on ESPN for the live telecast and Koepka’s gorgeous power fade.  Premium channels – that’s right Sling offers those, too, else how did he cancel HBO a couple years ago (before AT&T began including free HBO with any purchase of Wally’s Songbird Super Buffet birdseed)?  He remembers Showtime announced a new lineup of boxing a couple weeks ago, David Benavidez headlining.

“Fine,” he says to the empty room, “take my $10.”

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday on DAZN in the main event of a card from England’s Fight Camp, and therefore blessedly broadcast early afternoon here in the United States, London’s Ted “The Big Cheese” Cheeseman decisioned Worcestershire’s Sam “The Savage” Eggington to win a 154-pound title of some sort and set himself up for a future leap from British competition to European.  The fight was entertaining.

Twas Big Cheese night at the Camp in what was a fun, competitive, and fun-for-being-competitive spectacle of evenly matched pugilists who won’t be world-class at super welter but make for decent pageantry in this absurd time.

A confession: I watched Saturday’s match – no, heavens no, not the whole card – with an eye to comedy.  I saw it a prospect for satire, anonymous Brits doing mediocre things under a light rain of hyperbolic modifiers in the Queen’s accent.  There was some of that – Brits, to their credit, try even less to hide commercial entanglements betwixt promoters and broadcasters, making few feints at objectivity – but otherwise the mainevent was a watchable thing that reminded us how very very far we remain from normal, round the world.

This was the U.S. debut of Fight Camp, a Playboy-mansion-looking venue in a place called Brentwood, 30 miles northeast of London, where fighters ply their wares outdoors in a covered ring on the spot Hef’s pool should be.  There’s pipedin rustling sounds from a crowded restaurant or modest tavern, mainly a thing for broadcasters to talk over, a stab at texture, a nod toward pizazz long since gone from American sporting events – the opiate of our masses for a blessed few decades before actual opioids won the role.

British prizefighting has long lingered in American minds like a minorleagues affair from which a few super talented lads, Carl Froch and Ricky Hatton spring to mind here though in a better world Callum Smith might too, manage to escape to the majors, wherein they inevitably get outclassed by America’s superior athletes.  Nothing happened Saturday to rewire that.  There was an unplanned moment when the broadcast acknowledged as much.  It was the geometrical middle of the 12-rounder, and one of the two commentators began a swan dive off the three-meter board without first noticing his pool was dry:

“Both (men) want this so much!  This could lead to big things!  A high ranking in the IBF could lead to . . . 

“You know . . . 

“Some sort of . . .

“Opportunity with that prominent body.”

That was beside the point, much less this critique of that, as Eggington and Cheeseman were in their own conflict bubble; whatever inconsequence their struggle represented for bored Yanks watching a DAZN broadcast hours and hours too long, these two men were taxing their talents fully.  Big Cheese had more class and little pop though seemingly more pop than Eggington, who once had pop enough to fasten a final KO-by on Paulie Malignaggi.  Eggington is a scrapper who’s not scrapped outside Europe and likely’d not stay conscious the full 36 minutes if he did.  He looks the part and wants the contact but makes one questionable and obviously questionable decision every round and never quite brings what menace his bodyart and moniker intend to convey (aficionados know fragility has no more legible billboard than post-loss tats on a prizefighter’s body, even if society at large still doesn’t).

Since promoters no longer have tickets to sell they have fewer occasions for what bold lies pepper their rote exaggerations, and that does make things more tolerable, somehow.  Realtime exaggerations by the commentary crew feel somewhat less filthy when they’re spontaneous and not restatements of whatever the promoter said at the weighin.  But a little viewer resentment lingers, apparently, for this subscriber: I already paid for my subscription, you have nothing to vend, so if you’re going to talk because you are contractually obligated to talk, at least stop selling me what I’m seeing.

Alas, commentators are not selling fights to subscribers, are they?  No, they’re selling themselves to promoters.

Another reason a subscriber should have the opportunity to opt-out a commentary track.  Since the commentators are singing for their supper, and since as a subscriber I’m not even in the house much less at that dinner table, why should I have to listen to it?  And no, I shouldn’t have to mute my television, either.  I enjoy the sound of a fight; audible punch volume is the greatest factor in determining scorecard discrepancies between those who are ringside and those who are trying to hear punches between babbling voices.  An ability to hear punches is the exact reason ringside reporters scoring fights do not care about television viewers’ dissenting cards: While I was having my eyes confirmed by my ears, you were having your eyes distracted by some meandering narrative written a month ago.

We are reimagining everything right now, or should be, and so it’s a time to make wishlists – asking questions about the inane start times for boxing broadcasts, their inexplicable lengths, the American practice of making mismatches to build local ticketsellers when there’s no more local and no more tickets, and yes, once more, a commentary-free option.

The cynic in every boxing fan assumes nothing will change for the better, and that is wisdom hardwon, admittedly, but if not now, when?  Never in the tortured history of loving our sport has there been a better chance for reform of the obvious things none of us likes.  OK, as you were.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry –

Friday DAZN returned to boxing broadcasting with a good mainevent from Indio, Calif., in which undefeated Texas welterweight Vergil Ortiz manhandled Colombian veteran Samuel Vargas in an empty casino ballroom.  Ortiz threw every punch correctly and concussively and wore Vargas away till the end of round 7 brought a merciful technical stoppage.

Too early to say with Ortiz.  He does everything right and well and says the right things, too, but questions galore remain about his handlers, his promoter and his trainer, and their aptitude for developing a young prospect like Ortiz.  There’s a pink flag in there, as it were, about his weight, as well.

Ortiz turned pro four years ago as a junior welterweight and began campaigning round 147 a year ago without first winning a world title at his born-on weight.  Much as Golden Boy Promotions needs promising prospects and many as the world titles are in the world it’s a touch concerning Ortiz outgrew junior welter before his promoter got him a title shot.  And while many prospects have been funneled to Robert Garcia’s Oxnard these last 10 years, since Garcia steered Brandon Rios to an unlikely championship and nearly got Antonio Margarito blinded by Manny Pacquiao, there are a few questions about Garcia’s versatility as a trainer and teacher.

Samuel Vargas was an interesting choice of opponent for Friday’s match and DAZN’s return to boxing.  Vargas is a welterweight ratings board unto himself.  How you did against Vargas sets your status: Errol Spence (KO 4), Danny Garcia (KO 7, 2:17), Ortiz (KO 7, 2:58), Amir Khan (UD 12), Luis Collazo (SD 10): Collazo gets decisioned by Khan who gets stiffened by Ortiz who gets decisioned narrowly by Garcia who gets decisioned widely by Spence.  Would that all things were so symmetrical.

Vargas showed more than merely heart in Indio.  He showed veteran savvy when hurt; once he realized he couldn’t attrite Ortiz he retreated to the ropes and boxed pretty effectively, taking away Ortiz’s firstchoice weaponry and stinging him with accurate if anemic counters; he made Ortiz make decisions Ortiz had yet to make in his prizefighting career but will have to make whenever his promoter tries to make real money with him.

Vargas was a low-intermediate challenge for Ortiz but unfortunately the best sort of test Ortiz will see before being the b-side against bigger promoters’ titlists.  PBC owns every welterweight a-side but one, and Ortiz sure ain’t ready for Bud Crawford.  Thus the pink flag allusion above.  There’s no substitute for the experience of a 12-round title fight, for exhausting oneself in 36 minutes of combat with a man who expects to beat you – either because it’s his belt and you’re the usurper, or because the title is vacant and he resents your quick ascent – but Ortiz isn’t going to have any of those at welterweight, and it’s unfortunate he didn’t have any at 140 first.  You have to get seven deep in The Ring’s current 147-pound ratings before you consider making Ortiz a favorite, and even then it’s not much of a consideration.

Who, then, will Ortiz perfect his craft against in the weird silence of a pandemic?  Don’t answer that.  Let’s treat that weird silence instead.

There was an interesting moment in between one of the rounds of Ortiz-Vargas on Friday.  DAZN showed an instant replay without commentary, ostensibly to allow viewers to hear the concussiveness of Ortiz’s punches, but what you heard nearly as much were DAZN’s commentators yelling about the punches in realtime.  I don’t think I’ve ever heard commentators so clearly in an instant replay.  Then there was veteran referee Jack Reiss’s trip to Ortiz’s corner to explain his reason for admonishing Ortiz to stop spinning Vargas a round after DAZN’s Sergio Mora talked loudly about how much he disagreed with his own misinterpretation of Reiss’s officiousness.

Lots of strange new ingredients, there.  The referee hearing so clearly what was being broadcasted about his performance, the twoman commentary crew – seated 20 feet apart and invariably yelling to one another without realizing it – seeing the referee influenced by its commentary, the fighters’ conversations with one another and the referee being casually audible, and the absence of thousands of their fellow men communicating in yells and whispers and cheers and beer orders reducing the number of words the twoman crew spoke during the action.  It was a more intimate spectacle, a purist’s view, but nothing to attract casual fans, who delight in celebrity and sadism much more than craft or tactical nuance.

Variables affecting variables at variable rates – the quintessence of selforganization.  The promoters and networks, who play a centralizing role, surely don’t enjoy all these new variables (except for Bob Arum who’s old enough to find it amusing), but the fighters don’t seem to mind it too much.  They’d rather have what initial adrenaline a crowd supplies, but their ability to summon adrenaline from nearly any source is why they’re professional fighters; so long as paychecks clear and bank accounts stabilize prizefighters mightn’t mind the intimacy of their new arrangement.

Viewers are certainly privy to more than we were before.  Again, the cameras and commentators and promoters and commissioners and pressrow media, all, were existentially invested in having a monopoly on the information given aficionados.  In most cases these monopolies were naturally erected; Max and Jim and Larry were able to tell you things you didn’t know because they had a truckful of guys with headsets hearing all the things you couldn’t hear, and their commentary was essential in marketing to you a product intended to grow subscribers – just like Sergio’s commentary and Tim and Dre’s commentary and Paulie and Al’s commentary.

But as subscribers go wanting and advertisers go with them, we draw closer to a day, perhaps, when aficionados can have all we’ve ever wanted: a commentary-free audio track.  For an educated viewer, after all, there’s never been anything so poetic as the sounds of punches, in their sundry rhythms and rhymes, and how blissful might it be to listen finally without impediment?

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

SAN ANTONIO – No reprieve.  The grim numbers grow grimmer each evening as a fine local publication, RivardReport, sends its weeknightly communique detailing this city’s latest COVID-19 stats.  The mortality rate, across Texas, remains suspiciously low.  Attempts to attribute deaths to pneumonia and influenza, successful in the late winter and early spring, now look craven in summertime – and so the numbers of dead grow no matter efforts to suppress them.

If we never knew the economic might of local schoolboards it was a failure of our collective imagination.  As small schoolboards vote to keep classes virtual till round Thanksgiving, employers’ return-to-office plans get suspended.  In its tragic way there’s something charming about five-person independent schoolboards effectively telling multinational corporations what they can’t do with 200,000 employees.  There’s a messy vitality to it; decentralization breeding quirky consequences.

None of this helps our beloved sport’s hibernation.  Last week brought more postponements and cancelations in boxing, while Canada forbade American baseball players from migrating, and the inevitable day Americans will have to begin sneaking across Mexico’s northern border drew a bit closer.  In a few weeks’ time DAZN will begin broadcasting anonymous British prizefighters the way ESPN has broadcasted anonymous North and South Americans, in an effort to prove that boxing-mad Brits aren’t yet mad enough to tune-in for unattended smokers.

There’s nowhere to go, then, and nothing to watch, so we recede deeper in literature or depressants, or both, and that brings us an idea for this week’s column.  Some of our language’s greatest poetry must be read aloud to be understood, reading it aloud makes it not only accessible but many times more entertaining, and so, perhaps, acting-out our favorite combinations might help us be better entertained by prizefighting if it returns.  Geoffrey Chaucer and Sterling A. Brown, poets separated by an ocean and about 700 years, specifically are two men whose seminal works I’ve been enjoying for a while and thought to write about.

Most of us, probably, are familiar with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, at least a couple of them, for enduring them in highschool literature classes.  I remember the Pardoner and the Wife of Bath and none others from a week of 11th-grade English.  Years later I returned to Chaucer and got an abridged copy with Chaucer’s original text on the right page and a modern-English translation on the left and had trouble believing how much more fun they were than I remembered.  There were no affordable copies of the unabridged text, alas, and so I read what 300 pages were available and put Chaucer away.  A couple years later, unbeknownst to me, Penguin Classics published all 800 pages of Chaucer’s Tales in their original prose, an English that preceded Samuel Johnson’s dictionary by 350 years.  Read silently, they are mostly nonsensical, and read aloud they are fabulous (here Chaucer describes a monk):

 And for to festne his hood under his chin

He hadde of gold ywroght a curious pin;

A love-knotte in the gretter ende ther was.

His heed was balled, that shoon as any glas,

And eek his face, as he hadde been enoint;

He was a lord ful fat and in good point.

His bootes souple, his hors in greet estat.

Now certeinly he was a fair prelat;

He was nat pale as a forpined goost.

A fat swan loved he best of any roost;

Sterling A. Browne came out a tradition very different Chaucer’s and sought to capture a different form of the same language, one of still greater vitality and messiness (from “Sister Lou”):

Then, when you gits de chance,

Always rememberin’ yo’ raisin’,

Let ‘em know youse tired

Jest a mite tired.

Jesus will find yo’ bed fo’ you

Won’t no servant evah bother wid yo’ room.

Jesus will lead you

To a room wid windows

Openin’ on cherry trees an’ plum trees

Bloomin’ everlastin’.

An’ dat will be yours

Fo’ keeps.

Den take yo’ time. . . .

Honey, take yo’ bressed time.

Reading these poems aloud summons their flavor like coffee and hot chocolate do Mexican pastries (which otherwise taste heavy and flat), and since we’re mixing and mashing metaphors up and down this column, let’s go another step:

Not till the lads at San Fernando Gym began rehearsing The Marquez in 2010 – left uppercut, right cross – did the combination make nearly so much sense to us.  We’d seen Juan Manuel employ the combination to surprising effect.  (Hell, a few of us saw him snatch the fighting spirit right out Rocky Juarez in 2007 with a preposterous right-uppercut lead, being hit by which sent Juarez slumpshouldered back to his corner wondering why he even bothered.)

Throwing The Marquez on a bag, heavy or uppercut or double-end, taught you instantly its wisdom – just how far off centerline the uppercut took your head, just how fullcocked it made your lead shoulder, just how symmetrically it set your guard, just how fully it let you put your right shoulder to the cross.  None of us got any of its defensive virtue, though, till we began throwing it to imitate our sport’s finest finisher.  Till we began reading it aloud, as it were.

Something different happened a few years earlier in Phoenix when Donnie Orr, a Canadian middleweight, taught me how to read Yori Boy Campas aloud.  He showed that many of Campas’ lefthooks to the body were actually double hooks, the first to knock the opponent’s right elbow out the way, the second to attack the liver, and not until I’d spent years trying to get the timing and balance right on the heavybag – if you unload with the first, there’s nothing on the second – did I appreciate how much more than a shortarmed attrition fighter Campas was (along with being a delightful and gracious interview).

Reading Chaucer and Brown then shadowboxing your favorite fighters’ greatest hits – what else have you got to do?

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Last week while reading The Wind in the Reeds by Wendell Pierce, I reflected on what it was about Pierce’s character, The Wire’s Bunk Moreland, that enchanted me enough, 12 years later, to read Pierce’s delightful memoir.  Then on Saturday afternoon YouTube recommended clips of a Chuck D interview by djvlad.  And a pattern emerged.  What a Juilliard-trained actor and the leader of Public Enemy had in common was radiance.

There are men who glow.  One needn’t dig very deep in anyone’s account of meeting Muhammad Ali before encountering an allusion of some sort to this glow.  Skin tone and face shape no doubt help some performers glow more than their inner lives might predict, but these are oftentimes illusions more than real gold.  Ali had real gold.  He had an ugly side, too, doubt not, but expressing that ugly side so vigorously so often sweated much of it out of him, and what remained inside kept itself insulated by canceling his mobility, his expressiveness, and finally his very voice.

I was unprepared for Chuck D’s glow.  That unpreparedness, what it says about glow’s audience, the role of others’ perceptions and vistas, is something to treat during this, another eventless week in our pandemic slog.

Chuck D has glowed for who knows how long without my perceiving it.  He has been a speechmaker for decades and a worldclass performer for decades longer than that.  As a very angry teen I saw Public Enemy at Boston’s Orpheum Theater in 1991.  The group was touring with metalband Anthrax, with whom they’d redone “Bring the Noise”, shortly after Apocalypse 91 got released with its remarkable “Can’t Truss It” – a song still fresh and audacious and militant 30 years later.

As a less-angry college freshman I saw Public Enemy in 1992 at Sun Devil Stadium in Tempe, Ariz., when they opened for U2 and performed only one song, “By the Time I Get to Arizona”, a protest anthem.  A stadium concert can be heard for blocks, and I recall more fondly than the show the reaction of two African-American dormmates, Uumoiya and Jimmy, when they recounted their pride at Chuck D’s shutting the show down after only one song and saying his band would play no more in Arizona till the state recognized Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a national holiday.

“We knew PE wouldn’t sell out,” said Uumoiya.

By 1993 I’d lost interest in hiphop; if “Welcome to the Terrordome” is your anthem, “Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang” holds few delights.  In 2012 I wrote Chuck D a letter, addressed to Carlton Ridenhour, thanking him for the example he’d set.  During that time I wrote regularly for The Ring magazine and wondered if there were a way I might make “Burn Hollywood Burn” enough about boxing, in some finagled way, to interview Chuck D and Big Daddy Kane – never getting more than a minute in the thought before realizing it was boyhood fantasy masquerading as literary pursuit.  Honestly, I didn’t want to interview either man – for fear of making them touchable.

It was with that same sense of Chuck D’s untouchableness I spent Saturday watching his recent interview, admiring his greatness from afar and marveling at his glow.  It began an inventory of prizefighters I’ve met who exude something similar (fail as I might, I do try to make this column about boxing).  The inventory had me looking at my favorite fighters, naturally, and finding few of them glow, as they remain too close to combat’s requisite edge.

Among current practitioners, probably Roman “Chocolatito” Gonzalez is the closest I’ve seen to glowing, and that may be an artifact of this persistent optical illusion: To me, Chocolatito’s countenance often resembles young Cassius Clay’s.  Chocolatito, too, has one of the apparent requirements for the glow, which is a set of deeply held spiritual beliefs for which he makes sacrifices.

Maybe this is a commentary on spirituality, and maybe it isn’t.  Having more responsibilities than needs, that universal pathway to contentment, is a thing religions gift their flocks, an outward gaze that quiets minds’ ceaseless chatter.

Then it came to me, in that mix of exuberance and relief that marks every week’s discovery of some topic, any topic, about which I can fashion 1,000 words – there was a prizefighter who glowed like no other I’ve interviewed: Roberto “Manos de Piedra” Duran.

Recently, to commemorate Duran’s release from his coronavirus-related hospitalization, colleague and friend Norm Frauenheim tweeted about Duran, recollecting Duran as Norm’s favorite interview in more than 40 years of such things.  I was there, that day in 2006, beside Norm, in the conference room of a Phoenix hotel, as Duran regaled us with wondrous absurdities for 40 minutes; Norm was the interviewer, I the interpreter, and Duran the raconteur nonpareil.

He weighed at least 100 pounds more than his lightweight prime.  He was rounded and glowing.  There were no sharp edges to him; he bore no resemblance whatever to the bearded madman who took Sugar Ray Leonard’s ‘0’ at welterweight.  He was gregarious, generous, warm, beautiful.  He had the quality of a man accustomed to being observed, admired, and unwilted by others’ unbroken attention.

If he’d not been through a spiritual transformation – and perhaps he had – he’d been through the sort of existential crisis that gives birth to one.  Five months after he outfought Leonard in 1980 began Duran’s bout with bottomless ignominy during the eighth round of their rematch.  Exasperated, Duran waved the fight off, turned his back on the battle, and sauntered to his corner.  “No mas” became a hashtag half a lifetime before Twitter.  Contempt’s contemptuous revenge; Duran’s disgust with what he misperceived as Leonard’s cowardice birthed a phrase that got misperceived round the world as an ultimate act of cowardice.

Twoscore years and 45 prizefights and four weightclasses and a car accident and a battle with COVID-19 later, though, Duran glows.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

SAN ANTONIO – Friday the emergency alert came on everyone’s cell round noon local time and read “punishable by a fine of $250” for those Texans caught in public maskless.  To get ahead of what petulant witlings compose his base, too, the governor went so far as to say one’s nose and mouth must be covered by his mask.  A timid, halting ascent from madness this has been; first mayors were forbidden from requiring masks then private companies were required to enforce masks then finally, after trying every other thing, the governor started to do the right thing.

Often wrong but never uncertain, Texas officials now indicate their new plan will suffice with much the confidence they brought to their premature-opening plan.  The townspeople, spooked, again, ain’t likely to sustain an economic recovery any time soon, howsoever desperate they are for it.

Boxing brings no respite to their anxieties.  Given an open platform on America’s largest sports network prizefighting has shoveled refuse at us, reminding aficionados if not network execs why giving promoters exclusive contracts is such a terrible idea.  Thus far it’s only ESPN that looks rolled, but soon it will be DAZN’s turn.  Everyone will tell you he’s doing the best he can in extraordinary circumstances – the fighters just want to make meaningful fights; the promoters are hustling everywhere to bring you high quality whatevers – and everyone is lying.  The fighters, finally freed from an obligation to look hungry, are, with nary an exception, fine with a sabbatical.  The promoters, given a choice between taking a financial loss to keep their best men busy or waiting them out, fill their cards with an ever dwindling demographic: Men who need money enough to risk their lives for it, and are COVID-19 negative.

This portends nothing so much as tuneups far as the eye can see; excepting only Tyson Fury and Canelo Alvarez every other a-side fighter intends a couple tuneups before reimmersion, which means a probable end to competitive prizefighting till at least March.

And they’re right.  This period of lost immersion will be ruinous to many prizefighters.  They’ve lost the language of the thing.  Few are the men who’ve suffered a professional fighter’s trainingcamp and would endure it again freely.  If a man is already in the masochistic rhythm of prefight rituals and some shortmoney opportunity arises he takes it because it may be his rare shot.  But when he knows no momentum lurks, win or lose, better to find a job doing something else.  Hell, not even the oftcited ecstasy of a crowd is on offer till 2021.

This lost immersion affects every performer, every audiencemember.  Last week I was reading Based on a True Story by Norm MacDonald, the Canadian comedian, and considering how this idea of immersion explains much of what is lost by such a performer if there is no audience.  To watch MacDonald on YouTube clips is to laugh a goodish amount though nowhere near so much as do those oncamera with him; something about the man’s simple presence is funny, that be his unconscious competence, and often as not you find yourself laughing at laughter’s contagion more than his jokes.  And he knows this and has spent decades observing it in others and cultivating it, immersing himself in what is funny till he glows with it, tastes like it, stinks with it.

MacDonald has found a way to make others laugh without being funny, the way some men – accounts of Sonny Liston spring to mind, here – needn’t do a single menacing thing to frighten a room.  Some of this is repetitions, certainly no one ever achieved unconscious competence without a stint in conscious incompetence, but more of it is lifestyle.  Regardless of talent MacDonald never would’ve become automatically funny without immersion in other comics – not watching them on YouTube but being in the same room with them for thousands of hours, laughing with them and being laughed-at by them, capturing the essence of what is funny then distilling it and distilling it till he knew it by scent and flavor.

Boxing works the same way, though at a rate faster as it is corrosive, because being unconsciously funny is a hell of a better life than being unconsciously violent.  The common metaphor we use for boxing’s unconscious competence is edge or something similarly dangerous.  It is a full being; a man who is in fighting trim and reflexively belligerent and unblemished by mercy; a man so complete in his commitment to sanctioned violence th’t he enters a confrontation with a clear mind and reacts; a man who no longer has to think how to hurt another man but be given the opportunity.  It is not a pleasant state, whatever its rewards of status, and who that might escape it wouldn’t?  And most every prizefighter you can name and more certainly those you cannot are now on a forced sabbatical from this, starting 100 days ago.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

SAN ANTONIO – Saturday the emergency alert came on everyone’s cell at 7:00 PM local time and read STAY HOME, a first of its kind.  This county, Bexar, has become one of the most fecund places in the world for COVID-19 less than a month after our mayor’s effort to slow his city’s reopening got gutted by a governor whose party presumes to be about small government and local rule.  Unless local rule should thwart plans to keep people from collecting unemployment insurance.

A premature reopening driven by business interests now becomes a tardy rollback driven by mortality projections, and whatsoever does a governor say to restaurants and bars that closed and lost inventory and staff then reopened and rehired and repurchased and now, weeks later, reclose and lose inventory and staff anew?  He’s floated the idea of saying he never said to do any of it, one more cock crowing at the sun, and maybe he’s right.  Maybe all these flags and uniforms and offices and guns belie the fact no one is in charge, whatever their hardwon titles and salaries imagine, and maybe this American experiment never could’ve gone another way.

Too many hours after Saturday’s emergency alert came another weak boxing card on ESPN, this time from TV Azteca’s Mexico studio, not Top Rank’s in Las Vegas, and Mexican super featherweight titlist Miguel Berchelt hunted hopeless Mexican journeyman Eleazar Valenzuela to a round 6 stoppage that BoxRec says goes on the ledger like an NC because Mexico City refuses to sanction combat sports during a pandemic.

Immediately after referee Cesar Castanon stopped the match Berchelt sprinted to a nearby corner and leaped on a ringpost to salute his fans.  Nobody was there.  He lowered his gloves and self pretty quickly, realizing there was, appropriately enough, no one to celebrate his stamping a 13th loss on Valenzuela’s ledger.  Earlier that afternoon, unbeknownst to Berchelt, professional golfer Phil Mickelson had made some of the same futile gestures in Connecticut, giving his so-humbled-by-your-devotion smiles and nods to empty stretches of sod where habit told him fans should congregate.  It’s a quibble, really, but it sort of marks these insincere acts for the selfaggrandizing things they ever were; when you robotically acknowledge your fans whether they’re present or not, it’s a matter of muscle memory, not connection.

But what about Berchelt’s activity and pop!  Sure, I guess, but who cares at this point?  It has been so long since a meaningful fight and so many more-meaningful things have happened meanwhile, it’s a disservice to y’all to feign excitement.

There was no drama and only a sadist’s suspense.  The match was a disservice to Berchelt, too, as five rounds with Eleazar Valenzuela made him less competent for a fight with Vasiliy Lomachenko, against whom he has truly little chance regardless of layoffs.  Timmy and Dre were bored from bell to wave and it was good to hear them husbanding passions for another day.

I know the media cycle has moved-on from racist police violence and all, but I want to return for a spell to something Timothy Bradley spoke about (4:00) a few weeks ago.  He described being pulled-over with his four-year-old son on their way to school, pulled-over because of the color of their skin.

“My heart was pumping a hundred miles per hour,” said Bradley, and that’s the part I wish to treat. 

No less a hero than Bradley, someone who spent 144 minutes in pitched fistic combat with Manny Pacquiao and Juan Manuel Marquez, the man who fought Ruslan Provodnikov unconsciously for 11 rounds, that guy, was struck by a fear so visceral he eschewed a career of hiding all selfdoubt to tell a national television audience how afraid he was, a year later.

What does that say about the way our system tortures millions of Americans as they do things so mundane?  That Tim Bradley felt more afraid for his life driving his son to school than fighting his generation’s most dangerous men is an indictment that should strike aficionados in a place most anecdotes do not.

Recently Barack Obama recommended for aspiring antiracists a 1963 collection of essays, The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin, and I found nothing so striking as Baldwin’s imparting that African Americans do not seek acceptance from white Americans; they just wish to be left in peace.  Here in Texas the right to be left alone is embraced, at least publicly, with religious fervor, and yet for millions this lowliest expectation goes routinely unmet.  People in this state, whether black or brown, have been on this land or in this country full centuries longer than their uniformed oppressors – uneducated folks who, a couple or three generations removed from Europe, risibly call themselves “real Americans” in front of people who, through hundreds of years of crimes against them by the American system, have incredibly, irrationally, not given up on their country.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Tuesday marked the publication date of Toronto writer Jimmy Tobin’s Killed in Brazil? The mysterious death of Arturo “Thunder” Gatti (Hamilcar Publications, $10.99), the latest in a series of boxing-themed true-crime books under the Hamilcar Noir imprint.  The book is excellent for the questions it asks.

I realized somewhere in the first 20 pages I care more about Jimmy’s writing than Gatti’s legacy.  Maybe I knew that before I began reading Killed in Brazil? but I was not conscious of it.  I revert to the first-person earlier than appropriate, here, because it affords an insight about Jimmy’s writing; he makes a reader conscious of his thoughts more and more often than most writers.  

Where I find myself lost in other gifted writers’ words or stories, or simply skimming lesser writers, I find myself more aware when reading Jimmy, I find myself guessing why he made certain choices, asking how much of what I’m thinking he intended.  Oftentimes I pause and answer a question he poses then decipher his reason for asking it, but when he is at his best, I find, I can’t decipher why he asked a question, and I like that discovery.  I like that he’s gone in a direction I can’t explain because I know he is an intelligent writer and a thoughtful person, tender even, who writes with authority, and so, if he’s gone somewhere without leaving breadcrumbs, I know he’s invited me to a place I’d not have accessed without him.

This is not a long book but a dense one.  I read it in three sittings, but I’m not a fast reader, particularly, and the more I enjoy a book the more slowly I read it.  Killed in Brazil? is 71 pages long – fewer than 25,000 words – but one finishes it without a sense it needed to be any longer, and a further sense that in hands less capable than Tobin’s, in fact, it might have been shorter.

The dispassion with which Arturo Gatti gets treated is a unique appeal of this book.  When has anyone treated anything about Gatti dispassionately?  Ever since his first fight with Mickey Ward most of us have found ourselves effectively bullied into attributing to Gatti magical powers he often didn’t possess.  For fear of getting browbeaten by his vocal champions most of us either didn’t dare or didn’t bother to write his fights with Oscar De La Hoya and Floyd Mayweather were such mismatches they evinced no courage from any of their three participants.

Tobin gives Gatti’s vocal champions, those given to browbeating, plenty of space on his pages.  After affording their implications lots of credit in the book’s opening third, “Fracture”, Tobin spends the book’s middle third, “Preternatural”, doing pure boxing writing, the hooks and uppercuts and willfulness of Gatti’s career, before finishing with “Confrontation” – the book’s final third.  The third third is the book’s best, as it shows us more of its author, what he values, than its two predecessor parts.

Tobin begins Part III with a commemorative mass in Jersey City, N.J., and gives the opening quote to promoter Lou DiBella as he attains an applause line about Gatti never quitting in his life and definitely not in Brazil, where Gatti’s people believed Gatti’s small Brazilian wife incapacitated, strangled and hanged her husband.  Then Tobin gives the stage to television investigators and Gatti familiars and their attorneys, many American, some Canadian, and one can read their rage and certainty in every quote. 

Then Tobin quietly dismisses them and just sort of wanders away to material that is much more interesting; like a man cornered in a bar by drunken fans – their chests painted in the team’s colors, their hatred for the other side distorting – who spots a noted intellectual having a quiet beer in an opposite corner, Tobin gracefully shares the actual findings of actual courts of law then begins contemplating what drove Gatti to do the thing Brazilian authorities concluded he did do, and the effect of its denial:

“When a family loses one of its own to suicide, a panic descends.  This panic is rooted in the need to understand, to quarantine this act of destruction, to make it intelligible before the suffering borne of mystery spreads.  This process can be quick: if the family recognized the person as capable of suicide, a clear chain of causality, of logic, can be established between the episodes of a traumatic life and its cessation. And identifying this chain brings solace. At that point of death, the dead no longer suffer. And just as important, the living don’t suffer for them. There is no more bearing witness, no more helplessness, no more hope, no more living tied to the mast in the tempest of another’s turmoil. Yes, a suicide like Gatti’s can rend a family’s chronology, forcing parents to live the nightmare of burying their child, but it is beautiful in its power to liberate. It can be heroic.”

That is a remarkable paragraph.  I’ve now read it, re-read it and transcribed it, and I still don’t know if I agree with it, but it enchants me.  It’s a daring turn and one Tobin makes deftly.  It represents a talented writer’s choice: What it is about prizefighting that causes what brain damage might make a father and husband an addict and suicide is a worthier direction than appeasing readers who just want reassurances their favorite fighter never took his own life.

Killed in Brazil? concludes with a loving treatment of Gatti’s son and Gatti’s legacy, completing for its author a circle begun with the book’s dedication.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

SAN ANTONIO – Saturday I went for a drive in a random direction and learned a bit more about the spread of COVID-19 in this community (though nothing science hasn’t been trying to tell us in its now-hoarse voice).  If this turns out to relate to Tyson Fury, like the rest of the column, I’ll be surprised and overjoyed, and if it doesn’t, I’ll probably revise a clumsy * break somewhere below, but follow along if for no other reason than the guy writing this hasn’t an inkling where it might go and little more of an inclination to tidy-up when he’s done.

How did randomness get achieved on a Saturday drive during the withers of a pandemic lockdown?  The mailman delivered a hand-addressed letter days ago to the wrong address, this one, and days of flagging the letter in the box did nothing to get him remove it.  Finally I put the address in Google maps and headed wherever the voice directed.  The southeast neighborhood where I landed is workingclass like this: Most everyone in the neighborhood works fulltime, and per-capita annual income is less than $23,000.

The stripmall was bursting and traffic was congested as anywhere I’ve seen it since March.  If you don’t have access to a creditcard you haven’t access to Amazon, and do your shopping locally; and if you give 50 weekly hours to work (jobs in that neighborhood ain’t virtual, and if the pandemic has taught the rest of us something about work, one hopes, it is to include, henceforth, one’s commute in hourly wage calculations) and you get paid weekly you have only Saturdays for shopping, like everyone round you.

The neighborhood was spared the first COVID-19 wave, like most of this city’s neighborhoods, but now that state government has sacrificed its citizenry to the market god – the governor last week refusing our county judge’s pleas to make masks mandatory, citing available hospital beds and freedom – this neighborhood will suffer an outbreak in wave 2 the way the rest of our city’s neighborhoods now do, and that outbreak will be exacerbated by what unmasked congestion marked Saturday’s stripmall.

Then all is hopeless?  No, no it isn’t.  The social order convulses right now, and that will bring a change that has nearly good a chance of being for the longterm better as being for the longterm worse.  Young protesters have made a calculation of their own: The chances of my catching a deadly virus while marching outside, now, are less than the chances of a loved one being killed by police.

That’s a quite extraordinary thought and perhaps a rational one.  It’s the perhaps-an-irrational part that is changed.  In bygone days a community’s elders would read the youngsters a scroll of benefits and historical sacrifices and tell them it’s their turn; sacrifice your vigor right now for improved fortunes later.  Except today’s youths can’t see a damn thing these elders sacrificed for anyone and see no coming fortunes either.  If protesting what violence might kill their peers now causes them to spread among their grandparents a deadly disease, well, sacrifices must be made, no?

God help us – get to the hopeful part!  Tyson Fury brought aficionados hope last week (you now find yourself in the middle of a transitional sentence so graceful only a bald, obese gypsy might attempt it) when he agreed to the terms of a fight series with his division’s last remaining titlist in 2021.

After Fury dispatches Deontay Wilder later this year, or doesn’t, he says he’ll make two matches with Anthony Joshua then leave our beloved sport much better than he found it, which is remarkable.  All it ever took, Fury now proves, is selfbelief – or lunacy.  Fury took an illadvised match with Wilder a couple years back because he believed in his talents, or was fully out of his mind, and did enough and made enough of it to make an enormous rematch and whalebone Wilder in February.

Three years ago the idea of Deontay Wilder being the best heavyweight in the world was absurd, sure, but the idea of Fury being the clear favorite in a rubbermatch with Wilder and a pair of matches with AJ was absurder still.  Then the Gypsy King went Lazarus on Wilder and Tysoned him, while AJ got emasculated by El Gordito and stayed that way in the rematch.

Wilder’s got about 90 seconds later this year to snatch Fury’s initiative with an overhand right, and if he doesn’t, if Fury makes it to round 2 without a concussion, what’s going to stop him?  ’Twon’t be Wilder’s newfound fragility.  Or if AJ goes robot destroyer Fury undresses him – Joshua is both less powerful and more predictable than Wilder – or if Joshua shows us that guy we saw last time Fury upstages Willie Pep by winning 12 rounds without throwing a punch.

Of course with Fury there ever be nemeses lurking, the Furies, as it were, whatever agents Fury might summon for his autodestruction next time, if there’s a next time; Fury might well undo himself, but probably neither Wilder nor Joshua will.  Fury’s selfbelief forced Top Rank to work with PBC and forced Eddie Hearn to work with an alleged Irish weapons smuggler in the Emirates, which ought be a lesson to aficionados if not their favorite fighters.

Next time Bud Crawford and Errol Spence sign opponents you must BoxRec or a middleweight titlist tells you everyone above 147 pounds is afraid of him, remember the Gypsy King and know what’s lacking actually is simple selfbelief.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Tuesday evening on ESPN undefeated American featherweight titlist “Fearless” Shakur Stevenson will make a 10-round match with Puerto Rico’s oncedefeated Felix Caraballo in the first major boxing broadcast since COVID-19 lockdowns began in March.

And so we return, limping and heavy and rusty, to the confines of the familiar, a column that treats, for the first time in 13 weeks, a contemporary boxing event.  It’s an honest relief to pivot away from stakes-so-high subjects like global pandemics and national racism to a low-stakes happening like Tuesday’s ESPN fare.

In a recent interview Stevenson conceded he knew next to nothing about his opponent, and that, too, brought a helping of relief.  Me either, Shakur.  Tuesday’s broadcast is not about Caraballo or even so much about Stevenson, even if the unlikely happens and Caraballo upsets Fearless, but about boxing’s tentative return to a changed world.  In this sense it is reminiscent of Pacquaio-Clottey in 2010, when the venue was at least important as its participants and much more important than Joshua Clottey.

What will boxing look like in a sealed Las Vegas ballroom?  Not to empty ESPN’s telecast of suspense or anything, but it will bear a striking resemblance to every Friday-night appetizer card on fight weekends and the first six matches of every Saturday undercard in Las Vegas for the last 15 years, though with more-flattering acoustics.

Unsurprisingly promoter Top Rank has in Stevenson an apt protagonist for its return broadcast.  Stevenson is young and new enough to settle for a contender’s purse while bringing pedigree and charisma enough to convince what sports generalists believe whatever ESPN shoves in their gaping maw he is the second coming of [insert name here].  In Stevenson’s last match, an October unanimous-decision victory for a vacant featherweight title, one ESPN commentator said aloud that, in order for Joet Gonzalez to win the match he would need, in the championship rounds, a Chavez-Taylor turn of events, a tablesetter comparison asinine as it was typical.

Former HBO commentator Max Kellerman was the champion of such affiliate-marketing schemes.  He would liken some barely proven titlist to Rocky Marciano or Sugar Ray Leonard and then immediately walk it back with a clumsy “that’s not to say, Jim, that Triple G is in fact Muhammad Ali!” – knowing the associative sauce was ladled and would congeal on the minds of HBO viewers.  Last week it was a similar game of Stevenson stating he doesn’t like to compare himself to Floyd Mayweather, much the same way this column doesn’t like comparing itself to Don Quijote.

Wait, did Bart just compare himself to Cervantes?

No, of course not, he would never do so and can’t be blamed if you accidentally did.

Stevenson is right not to compare himself to Mayweather.  When he says he is better than Floyd was after 13 prizefights what he means is that he fights more like Money May than Floyd did.  True enough.  Stevenson is featherfisted when set beside Pretty Boy Floyd, who was more often compared to Mike Tyson than any shoulder-rolling ring general in the early days of his career, which is the largest reason Stevenson’s non-comparison to Floyd doesn’t bode particularly well for the lad.  Nobody was exclaiming about Floyd’s ring IQ or footwork that early in Mayweather’s career because he was knocking opponents stiff.  The defensive mastery Mayweather is now known for was a product of adjustments he made four weightclasses and many broken handbones later.

Top Rank knows all of this the same way it knew what it had in Mayweather after 13 prizefights.  One assumes Felix Caraballo is a proper fit for Stevenson’s style and will make both an entertaining match and a showcase victory for Stevenson.

But that’s not really of the moment, is it?  How many sports-deprived folks want Tuesday-night boxing and how feasible is something comparatively simple as a fightcard broadcast during a pandemic and how much financial sense does any of this make right now and what athletic-commission protocols feel heavyhanded – those are of the moment.  It’s already something we’re thinking, so let’s go ahead and state it: After more than a week of watching nationwide gatherings tens of thousands of citizens strong, how current to us do the COVID-19 protocols arranged and agreed-to a month ago now seem?

Top Rank apparently spent upwards of $25,000 on testing for Tuesday’s card, to ensure its antivirus venue is airtight.  Meanwhile, in just about every city from which Tuesday’s fighters hail, thousands of protesters gather in close quarters for hours at a time, shouting and singing and jostling and sweating and sneezing and coughing.  There is the matter of comparative viral load in open air, yes, and the larger matter of legal liability – there’s nobody to sue if you get sick demanding an end to the legal system – but Tuesday’s protocols feel already outdated.

The question is whether they feel outdated because citizens have ended quarantines and lockdowns with a fistraised fury, or because sport itself feels so frivolous at this moment.

There is a chance the United States of America is unraveling right now, completing its arc as an empire in record time, and if that’s the case, if that’s even a possibility, there can be no wonder why Walt Disney Company, owner of ESPN and an institution that has benefitted from American hegemony disproportionately more than most, would be so invested in a return to the old normal of sports-as-opiate.  The irony is lost on no one, no one in the world, the athletes Disney now needs to restore its old normal come almost exclusively from communities that have played the role of exploited far more often than beneficiary.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

SAN ANTONIO – Onto the kindling of this city’s massive unemployment and bursting foodbank lines and COVID-19 fear and socialdistancing alienation dropped last week the match of yet more racist police violence, making a conflagration inevitable.  Except it wasn’t.  It didn’t happen.  Saturday evening 5,000 or so residents marched civilly to SAPD Headquarters in a legal reminder to those who police us they do so only with our permission.

Many hours later a tiny fraction of this city’s hopeless and misdirected smashed some windows and threatened a mall and shouted insults at a coterie of overarmed loons protecting the Alamo – hallowed grounds so sacred they’re shared by Ripley’s Haunted Adventure, Tomb Rider 3D and The Amazing Mirror Maze – and frightened lawenforcement officials responded as they do, with projectiles, though thankfully projectiles of impermanent effect.

This column will feign no expertise about any subject below this line.  At age 46 I’m too young to be ideological as a boomer and too old to be ideological as a millennial.  I’m part of the comparatively tiny and robustly pragmatic generation sandwiched betwixt the ideologues.  Part of a generation that, at least last Friday, best autoidentified as Killer Mike’s – for who came close to giving a better speech?

I don’t want to be here, either, this week, writing about a subject I’ve avoided best as I can since the last L.A. riots happened a month before my highschool graduation.  It felt genuine historic then and moreso that November when George H. W. Bush became the only incumbent American president to lose an election in the last 40 years.  Then as now politicians promised reforms and pleaded for their donors’ financial interests by telling us that anything but peaceful and preferably silent acts of protest undermined whatever it was they thought we were trying to tell them.

The system prevailed; those who’d given voice to the rage that happened 28 years ago got repurposed – Ice Cube starred in Are We There Yet? and Dr. Dre covered his debut album with a cannabis leaf and Ice-T began his career as a television cop and one half of Public Enemy made Flavor of Love – and things got quieter and sillier but decidedly not better.

This all feels insincere sanitized, so let’s stop it.

I am not friends with any cops or politicians.  Not one peer I admired in highschool or college went on to be a cop or a politician.  Frankly the people who populate both ranks feel weird to me.  Cops my age feel like lonewolf losers, socially awkward cowards who fantasized of being soldiers but lacked some essential quality, tangible or otherwise; politicians my age, of which there are comparatively and blessedly few, feel like failed salespeople who hadn’t the chops to play in the free market, and stoke grievances for votes instead.

Most days I look at millennials and envy their ideological bent, wondering what it must feel like to care so much about so many different things, but not last week, not this week.  It’s simply too raw and painful to feel that much.

Last week I thought of the kids who in 2010 hit heavybags at San Fernando Gym, a mile up Santa Rosa from SAPD Headquarters, where they are now, as legal adults, and if life kept them safer here than in another city like Minneapolis, an 18-hour drive up I-35, a city my blissful ignorance used to equate with only icehockey players and Lake Superior, certainly not a racist police force and buildings aflame.

One reason I have hope our kids are safer here than other American cities is our police force’s demographics.  We are a majority-Latinx city with a majority-Latinx police force.  Whites occupy a disproportionate share of our sworn officers, yes, 42-percent the police force while 25-percent the citizenship, but they are still the minority of police here.  And one thing that seems essential in all this is a populace policed by its own, not by an occupying army that commutes daily from a suburban fortress, dons anonymizing equipment, collects weapons of war and patrols our streets in attack vehicles.

Now is the place, I know, one is supposed to walk half this back in the name of balance, talking about all the good cops – but as mentioned above, I don’t know any.  Among my friends over the years I’ve counted project managers and a porn star, a meth dealer and prizefighters, golf pros and guitarists, a Mexican machinist and a Puerto Rican barber, Catholic nuns and Linux DBAs, a coke addict and firefighters, prostitutes and Marines, a Lebanese restauranteur and an immigration lawyer, and as many corporate VPs as writers and painters – but no, not one cop.

None has yet been cool enough.  I feel uneasy round them.  They feel like a dangerous combination of barely competent and violence-prone, dull knives, the sort of men who do things badly and blame others – the worse they do the more they project their selfdisgust on bystanders.  Too, I aspire to be an antiracist, though I’m no angel, and I doubt police work, as currently taught, can be compatible with antiracism.

As I sat about procrastinating and dreading this column I kept returning Saturday to a piece written by Joel Garreau in September 2005, a couple weeks after Hurricane Katrina destroyed parts of Louisiana.  Ten days was time enough for politicians to come out of hiding and start their orgy of promisemaking.  They would shower money and resources and strength and pride and, well, you know the spiel, until all was better than ever.

But Garreau knew it was nonsense and began his Washington Post piece thusly: “The city of New Orleans is not going to be rebuilt.”  He went on to explain why: “Sentiment won’t guide the insurance industry. When it looks at the devastation here, it will evaluate the risk from toxicity that has leached into the soil, and has penetrated the frames of the buildings, before it decides to write new insurance – without which nothing can be rebuilt.”

Mixing this idea with Killer Mike’s, I wonder if robust, insurance-mandated citizen-review boards aren’t a way for cities to find their ways partially out of this morass; commercial realestate insurers have long looked at climate science before underwriting construction projects and after what just happened in Minneapolis they’ll have to consider police forces unaccountable to their communities dangerous as natural disasters.  More predictable too.  I lack Killer Mike’s decency and optimism, truthfully, but if there’s a freemarket solution to this problem – and probably there is not – it may be found, oddly enough, in insurance underwriting.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

beeenk … beeenk … beeenk

Get it swinging stiff it arm it bring the hook hard sand unsoftened heaviness heaviness dig the hook “Carve you up” pat the jab pat the left put the right out touch it get the back heel up touch it bring the left shoulder slam the back heel no no time it slam the back heel put the right hand out there slowmotion if you have to just tap it ignore them ignore them now swing the left round swing the

Slam the back heel

Slam the back heel

snap

there it is there there time it time it now touch put the right out to cock the shoulder bring the front hip round only a touch tap the bag move the elbow move his elbow now bring the hook no recock all hip dig it dig it in “Give it up, giving it up – mmmmhmm” front foot out slide round slide round again victory lap no one cares right foot left toe left foot jab it out jab jab knock with the jab move him back stiffarm knockknock looks like punches, Iceman Adams, stiff arm knockknock hook low clumsy bad knockknock down uncocked have to fix the right the upsnap have to fix fucking Reyes gloves get closer smell paint sweat ignore the black go to the red nobody up in the black dig in the red dig in the red the heavy sand unchastened “What do you want now, girl?” snap the head round the left follow the head spin another lap where’s the timer hot hot idiot heater second round no bullshit, kid, first round slap it out put the bag back with the jab use the archer try it two-step back shortstep leave the lead fist move with the shortstep

snap

Better again again

Better better body it

beeenk …

shoulder it make it swing keep steady don’t flurry better than that shoulder it swinging case anyone sees it make it swing body it tire it “Put your weight on it” dig the hook dig it again knucklescuffer don’t drag stab stab the hook spin out don’t pander don’t flash same rate pace pace cruise a little heat keep the legs be aware beware reminder re-mind-er jab out finish jabbing jab jab

beeenk … beeenk … beeenk

dent admire the dent, yes.

“Safe Hands, man, what’s up!”

“Just over here on my beautification grind, eh.”

“Your what?”

“You see Benjamín on the uppercut bag?”

“He didn’t hit himself, did he?”

“He was showing those two Haitian kids – the brothers? – how to rip the right uppercut as a lead –”

“You’re bullshitting –”

“I’m kidding –”

“I was going to say –”

“He looks much better, man, I’m not kidding.”

“What did you tell him?”

“He asked how to get a guy to throw the cross so he could impale him on that new uppercut –”

“Oh I gotta hear this –”

“Told him to hang the jab to draw the cross.”

“You’re gonna get him killed –”

“Not in here, not with eighteen-ounce gloves.”

“You find the eighteen-ouncers?”

“Bought a new pair.”

“Safest hands in the gym.”

“Working on The Margarito today –”

“Not The Marquez?”

 beeenk … beeenk … beeenk

“A la chamba, ya.”

Stiffarm it make it swing damn heat is an envelope tastes salty good good use the jab move the back foot cmon over mon over follow the jab synchronize the back foot righthandrightfoot one move together one now the left

Everything the left everything everything the left everything everything

bump

dance away spin reset light reset jab jab take a lap jabbing ignore them ignore them nobody knows “This is ours, all ours, nobody’s but ours” again again follow the jab follow the right with the right one now dig dig dig

bump

slap it right palm reset back foot jab jab who’s in the ring who jumps rope in the ring? damn this heat damn this heat laces loosening front shoe laces loosening they’ll hold no excuse no permission slip, dude, onetwothree get that back heel up higher bring the hook bring the hip not the hook hit the bag with it hipbone to bag it now the left now

snap

proper rest the forehead on the bag add some weight to it put some weight on heavybag adds weight to punches make it heavier “You’re going to get it now, no more games, no more playing” left left Foreman left left make a grapefruit dig it out left right just cocks right shoulder just cock it left left break your hand break the sand let the bitches hit waterbags sand makes the man dig dig nobody hits this hard pretty bitches nobody dents this bag my bag nobody “Who else does this to you, puts it on you?” step out push the jab knockknock no laps throw the cross back hip comes first hit the one-iron upsnap damnit upsnap anemic

beeenk …

dig the hook rather hook hook circle breathe take a lap breathe shut your mouth nosebreathe do what you do body it weight it shoulder forearm shimmy shimmy let it swing past circle it take a lap now catch it left

snap

proper again “You’re not satisfied till I am” nothing else be done spin slap spin playful playful watch it swing past now catch it square right “Who else, tell me, who else?” get lighter get lighter never see a man this heavy so light back foot tap the toe resettle but light light front toe barely touches barely “Not the best; the only” finish lefthook finish better off finish stride off.

beeenk … beeenk … beeenk

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

SAN ANTONIO – A curious scenario now plays in this city re COVID-19.  Told they can come out their residences and resume consumption at the previous pace, told they simply must resume consumership to save Texas business interests, er, liberty, residents are noticeably less inclined to do so than they were a month ago when it was verboten.

As I sit at the same window I’ve now sat every week at the same time since March, I’m able to report traffic isn’t 50-percent what it was during lockdown.  This be the fruit of unintended consequences.  When there was an authority remanding South Texans to their homes there was an object for their natural, childlike defiance; now that Lone Star government has gone proudly missing South Texans realize they’ve been abandoned to their proper fates, the cavalry ain’t coming for or against them, and much of April’s animating bravery has vanished.

Most thinking folks have spent this pandemic imagining the sundry ways life might be worse when it resumes, officially or otherwise, but few of us have considered how it might be better.  We’ll not get the full resetting many have wanted for a decade or two, life never is so symmetrical, but we’re already getting a partial resetting.

Airfare prices, for one, are undergoing a resetting not seen before.  No, they’re not going down the way every experience informed you they should, are they?  That’s because there’s no demand to compete for; most of us wouldn’t board a Southwest flight for free right now, so why drop the fare from $105 to $5?

A similar thing is about to play-out in malls across the fruited plain: Businesses expect loyal Americans to be so thrilled to have their inalienable rights to inessential and conspicuous consumption restored they’ll gladly pay a 30-percent markup for what heroic decisions retail CEOs have made on their employees’ behalves; meanwhile every American risking her health and familiars’ lives to go shopping expects Black Friday.  What happens, in other words, when supply and demand disappear together?

That question underlies much of the hesitancy you see in professional sports’ reluctance to return.  Oh sure, there are all the concerns they express publicly and often.  But there’s one longerterm concern they don’t express.  What happens if they turn the cameras back on and there’s not the pent-up interest they assumed in their budget?  The longer we adapt to a life without sports the fuller the resetting when they come back.  Sports gamblers, we learned last week from John Cassidy, have moved zealously to the stock market, a place where the Federal Reserve now backstops their wagers effectively as David Stern used to do with NBA Playoff games.

Ten years ago there were 100,000 boxing junkies who purchased every pay-per-view no matter how rank.  Are there still?  It sure wouldn’t be hard to find out if any promoter wanted to.

This week MUBI dropped in its curated queue the 1922 German silent film Nosferatu, and I watched it on a lark, the way you wouldn’t seek-out a history of Ecuadorian cacao cultivation but if one happened to be on the shelf of your Airbnb in Quito, why . . . I didn’t not-enjoy the “Symphony of Horror” in part because of the way I found myself preprepared as an audience member.  I didn’t expect action or explosions or color or dialogue; on its own terms it was fine once I got past an expectation Chaplin’s tramp would appear in each next scene.

Sunday I watched 30 minutes of TaylorMade Driving Relief on NBC and didn’t enjoy it.  Stripped of their accoutrements the best golfers in the world look like highschool fourball players on a Wednesday afternoon.  Much of the reason we believed what they did was essential and special was because thousands of our fellow men were behind them in every shot jostling for a chance to be close to them.  That conferred an authority no amount of commentary can – and no, none of the commentators considered shutting up long enough to allow the players’ undoubtedly insipid banter be heard.  Even money, that oldest authority-conferring trick in America, failed to land: When each month brings news of another $1 trillion in government relief that does little to relieve, how much of a fuck does anyone give if Rory or Rickie putts for $50,000?

If you’re going to look like TikTok you need teenage spontaneity, not fiftysomething Mike Tirico laughing over Bill Murray’s jokes before they’re told.  And yet, it dawns on me as I peruse YouTube today’s kids mightn’t be so good at improvisation as their predecessors, and there’s an element of improvisation required in broadcasting even something monochrome predictable as professional golf.

But the ongoing resetting requires much reimagining.  Every single item in the value stream of professional sports, right down to something insignificant as this column, must be reevaluated.  While the networks and teams and promoters and agents fumble about doing this, iterating their ways to a new normal, they need to start giving their product away and keep giving it away long after brave fans consider returning to their arenas.  If that means men in costumes playing children’s games no longer get 2,000 times the salary of a U.S. soldier, why, that’s an adaptation we’ll all have to stomach.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Editor’s note: Since 2016 we’ve allowed Bart Barry to interview himself about the state of the craft once annually when he is particularly bereft of ideas for his weekly column.  Each week since March 23 we’ve expected him to request a self-interview opportunity (yes, he uses a proper hyphen when he emails).  This week it came.

BB: We only get to go to this well once every –

BB: Let’s not begin with a cliché, kid.

BB: Surprised it took this long to revert to form?

BB: A little, yes, but you do realize, right, there’s no need to use prepositions when we interview ourselves?

BB: Surprised it took long revert form?

BB: Much better.  The prepositions are for others’ clarity; when we picture a glass of TexaCola we never need of in the picture.

BB: Frankly –

BB: It’s a glass with TexaCola, obviously, not a glass constructed of cola.

BB: Be neither tedious nor insipid, lad.

BB: I loved last week’s column.  I love Kevin Barry.  He’s the writer who comes nearest the ideal of writing in the mind’s proper code.

BB: An Irishman, naturally.

BB:  Land of James Joyce, but oh so much more enjoyable.

BB: Twas a legendary matchmaker who set the hands on the Joyce clock for us –

BB: Denver weighin –

BB: Sweatbox firehazard –

BB: “You know anyone who’s ever enjoyed Ulysses?”

BB: Literature for people who enjoy feeling smart more than reading.

BB: What’s this, then?

BB: Easy to write.

BB: Does that inoculate it?

BB: One hopes.  Anything th’t can be written fastly and funlike can’t be too Joycean.

BB: How’s quarantine, son?

BB: Lovely, if I’m honest.  Haven’t read so much in 20 years.

BB: Tell me about American energy.

BB: I love that we can use italics here instead of quotes because I can’t make myself put the punctuation mark inside the quotation marks.  It looks all wrong to me.  Looks fine in dialogue; looks awful elsewhere.  I assume it’s a vestigial ask from some 18th-century typesetter.

BB: Tell me about “American energy”.

BB: Peggy Noonan used that term recently in a column, or quoted someone who did, and it struck me like a perfect euphemism for desperate anxiety.  Even in its context – a man whose wife won’t let him quarantine peacefully on his La-Z-Boy but instead remands him to Home Depot – it reads like desperate anxiety.

BB: One man’s desperate anxiety be another man’s entrepreneurial zeal.

BB: Lockdowns have shown us what’s what.  Revenge of the unenergetic, as it were.  Good to see the hyperactive boys, be they 15 or 75, trying to sit still, and they can’t.  All that hyperbolic bullshit about “hustle” we’ve been hearing from them for centuries –

BB: Turns out it wasn’t ever the choice they credited themselves with making.

BB: Monkeys moving wood.

BB: “You don’t think I’d like to just sit around all day on my couch doing nothing?”

BB: Turns out, dude, you can’t sit on your couch in your own home in the presence of your own spouse and offspring for a full hour, can you?

BB: Sounds like someone’s dad yelled at him for not sprinting from the dugout each inning.

BB: You miss him?

BB: Nope.

BB: What about her?

BB: This is the second Mother’s Day since her passing – though there’s not been the void we were raised to expect.  I miss none of the zaniness, and all her best qualities are somewhere in her daughters already, so . . .

BB: Whither our beloved sport?

BB: I credit it with staying for the most part quiet, with recognizing there’s no optimization right now, and thus no reason for selfimprovement or willful change.

BB: Boxing ain’t been on its grind.

BB: All the better.

BB: Tis a bit of a surprise.  One’d’ve thought callouts and socialmedia threats’d’ve been at record highs, right?

BB: Bullied into silence, a little, methinks.  When they show us Ali marathons or Tyson clips or items from the Pacquiao and Mayweather vaults, it quiets them, even the dummies.

BB: What does the return look like?

BB: Ask someone knowledgeable.

BB: Right.

BB: I’m not sure I’ve the imagination for that even if I thought about it in selfinterested terms for a month, and I damn sure have not.

BB: Empty arenas?

BB: We’re well-practiced at that.  Even our best ideas –

BB: The DAZN tournament, the one with the –

BB: The one Usyk won –

BB: And Callum Smith and Inoue –

BB: World Boxing Super Series!

BB: There you go.

BB: Even that had its prelims go off in what were effectively cavernous television studios.  Just bring them inside the studio.  Surprised Top Rank hasn’t built that yet.

BB: Or PBC.  It’s what they’ve been after for years.

BB: Do you miss traveling?

BB: Not nearly so much as previous years’ expenses predicted.

BB: I don’t miss any of it.  I didn’t prepare for this, but I’m well-prepared somehow.  The music stopped, and I like the chair I find myself in.

BB: Tell them a secret.

BB: We didn’t expect to be doing this, still, in 2020.  There was a final interview with the boxing writer by the boxing writer tacitly planned for last December then the new job fell through and with it the relocation and a justification to end all this, and here we are, sans regret.

BB: And still kicking long enough to write a review of Carlos’ book and Jimmy’s.

BB: I’ve not had a regret since puberty, but in November I felt a twinge of disappointment I’d not have the column when those guys’ books got published.

BB: Reading takes care of its own.

BB: Every experience in every life is equal parts impossible and inevitable.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Hotel Viejoyhermoso, San Jacinto Plaza, El Paso, Texas, on a Friday evening in June 2012

Worst scorecard I’ve seen, you, Bruce?

What were you thinking and are you embarrassed by it?

Stocky writer standing presenting performing for three salts, old, nervous the lad, wee in his presentation, stocky to quickshrunk, iffy – though not quite.

Gorgeous old bar here, he says.  Read somewhere there are more free museums here per capita than another city.  Any American city.  Isn’t that something?

Timmy told us he knows he lost.  Went back and rewatched it, knows he didn’t win it.

But your scorecard.  Just the damndest thing.

Dastardly.

Who paid you post such shite?

I’m at The Courtyard across the way, he says.  Pool on floor seven.  Can see Juarez.  Warning words or pleas for help on a mountain.  Y’all see it?

You and two other jokers.

There were three of you scored it blindfolded.

Six if you count the officials, he says, annoyed finally.

Make sure Bob doesn’t catch you.

Do you one better, he says.  Lee’s got me writing for AP tomorrow night.

Old salts cackle.  Just don’t –

They ask you to score it?

Don’t score it.

If you score it run her past me first so I can fix it.

Will do, he says.

___

Sun Bowl field, UTEP, on Saturday afternoon

Spicy hot midday midfield no shade till outside sidelines hot like picosa hot till your mouth burns or hot like caliente blisterbubbles your tongue? Yes.  Deranged hot.  Texas sun showing out for its bowl.  Print media, no meal, sippy bottles warm water runny cooler a sixty dasher off tables.  McCarson’s got a hat on, only Irish with half a wit.  Barry bareheaded like an ass, stocky writer.

Juan Carlos, good to meet you.

Barry – what time you get here?

Hours ago.  Nobody told me.  What time the fight is?

Hell if anyone must be nine or ten Eastern, no?  Su acento no es mexicano.

Soy hondureño.

The crime reporter!

Supposed to be trouble tonight else they don’t call me.  Hope so.  Mexican kid, what’s his name?

Chavez Jr.  Failson dated someone’s deceased son’s wife.

Laughing.  Givesn’t a quarterfuck.  Bluemat reads America’s Safest City.

___

Courtyard, North Santa Fe Street, El Paso, Texas, on Thursday night

I like your shape, muy nalgona, extraordinary.

I told you, she says.  But you didn’t believe me now you believe me see it’s for real.

Surreal, he says, so real.  What do you want to order?

I’m nervous.

Don’t be.

Tell me more about the boxing thing.

Filibuster it, he thinks, warms up, goes in, script reading from flight home from Vegas from flight away to El Paso, many hours thinking.

Do you know who Pacquiao is?

Duh.

He lost by decision a few days ago.  A few of us scored it for the other guy, Bradley, good man.  Institution’s pissed.  No dissent be brooked.

You use fancy words like you’re trying to impress me but you don’t have to you know?

C’mon let me show you the best view here.

On the roof?

No my room.

___

Sun Bowl field, UTEP, on Saturday evening

Did you get the time?

Right here, says McCarson.  It was a right hand.  Two fights to go.

Or a left.  Doing double duty.  AP expects five hundred a few minutes after the bell.  Trying to write for Abrams too.  Got a crime reporter check me out.

Judges: Filipino, Texan, Brit.  Referee: Failson Texas.  Mayor John Cook please remove your hats and take your feet dim the lights and I sing for you, a cappella, just a guitfiddle for the anthem and a key to America’s Safest City for Mr. Bob.

Freddie’s giving Junior a shoulder rub.  Pulled up in a stretch Humvee.

See the snipers on the roof, says Juan Carlos, make sure you mention them, Barry, and scare the angrydolt gringos back in New York.

Good idea.

Who wins?

The shootout or the fight?

You funny – I gave up on the shootout hours ago.

Cannot imagine we’d be all the way out here next to Juarez if they planned to nod at the Irishman.

Ut’s his name?

Irish Andy Lee.

Who’s the guy with him looks familiar?

Steward.  Kronk Gym.  Trained Hearns.

Motor City Cobra!

Every Latino calls him that every American calls him Hitman.

No heroes in Honduras are hitmen, güero.

___

Hotel Viejoyhermoso, San Jacinto Plaza, El Paso, Texas, on Friday evening

Look who it is.

Who’s this kid?

One of the dummies scored it gainst Manny.

I was in good company, he says.

You guys sit next to one another like penpals?

Nope.

HBO guys told me the scores fore it got announced.  Ducked out.  Didn’t want the reaction.

They know the scores before they’re announced? he says.

Salts chuckle one looks askance the other two, two of the three irate a rube happened their huddle.

Who’s this, Bruce?

Barry.

Never heard of him.

___

Courtyard, North Santa Fe Street, El Paso, Texas, on Thursday night

That was a helluva round three.

Me hechaste al plato, cabrón.

What time your kids expect you home?

They’re with their dad this week.

Let’s go eat.  You must be hungry.

Then we make a little güerito with green eyes mmm.

God no please.

___

Sun Bowl field, UTEP, on Saturday evening

Junior didn’t punch for a couple minutes stomped slowly about hoping to make up what he lost making weight and drained.  Irish Andy much smaller defter too moved more better more schooled.  Freddie looking weird between rounds Manny looking confident.  Fifteen minutes in gears shift with a snap.  Irish Andy fading fading bleached white redfaced white paled; Manny proper nervous cornerways.  Junior pounds his balls out.

Shit that was fast.

I get you quotes, says Juan Carlos.  Just write, Barry, I come back.

Honduran madman over one table under another comes up middle of HBO screen cuts in the interview like he’s Larry or Max comes back to write half the five hundred with quotes.  Pro’s pro.

___

Tamaulipas Tacos, Rojas Drive, El Paso, Texas, on Sunday morning

I’m not from the Eleven Families or nothing.

But raised affluent.

Juan Carlos shrugs sated looks the yellow posted menu more food.

Good food, fair prices, says Juan Carlos.

On me.

What I want to do is build up great credit get a huge cash advance move the hell out of here, straight abscond, can it be done?

Nah by the time you get that far you believe in the system and never leave, makes whores of us all.

This was fun for my first boxing fight.

Yeah they’re not all like this, eh?

___

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

SAN ANTONIO – Nothing is returned to normal, not even our last catastrophe’s new normal, and it becomes more obvious the few times you catch someone trying to act like normal.  Thursday’s first trip to a supermarket in 10 days found everyone’s adapted to these bizarre circumstances except the employees.

While customers’ habits have changed enough to have the marketplace nearly empty of shoppers the marketplace’s wellmeaning attempt to keep a full staff in place works against itself as more employees than customers makes the employees frantic in their habits of busylooking, the product of 200 years of post-industrial-revolution habitry – “time to lean, time to clean!” – so the only ones constantly breaking sixfoot radii are the workers everyone wears equipment to protect.  They swerve round you and dash before you in a futile attempt to burn a surplus of energy that makes you batty if you retain it – for what else is anxiety, ultimately?

A better boxing writer would be playing along with his peers, livetweeting decades-old matches because they happen to be broadcasted as if live on Disney’s sports property, but I can’t bring myself to it.  These fights are available on YouTube forever and watching them with commercials to support multinational revenues doesn’t feel patriotic as it did when we used to drive to the mall with Old Glory flying.

Saturday, which has become lovely in its timelessness, found me bouncing between The New Yorker and Shakespeare.  In the 35 or so years since I watched my grandmother read The New Yorker I’ve often marveled at the quantity of sparetime one might need to justify a subscription.  Piles and piles of them I’ve accumulated over and over, refusing to dispose of them till I’ve surveyed every page, while never surveying more than a third the pages before peeling off their labels and walking them to a nearby lobby, coffeeshop or laundromat.

All that’s changed.  On the one end I have, on average, 16 perfectly empty hours every Saturday, and on the other end I have an evolving surfeit of self-forgiveness for not-reading whatever I once believed I must read.  It’s not nihilistic as all that, though I have noticed for six years now a creeping nihilism (blame meditation?); it’s an honest accounting of how much I’ve read and how microscopically little I retain of it.

Saturday I began reading new short fiction by Ben Lerner, which isn’t great, and wondering why his name was enticingly familiar to me.  The Contributors page didn’t help.  Google did: Lerner’s first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, was marvelous, and I enjoyed it in 2011 and thought of it often while using said station in 2014.  That trip to Madrid was about nothing so much as standing before Velazquez’s masterpiece, Las Meninas, at El Prado, a 10-minute northwards hike from Atocha Station.

A couple Saturdays ago I came on a short piece in The New Yorker that treated, in part, that very painting, as its author, believing himself terminally ill before coronavirus, chose as his dying wish of sorts to spend many hours looking at the painting again with new eyes.  He made a wonderful comment: Velazquez could not have been painting himself via a mirror positioned where you, an observer, stand, set between the canvas and the royal couple, unless he and everyone else were lefthanded.  Touché!  There is quite a bit of chromatic aberration edging the shadow at the centerpiece’s feet, though, so lenses were employed even if Velazquez put himself in freehand.

It came to me Saturday morning Petruchio might be Shakespeare’s most enjoyably masculine character, and a couple hours got gobbled up a couple hours later by The Taming of the Shrew.  The play hasn’t aged badly as its critics.  Shakespeare, as critic Harold Bloom wrote quite a few times, buries his undertakers.  Reading the play with a father’s eyes – my sixyearold daughter is nearer Kate than my fiveyearold son is Petruchio – I found some essential wisdom in the play’s courtship, particularly as Petruchio treats so directly the subject with his future father-in-law, Baptista:

Though little fire grows great with little wind,

Yet extreme gusts will blow out fire and all.

So I to her, and so she yields to me,

For I am rough and woo not like a babe.

Far from dashing for his rifle or assuming a postfeminist fetal position (practical redundancies, those), Baptista sincerely wishes Petruchio luck.  Many of the comedic elements are still funny, despite 430 years and thousands of renditions, and the language is gaudy rich: “You peasant swain, you whoreson malt-horse drudge!”  Petruchio’s ultimate motivation – “I come to wive it wealthily in Padua – / If wealthily, then happily in Padua” – doesn’t feel congruous today as it likely felt in 1592, being that Petruchio is already wealthy and today’s ruling class, ironically, better insulated from what economic calamities now befall the rest of us decennially.

Petruchio laughs at himself and circumstances, embraces absurdity, acts as a dutiful wingman, knows his purpose, speaks to his elders respectfully if directly, and woos not like a babe – would that young American men were reliably given such an example.  By the end of Taming of the Shrew you can envision Petruchio sharing an ale with Jack Falstaff while laughing merrily at a Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. match, something one cannot say for Hamlet or Othello or Romeo (or even Henry V unfortunately).

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

SAN ANTONIO – Ten years ago I moved here and
promptly failed an eye test for my Texas drivers license so badly the examiner
and I both thought the other was joking about its results: I thought she was
kidding when she said there were letters on the left side, and she thought I
was kidding when I began reading from the middle. I’d lived most of my adult life
in Arizona, whose licenses have extended durations, and hadn’t taken an eye
test in 15 years or so.

In a few weeks I had my first pair of glasses, and
suddenly the world was in such high-def I immediately ceased my lifelong
indifference to visual arts. Soon, as longtime readers and friends know, I was
deep in a survey of painting that would last and last. By 2011 my survey had taken
me to the 17th-century Dutch masters and their seven-layer practice, and since
layers were all I was after in writing I eventually hatched an inside-out writing
process.

Now seems good a time as any to share it:

I. Cartoon Layer: Create a precise structure of
borders between areas of highlight and light, light and halftone, halftone and
shadow, and reflections – the lines are all there, and they might even be a
mess, but they are there; this sets the hard outline of what is to come.

“After his third match with Rafael Marquez, a
classic that happened in the bowl of Home Depot Center’s tennis stadium in
Carson, Calif., Israel Vazquez sat on a makeshift dais in the bowels of the
structure and listened to Marquez’s promoter and manager threaten pointless
protests and journalists. Izzy’s face was a mess. He gently mumbled when his
time to speak came, complimenting his opponent and thanking everyone.”

*

II. Imprimatura Layer: The degree of darkness or
lightness of imprimatura should be chosen in relation to the largest light area,
defining the absolute middle tone, determining the mood of the portrait – to
enable a newfound clarity in the next layer.

“El Magnifico deserved
better than what postfight shenanigans he endured in the moments that followed
his career’s greatest feat, one that would someday claim half his eyesight but
none of his goodwill. After his third match with Rafael Marquez, a classic
that happened in the bowl of Home Depot Center’s tennis stadium in Carson,
Calif., Israel Vazquez sat on a makeshift dais in the bowels of the structure
and listened to Marquez’s promoter and manager threaten pointless protests and
journalists. Izzy’s face was a mess. He tenderly rose and gently mumbled
when his time to speak came, complimenting his opponent and thanking everyone.”

*

III. Umber Layer: For defining values between lights
and darks by presenting them near one another, setting characters’ most positive
and negative traits – this is where absurdity must be injected if at all.

“El Magnifico, ever humble
in victory as he was vicious in its pursuit, deserved better than what
postfight shenanigans he endured in the moments that followed his career’s
greatest feat, one that would someday claim half his eyesight but none of his
goodwill. After his third match with Rafael Marquez, a classic that happened in
the bowl of Home Depot Center’s tennis stadium in Carson, Calif., Israel
Vazquez sat on a makeshift dais in the cold bowels of the structure and
listened to Marquez’s obnoxious promoter and more obnoxious
manager threaten pointless protests and accuse journalists of cheapening the
event for asking why a protest needed filing. Izzy’s face was a mess at
rest and worse when he smiled. He tenderly rose and gently mumbled when his
time to speak came, complimenting his sullen opponent and thanking
everyone.”

*

IV. Dead Layer: For creating space and distance by
making the largest quality too large, embellishing it till it casts a shadow on
its characters, this may also be where mystery is introduced – this is where
dialogue may be added if at all.

“El Magnifico, ever humble in victory as he was
vicious in its pursuit, deserved better than what postfight shenanigans he
endured in the moments that followed his career’s greatest feat, one that would
someday claim half his eyesight but none of his goodwill. After his third match
with Rafael Marquez, a classic that happened in the bowl of Home Depot Center’s
tennis stadium in Carson, Calif., Israel Vazquez sat on a makeshift dais in the
cold bowels of the structure and listened to Marquez’s obnoxious promoter and
more obnoxious manager threaten pointless protests and accuse journalists of
cheapening the event for asking why a protest needed filing.

‘That you would ask such a question,’ crowed
Gary Shaw, ‘after what these men just did, after the bravery they just showed,
is disgusting!’

Izzy’s face was a mess at rest and worse when he
smiled. He tenderly rose and gently mumbled when his time to speak came, complimenting
his sullen opponent – Rafa, after all, had just volunteered to die in the
ring rather than be subjected to a standing eight count – and thanking
everyone with a sincerity both pained and painful.”

*

V. Color Layer (Dark): Make shadow areas darker
and more colorful by placing them near positive qualities – challenging questionable
verbs and modifiers.

“El Magnifico, ever humble in victory as he was
vicious in its pursuit, rated higher than what postfight shenanigans he
endured after his career’s greatest feat, the fight that one day
claimed half his eyesight but none of his goodwill. Thirty minutes after
his third match with Rafael Marquez, a classic that happened in the bowl of
Home Depot Center’s tennis stadium in Carson, Calif., Israel Vazquez sat on a
makeshift dais in the cold bowels of the structure while Marquez’s
obnoxious promoter and more obnoxious manager threatened pointless
protests and accused journalists of ruining their event.

‘That you would ask such a question,’ crowed Gary
Shaw, ‘after what these men just did, after the bravery they just showed, is disgusting!’

Izzy’s face was a mess at rest and worse when he attempted
a smile. He tenderly rose and gently mumbled when his time to speak came,
complimenting his sullen opponent – Rafa, after all, had just volunteered to
die in the ring rather than lose a point to a standing eight count – and
thanking everyone with a sincerity both pained and painful.”

*

VI. Color Layer (Bright): Lighted areas should be
made lighter and more colorful, using paste-like mixtures applied rather
thickly, in a hard break from its predecessor layer – and inserting actual
colors.

“El Magnifico, ever humble in victory as he was
vicious in its pursuit, rated higher than what postfight shenanigans he endured
after his career’s greatest feat, the fight that one day claimed half his
eyesight but none of his goodwill. Thirty minutes after his third match with
Rafael Marquez, a classic that happened in the cement gray bowl of Home
Depot Center’s tennis stadium in bluecollar Carson, Calif., Israel
Vazquez sat on a makeshift dais in the cold bowels of the structure while
Marquez’s obnoxious promoter, stretching an emerald track suit, and more
obnoxious manager, scowling in funereal black, threatened pointless
protests and accused journalists of ruining their event.

‘That you would ask such a question,’ crowed a
redfaced Gary Shaw, ‘after what these men just did, after the bravery they
just showed, is disgusting!’

Izzy’s face was a mess at rest and worse when he
attempted a smile round his lipstick-red eyes and swollen mouth. He
tenderly rose and gently mumbled when his time to speak came, complimenting his
sullen opponent – Rafa, after all, had just volunteered to die in the ring
rather than lose a point to a standing eight count – and thanking everyone with
a sincerity both pained and painful.”

*

VII. Finishing Miksture Palette: Details of
textures, thickly applied highlights and bright reflections, this is the place
for impasto – doing audio revision and looking for places to lighten.

“El Magnifico, ever humble in victory as he was
vicious in its pursuit, rated higher than what postfight shenanigans he endured
after his career’s greatest feat, the fight that one day claimed half his
eyesight but none of his goodwill. Thirty minutes after his third match with
Rafael Marquez, a classic that happened in the cement gray bowl of Home Depot
Center’s tennis stadium in bluecollar Carson, Calif., Israel Vazquez sat on a
makeshift dais in its cold bowels while Marquez’s obnoxious promoter,
stretching an emerald track suit, and more obnoxious manager, scowling in
funereal black, threatened pointless protests and accused journalists of
ruining their event.

‘That you would ask such a question,’ crowed
redfaced Gary Shaw, ‘after what these men just did, after the bravery they just
showed, is disgusting!’

Izzy’s face was a mess at rest and worse when he
attempted smiles round lipstick-red eyes and a swollen mouth. He
tenderly rose and gently mumbled kind words when his time to speak came,
complimenting his sullen opponent – Rafa, after all, had just volunteered to
die in the ring rather than lose a point to a standing eight count – before
thanking everyone with a sincerity both pained and painful.”

*

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry–

It’s an exercise we did in a coaching workshop in Boston to help coaches listen more deeply and improvise more freely with clients.  An instructor provides an outlandish subject, and a group of four or five coaches then pass the idea round and round, following an order like this: When the person on your left stops talking, begin by saying “what I like about that is . . .” then build on it by saying “and another thing is . . .”  It creates new ideas naturally, iteratively, and lends them texture.

*

What I like about Norm’s
column Friday is . . . how it mixes Apocalypse Now, Joseph Conrad, the
Yavapai-Apache Nation and Tommy “The Duke” Morrison.

What I remember best about that event are two
things: The frighteningly labored way Morrison breathed in the caravan
immediately after his fight’s conclusion, and the reaction of my brother-in-law
years later when I recounted the contents of the Morrison doctor’s note.  This was 13 years ago, after Jesus “El
Martillo” Gonzales’ 2005 loss to Mexican toughman Jose Luis Zertuche decimated
promoter Top Rank’s interest in Phoenix – for history buffs, yes, it happened
on the card that saw Julio Cesar Chavez’s storied career come to an ignominious
end – and Valley of the Sun hosted a babbling brook of out-of-town promoters
who remembered how many tickets Michael Carbajal sold a generation before,
multiplied their ambitions by the number of names ending in ‘s’ or ‘z’ they could
count in a Phoenix phonebook, and imported everyone from Hector Camacho Jr. to
Tommy Morrison.

If memory serves Morrison was to return to action
in Phoenix itself a halfyear before, on the untelevised undercard of a ShoBox bill
that featured Juanma Lopez and Victor Ortiz, but bloodtesting irregularities instead
put Morrison ringside with a hastily affixed cast on one of his hands.  Before Morrison’s cage debut but after The
Arizona Republic story that got Norm temporarily banished from ringside there
was a letter from a doctor of some sort attesting to Morrison’s health, and
what made it absurd in the threadbare way boxing does absurdity was its opening
sentence about “Tommy ‘The Duke’ Morrison” – that a medical professional thought
to include a fighter’s nickname in an official document.  A couple years ago that detail put my
brother-in-law in stitches.

I have at least three iterations of Apocalypse
Now in a variety of formats and occasionally return to the Redux –
with its deleted scene on the French plantation – and ask myself if the movie
mightn’t be the one time in American history when a work of cinematic genius
was based on a work of literary genius.

And another idea is . . . the influence boxing had
on Marlon Brando, who showed up on Francis Ford Coppola’s 1976 set in the Philippines
many pounds overweight and selfconscious enough to disrupt much of the already disrupted
script.

Round about the time of Tommy Morrison’s
cage-fighting debut, coincidentally, I was a few thousand pages into a survey
of Brando biographies for reasons that escaped me then ably as they escape me
now.

Before Brando became the youngest actor to win Best
Actor for his portrayal of Terry “I Coulda Been a Contender” Malloy in On
the Waterfront, whose screenplay was written by IBHOF writer Budd Schulberg,
Brando had his too-perfect face rearranged backstage while touch-sparring with
a stagehand during his Broadway run of A Streetcar Named Desire.  Legend has it that broken and poorly reset
nose transformed Brando’s countenance from angelic to believably masculine, and
that transformation enabled him to become America’s greatest cinematic
performer.

Brando struggled with his weight like a
prizefighter.  He yoyoed between films
like Ricky Hatton between title defenses before eventually succumbing to Nature
and gaining hundreds of pounds.  The
blueprint for such a massive accumulation was always there – you can see it in
his shoulders and arms and hips in the cinematic adaptation of Streetcar.

Saturday I watched The Chase, a Brando
movie from 1966 that co-features Robert Redford, Jane Fonda and Robert Duvall,
and Brando, even then, was simply wider than his costars.  He was explosive, too, and everything he did
happened on a rhythm other than others’ consensus rhythm.  The movie is not particularly enjoyable but
intimately violent.

For the last however many years it has been fashionable
in some political circles to bemoan Hollywood violence, all those fake
explosions of fake robots and fake superheroes, but if you want believable and
sustained violence, check-out some movies from the 1960s.  Two-thirds of the way through The Chase
there is a scene at the sheriff’s office when some local drunks emboldened by
the movie’s rich guy decide to lock the sheriff, Brando, in a room and put in
work.  The scene has a lot of blood and sadism
and Brando’s trademark masochism, too, as Brando’s character, knocked
unconscious several times by fists and feet, keeps reviving and returning to
the fray and getting beaten ever more viciously by the same three guys.  Brando throws himself on and off a desk a few
times and appears to wince in genuine pain as he lands on the tile floor.

There are lessons about greatness in the Brando filmography
– particularly how awful even the greatest performers can be in many
performances (from 1960-1971 Brando starred in 14 movies that, cumulatively,
might make two watchable ones).  Failure
is forgivable, alas.  Especially in a
time such as this one.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

SAN ANTONIO – Friday afternoon, 10 miles southeast
of here, restrictions got eased by local government and free COVID-19 testing
became much more accessible at Freeman Coliseum – which shares a lot with its larger,
more celebrated successor, AT&T Center, home of the Spurs.

If you’re thinking, Freeman Coliseum, why, where
have I read about that recently, here’s to hoping the answer is “Sporting Blood”
(Hamilcar Publications, $27.95), Carlos Acevedo’s new book of “Tales from the
Dark Side of Boxing” – in which Freeman Coliseum gets recalled more times than
I can recall seeing it in any book I’ve read.

That last clause works well about a lot of items
in Acevedo’s book, which is a clumsy way of imparting how damn original it
is.  Not gimmicky original, not look-at-me-I’m-writing
original; proper original.

I’m going to let things go where they might from
here, adopting a first-person style nearer what Thomas Hauser employs in
“Sporting Blood’s” foreword, eschewing what straight, third-person boundaries
Carlos sets for his art.  Hauser and I
came on Acevedo’s magnificent prose right about the same time in 2011.  I’m sure I found TheCruelestSport.com via a
Steve Kim tweet and knew within a paragraph how large Carlos’ talent was by the
only indicator I trust: Envy.

Once you’ve decided you’re a writer you’ve
unwittingly entered a competition with everyone you read henceforth, and
reading, the deep pleasures of which first made you think about writing,
changes and changes.  You imitate your favorite
writers, reading them more to write them better – like Ellison transcribing
Hemingway – and they become your influences, and then you read their influences,
and if all goes well you luck into Harold Bloom’s misprision.  Along the way you start reading the seams of
others’ writing, both in the way a couturier examines a dress and the way a
major leaguer knows to lay-off a breaking ball. 
You see the dozens of decisions every author makes on every page, and
how he executes them, and frankly it makes reading average writers a lot less
fun. 

But reading takes care of its own, and if you
enjoy it enough to do it enough, reading leads you to the best writers, and their
stitches are so tight, and they hide the ball so well in their windups, you
transcend your pettiness and enjoy them much more than you could if you weren’t
a writer.  I thought about this a goodish
bit by the midpoint of “Sporting Blood” – about just how much I was enjoying
the experience of being immersed in Carlos’ world, however unpleasant he tries
to make it.  (There is no flimflamming in
the book’s subtitle.  More about that in
a bit.)

Carlos writes in a masculine prose that is not
macho.  It knows what it is, has no
compulsion to explain itself, feels effortless, knows where it’s going, and doesn’t
compromise its style for others’ whims. 
Carlos himself is nearly unknowable in his writing and uncompromising.

Most of the authors to which Carlos Acevedo now will
be compared had either great editing or incredible access and usually
both.  They worked at newspapers or magazines
with full editorial staffs, sat a row or two from the canvas at every fight,
and got to follow their subjects from training camps into dressing rooms and
back to hotels.  Carlos has matched or
bettered them with a library card.  That
takes ambition, discipline and magic.

“In the years since his humiliating surrender to
Sugar Ray Leonard in the infamous ‘No Mas’ debacle, Roberto Durán, formerly the
most revered fighter in the world, had become little more than a pot-bellied
barfly whose roadwork consisted of chasing women.”

That’s from “Yesterday Will Make You Cry” – a
chapter about Davey Moore, not Roberto Duran, and it’s a good look at the craft
one finds throughout the book. 
“Pot-bellied barfly” is both rhythmic and evocative, and wonderful for
being unnecessary.  It’s writing for
those who love to read.  Here’s some
more:

“Although [Mike] Quarry never won a world title,
he was surely the undisputed parking lot champion of the San Joaquin
Valley.  More than one poor schlub found
himself, bridgework loosened, nose newly askew, laid out on some patch of
concrete in Bakersfield, courtesy of a left hook that had failed to stop some
of the best light heavyweights in the world but was more than enough for
paunchy nightcrawlers who trained exclusively on Combos, Alabama Slammers, and
Marlboros.”

That’s from “Lived Forward, Learned Backward” – a
chapter about the Quarry Curse.  The
second sentence just goes on and on, reveling in its stamina.  I was chuckling and shaking my head and
thinking what the hell is Carlos doing? even before the “punchy
nightcrawlers” showed up with their “Combos, Alabama Slammers, and Marlboros.”

This book is ever judgmental but never
unsympathetic.  It embraces the absurdity
of its subjects’ lives the way many of them lived to do.  And it’s joyful in its own immersion.  “Total Everything Now” is an exquisite
chapter, beginning with its title, about Mike Tyson’s 1988, peppered throughout
with mentions of Tyson’s notorious mother-in-law, Ruth Roper.  But not until the sixth allusion to Ruth (a
feeling of pity, distress, or grief), a gratuitous parenthetical about her
ubiquitousness on the chapter’s final page, do you realize Carlos has aptly and
humorously used her name for seasoning throughout.

He does something similarly free-indirect with
drugs in a chapter about Sonny Liston’s death, “Red Arrow”, named after “a
bebop trumpeter nicknamed ‘The Red Arrow.’” 
Suddenly a hitherto-sober book fills with amphetamines, morphine,
mushrooms, pot, LSD, horse, barbiturates, tranquilizers, reefer, coke, sniffing,
shooting, skag, joypopping, and chasing the dragon.

Which at last brings us zigging and zagging to a
theory about Acevedo’s choice of subject, “The Dark Side of Boxing”.  The best writers want to be read creatively,
and so here comes some creative reading:

In “Sporting Blood’s” final 10 pages one of
Acevedo’s numerous and rich similes includes William S. Burroughs and his cut-up
method (wherein Burroughs took linear stories, cut them to pieces, then
reassembled them in nonlinear ways).  Subsequently
I spent Saturday reading “Naked Lunch” – Burroughs’ 1959 tale of debauchery –
thinking about how Carlos tells his stories of Muhammad Ali (“A Ghost Orbiting
Forever”), Aaron Pryor (“Right on for the Darkness”), Johnny Tapia (“Under
Saturn”) and Tony Ayala Jr. (“The Lightning Within”).  If one set out to use a cut-up style to
describe actual prizefights, it mightn’t work; there are but eight punches in
the boxing cannon, after all, and championship matches generally progress in an
orderly if not predictable way.  But if
one wished to tell to-the-edge-of-panic tales of these men’s lives both before
and after prizefighting . . .

*

CARSON, Calif. – Before Chocolatito got stretched
by The Rat King, I flattened my left hand and set it at eye level then said to Sean
Nam, a talented young boxing writer from New York, “Here’s Carlos.”

Then I set my right hand at chest level and said,
“And here’s everyone else.”

*

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

SAN ANTONIO – Frantic is the word for it.  I sat on the back porch Saturday morning and watched through the yards a wellbuilt neighbor in his late 50s or early 60s with a pickup truck or two, a surfeit of energy and no way to show industry.  He strode across his walkway, got in his pickup and moved it five feet.  Then he got out and went back in his house.  Five minutes later he was outside to move the truck again, more or less replacing it, then some lingering then back in the house.

Ten minutes later he was outside again, this time
pulling his pickup out the driveway to station it on the street.  Then to the cellphone.  Then a couple laps round the pickup and back
in the house.  Ten minutes later someone,
a coworker or familiar in a similar truck, arrived, and there was a blessed
excuse to drive somewhere, and off they went.

It hadn’t been four days since the mayor ordered
citizens to stay in their homes.  Nothing
herculean there.  Just stay home.  Unless you have an emergency, just stay in
your home and wait for this to blow over. 
Don’t be a vector.  Two-thirds of
us, to judge by traffic patterns, heeded his counsel.  But there’s always an anxious third that just
can’t help itself – folks who can no more stand their own company than a dog
can resist barking.

Someday, I imagined, stories written about this
time will make what inevitable sickness or death visit my neighbor like a
mountain of coincidences, mischief of the diabolus ex machina; had only he just
resisted that final urge to run to Wal-Mart to buy an extension cord, why, he’d
be with us today.  And those stories will
be wrong.

The energy such men are taught to show is a
consuming anxiety.  Thoreau’s “quiet
desperation” – a gnawing need to show they can provide.  Those who fancy themselves leaders are worst
in crises like this one.  They can
weather any storm and giddily sacrifice themselves for the smallest mission but
cannot sit still.  The one torture they
cannot withstand is their own company, the misery of being by themselves.  When they’re not leading often as not they
are drinking.  The alcohol makes them
ornery and gives their fidgety trip to the corner store a heroic sheen.

This is where hustle culture abandons us.  When there’s nothing to hustle for.  When the environment we self-optimized for
changes into something new and as yet unknowable and unpredictable.  Time to learn a new language! time to start a
new business! time to get up an hour earlier! 
For what? for what? for what?

And so on in a tightening spiral of dread.  And that’s before the imagination even gets
warmed up.

Now is a capital time for relaxation.  For doing nothing.  For showing complacency.  For catching-up on lost naps.  For reading whatever amuses you, regardless its
nutrients.  For doing whatever mindless
thing you fancy (for me it’s watching videos of men shaving with Merkur
slant-blade safety razors, silver-tipped badger-hair brushes and artisan soaps).  For conserving calories.

For many American men that’s a treasonous
suggestion, still.  But if you were
working really hard three weeks ago, is there any chance your working a touch
harder might’ve precluded your restaurant’s closure, your 401K’s ruin, your corporation’s
market cap being sawed in half?

An amateur boxer self-optimizes differently in
camp for three, two-minute rounds than a defending champion self-optimizes for
12, three-minute rounds, and both self-optimize differently than what
predecessors of theirs kept fighting till one could no longer toe the line.  How much different would their training camps
be, too, if some fights arbitrarily ended with a bell after 35 seconds and
others went the duration of cricket matches?

Even that analogy assumes a fight would be done
with gloves or at least combat of some sort and that there would be a
fight.  No such assumptions be
trustworthy now.  Supply and demand
aren’t supposed to crash together.  A
hundred men will make 100 different predictions for what the world’ll look like
a year from now, and one will be right, and we’ll hail him like an oracle (and
hale his 99 peers like witlings), but none of us knows.  None of us knows.

It’s good to be unafraid, as always, but not
cocksure.  If you are in an essential
trade like garbage-collection, by all means go to work and stay safe as
possible.  If you’re in an inessential
trade, though, like accounting or sales or data analytics, don’t convince
yourself otherwise; heed your mayor’s counsel and stay in your home and husband
your energy for whatever happens on the other side.  It’s going to be harder than you think.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry 

By Bart Barry

SAN ANTONIO – If writing this column in a time of
quarantine has advantages they are not immediately apparent.  This city has reacted quickly for a Southern
one, postponing Fiesta – our admittedly incongruous celebration, wherein a
majority-Latinx community celebrates the taking of Texas from Mexico by playing
in unfaltering rotation “Sweet Home Alabama” – which means at about half the
speed of a Northern city.  Looking out
the kitchen window is not much fun as the coffeeshop window, even whilst
sipping TexaCola
while Gramatik’s SB#2 saunters through AKG noise-cancelers.

There was a metered line at the entrance to the
supermarket this morning, after it closed four hours early yesterday, but it
wasn’t ominous as that; the stockers, too, were locked out all night and needed
extra space to shelve items.  The
metering was done by the time I left.  Here,
too, there has been a run on toilet paper because everybody is doing it so it
must be worth doing and one regains a sense of control when he stockpiles for
his family, especially bulky, soft items.

There’s raw generational conflict on social media,
and as a member of our smallest contemporary generation I find it more amusing
than enkindling – greeting each day with practiced pragmatism in lieu of ideological
braying.  The GenX philosophy: Referee
the fight, treaty with the winner.

Since there’s plenty of time for reading these
days and Press Box Publicity was kind enough to send a review copy of “Coach to
Coach: An Empowering Story About How to Be a Great Leader” by Martin Rooney
(Wiley, $23.00), let’s go there and see. 
Wherever it might wish itself shelved – “BUSINESS & ECONOMICS/Motivational”
says the back flap – this book is a selfhelp work of fiction based on true
events, light and breezy, its 30,000 or so words stretched ambitiously across 182
hardcover pages.

It’s a sparse sort of football-themed remake of Eliyahu
Goldratt’s “The Goal” – that genrebending tale of production dynamics that save
a manufacturing floor and a marriage, 15 years before “Who Moved My Cheese?” reduced
American business literature to a coloring book.  “Coach to Coach” feels like a book a mentor
gives a young man starting-out in coaching after getting through college
without reading a full-length anything.  Maybe
it knows its audience too well.

It also feels like this hardcover is but the
opening gambit in a multimedia extravaganza, to be followed by a TED Talk,
corporate speaking engagements and the ubiquitous podcast.  Nothing in the book is wrong.  And nothing in the book is complex.  Promoters and participants in this genre
would have us believe they take mankind’s greatest mysteries and distill them
to their essence, roughly one mystery a week, like Gurudev channeling Sudharshan
Kriya after a decade in isolation.

Unlikely.  Their
selfhelp magic works in inverse proportion to a reader’s experience outside the
genre:

“Empathy is first about spending time thinking
about where someone is coming from.  Only
then can you help them get to where they want to go.  And the only way to ‘hear’ where someone
wants to go is to take the time to listen.”

That is an aphorism Martin Rooney’s coach, Brian
Knight, writes in his coaching notebook the night before his team’s “big home
game” about 4/5 of the way through his book. 
That it’s italicized says quite a bit.

A more sophisticated reader interested in improving
himself as a coach might be better served by Nunyo Demasio’s “Parcells: A
Football Life”.  About six times the
length of “Coach to Coach” Demasio’s exhaustive biography shows how successful
a man can be manipulating young men in football equipment while laying waste to
the lives of those who love him.

Ah hah, see that, “Coach to Coach” gets right to
the essence in a fraction of the time!

And whither the time you save not-reading long works
about complex characters?

Rooney’s story is driven by an “old coach” who
appears without exposition after Brian Knight’s linebacking corps underperforms,
and the old coach teaches with stories.  In
the spirit of that method, here’s a quick story about misplaced efficiency:

Mark kept a large dictionary on his desk in the
marketing department at one of the nation’s largest insurers.  One day, Billy came by and spotted the
dictionary.

“Hey bro,” Billy guffawed.  “What, haven’t you ever heard of Dictionary.com?”

“I have,” said Mark, a little annoyed by Billy’s
question.

“We’re the same age,” Billy said, knowing he and
Mark liked to flirt with Sarah, a project manager across the hall.  “Why are you wasting time looking things up
in a big old book?”

“Have a seat,” Mark said, offering Billy a
chair.  “There’s a secret I’m going to
tell you.”

“Think I’ll stand if it’s all the same,” said
Billy.  “But tell me the secret.”

“If you only go right to the words you know you
don’t know,” said Mark, “you never get a chance to see all the words you don’t
know you don’t know.”

“Wow!” said Billy, with deep admiration.  “I guess I never thought of it like that.”

“Happy to help,” said Mark.

“I’m going to go tell Sarah what a cool guy you
are,” said Billy, giving Mark a fist-bump.

*

The truth of selfhelp books is they succeed at
what they’re about, which is selling more selfhelp books.  It is rare such a book leaves you feeling
less than you did when you began reading it and rarer still you remember its lesson
a year later.  But they serve a purpose,
and those of us who read often and deeply probably oughtn’t scoff often and
deeply as we do at the genre.  You could
do much worse than spend this quarantine reading selfhelp books.  You could do better, too.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Initiative is the word for it.

It’s what Deontay Wilder had in the first match
and lacked in the second, the first 30 seconds said.  Tyson Fury wasn’t blarneying pure when he
promised an early knockout.  He fought
the opening halfminute like a man who read the tale of the tape and wondered
what the hell his timidity’d been about 14 months prior.

Fury stepped directly in Wilder’s space and
surprised both men when he did.  There’s
a primeval intelligence in us all, most carry it much deeper than prizefighters
do, and Fury found it and employed it, and Wilder got stunned by it.

A good argument exists for why this intelligence formed
and why we retain it: survival of the species. 
One thing a species isn’t supposed to have in this unpredictable and
oft-violent world is a capacity for selfextermination; perils enough abound
without a species’ predators making prey of their brothers.  This primeval intelligence, then, is about
sensing instantly in your gut who you can dominate and to whom you must submit,
to forgo mortal conflicts.

Men the size of Fury and Wilder are wholly
unaccustomed to submission’s unmistakable electricity.  If Wilder’d ever felt it before in his life
it was only accompanied by bonedeep fatigue (that undefeated coward-maker) and
never in the opening halfminute of a confrontation.

Yet there it was. 
Wilder’s eyes bulged and his mouth opened, and the signal bounced from tower
to tower.

Wilder: What?

Fury: Aye.

Wilder: Wait, what?

Fury: Aye.

Whatever made Wilder initially weak then multiplied
itself by itself.  The retreat, the
absorption of abuse, the sudden and desperate summoning of boxing skills he
never has had.  Wilder’s feet were below
a different body a full round before his right leg went frictionlessly from
underneath him like an iceskate.

Fury’s right fist in round 3, the devastating
conclusion of a 3-2 combo whose effect shocked Fury nearly much as Wilder, drove
upon Wilder’s left ear and made it seep blood like an ear should not.  Wilder went down like he’d been
hiptossed.  And Wilder winced from the
deep pain of taking a punch from a 270-pound man in a place he was unprepared
to be punched.  Imagine, next, finding
yourself on your chest, legs unreliable, the left side of your head shrieking
pain.  And not even a quarter of the way
through your scheduled ordeal.

Wilder was unlucky to escape round 3.  Had the round been a minute younger, probably
Kenny Bayless would have stopped it with Fury’s next charge, extending Wilder’s
career and wits.

By the time Wilder got dropped by a shoving body
punch a couple rounds later the only decent reaction to his plight was
sympathy.  I felt it while reviewing the
rematch.  Wilder rose with a body and
face that strove for one thing – dignity. 
There was no bravado left, not much predatory impulse, surely no wiles;
Deontay just wanted to be dignified about lifting himself off the bluemat. 

Oddly, maybe, I thought of Bernard Hopkins and
what he said before his match with a different man from the United Kingdom: “I
would never let a white boy beat me. I would never lose to a white boy.”

I’m ignorant to the origin of Hopkins’ sentiments,
for a variety of reasons including privilege, and there’s no telling if Deontay
related to those words then or later, but wherever and however Hopkins first
heard that sentiment chances aren’t bad Deontay’s heard similar.  As if the burden of making combat with a
fellow giant weren’t enough, right?

Which isn’t a bad segue to the costume issue.  It’s not farfetched as it sounded when Wilder
spoke on it.  An enormous error in
judgement, that getup.  The weight of it
isn’t so much the thing either.  It’s the
deprivation of air, the lunacy of covering one’s face during a massive surge of
adrenaline, and the LEDs.

Not so long ago I subjected myself to a
stroboscopic experience called PandoraStar, choosing right idiotically a
30-minute “Energy” experience, and let me impart: Flashing lights on the backs
of your eyelids scramble your brain.  How
do I mean?  I was five minutes in the
experience before finding my rightmind enough to sing the ABCs; I once made a
decent living in letters, that is, and for at least 300 seconds I couldn’t
remember any.

Is that what happened to Deontay?  Hell if I know, but he wasn’t right from the
opening bell. 

Deontay has three qualities as a prizefighter: Menace,
conditioning, power.  Deprived of his
conditioning – his mouth was open 10 seconds in – Deontay had little power to dispatch,
and his countenance the entire match was more reliably worried than fearsome.

This time round, too, when Deontay launched a
righthand and missed, he got hammered, not hugged.  In the 2018 match Fury seemed so relieved when
Wilder’s right missed he embraced the man as if from joy.  This time he punished him, roughhousing and choking
him in clinches, delighting at his weakness, toying with him, putting his
weight on him, dominating him – even fellating his bloody neck.

There’s no way Wilder prepared for those
experiences after the first match. 
Almost definitely Wilder’s camp got dedicated to closing escape routes
and visiting a concussion on Fury 18 minutes earlier at least.

Which brings us to the coming rubber match.  If Wilder is to have even a puncher’s chance
he needs to change Fury’s entire calculus in less than a minute, violently
unraveling their identities before either man has time to remember their order.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Editor’s note: Chocolatito City
was a five-part series written in the doldrums of 2016.

*

Saturday in Frisco, Texas, Nicaraguan Roman
“Chocolatito” Gonzalez defeated Birmingham’s Khalid Yafai by ninthround
knockout to snatch Yafai’s WBA super flyweight title surely as he snatched
Yafai’s consciousness with a gorgeous 1-2 that might’ve been a 3-2, aiming as
Chocolatito did for Yafai’s lead hand much as his head, then putting his cross,
the 2, square on Yafai’s open chin.  If
it was the last great fight legend tells us remains within every great fighter,
well, it was just that.

Evidently the reports of Chocolatito’s demise have
been greatly exaggerated – even by sources
esteemed as this one.  Perhaps it was
a misplaced desire to put a neat bookend on an era or to justify not-traveling
a comparatively small distance to see a legend win another title fight,
especially after traveling a lot farther to see him washed and folded in
Carson, Calif.

Whatever it was it didn’t work, and worse yet, it
caused a tempering of joy for what did work. 
While picking against Tyson Fury a couple weeks ago did nothing to detract
from the emotion of watching him denude Deontay “Wardrobe Malfunction” Wilder,
oddly writing disparagingly of Chocolatito’s comeback detracted from the
experience of his prevailing in Frisco.  As
an underdog.

Somewhere it already must be written or said a
reliable mark of greatness is winning a match as a betting underdog.  The bookmakers know what they’re doing
because all they’re doing is balancing a ledger, and selforganization of those
who suspect themselves experts enough to wager zealously on a prizefight dictates
their balanced ledger comprises wisdom. 
The chalk, as it’s known, is right far more often than boxing
experts.  And the chalk had Yafai a
slight favorite.

The usefulness of the chalk in evaluating
greatness is how infrequently the chalk gets fooled by prefight gimmickry;
where socialmedia posts cost a few seconds and seek to game imagined popularity
metrics a man who places a wager with a bookmaker has a financial incentive to
ignore what promotional noise the rest of us feed on.  Some of us bet $20 to enjoy a fight more,
surely, but those sorts of bets don’t move the chalk.

Let’s treat Big Drama Show for a moment, here, as
his case is proper illustrative.  During
his “historic” reign as middleweight champion, how often did Gennady Golovkin beat
men favored to beat him?

Well, never, because, duh, everyone in the world
was afraid of him so he had no choice but to fight little guys whom bookmakers
knew had no chance of beating him!

What might’ve happened had he plied his wares against
men who weighed 168 pounds rather than 148? 
The chalk would’ve reflected that, making Andre Ward, for instance, a
comfortable favorite and likely making both BJ Saunders and Callum Smith narrow
favorites, because the chalk knew Golovkin’s power wouldn’t travel, whatever
the HBO hype machine screamed at us. 
Thus, had Golovkin dared to be great and challenged a super middleweight
titlist during his prime and beaten someone oddsmakers favored over him, his
legacy would be different from what it will be, no matter the outcomes of his subsequent
matches with Canelo – whom historians will place 50 or so spots above him.

Did Chocolatito deserve to be an underdog
Saturday?  Yes.  He got stopped right brutally 2 1/2 years ago
by someone, Srisaket Sor Rungvisai, whom aficionados regard as excellent more
than unbeatable.  As Gallo Estrada showed
us a year ago, a prime Chocolatito should not be iced by any version of Sor
Rungvisai – hence the version of Chocolatito who did get stretched was not
prime.

If at age 32 Chocolatito is not quite ancient for a
former world minimumweight champion he is close, and he’s also matching
himself, at 115 pounds, with men who absorb punches multiples better than 105-pounders
do because, as we know, fighters gain weight on their chins more than their
fists.  Some of what happened Saturday, too,
was about styles.

Power punchers like Sor Rungvisai, who get foiled
often by defensive specialists, treat volume guys like Chocolatito much as a
threshing machine treats dry husks, while volume guys like Chocolatito tend to
overwhelm stylists like Yafai – which is why Sor Rungvisai’s decision to box
with a stylist like Estrada wasn’t wrongheaded as reported and neither was Yafai’s
decision to switch from cutiepie to enforcer when matched with a
volume-punching genius (whom he was never going to dissuade with defensive
precision).

Wait, but BK and Latin Snake told us a hundred
times each . . . Yes, yes, I know – Yafai is a former Olympian who foolishly abandoned
the strategy they scripted for him.  Well,
guess what, guys, if Gallo Estrada couldn’t foil Chocolatito with a jab,
there’s no chance in this iteration of the universe or the next Yafai could,
and to Yafai’s credit, he got that almost instantly and did what he calculated,
as a former Olympian, gave him the best chance.

Because it didn’t work doesn’t mean it was wrong; Chocolatito
in his prime, at, say, 108 pounds, cut guys like Yafai in half in five rounds;
seven pounds and seven years beyond his prime, it turns out, Chocolatito still
has enough to raze guys like Yafai in nine rounds.  Yafai might have boxed his way to a dull and
lopsided-decision loss to Chocolatito. 
Instead he made an entertaining gamble on his own size and
strength.  He lost his title but gave us
an unforgettable experience.

I’ll take more of that, please.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

“Playing to strengths delivers excellence; merely
fixing weaknesses does not.” – Paddy Upton, “The Barefoot Coach”

Saturday in Las Vegas, British heavyweight Tyson
“Gypsy King” Fury at long last rematches his 2018 championship draw with
American Deontay “Bronze Bomber” Wilder. 
As the rematch will be a pay-per-view affair the next six days promise
an explosion of hyperbole to which this column will not contribute.

Because neither man is what one’d call “good” at
boxing.  In fact, to honor NBA All-Star
Weekend here’s an oldschool simile: Fury-Wilder 1 held all the aesthetic
delights of a threepoint shooting contest between Robert Parish and Mark Eaton.

Because he looks the part, probably we get
unfairly tough on Deontay here; while Fury fights very much like an obese gypsy
in recovery, Wilder does too, despite looking an Adonis dipped in espresso-gold.

As part of precolumn research that was not
exhaustive I partook of a video called “Deontay Wilder VS Tyson Fury
Highlight | The best Fight” – by virtue of its viewcount and pedigree the
video’s title appears unironical, and that is remarkable given how much
fighting it does not have in its 12 minutes. 
The video features someone’s honest effort to cross-stitch a
championship prizefight’s best 1/3, and there aren’t a dozen clean punches landed
the whole reel.

You’ve got Tyson doing his slap-n-jiggle thing, playfully
spanking Deontay’s cheek with his palm whilst his torso jiggles like it too was
playfully spanked, and you’ve got Deontay, decidedly less urgent, doing his
“Wilder and” Wilder thing, punctuating each quixotic tilt with a windmill
right.  It’s immensely entertaining in
its way, though, because of the men’s simple immensity.

I recall its being way more entertaining in
realtime, too, for the reason every heavyweight fight is suspenseful.  Knowing what didn’t happen after 36 minutes,
though, makes reviews tedious, in a way the rematch may prove.

It seems Fury outsmarted himself in this leadup as
well.  Much of his good scoring in the
first fight concerned universal doubts as to his mettle and durability.  He’d told us he was a miracle of regained
character and volition, and told us and told us, but knowing he’d be chased by
a giant lunatic for a halfhour or so few of us thought he’d pitch the perfect
game he needed.  Yet he almost did.  And every minute that went by with his
remaining upright favored him on every scorecard, official or otherwise; Fury
got a whole lot of credit for ring generalship and defense so long as Wilder’s
aggression remained ineffective and his punching stayed uncleanly.

But for this rematch Fury’s been running his mouth
about an early knockout.  He doesn’t plan
to do this – it’s too ridiculous of a prospect, even, to be a prefight chess
move – but in selling the fight in an unoriginal way Fury has changed
expectations.  You spend your
trainingcamp citing selfhelp literature and people mistake your every retreat
for strategy and in some cases courage, but you tell people you’re there to
snatch another man’s consciousness, and quickly, you’re getting a lot less
credit for not-punching.

Wilder, meanwhile, is a man of his word.  He’s there to bean you with a fastball, and
he don’t say otherwise.  What’s sometimes
lost in our promoter-induced squinting to see talent in Fury that absolutely is
not there (shrink him to 135 pounds, call Juan Manuel Marquez and administer
extreme unction) is what a specimen of conditioning Wilder is.

Until you’ve hurled yourself headlong at sea-level
air you don’t realize how tiring it can be. 
Wilder loads his life into half his punches, misses cleanly and then shoulders
the burden of stopping his right fist from sailing to the cheap seats.  Missing punches is physically fatiguing as it
is spiritually discouraging.  And yet.

Wilder had strength and selfbelief enough to knock
the dust off Fury 33 unsuccessful minutes after he started trying.  We spent an unfortunate amount of time
praising Fury for his lastround Lazarus, postfight, without commenting enough
on Wilder’s unexpected round-12 power; Wilder merely met expectations while
Fury exceeded them.

That quote at the top explains the success of Wilder’s career philosophy.  He began boxing too late in life to trifle with nuance.  The last American male to win an Olympic heavyweight medal, Wilder saw his marketing potential long, long before any of us imagined he’d be a unified titlist.  He saw the fear in other men’s eyes – including refs’ – when he went crazy, and he kept iterating his way to the most frightful competitor he could be.  That required an ability to cut a man’s lights with any punch he threw, no matter how early or late, and doing so requires great fitness.

Where an uncertain athlete might’ve found his way
to Wild Card or Kronk to learn footwork or head movement or conservation of
energy, by 2010, Wilder took only what he did best and committed to doing it
better.  If the holes in his style aren’t
any larger now than when he started, they are, surprisingly, no smaller.

But what, honestly, has any man done to exploit
these holes?  Fury got so flustered by
Wilder’s intensity he forgot to hook Wilder’s elbows on every clinch.  Be not fooled by Tyson’s opportune mugging
later; he was proper frightened for his first 10 minutes across from Deontay.  Which is proper absurd in its own right – nature
endowed Fury with a larger frame than even the top 1-percent of all men in
human history, but he sure doesn’t fight like it.

Saturday I’ll be cheering for one outcome as usual.  A knockout. 
Since Wilder is much likelier to bestow it, I’ll take him: KO-9.

*

Author’s note: This column will be on sabbatical
next week while its writer visits Mexico.

*

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Three Saturdays from now a comain at the Dallas
Cowboys’ practice facility will feature Nicaragua’s Roman “Chocolatito”
Gonzalez, the once king of our beloved sport. 
Chocolatito will challenge Birmingham’s Khalid Yafai for Yafai’s WBA
super flyweight world title.  It will be
the third time Chocolatito fights since what Srisaket Sor Rungvisai did to him
in 2017.  It likely won’t go well for
Chocolatito.

It’s the sort of return that appears to be financial-advisor-mandated
more than love-o’-the-game compelled.

How dare I? 
Well it’s the weight mostly.  In
some longlost video or other familiars of Chocolatito’s crowed after his second
and brutalest loss he’d been manipulated somehow or other to make fights at super
flyweight.

Now he’s back at that weight in a tilt with a
legitimate titlist who knows how to punch and be punched at 115 pounds, and
more troublesome still: Yafai made his prizefighting debut at 122 3/4
pounds.  Chocolatito’s own debut, 15
years ago, happened at 108.  No need to
bore you with the maths, dear reader, but 14 pounds on a man who weighs not
much more than 100 is an appreciable bit, and more appreciable still on a man
who invites contact the way Chocolatito does. 

If there’s a lasting strike against Chocolatito as
a stylist it lies in how much he allows and always has allowed opponents’
gloves touch him.  Chocolatito is a
proper prizefighter and showman, mentored by a modern master of the craft, the
late Alexis Arguello, and the craft until recently required a man be punched to
achieve celebrity and wealth.  That is
how Chocolatito learned to fight, then, before men learned to extend their
careers by specializing in defense and mic skills, igniting in ticketbuyers a frothing
lust to see them slept, and pundits adapted themselves to modern metrics, going
along with a charade the best fighter is he who fights least.

If Chocolatito, pre-Rat King at least, did not
often catch punches flush on his chin he nevertheless caught plenty on his
shoulders and wrists.  Even a novel
dissuasion technique of his – hanging the hook between an opponent’s right shoulder
and ear such that the opponent’s cross necessarily drove Chocolatito’s left
knuckles into the side of his aggressor’s head – required an opponent’s right
wrist at least to crash against Chocolatito’s upper left arm or shoulder.

Which wasn’t any problem when Chocolatito was
young and nimble and big as those who challenged him.  That stopped quite abruptly in 2016, when Chocolatito
made a successful if illadvised challenge for Carlos Cuadras’ super flyweight
title.  Chocolatito did what he’d always
done and well as he’d always done it but the effect it took on Cuadras was disproportionately
less than anticipated.  And that
anticipated what’d come next even while few of us did.

Srisaket Sor Rungvisai is an excellent and
bruising prizefighter but hardly the man we expected to unseat the world’s
best.  Sor Rungvisai did so with quite a
bit of skill but even more physicality. 
Just that suddenly the headbutts and whatnots that favored Chocolatito,
always, favored his opponent moreso.  If
Chocolatito looked a man threadbaring himself in his first match of 2017 he
looked worn and desperate by September of that year, when Sor Rungvisai’s
misses moved him round the canvas.  Sor
Rungvisai was happy to trade with Chocolatito, and a few minutes into their
rematch it was a mismatch.

Not since Roy Jones Jr.’s collapse did a man
considered invincible look so immediately vincible.  Since then Chocolatito has been semiretired,
fighting twice in 29 months against men with a cumulative 10 losses and four
draws on their dossiers, sparring partners honored to share a mat with
him.  Even so.

A couple months ago in Tokyo against Diomel Diocos,
a man of impeccable courtesy and a chin that floats, Chocolatito looked
initially dull, needing a round and a half too long to victimize a designated
victim.  Because at 115 pounds his
punches no longer pack, Chocolatito exerts more throwing them, both tiring and disbalancing
himself; even the feckless Diocos managed to get an uppercut in position for
Chocolatito to impale himself.  Luckily
for Chocolatito, of course, Diocos, in the homestretch of a 1-4 year and seven
fights since his last knockout, hadn’t a prayer of hurting Chocolatito, who
looked more sheepish than vicious in finishing him.

Unluckily for Chocolatito, the whole thing now
looks a setup, doesn’t it?  In Frisco,
Chocolatito will fight under a British promotional banner a man the BBC calls Britain’s
longest reigning world champion.  What do
you think that portends?

Hint: “A chance to justify a rubber match with Sor
Rungvisai!” mightn’t be the answer.

No, the purpose of Yafai-Gonzalez is to get the
Brummie a hall-of-fame scalp en route to a higherpaying affair with higherweighing
men.  Fair is fair, right, and it’s all
in the game, yes, but one hates to see it in realtime, a man once an example of
boxing’s best qualities made an example of a different sort altogether.

A couple hours ago, when I set about this column,
I believe I planned to name it “Why I’ll be in Frisco” – and now I realize why I
won’t be.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry