By Bart Barry-

Saturday at Madison Square Garden in a fight
broadcast by DAZN, statuesque world heavyweight champion Anthony Joshua and misshapen
challenger Andy Ruiz made quite possibly the funniest spectacle in our beloved sport’s
history.  If you weren’t laughing or at
least smiling you missed one of life’s unique opportunities, and if you were
among others who weren’t laughing with you, why, you must improve your
associations immediately.

Chubby Andy Ruiz, brought in on short notice for a
ritual humiliation with the baddest man on the planet, razed Joshua a fourtime,
made him a passive round-7 quitter, and humiliated the whole of boxing’s heavyweight
institution.

The moment was ecstatic.  As ringside commentators and scribes readied
their solemnest tones to impart the historic import of what just happened, the
DAZN replays, hyper-definition hyper-slo-mo showed the challenger’s back,
jiggling pornographically, as he put the finishing touches on AJ.  It was a form of visual comedy whose
authenticity someday may be matched but cannot be topped.  It was a sight so wondrous a child couldn’t
miss its absurdity and any right-thinking adult had to enjoy it a hundred times
more for its rarity.

Joshua, to his credit, laughed through the entire
episode; perhaps the absurdity enchanted him, too, or perhaps he was knocked
silly or perhaps longsuffering aficionados called for comeuppance in a single
voice and for once the universe heeded us. 
It was not a joke on Joshua so much as his enablers.  The selfaggrandizing fleshpeddlers and
circusbarkers, the celebrity tourists and their publicists, the vlog buffs and
podcast critics and every dweeb with a calculator app and pay-per-view
prediction, the lot of them, didn’t know enough to laugh – didn’t realize the
moment called for joyful selflessness, for losing oneself not in Ruiz’s triumph
but in our sport’s absurdest moment.

“Honest to God, he’s going to lose to Ruiz.”

“AJ’s going to get caught with a lucky punch?”

“Nope.”

“He’s going to separate his shoulder or sprain his
ankle?”

“Not even close.”

“He’s going to get robbed by Yank judging?”

“Colder.”

“I give up.”

“Fully able to continue, after getting spanked and
sparked by an obese lad over whom he towers, Joshua’s going to spit his
mouthpiece, retreat to a corner and refuse to defend his four titles one second
longer.”

Part of the ecstasy of the moment was its impossible
unpredictability.  Even if a wiseacre or
innocent among us bothered to pick Ruiz on a lark, not even he might’ve
predicted Saturday’s final instants: Joshua’s taking a knee, enduring another
count, rising robotically, retreating to a corner, refusing to toe the line,
telling the referee he wanted to toe the line, reclining further in his corner,
refusing to toe the line, telling the referee he wanted to toe the line,
watching the referee wave hands in front of him, feigning a momentary disgust, resigning
himself, reclining once more.

Joshua’s hardest fight was with disbelief much as Andy
Ruiz.  Told his entire career what a
business he was, how many livelihoods he sustained throughout the kingdom, how
groundbreaking be his brand, AJ waited patiently for some institutional
intervention; his majesty requested a sabbatical in round 7, and only the
grandest act of ingratitude might deny it. 
Then it happened – his request got declined.  As you read this, whether on the day it is
published or 10 years later, Joshua still can’t believe his request for recovery
time got rejected.

Do you have any idea who I am?

It’s funnier still to know, as we all now do, his
request for sabbatical, if granted, wouldn’t have changed anything but the
official time of stoppage.  Joshua was
beaten in round 3, not even a halfminute after dropping Ruiz with a dandy
hook.  Ruiz rose, confused, while
something like the word “inevitable” went through every bystander’s mind at
once.  It was, then, time to train our
eyes on Joshua, the better to observe how quickly he took Ruiz’s consciousness,
compare it in real time with our recollection of what Deontay Wilder did a few
weeks back, and birth a fully formed conclusion on who would win the
hypothetical match between them.

And then in the middle of the sacrifice Saturday’s
scapegoat nipped its highpriest.  Just a
nip, truly, a balance shot but nothing a baddest man on the planet should register.  Then the entire artifice came down in a laughable
heap, rose, then came down again and again. 
We can leave the serious analysis to anyone who still takes any
heavyweight seriously but drop a breadcrumb as we skitter away laughing: Ruiz
nearly broke Joshua in half with a midrounds right cross to his midsection that
dropped the champion’s left guard surely as fatigue dropped the champion’s full
self, and that tells you the wisdom of Joshua’s wanting an immediate rematch.

How damnably fragile be these giants!  Ten punches in his finishing move Joshua was
suffocating, heaving his gorgeous pecks and regal delts, pleading Manhattan
thicken its air.  What the hell kind of
professional fighter finds himself drowning 10 punches in to a fight’s ninth
minute?

It added to the moment’s high mirth, though, it
did.  The fatman’s shimmying pursuit, the
giant’s ridiculous retreat, the most important arena in the history of
important arenas gone muted, the imperial palace reduced to what red sauce and
orange cheese cover an enchilada plate.

The spectacle was relentless fantastic.  The champion tagged and toothless, his mouth
alternating between airsucking ovals and get-this! smirks, the champion’s
boundless selfassurance swapped in a realtime identity crisis (how about that
ridiculous bouncing-n-boxing thing in round 6), and all for our entertainment.  Sport can be no more entertaining than
Saturday’s main event.  If you’re new to
boxing be grateful you’ll have a standard of comparison the rest of your days,
and if you’re old to boxing be grateful you lived long enough to witness the
funniest moment of the modern era.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Tomorrow, “Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World” (Riverhead Books) by David Epstein, author of “The Sports Gene”, will become available to the public.  There is but one mention of a boxer in the book, Vasyl Lomachenko, and this happens on page 8.  Because the subject is an interesting one, though, and because its publisher was kind enough to send me a review copy despite my disclosing both this site’s specialized subject matter and my own tiny readership, what follows is a criticism made in good faith.

The longer this book went on, and the deeper I
found myself in it, the less I enjoyed it. 
Not because of some unsettling truth, some grave misreading of myself or
my life’s choices held up to a mirror’s objective gaze; it was because the book
became increasingly repetitive and predictable.

All the usual suspects gather: Tolstoy, Einstein,
van Gogh, Darwin, Edison, Kasparov, Michelangelo, jazz, NASA, U.S. Armed Forces,
biomimicry-driven animal metaphors (foxes, frogs, birds, hedgehogs, darkhorses),
and lots and lots of PhDs.  Little of the
material written about any of these subjects is new or originally interpreted,
which makes their appearances unfortunate – since much of the rest of the book,
parts that don’t detail academic acclaim or retroactively certified greatness, are
quite enjoyable.

“Range’s” most enjoyable character is Frances
Hesselbein, centenarian and accidental CEO, who doesn’t prove the book’s
central theme, which is to be contrary, so much as give the book something
delightful.  Her primary gift, one
assumes, lies in her adaptability, which may make her a generalist or an
oscillating specialist or a fox or a hedgehog, depending where one finds her in
her history and chooses to place her in his thesis.  She is not a tidy package because she is a mammal,
and few such creatures are tidy packages.

But a celebration of mammalian adaptability is
well-trod already (M. Mitchell Waldrop knocked the subject out of the park 27
years ago with “Complexity”), and so a celebration of anti-specialists, people
who aren’t raised to be automaton prodigies like Tiger Woods, composes a highly
anticipated subject in 2019.  Woods
features prominently in the book’s opening, in a well-crafted, turn-the-clichés-around
sort of commentary that actually, and quite surprisingly, suffers in no way
from his unexpected Masters victory a few months ago – a happening that looked
nigh impossible during the time Epstein wrote “Range”.

Woods, of course, is the prototypical,
10,000-hours-to-mastery mold into which a million vicariously thrilled American
fathers have poured their offsprings’ childhoods since 1997 or so.

But watch how that might itself be turned round:

Eldrick had
an overbearing father.  The boy was
forced to play golf all the time because he had a gift, one his father told
business partners would change the world. 
Eldrick succeeded at a shockingly young age.  His course was set.  He would be the world’s greatest golfer and
the world’s richest golfer, the specialist’s specialist.  But after puberty Eldrick realized he had
another calling.  He spent nearly as many
hours practicing seduction techniques as chipping techniques.  He loved to uncover women like he uncovered
his driver (a tiger head sewn by his mother). 
One day the generalist that he loved to be clashed with the specialist the
world expected him to be.  Sponsors fled,
surgeries followed, he lost hundreds of millions of dollars in a divorce
settlement.  But he continued doggedly on
his generalist quest to prove a balding nerd raised at a country club could be
every bit as promiscuous as an NBA power forward or rock musician.  Some successes and many humiliations later, one
quiet spring afternoon in Georgia, Eldrick “Tiger” Woods became only the second
professional golfer ever to win 15 career majors.

*

The money Americans pay self-help authors creates
a gravity nonfiction authors of all stripes now find irresistible.  Subsequently, there’s something a touch too
glib in most American writing.  Every
character finds his life compressed into Forrest Gump’s.  Epstein appears aware of this and often resists
it.  But gravity remains:

“As a final flourish, with just a few hours of
work, a colleague helped (Gunpei Yokoi) program a clock into the display.  LCD screens were already in wristwatches, and
they figured it would give adults an excuse to buy their ‘Game & Watch’,”
Epstein writes about a generalist Nintendo employee.  Just four sentences later, Epstein completes
the epic thusly: “‘Game & Watch’ remained in production eleven years and
sold 43.4 million units.”

In a 100,000-word book, this is about the same as the
Gumpian invention of the smiley-face t-shirt. 

Ah, but this book is supposed to be t-shaped, rogue,
to make manifest its point about sampling numerous disciplines, represented
here as anecdotes, en route to serendipitous, interdisciplinary breakthroughs!

Well, OK. 
But let’s go all the way with our reconsideration of everything and ask
this entirely relevant question: Why bind all of this in a book when there are
more appropriate media available?

It’s because, in an inversion of its inversion,
this book wants the academy’s approval very much.  This thought happened somewhere in the middle
of an Epstein anecdote: “‘Outsider artists’ are the self-taught jazz masters of
visual art, and the originality of their work can be stunning.  In 2018, the National Gallery of Art featured
a full exhibition dedicated to self-taught artists; art history programs at
Stanford, Duke, Yale, and the Art Institute of Chicago now offer seminars in
outsider art.”

The academy approves, see!

But how very mediocre of it, and how perfectly
backwards.

The intended audience for this book, hyper-educated
professionals who fancy themselves rebellious, should be surprised exceptional
things happen for generations without once appearing in textbooks.  Nobody else will be, though, and certainly
nobody who reads often about our beloved sport.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday in Scotland the World Boxing Super Series held the final semifinals matches in its bantamweight and super lightweight divisions, and they went even better than hoped. Hometown southpaw Josh “Tartan Tornado” Taylor defanged Russian Ivan “The Beast” Baranchyk, and Japan’s “Monster” Naoya Inoue proved exactly that against Puerto Rican Emmanuel Rodriguez. The fighters’ aggregate record Saturday morning was 69-0 (52 KOs).

This wonderful DAZN combination of excellent performances in authentic prizefights, the rare fusion of excellence and authenticity, is something WBSS, in only its second season, has given us more of than any of its rivals. Not peers, mind you – rivals. Peers would be doing their best to do what WBSS does, which is provide incentive enough to our beloved sport’s abundance of shortsighted agents to make them please both current consumers and would-be consumers (most of whom self-identify as former consumers).

To wit: across the digital spectrum Saturday a former giant in the prizefighting space – forget not, Showtime, when it was lean and innovative a decade ago, gave us the Super Six – appealed to the worst of its remaining viewership by promoting a mismatch with an a-side’s homicidal musings. Likely there’ll be more here about what Deontay Wilder did, in a few weeks, after Anthony Joshua fights, because unless those guys are fighting one another or Tyson Fury, neither of them nor their exploits merits more than half a column anymore.

It’s much easier to be cavalier about boxing’s flagship division the week after a Naoya Inoue fight, isn’t it? He is the very essence of what pound-for-pound was intended to measure when the concept got launched during Sugar Ray Robinson’s era. If you were able to make Inoue and Wilder and Joshua and Fury the same size and fight them in a round tournament the question is not whether Inoue would emerge as winner or even if Inoue would win every match by knockout but whether any of today’s best heavyweights could make it out the first minute with him. The gulf in craft, leverage and reflex is that great.

To attract casual fans, I know, we’re supposed to pretend this is not so, we’re supposed to squint to see something great about today’s heavyweights besides their mass, but it simply cannot be done during WBSS season, when prime world titlists fight one another, one after the other, showing each other respect before and after their confrontations while subjecting one another to relentless violence between the ropes. It makes farcical inauthentic much of the rest of the year’s fare.

Inoue is the world’s best prizefighter right now. Better than Bud, better than Hi-Tech, better than The Truth, better than Canelo. He is making highlight-reel showcase opponents out of world titlists in matches expected by experts to be competitive. I can’t name his promoter, I don’t know his training techniques, I don’t know if he was an Olympian, and if he’s a heartthrob in his native land I don’t know about that either. I don’t know, in other words, any of the flummery publicists pass our ways when it’s time to grow the brand and risking more than words is out of the question.

Here’s what happened Saturday in WBSS’s bantamweight semifinal: Emmanuel Rodriguez, a larger man making the third defense of a title he won on the road, went directly at Inoue the way a champion does when he thinks his challenger is a hypejob. He moved Inoue back, too, and chastened him with a few counters, and the first round was excellent and competitive, exactly as an aficionado, as distinct from a branding fanatic, should wish every round of every fight be. The second round was going competitively, too, until Rodriguez turned a touch too brazenly on a left hook and got spuncycled on the next. After that things got real academic real quick. Inoue went bodysnatching, not headhunting, as a man does when he wants his opponent’s submission more than he wants a YouTube clip, and Rodriguez collapsed for being caved-in.

It was decisive and quick, not sloppy or preordained. It was another chance to be euphoric at the spectacle of boxing done beautifully.

And it wasn’t even Saturday’s main. That came after a moment of mutual admiration between Inoue and his WBSS-finals opponent, Nonito Donaire, now enjoying a career resurrection complete as it is completely unexpected. Donaire’s winding transition from promoter-creation brat to international ambassador concluded prettily with his sincere congratulations to Inoue, a moment of affection and elegance enough to make you proud of your commitment to our sport, enough to make you wonder, however briefly, if Donaire, once considered a prodigy too, mightn’t have a last hook in him, a sink-all-coffins-to-one counter that he starts with Inoue’s a millisecond earlier and a millimeter shorter and makes all Japan inhale sharply.

It’s a farfetched scenario, indeed, though not farfetched as Donaire’s simple presence in the finals; “dear Lord, give me just one chance to throw the hook” – so went Nonito’s prayer at tournament’s start, and now he will have it. A more answerable prayer will have Josh Taylor who, after blackmatting Ivan Baranchyk a twotime in a prizefight proper brutal, looks forward to Regis Prograis in the finals.

There’s no reason to hold the decisive match on neutral ground, Super Six’s largest mistake; return to Glasgow and let Prograis try and stretch the Scotsman in his home gym, knowing if he lets European judges score one of their own he’ll have read to him by a kilted ring announcer three cards prefilled at Friday’s weighin. Same goes for Inoue-Donaire for that matter; let Nonito choose the venue – Inoue’s supporters have the means and willingness to travel wherever their man plies his craft.

O but the WBSS is so much better than everything else.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday in the comain of an ESPN broadcast from Tucson, Mexican super bantamweight Emanuel Navarrete successfully defended his WBO world title by stopping former WBO super bantamweight titlist Isaac Dogboe in a pretty savage way. Both men were the same men only moreso in their rematch.

There’s something more disquieting about a volume-puncher’s demise, more decisive, something fated like a log being fed in a woodchipper. He rarely has much more than a plan A1 or A2; if plan A was shift-right-throw-left, plan A1 is shift-left-throw-right or jab-jab-hook instead of jab-hook; his primary attack, which is his defense, too, is reliant near entirely on an assertion of will, on a career-defining assumption he can continue longer than his more-talented peers. And the peers are near always more talented because who that had reflexes enough would get hit often as the volume-puncher, and who that had power enough would require such volume? Because the volume-puncher needs hundreds of repetitions to turn his trick he relies, too, on a signature rhythm, and woe betide the volume-puncher whose rhythm gets solved by an opponent.

Since Joe Frazier’s sainted name got invoked in a proper context during Saturday’s broadcast, his case is one worth visiting. He’d not a prayer against George Foreman because volume-punchers haven’t a prayer against true sluggers, and Foreman truly was one. Frazier’d much better than a prayer against Muhammad Ali, a boxer for most intents and purposes, because Frazier’s hit-you-everywhere-at-all-times attack offended Ali’s sensibilities much as his chin. Then came the 14th round of their third fight, their 41st round together (15+12+14 because their 1974 rematch was a 12-round affair for less than the real title), and Ali solved Frazier’s rhythm and movement. And heavyweight prizefighting’s greatest trilogy folded into a vicious target practice trainer Eddie Futch mercifully stopped with a singularly elegant gesture.

No fighter more needs protection from himself than a volume-puncher, as champion-cum-broadcaster Timothy Bradley should and did know. Beneath commentator Joe Tessitore’s hysteria and Andre Ward’s cerebral detachment a close listener heard Bradley’s empathetic fury with how poorly Dogboe’s corner protected its charge and son. Bradley knew well as anyone in the city of Tucson how hopeless was Dogboe’s strategy and how helpless Dogboe was to relent. Bradley, beaten semiconscious for at least half a fight by Ruslan Provodnikov and caught hung over his front knee more than a few times by Manny Pacquiao, registered early and often Dogboe’s masochistic pleas for an uppercut from Navarrete.

Whatever Bradley said, here’s what he silently willed from ringside: Isaac, before you make one more forward step, take your right glove, set it palm-down, and lodge it between your chin and throat, damn it! Dogboe didn’t have this standard maneuver in his quiver because his father proved more conditioning-coach prophet than boxing trainer, and because Dogboe’s title run was too entangled with his father’s proselytizing and NeHo chanting to permit Dogboe seek wisdom elsewhere.

However universal be certain elements of our beloved sport – like: catch the uppercut with an open palm set under your chin – there are others that might should bring pause from a Western pundit like: What in the Sam Hill do I know about the father-son dynamic shared by Ghanaian émigrés to London? And before anyone takes to his hind legs to bray about universal truths, he should ask how many supposedly universal expressions of a father’s love permit a world-title run in prizefighting.

Which leaves us where exactly? It leaves us wondering if Dogboe’s dad should be exiled for malpractice as at least a third of Saturday’s broadcast team insisted, or if perhaps Saturday’s fight got stopped at the right moment.

(Here’s a confession that addresses conviction: I googled “Dogboe hospitalized” immediately after writing that sentence, to ensure it wasn’t already an empirically dumb thought.)

However long looked the odds of a Dogboe comeback eight rounds through Saturday’s comain, they were shorter still than the odds of a 5-foot-2 man from Ghana making $100,000 for 35 minutes of work as a professional athlete in Arizona.

Time and again we return to the ‘t’ in each of life’s algorithms; if you start observation’s stopwatch at the opening bell of a rematch with Emanuel Navarrete, the Mexican who outclassed your son but five months ago, Paul Dogboe looks a sadistic ignoramus for allowing his son enter Saturday’s championship rounds, but what if you start that same stopwatch on his son’s birthday in 1994? If nothing else, you weigh the catalog of theretofore-unbelievable things your son did to bring himself to his rematch for a super bantamweight world title 24 years later. And under that weight, probably, you honor initially his petition to continue fighting.

Let none of the weight of those words diminish in any way Navarrete’s accomplishment. Twice he entered a title fight as its b-side and twice he prevailed, and the second time more prevalently than the first. That makes him the right kind of titlist, and that makes him increasingly unique among his peers. Navarrete did not doubt even momentarily his place in a ring across from Dogboe, wherever his promoter or his promoter’s broadcast partner’s interests lay.

Navarrete was the much larger man and better boxer, and he acted like it, broken right hand or otherwise. He knew Dogboe’s need to make a vacuum of the ring that suffocated any initiative but his own, and he snatched the initiative from Dogboe and did not relinquish it. Brutal as the fight was for Dogboe, it was not gentle on Navarrete, though you’d hardly have guessed it by watching the Mexican.

Aficionados got afforded a tiny peek under Navarrete’s professionalism and decency the moment he dropped Dogboe on the canvas in round 12. Navarrete’s glance at his unmanned foe was conclusive to the edge of contemptuous. Such a glance should delight aficionados about Navarrete’s prospects as champion.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday in Las Vegas Saul “Canelo” Alvarez further unified his undisputed status as world’s best middleweight by narrowly if unanimously decisioning IBF titlist Daniel Jacobs in DAZN’s second-best mainevent of the last two weekends. Canelo did what Canelo does, and if it isn’t worth the $300 million or so his new broadcaster pays him, it’s still worth more than whatever any of his peers makes.

No, the variable Saturday was not Canelo but Jacobs. And Jacobs was no variable at all, turning in another B+ effort – the average of A talent and C audacity – ensuring more generous paydays and flattering profiles to come.

Let’s see if we can mimic Jacobs’ fighting style for a few words.

*

Seems like a good idea might be to start stepping forward and maybe committing a little more, maybe jabbing, or if you’re already jabbing, maybe, you know, start stepping into it and seeing if the other guy’s head mightn’t move back a little or else try seeing if his whole body might, kind of, start moving back or relenting, or maybe relenting isn’t exactly the right term, since boxers, by the way they usually are, don’t tend to be too relenting, however they sometimes seem at times to be, and so it’s probably right to try remembering it seems hitting the other guy is probably as good of an idea for bringing yourself closer to victory as it is for keeping him from, like, going after you too hard if you don’t want him to, but there are also counterpunches that favor his momentum, so, you know, either way?

(Editor’s note: This is indecisive and awful; you have the words, but for God’s sake, you’re afraid to use your vocabulary and, frankly, you write like a bitch.)

Any man who enters a prizefighting ring and doubts for a moment the malice of his opponent is doomed. When a sense of doom pervades any motion by any fighter, it is a spectacle weak as it is unfortunate, but it is tragic, in addition to weak and unfortunate, when the doomed man has more talent than the man dooming him.

*

Most fighters box best when they are happy, not so much in the sense of euphoric as comfortable. They find rhythm, dare we say flow, and that familiar rhythm frees their hands and feet to respond so instantly to the commands from their central nervous systems as to appear mindless, as to fool both onlookers and fighters towards thinking the hands and feet do the processing for themselves.

Daniel Jacobs is an exception to this. He fights best when he is angry. Some of this might be attributable to the physical weakness and subsequent doubt he experienced when his body turned against itself in the form of cancer. More of it is likely attributable to what Dmitry Pirog did to him nine years ago.

In Jacobs’ case, for whatever reason, there is a deep fear of humiliation, and not until an opponent begins to humiliate Jacobs via his own inaction does Jacobs risk the humiliation of what open aggression might get him stretched. In those retaliatory moments, though, when Jacobs fights from a place of deep offense, when he returns fire in a way that says “how dare you!”, he is fine a middleweight as his generation can boast.

But no sooner does Jacobs restore order than he relents once more, satisfied to look good losing a narrow decision, one close enough to keep the money handle cranking for a rehab match then a rematch, rather than chance a humiliating knockout loss by going for another man’s unconsciousness. There were a few times Saturday Canelo knocked Jacobs backwards and used the resulting space to press his advantage. And Jacobs braked that immediately. Canelo stopped, chastened, collected himself, then looked nearly relieved Jacobs was back in his own head, overthinking what might happen if he went further.

These moments were so different from the moments Jacobs went on offense and shoeshined the pitapat till he got hard countered. Jacobs on his shinebox looked put-upon by the task, almost annoyed, joyless robotic: This is what I must do or my corner will lecture me when I get back home. Canelo bought none of it; he knew Jacobs couldn’t possibly decision him in Las Vegas, and so Jacobs’ shoeshining mattered only insofar as it taught Canelo the downbeat upon which Jacobs might best be sandblasted with a counter hook or uppercut.

If all that came through a DAZN stream to a thousand miles from ringside, do not doubt how obvious it was to both men Saturday.

Canelo is not an alltime great, but he is the best thing we’ve got right now. He challenges himself when he needn’t (imagine, for a moment, how many times GGG would lap the welterweight and super welterweight fields had he Canelo’s contractual guarantees as middleweight champion), and he makes reliably entertaining fights. Not great fights, no, not spectacles of such violence and willfulness spectators openly consider the human condition, but reliably entertaining fights. So it has been with him from the beginning, whether collecting a kneeknocker from the other Miguel Cotto in his American television debut, or knobpulling the Amir Khan slurpee machine, Canelo does just a spot more than his critics think he might – and curses them to endure pundits’ hyperbole till the next Mexican holiday weekend.

Canelo was just audacious enough Saturday to make the official scorecards fair. He fought the best prime middleweight he’d yet to fight, too. Our beloved sport has had better standardbearers than Canelo, but recently it also has had much, much worse.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

After two weeks of exhibitionist fare boxing returned Friday and Saturday to competitive and excellent matches, excellent for being competitive. Or maybe the passive voice delivers better here: Boxing got returned to competitiveness by DAZN. The aficionado’s platform delivered simple, striking excellence Friday, with its broadcast of Mexican Juan Francisco Estrada’s super flyweight rematch with Thailand’s Srisaket Sor Rungvisai. Then the next round of the World Boxing Super Series happened Saturday with two of its semifinal matches, Regis Prograis versus Kiryl Relikh and Nonito Donaire versus Stephon Young.

They were all three of a piece and beautiful for the same reason: They participated in a genuine pursuit of the best available competition by identifying that competition and then going to it.

Friday’s participants had the benefit of having already identified, through their own perseverance and courage, the very best opposition they might face, and then, bless their exceptional spirits, chosen to face each other once more. Saturday’s participants, two of the four anyway, did their level best to identify what men would challenge them properly – with one of the other two a latenotice replacement and the fourth, Donaire, having previously identified such men and done his best against them.

More about that in a bit if space and endurance allow, but back to the main event among main events, back to a fight unlikely to be surpassed the rest of this year. No, Estrada-Sor Rungvisai 2 was not what mindless madness we bestow yearend honorifics upon but rather two of the world’s very best prizefighters in their primes and fighting one another best they were able. More clearly written, even had Errol Spence and Mikey Garcia been the exact same size, they’d not have been able to match Estrada and Sor Rungvisai for quality; Spence lacks Sor Rungvisai’s experience like Garcia lacks Estrada’s complexity.

There is, as a matter of fact, no current prizefighter who has on his resume a man better than the man whom Sor Rungvisai took from prime to pursuing-other-career-opportunities. If you take the best win on the resumes of each of prizefighting’s five best practitioners currently and add all those men all together, they just about equal the Roman “Chocolatito” Gonzalez whom Sor Rungvisai decisioned then slept in a halfyear’s time.

Eight pounds and 6 1/2 years ago Chocolatito put it on Estrada thoroughly, and it made Estrada better – and that makes Estrada exceptional. Friday was about Estrada more than Sor Rungvisai. The man aficionados who know what’s what affectionately call The Rat King showed up and made the sort of fight he makes every time, and if DAZN’s mediocre broadcasting crew didn’t realize how close the fight was it was because their headsets precluded them from hearing punches well as the judges did – as, below a din of babbling groupthink, Sor Rungvisai’s body punches, to which he committed from the very start, made audible confirmations of what tariffs they exacted from Estrada’s awesome initiative. And it was indeed awesome.

Estrada showed Sor Rungvisai the same lack of respect that canvassed Chocolatito in March 2017 then savasana-d him in September that year. After 12 rounds of tasting power from a man who’s much of it as anyone fighting, Estrada went after Sor Rungvisai like he’d no inkling who Sor Rungvisai was. This column is proof you can write about our beloved sport 14 years and think about it in your spare time, too, and still not be very close to explaining how a man does what Estrada did – delusion himself into believing a man who beat a man who beat him, and who also punched him hard and often 14 months ago, is so much less than the sum of those accomplishments he might go after him directly if given another chance.

Estrada fulfilled every definition of courage Friday. With both an outcome and his own health in doubt Estrada chose to go first. Compare that statement to the very best you might say or write about what Terence Crawford did a couple Saturdays ago or Vasiliy Lomachenko did the week before that. Among the world’s best prizefighters, and Estrada is exactly that, the nearest one comes to a man making Estrada’s choices is Saul “Canelo” Alvarez, and we’re not allowed to celebrate him too loudly because he’s both overcompensated and guilty of bodypunching the shine right off yesteryear’s embellishment, the former “most feared” champion now readying to make a June war on Canada’s fourth-best middleweight.

Saturday’s fights were excellent and suffer only if one happens to watch them immediately before or after Estrada-Sor Rungvisai 2. No matter how much they might suffer by comparison, anyway, they are redeemed by the tournament that made them happen, even if that tournament’s masterminds have yet to realize their fights do not belong in American venues or any venues unknown to boxing and farflung as Lafayette, La.

Nonito Donaire, a subject of sympathy through his opening 10 minutes with Ryan Burnett in November, now finds himself the WBSS’ unlikeliest finalist yet, after hooksawing poor Stephon Young in Saturday’s comain. Donaire did not belong in the semifinals but Young belonged there much less, and Donaire played him a 2007 Vic Darchinyan remix to prove it.

The evening’s mainevent and ostensible reason WBSS stubbornly returns to empty Louisiana arenas, Regis “Rougarou” Prograis, beat the joy out a very good Belarusian super lightweight named Kiryl Relikh, causing Relikh and his corner and referee Luis Pabon to conclude as one the match needed concluding at its midway point. On his shield Relikh did not retire, but the result’d’ve doubtfully changed had he tried to do so.

Were this another tired exhibition on premium cable or its cheaper counterparts there’d be plenty of reason to doubt Prograis is good as he looks. But that’s the blessed thing about this WBSS tournament (and the Super Six before it): If Prograis turns out to be peerless it will be from his lessening his every peer.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

ZAPOPAN, Mexico – This is a place that looks like Guadalajara on a map but like Chapalita right next door holds itself apart from the city at whose airport you must first arrive to visit. Saturday began with a pool party in the hills, a familiar’s friend’s parents’ house, the sort of thing that made more sense when you were 25 years younger and relies on no one saying or even thinking something like that. In its Late Prosperity manner, it was an apt way to begin an afternoon that led to an evening that concluded with Terence “Bud” Crawford’s unmanning Amir Khan.

Thing about Late Prosperity is the spotlight it shines on bygone aspiration. Whereas a pair of Hush Puppies and a La-Z-Boy remain comfortable years and years after their original influencers have migrated to sneakers and IKEA, what modern sorts of architecture and design hallmark Late Prosperity were quite obviously chosen to make an important statement regardless of their dysfunction.

When the asymmetric fixtures basked in a fresh coat of Miami Vice pink or turquoise it mattered little the sharp edges and discomfort all round them, but it’s been 30 years and the green’s gone moldy and the pink grayish, cream-of-what-once-was, and now the first thought that happens, long before even the least-discerning mind processes it, is a word like “unkempt” – which marches the mind down a path of spent-fortunes and last-testaments ignored of economic necessity. The fiftysomething children or grandchildren, overeducated products of overpriced educations, retain all the cultivated tastes and enthusiastic weirdness of their eccentric forebearers but naught of the fortune; what’s desperately worse than weird rich people is their middleclass descendants.

That made Saturday’s poolparty fine foreplay for Saturday’s pay-per-view broadcast. What are some of the hallmarks of Late Prosperity in boxing? Words like “historic” uttered over and over. Words, for that matter, of any kind, uttered over and over. The motormouth striving for relevance, the venue worship, the tired namedropping:

“Madison Square Garden. What, you’ve never – how about Marciano, Robinson, Frazier, Duran, Ali? Surely you’ve heard of them, everyone has. We were surprised to get the invitation but thrilled to accept, but when you think about it, actually, it makes sense we would be here. My grandfather was from Holbrook, you know, which is very nearby Brockton, where Rocky Marciano grew up?”

Meanwhile, all round this production, the normal people with publicschool educations and jobs with salaries and bosses, folks who know who they are and don’t mind it, politely nod and silently wonder when the cake will be cut. Not for a hell of a while. Not till another halfdozen drinks get mixed and the same halfdozen dull stories get renovated and recounted, not till these normal folks get reminded in every imaginable way how lucky they are to be what bit actors compose the background scenery in the crowded courtyard where the historymaking event is due to unfold in the next hour or two.

It’s maddening enough to make you mad enough to ask how it all happened like this, and if you begin the search for a specific villain and go deep enough in it you realize there’s no villain but the system – everyone who thinks he’s a puppetmaster be entangled in the same string lattice as the paupers whose strings he thinks he pulls. Bud Crawford’s lowblow was a fitting end to such a spectacle, fitting as Amir Khan’s predictable and anemic submission to a better man’s fists.

To watch Khan is not to get surprised by his victimhood in meaningful fights but to get surprised by anyone else’s surprise, to wonder, essentially, who the hell decided we should take him seriously in the first place. There was no moment any aficionado doubted Saturday’s outcome; Khan was smaller and weaker and dumber and slower and less balanced and less prepared, and watching him beaten conclusively unto unconsciousness would satisfy solely our beloved sport’s worst impulses. That’s before we consider this was a pay-per-view event, th’t there was an additional charge to see this mess because a transnational media corporation and its wealthy promoter couldn’t possibly cover whatever purse the world’s best prizefighter wanted for a welterweight exhibition match.

Something only marginally worse happened on Fox Sports for free, Saturday, and if PBC still shows no empathy with aficionados’ plight, at least it gets the price right often as not. It’s exhibition matches far as the eye can see, there, too, though without (as much of) the pound-for-pound puffery ESPN now pounds its viewers with.

While we’re evidently stuck on the letter ‘p’ let’s get into this week’s palliative. DAZN will broadcast a wonderful rematch Friday and the continuation of a still-more-wonderful tournament Saturday – when Srisaket Sor Rungvisai and Juan Francisco Estrada swap blows in Inglewood, Calif., the night before World Boxing Super Series returns with two junior welterweight matches from Lafayette, La.

DAZN does not yet know what it is, but we already know it is not Late Prosperity. DAZN is making mistakes its peers do not, it is choosing events at least as much as personalities, it is aspiring to become a platform while its peers get remanded, yet again, to the role of copromoter.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday morning (ET) once-defeated Ukrainian lightweight prodigy Vasiliy Lomachenko unconscioused Anthony Crolla before long in Los Angeles. Saturday night undefeated welterweight titlist Terence Crawford will batter and fry Amir Khan in New York. Both men are ESPN champions, both men are former HBO champions, and both men will have to wait at least a week before ESPN’s expert, formerly with HBO, tells us who’s the better man.

Saturday’s was not for Lomachenko a win for the ages, despite what saturation coverage said about it – coverage whose best feature was the hour at which it came. But it was a win that might age OK for what it tells us about the toll such wins take, the necessary suffering that comes with increasing one’s risk baseline till the easiest win exacts some tariff on the winner’s physical self.

For if Anthony Crolla does not represent an easiest win for a fighter that man does not belong in any meaningful conversation about the utterly meaningless pound-for-pound argument promoter Top Rank now goads ESPN to have with itself. The pound-for-pound title was/is on the line this/last week about the way the NBA championship is on the line annually at the Verizon Slam Dunk Contest; if a man might be recognized as prizefighting’s best for icing a thirdtier opponent balletically, why not crown professional basketball’s best player according to one’s talent for balletically dunking on an unguarded net?

As friend and colleague Jimmy Tobin so insightfully tweeted: “Talking about P4P shit is especially silly after a Crolla fight.”

But there they were, 2/3 of the HBO-recycle panel, well into the witching hour Saturday morning, talking about the importance of what Lomachenko did to hapless Anthony Crolla. What he did, apparently, was break his right hand on Crolla’s head, which is meaningful in the same way it was when Floyd Mayweather broke his right hand on Carlos Baldomir’s head in 2006. It mattered naught to the outcome but changed a career’s trajectory.

Never again after Baldomir would Mayweather fight often, cheaply or with a knockout in mind. If Mayweather were never naturally likable, after the Baldomir fight he marketed himself as a villain, sowing his fortune by putting as many pay-per-viewers on the against-side of the ledger as the for-. However well he performed financially Mayweather knew he was nowhere near the fighter he’d been with healthy hands.

And how did Baldomir turn the trick of changing Mayweather’s career? The same way Crolla, and before him Jorge Linares, changed Lomachenko’s career: By simply being a naturally bigger man. Unattributable to talent or fortitude or whatever other euphemism we employ for brutishness, Crolla needed to be struck hard by Lomachenko more times than his lighter predecessors did. Each flush shot Lomachenko felt his knuckles deliver emboldened Lomachenko to sauce even heavier the next.

Thing is, though, there just ain’t that much horsehair or foam or tape between Lomachenko’s knuckles and his victim’s cranium, and there’s but so much density in feathery human handbones and tensile strength in what ligaments keep them ordered at impact, and you can only court the catastrophic so many times before it accepts your proposal. There is no irony in Lomachenko’s having to wait till his right shoulder healed from surgery to generate enough torque to break his right hand; it all speaks to what brittleness age and weight-scaling visit on every prizefighter inevitably if not always proportionately.

Lomachenko knows this. And this knowing begins to explain the urgency with which he has made title fights and climbed weightclasses. In the increasingly entertaining Lomachenko cinema – that precedes his increasingly predictable fights – this time Lomachenko held his breath underwater for three minutes. It was an impressive feat suspensefully rendered. Impressive and suspenseful, that is, until Lomachenko revealed he’d been able to hold his breath 50-percent longer as an amateur.

If Lomachenko is 50-percent less adept at oxygen-denial than he was in his twenties, what else is deteriorated and how much – handspeed, footspeed, reflexes, derring-do? Anthony Crolla sure as hell didn’t tell us.

Until last month, the common wisdom was that Mikey Garcia could. That’s no longer quite so assured. If prizefighters are improved by winning championships they’re diminished by first defeats and especially shutouts. One imagines Garcia returning to lightweight and commencing a reign of terror on whichever taxistas and mecánicos PBC tees-up for him, and perhaps that farce shall endure a bit, but what happens the next time Garcia is across from a man more talented than he is? Does he relentlessly press violence, now confident no lightweight has the power to dent him, or does he 1-2-3 his way to another safe loss?

If Lomachenko-Garcia happens, and there is exactly no reason to think it will, here’s what we’ll tell ourselves: Garcia’s greatest advantage is the fundamentally sound and powerful way of his attack; a jab-cross combo thrown by a powerpuncher at 135 pounds is just the thing to scramble Lomachenko’s signals and reduce the Hi-Tech network from fiberoptic to can-on-a-string.

We’ll do this because as aficionados we’re a bunch adaptive as we are resilient. This week, in fact, we’ll be telling ourselves there’s something quintessentially heroic about Amir Khan’s next knockout loss.

Khan might have taken the easy route by retiring once he was no longer the best in his division but instead he has challenged himself to lose more brutally each year. No, he has not always succeeded in this quest, which proves its nobility. After Danny Garcia detailed him in 2012, Kahn spent two years making rehab matches with retreads who’d not spark him. Then came redemption proper: Khan’s faceplant against Canelo Alvarez won 2016 knockout of the year. Back to the lair went Kahn, effectively retiring in 2017 and 2018 despite fighting twice, before emerging like Zorro for a spectacular loss to Terence Crawford this Saturday.

Crawford, ESPN welterweight champion, and Lomachenko, ESPN lightweight champion, now engage in a pitched hypothetical battle for a still-more hypothetical title: If you take the Lomachenko who just broke his hand punching Crolla and the Crawford who seeks to widow Khan’s wife, and imagine they are the same size, and further imagine their promoter would deign make them fight, who would win Lomachenko-Crawford?

Once you’ve answered that hypothetical question according to the imagined criteria above, forget all of it and ask yourself even dreamier questions like who wows you more and what should the purse-split be for the number of pay-per-view buys you imagine this hypothetical match’d garner. Now take that heaping mess, go to Twitter and find someone who disagrees with you, and engage him relentlessly. Prove yourself a historian or a clairvoyant. Stay engaged.

For whatever you do, don’t refuse to participate in this nonsense till the best men in each division choose to fight one another.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday in Los Angeles once-defeated Ukrainian lightweight titlist Vasyl “Hi-Tech” Lomachenko will successfully defend his title against Britain’s Anthony Crolla on ESPN+ in a match that challenges prefight scriptwriters to excavate some superlative as yet unused on Lomachenko. Hi-Tech will look sublime, spiteful, special and spectacular against Crolla. And for a low monthly rate subscriber aficionados will witness all of it.

When this preview strays from Anthony Crolla, and it surely will, indulge me please, since it won’t be a straying of laziness or complacency but desperate boredom.

If there’s occasion for plumbing the depths of Crolla’s highlight reel such occasion escaped me nimbly as I set out to do so. Bygone years this sort of thing was risky. You figured the late Vernon Forrest was so much better than his next challenger, such a prohibitive favorite, you didn’t bother returning to silly episodes of The Contender to see if Latin Snake was any sort of a boxer, and then the prohibited happened and you looked a fool – and back then readers abounded enough to tell you as much.

These days temptations are very much other; go outlandish and put all eggs in the underdog’s basket because the only way anyone will remember any prediction is the occasion of an unthinkable upset, and nobody has attention span enough to bury himself in the archives and see how many times you picked outlandishly for this one ticketcashing score, has he? This column is too regular, though, to make such irregular efforts as fruitypicking the oneoff for a singular story, which is exactly what a Crolla victory over Lomachenko would prove be for a week at least or until some wiseass remembered Orlando Salido had exactly twice so many losses as Crolla when Salido did the unimaginable and fouled his way to a clear victory over a man we later learned was a generational talent.

One needn’t set out for the gloatful score, then, when sturdier intentions favor beginning with a possibility of the champ’s upset and looking for how it might happen then deciding after an appreciable review, say two or three minutes, it cannot happen. This is when you turn boxing sage and answer one essential question: If there were no more important phrase in the English language than “I told you so”, in a couple years how would posterity read your preview? Satisfy that criterion and build nothing to dam what accolades flood your DMs.

Anthony Crolla is a fine, basic lad who won a world title the right way from a Colombian named Darleys Perez, in his second try, defended the title once then made a pair of losing scraps, one of them close, to the man last seen getting wet-tissued in Madison Square Garden not long after being designer-distressed by Lomachenko, chinny Jorge Linares. There was that moment, though, wasn’t there, when Linares dropped the prodigy and made us hopeful something other than yet another woeful mismatch was in the offing. Of course you’ve forgotten; that happened nearly a year ago, and can you remember what Lomachenko has done since?

Oh, in that case, you’re a better man than I. I recall more about Lomachenko from highlight videos and overwrought profiles, and the requisite ESPN fare (Lomachenko, a man very accomplished at violent acts, turns out to share a complicated relationship with his father – in a twist no one saw coming) than anything he has done in the 11 months since he won his lightweight title from the man who won his lightweight title from Anthony Crolla, the man who lost to the man who lost to the man and is about to lose to the man. If that’s not circular symmetrical it’s because it’s not much any geometrical shape that has symmetry; it’s a linear thing. The wrong sort of linear thing, definitively not a lineal thing, then, but a linear one nonetheless.

It’s not too early to start salivating at the prefight Loma footage, pingpong pops in Spidey spandex, it’s not too . . . oh, enough pretending.

Here’s what happened when I looked for Crolla highlights a while ago: YouTube used years of my viewing activity to recommend yet another Lee Trevino video. This has almost nothing to do with boxing save that Trevino is of Mexican descent the way most of the last generation’s best prizefighters were. But whereas those men came out a prizefighting lineage Trevino came out of nowhere, many years ago, an El Paso club pro raised on a dirt floor by a gravedigger grandfather, a marine and autodidact whose first professional victory was American golf’s greatest prize, a master ballstriker and shotmaker who needed no lessons to torque the clubface in just such a way to visit maximal inertia on the back of a golfball.

If YouTube history can be trusted, no visual spectacle delights me much as Trevino’s swing, and not prime Trevino, either, but the 50-year-old version I saw drive a golfball at the Digital Seniors Classic 29 years ago, in a move unmatchable for power, grace and violence. Not since Juan Manual Marquez snatched Manny Pacquiao’s soul has anything in our beloved sport transferred to me what energy a glimpse of Trevino’s swing does.

There, just above, that’s the way I would like to write about Vasyl Lomachenko but cannot. It’s all too precious and prescripted with Hi-Tech, too white-earbuds, not enough analog. He’ll stream through Crolla on ESPN+ and aficionados will get dangled and promised, the usual maybe-Mikey-Garcia-next canard, and made to feel unappreciative for not thanking hard enough what promotional benefactors give us semiannual glimpses of Lomachenko’s otherworldly talent. Then it’s back to the Trevino videos for me.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday in the mainevent of a Golden Boy-promoted and DAZN-broadcasted card from Indio, Calif., undefeated American lightweight Ryan “KingRy” Garcia (2.3m followers, Instagram) whacked-out hopeless Puerto Rican Jose Lopez in two rounds. If Garcia’s punches occasionally wanted for precision they lacked no malice, and their thrower no cocksuredness, and that recommends young KingRy because few are the prizefighters who start an uppercut after missing in the same flurry with hooks and crosses.

If you think Garcia isn’t yet quite what his socialmedia following believes, friend, you’ve come to the wrong place, as this space hopes to be a KingRy fanpage for at least a few hundred of the words that follow.

Without access to any demographic data for 15rounds.com a hunch tells me we lack a reliable readership among women, 18-24, a lack more pernicious than may first appear because our target demographic repels, or at least frightens, women, 18-24. And if you’re thinking “well, frightening them first sometimes does wonders,” you’re making my point – even while you might be right. Consider this column, then, a partial effort to pander and a partial effort to celebrate the potential of a young prospect; if by chance you are reading this column in the year 2024 and KingRy just failed in his fourth attempt to become a world champion, let’s hope it was a 23-year-old woman whose recommendation brought you here.

Rumor has it young women can be charmed by magic tricks, and while this effort, thus far, is bereft of magic, tricky or otherwise, its author has recently taken to juggling for reasons at best tangential to anything prizefighting but a touch germane to Garcia. Let’s see if the metaphor doesn’t collapse before it inflates.

If our focused vision, the detailed and conscious study of a visual object, happens via the cones of our foveae then most of boxing we watch with the rods of our peripheral vision. In a figurative sense this happens during nearly any pay-per-view undercard because broadcasters and promoters stock these with such swill no adult’s fovea need be wasted. In a literal sense, too, we trust most boxing viewership to peripheral vision, what suspenseful happenings occur while we fix drinks for acquaintances or discuss the weather with their wives.

Until Saturday the weight of my viewership of Ryan Garcia fell upon my peripheral vision exclusively; probably I caught some of a couple of his matches during some undercard broadcast or other, and (pander alert) I resolved to open an Instagram account to follow his photogenic exploits, but I never cleared a calendar’s moment for him.

Here’s something you already know but may not’ve considered: The rods of your peripheral vision are far better at detecting both motion and its rate than the cones of your fovea. You’re reading this with your fovea, that is, but if while you’re reading this a redfanged predator is creeping upon you it will be your peripheral vision that does the detecting – and there’s a strong argument to be made it is this, your very unconsidered faith in peripheral vision, that allows you to do something decadent as concentrate on words about boxing (ostensibly).

Which is sort of where juggling comes into play. Like most lads raised in New England I’ve gone through nearly all my life without any fascination whatever for motor sports. My first college roommate was from North Carolina, and until I met him I’d no inkling what NASCAR was nor a first inkling how absurdly popular it was. I still don’t watch live auto racing (or, to be fair, live most-any-sport-but-boxing), but I like sports documentaries of all kinds enough to’ve spent a goodish amount of time in March watching programs about Formula 1 (and even more time watching footage of the late Ayrton Senna). Along the way I caught one pattern more than another: Most Formula 1 drivers juggle to cultivate a discipline like: Look with soft focus on the horizon, say halfway up your windshield, while trusting your peripheral vision to detect others’ motions round you.

Despite an abiding fascination with palindromes I’ve no desire to do anything with a racecar but admit the Formula 1 driver’s discipline has a myriad of applications in life. So I bought the juggling balls (leatherskinned hacky sacks, effectively, the better for not bouncing when you drop them hundreds and hundreds of times) and watched the YouTube videos and did the oneball toss then the twoball toss then the threeball flash and then a halfdozen or so hours into the enterprise things made sense and quite apparently it was easier to keep two balls in the air while juggling three than turn the same feat with only two. (And it applies to this discipline, too: Right now I’m keeping soft focus on a wordcount of 1,000 while trusting peripheral vision will tell me if any worthwhile ideas about Ryan Garcia should come swooping in.)

Oh, here they come. What I like about Garcia: He has his new stablemate Canelo Alvarez’s best offensive traits and moreso. What surprises most about Canelo in person, for translating least on television, is his intensity of attack; if he doesn’t appear much faster at ringside he appears degrees more intentional; he very much wants to hurt you with his punches. The first time I covered a fight of his at ringside was the match with Austin Trout, and the experience impressed upon my memory an enduring sensation like “Wow, this dude is physical.” Not even sure what that means exactly, but you get it.

Garcia doesn’t yet have the same effect, his body is still a boy’s, comparatively, but his attack is relatively more intense than Canelo’s for coming from a relatively less-affected place. Garcia appears more loosely wound when defending than Canelo and meaner when attacking. However much of this should be attributed to opponent-quality remains to be gathered. Garcia mayn’t have Canelo’s chin, and best stop pulling it straight back regardless, but he has a prettyboy’s pride and presence, the relaxed posture of a guy who can pull your girlfriend and likes being resented for it.

Garcia’s a Spanish 102 class and an Olympic gold medal from being Oscar De La Hoya, perhaps, but our beloved sport is a lot more than that from being what it was in 1995, when De La Hoya won his 18th prizefight.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter (though not Instagram, alas) @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

“It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books – setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them.” – Jorge Luis Borges

OKLAHOMA CITY – This proud city stands between Arlington, Texas, and Omaha, Neb., though not midway between; this capital of Oklahoma is nearer Arlington than Omaha, a geographical position whose shading made it quite right for Wednesday’s co-promoter / co-broadcaster confirmation announcement of what numbers have frozen our beloved sport in anticipation for nearly a month since PBC on Fox Sports’ welterweight co-champion Errol “The Truth” Spence (waltzing to a harmless decision over Manny Pacquiao in September) toed the pay-per-view line with Top Rank of ESPN’s welterweight champion Terence “Bud” Crawford (keelhauling Kell Brook in October). Spence won.

“We did it!” exclaimed promoter Richard Schaefer in Bricktown Brawlers Hall, the third-largest conference room on the second floor of the Cox Convention Center, a meeting place named after the Indoor Football League team that warmed Oklahomans’ hearts in bygone days. “Bob said we couldn’t, and I said, ‘Bob, we’ll see about that!’ And now we have, have not we, Bob?”

“This is a stupid exercise but necessary,” averred promoter Bob Arum from his seat at a makeshift dais before a sprawling purple, black and electric-blue canvas billboard filled with the announcement’s tagline: PURSES COLLIDE. “Only an idiot would take these numbers more seriously than the fights or fighters themselves, and since most of you are idiots who write for idiots, here we are.”

Such levity on Arum’s part did little to defuse what tensions mounted ceaselessly in a war of promotional trashtalk that began at ringside in AT&T Stadium after Spence-Pacquiao and grew only louder at the postfight presser in CHI Health Center after Crawford-Brook. His charge having lost by a few hundred thousand pay-per-viewers, Arum may have been eager to change the conversation to a proposed Crawford-Pacquiao tilt early in 2020, but gathered fans were having none of it.

“You come at the king, you best not miss,” said Lil Audi, a self-proclaimed broadcast aficionado in a blue Fox Sports ballcap who chose not to give his real name. “Dadunh-duna-DAH! My boys beat that ass.”

Though neither Spence nor Crawford was present at Wednesday’s event, representatives from both their networks as well as surprise representatives from both fighters’ former networks, Showtime and HBO respectively, gathered and lent gravity to the proceedings.

“‘The Truth’ is, Errol will always be family,” said a Showtime representative. “While we wish we could’ve done the Pacquiao fight, we understand the economics of the situation, and we’re thrilled to announce a Muhammad Ali documentary we’re working on for next spring.

“It’s a spoken-word mashup of Ali in others’ words, featuring such distinctive voices as Californication’s David Duchnovy and Dexter’s Michael C. Hall. And of course Showtime Championship Boxing’s own Paulie Malignaggi.”

Not to be outdone, HBO’s new Executive Vice President of Streaming Services put her own spin on the event.

“Words cannot express how happy we are to be out of this mess,” said Priyanka Malhotra. “I’m here, in large part, to ensure the stake we drove in boxing’s heart has not been dislodged by money or a detente between rival promoters. And yes, to announce ‘LJ on MJ’ – an original series that takes viewers on a tour of Michael Jordan’s favorite parts of New York City, produced by LeBron James.”

So much attention devoted to who attracted more pay-per-view buys, those observers formerly known as aficionados can be forgiven if they inadvertently and initially mistook Crawford’s round-three razing of Brook as more definitive than Spence’s keepaway scorecard-whiteout of Pacquiao. While Crawford’s predatory instinct and Brook’s inexplicable popularity in the U.K. otherwise might’ve combined for a win, the smart money, as they say, was ever on Spence.

“These fans who think they’re promoters never understand international buys,” said Arum, Wednesday. “They won domestic buys, whatever, but when the money is finally counted and Machiavelli is done keeping his enemies closer than his friends, we’ll see which fighter emerges with the better actual paycheck.

“But don’t expect the Swiss banker to throw another press conference about that number.”

“This is a win and a win for boxing,” replied Schaefer. “It’s a win because Errol Spence won more pay-per-view money. And it is also a win because Errol Spence will make even more money in his next fight, which we are thrilled to announce will not be with Terence Crawford.”

While old timers may scoff at boxing’s new fascination with numbers of viewers between fighters, rather than numbers of punches thrown, truth is, this fascination is hardly new.

“Reminds me of the Money Era,” said Lil Audi. “The haters were all ‘It’s bad for boxing if the two best don’t throw hands in their primes,’ but we got those Maidana fights outta Floyd, right, and we got JMM waxing Pac like Rain Dance.”

“Of course he names himself after a German car,” said Arum, when asked about those comments. “He’s an idiot.”

While serious fans are likely to remain fixated on the implications of Wednesday’s announcement for a halfyear to come, casual fans now understandably obsess over boxing’s flagship division. With no chance of Fury-Wilder 2 or Fury-Joshua or Joshua-Wilder in the foreseeable future, post-presser talk Wednesday shifted to broadcaster DAZN’s subscriber rate and a revenues-growth argument for ESPN+ charging more in 2020.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

ARLINGTON, Texas – Saturday in the middle of AT&T Stadium in the middle of the DFW metroplex welterweight titlist Errol Spence beat lightweight titlist Mikey Garcia 36-0 on official scorecards, 37-0 if you count one scorekeeper’s view of a latemiddle round. Accurate tallies, both.

It was a Spence masterpiece until the 11th round ended with Garcia still conscious. After that began the doubts, the narrative’s rewriting, after that began the deeper suspicion on his finest night Spence was not quite Bud Crawford, whose name should not be spoken.

Spence had not before faced an opponent of Garcia’s talent and craft, and Crawford still hasn’t and likely won’t, but Spence fought Garcia with a civility, a decency, a compassion, even, a quarter, finally, Crawford affords no opponent. This makes Spence a lighter soul, a more marketable product, a person you’d rather like to meet, but it makes him less of the one thing anyone reading this wants in his favorite prizefighter.

Indulge a thought experiment: What might Crawford have done otherwise, immediately before or after the 11th round? It’s in the eyes and where Crawford’d’ve set his. Not on the Garcia he was wounding with nearly every punch but on the Garcia manning the corner’s cotton. Crawford would’ve said with his eyes and voice, if his eyes were not emphatic enough, “Robert, I am going to spike your little brother till it spikes your conscience – I am going to break your will, not Mikey’s.”

Spence is everything most want in a prizefighter and promises many joys to come, but he is an athlete-specialist, not a predator. Would he be specialist enough to beat Crawford? I’m not sure he wouldn’t, but at ringside I was sure he would be until halfway through Saturday’s final round. He had a dispirited and physically reduced little man in front of him and an older brother trainer who’d floated the idea of flying the white feather eight minutes earlier, and instead of snatching consciousness with a proper dose of cruelty Spence went sweet on us.

My work is done here, he said, à la Money May; let’s use this time to prep the postfight interview and revel in my accomplishment. It was an acceptable and marketable thing to do, and if we’re honest, such relentfulness likely matchmade a payday with Manny Pacquiao (a man with enough bonedeep cruelty to steel via transfusion the entire PBC stable, lightweight to heavy), but it was disappointing to those know who what’s what.

It was a signature PBC fight in that sense. Little blood, gloves a bit too big. Safe boxing, as it were. There’s something still sanitized about PBC fare, an abiding sense, even at ringside, none of the anointed ones is in true danger. Mikey took the sort of sustained abuse that writes neurology whitepapers 20 years hence but suffered none of what gore’d make Fox Sports reconsider its recent investment.

Let’s precede the next turn like this: PBC has improved considerably its relationship with print media, largely by hiring retired newspapermen, and to imply writers were treated less than fantastically Saturday in AT&T Stadium would be inaccurate as it were ungrateful. But the outfit’s mysterious figurehead was invisible as usual and inaccessible as ever. And his absence brought a postfight thought like: He’s not a violent man, he doesn’t want violence in his life, and he signs fighters according to every criterion save savagery.

All the stable staples were ringside for the main: Floyd, a purple and bedizened toddler; AB, a gleeful rogue in pink, trailed by Gervonta and a greenhaired date; Leprechaun Shawn; Manny, declawed and spacey; the Brothers Charlo, lion tamers more than lions; Deontay, garishly garnished, unable to stop smiling. For edgy you had to look in the cheaper seats and see the elder Benavidez brother – but we know how Bud did him.

It was pleasantly safe the whole night. A better, more committed writer – hell, even this writer 10 years ago – might impart this was not as things should be, but again, the whole night was too pleasant to notice. PBC is a socioeconomic achievement in that sense, too, and an intentional one, one suspects. To have so many men whom the (white) American imagination makes so dangerous assembled in a small space, at the center of which actual violence is the point, and have it blanketed by appreciable calm and fun was at least a part of Al Haymon’s original vision. For it could not be accidentally so.

It really was fun during the ringwalks, too. There’s nothing like the energy of the stadium ringwalk, tens of thousands of lubricated throats and psyches foreplayed into a froth by undercard mismatches and earsplitting technobeats, rising as one in the ecstasy of anticipated violence. Mikey’s mariachi production and glinting eye; Errol’s marching band; both men making a much longer walk through a crowd much longer assembled than anything a casino could host.

The main event that followed was nearer a dud than a classic, true, but that was attributable to every reason every one of us thought the hour the fight was announced and dutifully went about forgetting in the months that followed. Spence was quicker than the man Mikey prepared for; a regimen of adding weight and sparring weighty men did as it ever does, putting weight on Mikey’s chin, not his fists, but quickly it made perfect sense no sparring partner big or bigger than Spence would have the Texan’s reflexes – else that man would be a world champion, not a sparring partner. By round 3 it was not a question of whether Spence would beat the 147-pound Garcia 12 times of 10 but whether, in a hypothetical tilt for Mikey’s lightweight title, Spence wouldn’t be the favorite there as well, so much better were Errol’s reflexes and footwork and accuracy than Garcia’s.

What Spence revealed in Garcia was an excellent technician of exceptional power (below 140 pounds) whose skills were actually orthodox and basic as suspected. The lesser man in size and strength, precision and mobility, Mikey had, by round 9, nothing on which to depend but his whiskers and Spence’s mercy. And blessed he was with both.

While his older brother and protector, dullfaced and resigned, watched silently in the corner.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday in Carson, Calif., American welterweight titlist “Showtime” Shawn Porter decisioned Cuban Yordenis Ugas by controversial splitdecision scores in an uncontroversially dull prizefight broadcast in primetime by Fox Sports to promote the network’s upcoming pay-per-view debut. Saturday’s controversial decision came out more palatable than usual, though; having the match’s loser be the one who wins the outrageously lopsided card, it turns out, helps the medicine go down.

Saturday’s final round reduced to an evernarrowing matter of who wanted it more and ever-reducedly made manifest this answer: Neither man. Ugas, effectively if not expectedly, reduced “Showtime” Shawn to “Fox Sports” Porter, a feinting, doubting, boxer-strategist much more like his PBC stablemates in 2019 than himself in 2015.

Porter’s strategy appeared like: They expect me to attack so they can counter me, and I’m not going to fall for that. Good far as it goes, no sense in giving a challenger exactly the champ for whom he prepared, one supposes, but what was the second part of that plan? It could not have been to meltdown Ugas from making him chase or miss since even minimal preparation on Porter’s part would’ve uncovered Ugas’ reluctance to lead, a culturally ingrained reluctance no camp or chiefsecond might eradicate in under a tenyear, and Porter strikes no one as unprepared.

Or maybe that is no longer so. It was true for the last halfdecade at least, but Friday’s scale reported otherwise, and we might as well not ignore it. If Porter was not before voted by peers Least Likely to Lose His Title on the Scale he was verily in the running each year since gaining his first belt in 2013. Not a stylist gifted as his stablemate welterweights, the madefortelevision gaggle that can’t seem to fight one another despite sharing both the same contractwriters and the same signing pen, Porter remains the most attractive of the lot because of his honesty.

There was something charming about Sugar Shane Mosley’s being ringside Saturday to see Porter; honesty recognize honesty, as it were; if Mosley weren’t at least twice the fighter naturally that Porter is he was also a fighter honest enough to keep choosing newer and bigger and better foes till he came to the same choices Porter often finds himself making. If it’s not certain a prime Mosley would beat Keith Thurman and Adrien Broner in the same night it’s probable enough to wonder if Sugar Shane, inspired by the long money Manny Pacquiao got for such easy work in January, wasn’t in Carson scouting.

If Porter is an honest fighter he gave a performance less honest than usual, Saturday, and if that isn’t Ugas’ fault it’s mostly Ugas’ fault. Whatever else an honest prizefighter does he must at least endeavor to hit his opponent often and hard as possible even if it means being hit in return. In the annals of Cuban prizefighters there are precious few men who meet that standard and Ugas sure as hell isn’t one. (Said list in the modern era likely starts with Joel Casamayor and ends with Luis Ortiz.) Instead Ugas is the latest graduate from Havana’s be-not-shamed school of boxing.

This was the thought that happened halfway through Saturday’s match – when Ugas glared and asserted postround dominance over a man he’d just refused to punch-first in 180 seconds of opportunities. It’s a congenital condition among Cuban prizefighters in the sense it happens at their birth as professional fighters. Many international amateur bouts are fitness competitions much as they are acts of combat, judged and slightly menacing CrossFit happenings wherein you must throw early and often to outpoint your opponent. The Cubans do this masterfully and once understood the geometry of computerized judging (1992-2012) too; there were dead zones on the canvas, wherein the required three of five judges were unlikely to register a landed punch, and the Cubans knew better than to exert while upon them.

Everything changes for these guys, though, once the gloves get smaller or the rounds get longer. They arrive at an ethos that finds immense shame in their being hit cleanly or stopped. Losing “controversial” decisions bothers them little if at all, no matter how many times they and their countrymen lose exactly the same way. Porter’s corner was loudly concerned Saturday their man was putting his title at risk by not engaging more and ferociously with his challenger. Ugas’ corner, contrarily, saidn’t once something like: “We never win these close decisions, so for heaven’s sake hurt this man until he is unconscious!”

There was Ugas, then, in the championship rounds of a match there for his taking, feinting and glowering and taunting and threatening but never leading with anything but the safest of getaway jabs. It can’t be a technical thing, not for a Cuban. So it must be a cultural thing that consigns gifted men to the same tough-test game-challenger robbed-unto-perpetuity role so many Cubans play in professional fighting. And always with the sympathyseeking autobiography, too; if it’s not a loved one’s terminal illness it’s a family jailed by the Castro regime. Anymore it feels like a script designed to excuse a contender’s lack of ferocity with a narrative trick like: After everything he’s sacrificed to be a world champion only the most dastardly official wouldn’t give him every close round, and they’ll all be close – only the scrofulous judge’d render an unfavorable tally.

Whatever say our insipid brethren on the scorecard-ethics beat, I’m glad for every close decision that goes against the challenger. Take the champ’s consciousness or take your seat quietly.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Soon undefeated welterweight Texan titlist Errol Spence will defend his IBF belt against undefeated lightweight Californian titlist Mikey Garcia at AT&T (formerly Cowboys) Stadium in Arlington, Texas, on a PBC pay-per-view card distributed by Fox Sports. The ticketselling onus is on Spence much as the entertaining onus be on Garcia. While one can’t help but appreciate the quality of both prizefighters one is equally challenged to forget the unsatisfying way similar such handicap matches have gone in the last few years. But anyway a preview must be written.

There’s something hopeful about writing a fight preview you don’t find in any other column subject. Indulge me a bit, here, as this might be more about the mechanics of the craft than the upcoming fight – which you’ve got a wellformed opinion about already and hardly need information from me to refine.

At best a preview column might remind a reader of something he already knows. On rarest occasions there’s something overlooked by every expert and a writer taps it, but that’s unlikely to the precipice of impossible in the internet era. Some styles mesh unexpectedly. All fighters have flaws, and the surprises come along when, for reasons indecipherable enough to be called “chemistry”, an underdog sees a favorite’s flaws with a clarity unanticipated by all that favorite’s previous opponents. This is exceedingly rare with every trainer having access to footage of every prospective-opponent’s efforts.

Nothing trustworthy comes out of camps because they’re intended to deceive. You already know this. Every fighter has had the best camp of his career before the biggest fight of his career until he loses. Then you hear about the hand injury, the lacerated eyebrow, the pneumonia, the chief second’s visa issues.

The part of column writing one improves at most over the years is sizing ideas. Your first year of columns invariably includes a Homeric treatment of your chosen subject’s appeals. In this case it would be a humanitarian justification of prizefighting’s very being: makes heroes of underprivileged kids, provides official supervision of violent events that were going to happen anyway, affords the cultural edification of seeing courageous acts publicly done. You know going in these are 100,000-word ideas and you think: Imagine the literary density that’ll happen if I can get a 100,000-word idea compressed into a hundredth of its due!

This doesn’t work, and if you don’t end up in the shabbiness of bullet points you might as well. So you retreat into newsitorials, opinionated reporting, verse-chorus-verse. Then you take another chance in your second or third year: Growing the 100-word idea into 1,000 words. The essence of a left hook, the telltale snicker from the final presser’s dais, why some challenger’s wearing “I Luv U Mom” on his trunks foretold every single thing that happened in round 4.

This is enervating work but more rewarding than year-one’s compression initiative. Here’s why. By missing widely on the spectrum’s opposite end you’ve set a more-workable range than if you tried to make a smaller correction. By trying to stretch 100 words into 1,000, in other words, you’ve improved yourself disproportionately more than a lad who tries in his second year to compress a 50,000-word idea in to 1,000.

If you stay with it long enough, of course, you can’t help but improve. But endurance in this case, and especially in a case of no financial reward, is a function of talent; you might have written 1,000-word columns about a seasonless sport like ours for a decade without more than a lick if you needed to do so to pay rent. But to turn the same feat for free requires facility of some sort – at some level, however invisible it be to the practitioner, doing this must be easier for you than the hundred or so folks who threaten to do it but don’t.

What’ll happen a couple Saturdays from now in Arlington? What we already think will happen. Two of this generation’s best fighters in an unsatisfying handicap match. For what could happen that would satisfy? Garcia stretching Spence is the only thing that comes to mind. And how likely is that? Spence stretching Garcia would be cathartic in its moment, like when Canelo fabric-softened Amir Khan then folded him with ruler-scored creases, but that catharsis would deteriorate quickly into an idea like: Spence did what he was supposed to do.

Some of you may tell yourselves seeing Garcia make a masterclass in boxing and play keepaway unto a 12-round decision would induce longlasting euphoria, but if that were true we would talk about Leonard-Hagler today often as we talk about Hagler-Hearns. Which we don’t.

Errol Spence is one of my favorite fighters. Mikey Garcia was one of my favorite fighters eight years ago – the night in 2010 he took the staples out Cornelius Lock on a card in Laredo was memorable impressive. Garcia squandered much of aficionados’ high opinions of him with the way he ended things against Orlando Salido in 2013 and the way he began them with Juanma Lopez five months later. Not long after that began his hiatus and a comeback against opponents either unproved or proved underwhelming; only in a promoter’s alternative universe is decisioning Robert Easter a meaningful feat for someone of Garcia’s gifts and pedigree.

Which is why Garcia now shoots at the moon, bounding up a couple weightclasses and fighting one of the world’s two best welterweights. He has hall-of-fame gifts unjustified by his resume. Spence’s case is more sympathetic. He wants to unify a division whose fellow titlists are wanting for one reason or another, but absent that he might as well go for the biggest payday available. One assumes this is that. But I’m not sure. Ringside in December a veteran of many Garcia fights told me: “He never did sell tickets for us.”

But one doesn’t book a football stadium otherwise, right? We’ll know soon enough.

Garcia’s quest, to justify his gifts, brings us neatly back to the craft of column writing about boxing. For all but a practitioner or two it is the only reason to file regularly. To justify one’s perceived gifts in a way that precludes regret, to preclude the gnawing sensation that accompanies an admission of one’s own ungratefulness.

Doubtful AT&T Stadium is the place to complete such a journey, I’ll take Spence, KO-11.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday on DAZN in a prizefight between formerly good lightweights matched 15 pounds and nearly so many years past their primes Mexican Humberto “La Zorrita” Soto decisioned American Brandon “Bam Bam” Rios by wide Mexican scorecards in Tijuana. Probably the cards were unfair to the American’s activity and ineffective aggressiveness, yes, but they were precise reflections of the difference the men shared in class. A blessing on such uncommon precision.

What surprised mostly, for being unobstructed by either man’s reflexes, was how markedly better Soto was than Rios, better in a way which caused one’s mind to race backwards and color his memories with doubt’s shadow. Whosoever won the match on an honest card wasn’t relevant to nary a spectator; that sort of determination required a calculus of activity and generalship and sundry other considerations properly dispensed of by any aficionado who knows knockouts matter more than the aggregate value of every other outcome. Perhaps Rios did enough to unsteal some of the rounds Soto otherwise stole, and perhaps it means naught either way.

What mattered Saturday was the clarity of the disparity, as it were, the entire levels, much less details, which separated the combatants’ skillsets. Rios shone as an object lesson in what a toughguy can do in a region and sport whose every participant is not a toughguy and how much it helps, too, if you speak English and once used it to give premium broadcasters juicy soundbites. Soto, conversely, showed how strikingly competent a prizefighter had to be to come out Mexico when he did.

Soto, one can be forgiven for not realizing, lost his first world title challenge – getting nearly shut-out by Joan Guzman in their WBO super featherweight tilt – the same year Marco Antonio Barrera and Juan Manuel Marquez fought for the WBC’s title in the same weightclass. Soto was 10 years and 52 scraps into his prizefighting career without so much as a ticket for the Pacquiao-Marquez-Barrera-Morales lottery.

Soto didn’t get out Mexico without he lost a fourtime. There’s an element of craftbuilding there, though, American prizefighters, even a generation before today’s, rarely endured. Early losses on American resumes were a blemish cursed for getting a fighter blacklisted from television. In Mexico, though, where an undefeated record courted suspicion much as it evinced prospective greatness, fighters like Soto realized the only chance to make a fortune in prizefighting was as a world champion, and if you deserved to be such a thing there were avenues enough to attain it, and if you didn’t deserve it then you didn’t deserve it and the only way to know was to fight and fight.

Little in the Soto dossier looks like a wellmanaged prospect cherrypicking a madefortelevision title. Meanwhile, one border and 16 pounds away Andre Berto was saturating HBO’s airwaves with a six-defense run as the WBC’s welterweight titlist, even while sympathetic pundits agreed he probably wasn’t ready to fight other titlists in his same weightclass. You got onthejob training, in other words, as an American prospect, complete with generous cable contracts and inflated rankings, even while your fanbase couldn’t fill a Tijuana cinema much less a bullring.

Onto this scene exploded Brandon Rios with his 2011 stoppage of Miguel Acosta. Four months later Rios was on HBO obliterating Urbano Antillon, a oncepromising prospect ruined by SoCal gymwars, and five months after that, in December, Rios was back on HBO missing weight and fighting someone named John Murray, a man who’d qualified for his title shot by getting knockedout that July. Seriously. By now there was little limit to the silly things experts were saying and scribes were penning about Rios’ otherworldly feats of chin and fist.

Then came the Richar Abril debacle on HBO. Rios missed weight again and got outclassed in every sense of the word – and only Adalaide Byrd happened to notice. Rios got his toughman matchup after that, making a trilogy with Mike Alvarado, and a lot more money from HBO, interrupted only briefly by his being heavybagged in China by a rehabbing Manny Pacquiao who dropped to Rios a total of perhaps 30 nonconsecutive seconds of the 2,160 the men spent together.

All the while somehow persisted the myth Rios was a prodigious infighter, a man who knew well how to mill on the inside, which he did not. I recall distinctly a gaggle of smug South Texas doofuses (a doofusi?) helping me understand how badly I misunderstood my own eyes during Rios-Abril, a match wherein Rios routinely set his head behind Abril’s left shoulder and winchcranked a lefthanded lob (to replicate the power of this shot, raise your left hand, make a fist, and flex your left bicep, then pull your fist into your cheek). Because every Mexican is a tough infighter.

Except Rios is a Mexican-American infighter, which, as Soto showed so ably, is a lesser breed. The opening rounds of Saturday’s match looked like a YouTube video of a fat American partyanimal picking on the wrong Mexican abuelito in a bordertown cantina. Rios had nothing but the rude force of (relative) youth; there wasn’t a single element of fighting Rios did well as Soto, and if Soto’s cultural norms precluded clowning he nevertheless appeared surprised by how easy Rios was to hit and make miss. Exhausted a minute into the fight Soto still managed to hit Rios whenever and however he wished for the 35 that followed. Rios’ generally overrated, if likable, trainer, Robert Garcia, beseeched Rios stop allowing Soto to win every round with merely 10 seconds of exertion, but Garcia must’ve known what Rios didn’t bother telling him which was the difference in class be so vast Soto probably didn’t need more than five seconds of roundly exerting to do it.

The evening’s biggest losers were its oddsmakers, pros who usually know better, for having installed Rios as a wide favorite fighting a Mexican in Mexico. Guess lots of folks believed those HBO press releases way back when.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

SAN ANTONIO – Outside the coffeeshop where this effort happens Nature is entirely mixed-up, leafless branches beside trees suddenly in bloom beside trees still shedding dead leaves. One week ago winter was a sleeting vengeance, a few days ago it was 90-degrees, today is more autumn than spring but neither Thursday’s summer nor Monday’s winter. It makes one wonder what dramatic changes home-construction philosophies will undergo necessarily in the next few decades, how inadequately traditional remedies and materials may serve.

This was to be an essay about the difference between what Andrew Cancio did a couple Saturdays ago as the underdog in a world title fight and what Leo Santa Cruz did a late-replacement Saturday as a prohibitive favorite, and maybe it will be at some point accidentally, but there’s reporting and writing and homages of sorts, and this rarely be a space to come for reporting, so let this instead be a written homage in its way to what Santa Cruz did and the way he did it, busyness for its own sake, a ferocious pelting of partially aimed exertions that feel portentous in their moment but ultimately leaven’t a mark on their objects or audience.

Biomimicry, according to neuroscience (that wonderfully flexible science of whatever you wish it be – with every one of a trillion neurons representing the potential for a specialized field), increases human creativity, and so an observation about a dog on a hiking trail: He absolutely has a sense of himself, he is selfconscious enough to know “mine” – whatever else might territoriality be? – even as he hasn’t a grasp, really, of “yours” and at best a fleeting grasp of “not mine” much the way a human child grasps “my toy” years before “not my toy” years before “your toy”. And a dog is better for it since whichever comes first, selfconsciousness or memory, being unable to grasp not-mine or very much of the past-tense allows a creature to go through life with very few lamentations and nearly nothing akin to nostalgia. Most resentment probably reduces to “not mine anymore” and so even if biomimicry hasn’t made this effort any more creative it has limited finely its author’s chances at resentment – like: A talent for writing columns is not mine anymore – and if that doesn’t eliminate anxiety it certainly closes one door to it.

A brief reminder: Howsoever much we fetishize work ethic, when the real thing arrives, true and natural and genuine talent, it is a lightning bolt. That obvious, that different, that awestriking. It is a phenomenon so complete it causes us immediately to ask questions about luck, to pose riddles about what happened to a talent’s possessors born too soon or too late – what happened to the child born with Johann Sebastian Bach’s gift 5,000 years before the violin and harpsichord? what happens to the child born with Bobby Orr’s gift in Lima instead of Ontario? Maybe it’s all luck and has been and always will be, whether genes luckily arranged or luckily arranged genes lucky to come along when and where they did.

Unbeknownst to its readers, y’all, this column gets written after 3 1/2 hours of volunteering at a bus station on Sunday mornings with a nun-organized interfaith coalition whose ministry is easing the passage of just-released Central American asylum-seekers, predominantly women and very young children, as they make their ways to sponsors’ homes all round the country. Backpacks with blankets and coloringbooks and other sundries and bags of nonperishable foods get distributed, one to a family, sometimes 500 in a week, and itineraries get reviewed and maps gets drawn and on the occasion of stranded passengers shelter gets found, and it all adheres with remarkable consistency to a Karma Yoga principle something like: Work without expectation of reward. None of us is the caricature U.S. politics and its media coverage make us; the detention-facility contractors who escort the asylum-seekers to the bus station aren’t heartless or morally compromised, the Central Americans aren’t predatory or transactional but frightened and grateful, the busline is nothing like a psychopathic profitseeking entity, and the volunteers aren’t wholly without competing selfinterests. Every thing buzzes and improvises.

Sunday, though, a young mother with an infant child asked about her younger brother and where he might be, she had his bus ticket, and would they be bringing him to her, he was only five years-old – should she take her afternoon bus to Houston or wait for him at the station, and surely someone must know where he is, a five-year-old? Because the person who accompanied him from Guatemala was not his biological mother but his biological sister he had been sent to a different detention facility, and now his older sister stood in an unknown city, with a Spanish name at least, asking what she should do next.

You pass her on to a volunteer from a different, legal-counsel group, since she might have contacts at the detention facility, and you pass the griefcounseling role to a Mexican nun from a local monastery, and you walk it off by volunteering to get medicinal supplies from the basement of a local church. If fatigue makes cowards of every man so does powerlessness for the same reason, and there be naught so pathetic as impotent rage. With that as a disclaimer, then, take this in the spirit of its intention: The executive who enabled these policies may well be old enough to escape their consequences, but his abettors will not be – there will be trials for this someday, too much evidence has accrued since June and it evinces too much inhumanity, and so lets this act as but a tiny marker. When the apologists emerge, babbling about sovereignty this or patriotism that, calling every prosecution politically motivated and every sentence deeply unfair, know this: Justice is being served, finally if tardily.

Nothing unjust seems to happen in a boxing ring while the fighting happens. Fouls occur, yes, but no one gets to a level of televised combat without he knows how to suffer and avenge such things. There are refs who shade one way or the other, generally a-side, but they don’t get to where they are, either, without a thousand hours of practice. Our beloved sport’s injustices happen offcanvas. Judges, promoters, managers, so forth. The more decisive a man is in the act of fighting another the better his chances of going unrobbed by refs and judges, though, which is another reason to celebrate what Andrew Cancio did some Saturdays ago in California, when he beat his opponent to quitting and took the matter directly out of any hands but his own.

As one ages the more easily he finds it to celebrate individuals who manifest justice with their own fists than to catalog injustices. Or perhaps that is what laziness and cowardice catalogers would say it is.

Outside on the communal green of this revived and repurposed historic brewery a collective of acrobats or yogis perform balancing acts we once called cheerleading but now bedizen with spiritual elements, perhaps deservingly, and it’s the performative act of the whole thing that rankles. But no sooner does one reach for a metaphor about social media’s ills than he realizes human spirituality has often as not been a performative act, has it not, and, anyway, he’s too young, still, to be so curmudgeonly.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry

Saturday in California on a surprisingly rich card of mostly anonymous fighters (outside the Golden State anyway) DAZN and Golden Boy Promotions delivered something wondrous as it was unexpected: American super featherweight Andrew Cancio beating to broken undefeated Puerto Rican titlist Alberto Machado. With unfortunate infrequency does an underdog win a world title and still less often by round-four bodyshots stoppage. Even if it now starts happening monthly it will never be tiresome.

One might fairly infer from this the glimmeringest of hopefuls, yes? We are a dissatisfiable bunch, the aficionados, drawn as we are to violence, subjected as we are to disappointment oftenlike, that no sooner do we have airwaves (cablewaves? satellitewaves?) saturated by our sport than we begin loud lamentations – in volume relative to our experience – the offerings’ quality shall plummet. And it shall. The same way teamsports leagues become diluted with each expansion so too has our beloved sport with its each new league, be that league DAZN, ESPN, Fox or Showtime.

What happens when network trafficopters filled with cash cropdust cities that haven’t opened a new boxing gym in a decade but have closed three or four. When the undeserving suddenly get rich the deserving make comebacks or delay retirement plans under the auspices of what Golden Boy Promotions partner Bernard Hopkins once called “back wages”. Nobody amongst us generally blames them because we know the brutality of this entertainment medium, what grisly things these men do for our amusement, and even a band of misanthropes misanthropic as ours can’t quite cross the line to begrudge them. We suffer it then, unenthusiastically, caustically, characteristically, so long as commentators properly stay their throats and scribes stay their fingers, admitting the fare be reheated retirementplan mush and not worldclass prime.

We’re not the suckers they think we are but a resentful lot. Anyone ever attached to any local boxing scene gets this; every carpetbag promoter comes cantering about with his unique recipe, asking insiders his same rhetorical questions we’ve all heard from each of his predecessors, the conman’s shimmer in his smile, and no sooner do we try to answer earnestly, telling him what we’ve seen work and what expectations are reasonable, but his head swivels elsewhere, the better to spot a new mark. A friend and colleague of ours who’s forgotten more about Arizona’s boxing market than Phoenix’s next dozen promoters will know in the aggregate, Norm Frauenheim, has a typically sanguine view of those swivelheaded promoters: “I figure, hey, it’s their money.”

The new broadcasters don’t care because they’ve run the numbers and know if aficionados were a mass critical enough to seduce HBO’d’ve found a way to sate us and stay in the game. So it’s a game of capturing the naive, which is itself a game for the naive. For among the target demographic of naive combatsports fans who’d fall for such swindles regularly or longly enough to justify recent budgets are gaggles of former boxing fans who pretty loudly declare their lost allegiance attributable to dilution – in the form of too many champions and too many weightclasses and too many too-manies making worthless fights too many.

Shoving into this maw an annual Gervonta Davis mismatch is a surefire way to get canceled (two months ago I finished with Showtime nearly a year to the day after I finished with HBO). Which leaves three leagues: Fox, free, ESPN+, cheap, and DAZN, cheaper than premium cable but more than ESPN+ and Fox combined.

In the apparently revived WBSS, DAZN has something uniquely special, something no other league approaches, and that is meaningful combatants making meaningful fights that go somewhere. It’s a best-of-the-rest strategy aspiring to be more and quite possibly succeeding at such aspirations: No one has come close to building an Oleksandr Usyk mightily or quickly as WBSS just did.

Which brings us to Saturday’s wonderful surprise and what it might portend. Golden Boy Promotions, since its figurehead’s plunge and CEO’s termination a few years back, is a regional attraction with a single moneymaker – currently prizefighting’s greatest – and a magazine. Three years ago that wasn’t just not-much but barely anything at all. But the outfit got through the thinnest of years by equally thick margins and is out the other side, with a meaningfully massive infusion of cash via its association with Canelo Alvarez and a committed network which doesn’t want for dates.

Five years ago this would’ve meant fizzing cases of Tecate commercials stacked shamelessly atop shameless mismatches. But Saturday it surely did not. The favorite got canvassed in the final undercard bout, the favorite got canvassed in the comain, and the favorite got keelhauled in the main. More of that, please, whenever you can, thanks.

There’s something simply cynicism-proof about watching an unretired longshot like Andrew Cancio win a world title by breaking an undefeated favorite in half, especially after that favorite drops him in their match’s opening 90 seconds. It speaks to Golden Boy matchmakers’ matchmaking prowess, too, it does. Years ago, at the firm’s inception, Golden Boy’s fatted matchmakers made ugly showcases; their CEO scammed HBO with sparkly a-sides, and the matchmakers’ job was not to blemish the records attached to those names. Golden Boy didn’t build many fighters and didn’t make many great matches either. That matchmaking staff, now, is chastened and leaner. When the company’s primary earner fights all comers, too, it’s nigh impossible for coworker talents, whether contenders or prospects, to refuse whoever they’re offered. Which is how we get matches like Saturday’s – matches made to be entertaining contests more than gory coronations.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday or Sunday on ESPN+ Russian Sergey “Krusher” Kovalev decisioned Colombian Eleider “Storm” Alvarez in Texas to reclaim one of the titles Kovalev won, in part, by losing so spectacularly to Andre Ward in 2017 that Ward decided to retire on the highest note of his career. In avenging his latest knockout loss, Kovalev boxed well, Saturday, and Alvarez did not, and that was that.

Kovalev is and will be remembered as a b-level prizefighter cleverly presented as much more by a b-level network, in mid-descent from a-level, a symptom more than a cause, a titlist folded in half by the only a-level prizefighter he faced – average ingredients well-prepared during a famine. Much of what happened Saturday, much of what you’ll read and hear for the rest of Kovalev’s career, is and will be about preserving illusive credibility despite concessions to illusions past.

“Others are wrong!” in other words, not “I was right.” Overtraining this or distractions that. Paeans to Kovalev’s age aside, what aficionados saw in Kovalev-Alvarez 2 was the same guy they saw tentatively box to victory against Bernard Hopkins, a once a-level prizefighter 50 or so days from his 50th birthday.

Now that we have the hindsight of the same B-Hop being knocked outframe, outboxing, outring by Joe Smith 13 months after Kovalev’s careful showing we might reexamine our insightfulness before we reappraise Kovalev. Could he punch? Sure he could. Was he a frontrunner? Sure he was. Could he finish? Yup. Was he great? No, never.

There’s selfservice in Andre Ward’s ongoing postrematch analyses of Kovalev, even while there needn’t be, an opening desire to reassert Ward’s superiority followed by a closing desire to burnish Ward’s legacy a smidgen more at halfprice. What remains constant as gravity, though, is a fact like: Were Ward and Kovalev matched at Ward’s best weight, not Kovalev’s, Ward would’ve gone 10-0 (10 KOs) in both this lifetime and the next.

Saturday’s question, finally, isn’t whether Kovalev underwent some historic revision in one training camp with Buddy McGirt (he didn’t) or whether Eleider Alvarez underwent some historic dissipation in the last halfyear, but why we actually care. Some of it, though much less than years past, is standard Stockholm-syndrome stuff. The January boxing calendar is historically anemic, leading young fans and pundits to get unseemly giddy at anything better than an obviously mediocre happening before March.

Most of it, though, is vestigial HBO hype. Like the network’s defunct commentary trio scoring midrounds according to prefight prejudice, quite a few of us did not notice HBO’s shift from singular authority to underbudgeted shell, when it happened, because it was incremental.

The emerging consensus is that HBO Sports’ last great boxing authority was Lou DiBella, who left the network in 2000. That feels about right. The talents and promotional relationships DiBella built and featured carried the network a little less than a decade before the network’s dearth of knowledgeable programmers began showing its ribs. The departure of a talented producer though talentless programmer in 2010 began the qualitative freefall that followed. Wealthy and knowledgeable became wealthy and gullible became middleclass and gullible became poor and gullible became canceled.

Nearabout HBO’s middleclass and gullible stage arrived a surfeit of prizefighters raised in the Soviet Union to prey, at once, on the juvenile nightmares and adulthood nostalgia of fiftysomething viewers. It took little in the way of imaginative squinting, then, for HBO Sports’ target demographic to see in Kovalev, and his fellow Eurasian bogeyman, Gennady Golovkin, far more than what they actually were (later confirmed, of course, when both were beaten by smaller men from North America, “controversially”). A reflexive reality still happened in viewers’ minds and that reality affected commentators’ perceptions even as they sought to affect viewers’ perceptions.

One monument to this, probably the greatest, was Kovalev-Hopkins in 2014. Kovalev dropped Hopkins in their first round together and then did not imperil him again in the 11 that followed. A fearsome 31-year-old puncher, in other words, was unable to snatch consciousness from his dad in 36 minutes of trying. Absurd as that sentence reads today we all obeyed a tacit moratorium on calling it what it was – desperate as we were to keep the juggling balls in the air, to contend our oncegreat sport broadcasted on a oncegreat network was something more than risible goofy. Surrealer still was the twoyear, fourfight Kovalev victory pageant HBO hosted in the great man’s honor after Kovalev decisioned a man 10 years nearer Social Security eligibility than his physical prime.

This really happened. You may even be old enough to remember it.

It took super middleweight Andre Ward 20 rounds to do it, but this too happened surely enough: Kovalev, eyes averted, belly up, offered himself to Ward with thighs splayed – the better to be sniffed – in an act of animal submission more ably narrated by David Attenborough than Jim Lampley.

And still HBO persisted! This time with silly opponents and sillier narratives right up until Kovalev got himself whupped by a shortnotice Colombian making a world-title-match debut after his 33rd birthday. Yet another coursecorrection ensued and Eleider Alvarez, a man who’d knocked-out a perfectly symmetrical if entirely unimpressive 12 of 24 opponents, became some Andean beast whose fists Kovalev would need God’s own luck to survive.

OK, fair point: This last was ESPN’s manufacture, not HBO’s. Alvarez regressed to his mean; the Krusher character begins its next rewrite. Fortunately Kovalev’s latest comeback has found its proper platform, off premium cable and on a $5/month boxing-after-midnight app.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

SAN ANTONIO – Not even a threehour drive from where this was written, Saturday night at Houston’s Toyota Center Mexican super welterweight titlist Jaime Munguia decisioned Japan’s Takeshi Inoue on unanimous scorecards that were semiaccurate despite likely being filled-in over breakfast tacos. The match’s promoter, Oscar De La Hoya, a promise machine, promised to be back in Houston again and again, as he does in every city he visits.

I wasn’t there and through the opening credits of Saturday’s mainevent couldn’t remember why, exactly, I’d forgone the experience, especially considering December’s trip to Corpus Christi for a spectacle promising nothing much qualitatively greater. (Toyota Center, too, remains dear for being the site of a personal ringside highlight and Golden Boy Promotions’ greatest early show: Juan Manuel Marquez versus Juan Diaz, 10 years ago next month.) Then a few minutes in the opening round it came together: I did not believe a month ago, and remain no more convinced today, Munguia is a mainevent fighter.

He may be on his way like Antonio Margarito once was, but he’s not there now, and his promoter’s abundance of broadcasting opportunities more than Munguia’s abundance of talent is why Saturday’s was a headline gig for the Tijuanense. It shines through in Munguia’s hitch, more pronounced when he is moving backwards or sideways than when his aggression bends him forwards. His hands too low, his chin too high, Munguia raises his gloves drops them raises them to get each combination started, and it’s the very way Inoue ducked so many high hooks early (before Inoue decided these punches were better blocked).

It’s a large reason Munguia works best moving forward and should not move to weightclasses whose titlists do not let him move forward on them. Munguia is enormous for 154 pounds, and enormity composes most of his talent at this point. We’re told how young he is and likely to outgrow his weightclass, and that doesn’t bode well for him since adding six pounds will make him punch hardly harder but absorb abler what punches clip his chin, which is many. Because his trainer’s breakthrough professional accomplishment was befriending Joel De La Hoya Sr. decades ago, Munguia hasn’t a proper tutor to admonish his left glove upwards, upwards, and this leaves him scarywide open to rights of all shape and flavor, from dunking-overhand to piston-cross.

Limited as Inoue was in every pugilistic tool save desire he nevertheless struck a prizefighter in his third title defense with punches launched from his own hip. How he did this speaks to Munguia’s want of ring IQ. At least once every round Inoue’d bull Munguia to the ropes, where Munguia’d drop his left hand as if involuntarily. His opponent’s guard pinned at his waste for reasons Inoue found fortuitous if puzzling as the rest of us did, Inoue’d force the palm of his left glove between Munguia’s chin and collarbone then blast Munguia with a right. The first few times it happened one immediately sensed Inoue must be about more than first impressions (dominated as those were by images of Inoue’s crossing right foot behind left every time he pivoted) and onto wily stuff indeed, as he teed-up Munguia’s chin in a way more than figurative.

But no. Munguia simply didn’t have an answer for being bullied back. Sometimes Munguia returned fire, sometimes he brought Inoue to his chest and looked for the ref, and other times he began a rabbitpunch-off and looked for the ref. In this sense if no other Munguia gave the impression of a mainevent fighter, a true a-side: He expected official enforcement of favorable terms and got that quite a bit in the match’s first half from a sometimes officious ref unable to break the fighters without assigning culpability.

On to Inoue. What Japanese pressure fighters have that all pressure fighters have but few have more than the Japanese is self-possession. There are cultural origins for this, probably, or maybe it’s a selfselection sort of thing, whereby matchmakers know an entertaining test will be given their fighters if a b-side gets imported from Japan. How else does one explain Inoue’s presence on Saturday’s card in the first place? It’s not enough to say Inoue’d only once before fought outside Japan; Inoue’d only twice before fought outside Korakuen Hall.

Yet there he was, making his American debut in a mainevent at Toyota Center, home of the Rockets, and making a proper show of his opportunity, too. A little zany, a little eccentric, a little offkilter – that was Inoue during fightweek and into fightnight and right through the last bell. Those aren’t pejorative modifiers because they’re not even tangential synonyms for the pejorative modifier Munguia was after, after all: Intimidated. Inoue was not that. Even when he got near kneedropped midlate by the same basic combo Munguia bounced off him 50 times Inoue straightened and shimmied and recollected on his stool.

Something else Inoue’s self-possession revealed about Munguia: He may not hit hard as advertised. Despite doing regularly the one thing every single completely superfluous commentator demands – punching to the body – Munguia did very little to take Inoue’s legs and still less to take Inoue’s spirit. Frankly the left hooks Munguia landed to Inoue’s body took about much from Munguia as they did from Inoue, blasphemy of all blasphemies.

About the completion of boxing commentary’s superfluousness: DAZN is an innovative platform without innovative commentary. Already the Kenny Mora Leonard trio is brutedreadful for all the reasons Lampley Kellerman Jones became so; the whole enterprise is banal, salesy and most of all constant. The threeman booth means someone or -ones must be talking every instant, and since there aren’t that many ways to sell a product to a customer whose payment you’ve just confirmed and since the new media reality is that no one who might criticize a promoter or manager or programmer, much less an advertiser or sponsor, is allowed a live mic, televised boxing commentary now reduces to a childlike contest of who can say “unbelievable” the most times, where five years ago it was at least a contest of who could say it the most euphemistically.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday on a Showtime pay-per-view broadcast for the gullible and nostalgic Filipino great Manny Pacquiao decisioned American mediocre Adrien Broner by unanimous scores way closer than what action they appraised. Make or break, do or die, verb or other verb, Pacquiao-Broner finished a latenight show that was simply awful.

It was a lowbudget swindle, top to bottom, a return to the days when Showtime was the scrappy underdog, productionwise, while being so very far removed from that, qualitywise. Saturday’s was the work of a rubberstamp applied to a starmaking enterprise without an element of quality control in its ranks. What caustic commentary follows about the undercard is necessarily limited to a foiled plot to miss the whole damn thing, which be nigh impossible when the comain goes off a halfhour after the mainevent should.

In fact, start there: What possible demographic do you sate with a live sports event that concludes at 1:30 AM ET, last-call whoremonger? Stack the undercard a hundred fights deep, à la Don King, if need be, but don’t subject viewers to it; because it sure ain’t our problem PBC has more talent than it can afford to fight annually.

Comain victor Marcus Browne may be an exception to this, he’s on the rare PBC biannual plan, but he’s not exceptional. Perhaps it was the hour of his antics, but there’s something aesthetically offensive to a spectacle such as: After cautiously playing keepaway with a man so bloodied by his own wound even Tony Weeks tries to get the doctor to stop your fight, after wheeling shamelessly in the final 30 seconds from a man blinded by his own blood, you then perform the wrath of Achilles a halfsecond after the final bell frees you from the possibility of being punched again.

An apt leadin, that, for Showtime’s shopworn aping of HBO’s moribund model. Commercial, commentary, movie, national anthems, movie, ringwalk. National anthems, apparently, intend to announce: This is a serious event. But there’s no such thing as a serious event after midnight, that’s when, according to Eric Clapton, one merely chugalugs and shouts, which mightn’t actually be the worst way to describe AB’s performance in the main.

Broner is an entertainer who fights, not a fighter who entertains, and he’s not that entertaining either. He captures Floyd Mayweather’s schtick successfully enough to capture PBC funds, captured from Showtime, but not well enough to capture an audience. Mayweather long sold the prospect of comeuppance, a chance to see a boorish lout lose his undefeated record, maybe violently. But we’ve now seen Broner lose every way it can be done consciously, and the catharsis is long gone: There are committed if casual boxing fans among us who’ve watched hours of his fights live and have yet to see him win. Broner’s a conman who’s not conned anyone but his employer in a halfdecade. Because he rightly distrusts his conditioning, Broner makes dramatic fights that lack suspense and increasingly lack drama, too.

AB’s latest personal trainer, Kevin Cunningham, has collected a couple plump checks for bringing Broner in on-weight and fiercely performing empty orations, the sort of no-nonsense, give me 10 more reps, former-cop, cliche-gushing pap hardboiled sportswriters used to go cuckoo over.

After losing all but a handful of Saturday’s 36 minutes Broner leaped on the turnbuckle like an adolescent thespian following unclear stage instructions – over here, hands raised, OK? Pacquiao, who, a career ago, took the primes from three hall-of-famers seven times in five years, watched it all with a shrug: I guess this is the thing at my new circus, and the money’s nice, so, sure.

A certain barely detectable sadness now accompanies Pacquiao in the ring (or perhaps that’s projection); the men whose vanquishings made him a legend are already in Canastota, or just about, moved on to roles more permanent if less prestigious than Pacquiao’s senatorial gig, while Pacquiao plays acoustic renditions of his greatest hits with inferior and comparatively anonymous bandmates backing him. Maybe Manny needs the money, but more likely he just loves to play, and if the songs don’t have yesteryear’s force they still beat the hell out of silence.

In some odd way it brings to mind Marco Antonio Barrera’s bewildered look in Manchester a decade ago, after Barrera’d left his partnership at Golden Boy Promotions to contract his services on a fight-by-fight basis to whomever would pay for a legendary name on his inferior fighter’s resume, and a cut suffered early but allowed to bleed till Amir “Tomato” Khan could get his Barrera stamp happened, and Barrera absolutely could not have cared less. Fifteen months later Barrera was in San Antonio, going through the motions now with Top Rank, and he wanted to talk about the late Edwin Valero (with whom Barrera’d prepared for his uninspired 2007 rematch with Pacquiao) more than himself, and his cadence resembled that of Manny’s prefight chinwag with Showtime’s never-not-insufferable Jim Gray, Saturday.

It’s not that Manny’s not still fun to watch, he is, and it’s not that someone ringside for his best matches feels Manny’s new PBC tour is demeaning, not really, it’s that Manny himself seems to feel demeaning. Like he feels sorry for anyone gullible enough to swallow Saturday’s swill and call it otherwise.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday on Showtime Pay-Per-View Filipino senator Manny Pacquiao looks to avenge his 2015 loss to Floyd Mayweather by shoving his left fist through the face and out the other side of American welterweight Adrien Broner. This match belongs on pay-per-view only in the sense no network would offer what purse guarantees either man expects, and therefore distributing its financial risk across what remains of the gullible public is the rationalest way to make it happen.

Pacquiao should win well enough to spark six months of rumors about his next opponent, and Broner should collect savage enough of a beating to sate pay-per-viewers’ bloodlust at least until Error Spence does wicked things to Mikey Garcia in March. That’s the assumption, anyway: Those with the means to purchase the fight either revere Pacquiao or hate Broner because nobody hates Pacquiao and nobody who reveres Broner has the means to purchase the fight.

Socioeconomic realities being what they are, and their hatching what priorities they do, the prose excoriating Broner over the years has been exponents better than what writing celebrates him. When he was calling himself Mr. HBO a halflife ago, the usual suspects copy+pasted press releases about him and wrote round them, barely, and a writer or two, too, wrote well about him, one even visited a Colorado trainingcamp, if memory serves, but there was no bottom there to plumb; AB was a caricature of Floyd Mayweather’s caricature of a darkskinned man for lightskinned men to hate.

In that doublenegative of sorts Broner made something positively charged – in the electrical sense if not the ethical one – something Broner was for, where Floyd was mostly against things. How much of television happens in writing and editing, we don’t know necessarily, how much of what we are told to feel about fighters is manufactured by producers who know how, but one gives everyone the benefit of the doubt by writing some nugget of unlikability glowed from Floyd early on and got produced for maximum effect. Floyd was presented as invulnerable even when he looked like he was about to cry.

At root, though, Floyd is a deeply unlikable person – read: on a personal level, nobody likes him – whose fights were for the most part tired and tiring repetitions of one another. It’s worth repeating, the more we got to know Floyd, the more cameras were trained on his personal life, the more we saw someone asleep in most every frame. Floyd wasn’t unlikable because of the caricature he played or because of how gleefully fraudulent the 12th rounds of his fights felt, but because no matter what he did or spent he was a dullard.

To be in any room with Floyd for more than an hour is to be bored.

Broner feels different from that. There’s a vulnerability to Broner. Sure, most of that is born of the losses on his ledger, the salesman’s instinct with an inferior product, but that might be the wrong way to see it. Floyd talked about his undefeated record as a means of comparing himself to whatever fighter aficionados held dear; he wasn’t TBE because he cared about being the best ever – he’s learnèd enough to know no historian could look at the men he fought, and when he fought them, and what they weighed when he fought them, and put Floyd in any top 20 list – but rather because he knew it would drive you nuts enough to buy his next fight no matter how silly its premise or demonstrative it oddsmakers’ eyes-rolling.

Floyd didn’t promise he wouldn’t be hit by his opponent, though in retrospect it would have made his fights more interesting if he had, but rather that he’d make an entertaining fight. That he never did do that accumulated resentment enough among aficionados for nobody to miss him.

Broner, on the other hand, makes an entertaining fight every time he puts gloves on. Broner’s defense is porous, his footwork often a tangled mess. He’s quick enough and strong enough to hit any man and flawed enough to be hit right back. He doesn’t sell his fights like: Come see AB the technician perform flawlessly again. He says: Come see this obnoxious clown get his clock cleaned.

Anyone who was in Alamodome for the signature beating of Broner’s career – Chino Maidana’s 2013 assault – knows there was tension in the championship rounds when, after absorbing everything Maidana could throw, Broner looked the fresher man, the abler combatant. (Another feature of that match that speaks to Broner’s otherwise inexplicable staying power: Never in 14 years of covering fights have I seen a more unambiguously joyful crowd than the one that spilled out the stadium in San Antonio.) And who among Broner’s eloquent undertakers didn’t shudder a bit when AB clipped Shawn Porter in the final round of Broner’s second career loss?

Had Broner an iota of discipline he might’ve proved himself an elite lightweight before eating his way two divisions up; if there’s little doubt prime Pacquiao would’ve beat Broner at 135 pounds there’s much more doubt than what greeted Pacquiao’s fight with David Diaz at that weight.

Which brings us, feet tangled and retreating with gloves overhead, to Saturday’s match. Here’s one way to look at it: Since 2017 Pacquiao is 1-1 and Broner is 1-1-1, making neither guy the rational a-side, and since when do you put a match on pay-per-view without an a-side?

Another way to look at it is . . . well . . . maybe there’s not another way to look at it.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

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

Local politicians say San Antonio is the fastest growing city in the country, which may be true or wildly false – who bothers knowing the truth of anything anymore? – but if one trusts his intuition he’s able to confirm a coarsening, at least, the sort of coarsening that happens when strangers get crowded together; I felt similar traffic patterns living in Silicon Valley in 2001, and since most of the country is a couple decades behind Silicon Valley, it feels about right South Texas should be arriving at San Jose-2001 in 2019.

I believed persons might change themselves through force of will then saw no one turning the feat in more than cosmetic ways, then I believed no one changes but becomes solely more deeply himself then saw folks years later unrecognizable, then I decided no one changes himself but does get changed by life.

Ringside for Ramirez-Hart 2 in Corpus Christi brought further evidence of a mysterious sort of thing like physical IQ, something Norman Mailer jabbed in his treatment of Ali-Foreman, “The Fight”, whereby one’s experiences in combat, or one’s ancestors’ experiences for that matter, make the non-thinking, or anyway non-selfconscious, parts of one’s body abler to respond in a boxing match via bypassing consciousness than pinging it for preapproval, and meandering deeply enough in this thought brings an intersection with one’s selfconcept, one’s identity, that might explain why professional athletes often sense the pain of failure just like the pain of injury.

I can’t envision any viable model whereby unbought boxing-writing pays a living wage for more than a handful of its practitioners, whereby more than a dozen writers work for publications independent from promoters and pay their rents that way, much less mortgages, and this doesn’t make boxing-writing an anomalous form of journalism so much as a predecessor form: when you don’t expect to get serious pay for something you don’t worry about capturing consensus or abiding by it, and that means you strain for objectivity very little, which is probably fine since the obvious bias of opinion be more palatable than what dishonesty can accrue when wellintentioned objectivity becomes your objective.

Pause.

Jesse Hart appeared uninspired during the opening half of his rematch with Zurdo, a rematch Hart demanded, almost begging, which made veteran observers wonder if Hart were unwell or if Ramirez were specialer, and it unraveled thoughts about failure in prizefighting – rarely unaccompanied by somethought like “I’m unable to do this” – which quickly reraveled into thoughts about the essence of relenting, that it isn’t so active as quitting but rather passive like nonresistance; far oftener does a man fail at prizefighting by shrugging than shaking his head.

There’s a hint of schadenfreude for aficionados as the richest prizefighter of our last generation now wears down mixed martial artists and walks down teenage kickboxers; it proves nothing about any of the three sports except economic circumstances disparate enough to drive a man and a boy to seek a payraise by imperiling themselves and failing painfully at someone else’s craft.

There’s nothing yet on the 2019 calendar that rivals Fury-Wilder at last year end; there are curios where old guys fight and little guys dare to be great by scaling classes, and such spectacles, like Kell Brook’s getting expunged by GGG or (again) Amir Khan getting knockout-of-the-yeared by Canelo, bring to mind a distinction strategist Carl von Clausewitz inspired when he defined courage as a trait a warrior uses to overcome doubt; we can invert this and imagine a doubtful outcome is a prerequisite for courage, which is to infer it is no braver to enter in a hopeless contest and lose than vanquish a hopeless opponent.

I wrote all that once before, more than 10 years ago, and now that I read it I realize how much more careful I was then – we were aligned with CBSSportsline.com at the time, and if one hoped to appear on those pages he had to write for a verily casualer fan – and my initial dismay at returning to rehash so easily an idea I explored a decade ago now changes in realtime to a consideration this idea, failure being more passive than active, is better when revisited, else why keep revisiting it?

Boxing keeps posing this question, after all.

(Feet got a bit tangled there.)

Apropos of HBO Sports’ demise, a month ago I wrote a harsh sentence-fragment eulogy for eulogizing, “To hell with all that”, and the words weren’t uninspired; both parents passed in 2018, and their passings afforded me chances to see how voluntary grieving might be, and in some circumstances, I discovered, it can be altogether voluntary, which asks assorted additional questions about both the deceased and their survivors.

Pause.

American Bank Center felt emptier in December than February, much quieter, which spoke in a declarative sentence about the trendline of Zurdo Ramirez’s drawing power, and since nobody’s ever read such a graph better than Bob Arum, one imagined Southpaw Ramirez will get put in hard in 2019: Who better to welcome Gennady Golovkin to the super middleweight division on ESPN?

If boxing is no more hopeful at the beginning of this year than usual it is more ubiquitous, which means something in the future even if it means precious little in the present – there are more American kids, potential NFL running backs and NBA point guards and Major League center fielders, now being exposed to our beloved sport, and at least a few may make their ways in local gyms and replenish our ecosystem – and we’re never more than a great American heavyweight away from being kings again.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

2017’s end-of-year romp, a mosaicked effort about Chocolatito’s abrupt plunge from boxing’s apex, brought an examination of conscience that lauded what salutary effects result from travel to cover our beloved sport, a quiet promise, it now seems in retrospect, to travel much oftener for boxing in 2018, a promise quite exactly broken by its maker with two exceptions, exceptional trips to Corpus Christi – home of Selena – I now hope to explore like a cumbia: left foot and right foot neutral, right foot back, left foot neutral, right foot neutral, pause, left foot back, left foot neutral, and again.

I planned to travel thricely, at least, to locales farflung to cover boxing in the new year when I wrote about traveling to Santa Monica Pier but then life happened, and deaths, too, and the calendar never quite shaped up – the interestingest events being in Eurasia or saturated or not enticing enough in some other way.

Somewhere buried in quips about the size of Top Rank’s platform on ESPN+ for Mexican Gilberto “Zurdo” Ramirez and the champ’s awkward threats to other super middleweights and awkwarder threats to ascend to light heavyweight resides a conceit like: Zurdo might outwork WBC’s David Benavidez, a formerly pudgy kid PBC now fights but annually, but he can’t beat WBA’s Callum Smith, so let’s swerve tourneys like that.

I can’t pretend to enjoy the drive into Corpus or imagine anyone else does, but I still believe there’s no place like ringside, no place so honest, to remind you why you excavate these 900 or so words every Sunday, and I like Shell’s in Port Aransas, too, a 40-minute drive, offseason, and a short ferry ride away.

Pause.

The first week of February found Zurdo in American Bank Center to defend his WBO fraction of the championship against Habib Ahmed, an undefeated Ghanaian making his first boxing trip outside Ghana, while the world’s best 168 pounder, Callum Smith, readied for his WBSS semifinal a few weeks later in a tournament from which Zurdo was noticeably absent.

Now the WBSS schedule sits colorful empty after months of reports about missing bonuses and disintegrating investment, and the WBSS is such a good thing and DAZN such a proper platform, one hopes its organizers dust themselves off, draw a black line through any stateside venues and bring to fruition season 2 in Scotland and Japan and Russia and Poland, places where a proper gate helps purses get paid.

San Antonio doesn’t host big events these days, which is unjust, well as Canelo’s tilt in Alamodome went some years back, and the main reason cited is a dearth of local ticketsellers, which is unjust, well as Canelo’s tilt in Alamodome went some years back, but there’s also a certain relief that comes with such an absence: I can skip hours upon wasted hours of fightweek festivities, empty if hyperbolic tributes to sponsors, and get right to the broadcast itself, which is better earlier and much better with a twoperson booth or fewer.

I sat beside Don Smith in February at ringside – he was visiting Corpus from Phoenix to cover Jose Benavidez’s comeback – and he epitomized the essential eccentricity of the boxing writers you meet as a boxing writer, the guys who publish offline newsletters and set clippings from their bestknown works beside themselves on pressrow, guys fond of conspiracy but fonder of fighters, and a few months later matchmaker Bruce Trampler tweeted about Don Smith’s demise, killed by a motorist at a bus stop, and as I write this I believe more deeply than before Top Rank’s facility with and affinity for journalists separates it from other promoters; it’s the part of the job (along with don’t steal from your employer) Golden Boy Promotions’ Richard Schaefer just never got; it’s the part of the job PBC’s founder founded PBC on avoiding.

Boxing shows itself today nothing so much as adaptable, gliding forward from HBO Sport’s collapse, an event unthinkable to aficionados even five years ago, with barely a blink of acknowledgement, and that gliding happens even as 2019’s calendar looks weak so far.

I don’t find nearly so much discovery in boxing writing these days as I did, say, 10 or 12 years ago, and I don’t seek it, either, like I did that many years ago, and when I wonder why it returns me to a question Lee Samuels asked a few weeks ago at American Bank Center – “What sites do you read?” – and a realization I don’t visit boxing sites to read writers anymore but use my favorite writers on Twitter like portals to the sites that publish them, and if this is a good new bent, writers not publishers, I’m not sure it feels like one.

Pause.

Two undercard guys stood out February in Corpus, Jose Benavidez and Jesse Hart, and this too evinced the importance of matchmakers who know what they’re doing, matchmakers able to balance the oftcompeting priorities of entertaining in the moment while building another moment a halfyear away, so in October it wasn’t a surprise Benavidez got worn to torn by Bud Crawford and a couple months later Hart, so relentless in February, looked nigh relentful against Ramirez.

When dilettantes pontificate about boxing’s failures, assuring the miasma boxing will die or already did, they underestimate the simple inertia of a sport with a century or two of aficionados’ influencing other aficionados, they forget boxing moved on from irreplaceable men like Muhammad Ali to utterly replaceable men like Floyd Mayweather and just kept selling.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday in Brooklyn on Fox, in the debut of a new business model by which the PBC receives money for presenting its fighters on public airwaves instead of paying to do so, Houston super welterweight Jermell Charlo got decisioned by Detroit’s Tony Harrison, controversially, and Houston middleweight Jermall Charlo decisioned Russia’s Matt Korobov, uncontroversially. Another uncontroversial point: Neither Charlo exceeded expectations.

Either the Brothers Charlo are the future of prizefighting or they’re a couple more in an eyeless promotional group’s attempt to manufacture by dint of hardwork and stubbornness future pay-per-view stars, b-less a-sides, in strict adherence to a moribund business model that made a very few folks very rich some years ago. Saturday neither solved that riddle nor brought the riddle any nearer its conclusion, featuring, as it did, a public-airwaves broadcast sans knockouts. For he is an elusive consumer indeed who’ll say in 2020: “Let me pay $80 to see the two brothers I saw on that Fox show at the end of 2018.”

One can fixate on scorecards, like we’re told to do after every single title match that ends with a final bell, or one can concede he’d not be fixating on scorecards were the favored fighters good as commentators promised him they’d be. Or just as possibly these are the musings of a pundit who missed the narrow Charlo window by virtue of poor timing.

If a search of Google Drive be trustworthy I began covering the Brothers Charlo from ringside about 10 years ago. Jermell Charlo decisioned a lad named Juan Serrano in Houston’s Toyota Center some hours before Juan Manuel Marquez memorably hooked, lined and sank Juan Diaz. Charlo’s record was 6-0 (3 KOs) and his opponent’s was 2-5-1 (2 KOs), and yet the fight was an entertaining one because Charlo’s opponent, despite having no power of his own, walked directly through Charlo’s punches. Four months later I began a report of Charlo’s match with Federico Flores in Tucson like so: “Light hitting or otherwise, Jermell Charlo’s got class.”

In 2012, on the undercard of Garcia-Morales 1, Jermall Charlo (9-0, 5 KOs) made that Saturday’s second match in an empty Houston arena against Sean Wilson (5-9, 1 KO) and did not fell him but did stop him. A year later, I covered Jermall in the gymnasium of a small San Antonio college, on a Golden Boy copromotion card, and while a better journalist would take the time to divine whom Charlo fought that evening it’s more fun to share this: When the match was near enough to publish a bout sheet that bout sheet read Charlo (11-0, 7 KOs) vs. T.B.A.

For some stark contrast, there’s this: Vasyl Lomachenko just made his 12th prizefight, in May, and won a world title in his third weight division.

I covered the Brothers Charlo a halfdozen times from ringside and came away from the experiences unable to discern which was who and struck by how little stopping power either’s fists comprised. Sometime after that PBC launched as a venture and I used its indifference to unbought media like an excuse not to perform what acts of diligence previously got me to watch the Charlos.

Imagine my surprise, then, when writers whose opinions I respect began writing unironical accounts of Houston’s lion twins’ savage dismantling of fellow prospects. Was it enhanced matchmaking, or an enhanced training regimen? Yes, it was/were.

But now I do wonder about any newly aspiring aficionados who came upon the Brothers Charlo for a first time Saturday night. No matter how little expertise an American male actually enjoys about our beloved sport, very few American males are more than a nationally broadcasted knockout or controversial decision away from amplifying loudly and confidently whatever they heard they saw. They’ve seen Tyson highlights enough on YouTube to know what’s important and trust their guts in all matters of sanctioned violence. While they may infer a faint affiliation between a promoter and the network for whom that promoter acts as an exclusive supplier of prizefighting talent they trust that network’s commentating team much more than the scorekeepers who turn in official tallies – in a wonderfully American way that confers more legitimacy on any authority whose bribe is right out in the open:

“The judges are on the take.”

“So are the commentators who make you think that.”

“Yeah, but they’re getting paid to give their opinions.”

Which is why Jermell’s getting decisioned by Tony Harrison brought so much more outrage from Fox viewers than Jermall’s 11-rounds-to-1 favoring on an official scorecard published by the son of Fox’s unofficial scorekeeper. The first event was unforgivably offscript while the second aligned neatly with what viewers got promised they’d see.

The bent of most boxing viewers is such that if you don’t give them a violent catharsis they’ll tend to make one, with judges and referees topping their lists of wouldbe victims. If they say they’re leaving because of corrupt officiating they’re not leaving. If they actually do leave trust it’s this: There wasn’t enough violence. That is a problem for any boxing broadcaster but particularly a problem for those who align themselves exclusively with PBC, as PBC does not specialize in violence but rather promise and potential and charisma and skills. For more than a decade the Brothers Charlo have shown lots of all four, and so?

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas – A mile south of American Bank Center stands the Selena Memorial, known as Mirador de la Flor. It overlooks a small harbor that abuts Corpus Christi Bay, which floats to Mustang Island, a crescent sliver of land separating this city from the Gulf of Mexico. Far as coastal cities go, this is an ugly one, truly, but Selena, as both an ideal and a memory, is beautiful, and it feels good when I tell folks I’m heading southwards that they ask about visiting Selena, now, rather than an aircraft carrier.

I’m here because of a fightcard at American Bank Center, of course, one that wasn’t good as its February predecessor, here, though probably better than its Saturday successor in New York, an interminable DAZN insomnia cure with Canelo Alvarez’s tri-spiking of hapless Rocky Fielding’s liver like its Sundaymorning alarm. Fielding was what we knew he was, and Canelo did exactly what a dominant force should do a submissive one. Aside from what matchmaking gripes all sounded months ago the only fair complaint about Canelo’s debut on a new network was the ungodly hour it finally happened.

Does that suffice for a topical summary? It does.

“El Zurdo” Gilberto Ramirez, a Mexican super middleweight titlist who neither participated in WBSS’ first season nor seems slightly interested in matching himself with those who did, gained a lukewarm vengeance on the halfdozen or so aficionados who told people they thought Jesse Hart won his first match with Zurdo 15 months ago, by decisioning Hart narrowly Friday night. Ramirez is the better fighter, the harder puncher, even the handsomer man. He may ultimately have more grit, too, than Hart. But if Ramirez won acclaim from official judges in Friday’s rematch he surely won no new fans and lost some old ones.

Ramirez explained his poor form in rounds 8-11 by citing an elbow injury. Could be. Hart obviously sensed something and stopped hesitating to walkdown Ramirez after the seventh. But Hart did something else, too: He showed how limited Ramirez is. A rangy frontrunner who’s very good from his preferred distance Ramirez hadn’t an inkling what to do with a man inside said distance, even while that man was not punching or holding but mostly just leaning on him. Hart turned the boxing match to a shouldering chesting necking contest and Ramirez didn’t do nothing about it. He planted his feet and waited for the ropes to break or the ref to yell it.

Soon thereafter Ramirez said he wants to move to 175 pounds, where his lack of infighting should adhere itself to a lack of power and get him either decisioned or protected so unflinchingly by Top Rank’s matchmakers he might as well have been.

The more interesting story was Hart, who looked a feral beast against Thomas Awimbono 10 months ago. Still scowling when he approached press row after merely 88 seconds of uberviolent work in February, Hart demanded a rematch as his proper due and convinced those of us who were listening. How much more fragile Hart looked in the opening half of that rematch, though! Talking to himself through an open mouth as he absorbed bodyshots and retreated from Ramirez’s feints Hart appeared like no one so much as a fighter ready to reveal, postfight, a trainingcamp injury or case of foodpoisoning (preceded necessarily by the “I don’t make excuses” tagline).

It led me to a ringside thought like: I have no idea what this man is thinking. Not in the sarcastic sense of “what were you thinking?” but in the much larger sense of an unknowable inventory of factors in Hart’s life that brought him to that moment, as a lubricated female voice a few rows back besought him to do what only she believed he could do, over and over and over, and over, and his corner urged him on, and the rest of the arena cheered heartily against him. Probability says I shouldn’t have had any better idea what Zurdo was thinking – regionally at least, I’m from a part of the world much nearer Hart’s Philadelphia than Ramirez’s Mazatlan – but Hart felt so deeply unknowable it was a thought and word into which I burrowed as Hart went dispiritedly backwards.

This isn’t a pledge to understand a fighter like Jesse Hart better in the future but a confession I probably never knew a thing about a fighter like Jesse Hart and a soft promise not to act like I do.

Which gets me thinking about the art of matchmaking and those who do it better than others. Top Rank does just about everything better than every other promoter, save perhaps signing prospects, but its complexion has changed noticeably these last few years. There are the legends on its staff, another of whom deservedly goes in Canastota next June, and they occupy the same ringside seats as ever they did. But tucked in the left corner of pressrow now sits a braintrust of laptops and tablets and smartphones, and what youngsters understand their mechanics and reach, that represents Top Rank today, a company endangered by economics two years ago and now a lesson in adaptability. Such adaptation has bestowed on Top Rank’s legends a sheen of fated contentment, pleasant to observe as once it was unlikely.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas – Their first match in 2017 was close and controversial. Their rematch was closer but less controversial.

Friday at American Bank Center in an entertaining scrap for the WBO super middleweight title televised by ESPN+, Mexican heartthrob “El Zurdo” Gilberto Ramirez (39-0, 25 KOs) remained undefeated by narrowly decisioning North Philly boxer-puncher Jesse “Hollywood” Hart (25-2, 21 KOs) by majority scores of 114-114, 115-113 and 115-113.

The 15rounds.com ringside card also sided with Ramirez, 116-114, scoring rounds 3 and 10 even.

“I hurt my left elbow in round eight,” said Ramirez afterwards in his native Spanish. “It wasn’t worth dick then.”

After a tentative first round, where neither guy wanted to lead but both wanted to counter hardy, Hart began to absorb left uppercuts from Ramirez in the second. By the fourth Ramirez began to piece Hart up, making Hart relent in a mouth-agape retreat, forcing Hart to exert and punch back harder than planned, which made round 5 the best of the match’s opening half.

Both men presented their chins for uppercuts, and both made tasted and served them, but Ramirez, of the two men, committed far more to bodypunching. Ramirez, too, feinted Hart out of position often, making one wonder about Hart’s confidence or conditioning.

“If I hadn’t hurt my elbow, I would have knocked him out,” said Ramirez of his advantage in the fight’s first half.

With Ramirez no longer fit and right in round 8, though, Hart’s improved physicality changed everything. Hart’s leaning on Ramirez revealed El Zurdo to be an immobile and often lazy infighter of limited leverage and creativity in the ninth.

“I pressured him, I boxed him,” said Hart after the match. “I really don’t know.”

For reasons that were unclear, after his two best rounds of the fight, in round 10 Hart returned to Ramirez’s preferred range and lost some advantage before returning to a more favorable, smothering attack in the 11th.

Round 12 was both excellent and brutal, with Ramirez doing what a champion must, seizing the initiative from Hart and retaining his belt despite a final-minute rally by the Philadelphian. If the decision was close, it was also popular, as Friday’s small crowd was passionate and partisan-Mexican.

ARNOLD BARBOZA VS. MANUEL LOPEZ

Friday’s comain featured a good boxer, California super lightweight Arnold Barboza (20-0, 7 KOs), against a decent one, Coloradoan Manuel Lopez (14-3-1, 7 KOs). The better boxer won, by three scores of 100-90, in a fight that served as a proper – by not being overly compelling – appetizer for the main event to follow.

Barboza is very good but also lightfisted. He leverages his punches correctly, and they sound robust when they land, but as evidenced by his knockout ratio, his opponents suffer surprisingly little damage. Ringside and cheering Barboza on, with near-constant suggestions, was the former master of 140 pounds, Terence Crawford.

The delta between Crawford and Barboza is exactly the delta between Barboza and Lopez.

JOSHUA GREER VS. DANIEL LOZANO

Chicagoan Joshua Greer (19-1-1, 11 KOs) looks the part and punches the part, when he connects, which he did often Friday night, and had to, too, in order to chop down stonechinned Floridian Daniel Lozano (10-6, 3 KOs) and secure a WBC Continental Americas title. Wearing a frilly red-and-white outfit with tennis-ball-green boots, Greer used his speed to discourage Lozano early and often.

In the last minute of round 7 Greer then used power he’d not shown in the preceding stanzas, dropping a four- or five-punch combination (fast as it was, could’ve been either number) that finished with a crisp righthand that put Lozano on the seat of his trunks. Lozano beat the count comfortably and made it to round’s end.

But with their man prohibitively far behind on the scorecards, Lozano’s handlers did the compassionate thing, stopping their man from answering one more bell.

UNDERCARD

The evening’s final nontitle match featured California lightweight Gabriel Flores Jr. battering about the ring Maryland designated opponent Edward Kakembo in a contest that comprised but one doubt: Will Flores stretch Kakembo or not? Not won, and so did Flores: 60-52, 60-52, 60-52.

Mexican super bantamweight Jesus “Veneno” Arechiga (7-0, 6 KOs) began Friday’s match having stopped every opponent inside the distance and in round 1 looked primed to waste Mexican David “Choko” Martino (6-6, 4 KOs) quickly, but in a scheduled execution the condemned survived with some grit and some wiles and some decent punching, and the muscular Arechiga’s faded power, too, Martino made it to the final bell of a fight Arechiga nevertheless won easily by three scores of 40-36.

Friday’s first title match, a super featherweight scrap between Los Angeles’ Mikaela Mayer (9-0, 4 KOs) and Colombian Calixta Salgado (17-11-3, 12 KOs) for the NABF title, finished with a wide decision victory for Mayer, 80-72 three times. The rangey Mayer proved herself superior in every category, from physicality to body punching to footwork, putting a comprehensive eight-round beating on her outmatched if rugged opponent.

In the undercard’s third match BoMac-trained New York lightweight Jamel “Semper Fi” Herring (19-2, 10 KOs), a lighthitting southpaw, decisioned Brazil’s Adeilson Dos Santos (19-6, 15 KOs) by three scores of 80-70, after successfully wearing-down Dos Santos late with left uppercuts.

Before that Mexican bantamweight Ruben Vega (11-0-1, 5 KOs) drew over six rounds with Dallas’ Oscar Mojica (11-5-1, 1 KO).

Friday’s first match saw Panamanian welterweight Roberto Duran Jr. (2-0, 2 KOs) use manos-jovenes-de-piedra to make instant work of Brownsville target Leonardo Pena (0-3), finishing the local fighter in under a minute.

Opening bell rang on a cavernous American Bank Center at 5:17 PM local time.

By Bart Barry-

More historic happenings, Saturday, more unforgettable things you’ve already forgotten, more unbelievable events you believe completely. At New York’s Hulu Theater Ukrainian lightweight Vasiliy Lomachenko unified titles by decisioning Puerto Rico’s Jose Pedraza after Mexican super bantamweight Emanuel Navarrete beat up charismatic Ghanaian Isaac Dogboe and took his title. All the while a oncegreat broadcaster bid itself a weteyed goodbye in a very private ceremony.

It was a night of good prizefighting that acted, in collaboration with the calendar, a fine contrast with a night of great prizefighting six years past. With Dogboe’s selfbelief and Lomachenko’s craft came a reminder of a man, Juan Manuel Marquez, who epitomized both qualities and emerged from a much hotter crucible more heroic than both men, in 2012.

“Ohhhhhh!” went Roy Jones’ call on that HBO pay-per-view broadcast – writing of contrasts.

And let us use this as a proper contrast. When a broadcaster has the time and wherewithal to roll out of his prescripted, canned and shelved tagline during a knockout, trust little what hyperbole follows. “All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling,” quipped Oscar Wilde, and so it be with ageful boxing commentary; the commentator’s desire to make the soundtrack of something historic is sincere as can be but what often comes out are sounds of unseemly striving. Moments are not memorable because someone tells you they’ll be memorable, and no matter how hard he tells you how unforgettable this moment is won’t make it so either. Moments are memorable when they make you fully present, which is impossible while someone fills your ears with his loud forecast about the unknowable future.

In its dotage HBO fell prey to this much as any broadcaster, fell prey to what straining happens when the importance of the platform and its presenters surpasses the importance of what events they present. The amplification, the absurd analogies, the vending. Now that it ends whimpering we get told what a loss we suffer, but that’s neither appropriate nor accurate either. Inappropriate because the departed don’t get a vote in the matter. Inaccurate because boxing has recrudesced during (if not because of) HBO’s demise. The montages and incessant lookingsback to come will play on our vanity, telling us it’s only narcissism if our lives aren’t fully historic happenings, which of course they are, else we’d not have been chosen to witness such historic happenings – and so on in a loop of lugging, effortful prepositional phrases mostly intended to prime us to consume the next historic product.

Salesmen in one aisle, amplifiers the other. One side shepherding and bullying for consensus, the other side adding eight exclamation marks for every witticism.

We return briefly to RJJ’s Marquez-Pacquiao 4 call. The moment was perfect because it was unscripted and Jones’ reaction to it pure. No context needed. Marquez, bloodied and buzzed, planted and threw, consequences be damned. What followed for Marquez was perfect a moment of vindication as sport can afford a man. Hours later on the way out MGM Grand’s main entrance the promotional ring had a guard dissuading Mexicans from climbing on the apron and posing for pics on their faces, hands tucked behind them, Pacquiao style.

Saturday had none of this. It had a charismatic titlist in the comain gutting out an ugly loss and a prodigy – we’re now told ceaselessly – looking less than prodigious in victory. Pedraza proved of Lomachenko what Marquez proved of Pacquiao: They don’t like fighting in mirrors. They are best when their opponents try to react conventionally to their unorthodox attacks, and they are much less when their opponents move symmetrically away from them. If Pedraza is obviously not Marquez he proved Lomachenko is not so much Pacquiao as a standardbearer for our collective desire to find another Pacquiao.

The best part of Saturday’s broadcast came when Tim Bradley asked his cocommentator a direct question about his opinion of Lomachenko’s performance. With that Bradley yanked the broadcast out of the thirdperson past – where experts have said and noted authorities have shared and highly regarded trainers have assured and pundits have never before seen – into the firstperson present. Hey, pal, tell me what you think right this moment.

Firstperson present, like RJJ yelling ohhhhhh. Nobody yelled ohhhhh Saturday. Dogboe barked NeHo a few too many times. We saw very good prizefighters wellmatched. We got told we’d see footwork that was sublime and teaching that was genius. But nobody yelled ohhhhhh at home or in the theater because nothing in the main or comain merited it.

While that happened, the former heart and soul of boxing paid a final tribute to itself in a stadium populated and passionate as a television studio.

If we let the matter be, if we let our sport enjoy its new stature and riches, we will surprise ourselves with how quickly we forget HBO Boxing, with how unstoppably our beloved sport marches on. If there’s an argument it’s ungracious to interrupt a eulogy this way, there’s a counterargument against eulogies in general. We burden ourselves with others’ pasts that we may soon burden others with our pasts. To hell with all that.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday in Los Angeles two heavyweights battled for a significant part of the world championship and surpassed expectations en route to a split-decision draw likely won by Brit Tyson Fury, “The Gypsy King”, over American Deontay “The Bronze Bomber” Wilder. Fury jittered and juked and cuffed and holstered Wilder for all but 25 or 30 seconds of their match, but those seconds were important ones, so important th’t had Fury not landed on his shoulder before his head in round 12 he’d not have afforded sundry pundits a chance to do their misanthropic best while appraising the scorekeepers’ produce.

Boxing won Saturday in the same sense its combatants emerged victorious from their scrum: Both guys to the occasion rose and proved much better than earlier versions of themselves. But these are not great fighters, and while their match was far better than it might have been, to put Fury-Wilder on any fight-of-the-year lists is to consign heavyweights to the soft sizeism of low expectations. Expectations honestly arrived at, albeit.

In his second career championship prizefight Fury was indeed much better than in his first, and if Wilder did not quite finish Fury he at least felled him twice with punches you might in good conscience teach a youngster to throw. As promised the match was often insipid but never unsuspenseful. Both men, too, did their best; they presented great versions of themselves to one another and took honest shots. Neither man awoke Sunday with regrets.

In their ways Tyson and Deontay are evenly matched talents. Were fights still to go till one man got disabled from toeing the line Wilder would win every time, much as Fury’d do were championship prizefights reduced from 12 rounds to 10. Pursuing the feat continually Wilder should expect to knock Fury to the bluemat once every 27 minutes, on average, for the next five years, and Fury should expect to enjoy striking Wilder 60 times flush before his each horizontaling. Conditioning and what pronouncedly variable rates of dissipation affect conditioning being held equal, of course, which it’s safe to imagine they’ll not be; if Wilder looked partially chastened at the closing bell Fury looked elated, vindicated, ready to spend another extended sabbatical traveling and writing.

Whatever the eternally lamenting masses opine of the decision, fact remains in a fight with Tyson Fury, Wilder could win decisively by landing only two punches in any second less than 36 minutes and win controversially by landing just 10 punches in a match settled by official judging. Life is unfair all over but particularly so in prizefighting and magnificently so in heavyweight prizefighting.

If there’s no desire here to play scorekeeper-apologist there’s some desire, indeed, to impart a thought that came along about the time Saturday’s decision did: In a round, such as the first, when combatants land an aggregate of six punches in 180 seconds, a punch every half-minute of threatening the feat, a judge’s position on the mat actually might affect his card honestly. Were you judging three minutes of mutual belligerence you might intuit from what glimpses you caught a general sense of what happened even while being blocked by either of the combatants or the referee or even a camera flash in the background for a few of the decisive moments. But tasked with catching the one punch either man might land every halfminute you might could fail at the sight of a ref’s back obstructing your eyes or the hulking surface area of one of the two giants blocking fully your view of his opponent’s purchasing fist.

Were we more interested in truth than decisiveness we’d petition sanctioners round the world encourage their scorekeepers to mark 10-10 frequently as they mark 10-9, to say, effectively, “I don’t know who won that round so it was even.” What boxing judges I’ve known are decent, average folks empowered disproportionately for a few hours every year. The obviously corrupt ones are not local but imported from jurisdictions renowned for their corruption. If such a person wished to rig his card and withstand subsequent commission scrutiny he might give every early round to his designated man, and in the absence of clean punching cite subjective factors like ring generalship.

Two-point rounds, in this scheme, bring unwanted attention; if gentlemen can agree to disagree about 115-113 tallies, either way, 115-111, to pull an example out of thin air, makes sparkly what probably wishes be occult. (Fortunately for one Las Vegas judge who attempted a similar sort of legerdemain for Pacquiao-Marquez 3, scoring rounds 8-12 geometrically opposite what happened, Pacquiao did not fell Marquez in round 12, for that would’ve made an evidently excusable 116-112 card into an investigatable 117-110.)

But haven’t you written an aficionado should prize knockouts so highly he caren’t a whit who wins a decision, no matter its corruption? Indeed, and that mostly holds, with the conceivable exception of a stylist so negative he mustn’t stutterstep even once along a tightrope spanning 2,160 seconds – for him alone one might justifiably endure the suspense of official scorecards’ unveiling. There’s irony, yes, such a tightroper find himself bequeathed a frame so absurdly imposing as Fury’s. If there’s something aesthetically dissonant about any 200-pound man in flight Fury’s beating a nimble retreat at 6-foot-9 and 257 pounds is ridiculous to the point of beautiful.

In the general range of consciousness prizefighters and aficionados roam nothing worse might be said of a man than others laugh at him. A few bands higher, though, comes this possibility: Causing the world to greet you always with a chuckle and shake of the head, as Tyson Fury does, is a trait wonderful as it is uncommon. Long live the Gypsy King!

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Saturday in Los Angeles undefeated 6-foot-9 Brit Tyson “The Gypsy King” Fury will toe the line with undefeated 6-foot-7 American Deontay “The Bronze Bomber” Wilder in 2018’s most-interesting heavyweight title match. Wilder is a professional athlete who fights like he’s insane. Fury is an insane man who boxes conventionally. Either the affair will be insipid-cum-suspenseful, with Wilder pansearing Fury after nine or 10 eventless rounds, or it will be suspensefully insipid, ending without Wilder landing but one of 1,000 threatened punches.

Embrace the madness – that’s the only sage council for this week. Nobody has any idea what will happen. We’ll all opine freely in a sporadic if predictable game of casual-capture, as none brings the casuals coming like heavyweight prizefights, and those of us who are wrong will disappear from the prediction game till January and those of us who are right will crow toldyousos, keeping and publishing an embellished tally of our past predictions, till everyone is bored(er) of us.

The wisest among us forego the prediction game altogether, the wiser among us forego the prediction game unless we believe fully in an underdog, the gormless among us predict the favorite will win then hogstomp about fightnight reminding those who disagreed what fortunetellers we be. It’s most fun to have no idea what will happen and nearly as much fun to cheer the longshot and anxiously funless to pick the favorite, in the name of being right, and see the underdog transcend himself.

If you’re reading this you’re serious enough about our beloved sport to know following it for any reason but fun is a fool’s errand. You’re also, one hopes, introspective enough to look deep inside your reasoning about Saturday’s match and conclude how much fun it will be, how wickedly suspenseful, when the opening bell rings and you get to cheer for one loon or the other without much idea what comes next.

There’s a good chance not a damn thing, actually, comes next. For 36 minutes, that is, absolutely nothing might happen. Fury is a good boxer but not much of a fightnight entertainer; Wilder is an entertainer but not much of a boxer. From time to time fortune commands such a combination entertain us mightily but most of the time it does the other thing.

If every experience in a lifetime is equal parts impossible and inevitable till it happens, this fight shall make it manifest in real time. If Wilder clocks and clears Fury it will’ve been inevitable an undefeated Olympic bronze medalist should wallop to snot a dilettante exchampion struggling with every known form of autosabotage. When Fury throws a nohitter Wilder’s way it will’ve been impossible a barely tested freestyle puncher might land on a man who slaptaunted Wlad Klitschko 12 rounds deep.

Pressed to choose an outcome, I’d lean impossible, but the good thing is I’m not pressed at all, and the better thing is I’m choosing anyway because it’s fun to watch with a rooting interest and it’s fun to be wrong, too. Were Wilder a product of any but the PBC I’d consider this match a farce, probably, thinking any pay-per-viewer be courting the swindling, Gypsy King and all. But PBC’s approach to boxing has been: Sign everyone, match them with no one, and try to seduce broadcasters.

PBC acquired Wilder via its quadrennial Olympic signing spree then kept him miles from any honestly ranked contender till year 10 of his career. That’s no typo: Deontay Wilder began fighting professionally in 2008 and didn’t get tested till 2018. For a little context, Mike Tyson lost to Buster Douglas in the fifth year of Tyson’s career; Tyson had unified the heavyweight division, peaked and begun his descent five years shallower in his career than Wilder was when he escaped Luis Ortiz in March. For a little more context, Muhammad Ali had won the heavyweight championship of the world from Sonny Liston, defended it nine times, endured a three-year exile, returned to the ring, fought a couple tuneups and lost a decision to Joe Frazier before he was 11 years in prizefighting. There’s no need to pretend times’ve changed is the reason for Wilder’s dossier, either; Anthony Joshua, world’s other heavyweight champion, has accomplished more than Wilder, in five years.

No, by any precedent, historic or otherwise, Wilder is a matchmaking miracle – it’s miraculous in what was often considered a dying sport so many willing victims were excavated from the heavyweight mines. Yet here Wilder is, unencumbered by his resume and earnestly wondering why so many Americans haven’t an idea who he is. Well.

There’s a certain horsesense among even casual fans that values competition more than hyperbole-followed-by-showcase-followed-by-hyperbole. It’s why market forces have shown HBO Sports’ signature-destination philosophy to a signature destination; ain’t nothing compelling about broadcasting LeBron dunking on highschool teams whilst panelists extrapolate how he might’ve fared against Wilt.

Wilder is Saturday’s wildcard. Loopy as Fury’s last few years have gone, variable as his psyche may be, he’s still more of a constant when the bell rings. He’s odd and weird and does everything on an offbeat but he throws the 1-3-2 like a man taught how. Wilder primarily crawlstrokes crazy at shorter men, bodies them backwards incidentally, then hammerstrikes their bowed heads. He inventively uses others’ disbelief against them.

The question, then, is: Can Wilder get Fury to hold in his mind any belief long enough to turn it disbeliefwards?

Each man has the best chance of besting the other man by being himself. Wilder would be a fool to try boxing Fury, and Fury would be a greater fool if he tried to slug Wilder. In the decisive moment that should come in the final four rounds Saturday, when Fury’s lack of conditioning greets Wilder’s abundance of it and Wilder mashes Fury’s head with something dastardly, both men will go hotblooded mindless and their basest combative tendencies will prevail. Wilder will appear a man committed to murder and Fury his resigned victim, and if the referee goes for it Wilder will attain a new stature, and if the ref doesn’t all three scorecards should go 119-110, Fury.

I’ll take Fury, UD-12.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Bart Barry-

Friday night in Oklahoma, Saturday morning east of there, undefeated Dallas junior welterweight Maurice Hooker successfully defended his WBO title by stopping Mexican-Oklahoman Alex Saucedo in the seventh round of a wonderfully violent contest on ESPN. If it’s tempting to write each man’s stature was improved by the contest it is also inaccurate. Hooker took the left side of Saucedo’s face, with righthands, then Saucedo’s fighting spirit in a masterful assault

He also collected a large purse, acquiesced to the event’s promoter, comporting himself nobly as the b-side, then beat the a-side’s ass. That’s a blueprint for how to thrive in this, our newly re-balkanized and suddenly wealthy sport. Hooker got $1.2 million to defend an obscure 140-pound title round midnight on a Friday, which is way more than he’d’ve made a couple years ago. His copromoters may not have had a cashout in mind when they let Top Rank win the purse bid, but they also may not have expected what happened either. Top Rank sure didn’t.

“Cost-of-doing-business,” one imagines Bob Arum and others to’ve said while creating Saturday’s contract; “we’ll pay-up for Saucedo’s title then control the division, whatever happens.”

Now DAZN’s Eddie Hearn, the solvent one among Hooker’s copromoters, has an admired titlist and a committed platform and a dumptruck of cash with which to build an enticing mate for whoever wins WBSS’ super lightweight tourney. Enviable.

Top Rank, meanwhile, has a chastened contender in Saucedo, a man who has reached his ceiling quite a bit lower than planned. Saucedo appeared like no one Friday night so much as his 17-year-old self, the offensively minded kid who tasted punches aplenty in El Paso’s Sun Bowl when for the first time in his four-prizefight career he happened on an opponent he couldn’t hurt quickly. Perhaps historians someday will regard Maurice Hooker as the best counterpuncher in a generation and Friday will become retroactively sensible – Alex had nothing to be ashamed of getting boiled and iced by an alltime great – but that is not probable. An explanation that ages better might be: Hooker exploited Saucedo’s evidently nonevident defense and hit him more than any chin might withstand.

Saucedo’s chin was Friday’s antagonist, as he took a remarkable number of blows from a man who knows how – a defensive style henceforth known as The Abel. Previously misnamed “Mexican Style” by a Kazakh, misnamed because Salvador Sanchez and Juan Manuel Marquez wouldn’t recognize it, The Abel is where you eliminate a fighter’s head movement, beseech him attack an opponent like a heavybag, and leave every defensive responsibility to his chin.

Each defensive style has its susceptibilities, of course. The Philly Shell, for instance, can be solved by a great jab; The Lock leaves a man open to uppercuts. The Abel is unique in that it relies not so much on what an opponent does but who an opponent is. The Abel requires sympathetic matchmaking to prevail. An example of a scenario wherein The Abel worked exquisitely well was putting a career welterweight in a match with a career middleweight (putting that same middleweight in with a career junior middleweight or middleweight, of course, was less advisable). The Abel is practiced in bars and prison yards round the world but named after its vocalest proponent, Abel Sanchez, a man who sits beside Andre Berto atop the HBO-made Boxing Personalities list.

Years ago, when the flaws in Alex Saucedo’s craft became apparent, a hunt began for a trainer who could cut, sand and lacquer them away. Saucedo was young enough to reform. If Sanchez isn’t exactly the wrong man for that job he’s a workable imitation of the man who was. Rather than fix Saucedo’s defective instrumentation Sanchez plugged Saucedo in, jiltknobbed the amp and told him to wail away.

What resulted was not so much offense-as-defense but offense-or-unconsciousness. Saucedo had no transition Friday; while Hooker was many things Saucedo was binary – either hitting or being hit. Hooker might’ve won 12-0 with his jab alone but couldn’t help himself, took chances, and properly deleted the official scorekeepers’ roles.

There was a moment in round 2, however, when it appeared injustice might be served and Saucedo’s binary commitment to offense might be rewarded another night. He dropped Hooker early with a partially missed cross, and you wondered if The Abel mightn’t be in for a title run at 140 pounds like its run at 160. As Hooker is a career junior welterweight, though, those hopes got canceled a minute later when Hooker thrashed Saucedo through the round’s final minute.

There was another moment, or actually 2 1/2 minutes of them, in round 6, when Hooker retreated to the ropes and let Saucedo punch him like a heavybag. As it happened it looked so intentional on Hooker’s part to make the cynical among us wonder how very much cash might’ve been in Hooker’s cashout package. Or maybe Saucedo’s attack was that devastate fatiguing? No and no. Rather, it turns out, Hooker was metering the dissipation of Saucedo’s power like the battery icon a couple inches northeast of where you read these words. Once Hooker sensed Saucedo’s punches were diminished to breakeven Hooker went for it, knowing he could land 10 flush for every one of Saucedo’s. He was right, too. Hooker beat down a hardpunching, granitechinned Mexican in his adopted hometown and stopped him seven rounds in, gloriously.

Saucedo will return; he’s young and fights charismatic enough to fill a Margarito-sized hole in Top Rank’s roster. But Hooker is the real story and a welcome addition to our beloved sport’s rapidly and radically changing ecosystem.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry