By Norm Frauenheim–

Being a sports fan during the pandemic from hell isn’t easy. It’s more about what’s missing than what’s really there, somewhere in the empty bubble amid seats filled with cutouts and annoying noise generated to sound like cheers.

Some things, of course, never change. I give you the Los Angeles Clippers, who were among the missing all over again this week in a vanishing act against the Denver Nuggets that was almost a nostalgic trip back to the old Clip Joint, basketball futility gone yet still not forgotten.

The Clipper fold in blowing a 3-1 lead in a best-of-seven series during the Pandemic Playoffs wasn’t pretty. For the Clippers, consolation probably rests in the circumstances of a trying time that everybody hopes to soon forget. It’ll come with an asterisk, a symbol that will mean it really doesn’t count. Yet in the here-and-now, it was almost comforting. During a time when it feels as if everything has changed, the Clippers didn’t.

They were familiar when little else is.

I mention this because it’s mid-September, a time when boxing would dominate the week. Wednesday, Sept. 16, was Mexican Independence Day. The familiar fireworks had become an annual ritual, an expectation of a major bout that began with Julio Cesar Chavez and continued with Oscar De La Hoya. It and Cinco de Mayo had become the game’s double date, a stage that belonged to the sport’s biggest stars, even if they weren’t Mexican or Mexican-American.

Floyd Mayweather Jr.’s last 10 fights, and 11 of his last 12, were on Saturdays tied to May 5 and Sept. 16. Since 2007, it’s no coincidence that two of the four top pay-per-view bouts were held on these dates, including the record setter – Mayweather’s decision over Manny Pacquiao on May 2, 2015 at Las Vegas’ MGM Grand.

It was a time to do business. A time, also, to prove that boxing could still stop the world, hold center stage.

But that’s missing this week. I had almost forgotten about it until I glanced at the calendar and realized that last Saturday or this Saturday was supposed to belong to Mexican middleweight champion Canelo Alvarez, who about five years ago had promised to take back the May and September dates from Mayweather.

Alvarez has fought in May and/or September seven times since his loss to Mayweather on Sept. 14, 2013 to Mayweather, also at the MGM Grand. His last fight in either month was in a victory over Danny Jacobs on May 4, 2019 at Las Vegas’ T-Mobile Arena.

But the traditional dates have gone dark since then. First, there was the pandemic, which eliminated any chance of Canelo facing UK super-middleweight champion Callum Smith in May or September. Now a lawsuit, filed last week, against promoter Oscar De La Hoya and streaming-service network DAZN leaves Canelo and the business without a date.

Boxing needs Cinco de Mayo and Mexican Independence on Sept. 16 as much as college basketball needs March Madness. On the calendar, those were days to circle. Days to make money. Days that define.

Without them, Canelo and the business are just a couple of guys hoping for a blind date. Not much future in that.

By Bart Barry-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim–

The lawsuit isn’t a surprise. It’s been looming, brewing for at least a year in the contempt Canelo Alvarez has for Oscar De La Hoya and in mounting impatience he has for DAZN.

It finally landed, all 24 pages of it, in federal court this week in Los Angeles. From money to broken promises, it’s full of all the usual grievances and suspects.

Canelo is suing for $280 million. He wants out of his DAZN contract, a $365-million over 11 fights a couple of years ago. Then, it looked like a titanic deal and it still does, at least in terms of what seems to be happening to DAZN. It never foresaw the pandemic. Who did? But it appears to have blown a huge hole in what the streaming service had hoped to do.

DAZN looks to be sinking. In negotiations for a September fight, it’s alleged that it could no longer afford Canelo’s contracted minimum, $35-million a fight.  Canelo was reportedly offered a smaller purse and some stock in the company. It didn’t take Canelo long to figure out that the stock might soon be worth about as much as the contents of a spit bucket.

He decided to get what he could in court.  Nobody knows how long the pandemic will last and what the impact on simple households and billionaire budgets will be. Long, drawn-out legal proceedings – is there any other kind? – could end with a judgment and no payoff. In boxing terms, just another paper champion.

But Canelo has the time and the money to risk it. He’s 30, which means there are three, four, maybe as many as five more years left in his prime. Plus, he’s already wealthy, thanks in large part to DAZN. He grossed $105 million for three fights — Rocky Fielding, Danny Jacobs and Sergey Kovalev. There was no Gennadiy Golovkin, which figures to be an issue in court. DAZN invested plenty on the bet that it would happen. Fans have wanted it. But the lawsuit says a third GGG-Canelo fight is past its due date.

Time to move on. But to where? And to whom?

The guess is that Canelo has plenty in the bank, perhaps enough for him to promote himself. According to Forbes, he made $94 million in 2019, including victories over Fielding and Jacobs. Add $35 million for his victory over Kovalev in his last fight, and he earned $129 million over the last couple of years.

He’s got deep pockets. But is it enough for him to follow De La Hoya and Floyd Mayweather Jr. into independent entrepreneurship? Impossible to say. De La Hoya and Mayweather split with established promoters and during eras when there was no COVID. Each found a network partnership. But it’s hard to say what happens during a time rocked only by uncertainty

Even if the money is there, it’s not clear that anybody would partner with Canelo. He has the pay-per-view numbers to say he is the biggest draw in boxing. But there’s a debate about whether he’s the world’s best fighter, pound-for-pound. There are lingering questions about whether he could in fact become the face of the game in the defining way De La Hoya and Mayweather were.

De La Hoya had good looks and fast hands. People liked him. Mayweather’s dazzling elusiveness frustrated foes and his cocky claim on being The Best Ever exasperated fans. People hated him.

In marketing terms, both De La Hoya and Mayweather knew their roles and played them, each with their own kind of genius. But Canelo’s identity has never been quite so evident. He doesn’t have De La Hoya’s smile. Unlike Mayweather, he appears to be uncomfortable with criticism from fans, who didn’t like Mayweather, yet paid for just a chance to see him get beat.

His unpopularity, even among Mexican fans, was mentioned by Julio Cesar Chavez during an interview during the before his stoppage of Kovalev. Chavez, who could do no wrong in a different Mexican era, said that not everybody likes Canelo during a new Mexican era.

Symptoms of that have been evident. Fans left Las Vegas’ T-Mobile Arena amid scattered boos after his draw with GGG in their first fight in 2017. Mayweather would have heard the boos and turned them into business. De La Hoya would have smiled.

Canelo doesn’t seem to know what to do.

Who to be.

It’s hard to be the face of any game if the fans aren’t sure who you are. Canelo may go his own way after the lawsuit is resolved and COVID is gone.

But will anybody follow?

By Bart Barry-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim-

It was a moment that summed up a pandemic. There was Jimmy Butler, a defining face of social-distancing as he stood all alone at the free throw line. The lane was empty. So were the seats. Butler sank the free throws. Game over.

It ended like that proverbial tree falling in the forest. Does it really make a sound if nobody hears it? It’s dutifully noted in the NBA record book. In NBA history, too. Miami’s 116-114 victory over Milwaukee Wednesday night was only the third playoff game to end at the line.

But who knew? More to the point, who cares? It’s nobody’s fault, really. The pandemic rolls on and on with no apparent end in sight. The NBA should be applauded for rigorous, responsible procedures that include regular testing and everything else that protects players, coaches and officials from COVID.

When the league resumed, it looked like a fast-break into disaster. But it hasn’t been. It’s been a disciplined model on how to deal with a health threat. The NBA is proving to be a more reliable guide than The Centers for Disease Control (CDC), a federal agency with more conflicting directives these days than Donald Trump has bleach.

But there’s an inherent problem with the NBA’s pandemic response. The league isn’t in the health business. Show biz is the NBA game. That means a close relationship with fans. But that’s hard to sustain in a so-called bubble in Orlando. The fans are represented by cardboard cut-outs. But, increasingly, fans are being cut out of the game, any game.

It’s just hard to be a fan these days. That was evident, more so than ever, in Butler’s singular moment at the line. In terms of proximity. In basketball, fans are never too far away. In normal times, Butler’s focus might have been interrupted by a raucous crowd in the baseline seats.

But they weren’t there. Cardboard doesn’t cheer. There’s only silence, which is what we’re getting from a fandom that might be losing interest.

According to reports this week, television ratings for the NBA were down 20 percent. There was an immediate reaction, a predictable knee-jerk from the crowd that blames the NBA for its walkout last week in protest of the shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisc.

Politics are an easy target, especially during these turbulent times. Too easy. I’m not buying it. The real reason is a rupture in the fundamental relationship that the NBA and any other sport has with fans.

It’s no secret that ratings have been down in boxing. The fights have been hard to watch. Sustaining fans’ interest is almost impossible. A reason is the absence of a loud ringside crowd. The connection between a live crowd and the fighters is as integral to boxing as it to basketball.

Fans, fair or not, can influence the judging. More important, perhaps, is their impact on the fighters. From this socially-distanced seat, that helped explain the uneven performance from Jose Ramirez last Saturday in a decision over Viktor Postol in a key junior-welterweight fight.

In his first fight under pandemic rules, Ramirez missed the loyal fans who follow him. He supports them with water projects and money for the farm workers in Fresno, his hometown. Their allegiance and loud support for him, an intangible combination, has been hard to evaluate. But they were missing Saturday and part of him was missing, too.

Watching Ramirez made me think of something Tiger Woods said a couple of weeks ago. Woods shot a sensational 66 in the final round of The Northern in Norton, Mass.

“Obviously the energy is not anywhere near the same,” Woods told ESPN. “There isn’t the same amount of anxiety and pressure and people yelling at you and trying to grab your shirt, a hat off you. This is a very different world we live in.

“You hit good shots and you get on nice little runs, we don’t have the same energy, the same fan energy.’’

Jimmy Butler and Jose Ramirez know the feeling.

By Bart Barry-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim-

Games don’t matter much, at least they haven’t throughout about a relentless pandemic. Only the platform does. The NBA took its game off the floor and out of the bubble this week to protest the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

It was the right thing to do.

It would have been too easy to just move on through playoffs in a season that has felt artificial. Fans are missing. So is much of the fun. There was a title at stake and still will be if the playoffs resume. But will anybody remember the eventual winner? Probably not.

What will be remembered is the way the NBA used its so-called platform to take a stand against a summer full of racial unrest. What was forgettable became memorable, thanks to the Milwaukee Bucks-led walkout Wednesday.  Not everybody agrees, of course. That’s what also makes the NBA’s fast-break move from diversion to relevance so controversial.

Politics and sports aren’t supposed to mix, or so goes the argument from those who think anyone with athletic talent surrenders their right to speak out. But tell that one to generations of athletes.

Tell it to Olympic sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who flashed the black-power slate while standing on the 1968 Mexico City medal stand as though it were a bully pulpit.

Tell it to Jackie Robinson.

Tell it to Jack Johnson

Tell it to Muhammad Ali.

Of all of them, Ali has become the historical face of protest. He’s the loud voice that sums up the reasons athletes sometimes have to use their sport and stardom as a megaphone. Ali’s sport, boxing, is an appropriate setting. As a symbol, there’s nothing quite like the ring, which is something that politicians use all the time. They talk about heavyweights and lightweights. They love to talk about in-fighting and how they fight off-the-ropes. They’ll also tell you not to confuse sports and politics.

It’s good to hear LeBron James and Los Angeles Clippers coach Doc Rivers say otherwise. Rivers attacked Donald Trump and his bucket guy, Mike Pence. The President and Vice-President talk about violence in the cities and fear in the suburbs.

“All you hear is Donald Trump and all of them talking about fear,’’ Rivers said Tuesday after a Clippers victory over Dallas. “We’re the ones getting killed.’’

Rivers’ comment made me think of Ali.

“You’re my opposer when I want freedom, you’re my opposer when I want justice,’’ he said when he changed his name from Cassius Clay to Ali and had his heavyweight title stripped for refusing to be drafted during the Vietnam War “You’re my opposer when I want equality.

“You won’t even stand up for me in America for my religious beliefs and you want me to go somewhere and fight, but you won’t even stand up for me here at home.”

During the turbulent 1960s, it was a powerful statement for a fighter who could be as cruel as he was cocky. But there was never much doubt about his timing on either side of the ropes in a battered craft that is and always will be what Mike Tyson has called it: The hurt business.

Ali knew when to jab. Knew when to counter.

Mostly, he knew when to take a stand. There’s always been an argument about where he stands among the all-time fighters. Even among the heavyweights, there’s a fair enough debate over who was the GOAT. Some say Joe Louis. Some say Ali.

But there’s never been much debate about who has had the greatest overall impact. George Foreman, stopped by Ali in 1974’s legendary Rumble In The Jungle, once told me that Louis was a better heavyweight, but that Ali was the better man.

The best ever.

By Bart Barry-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim–

Wait?

Or weight?

For David Benavidez, they are two options that sound alike and are linked by what he does after losing his super-middleweight title on the scale before his stoppage of Roamer Alexis Angulo last week.

He can wait, get back in line, fight his way back into a mandatory shot for his old title or a different one. The guess here: That wait wouldn’t be a long one. If he isn’t the world’s best 168-pound fighter right now, he soon will be.

But soon is a relative term, defined by a clock he can’t always control. Benavidez is 23. He’s growing, faster perhaps than he knows. His maturing body and metabolism will have the final say-so, no matter what he eats or how long he sits in a sauna.

For now, he’s gambling he can forestall the inevitable with a strict diet and Spartan-like discipline. He said after forcing Angulo to quit after the 10^th round that he’ll stay at super-middleweight.

In part, he blamed his weight – 2.8 pounds over the 168-pound maximum – on pre-fight changes forced by the COVID pandemic. I hear him. I’m dragging around a lot more than an extra 2.8 pounds since gyms and pools shut down. It’s hard to mask the quarantine fifteen.

“When I usually lose weight, I follow a system,’’ Benavidez said after he beat Angulo into submission at the Mohegan Sun in Uncasville, Conn. “Two gallons of water, you know, on Sunday, then two on Monday. Then, you know, but I cut all that off. You know what I mean? Because I wasn’t really sure how this bubble was going to work. We were only able to work out one hour a day, for an hour.

“And I didn’t have a sauna, and really the stuff I need to cut my weight. You know what I mean? But at the end of the day, I’m a man. You know, I missed weight, so you know, I’m not making any excuses. But I’m very disappointed about that. You know, stripped of my belt, paid a huge fine. You know what I mean? But at the end of the day, I’m still undefeated.”

He protected his record (23-0, 20 KOs). That was a wise move from a young fighter smart enough to know that Angulo was heavy-handed enough to be dangerous, especially if he had entered the ring weakened by a futile attempt to make weight. Benavidez could have returned to the scale two hours later. But he said no, knowing he couldn’t shed the extra pounds. He probably won’t remain unbeaten forever. Meanwhile, there are plenty of belts.

There are reasons to think his old belt, the World Boxing Council’s version, will be available to him after a relatively short wait. Canelo Alvarez got himself in line for it in a bout against Turk Avni Yildirim, who was set for a mandatory shot at Benavidez before the scale fail.

By a 36-1 vote this week, the WBC Board of Governors granted Canelo’s request for a shot at the vacated title. I’m not sure who cast the lone dissenting vote, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was somebody who has an investment in DAZN. Canelo-versus-Yildirim? Yildirim has two losses, including one to Anthony Dirrell, who Benavidez stopped a year ago. Safe to say, DAZN wants more for its money. The streaming service has been paying Canelo $33 million a fight. Now, there are reports that he is due $40 million for his next fight.

In a third fight against Gennadiy Golovkin, may be. Against somebody named Yildirim, no way.

In large part, Benavidez hopes to stay at 168-pounds long enough for a showdown against Caleb Plant, who holds the International Boxing Federation’s super-middleweight belt. Trash-talk escalation between Benavidez and Plant fueled hopes for a fight later this year. But COVID-19 changed expectations. Now, Benavidez-Plant doesn’t figure to happen until next year. It’s also not clear whether Plant would want to fight a Benavidez without a title.

For now, at least, Benavidez needs to test to determine whether he can still make 168. That means a bout under today’s COVID-dictated protocol with a 168-pound somebody. Maybe a somebody like Avni Yildirim.

Another scale fail would dictate a move up in weight to light-heavy.

Then, Benavidez would have to wait on Plant to make the move.

Wait and weight, it’s one of boxing’s inevitable combos.

By Bart Barry-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim-

From college football to gyms, it often seems as if the world is going out of business these days. It’s the shutdown era. But David Benavidez hasn’t seen the signs. He’s back in business, or at least he will be Saturday night.

Benavidez will resume his career, fighting for the first time in nearly a year in a super-middleweight title defense against a dangerous Colombian, Roamer Alexis Angulo on Showtime in Uncasville, N.Y.

It was a fight that was supposed to happen in mid-April in Phoenix. But the pandemic forced it to a later date and out of Benavidez’ hometown. Without any hometown fans allowed to be in the seats, it would have been hard to sell it as a homecoming anyway.

For now, at least, home is wherever and whenever Benavidez can finally answer another opening bell, this time in a fight to reignite the momentum he had after a stoppage of Anthony Dirrell last September at Staples Center in Los Angeles.

“Right now, I just want to get back into it,’’ said Benavidez, who at 23 is among the brightest young stars in an emerging generation expected to lead boxing into whatever awaits us in the post-pandemic era.

Without COVID and its crippling tentacles, Benavidez would probably have one, perhaps two, more victories on the left side of his unbeaten resume. He’d be further down his projected career path than he is now. But the boxing shutdown also was an opportunity, a moment to reflect on who he is. Who he wants to be.

Above all, he realized how much he missed the ring. And, above all, it sounds as if he deepened his commitment to a craft as uncompromising as it is brutal.

Amid uncertain times, Benavidez is more certain than ever.

“I feel like it’s a new chapter in my life,’’ Benavidez said during a call with reporters this week from Mohegan Sun Arena.

It is, in large part because Benavidez has more to fight for than ever. He’s about to be a father.

“In three weeks, I’m going to be a dad,’’ he said.

He’ll be a dad with lots of ambition, lots of skill to get what he wants and an evident willingness to fight. It’s that undisguised willingness that makes him so interesting. In terms of skill, he’s an unfinished fighter.

That was evident against Dirrell, who walked him into traps and punches before Benavidez simply wore him down and out. 

But that willingness, complemented by an abundance of energy, are traits of a fighter anxious to learn. Translation. There’s a lot of upside. He can get better. A lot better.

So much so that he believes he can be the world’s undisputed super-middleweight champ.

“There can’t be four champions at super-middleweight,” he said. “We can’t all be unbeaten. All of us need to take a risk. We need to fight each other. There’s Caleb Plant, Billy Joe Saunders, Callum Smith and hopefully, king of the boxing world, Canelo Alvarez.”

In Benavidez’ new life, he envisions fighting all of them. That would be more than one chapter. More like a book. But there won’t even be a forward without a victory over Angulo, who last January upset Anthony Sims in a pre-Super Bowl card in Miami.

“Angulo is very heavy-handed and he wants to win. He’s coming off of an upset win and I think that has him motivated to believe he can beat me,’’ Benavidez said. “…”I’ve just been working on every aspect of my game. My defense, the jab, body shots and keeping the distance especially. I think Angulo is the perfect opponent to display everything I have. This is going to be a rugged and tough fight but that’s what I expect for every fight from now on. As long as I prepare myself correctly, I think I’ll be fine.’’

Preparation is a sure sign of emerging maturity in Benavidez, who will be defending a World Boxing Council belt that he regained after it was taken from him for a positive cocaine test.

Benavidez is predicting a one-sided victory, but not necessarily a knockout.

“I want to win clearly,’’ Benavidez said of Showtime’s main event on a card scheduled to begin at 9 pm. ET/6 p.m. PT. “I don’t want there to be any doubt in anyone’s mind.’’

If he gets the decisive win, he wants to fight again in December or January. Benavidez hopes for an immediate title-unification shot at rival Celeb Plant. First, however, he might have to take care of a mandatory date against Avni Yildirim. Benavidez was supposed to Yildirim in April, but the Turk withdrew with an injury. That led to Angulo, but Yildirim is still ranked as the WBC’s mandatory challenger.

Whatever happens, a date with Plant appears to be more when than if. A long-running trash-talk exchange seems to make it inevitable.

“I want to fight Caleb Plant next.’’ Benavidez said “…I want those other belts. I want to take the chances now and show everybody, including myself, that I’m the best.

“There are lots of great fighters out there, great fights to be made for me. I want to take all of them.’’

By Bart Barry-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Low Housing Inventory Will Change

NHL: Knockouts

Jon Favreau & Vince Vaughn 2001 interview

Spittin’ Chiclets Interviews Keith, Matthew, and Brady Tkachuk

Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain Interview (1997)

The Return Of The Muhle R41 by Kevy Shaves

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

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

Brooks Koepka – Slow motion driver swing analysis

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

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

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

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim–

The path from COVID to comeback isn’t exactly clear. During an era defined by masks and mixed messages, it can go just about anywhere. Only a new stage, the next step, is certain. Top Rank is preparing to take it.

Call it Phase Two, a succession of nine cards from August 15 through October 13, according to a report in The Ring.

It’s still a life dictated by social distancing, but it’s also one full of hopes for the bigger fights that were there in the initial phase, 13 ESPN-televised cards from June through July at Las Vegas’ MGM Grand.

That series of shows often felt like a collection of undercard bouts always in search of a main event. But there were reasons for that. The necessary exercise was all about learning how to stage an event amid the wildly-unpredictable swings of a dangerous virus. It was more about establishing protective procedures and protocol.

There was some drama, but not much. At times, it was a little bit like watching major-league baseball’s Miami Marlins take the field after their roster was gutted by a widespread COVID infection.

Who are those guys?

In Phase 2, the promise and anticipation of major fights will be included, even if fans in seats are not. The biggest might be a lightweight bout with pound-for-pound implications between Vasiliy Lomachenko and Teofimo Lopez. A week ago, there were reports that the fight, scheduled for Oct. 3, was in jeopardy because Lopez wants too much money.

On Thursday, however, The Athletic reported that Lomachenko has agreed to a $3.25-million purse for a pay-per-view appearance. Whether the bout ever gets to an opening bell still depends on the pandemic, which has already forced boxing through a mind-numbing cascade of cancellations and postponements. Nobody is safe. Examples abound, happening almost daily. UConn canceled its football season Wednesday. Eight UCLA football players tested positive Thursday.

There’s no bunker deep enough, no bubble secure enough to hide from it. It could still deliver another disruption to plans for Lomachenko-Lopez. Nevertheless, there’s hope in reports of a looming deal. For a while, at least, half-empty looks half-full. Maybe, this one will in fact happen. 

It’s significant, one that suggests boxing’s comeback from COVID is progressing.

I’m not sure it will ever completely be the same, even with a vaccine that medical professionals say could be available late this year or early next. The most significant fight these days is being waged in labs. But a Lopez-Lomachenko agreement represents a badly needed injection of confidence for a sport beginning to wonder whether there will ever be a third Tyson Fury-Deontay Wilder fight.

There are other signs, too. Danny Garcia and Errol Spence Jr. have a reported agreement for a PBC-promoted welterweight fight on Nov. 21 on Fox pay-per-view. It would be Spence’s first fight since he was thrown from his car in a scary crash last October, just a few weeks after he fought his way into the pound-for-pound debate with a victory over Shawn Porter.

On Top Rank’s Phase 2 schedule, the promotional company goes back to a time when the pandemic was still an epidemic. Jose Ramirez-Viktor Postol was scheduled for Feb. 1 in China, where the virus started. It was canceled. Then, rescheduled.

Another cancellation and rescheduling later, here we are, Ramirez-Postol on August 29 in what is seen as a stepping stone for a 140-pound unification bout between Ramirez and Josh Taylor.

It’s too uncertain for a complete comeback. But it’s a beginning, all the way back to the beginning of the kind of fights that sustained the business and still can.

(Aug. 5, 2020) — Top Rank announced today the signing of undefeated heavyweight knockout artist Efe Ajagba to a long-term promotional agreement. 

Ajagba, 26, the Nigerian-born former soccer player, turned pro in 2017 after a decorated amateur career that included a berth at the 2016 Rio Olympics. A three-year professional, he has risen the ranks of the young heavyweights and is already rated in the top 15 by two of the major governing organizations. 

Ajagba will make his Top Rank on ESPN debut in 2020 on a to-be-determined bill. He has also enlisted the services of manager James Prince and head trainer Kay Koroma.

“I made this decision to become a better boxer and to advance my career. That’s why I signed with James Prince and Top Rank,” Ajagba said. “When I return to the ring soon, you will see a new Efe Ajagba. Kay Koroma and I are working on my head movement and defense, as I seek to become a more well-rounded fighter.”

“Efe Ajagba is one of the most gifted young heavyweights I’ve seen in quite some time,” said Top Rank chairman Bob Arum. “He has immense physical tools and a great work ethic. I have the utmost confidence that we’re looking at a future heavyweight champion.”

At 6-foot-6 and 240-plus pounds, Ajagba (13-0, 11 KOs) is one of the division’s most intimidating physical specimens, a natural puncher with six-first round knockouts on his ledger. He holds the record for the fastest victory in boxing history when, in August 2018, Curtis Harper walked out of the ring one second after the opening bell sounded. The disqualification win ended Ajagba’s string of knockouts, and he would score four more knockouts before being taken the distance for the first time in his career. Ajagba last fought March 7 in Brooklyn, knocking out former world title challenger Razvan Cojanu in nine rounds.

By Bart Barry-

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You know . . . 

“Some sort of . . .

“Opportunity with that prominent body.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

Follow all the action as Angelo Leo takes on Tramaine Williams for the vacant WBO Super Bantamweight title.  The action begins at 9 PM ET/ 6 PM PT with two rematches.  Joseph George takes on Marcos Escudero in a light heavyweight fight.  Raeese Aleem fights Marcus Bates in a super bantamweight tussle.

NO BROWSER REFRESH NEEDED.  THE PAGE WILL UPDATE AUTOMATICALLY

Round 1:  Straight left from Williams

Round 2 Counter from Williams..Counter left

Round 3 Straight left from Williams..Straight left

Round 4 Jab from Williams…Hook from Leo..Shoe-Shine from Leo…Right

Round 5

Round 6 Body shots from Williams..Left and right to body from Leo..Right hook from Williams

Round 7 2 left hooks to body from Leo..Left hook to the head…Fights on the inside..Body shots from Leo

Round 8 Counter left from Williams..Good body…Hard body shot from Leo..Body shot..Right uppercut

Round 9 Straight right from Leo,..Counter left from Williams…Body shots from Leo

Round 10 Leo lands a right to the head..Body/Head combination

Round 11 Leo working on the inside..Counter left from Williams

Round 12 Leo continues to come forward..Double left hook

117-111; 118-110 TWICE FOR ANGELO LEO

Round 1 Bates lands an uppercut..Left hook from Aleem

Round 2 Left gook to body and head from Aleem

Round 3 Jab from Aleem..Left from Bates…Left to body from Aleem..Counter right from Bates..Jab from Aleem

Round 4 Right from Aleem..2 lefts…Jab..Right to body…3 left hooks

Round 5  Aleem Jabbing

Round 6 Bates Jabbing..Right from Aleem..Counter right..Right to body

Round 7 Head combination from Aleem..Body shots

Round 8  Right…Body from Aleem..Right to body..Counter right

Round 9 Aleem Jabbing..Combination..Lead right

Round 10  Bates right hand is hurt…Jab from Aleem..Right..2 BIG LEFTS..BATES TURNS AWAY AND THE FIGHT IS STOPPED

Round 1:  Left hook from George..Right..Jab..Body..Jab from Escudero..Jab..Counter left from George..right from Escudero

Round 2 Body and head from Escudero..Combination from George..Left hook..Body shot..Uppercut from Escudero..Good jab from George..Counter..

Round 3 Right from Escudero..Jab..Left hook from George..Right from Escudero..Jab from George..Combination

Round 4 Body work from Escudero..George jab to body..Uppercut and left hook from Escudero..Counter right from George

Round 5  3 punch combination from George..Escudero lands a right..Body shot..Left hook…Body work

Round 6 Right from George…Escudero lands a right..Escudero lands a combination

Round 7 Escudero lands a left hook to the body…

Round 8 Right from Escudero…Hard right from George to the head puts Escudero down but ruled a slip

Round 9 Left from George..Counter left…HUGE LEFT AND DOWN GOES ESCUDERO AND THE FIGHT IS OVER

By Norm Frauenheim–

From height to reach, a tale of the tape is a reliable enough scale. But it doesn’t measure maturity. Growing up is a lot different than growing bigger. It’s an intangible, making it hard to quantify, but it’s there in tone and temperament.

You know it when you hear it.

It’s there in David Benavidez, a 23-year-old super-middleweight champion and wise beyond his years. An ongoing pandemic has already altered behavior and is about to change the marketplace, especially for prizefighters who grew accustomed to unprecedented wages during pre-COVID days.

Those days are gone. So, too, is a lot of the money, although it’s becoming clear that not everybody has awoken to the sobering news.

There are increasing reports of fighters at or near the top of the pay scale balking at projected fights because of money. Dollar-for-inflated dollar, Canelo Alvarez stands alone. But there are increasing reports that DAZN is asking him to take a cut in pay.

The streaming service, which signed Canelo to a contract worth $33 million-a-fight, is trying to cut costs. According to a Bloomberg story, DAZN wants out of its soccer deal with UEFA Champions League in Asia.

That report coincides with news that DAZN wants to re-negotiate with Canelo for a fight that has been proposed for Sept. 12. During the COVID era, there are no guarantees. There are no crowds either, which means Canelo will either have to wait for a later date – perhaps November — or a virus-killing vaccine, whichever comes first.

Then, maybe – just maybe – the eight-figure paycheck will be back in the market place. But don’t bet on it.  Only masks and social distancing are guaranteed these days. Benavidez seems to understand that.

“It’s understandable to think that taking a pay cut isn’t fair,” Benavidez said during a conference call introducing a Showtime schedule that begins Saturday with junior-featherweight Andy Leo against late stand-in Tramaine Williams and continues on Aug. 15 with Benavidez in a World Boxing Council title defense against Roamer Angulo in Uncasville, Conn.  “My contract states that my deal stays the same for this fight and the next fight.

“If I have to take a pay cut, I will take a pay cut. That’s up to my promoter and my manager, you know. We can definitely come to an agreement.’’

It looked as if Benavidez was poised to take big step up the pay scale last September after he scored a ninth-round stoppage of Anthony Dirrell and became only the second Arizona fighter to collect a $1-million purse since junior-flyweight legend Michael Carbajal scored the seven-figure feat against Humberto Gonzalez in a 1994 rematch.

But then there was COVID, which altered budgets if not mindsets. Amid reports of stalled negotiations with Canelo, Terence Crawford said he wouldn’t take a pay cut. Ryan Garcia said he wanted big money. Thursday, The Athletic reported Teofoimo Lopez was balking at offers to fight Vasiliy Lomachenko. Lower your masks, gentlemen. It’s only supposed to cover your nose and mouth. Not your eyes. That marketplace is changing. There’s no Floyd Mayweather Jr.-like payday in anybody’s post-COVID future.

Benavidez gets it.

“As for my fights, I give the best fights that I can possibly can give and deserve the pay that I get. But if we have to come to an agreement, we can come to an agreement.”

Dollars are the devils in the details, of course. But it sounds as if Benavidez has an unspoken awareness of what he has to do. To wit:  Keep himself in the mix and in the public eye.  His immediate goal is still a fight with Caleb Plant, who holds the International Boxing Federation’s version of the 168-pound belt.

But his name continues to be dropped as a possibility for Canelo, the reigning middleweight champion who won a secondary 168-pound title over Rocky Fielding and relinquished the 175-pound belt he won in a stoppage of Sergey Kovalev.

Callum Smith appears to be the leading candidate for whenever and where ever Canelo fights next.  If not Smith, maybe David Lemieux. Or maybe Benavidez.

Benavidez knows he is on Canelo’s short list. That awareness was evident this week when he appeared on the WBC’s internet production, Tuesday Coffee.

“I have a title that Canelo wants, the WBC,’’ said Benavidez, who had been scheduled to fight Angulo in Phoenix on April 18 in his first hometown appearance in five years. “If he gives me the fight it will be an honor for me. And if he gives me the opportunity I will be ready. I think I have what it takes to beat him: Youth, strength, speed.  I think I can beat him.”

“It is a fight that I want and, if he gives me the fight, it is going to be a war for people and it is a fight that people want to see. Boxing wins with that fight.” 

For now, however, Canelo-Benavidez has only been talk.

“Never an offer,’’ Benavidez said during the Showtime call.

 Also, never a doubt about a maturing fighter’s foresight to know that one day there’ll be one.

By Bart Barry –

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim-

Go ahead, wear a mask, stay away from crowds, stay at home and maintain social distancing. That might be enough to keep the COVID away. But the craziness? There’s no protection from that.

Example:

Mike Tyson versus Roy Jones Jr.

Apparently, it’s going to happen. I say apparently, because it looks as if a lot of things still have to happen after Thursday’s headlines about the planned event subside. Here’s what we do know:

The Dignity Heath Sports Park in Carson, Calif., has been reserved for Sept. 12, according to a story first reported by Yahoo. Tyson, 54, and Jones, 51, will wear 12-ounce gloves. The three-hour show is set to be distributed on pay-per-view on a new entertainment platform called Triller

Andy Foster, executive director of the California State Athletic Commission, told Yahoo that Tyson has put a hold on the date. Foster also said he spoke to Tyson and Jones via Zoom.

But details about financial backing and other significant details weren’t included. It’s being called an eight-round exhibition. As of Thursday, however, it was only an exhibition in how to generate headlines. Nobody better at that than Tyson. 

From pre-pandemic to pandemic, his power to generate publicity remains undiminished.

But buyer beware. I’m not sure this gets past the first drug test. That of course, presumes that there will be testing at all. That issue wasn’t addressed Thursday. But, safe to say, it will be for a bout between two legends already eligible for their AARP cards.

Tyson, of course, has been marketing himself and his ring resurrection for months through videos that display his punching power. Yeah, it’s still scary. It’ll be scary 10 years from now. Punching power is the last thing to go. George Foreman still had it when he regained a heavyweight title in a comeback at age 45 in 1994. Foreman, now 71, could probably still rattle the heavy bag with enough impact to light up message boards.

The surprise in Thursday’s news was that Tyson approached Jones about the exhibition. All of the speculation had been about a Tyson-versus-Evander Holyfield exhibition, a nostalgic look back on their infamous 1997 Bite Fight. Holyfield has posted his own videos, all of which showed that the retired heavyweight champ is in as good shape as any 57-year-old man could expect to be.

Instead, Tyson reached out to Jones, who had an almost mythic hold on the pound-for-pound crown during his middleweight, super-middleweight and light-heavyweight reign. Jones did win a heavyweight belt, scoring a unanimous decision over John Ruiz in 2003. Jones was the much smaller man, but Ruiz was no match for his blend of footwork and hand speech.

That blend is long gone, a fact that proved to be Jones’ undoing late in his career and now a potential danger against Tyson if the power in those videos is indeed real.

“I’m looking to be 100% of Mike Tyson in the ring,’’ Tyson said on ESPN’s First Take after plans for the exhibition were announced Thursday. “ … I’m a neophyte in taking it easy. I don’t know how to do it that way.

“I am one speed — forward. I don’t know, Roy is just going to have to deal with that.”

There’s still power in Tyson’s sales pitch, too.  He says he is launching a Legends Only League for retired athletes in all sports. Maybe, his planned exhibition with Jones is a beginning.

For Jones’ part, however, it was not clear that the exhibition was a done deal.  In a video posted on Twitter with Dr. Beau Hightower before a workout, however, Jones confirmed he had been contacted.  He’s interested.

“I still want to see these hands go,’’ Jones said. “I mean, I don’t know how to say no. So, don’t make me do it.  

“Mike is still a hell of a specimen.

“Still a problem to deal with.’’

A problem he might never face if a litany of other problematic details aren’t dealt with. 

By Bart Barry-

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

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

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

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

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

 And for to festne his hood under his chin

He hadde of gold ywroght a curious pin;

A love-knotte in the gretter ende ther was.

His heed was balled, that shoon as any glas,

And eek his face, as he hadde been enoint;

He was a lord ful fat and in good point.

His bootes souple, his hors in greet estat.

Now certeinly he was a fair prelat;

He was nat pale as a forpined goost.

A fat swan loved he best of any roost;

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

Then, when you gits de chance,

Always rememberin’ yo’ raisin’,

Let ‘em know youse tired

Jest a mite tired.

Jesus will find yo’ bed fo’ you

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

Jesus will lead you

To a room wid windows

Openin’ on cherry trees an’ plum trees

Bloomin’ everlastin’.

An’ dat will be yours

Fo’ keeps.

Den take yo’ time. . . .

Honey, take yo’ bressed time.

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

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

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

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

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

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim-

The Olympics were supposed to start a week from now. On July 23, Opening Ceremonies were scheduled for the 2020 Games. Like so much else, the Tokyo Olympics are just another postponement in a year that will only be remembered for a pandemic.

Maybe it doesn’t matter much during a time when diversions have been supplanted by infections and death counts. Masks are a lot more important than medals these days.

Still, it was a chance to see if there’s another Michael Phelps, or another Usain Bolt, or another Claressa Shields, or more of Simone Biles and Katie Ledecky. That’s the beauty of the Olympics. Amid its parade of pageantry and history, there’s always the promise of something new.

From Mark Spitz to Phelps, from Jessie Owens to Bolt, from Muhammad Ali to Joe Frazier and George Foreman, the Games recreate themselves. They remind us we’re getting faster and perhaps better. They’re overdone and way too expensive. But optimism isn’t cheap, which is something that becomes increasingly evident with every postponement forced by multiplying numbers that suffocate hope.

The Olympics will be back in some way, in some form. For now, the 2020 version has been rescheduled for 2021, still in Tokyo next year starting on July 24. In times ruled only by chaos, however, it’s fair to wonder if the Games will in fact go off as planned. Postponement is today’s only certainty.

Even if there are Opening Ceremonies next July, some of the key athletes might have already moved on. There’s no paycheck in waiting, especially when a pandemic is the boss. That’s especially true for boxing, which has pushed itself to the Olympic fringe over the last three-plus decades. Fact is, boxing has almost eliminated itself as an Olympic entity with successive scandals that date back to judging that robbed Roy Jones Jr. of a gold medal at the 1988 Seoul Games.

For every scandal, however, there are also fighters who come out of the Olympics and become the stars that are the pro game’s lifeblood and profit margin.

American Oscar De La Hoya won a gold medal in 1992. Floyd Mayweather Jr. won a bronze medal for the US in 1996.  American Andre Ward won gold at the 2004 Olympics in Athens. Gennadiy Golovkin (Kazakhstan) and Amir Khan (UK) won silver medals in Athens. Ukrainian Vasiliy Lomachenko won gold medals in two Olympics – 2008 and 2012. American heavyweight Deontay Wilder won bronze at Beijing in 2008. UK heavyweight Anthony Joshua won gold London in 2012. American Shakur Stevenson, an emerging star, won silver at Rio de Janeiro in 2016.

Without them, the pro game of the last 28 years would have been much poorer.

That creates a problematic future for today’s version of pro boxing. Although Olympic boxing has receded in terms of media attention, history says it is still an important resource. The best Olympic boxers arrive in the pro ranks already known to most of the customers. They have experience with the media, they know how to fight away from home and they know their way around the ring.

To wit: The business still needs them.

But no Olympic boxing in 2020 could strip the promoters and networks of the personalities and performers they will always need. Already, there is uncertainty about one of America’s best prospects, Keyshawn Davis.

Davis, the world’s No 1-ranked amateur lightweight and a silver medalist at the 2019 World Championships, did not report to Colorado Springs this week for training toward the re-scheduled Tokyo Games, according to a report in Boxing Scene. It’s not clear why he didn’t show up in camp Monday.

Davis, of Norfolk, Va., and a Stevenson friend, has sent out mixed messages about his plans. When the Tokyo Games were postponed in late March, he told some media outlets that he still wanted to go for Olympic gold. He would not turn pro until after the Olympics a year from now, he said. But he also said there was “a 70 percent” chance he’d go pro.

Who knows?

That’s about all anybody can say during days dominated by only questions instead of the Olympic motto: Citius – Altius – Fortius. The three Latin words means Higher-Faster-Stronger in most years. But they could mean anything, anything at all in 2020.

By Bart Barry-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

Follow all the action as it happens as Kamaru Usman defends The UFC Welterweight Title against Jorge Masvida; Also Alexander Volkonovksy defends the Featherweight title in a rematch against Max Hollowa; Petr Yan and Jose Aldo vie for the vacant bantamweight title.   The Prelims kick off at 6 PM ET with main card beginning at 10 PM.

The page will update automatically every 60 seconds…NO BROWSER REFRESH NEEDED

Round 1 Usman takes Masvidal down..Elbow…Front Lock…Jab…Masvidal lands an elbow..Masvidal cut around left eye…Left From Masvidal..Jab from Usman..Jab from Usman..Left from Masvidal..Right..Body shot from Usman

Round 2 Elbow inside for Masvidal..Good right from Usman..Masvidal cut on forehead..Usman shouldering to the body in the clinch..Combinaton from Masvidal..

Round 3 Kick to body from Masvidal..Usman hits Masvidal with low blow..Takedown by Usman..Another takedown..Elbow on the ground

Round 4 Takedown by Usman..Left from Masvidal..Body..Jab from Usman..Big left..Right

Round 5  Body shot from Usman..Counter from Masvidal..Takedown for Usman..Left from Masvidal

50-45 TWICE AND 49-46 FOR USMAN

Round 1 Body shot from Holloway…Nice Right..Volkanovski has a mouse under right eye..Nice right from Volkanovski..Right kick drops Volkanovski

Round 2 Big combination from Holloway..Knee to midsection..Left hook from Volkanoski..Right hand drops Volkanovski

Round 3 Solid leg kick from Volkanovski…Nice Knee from Holloway..Left from Volkanovksi…Body..Nice Jab

Round 4 Holloway landing at distance

Round 5 Good left from Holloway..Nice right from Volkanovski..Takedown..Left..Good left hook..Takedown

48-47 TWICE FOR VOLKANOVSKIL 48-47 FOR HOLLOWAY

Round 1 Big right from Yan..Leg kick drops Yan..Body shot from Aldo..Body shot from Yan..Leg Kick from Aldo..Leg kick to the body..Hard right from Yan..Hard shots from Yan in the Ground and Pound

Round 2 Inside leg kick for Aldo..Leg Kick..Another..Another..Left from Yan..Jab from Aldo..body shot

Round 3 Body shot from Yan  Body shot from Aldo,,,Body shot from Aldo..Hard body shot..Lead right from Yan..Jab..Body shot from Aldo..Uppercut..Elbow from Yan

Round 4 Body kick from Yan..Body shot from Aldo..Body shot from Yan..Aldo bleeding from the nose..2 hard uppercuts and a right from Yan..Ground and pound..Heavy shots on the ground..Flush head shots

Round 5  Big shot drops Aldo.  Heavy shots on the ground..Huge elbow..Crushing elbow…20 unaswered..Aldo bleeding badly..Yan lands about 50 more sHOTS UNTIL THE FIGHT IS MERCIFULLY STOPPED 

Round 1 Jab from Namajunas..Left hook from Andrade..Big right from Namajunas..Right from Andrade…Andrade bleeding from nose..Knee from Namajunas..Nice right..Knee
Round 2 Big body shot from Namajunas…Big right from Andrade…1-2 from Namajunas..Knee..Nice 1-2;..2 lefts from Andrade
Round 3 Body shot from Andrade,,Right…Jab from Namajunas..Right wobbles Namajunas..Big takedown..Namajunas bleeding from the nose..1-2 from Namajunas..Right from Andrade..Jab…Takedown from Namajunas..Hard jab from Andrade…

Round 1 Ribas lands a body kick..Left hand..Hard Takedown..Ribas bleeding from nose…RIBAS GETS AN ARMBAR AND VANZANT TAPS

Round 1 Oezdemir lands a right..Hard jab by Poachazka..2 hard shots from Oezdemir…Uppercut from Prochazka..Kick..Counter from Oezdemir..2 punches land..Both landing jabs
Round 2 Jab from Prochazka…HUGE RIGHT HAND AND DOWN GOES OEZDEMIR AND HE OS KNOCKED OUT

Round 1 Salikhov lands a right..Spinning kick..Hard left hook..Hard right hurts Salikhov..Ground strikes
Round 2 1-2 from Dos Santos..Huge Right..Uppercut from Salikhov
Round 3 Dos Santos lands a hard front kick

30-27 Salikhov; 29-28 Dos Santos and 29-28 Salikhov

Round 1 Flying knee from Amirkhani..Guillitone choke attempt...HE CHOKES HIM OUT

Round 1 Right from Santos..Nice Kick..Body kick from Bogatov
Round 2 Santos lands a double jab…Santos lands 9 straight hard flush shots..Bogatov is reeling all over the cage..he is in big trouble…Big Leg kick…Ground and pound ..Bogatov somehow gets on top of Santos and lands some ground shots.
Round 3 Bogatov lands a low blow…Santos looks tired..Another low blow..Takedown for Bogatov…Knee to the face while Santos is down=Illegal Knee..HE IS DEDUCTED 2 POINTS

Round 1 Nice Elbow from Tybura
Round 2 Nice elbow from Grishin..Good counter right from Tybura..Short knee from Grishin..Counter from Tybura..Takedown
Round 3 Takedown for Tybura..Grishin bleeding over the right eye

30-27 TWICE AND 30-26 FOR TYBURA

Round 1 3 leg kicks from Paiva..Nice counter..Solid right..Ripping body shot..Vicious inside leg kick..Zhumagulov lands a right..Right..Body shot..Takedown
Round 2 Big right from Zhumagulov..Jab..Body shot..paiva lands a body..Counter from Zhumagulov..Good combination..Takedown
Round 3 Nice Right from Zhumagulov..Takedown..Straight left…Low bow kick by Paiva…Takedown for Zhumagulov..

29-28 on all cards for Paiva

Round 1 Big right for Rosa..Inside leg kick..Takedown
Round 2 Right hand from Rosa..Knee from Melo…good 1-2..Heavy left hook from Rosa..Takedown for Rosa..Ground elbows..Heavy shots on the ground,,More hard Ground strikes..
Round 3 Knee from Rosa..Nice elbow..Melo lands a right

Round 1 Huge Right by Day drops Grant
Round 2 Body shot lands for Day..Front Kick by Grant..Right hand..Right..Combination..Flying Knee..Body..4 Punch combination Day..Lead Elbow..Nice right..Grant is applying an arm-bar
Round 3 Right from Day..Right over the top..1-2..E;bow from Grant..Rips the body..Right from Day..Combination from Grant..Right over the top..HUGE LEFT AND DOWN GOES DAY AND HE IS OUT COLD…FIGHT OVER

By Norm Frauenheim-

Ivy League football has more followers today than it has in years. Nobody is exactly happy to be among that newfound crowd.

But the Ivy League is No. 1 this week for taking a step that might be an early-warning sign of what – or what not – to expect for the rest of the year.

There’ll be no Harvard-Yale game this fall. There’ll be no kickoffs at all. The conference, known more for Nobel Prizes than Heisman Trophies, canceled autumn sports this week because of the pandemic-from-hell. Don’t expect the Southeastern Conference to fall in line anytime soon, if ever.

It’ll be a lot harder to cancel or postpone SEC football than it will to take down another statue of a Confederate soldier. A Saturday afternoon in autumn without the Crimson Tide and Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Sweet Home Alabama is harder to imagine than a Southern breakfast without grits. Football is more than a game. It is today’s version of Southern rock-and-roll. Rest in peace Charlie Daniels and Roll Tide.

Then again, I would never have imagined a May without a major Cinco de Mayo fight, a June without the NBA Finals and a July 4^th without baseball. Maybe, the NBA and baseball are about to happen in some way and some abbreviated form. But I’ll believe it when I see it. The Diamondbacks are scheduled to open at San Diego on July 24. The Suns and Wizards are scheduled for a July 31 opener in the so-called bubble in central Florida

But it’s hard to get excited, mostly because of a pandemic that is a game only for mask-less fools. There are plenty of them. At least, there are in Arizona, which might explain why the state is No. 1 in desperation. AZ leads the infection rate, world-wide.  As of Thursday, infections were found in 28 percent of COVID-19 tests. That’s one in every four people. I stood in a line of eight shoppers in the grocery store Thursday. If the stats are right, two were infected. I tightened my mask and stepped outside into 113 degrees.

It’s hot.

It’s scary.

It’s Ground Zero.

I’m not sure any kind sport will provide much refuge from that. At least, not in the here-and-now.

Amid the mind-numbing heat and fear, there was finally some sense from the smart guys in the Ivy League. They decided to quit playing around with the annoying succession of cancellations and postponements.

Let’s hear an opening bell when there’s a vaccine.

It’s hard to guess where boxing is headed amid it all. There may not be another wave of the pandemic this fall. But there already has been one wave of uncertainty after another. Top Rank has been staging regular cards for ESPN in Las Vegas for a month now. I like what they’re doing. They’re keeping the game alive and keeping some young fighters busy.

I also applaud Bob Arum for taking the lead in staging cards limited by social distancing, testing and all the rest, including some of the usual stupidity. To wit: Heavyweight Jarrell Miller, Big Baby All Over Again, tested for a PED in what was his second positive test since he was disqualified for a shot at Anthony Joshua, who went to lose to stand-in Andy Ruiz Jr. more than a year ago. Some things never change. It’s almost comforting. Almost.

But Arum is caught in the same uncertainty that has paralyzed the sports business. He had been working toward a September 19 date for Teofimo Lopez-Vasiliy Lomachenko fight. It is an intriguing bout, loaded with pound-for-pound potential. More significant, it looms as a fight that could be the beginning of business, post-pandemic. It’s hard to know whether that means business-as-usual. But it’s a date that was seen as a way to restore the profit margin.

Now, however, Lopez-Lomachenko has been moved to Oct. 3, according to Boxing Scene. The pandemic forced the move. At the rate it’s spreading, it’ll force some more, leaving Ivy League football with more followers than anybody could have imagined a few months ago.

By Bart Barry-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim-

The third Tyson Fury-Deontay Wilder fight was supposed to happen this month.

Early in the pandemic, the July 18 date at Las Vegas MGM Grand was viewed as something of a benchmark, a hopeful sign that business – the world – would be back as we’ve known it. Lived it.

But hope, known to spring eternal in better times, is futile these days. First, Fury-Wilder 3 was postponed to Oct. 3. Now, it has moved, pushed to Dec.19 at Vegas’ new Allegiant Stadium amid promoter Bob Arum’s hopes that a live crowd of about 20,000 will be allowed to sit in seats separated by today’s social-distancing dimensions.

“That is the date that we all want,” Arum told Las Vegas’ Review Journal. “That’s the date that both sides are happy with. Whether we’ll be able to do it in the stadium with limited seating, that’s in the hands of the gods.’’

Four months ago, few would have imagined that December would be a possible target date for the resumption of business as usual.

Then again, COVID-19 sounded like science fiction in those days. Who knew that masks would become a fashion statement?

Nobody, despite the mix of fairy tales and fake news from a White House collection of Baghdad Bobs, who keep saying the virus is going to disappear like a miracle. If only that miracle would make them vanish, too.

There are no miracles. But there is some hope, albeit frayed. And there is a potential vaccine, albeit delayed.

A vaccine might be the only realistic hope. The mounting fear of COVID-19 is summed up in the rising number of infections, especially in Arizona, Florida, Texas and California.

Just a couple of months ago, Arizona was thought to be the place where baseball would make its comeback. MLB talked about an abbreviated season in the desert at the spring-training sites in Phoenix. But that was before the virus hit Arizona like a haboob. It’s spreading faster than summer temperatures are rising.

Arizona, baseball’s epicenter in February, is a very different kind of epicenter now.

What has happened in Arizona, my home state, is just another example of what still figures to happen. No telling when the rate of infections will subside. Then, there’s the possibility of a second wave in November, the month before the projected third leg in the Fury-Wilder trilogy.

There are already widespread doubts about whether there will be a college football season this fall.

The NFL, perhaps, has a better shot at some sort of season, yet even it is talking about fans and even players signing some sort of waiver, an acknowledgement that even pro football fears that the pandemic will continue.

From boxing to baseball, money is a motivation for the attempt to get back in the game. Fighters and players still want to get paid. Networks are begging for live content. But the attempted return is as expensive as it is risky.

The NBA is planning to gather in Orlando where it will go into the so-called bubble, which is where boxing has been for nearly a month with weekly Top Rank shows in Las Vegas.

The players, like the fighters, will test, train, eat, sleep and play, all away from fans.  But life in the bubble isn’t cheap. It’s expensive to maintain and sustain. Yet, it’s an investment in keeping fans interested and around for the days when social distancing is a forgotten dimension.

But it’s beginning to look as if only a vaccine can ease public fears and bring the fans back into the arena for a first bell or an opening tip. I’m still hoping to hear that bell for Fury-Wilder 3. But, mostly, I’m hoping for a lab to produce a vaccine.

A vaccine might be the best investment. Long-term, it’s the only way to bet.

By Bart Barry-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim-

It’s a pandemic. Pandemonium, too.

Chaos is everywhere, a symptom seemingly suffered by many who apparently have not been infected by a virus that appears and re-appears like some mutant ghost.

Don’t believe in ghosts? Well, this one is real. It’s named COVID-19 and it’s got everybody scrambled, left with only a few ideas and yet no clue as to how to make any of them happen.

Sports are about routine. Go to the gym, do the roadwork, take batting practice, swim the laps, lift weights, spar, spar and spar some more. There’s a lot more comfort in the routines than there is in wearing a mask.

But that mask – day after day after day — is about the only thing anybody can be sure of any more. Of course, there are the exceptions, the fools who think a mask is a symbol or a statement. They won’t wear one, which is little bit like a skydiver taking the jump without a parachute.

All of this is a long-winded way of getting around to the point. Sorry for that. But these are days when you fill in the blanks while practicing social distancing. Maybe, that’s why Oscar De La Hoya said he’s still thinking about a comeback. What else has he got to do?

The routines are a framework for what’s possible. They represent realistic limits. Maybe, that’s why I miss them. I never thought I would, which in retrospect makes me think I was as foolish as that skydiver without the chute.

But, increasingly, I miss exactly what I had come to think was mundane, if not boring.  

In late June, I miss checking the major-league baseball standings. In May, I missed the NBA playoffs, the Kentucky Derby and Canelo Alvarez. In April, I missed the Masters. In March, I missed the opening rounds of the NCAA Basketball Tournament.

Mostly, I miss hearing an opening bell from a ringside seat.

All of the familiar moments and sounds are supposed to return. Baseball plans a 60-game season, scheduled to begin in late July. The NBA plans a play-off-like format in the so-called bubble. There’s talk of Vasyl Lomachenko-versus Teofimo Lopez in September. The signs are welcome, but suddenly other signs are disconcerting enough to think that I’ll have only the mask for the next few months.

Arizona, my home state, is suddenly in a race with Texas and Florida to be Ground Zero in the COVID-19 resurgence. It depends on the day and the percentage of infections per tests. I’d rather read the box scores.

It’s nerve-wracking and it raises troublesome questions over just how MLB plans to pull off a 60-game schedule built on teams playing within their region. The Diamondbacks, Rangers and Astros are supposed to play each other regularly, home and away. The Dodgers, Angels, Padres and Giants are in the region, too.

No fans are expected to be there. In cities confronted with rates exploding at a scary rate, however, how will they play in Phoenix, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, Anaheim, San Diego and San Francisco without somebody getting infected? One infection is enough to suspect a much bigger problem.

Infections are suddenly happening everywhere. Golf, considered an essential business in Arizona when the pandemic first hit, is dealing with them this week.

Four-time PGA Tour champion Brooks Koeppa withdrew from the Travelers Championship Wednesday because his caddie, Ricky Elliot, tested positive. Koeppa’s brother Chase, also withdrew. He had qualified for a spot in the Travelers field.

Golf prospect Cameron Champ tested positive and withdrew as well. Former U.S. Open champ Graeme McDowell, a former U.S. Open champion, withdrew because his caddie, Ken Comboy, tested positive.

Golf is ominous proof that no game is immune. The golf course, almost pastoral.  is perfect for social distancing. The game is played outdoors, where physicians say it’s harder to transmit than indoors. Golfers often stand close to their caddies, but it looked as if the 6-foot distance could be maintained without sacrificing communication or the way in which clubs are exchanged. Just wipe the clubs down in each and every exchange.

But the infections happened anyway. From clubs to bats, more look to be likely.

No way to mask the pandemonium. No way to trash that mask either. Anybody got a working parachute?

Follow all the action as Andrew Moloney defends the WBA Super Flyweight title against Joshua Franco.  The three-fight undercard begins at 8 PM ET / 5 PM PT / 10 AM Wednesday in Australia

NO BROWSER REFRESH NEEDED.  THE PAGE WILL UPDATE AUTOMATICALLY 

Round 1: Right and left to body from Moloney..

Round 2 combination from Moloney..Left to the body..Franco lands a left to the body..Counter from Franco..

Round 3 Right from Moloney..Right..Nice hook..

Round 4 Good left to body from Moloney..Jab/right followed by left to body..Left to body from Franco..

Round 5  Combination from Franco..Right

Round 6 Good exchange..Right from Moloney

Round 7  Combination from Franco

Round 8 Left to body from Moloney..Good jab/Right hand from Franco

Round 9 Good combination from Franco

Round 10 Right from Franco..Blood from Left eye of Moloney,,Hard body shots from Franco..Cut caused by a punch

Round 11 FRANCO LANDS A LEFT HOOK AND DOWN GOES FRANCO..Hard right from Franco..3 punch combination..

Round 12 Good right from Franco..Nice combination from Moloney

115-112; 114-114 TWICE FOR JOSHUA FRANCO

Round 1 Right from Diaz
Round 2 Right from Diaz..Right to body from Sanchez..Jab from Diaz..Counter..combination
Round 3 Jab from Sanchez…
Round 4 Jab from Sanchez
Round 5 Left from Diaz…Counter left..Right..Right..
Round 6 Left from Diaz..Combination..
Round 7 Uppercut from Sanchez
Round 8 Right from Sanchez..
Round 9 Left from Diaz..Sanchez lands a combination..Good right from Diaz..Good combination from Diaz…Jab
Round 10 Right from Diaz…Right

98-92 Twice, and  97-93 FOR DIAZ

Round 1: Body work from Contreras..Body..Double jab..Vargas jabs to the body..Good exchanges on the inside..Body shot from Contreras..
Round 2: Blood coming from nose of Vargas (Clash of Heads)
Round 3 Right from Vargas
Round 4 Right from Vargas
Round 5: Right from Vargas.  Another Right..Double right from Contreras..Good Jab..
Round 6:  Vargas lands a wide-left hook..Good exchange

58-56 on all cards for Contreras

Round 1: Stewart cut around right eye due to clash of heads
Round 2: Olguin lands on the inside…Right from Stewart
Round 3: Right from Olguin
Round 4 Left from Stewart
Round 5: Left to body from Olguin
Round 6 Left from Olguin..Left from Stewart…Right

57-57; 58-56 TWICE FOR OLGUIN

By Bart Barry-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry