By Norm Frauenheim-

On the traditional calendar, September means change, summer turning into fall. But it means something more these days, at least it does for a sport hoping to break out of a lonely bubble and back into crowded arenas.

There’s really no telling when the ongoing pandemic will subside long enough for the return of fans and the live gates that might restore a zero or two to purses. For now, however, September appears to be a potential window for the return of some of the game’s biggest stars.

At the top of the list, there’s a projected bout between lightweight Teofimo Lopez and Vasyl Lomachenko, who was No. 1 in most pound-for-pound ratings, pre-pandemic. It’s an intriguing fight in any month. Any year. September in Las Vegas is the hope in what would be an appropriate welcome back for boxing at its highest level.

Bob Arum, Lomachenko’s promoter, is also looking to bring back unbeaten welterweight Terence Crawford in September or perhaps October. Arum told ESPN that Manny Pacquiao is a possibility. Like Lopez-Lomachenko, Crawford-Pacquiao is a biggie any time.

“We’re going to have Terence fight in September, or October, period,” said Arum, who also mentioned Kell Brook, Shawn Porter, Keith Thurman and Yordenis Ugas.

Then, there are photos of Canelo Alvarez, in training for a projected fight in mid-September, presumably on the Saturday before or after Mexico’s Independence Day, which falls on Wednesday, Sept. 16. Canelo, the reigning middleweight champion, is the game’s leading pay-per-view attraction. It’s tough to underwrite a fight featuring Canelo without a live audience. Same for Lomachenko, Crawford and Pacquiao.

But uncertainty – more like chaos – still reigns because of COVID-19. The virus is spiking in Texas and Arizona, both key boxing markets. All bets are off, at least in term of anything other than tentative. Still, September is a possibility, albeit temporary. Medical experts are saying it could subside during late summer.

It’s no coincidence that September is considered the best month for baseball to wrap up an abbreviated season. That’s only if and when owners and players can reach an agreement over – what else? – money.

In a terrific story, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told the Los Angeles Times that baseball would be wise to confine its season to the summer months.

“I would try to keep it in the core summer months and end it not with the way we play the World Series, until the end of October when it’s cold,” Fauci said in a story published Tuesday.

“I would avoid that.”

There’s concern of a second wave in the fall. The infamous Spanish Flu more than a century ago killed millions worldwide, most of the deaths happening in a second wave that hit in October of 1918.

“Even in warm weather, like in Arizona and California, we’re starting to see resurgences as we open up,” Fauci said. “But I think the chances of there being less of an issue in the end of July and all of August and September are much, much better than if you go into October.”

If and when boxing can return with some sort of fan presence, Arum’s Top Rank will be better prepared than any other promotional venture. Top Rank’s ESPN shows in the so-called bubble are ongoing, including a card featuring lightweight Gabriel Flores Jr. against Josec Ruiz, Thursday in a ballroom at Las Vegas’ MGM Grand.

The shows have not been without some hitches. Thursday’s card was supposed to feature junior-welterweight Jose Pedraza vs. Mikkel LesPierre. But the bout was cancelled when LesPierre’s manager tested positive for COVID-19. It forced a shuffle. But expect the unexpected. Top Rank is doing exactly that, in the lead – in the bubble, too – in re-learning how to stage cards in a new and cruel world.

Work in the bubble will prepare Top Rank for the moment when the bigger cards can happen.

“You would want to do it at a time when there isn’t the overlap between influenza and the possibility of a fall second wave,” said Fauci, who could have been talking about any sport.

Fauci also cautioned that there were no guarantees.

But there is September, a possibility instead of futility.  

By Bart Barry-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim-

News of an agreement for two Anthony Joshua-Tyson Fury fights next year was quickly followed by bookies installing Fury as a slight favorite.

Maybe the headlines generated some business at the books. But the real odds are on whether these two fights will ever happen. Agreements are like a glass jaw. They get broken all the time.

Of course, Joshua and Fury agree that they would like to fight a couple of times.  Of course, Fury co-manager Frank Warren reportedly said Fury would be happy at a 50-50 split.

It’s easy to agree on half-a-share of nothing.

In effect, that’s what the Joshua-Fury news was this week. It was a tease, a diversion from all of the uncertainty that has boxing and virtually every other sport seeking to hit the restart button amid the ongoing pandemic.

There’s no way to predict when COVID-19 will vanish. And there’s no way to know what the world will look like after it does. If it’s business-as-usual in the post-pandemic era, then Joshua-Fury will move on to the astonishing money that appeared to be inevitable before anyone had ever heard of coronavirus.

But don’t bet on it.

The unemployment figures are too high and the lines at community food banks are too long to think there will be much pay-per-view money in anybody’s pocket for a while. The best bet is that they’ll be negotiating for a total purse that’s a lot smaller than anybody would have imagined just six months ago.

Besides, there’s a minefield full of things confronting each heavyweight before they could even re-visit their reported agreement in an effort to sign a contract, a real deal.

First, Fury, a 7-4 to 2-1 favorite over Joshua, is mandated to fight Deontay Wilder in a third bout, which has been postponed multiple times. There are reports of the second rematch going to Macao or Australia. Maybe, an option is the Raiders’ new stadium in Las Vegas with fans in seats configured by today’s social-distancing limits.

Then, there’s Joshua, who has a date with Bulgarian Kubrat Pulev. Like everything else, it’s been postponed repeatedly. Then, there’s talk of Joshua in another mandatory title defense against Ukrainian Oleksandr Usyk. No idea of when or where or even if. There are no plans these days. Just quarantines and curfews.

Even if Wilder-Fury 3 happens and Joshua faces Pulev, there is only more of the uncertainty that defines a pandemic thus far known only for deadly chaos. The singular power in Wilder’s right hand could score an upset.

Meanwhile, Pulev has little to lose and is tough, which means he’s dangerous for a Joshua who just hasn’t been the same fighter he was in a dramatic stoppage of Wladimir Klitschko in April 2017.

Joshua was curiously cautious in winning a decision over Andy Ruiz Jr. last December, about six months after Ruiz stunned him, scoring a seventh-round stoppage in New York.

Now, we see Joshua on crutches, his left knee in a brace for an injury he says he suffered while running in the woods.

He looks vulnerable.

Maybe that, too, is an illusion, another wager during a time when all bets are off.  

By Bart Barry-

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wait, did Bart just compare himself to Cervantes?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

Follow all the action as it happens as Amanda Nunes defends the UFC Featherweight title against Felicia Spencer.  Two big bantamweights featuring former champion Cody Garbrandt fights Raphael Assuncao and Aljamain Sterling battles Cory Sandhagen

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

Round 1 Right from Nunes..Right..Spencer swelling around right eye..Nunes takes Spencer down…Nunes lands a knee to the body..Elbow..Spencer cut on her forehead..Hard elbow by Nunes..Nunes outlanded Spencer 20-1.

Round 2 Right from Nunes…Jab from Spencer..Low kick from Nunes..Right from Spencer..Nunes takes down Spencer..Big elbows by Nunes..Spinning elbow..High kick from Spencer

Round 3 Knee from Spencer..Right From Nunes…good elbow…hard rights knocks Spencer’s mouthpiece out…Hard right to the body..Head kick..Right hand and uppercut..Front Kick..Low kick..jab ..right hand

Round 4 Hard right from Nunes..Takedown..Lead elbow..Spinningback kick to the body..Leg Kick..2 hard rights..Right hand gets Spencer down..Choke attempt…Spencer with a hematoma on forehead…108-31 strikes for Nunes

Round 5 Left from Nunes

50-44; 50-44 AND 50-45 FOR NUNES

Round 1 Redness on left leg of Assuncao..Straight right from Garbrandt..Counter from Assuncao..Left from Garbrandt

Round 2 Kick to head by Garbrandt..Right from Assuncao..Clean right from Garbrandt

Round 1 Martin gets the back of Magny..Right from Martin..Good low kick by Magny..Jab..Magney outlanded Martin 20-9
Round 2 Good right from Martin..Magny seems a little shaken…Martin takes Magny down..Magny lands a right..Exchanging low kicks…Magney up 47-22 in Strikes
Round 3 Right from Magny..Nice right..Good right..Big right from Martin…87-39 in Strikes for Magny

30-27 twice and 29-28 for Neil Magny

Round 1 O MALLEY LANDS A BOOMING RIGHT TO THE JAW AND WINELAND IS KNOCKED OUT

By Norm Frauenheim-

Top Rank is poised to hit the re-set button next week, mid-week, with live telecasts, the first in about three months, which is only a short season on a calendar that has been stripped of its ordinary reliability by the extraordinary.

Spring turns to summer no matter what, but it’s hard to know whether a long-awaited succession of opening bells continues to ring into autumn and winter with something that sounds like business-as-usual.

We’ll begin to find out, first Tuesday with featherweight champion Shakur Stevenson (13-0, 7 KOs) in a 130-pound bout against Puerto Rican Felix Caraballo (13-1-2, 9 KOs) and again Thursday with former 122-pound champion Jessie Magdaleno (27-1, 18 KOs) against Dominican Yenifel Vicente (36-4-2, 28 KOs in a featherweight bout, both on ESPN and both in a ballroom at Las Vegas’ MGM Grand Convention Center.

They are ordinary fights anytime other than now. The pandemic makes them extraordinary for what is known and unknown. Empty seats are the only sure thing.

Fans won’t be there.

Media won’t be.

Maybe, COVID-19 won’t be, either. That’s the idea, yet that’s all it is in what is essentially a couple of test runs in boxing’s first concerted attempt since the ring lights went dark in late March.

“This is something that nobody, at least from our end, has experience with,’’ Top Rank’s Bob Arum said Thursday during a conference call that included Stevenson and Caraballo. “It’s really been a work in progress, and it continues to be a work in progress.

“Imagine, as guys come into Vegas, they got to go into what is a bubble.

They’ve got to be escorted to a place where they can shake out, train. There’s a place to eat. We have a special dining room set up in the convention center. All of this is something we’re not used to. We’re not starting out with title fights. But maybe in a few weeks, we’ll start doing some title fights.

“There are issues with the organization. So, it’s not easy. We’re doing it one step at a time.’’

Arum has divided the comeback into phases, much like state governments are doing with the plan to re-open restaurants and businesses. This week, Phase One, is just an attempt to see what works. What doesn’t.

Phase Two would include a mix of second-tier title fights and perhaps a measured return of ringside media. Along the way, fans would be brought back, first in limited seating and then until all the seats can be filled without fear of a widespread infection of the dangerous virus.

Underlining it all is testing. Test before training. Before dinner. Test, test, test at all times. Arum estimated testing for each card costs more than $25,000.

“Just for testing,’’ Arum said. “Plus, the rooms, special security, the meals. This is a very, very large undertaking. But, obviously, we’ve get to get it done. We’ll probably be doing this for three months – June, then July and probably August.

“Hopefully by September, we’ll get back to doing events with spectators in a limited capacity.

“Then, hopefully by the end of the year, we’ll be doing events with virtually full capacity.’’

If it all works, then maybe – just maybe – boxing will be back to what it was by year’s end or early 2021. That would mean Tyson Fury-Deontay Wilder 3 and perhaps a third fight between Canelo Alvarez and Gennadiy Golovkin. All kinds of intriguing fights have been speculated. Terence Crawford-Manny Pacquiao has even been mentioned.

But it all depends on what begins to happen next Tuesday and Thursday. It is the logistical origin of a potential template that could guide a sport as old as any back to its future or send it down a path to its place in a post-pandemic era.

By Bart Barry-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim–

The Forbes list used to belong to Floyd Mayweather Jr., who became better known for dominating the money ranks than the pound-for-pound ratings.

Dollars buy crossover fans and Mayweather seemed to have an endless supply. The cash filled his suitcases and the minds of young fighters, who wanted to spend like him even if they couldn’t fight like him.

The biggest reward for the smallest risk, a ratio and a role model, became as important as any combination of punches. No matter what the sport, Mayweather employed it as effectively as anyone ever has.

But the ratio is vanishing in a pandemic for which there has been no apparent immunity. The risk is still there. Boxing without risk is aerobics. Have a nice workout. But the reward is eroding at a rate that will soon force fighters to think twice about that inherent risk.

The latest Forbes list of the world’s highest-paid athletes was released about a week ago. It includes four boxers – Tyson Fury at No. 11 with $57 million, Anthony Joshua at No. 19 with $47 million, Deontay Wilder at No. 20 with $46.5 million and Canelo Alvarez at No. 30 with $37 million.

At the top, Roger Federer, who is the first tennis player to ever be ranked No. 1 with $106.3 million in earnings and endorsements for the period between June 1, 2019 and June 1, 2020. He won’t be standing in line at any food banks before his next match.

Nevertheless, the list is a red flag, an early earning sign of financial trouble awaiting all sports and especially boxing, which includes few guarantees, other than stitches and scars.

Start at the top. Federer is there with income less than half of what Mayweather earned during days when he was No. 1 often enough to be named for the list. In 2018, Forbes Mayweather led the way with $285 million, most of it from his all-reward and no-risk dance with Conor McGregor, a mixed-martial arts performer then posing as a boxer.

Two to three years later, the money looks to be vanishing faster than a full-time job. Top-to-bottom, the pay-for-play list for the top 100 is down nine percent from what it was a year ago. Cancellations started in late February and never stopped until the entire sports landscape went dark in April.  Forbes predicts a steeper decline in its next list. No play, no pay.

https://www.forbes.com/athletes/#696328ea55ae

There are signs that some sports will return this summer in an abbreviated format. The NBA and NHL are talking about schedules at single sites in a format that would essentially be a payoff schedule. For now, baseball is locked into talks about money. Thus far, players are balking at proposed pay cuts.

Boxers aren’t that lucky. During the pandemic, they aren’t collecting any pay anyway. They are independent entrepreneurs. They have to fight to get paid, contract-to-contract. Boxing is set to hit the re-start button on June 9 in a bout featuring emerging featherweight champion Shakur Stevenson against Felix Caraballo in Las Vegas. Further bouts are scheduled throughout June and July.

But, essentially, they will be studio shows. In an effort to safeguard fighters and officials from catching the lethal coronavirus, there will be no fans. No ringside media. The bouts will be televised by ESPN, which is desperate for live content.

Yet, the absence of a live crowd limits the purse. That might be OK for young boxers still fighting to make their name. But for the established star, there’s no chance at earning the big money that was a hallmark of the Mayweather era and its immediate aftermath during pre-pandemic days.

Without a live gate, it’s hard to foresee Fury-Wilder 3 or a third Canelo Alvarez-Gennadiy Golovkin fight any time soon. How about Terence Crawford-versus-Errol Spence Jr.? Not this year, if ever.

No live gate also looms as a potential complication for Manny Pacquiao, the Filipino Senator who had been hoping to fight sometime this summer.

Pacquiao had been fighting for about $20-million. That’s a big number. He’ll be 42 on Dec. 17. That’s a short window for a fighter near retirement.

A solution? There might not be one during a stretch when the money will be short and Forbes forgettable.

By Bart Barry-

beeenk … beeenk … beeenk

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

Slam the back heel

Slam the back heel

snap

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

snap

Better again again

Better better body it

beeenk …

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

beeenk … beeenk … beeenk

dent admire the dent, yes.

“Safe Hands, man, what’s up!”

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

“Your what?”

“You see Benjamín on the uppercut bag?”

“He didn’t hit himself, did he?”

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

“You’re bullshitting –”

“I’m kidding –”

“I was going to say –”

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

“What did you tell him?”

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

“Oh I gotta hear this –”

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

“You’re gonna get him killed –”

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

“You find the eighteen-ouncers?”

“Bought a new pair.”

“Safest hands in the gym.”

“Working on The Margarito today –”

“Not The Marquez?”

 beeenk … beeenk … beeenk

“A la chamba, ya.”

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

Everything the left everything everything the left everything everything

bump

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

bump

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

snap

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

beeenk …

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

snap

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

beeenk … beeenk … beeenk

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim-

Canelo Alvarez is fighting for history. At least, he was, pre-pandemic, last November in his light-heavyweight stoppage of Sergey Kovalev. But history, like profit, has been suspended for who-knows-how-long because of COVID-19.

Alvarez is lucky. He was a wealthy man before the virus appeared and spread its deadly appendages like a weapon of mass destruction. Over just three fights in his rich DAZN deal, he earned $97.5 million, more than enough to pay for a lifetime of bills and a few Ferraris.

Canelo doesn’t have to fight, unlike most in the prize-fighting profession who are praying for some sort of paycheck in studio shows that figure to begin next month. But if money isn’t a motivation anymore, Canelo’s immense pride is. That’s why the reigning middleweight champion talked – and talked — about history before an 11^th-round knockout of Kovalev Nov. 2 at Las Vegas’ MGM Grand in his first and only fight at 175 pounds.

For Alvarez, history isn’t complicated. It’s simple. Singular. Julio Cesar Chavez is the defining face of Mexico’s fabled boxing history. He was when Canelo was born in 1990. He has been ever since.

In winning a title in a fourth weight class, Canelo had begun his monumental pursuit of supplanting Chavez. His run at history was underway. Now, a pandemic-altered landscape includes a potential dilemma for Canelo and DAZN.

History or profit?

Money or legacy?

Canelo’s claim on legacy is hard to make, much less sustain, when he’s not fighting. Inactivity opens the way to a skepticism that’s hard to counter. Think of LeBron James in his great debate over who’s The GOAT: James or Jordan?  James’ only argument is to play, just play. Yet just as the pandemic shuts down the NBA, the ESPN documentary, The Last Dance, reminds us just how good Michael Jordan was. Without another season and another title run, James has no way to further his claim on being basketball’s best ever.

James has to play.

Canelo has to fight.

Until then, it’s hard to argue with legendary trainer Nacho Beristain, who questions whether Canelo will be remembered as Mexico’s best ever.

“I think it is going to be a little difficult for him to end up being one of the best fighters to come out of Mexico,’’ Beristain told El Boxcast. “He is a good fighter, no doubt about that. I particularly feel how he boxes is attractive. But for him to be the best pound-for-pound, he’s not and he’s not going to be.

“I think they are intelligently evading some middleweight fighters who may harm him and are taking care of his career because they are making a lot of money. To a certain extent he is good, but I think he is not the best.”

The money is a staggering complication, the proverbial devil in the looming dilemma.

It’s easy to say that making history is the goal when you’re making $32.5 million-a-fight. That has been Canelo’s guarantee for each fight in the landmark, $365-million contract he signed with DAZN in 2018. He beat Rocky Fielding, Danny Jacobs and Kovalev in the first three bouts of an 11-fight deal. They were solid victories, but forgettable on a historical scale. Canelo, a former junior-middleweight champion, won a fringe 168-pound title against Fielding, retained his middleweight supremacy against Jacobs and won a fourth division title against a fading fighter, yet a known name in Kovalev.

Short-term, it did not answer questions still lingering in the wake of two fights with Gennadiy Golovkin. There was a draw and then a narrow scorecard victory for Canelo, who won a majority decision in the rematch. History and DAZN demand something definitive. But the world is operating on a different a timetable these days. Tick-tock, we’re all on the pandemic clock. There was talk about a third GGG-Canelo fight in September. Then, there was talk of interim bouts — Canelo-versus-Billy Joe Saunders and GGG-versus-Kamil Szeremeta before the final leg in a trilogy.

“We realistically want two fights this year,” Canelo trainer Eddy Reynoso told Box Azteca. “We couldn’t fight in May, so we are looking at September and December. We’re talking about [opponents] like Billy Joe Saunders.

“There’s also Caleb Plant and the WBC world titleholder at 168 pounds [David Benavidez]. There are several [options] … Golovkin could be the fight for December. His people have already said that he doesn’t want to fight Canelo until after the [Kamil Szeremeta] fight.”

When fights were cancelled, DAZN lost subscribers. Can the streaming network even afford to pay Canelo his minimum anymore? Will former subscribers renew after months of lost wages? Would Canelo be willing to make less money while he tries to make history?

Only the virus knows.

By Bart Barry-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim

In case you haven’t heard or seen, Mike Tyson is coming back. That’s news, of course. But it’s strange to call his plans a comeback. When did he ever leave? He’s always in the public imagination. In deed. In name. In words. And now in video.

Video of Tyson in the gym went viral during a time when a real virus has kept so many at home with nothing much to do other than fantasize. Yeah, It’s Mike all right, waking up the past with echoes of his crazy power.

It’s fun to watch. It’s even fun to wonder.

Still, I’m not sure Tyson can still fight at 53 years old. Precedent and caution say no. But Tyson is nothing if not unprecedented.

Above all, the power in his ability to fascinate and entertain remains undiminished. Forgettable he’ll never be. At one level, it’s astonishing how much attention he can still generate. The internet is on fire with talk of him fighting Evander Holyfield.

Forget that it’s supposed to be a four-rounder for charity. Headlines, driven by runaway imaginations, frame it as the third fight in a rivalry with more imagined sequels than just another trilogy.

The hunt for the last piece of Holyfield’s ear from the 1997 Bite Fight might already be underway. In perhaps an apocryphal story, it was found on the canvas by maintenance, placed on a cocktail napkin and then lost in a cab during a wild ride from the MGM Grand to a Las Vegas emergency room after Tyson bit it off in the third round.  Maybe, the National Geographic Channel can find it preserved in gold at a pawn store or buried in liquid nitrogen in a cryonics coffin beneath the Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign.

It’s a story that will never go away. Then again, neither will Tyson. In a twist on an old line, you just can’t make him up. His craziness is a jagged collection of contradictions, yet genuinely compelling.

To this day, I’ll always remember him from a moment a couple of decades ago when he was living and training at the old Central Boxing Gym in downtown Phoenix. It was July. In the Arizona desert, only hell is hotter and not by much. Tyson was in the gym. The doors were wide open. A few box fans provided the only AC. Tyson was happy. I was sweating.

Turns out, it was a day when Tyson just wanted to talk. There were pigeons and food and philosophy and history and music. He talked and talked some more. Finally, I told him I had to leave. He follows me out of the gym and to my truck. I open the truck’s door and put my right foot inside the cab. Suddenly, I feel a hand as heavy as an anvil land on my left elbow.

Whoa.

Remember, Mike wanted to talk.

So, I listened.

I’ll never forget the power, running from his hand through my arm, like a force of nature. With one yank, he could have ripped my arm from my shoulder. I stood there, right foot in the truck and left foot on the street, planted by that one hand.

He was frightening.

He was fascinating.

He was everything then that he is today.

Even on video, that compelling mix is evident. People watch, still watch, in part because Tyson’s extremes can’t be faked. Genuine is an increasingly rare commodity in our fake-news world. In Tyson, it’s still there, abundant as it is vulnerable

Truth is, I’d rather Tyson not fight at all. There’s too much risk for him and the 57-year old Holyfield. I’m not convinced either will ever answer another opening bell anyway. Mind and name recognition might withstand the cumulative damage from blows over more than half a century. But the body will not.

Injuries in training are a real risk, perhaps one that will be enough to cancel plans to fight again. We don’t need to see a Tyson comeback. He’s not going anywhere anyway.   

By Bart Barry-

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

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

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

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

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

BB: Surprised it took long revert form?

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

BB: Frankly –

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

BB: Be neither tedious nor insipid, lad.

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

BB: An Irishman, naturally.

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

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

BB: Denver weighin –

BB: Sweatbox firehazard –

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

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

BB: What’s this, then?

BB: Easy to write.

BB: Does that inoculate it?

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

BB: How’s quarantine, son?

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

BB: Tell me about American energy.

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

BB: Tell me about “American energy”.

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

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

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

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

BB: Monkeys moving wood.

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

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

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

BB: You miss him?

BB: Nope.

BB: What about her?

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

BB: Whither our beloved sport?

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

BB: Boxing ain’t been on its grind.

BB: All the better.

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

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

BB: What does the return look like?

BB: Ask someone knowledgeable.

BB: Right.

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

BB: Empty arenas?

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

BB: The DAZN tournament, the one with the –

BB: The one Usyk won –

BB: And Callum Smith and Inoue –

BB: World Boxing Super Series!

BB: There you go.

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

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

BB: Do you miss traveling?

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

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

BB: Tell them a secret.

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

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

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

BB: Reading takes care of its own.

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

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

Follow all the action as it happens as Tony Ferguson and Justin Gaethje battle for the UFC Interim Lightweight title.  The Prelims kick off at 6 PM ET with main card beginning at 10 PM and the main card will also have Henry Cejudo defending the Bantamweight title against former champion Dominick Cruz

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

Round 1 Nice right from Gaethje…Leg kick from Ferguson..Left hook from Gaethje..Leg Kick..High kick and jab from Ferguson..Kick to body..Right from Gaethje..Good right..Right..2 left hooks

Round 2 Sharp right from Gaethje..Big left..Stinging left..Right over the top..1-2 from Ferguson..Hard left hook from Gaethje..Hard left..Gaethje landing heavy blows..Leg kicks from Ferguson…Big right from Gaethje..Huge Uppercut that rocks Gaethje at the bell

Round 3 Good right from Gaethje..Ferguson cut around the left eye…Right from gaethje..Ferguson right eye is very swollen..Counter right from Gaethje..Massie=ve right rocks Ferguson…another Huge right…Right from Gaethje..Left from Ferguson..Nice leg sweep..Hard right from Gaethje..Left hook

Round 4 Left hook from Gaethje…left…Good front kick to body from Ferguson..Both land big shots…Hard right hurts Ferguson..Body shot..Jab..Left hook..Leg kick from Gaethje

Round 5 Right over top from Gaethje..Hard combination..Ferguson hurt…Ferguson is limping from kicks..Hard 1-2 Jab..Leg kick from Ferguson..More hard shots..Ferguson is getting beat up..Big right and left..Ferguson limping bad…FIGHT OVER…GAETHJE SCORES THE WIN

 Round 1 Leg kick by Cejudo..another..another and another..Knee from Cruz, but Cejudo takes him down..Left from Cejudo..Leg kick..Kick from Cruz..Lg kick from Cejudo

Round 2 Leg kick from Cejudo..Right from Cruz…Right from Cejudo..another right..Right from Cruz..left..HEADBUTT AND CEJUDO IS BLEEDING FROM THE FOREHEAD..HARD KNEE KNOCKS CRUZ DOWN..CRUZ LOOKS HURT…CEJUDO JUMPS ON CRUZ..SEVERAL PUNCHES AND THE FIGHT IS STOPPED

CEJUDO RETIRES IN THE OCTAGON AFTER THE FIGHT

Round 1 HUGE WILD LEFT HOOK AND DOWN GOES ROZENSTRUIK…FIGHT OVER

Round 1 Stevens lands a low kick and 2 punches..Nice Right..Body shot from Kattar..Nice low kick..Good low kick..Stevens lands a good low kick..Inside leg kick..Trading leg kicks…Good right from Stevens..left hook and body shot..Nice jab by Kattar…combination,,Huge right by Kattar..Big Body shot by Stevens

Round 2 Right from Kattar..Good low kick…Nice Combination..Hard uppercut..Good low kick…HUGE RIGHT DROPS STEVENS..2 FOLLOW UP ON THE GROUND AND THE FIGHT IS STOPPED…STEVENS LOOKS WOOZY AND IS BLEEDING FROM FOREHEAD

Round 1 Low kick by De Castro…Left hook..Low Kick…Hardy lands a low kick..Right from De Castro stings Hardy..Low Kick..Hardy stings De Castro with a right…Nice Kick

Round 2 Powerful leg kick by Hardy…

Round 3 Leg kick from Hardy..Hard leg kick..Right kick

30-27 on ALL CARDS FOR HARDY

Round 1 Pettis gets a good right to the body…Nice right..Leg kick from Cerrone..Right hand..Cerrone takes Pettis down after a Pettis kick…Combination from Cerrone..Good left by Pettis…Spinning back kick to the body..Good counter right..Left from Cerrone…Swelling from Cerrone Left eye

Round 2 Left from Cerrone..Stinging left from Pettis..Good low kick from Cerrone..Good right counter..Good combination from Pettis..Cerrone lands a kick to the body..Nice takedown..Knee to body….Short right from Pettis

Round 3  Cerrone lands a flush body kick..Nice combination..Pettis kicks to body, Cerrone catches it and then lands a knee to the body of his own…Low Kick..hard left from Pettis stuns Cerrone…Big high kick from Cerrone…Petts lands a left and a jab..

29-28 Pettis on all Cards

Round 1 Right from Oleinik..Leg kick from Werdum..Big right from Oleinik..Nice right from Werdum..Nice knee..Huge uppercuts from Oleinik..Werdum face is bleeding

Round 2 Spinning back-fist from Oleinik…Kick..Nice leg kick..Kick to head by Werdum..Big Knee..Right from Oleinik..Big right

Round 3 Take down by Werdum..Armbar..Punches by Olienik..

29-28 Werdum   29-28 Oleinik Twice

Round 1 Good right from Esparza..Kick by Waterson..Good right from Esparza..Kick to body from Waterson….Kick..

Round 2 Knee to the body from Waterson..Another..Flurry from Esparza..Knee from Waterson

Round 3 Good right from Esparza..Kick from Waterson..2 rights from Esparza,,Good knee..Good low kick..Big Right..Good knee to body from Waterson..Good flurry Esparza

30-27 Waterson  29-29 Esparza..30-27 Esparza

Round 1 Right from Price..Good right from Luque..Price swelling on right side of face..Counter right..Nice counter from Price….hard right,,..Submission attempt..Jab from Luque..good left hook..Hard right rocks Price at the bell

Round 2 Right and left from Price.Jab…Knee to the body..Right from Luque..Uppercut from Price..Price is cut under his right..left..Nice combination..Jab from Luque..Kick to body from Price..Nice body shot….Right to head

Round 3 Uppercut from Price..Lead kick…Huge left hook drops Price..Doctor looking at Price as he is cut very bad..FIGHT IS STOPPED

Round 1   Mitchell applies 2 Arm Triangles and Rosa was close to tapping both times

Round 2 Arm Triangle….Another by Mitchell…Hard elbows to the body and head

Round 3 Mitchell takes Rosa down again..

30-25 TWICE AND 30-24 FOR MITCHELL

Round 1 Spann takes down Alvey…Alvey gets back to his feet..Spann applies an arm triangle..Alvey stays calm and gets out of it..Alvey lands a lefr hand..Right and left..Leg kick..Good right hand from Spann..Nice right and follow up knee..Alvey lands a knee to the body

Round 2 Counter right hand from Spann..Big right from Alver..Spann lands a right and left hook…Alvey lands a Good left and right..Spann lands a nice front kick to the body…Left..Nice combination

Round 3 Front kick from Spann..Left from Alvey..Big leg kick to head from Spann..Left From Alvey..Combination from Spann..High kick from Alvey..Right hook hurts Spann..Alvey trying to choke out Spann..Left..Right hook hurts Spann

30-27 SPANN ON ALL CARDS

By Norm Frauenheim-

Mike Tyson wants to fight four-rounders. So, does Evander Holyfield.  I’ll let you figure out where that leads. The public imagination is capable of just about any fantasy these days. There’s not much else to do.

The imagination is an escape, a refuge from the tragedy of a pandemic that kills those we love, those we admire and those we wish we had known. There are no baseball standings. No NBA box scores. No opening bell. There’s only the obit page. It’s endless, columns of names, some celebrity and some anonymous, yet all gone.

There’s been a lot of talk about business-as-usual this week. That would be nice. Something to hope for. Pray for. But, for now, it’s another fantasy, just like Tyson-Holyfield 3. The obit page says that intensive care and funeral homes will be doing most of the nation’s business for a while.  

Jimmy Glenn’s name is on that page today. Glenn, 89, died early Thursday after a long battle with coronavirus. He was an amateur boxer, trainer, a cut man, manager and bartender. It was his bar, Jimmy’s Corner near New York’s Times Square, that has become a defining piece of real estate for a sport that has seen it all.

Glenn had seen it all. Or at least most of it. He used to talk about fighting former heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson as an amateur. Patterson won.

“But I went the distance,’’ Glenn told The Sweet Science in 2005.

He could have been a contender, too.

For 50 years, his bar became a gathering place for the contender in all of us.

The walls are covered with the posters and memorabilia that decorate scarred gyms everywhere. History fills the place like a shot glass. Tourists step in to gawk. Fight fans gather to debate or celebrate what they’ve just seen at Madison Square Garden. Writers are there to drink in the history and any other potent spirit.

Like so much else about boxing, the place is a mix of fact and fable. Among all of the photos, there’s one of Muhammad Ali, overlooking the bar. Then there’s a still from Raging Bull, the classic film starring Robert De Niro in his role as Jake LaMotta. The movie’s closing scene was filmed at Jimmy’s Corner.

Jimmy is gone.

His Corner is still there, a heartbeat for a sport and world in desperate need of one.

By Bart Barry-

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

Worst scorecard I’ve seen, you, Bruce?

What were you thinking and are you embarrassed by it?

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

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

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

But your scorecard.  Just the damndest thing.

Dastardly.

Who paid you post such shite?

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

You and two other jokers.

There were three of you scored it blindfolded.

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

Make sure Bob doesn’t catch you.

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

Old salts cackle.  Just don’t –

They ask you to score it?

Don’t score it.

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

Will do, he says.

___

Sun Bowl field, UTEP, on Saturday afternoon

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

Juan Carlos, good to meet you.

Barry – what time you get here?

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

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

Soy hondureño.

The crime reporter!

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

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

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

___

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

I like your shape, muy nalgona, extraordinary.

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

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

I’m nervous.

Don’t be.

Tell me more about the boxing thing.

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

Do you know who Pacquiao is?

Duh.

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

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

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

On the roof?

No my room.

___

Sun Bowl field, UTEP, on Saturday evening

Did you get the time?

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

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

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

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

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

Good idea.

Who wins?

The shootout or the fight?

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

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

Ut’s his name?

Irish Andy Lee.

Who’s the guy with him looks familiar?

Steward.  Kronk Gym.  Trained Hearns.

Motor City Cobra!

Every Latino calls him that every American calls him Hitman.

No heroes in Honduras are hitmen, güero.

___

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

Look who it is.

Who’s this kid?

One of the dummies scored it gainst Manny.

I was in good company, he says.

You guys sit next to one another like penpals?

Nope.

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

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

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

Who’s this, Bruce?

Barry.

Never heard of him.

___

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

That was a helluva round three.

Me hechaste al plato, cabrón.

What time your kids expect you home?

They’re with their dad this week.

Let’s go eat.  You must be hungry.

Then we make a little güerito with green eyes mmm.

God no please.

___

Sun Bowl field, UTEP, on Saturday evening

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

Shit that was fast.

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

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

___

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

I’m not from the Eleven Families or nothing.

But raised affluent.

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

Good food, fair prices, says Juan Carlos.

On me.

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

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

This was fun for my first boxing fight.

Yeah they’re not all like this, eh?

___

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim-

Nostalgia will survive the pandemic. So, too, will boxing, the world’s second-oldest profession.

A sure sign of boxing’s resiliency, its heartbeat, is in the interest for the video about the good old days that the networks are playing during coronavirus shutdown.

From Ali and Frazier, to Sugar Ray Leonard, Roberto Duran, Hagler, Hearns and all the rest, the legends are as current as they’ve ever been. They live on while the world has stopped, anxiously awaiting an end to a virus as dangerous as any since 1918.

The Spanish Flu was around then.

 So, too, was Jack Dempsey.

I’m not sure there’s another Dempsey, who won his first heavyweight title on July 4, 1919 and went on to be one of history’s iconic champions during the 1920s. Film on ESPN and Showtime of the greats over the last 50 years is a library full of evidence that confirms how much better the fighters of yesterday were than they are today. Above all, there were just more of them.

But the coronavirus tragedy is a painful lesson about history, good and bad. It does repeat itself.  Boxing’s history is as rich as it is long. There’s plenty to repeat.

It’s anybody’s guess as to whether it will. Or even can. The economics, post-pandemic, are problematic, at best. But the attempt is already under way.

Last Saturday, there was a card in Nicaragua at a Managua arena named for another legend, Alexis Arguello. Fighters went into the ring wearing masks. Former pound-for-pound No. 1 Roman Gonzalez was there, doing interviews with his mask in place. Fans were scattered throughout the arena, separated by at least two empty seats between them.  It was awkward, but it was a first bell after a couple months of a sobering silence.

Expect more.

More of the awkward.

A card is scheduled for May 23 in Patzcuaro, Mexico. It’s a joint promotion – Roy Jones Jr. and Carlos Molina’s King Carlos Promotions. Fans won’t be there. The card will be available, live-streamed with Molina (31-11-2, 10 KOs), a former junior-middleweight champion, in the main event against Michi Munoz (27-10-1 8 KOs).

Then, there are plans for junior-bantamweight champion Emanuel Navarrete to fight in an Azteca TV studio in Mexico City on June 6, according to The Athletic. The bout is subject to approval from Mexican health officials, who presumably would try to protect the fighters from the virus before they endanger each other.

Meanwhile, there are plans in the UK for a possible return to the ring in July. The British Boxing Board of Control (BBBofC) announced it was ready to work with UK health officials, if and when restrictions are lifted sometime this summer.

“Depending upon Government decisions it is hopeful that professional Boxing will commence in July 2020 and we will continue to use our best endeavours to do so and are working closely with our Promoters,’’ the BBBofC said in a statement this week.

The initial plan is to stage the cards without a live audience. Only fighters, a referee, judges, regulator, cameras and health officials will be there. Given fears about crowds these days, there’s a chance that few fans would show up, even if allowed.

According to a poll from National Public Radio (NPR)/PBS News Hour/Marist this week, 91 percent said it was a bad idea for large groups of people to attend sporting events.

The other nine percent might have been boxing fans, a small number, yet maybe as historically resilient as ever.

By Bart Barry-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Though little fire grows great with little wind,

Yet extreme gusts will blow out fire and all.

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

For I am rough and woo not like a babe.

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

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

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenehim-

Big fight weeks are little bit like the seasons. They are on the calendar, a date to anticipate, celebrate and debate. Next week was supposed to be Canelo Alvarez-Billy Joe Saunders. Maybe, the May 2^nd bout in Las Vegas would have been a good one. Maybe, it would have been a colossal dud.

But at least it would have been there, a reliable moment for the week-long routine before any opening bell. The give-and-take can be funny, then compelling, sometimes bloody, always edgy and often outrageous. It’s a crazy mix, but the chaos is imminent.

You can plan for it.

Not much to plan for now.

That calendar is as empty as the Vegas Strip. The emptiness is unnerving. It’s impossible to plan for what can’t be seen.

No neon, no nothing.

There’s no telling when the lights will come back on for boxing, or much of anything else these days in a world gripped by a crippling pandemic. We stay at home. We stay a so-called safe distance away from friends and neighbors. We stand in line outside of grocery stories, hoping to score a roll of toilet paper and looking for shelter at the first sound of a dry cough.

We watch bikers stare down nurses wearing masks in front of state capitols in protests that include people wearing AK-47s. I like the nurses’ chances at shooting down coronavirus a lot better than any of the thugs with weapons. The nurses are lot smarter. A lot tougher too.

I’d also prefer to see a Canelo-Saunders stare-down, too. It’s a lot safer.

There was a time when it looked as if Canelo-Saunders might mark the beginning of a boxing comeback from the pandemic. But that was before the Strip went dark, before the crowds moved out and the coyotes moved in. That was a couple of months ago. Seems like a different era now, and it was in ominous ways that continue to emerge.

There’s no telling how long the virus will hang around. There’s no idea whether it will vanish during summer heat and then make a vicious comeback in the fall. There’s just that emptiness.

Canelo, himself, hopes to be back in the ring in September, perhaps for a third middleweight-title fight against Gennadiy Golovkin.

“In my mind, I’ll be fighting in September, so hopefully this whole issue will pass and we can follow through with that possible date,’’ Canelo told Box Azteca.  “I do not know what is coming next, because everything is off. There were very good plans for this 2020, so hopefully in a month we will see positive results.”

If there was anywhere to place a bet on that in Vegas right now, you probably wouldn’t get very good odds. Increasingly, sports look as though they won’t be back as we know them until there’s a vaccine. That probably means next year.

Big crowds are where the virus gets transmitted the most. The beginning of the pandemic in northern Italy has been blamed on a soccer game in Milan. The pandemic took root in Louisiana because of the Mardi Gras party up-and-down Bourbon Street in New Orleans. If the virus has a chance to come back after a summer departure, it’ll happen while tailgating before a college football game or in the beer line before opening bell to a big fight in Vegas.

Germany just announced it has cancelled Octoberfest, Mardi Gras with a German accent. It’s a sure sign that the virus is expected to be around in some way through the end of this year, or at least until there’s a vaccine.

Boxing already has modest plans for its initial return. Top Rank’s Bob Arum is exploring ways to put together cards that will provide some live content for ESPN, perhaps as early as this summer. But the big bouts – a Canelo-Saunders kind of bout – will have to wait.

“There’s a limit to what we can do,” Arum told Top Rank’s Crystina Poncher in a two-part interview in the Catching Up With Crystina series. “It’s not going to be easy. Everybody has to be patient.’’

The cards would essentially be studio events, featuring fighters who would ordinarily appear on undercards for major bouts. There would be no fans. No live crowds mean no known stars. Promoters need the big gate to pay the big purses.

“Where the gate money is so much a big percentage of the revenue, I don’t see how you can do it without spectators,” Arum said.

That raises another question. When the pandemic ends, will anybody have enough money to buy a ticket at pre-coronavirus prices? Will the game’s richest fighters be willing to accept a fraction of the money they earned before the pandemic? Unemployment is projected to be at Depression-like levels.

Pockets figure to be empty.

Hard to plan for that, too.

By Bart Barry-

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

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

Now seems good a time as any to share it:

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

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

*

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

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

*

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

*

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim-

Pro wrestling is essential, at least it is in Florida, which apparently needed something to replace spring break and Mickey Mouse as a necessary diversion during the pandemic.

It sounds silly. Make that bizarre. Then again, pro wrestlers do wear masks, more to shock and mock than to protect. They’ll wear them into the ring, but maybe not into the grocery store.

Put it this way: There’s no disguise for it. Crazy is essentially everywhere these days, especially in Florida, my old home state. But the essential craziness knows no borders, any more than coronavirus does. It infects, destroying body and mind in just about any zip code. These days, home is Arizona, where golf has been deemed essential.  

At opposite ends of the Sun Belt, common sense, essential to survival in just about any time, is a casualty at this time. Try telling medical personnel that golf and pro wrestling are essential, too. A 9-iron is as essential as a respirator? If you say yes to that one, you’re essentially a fool or a Donald Trump supporter.

Trump is in the WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment) Hall of Fame. It’s no coincidence, then, that Florida deemed the WWE as essential at a cuckoo kind of news conference Monday in Orange County, Orlando, where the WWE has a rehearsal/training facility somewhere near Disney World. Only the citrus is real.

WWE chief executive Vince McMahon and his wife, Linda McMahon have given millions to Trump’s campaign. Trump, a Florida resident, appointed Linda McMahon to lead the Small Business Administration. She quit about 14 months ago to take a leading role in Trump’s 2020 campaign.

Nothing in this scenario is surprising. The money is a map. Follow it to a destination as scripted as any WWE event.

To use Trump’s language, it’s fake. Fixed. He likes it that way. He’s good at it, too. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be in the WWE Hall of Fame.

The trouble with Florida’s official declaration of the WWE as essential, however, is the potential opening it gives boxing and other sports. Top Rank’s Bob Arum told ESPN that he’s exploring ways to get ready for the day when the sport can resume.

“We would sanitize the Top Rank gym, limit the availability to those in the program and bring everybody into Vegas,’’ Arum said. “If the hotels aren’t open, rent them a facility to live in and get them ready when we do open up and we do the events with the testing and so forth, whether it’s in California, Nevada, Texas or Florida, any of those places.

“So, we’re working on all of that, but again, it’s a work in progress because we’re flying blind.”

But history already includes an ominous warning. Among the many parallels to the infamous Spanish Flu more than a century ago, there is a deadly chapter involving boxing, according to a story Thursday in The Guardian.

Bouts were suspended in October 1918 because of the pandemic. But they were allowed to resume that November. Eight boxers, two promoters and one gym owner died, according to The Guardian.

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2020/apr/16/what-ufc-can-learn-from-boxings-mistakes-during-the-spanish-flu-outbreak

History, like common sense, should be essential. But it’s another casualty.

Trump’s push to resume business as usual includes a 16-member advisory group. Vince McMahon is one, of course. So, too, are owners and officials from the NFL, major-league baseball, NBA, NHL, golf, tennis and soccer. Dana White, UFC chief and Trump friend, is part of the group, too. A week after ESPN and parent-company Disney said no to his plans for a UFC event on Native-American property in Central California, White still vows to stage mixed-martial arts on an island.

Notably missing from the panel is anybody from boxing, not even Don King, who partnered with Trump in promoting Mike Tyson. Trump doesn’t have too many friends in boxing these days. Arum rips him readily and often. According to Arum, Trump still owes him about $2.5 million for Evander Holyfield’s 1996 decision over George Foreman in a fight hosted by Trump’s failed Atlantic City casino.

But Trump apparently wants live sports back on his television screen. He said he’s tired of baseball reruns. That, apparently, has reignited interest in baseball moving to Phoenix for a season played at spring-training parks and the Diamondbacks home, Chase Field. Reportedly, Arizona Governor Doug Ducey is already talking with baseball officials. He can’t play essential golf all day, after all.

How exactly the baseball suggestion would work, however, is still anybody’s guess. Games would be played without fans in the seats. Players would be tested for the virus constantly. They would be quarantined in hotels between games. They would be quarantined in buses to and from games. In a sport with so many moving parts, it sounds like everything else during days when a major victory means you’ve found a few rolls of toilet paper on otherwise empty shelves.

Essentially impossible.

By Bart Barry–

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim-

At first, Dana White said he was going to stage the UFC’s next event on an island. Then, there was news that he decided on Native-American land in Central California, instead.

Guess Rikers Island wasn’t available.

Turns out, nothing was.

White can bully reporters, but he couldn’t bully his bosses at ESPN and parent-company Disney to go forward with his plans for UFC 249 on April 18. They said no.

“The powers that be there asked me to stand down and not do this event,” White said Thursday in an interview with ESPN, which was contracted to televise the event.

It was a surprising move. ESPN is desperate for live content. White is nothing if not defiant and defiance defines the UFC, even more so than boxing.

White expressed it in a style both pugnacious and pigheaded throughout the last several days. The cage czar sounded as if he still believes that coronavirus is either a hoax or as harmless as the common cold.

A mounting death toll says something else.

Defiance isn’t a vaccine

Yet, the cage czar marched on, a man who behaved like an island, even though it didn’t look as if he had found one.

He was a character out of an old movie, Apocalypse Now, a film loosely based on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a novel with a title that sums up the times. White is a composite, two characters in one.

He looks like Marlon Brando’s version of Colonel Kurtz, an eccentric and deranged version of a Green Beret officer hidden in the jungle at the end of a Viet Nam river. He often behaves and sounds like Robert Duvall’s version of an Air Cavalry commander who blows away a Viet Nam village with his helicopter gunships, surfs to celebrate and then says:

“I love the smell of napalm in the morning.’’

Translation: The risk of a few more body bags is just the price of doing business. But the potential cost in terms of perception and public health was just too steep for the network.

White was trying to cross a line that not even boxing could. Boxing, never a role model, has done business with notorious dictators and regimes.

There was George Foreman-versus-Muhammad Ali in 1974 in then Zaire in a deal with despot Mobutu Sese Seko.

In 1975, there was the third Ali-Joe Frazier fight in Manila in a deal Don King negotiated with Ferdinand Marcos.

Last October, Eddie Hearn took the Anthony Joshua-Andy Ruiz Jr. rematch to Saudi Arabia in a deal arranged by a monarchy seeking to distract from its history of repression. The bout was called part of the Kingdom’s “sports wash” policy.

Nothing new about tyrants and thugs in boxing. They are a known risk. Caveat emptor. For now, however, coronavirus is a different kind of risk. A very different kind of tyranny. Only a fool messes around with Mother Nature. She never taps out.

But White, perhaps like his friend President Donald Trump, didn’t appear to have much respect for nature. Trump, an ex-boxing promoter and current promoter of controversial hydroxychloroquine, had been as serious about coronavirus as he has been about climate change.

Trump’s attitude appears to have to have been altered, perhaps by experts or scientific data or just the simple fact that his soul mate, British Premier Boris Johnson, spent a few days in intensive care.

But the stubborn White tried to move forward anyway, with a pay-per-view show on April 18 at the Tachi Palace Casino Resort near Fresno. White didn’t plan the move because Tribal land is somehow immune.

It’s not.

On the Navajo Nation in northern Arizona and western New Mexico, there were 384 infections, according to reports late Thursday. A reservation-wide curfew was ordered through Easter weekend, April 10-April 13.

The reason White wanted to move onto Native-American real estate is all about jurisdiction, jurisdiction, jurisdiction. It’s not subject to state law. There’s an ongoing ban of boxing and mixed-martial arts throughout California. But that doesn’t apply to Tribal land.

White’s attempted move to property outside traditional regulation isn’t new. It happened in June 2007. Tommy Morrison, a former heavyweight champion, made his MMA debut at the Yavapai-Apache Nation in a hillside arena on the east side of the freeway from Phoenix to Flagstaff, AZ.

Morrison was found to be HIV-positive in 1996. A decade later, however, he insisted he was HIV-free, even amid questions about the validity of the blood tests he underwent.

On Apache land, he was not subject to testing. Before the bout, Morrison’s former agent Randy Lang told me, then a sportswriter for The Arizona Republic, that Morrison had tested positive for HIV as late as January 2007.

But the bout went on anyway, including rule changes. Morrison was allowed to wear shoes. His opponent, John Stover, a Native American from South Dakota, was not allowed to strike with his knees or feet. Morrison won, breaking Stover’s nose within two minutes.

Morrison left the ring, still insisting he was HIV-free.

Nearly 69 months later – Sept. 1, 2013 – Morrison, 44, was dead, just weeks after Morrison’s mom told ESPN that her son had full-blown AIDS.

“He’s too far gone,” she said. “He’s in the end stages. That’s it.”

It’s a sad story. It’s an important one to remember. Important not to repeat, too. Not on Native-American land. Not on an island. Not here. Not anywhere.  And, above all, not now.

By Bart Barry-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

*

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim-

There’s not much to do while trying to honor a stay-at-home order. There’s music. There’s yard-work. There’s listening to pundits and Trump’s lies and wondering if ear plugs would help. They’re probably not much protection from the virus, but maybe they’ll silence the misinformation and the idiocy.

Mostly, there’s just counting the cancellations. Wednesday, it was Wimbledon. Thursday, it was an extension of the California State Athletic Commission’s cancellation of boxing through the end of May.

None of it is a surprise anymore. It’s just another couple of depressing drumbeats in the funeral-like march of news about escalating deaths and a rising rate of infection. It’s beginning to sound as if everybody will be wearing masks before long. Nobody seems to know if they’ll stop the virus. But they will hide the frowns.

What’s next? Who knows? Nobody seems to know. As a sportswriter, you live a life measured by seasons and events. Opening Day, Opening Ceremonies, opening tip, opening bell. Now, they’re all gone, postponed once and then twice. After a while, you wonder what they’ll look like when and if the virus subsides.

It’ll be different. Best guess is that the days of big money — or to use today’s operative term – have been postponed for the foreseeable future. Who’s working? Disposable income? How about any income at all?

For boxing, that’s especially problematic. Who’s going to have money for streaming services, much less pay-per-view? Not many, at least not for a while. Meanwhile, there are the fighters themselves. If they don’t fight, they don’t get paid. Journeymen, boxing’s vital working class, will move on to something where there is a paycheck.      

“There’s always a fallout from this kind of stuff, you know, that changes the landscape of a business or the sport,” UK promoter Eddie Hearn told iFL TV this week.

Hearn is trying to foresee something positive. The shutdown, he believes or perhaps hopes, will force promoters and fighters to re-think how they do business. Above all, it’s an urgent reminder of just how vulnerable any opportunity is. Don’t waste it.

“I think how this will change is you’ll see fighters being moved into bigger fights quicker,’’ Hearn said. “I think that people will realize sometimes things aren’t guaranteed, nothing is given, and rather than having a warm-up fight or having this one first or this little one, I think people will be looking to have bigger fights.”

Maybe.

But they’ll have to be willing to fight for less, maybe a lot less, than the staggering purses before coronavirus. Post COVID-19, the world figures to be a very different place.

“It’s gonna be difficult,” Hearn said. “You know, when you come back – whether it’s June, whether it’s July – don’t just expect the whole world to go back to normal.’’

Best guess?

Expect a lot less.

By Bart Barry-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry 

By Norm Frauenheim-

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. — No Opening Day. No Opening Ceremony. No opening bell. I’m almost afraid to open the door. Any door.

It’s hard to know exactly what to do in a world that has suddenly gone dark, locked down and left without much of anything to do other than wait — pray — for the coronavirus pandemic to subside.

I’m bunkered down these days in Flagstaff, an Arizona mountain town a couple of hours north of Phoenix. The Grand Canyon’s south rim is about 60-miles away. It felt like a place to go, perhaps an escape from the daily onslaught of news about something often called COVID-19, suddenly an ominous acronym if there ever was one.

But there’s really no escape. The masks are here, a symbol of the fear that has gripped almost every community, big or small. I saw those masks on a trail, a popular two-mile loop between the snow-capped peaks that soar above Flagstaff’s historic downtown.

It’s a place to walk. It’s also a place to run, another trail that has long attracted Olympic medalists to train at altitude. They’re still here, running for perhaps the same reason I’m walking. We’re trying to get away from the bad news that is always there and always with no apparent end in sight.

Despite the natural beauty, I felt bad for them. Just a couple of weeks ago, they were running for a reason. They were running for a gold-medal finish. But, for now, that’s gone, pulled away by this week’s announcement that the Tokyo Olympics have been postponed until 2021. It’s the right thing to do. Really, it’s the only thing to do. It’s even what they wanted.

It’s what the USA Track and Field asked for in a statement Saturday, the day after USA Swimming asked for a postponement. Some of the world’s best swimmers also train here, indoors at a state-of-the-art Olympic-sized pool at Northern Arizona University. Take a Deep Breath, it says on wall at the pool. You’re at 7,000 feet.

But, truth is, the wind has been knocked out of them. The pool is closed. It looks as though Senator Rand Paul, a former competitive swimmer at Baylor, might have been the last person to get in a few laps. He was spotted in the Senate pool on the day he learned he had tested positive. Now, the Senator has got coronavirus to go along with ignorance. Maybe, the virus subsides in quarantine. But there’s no cure for the ignorance.

Sorry, for the angry aside. But there’s a void. Anger fills it these days. Paul is in the pool and the rest of us are swimming in lies from the White House. About a month and more than a thousand American deaths ago, we were told that the virus was under control. We were told that it would vanish like a miracle.

Bob Arum once told the media: “Yesterday I was lying, today I’m telling you the truth.’’    

The President, the Ex-Promoter-In-Chief, acts out that line, from day-to-day-to-damning day, in those press briefings. Too many of those – the lies, not the briefings – sent me out on to the trail like Forrest Gump. At least, I thought about Gump’s line:

“That day, for no particular reason, I decided to go for a little run. So, I ran to the end of the road. And when I got there, I thought maybe I’d run to the end of town. And when I got there, I thought maybe I’d just run across Greenbow County. And I figured, since I run this far, maybe I’d just run across the great state of Alabama. And that’s what I did. I ran clear across Alabama. For no particular reason I just kept on going. I ran clear to the ocean. And when I got there, I figured, since I’d gone this far, I might as well turn around, just keep on going. When I got to another ocean, I figured, since I’d gone this far, I might as well just turn back, keep right on going.’’

That’s kind of what those world-class runners are doing on that trail. They don’t know what else to do. Neither do I.

No telling when I’ll hear another opening bell. I thought it might be July 18. That’s when the third Tyson Fury-Deontay Wilder was supposed to happen. But now that’s been shelved, Arum told ESPN. The Athletic reports that the new date is Oct. 3. Don’t be surprised if that date changes a few more times. It’s just hard to believe much of anything.

But there is that trail, a place high in the mountains and a place to keep right on going.

By Bart Barry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Happy to help,” said Mark.

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

*

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

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim-

March Madness has taken on a new meaning. More like Sadness.

There’s been a crazy whirlwind of postponements, then cancellations. College basketball fans were told to stay away and watch the NCCA Tournament on TV. Then, they were just told to forget about it.

There’s no fast break these days, unless you’re heading to quarantine or trying to buy a roll of toilet paper. Don’t get trampled. The projected numbers from coronavirus are multiplying at a scary rate. Neighbors, at least I think that’s who they are, are wearing surgical masks.

Wash hands, don’t shake them. Practice social distancing, which apparently is done in a lot of ways. At first, I thought I had been doing that all my life. Hey, I’m still single. But then I learned. Stay six feet away from the person in front of you. Stay at home. Actually, that’s getting to be easy. There’s nowhere else to go, not even out to dinner.

The wild, wild world of sports has just gone weird. Very weird. That’s just another way of saying life’s toy department is not immune. Maybe, it never has been. America boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympics. Athletes were killed by terrorists at the 1972 Munich Games. Baseball players, basketball players and football players have all walked picket lines.

But this feels different. It’s dark. Empty. It’s no game and there’s really no way to know when one will be back, at least not one burdened by the fear surrounding virtually everything in the here-and-now.

There’s an idea that sports can go on without fans in the seats.

That’s what boxing had planned to do a week ago for the Shakur Stevenson-Miguel Marriaga fight, a featherweight title bout at Madison Square Garden’s Hulu Theatre in New York. Fans would have been banned. The Top Rank-promoted fight would have been seen only on ESPN. Essentially, it would have been a studio show.

For years, people have predicted that’s exactly where sports are headed anyway. Amid today’s prohibitive ticket prices, why not watch at home where a six-pack is about half-the-price of one beer?

The scary part is that I’m not sure anybody will be able to afford a beer, much less a ticket, after a virus that has suddenly crippled the way we do business. Streets, restaurants and bars today are as empty as those seats would have been for Stevenson-Marriaga.  

Top Rank eventually did what the NCAA did with the basketball tournament, an annual rite of spring. Actually, it didn’t have much choice. The New York State Athletic Commission pulled the plug hours after Top Rank had announced the show would go on, empty seats and all. Since then, the dominoes have been falling, one cancellation after another. Promoters are calling them postponements, but don’t ask them for a date.

They don’t know.

Nobody knows.

Coronavirus has a mind of its own.   

Besides, games in empty arenas would still mean sweating players, referees and everybody else needed to keep the lights on and the doors open.

Pandemic, fandemic. It doesn’t discriminate. Players, coaches and ball-boys are as vulnerable as anybody else, including cut men, bucket guys and the ex-promoter currently in the White House. Only the ball and gloves are immune. Basketball games and fight cards are just another way of spreading the virus.

Why risk it? Boxing is interesting because of its unshakable streak of defiance. But sparring with the coronavirus threat wouldn’t be defiant. Just dumb. Wait for another day. Big fights get postponed all the time by injuries sustained in training.

A move into the studio would have been a move to save the bottom line. But a game or a fight card without fans only sounds desperate. It’s a little bit like that old line about a tree in the forest. If it falls and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Does it matter? Says here, it doesn’t. It wouldn’t.

If sporting events without fans in the seats are an example of “social distancing,’’ then we’ve gone too far. People enter the arena to do some “social connecting.’’ Eliminate them and you eliminate the sport. Top Rank and the New York commission decided to fight on another day. There will be one. It was the right thing to do. The only thing.

By Bart Barry-

Initiative is the word for it.

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

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

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

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

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

Wilder: What?

Fury: Aye.

Wilder: Wait, what?

Fury: Aye.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry