By Norm Frauenheim-

LAS VEGAS – Boxing’s chessboard is full of potential moves Saturday with dueling cards that include 18 bouts televised by competing networks and each promoted by rivals who are learning how to cooperate.

Look for more lessons than solutions, more possibilities than answers, for a business confronted by declining pay-per-view numbers and no resolution to the tired question about Manny Pacquiao-versus-Floyd Mayweather Jr.

Pacquiao-Mayweather is a riddle without an answer. Yet, it’s always there, taking the air out of the game and, worse, diverting attention from a generation of young fighters who might help everybody forget about what hasn’t happened.

Meet Keith Thurman.

Fight fans know him. So do fighters. But their awareness of him includes emerging fear. Thurman, a welterweight, is beginning to fall into that category occupied by middleweight Gennady Golovkin. He’s somebody to avoid.

Consider this judgment: Oscar De La Hoya was asked Friday to pick between Thurman and Golovkin.

Who’s better?

“Thurman,’’ said De La Hoya, whose Golden Boy entity is promoting the Showtime television card at the MGM Grand that includes Thurman in a co-featured bout before the main event, a possible Mayweather eliminator between Amir Khan (29-3, 19 KOs) and Devon Alexander (26-2, 14 KOs).

Thurman (23-0, 21 KOs), who faces Italy’s Leonard Bundu (31-0-2, 11 KOs), is unlike Golovkin in one key aspect. He isn’t shy.

Thurman might be in a secondary role Saturday night. But he was front-and-center at Friday’s weigh-in.

He mocked Mayweather’s power. Why-oh-why, he asked, should anybody worry about getting knocked out by the so-called pound-for-pound king. Mayweather hasn’t stopped anybody in nearly a generation.

“If anybody should be scared, it’s Floyd Mayweather,’’ said Thurman, who tipped the official scale at 146 pounds during a weigh-in in which everybody made the mandatory except Jose Ramirez (24-3-2, 15 KOs) , the opponent for featherweight Abner Mares (27-1-1, 14 KOs).

Ramirez was three pounds heavier than a catch-weight, 128. He faced a fine if he did not lose the excess pounds. Both Khan and Alexander weighed 147. Thurman’s opponent, Bundu, came in at 146.5.

If Thurman can’t talk his way into a Mayweather bout, he hopes for a chance at Timothy Bradley, who is the star at the top of Bob Arum’s promoted card Saturday at the nearby Cosmopolitan.

Thurman said he wants to be the first to knock out Bradley (31-1, 12 KOs), who faces Argentina’s Diego Chaves (23-2, 19 KOs) in an HBO-televised show.

The forthright Bradley might be the most reliable possibility for Thurman. He says he’ll fight anybody and there’s never been any reason to doubt him. His promoter, Top Rank, however, might have some other ideas. Kell Brook has been mentioned. So, too, has a rematch with Juan Manuel Marquez .

There are, after all, reasons to avoid Thurman. More reasons than even Golovkin, De La Hoya said.

Both possess dangerous power. But De La Hoya says that Thurman possesses an added dimension in his ability to move. Sure, Golovkin is strong.

“Very strong,’’ De La Hoya said. “When Canelo (Alvarez) was sparring him up in Big Bear (Calif.), he said how strong he was. But a lot of fighters are strong. There are ways of beating strong fighters. But one thing about Keith Thurman is that he knows how to move. He has lateral movement. He throws combinations. He thinks in the ring.

“Golovkin is a fighter who has to beat you with his power. He has to. He can’ beat you by moving side-to-side, or going back. The thing about Golovkin – something that I learned from studying him – is that if he moves back, he can’t fight. He can’t fight. He can’t.

“But try and move him back. Good luck.’’

But at least there’s a chance at doing that. Golovkin still represents optimism at creating new business. Same with Thurman. There’s a potential for good luck in both, unlike the Paquiao-Mayweather riddle. By now, we know where that one leads. Still nowhere.

Notes: Jose Benavidez Jr. came in looking hungry at the weigh-in for his first world-class out against Mauricio Herrara on the Bradley-Chaves undercard. The 6-foot Benavidez (21-0, 15 KOs) was 138.5 pounds Friday for the junior welterweight bout. Herrera (21-4, 7 KOs) was 139.5. “I’m ready, more than ready, ’’ said Benavidez, a Phoenix prospect. “ …Irish middleweight Andy Lee (33-2, 23 KOs) tipped the scales at 19.2. Matt Korobov ((24-0, 13 KOs) was 159.4 Korobov-Lee is on the Bradley-Chaves card. …Unpredictable Victor Ortiz was as unpredictable as ever at the weigh-in for his comeback on the Khan-Chaves card. After some verbal taunts from Manuel Perez (21-10-1, 4 KOs), Ortiz (29-5-2, 22 KOs) began to push his welterweight opponent across the stage with the same forehead he used to head-butt Mayweather.

By Norm Frauenheim

LAS VEGAS — The ring doesn’t look like much of a refuge. Ropes contain the violence within them. Step inside at your own peril. But Devon Alexander feels more fortunate than ever at his chance to be there Saturday night. It’s his shelter from the storm.

“With all the stuff in Ferguson – the rioting and everything going on, coming here is iike a vacation for me,’’ Alexander said Thursday during a news conference at the MGM Grand before his welterweight bout Saturday night with Amir Khan. “You know, having fun.

“All of that stuff going on back there is crazzzzy. So, I just want to thank everyone.’’

Crazzzzy, all right.

True, too.

Alexander grew up in St. Louis about 15 minutes from Ferguson, which erupted in flames after a grand jury did not indict a policeman for the shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown.

The podium at a news conference is something of bully pulpit. It’s a chance to express an opinion, sell a point-of-view. But Alexander didn’t go there. He didn’t have to. Instead of more talk and more pontification, Alexander has a chance at something real rather than rhetorical.

He can win one for a community desperately in need of one. A sure sign of that intent was there in a Cardinal-red baseball cap stitched with the white SL initials. Alexander didn’t have to wear his heart on his sleeve. It was on his head.

“I want to bring all the positivity,’’ Alexander said in a conference call a couple of days before arriving in Las Vegas. “I know all of St. Louis is going to be looking at me from the Ferguson situation. They’re looking for something positive to come along with all of the rioting and everything like that.

“This win is going to make them feel like they won, too.’’

It’s an added dimension that dramatically multiplies Alexander’s personal stake in the Showtime-televised bout against the narrowly-favored Khan. For some fighters, that might mean more pressure. But not for Alexander, who grew up amid the real-life pressures of living in an impoverished neighborhood.

“Like I said, this is kind of fun, getting away from all of the madness, danger and rioting,’’ he told 15 Rounds after Thursday’s new conference. “All I have to do is focus on Amir.

“Compared to what’s going on in Ferguson, that’s a cakewalk.’’

Alexander’s trainer, Kevin Cunningham, is an ex-cop who grew up in Ferguson.

“Went to Ferguson Junior High and McCluer High School, which is in Ferguson,’’ Cunningham said in a conference call.

Cunningham didn’t attend Thursday’s news conference, because of slight illness, Golden Boy promoter Oscar De La Hoya said. Cunningham had announced plans to have Michael Brown’s father, Michael Brown Sr., at the fight. But it wasn’t clear Thursday whether he would be able to attend.

“We’ll represent St. Louis the way we always represent St. Louis,’’ Cunningham said Monday.

That means Alexander at his best and no frills attached.

His fight with Khan will be a study in stark contrasts. The UK media reported that Khan will wear designer trunks with 24-karat gold thread woven through the waist band. Off the rack, they’re not. Some reports placed the value at 30,000 pounds. That’s about $50,0000, or $15,000 more than Diego Chaves’ $35,000 purse for his HBO televised bout against Timothy Bradley in another significant welterweight bout Saturday night at The Cosmopolitan

“Where I come from, that’s a lot of money,’’ Alexander said. “It could be spent on something else. It’s not something I’d do. But I’m not flashy guy. I’m a simple man. I just want to show my skills.’’

He let his cap show his heart.

By Norm Frauenheim

LAS VEGAS – For better or worse, Jose Benavidez Jr.‘s time as a prospect is about to end. It’s his choice. Nobody else’s.

The 22-year-old Benavidez listened to alternate possibilities from Top Rank and his father, yet in the end the 22-year-old decided to take the training wheels off his career for a tough, grown-up test against veteran junior-welterweight Mauricio Herrera Saturday night at The Cosmopolitan in an HBO-televised bout for an interim WBA belt.

Nothing is more interim than a prospect. A moth has a longer shelf life. But a few interim steps were still possible for Benavidez, who signed with Top Rank not long after he won a national Golden Gloves title as a 17-year-old prodigy in 2008.

“I have a lot to prove here,’’ Benavidez said Wednesday during a media workout at the Top Rank Gym. “Everybody says he going to beat me, that he has more experience. But I’m ready to show everybody that I belong here, belong at this level.’’

By any yardstick, however, it’s a big leap. Benavidez (21-0, 15 KOs) has never gone beyond eight rounds. Saturday night’s bout is scheduled for 12, a distance that Herrera (21-4, 7 KOs) knows well. He’s been there in each of his last two fights, winning a majority decision over Johan Perez in July and losing a very debatable one in March to 140-pound champion Danny Garcia in Puerto Rico.

Benavidez could have taken an easier path. He was offered a 10-round bout at a catch weight against the Golden Boy-promoted Herrera.

“Yeah, we were going to fight a 10-rounder at 141, 142,’’ said Benavidez, who will get his first world-class test on a card featured by Timothy Bradley-versus-Diego Chaves. “”We might as well go down two pounds and fight for the title. That’s what I’ve really wanted.’’

Benavidez’ bold confidence is an expression of a maturing fighter and perhaps one who has regained confidence in a problematic right hand that sidelined him a couple of years ago. He underwent surgery to have a bone spur removed from his right wrist a couple of years ago. For at least a couple of fights, the unbeaten he was virtually a one-handed fighter. But that one hand happens to be at the point of a jab as good as any. It allowed him to survive a near knockout in the eighth round of a 2012 bout for a unanimous decision over a tough Pavel Miranda in Carson, Calif.

It’s a jab that figures to score against a tough and resilient Herrera, too. In a 10 rounder, that could have added up to a pivotal difference on the scorecards. But if it goes another two rounds?

“I’ve always trained to go 12 rounds,’’ said Benavidez, who trained for six weeks at nearly 7,000-feet amid the Big Bear ski slopes east of Los Angeles.

The weight also has been no problem, said the lanky Benavidez, who fought as a welterweight in a first-round stoppage of Henry Auraad in Phoenix, his hometown, on July 26.

“I thought 140 might be, but, no, no problem at all,’’ Benavidez said.

Benavidez’ father and trainer, Jose Sr., said he presented all the options to his son.

“I told him about the 10-rounder and catch-weight, but he told me ‘Let’s’ go two more rounds and go after that title,’ ‘’ his dad said. “It’s a chance to fight on HBO. A chance to get known. He thinks it’s a good opportunity and so do I.’’

Benavidez has been at the edge of world-class waters for the last nine months. Top Rank wanted to put him in against Brandon Rios, but HBO balked because he had never gone 10 rounds, much less 12. Benavidez dad said that there was some talk of a fight with Jessie Vargas. But, Jose Sr. said, the Vargas camp said no.

Then, a second opportunity against Rios popped up when there were doubts about whether Chaves, of Argentina, could get a visa in time for the August 2 bout. Chaves got the visa. Got disqualified, too.

“But we wouldn’t have taken that fight anyway,’’ the senior Benavidez said. “HBO called and asked if we were interested. I told them no, because it would have been just one week between fights.’’

But now, father and son say, is the right time.

From Herrera’s perspective, it’s lesson time. During his media session Wednesday, Herrera promised to take Benavidez to school.

“Yeah, he’s been doing a lot talking, saying he wants to make statement and all that,’’ Benavidez said. “But it’s not like I haven’t sparred with great fighters. I sparred with Manny Pacquiao, Amir Khan and Shane Mosley. When I was 15, I sparred with Bradley.

“We’ll see, we’ll see who schools who.’’

Who graduates, too.

Star of the Donnie Wahlberg, Mark Whalberh and Paulie Wahlberg reality show, Handy Nacho Laun will fight former Super Bowl Champion on January 31 at the Marple Sports Areana in Broomall, PA. Proceeds from the event will go to Wish Upon a Hero Foundation.

Tickets can be purchased at webtix.net and proceeds will go to the Wish Upon a Hero Foundation.

Celebrity boxing was created by Damon Feldman a former undefeated professional boxer in 2008. Feldman with his first match featuring Danny Bonaduce and has put on 76 celebrity boxing events including celebrities from Tonya Harding to Jose Canseco as well as rappers Coolio on and on World Xtreme Entertainment is now the companies name. The events are boxing meets pro wrestling meets reality television

Wxent.com better known as 16th minute of fame

By Norm Frauenheim–

The arenas and networks will be different.

Nearly everything else about dueling cards on Dec. 13 shares a common theme and the same Strip of tourists, vendors, mimes, pickpockets and Las Vegas neon.

From the Top Rank-promoted show featuring Timothy Bradley-Diego Chaves on HBO at The Cosmopolitan to Golden Boy’s Amir Khan-Devon Alexander on Showtime and about half-a-mile from the MGM Grand, it’s a fight for relevancy.

For the fighters.

For their business.

The two cards are one chance to finish a 2014 that saw a steady decline in pay-per-view numbers and even a dip in a non-PPV bout for the HBO telecast of Terence Crawford’s brilliant decision over Raymundo Beltran last Saturday.

Explanations for the trend abound. Main events start too late. Opening bell for Crawford-Beltran was after midnight in the East. It’s hard to generate interest in the American PPV market for fights in China. As of Thursday, there was no official count from HBO on the PPV audience for Manny Pacquiao’s blowout of Chris Algieri. But speculation made it sound as if there was more of the same in a downward spiral

Take your pick for what to blame, who to blame, in 2014. Blame Obamacare, or climate change, or any of the other convenient targets for anything and everything. But let Bradley get to the heart of what ails his livelihood.

“Pay-per-view is not what it used to be, baby,’’ Bradley said Thursday during a conference call. “These fans are catching on. They’re not buying anymore. They’re not buying the fights like they used to buy.

“You know, some of the best fighters in the world can’t even hit the million buys anymore. So, the best fighters got to fight the best in order to accumulate, get, those type of numbers again, man. For boxing, because people love boxing. But they want to see great fights.”

The cards on the second Saturday in December might – just might – be a move in that direction. Although on the same night and in competition for what appears to be a dwindling fan base, there’s real cooperation — instead of just talk — between the promotional entities. For while, it looked as if the Top Rank-Golden Boy feud would last longer than the 30 Years War.

Then, however, Golden Boy’s Oscar De La Hoya reached out to Top Rank’s Bob Arum in May in a move that shook up the game’s assumptions and hierarchy. Nearly eight months later, there’s tangible evidence of a thaw.

On the Bradley-Chaves card, Top Rank junior-welterweight prospect Jose Benavidez Jr. moves into world-class waters for the first time against the Golden Boy-promoted Mauricio Herrera.

Then, there’s Bradley’s trainer Julio Diaz. If the timing is right, Diaz will work Victor Ortiz’ corner in his comeback at the MGM Grand and then make .58-mile trip to The Cosmopolitan for Bradley in his bid to get back into the welterweight division’s championship mix.

It’s fitting, perhaps, that Bradley asked for an end to the feud during a speech at the Boxing Writers Association of America’s annual dinner last May.

“The fact that they’re working together is great,’’ said Bradley, who is coming off a scorecard loss to Manny Pacquiao in a rematch of his hugely controversial decision over the Filipino. “If I had anything to do with it, fantastic. And if I pissed anybody off, I’m proud.’’

Bradley is not exactly in the peace-making business. Like any other fighter, he’s an independent entrepreneur. He’s contract worker. If Top Rank and Golden Boy are on the same page, there are more opportunities for him if he beats Chaves. Only time, however, will determine whether the two can sustain a working relationship.

If so, maybe there would be fight for him against a Khan or Alexander. Kell Brook also as been mentioned.

“I live in the present tense,’’ he said. “I don’t live in the future. I try not to. The thing is, there are still some bridges that need to be crossed. Okay? The Cold War, yeah, they say it’s over, or ‘we’re trying to work together.’ That’s one thing. …I would embrace any of the type of fights that have been mentioned. But there’s still some bridges that have to be crossed. That’s the bottom line.

“Until those things are fixed, hey, I don’t know, I don’t know. But I’m going to stay in my lane. I’m going to do what I do. If these guys want to fight, I’m right here.’’

It’s no secret that Bradley would not be at the top of Khan’s list if – as expected — he beats Alexander. In Khan’s quest to regain relevancy, the UK welterweight hopes to restore his candidacy to be Floyd Mayweather Jr.’s running mate if the been-there, done-that campaign for Pacquiao unravels all over again.

Bradley said Thursday he hopes Pacquiao-Mayweather happens.

“I think it should happen,’’ he said. “I don’t know if it will happen. Right now is the perfect time for it.’’

Bradley predicated that Pacquiao-Mayweather would set the PPV record with 3 million buys. That’s a number, a milestone, that would say the business has won the fight. Relevancy restored.

But is it a bridge too far? In 2015, the answer to that one will be the Story of the Year. Maybe, Fight of the Year, too.

Bradley calls Chaves dirty

More than one headline always comes out of a Bradley conference call. Chaves, disqualified against Brandon Rios in his last bout, is a “dirty fighter,’’ he said.

“Really a dirty fighter,’’ said Bradley, who came to that conclusion after studying video of several Chaves’ bouts.

If Chaves fights dirty, Bradley said he is prepared to counter.

“With stuff of my own,’’ he said. “Everybody knows what that is.’’

Bradley is often accused of his using his bald head as a weapon in intentional butts.

More Bradley: Meat on his vegan bones

Bradley has suspended a strict vegan diet for at least this fight.

“Eating fish, eating beef,’’ said Bradley, who hopes the additional protein will make a difference.

By Bart Barry-

Saturday at CenturyLink Center in Omaha, Nebraskan lightweight champion Terence Crawford decisioned Mexican Raymundo Beltran lopsidedly, 119-109 and 118-110 and 119-109, in a match that was not large as its superlatives but demonstrated Crawford should stay at lightweight, which he won’t, Beltran was overrated, which no rater will admit, and Crawford should be 2014’s fighter of the year, an award that instead will go to a Russian who decisioned a 49-year-old last month.

In this, the final month of this, one hell of a dreadful year for our beloved sport, there are clear factions established among aficionados, anymore, and these factions predict with unfortunate accuracy the way each HBO main event will be seen. There are the sturdy optimists, identifiable by their collective disgust, creatively and diversely expressed; and there are the evangelists, using to describe today’s middling fare what words once adorned feats by Marvelous Marvin Hagler and Roberto Duran – and almost always with a financial incentive for imposing such overwrought modifiers.

The sturdy optimists saw Saturday on HBO two mediocre featherweights followed by one good lightweight and one very good lightweight. The sturdy optimists, who are optimistic for their refusal to call a counterfeit the true coin, saw nothing great happen. The evangelists, contrarily, saw the possible future of Puerto Rico prizefighting score a questionable draw with a Russian fighter – and if this year taught us little more, it taught us a former-Soviet-bloc fighter has amazingness as his birthright – followed by a future great with every tool establishing lightweight lineality against a very good contender (who should be champion!) before 12,000 Nebraskans, which is an astounding number when one considers it is 30-percent more fans than Gennady Golovkin’s record breaker of a ticketselling feat comprised in October.

The less written about undefeated Russian featherweight Evgeny Gradovich and undefeated Puerto Rican Jayson Velez’s remaining undefeated against one another, the better – as each man would be better served fighting the other man six more times than getting axed by Jamaican Nicholas Walters, and so let’s just wait for their third rematch before returning to them.

Terence Crawford is much better than most of his peers, both better at fighting than they are and better at interesting the townspeople of his native city in prizefighting, and promoter Top Rank deserves credit for working to build Crawford as an attraction in Omaha, a city not identifiable by anyone as interested in boxing till recently. Crawford’s large ticket sales in his hometown are surprising as the paucity of tickets he would sell in Las Vegas if he took his show on the road, which he oughtn’t do.

Crawford needs offensive-minded opponents to entertain best, and the more offensively basic and defensively suspect such athletic men are when they move forward, the better. Raymundo Beltran, a Mexican who fights out of Arizona and California, often as a sparring partner to the stars, was nearly right for Crawford’s style as Yuriorkis Gamboa was for Crawford’s ascension-making performance in June. Beltran fought gamely but ultimately succumbed to a sparring-partner ethic that makes meaningful effort, and the good work it gives one’s customer, nearly valuable as victory. When Beltran whacked away at Ricky Burns a couple Septembers ago, he used his Mexican suspicion of others’ acclaim to test the Scotsman and find him wanting, before treating Burns like an impostor. Saturday Beltran began with the same Mexican suspicion, one that grows in another man’s hometown, serendipitously enough for Mexican prizefighters and aficionados, to test Crawford, and land what was a jarring righthand in round 3.

But this time the man across from Beltran was a customer, not an impostor, and it remanded Beltran to nine rounds of hard labor and meaningful effort and what satisfaction and acclaim he received immediately afterwards despite losing 10 rounds unanimously. So dismal has boxing become that Crawford’s sporadic efforts to knock-out Beltran in rounds 11 and 12 met with near breathlessness from HBO’s broadcasting crew, as if endeavoring to land the decisive blow on a man whom you’ve outclassed for a solid half hour is a new and abstract form of courageousness. Alas. Evangelists are not culpable for lapses in quality control; their job is enthusiasm, not discernment, and their craft is craftily wording homages and tributes to whomever gets placed before them, not choosing those men.

Now Terence Crawford, who has the skills, potentially, to be a great lightweight but lacks the physical strength to be more than a good junior welterweight and a mediocre welterweight is summoned to 140 pounds, which is unfortunate because he fought Saturday at 153 pounds and did not carry in either fist power enough to stretch a man who began his career at 126. Barring nifty matchmaking, Crawford may well have scored his career’s last meaningful knockout in the very year aficionados happened to get excited about him, a phenomenon becoming too common in prizefighting to be called phenomenal.

It is hard to imagine Sergey Kovalev’s decisioning of a 49-year-old Bernard Hopkins evinces greater merit than Crawford’s three decisive victories over men in the primes of their careers, but as Kovalev’s decisive victory happened in front of more American boxing writers than the aggregate of Crawford’s three victories, well, one needn’t be a pessimist to know which way the nod will go, as the optimists look middle-distance, detached, and the evangelists make sure someone is looking at them for a quiet fist pump.

*

Editor’s note: After a one-week Spanish hiatus, Bart Barry’s column will return on Dec. 15.

By Norm Frauenheim–

Manny Pacquiao has spoken. Freddie Roach has spoken. Bob Arum and Oscar De La Hoya have spoken. They’re still speaking. We’ve yet to hear from the Republicans and Democrats, but even they’d agree. The bandwagon demand for a Pacquaio-Floyd Mayweather Jr. fight is back at the top of the noise meter. It’s as loud as ever. But it’s hard to say whether that means it’s any closer to reality or just back in the same old echo chamber.

Has anybody heard from Mayweather? Hello, Floyd, are you there? Hello, hello?

As of Thursday, there had been no public response from Mayweather, other than an Instagram mocking Pacquiao’s face-down knockout suffered against Juan Manuel Marquez. Zilch, nada, bupkus. It’s impossible to know why. Maybe, Mayweather is talking through back channels, through Al Haymon. That’s the optimistic take. Or maybe he spent Thanksgiving trying to make room for turkey by extracting the foot that has been in his mouth since September when he was ripped for saying that the NFL should not have increased its suspension of Ray Rice from two games to indefinite for a knockout punch of his then fiancé. That’s the cynical take.

The less Mayweather says to the media these days, the better. Over the last three months, the unbeaten Mayweather’s credibility has taken a beating. It continued when he threw Showtime and his own believability under the proverbial bus with comments to the Nevada State Athletic Commission that some segments in All-Access were more entertainment than real, more fiction than fact.

There’s no change at the top of the pound-for-pound debate. Mayweather is the consensus No. 1; Pacquiao is among the top five, depending on the rating. In terms of their public profiles, however, there’s no comparison anymore. Where there’s mistrust in Mayweather, there’s renewed credibility for Paquiao. Before and after his blow out of Chris Algieri, he picked up endorsements with Foot Locker and AirAsia. Mayweather’s endorsements? Zilch, nada, bupkus.

Pacquiao’s commercial success gives him a media presence that Mayweather doesn’t have. That was oh-so evident in the entertaining Foot Locker ad that gave Pacquiao a subtle, yet effective way of talking about the Mayweather fight without mentioning Mayweather himself. It’s safe to say that one annoyed Mayweather, who was frustrated several weeks ago when a Jamaican woman in a London barbershop didn’t recognize him. The guess here is that she probably would recognize Pacquiao. She, like most people, sees more ads than pay-per-view boxing. The endorsements give Pacquiao a bully pulpit. Mayweather has Instagram.

But it’s hard to judge whether the power in Pacquiao’s endorsements and universal support will finally make the fight. This isn’t a democracy. Without Mayweather’s vote, it stays in never-never land.

The best guess here is that Mayweather, the cautious counter-puncher, is waiting on some leverage. As of Thursday, there had still been no reports on HBO’s pay-per-view number from Pacquaio’s six-knockdown demolition of Algieri in Macao. By the way, has anybody ever witnessed six knockdowns in what was supposed to be a major fight? Howard Cosell, remembered for Down Goes Frazier, would have ruptured a vocal chord. But we digress.

Disappointing PPV numbers would give Mayweather a potential edge at the negotiating table. That’s when he might begin talking. A civil claim by his ex-fiance, Shantel Jackson, is another potential factor. In a suit filed by legal gunslinger Gloria Allred, Jackson alleges assault, battery and invasion of privacy. TMZ reported Wednesday that Mayweather’s attorneys filed court documents asking for dismissal of some claims. According to the documents, Mayweather argues he did not violate her right to privacy when he reported through social media that they split because she had an abortion.

A judge has has yet to rule. Safe to say, however, the suit has the potential to be messy, explosive and expensive. There are unsourced reports in the Philippines that Mayweather could be guaranteed $100 million in a Pacquiao fight. A percentage of that speculated number represents a lot of money in an out-of-court settlement or a judgement against Mayweather for a piece of his future earnings.

Come to think of it, it says more than Pacquiao, Roach, Arum, De La Hoya and the media could ever say. It also might explain why Mayweather hasn’t said anything at all.

By Bart Barry–

FORT WORTH, Texas – The understated perfection of architect Louis I. Kahn’s soft marble masterpiece, Kimbell Art Museum, known round the world as The Kimbell, is so palpable one cannot fathom hoarding its charms, if architectural charms were somehow hoardable, and feels a compulsion to share. Long a fan of friend and mentor Thomas Hauser’s accounts of meals enjoyed between his mother and sundry boxing personalities, I thought to have my own mother, with whom I shared The Kimbell’s charms Saturday, participate in this column in a sort of “Watching Pacquiao-Algieri with Mom” bent. I am evidently incapable with coordinating as this piece shall prove itself with the third-person.

Saturday Manny Pacquiao made an inspired sparring session in gray Macao or Macau, in the same country, China, whose capital is either Peking or Beijing, with Long Island junior welterweight Chris Algieri, a match Pacquiao won by a football-like points spread, dropping Algieri numerous times upon his metalblue trunks and allowing Algieri a chance to win the fight not once. Even before receipts are counted this event should be called plainly what it was for its hundreds of thousands of viewers: a failure.

But I was sound asleep by the time Manny Pacquiao began his long-awaited ringwalk through the cheering throngs of Cotai Arena. My laptop, whose volume I muted for the third undercard scrap, due mostly to my bottomless indifference for the future of Chinese boxing under Freddie Roach’s tutelage, flashed what high-definition images TopRank.tv sent its way, I do not doubt, as my mom, sporadically awake through the main event, later confirmed, in a faux if empathetic enthusiasm for her son’s favorite sport, “Pacquiao won!” But I saw none of it. I do not recall so much as stirring from my hardwon slumber, despite a Friday payment of $59 to Top Rank, to see the event for which I’d paid such a stipend because, truth be told, I paid that stipend for little but plausible deniability to you, dear reader, when I was unable to write intelligibly of the last meaningful fight of 2014, this, the most meaningless year of boxing I’ve yet covered.

And I will not cover three such years in-a-row.

Sometime after midnight, when I awoke to a shinyblue announcement from TopRank.tv my event had ended, I panicked for all of a second. Then my fright subsided, as I realized a column about not-watching Pacquiao-Algieri, at this point, likely would be more entertaining than watching Pacquiao-Algieri proved. Once panic subsided, again instantly since little written about this sport, anymore, would be consequential if you were paying to read it – which, coincidentally, you are not – I found a videostream on YouTube of a guy recording on his cell camera the very same TopRank.tv feed I purchased and used to remedy my hypothetical insomnia, as well as the hypothetical insomnia of my hypothetical children and their hypothetical children and so on for three generations more (if Twitter accounts of Pacquiao-Algieri are believed), and that stream, grainy and skipping, showed me what needed showing, which was very much not much at all.

Mark me down with the other naifs who believed Algieri might have a solution for Pacquiao, long and skittish as Algieri was, able with leftward wheeling as he was, and was a little surprised the Long Islander won nary an exchange, while losing quite a few rounds by more than his gentlemanly one point. Nothing about big-league kickboxing, as it turned out, prepared Algieri for big-league boxing, and what disparate rhythms and sophisticated traps a man of Pacquiao’s extraordinary experience and accomplishments might access in milliseconds in any ringside emergency – nothing of whose sort Algieri managed to create.

Disrupted. That was how Algieri looked on a video stream just as disrupted by whatever guerilla band succeeded several times in hijacking the internet server in whichever agrarian wasteland my anonymous YouTube postfight broadcaster uploaded his stream from; watching a master prizefighter like Juan Manuel Marquez time and occasionally neutralize Pacquiao, watching a fantastic athlete like Timothy Bradley survive Pacquiao’s onslaught after being rendered stationary, both, likely convinced Chris Algieri, who, in a nod to his entire generation thus far, has a greater competence for self-belief than another activity, his athleticism, for being greater than Marquez’s, and his boxing acumen, for being greater than Bradley’s, would help him jigsaw a puzzle Pacquiao couldn’t possibly piece together.

But Algieri and his witling chief second both had it all wrong, as we all now know. Pacquiao, even at this advanced stage of his career, is still a better athlete than Bradley; Pacquiao, even when reduced to savagery, is still nearly good a technician as Marquez (even if his tactics are not transferable or teachable as the Mexican’s). Algieri is not nearly the athlete Bradley is, and no better of a technician, and Algieri is not nearly the technician Marquez is, and no better of an athlete. Algieri is a C+ prizefighter who found a perfect stylistic mesh with Ruslan Provodnikov, a Siberian with A+ power and C- everything else, finagled it to a million-dollar payday and now will recede into supporting roles on HBO and then Showtime and eventually ESPN, however much sorrowful howling or barking or squeaking Algieri’s beloved fellow Stony Brook Seawolves make when they experience their grief at losing a smug nutritionist from the pack.

Oh, what could have been is not, and meanwhile, and frankly, who cares if Pacquiao ever does fight Floyd Mayweather? Regardless how good a match the men subsequently make now, it will serve mostly as a reminder how very much was squandered by all parties in the five-year hellbroth boxing’s powerbrokers began brewing of our beloved sport in the moments that followed Pacquiao’s 2009 stoppage of Miguel Cotto. Lots can change in five years, anyway, and let me provide further proof:

In 2009, like many another boxing writer, I might have reached for the easily grasped and metaphorical cliche of Pacquiao-Algieri putting me to sleep. But it’s now 2014, and my commitment to journalism is deepened. I am a participatory journalist, in the spirit of George Plimpton or Hunter S. Thompson, and Saturday night, as it pertains to the dull affair of Pacquiao-Algieri at least, I went full-gonzo.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

Follow all the action live from Ringside as Manny Pacquiao defends the WBO Welterweight title against undefeated WBO Jr. Welterweight champion Chris Algieri. The show begins at 9 PM ET / 6 PM PT / 10 AM in Macau with a three fight undercard that will feature two world title bouts. Jessie Vargas defends the WBA Super Lightweight title against Antonio DeMarco. Vasyl Lomachenko defends the WBO Featherweight title against Chanlatarn Piriyapinyo. Zou Shiming takes on Kwanpichit OnesongchaiGym.

12 ROUNDS–WBO WELTERWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP–MANNY PACQUIAO 56-5-2, 38 KO’S) VS CHRIS ALGIERI (20-0, 8 KO’S)

Round 1 Pacquiao lands a couple of body shots and Algieri moves around the ring…10-9 Pacquiao

Round 2 STRAIGHT LEFT AND DOWN GOES ALGIERI..Algieri lands a right..Pacquial lands a left…20=17 Pacquizo

Round 3 Algier lands a right..Straight left from Pacquiao..good combo finished off by a right hook..body/head combo..30-26 Pacquiao

Round 4 Pacquiao beginning to get inside and land quick and effective combinations..40-35 Pacquiao

Round 5 Leadping left from Pacquiao..50–44 Pacquiao

Round 6 PACQUIAO SCORES KNOCKDOWNS WITH LEFt HAND and the 2nd a right hook to head..60-51 Pacquiao

Round 7 Pacquiao landing quick combinations…Algieri lands a left to the body…70-60 Pacquiao

Round 8 Pacquiao controlling the fight..Algieri gets in an occasional jab…80-69 Pacquiao

Round 9 HUGE LEFT AND DOWN GOES ALGIERI…HES HURT…PACQUIAO ALL OVER ALGIER…HE TAKES A KNEE…Pacquio looking for the finish but the bell rings..90-76 Pacquiao

Round 10 LEFT UPPERCUT AND DOWN GOES ALGIERI...100-84

Round 11 Pacquiao dominating and lands a hard left and right...110-93 Pacquiao

Round 12

119-103, 119-103 and 120-102 for Pacquiao

12 ROUNDS–FLYWEIGHTS–ZOU SHIMING (5-0 1 KO) VS KWANPICHIT ONESONGCHAIGYM (27-0-2, 12 KO”S)

Round 1 Shiming lands 1-2..10-9 Shiming

Round 2 Big flurry from Shiming…BIG LEFT HOOK AND DOWN GOES KO..BIG RIGHT AND DOWN GOES KP..Huge flurry on the ropes at the bell...20-16 Shiming

Round 3 Shiming contuing to land combinations..30-25 Shiming

Round 4 KO lands body/head combo..Terrific two way action,,39-35 Shiming

Round 5 Sneaky right from Shiming..Right buckles KO..2 hard rights...49-44 Shiming

Round 6 KO deducted a point for a low blow..COMBINATION AND A SLIP BUT RULED A KNOCKDOWN FOR SHIMING..Combination to head and hard right from Shiming..59-51 Shiming

Round 7 Shiming jumps in with a right…69-60 Shiming

Round 8 KO lands a right..Left from Shiming…right..straight right..Shiming left eye cut and swelling…combination..79-69

Round 9 Shiming boxing and moving…89-78 Shiming

Round 10 Shiming bleeding bad from left eye…KO tags with a hard right that sets off a furious exchange..uppercut from Shiming..right from KO..98-88 Shiming

Round 11 Shiming jumping in with thw right..KO chasing Shiming around the ring..108-97 Shiming

Round 12 Right from Shiming…The get tanGLED UP BUT RULED A KNOCKDOWN FOR SHIMING…118-105 SHIMING

119-106, 119-106, 120-103…ZOU SHIMING

12 Rounds WBO FEATHERWEIGHT TITLE–VASYL LOMACHENKO (2-1, 1 KO) VS CHONLATARN PIRIYAPINYO (51-1, 33 KOS’S)

Round 1 CP lands a right…Lomachenko lands a left to the body..1-2..hard left to the body..boy comboo..10-9 Lomachenko

Round 2 Lomachenko boxing…20-18 Lomachenko

Round 3 Good combinaton on ropes from Lomachenko..hard 3 punch combo…30-27 Lomachenko

Round 4 Right from CP…Lomachenko lands a left to the body..hard right hook..HUGE COMBINATION,,,BIG LEFT AND DOWN GOES CP…40-35 Lomachenko

Round 5 Big counter left from Lomachenko..step around left..50-44 Lomachenko

Round 6Hard combination on ropes..60-53 Lomachenko

Round 7 Good counter right from CP..Hard jab and follow up right from Lomachaneko..70-62 Lomachneko

Round 8 80-72 Lomachenko

Round 9 Lomachenko jabbing..90-81 Lomachenko

Round 10 Uppercut from Lomachenko…Body shot..left..Body shot from CP..right...100-90 Lomachenko

Round 11 Hard left uppercut from Lomachenko..110-99 Lomachenko

Round 12 Lomachenlo landing combo on the ropes..120-109

120-107 on all cards for Lomachenko

12 ROUNDS–WBA SUPER LIGHTWEIGHT TITLE–JESSIE VARGAS (25-0, 9 KO’S) VS ANTOINO DEMARCO (31-3-1, 23 KO’S)

ROUND 1 Straight left from DeMarco…Jab from Vargas..10-9 DeMarco

Round 2 Vargas lands a right…Vargas cut under left eye…19-19

Round 3 Vargas lands a counter right…right..counter right..DeMarco lands a right hook..right to the body..Straight right to body from Demarco..left uppercut…29-28 Vargas

Round 4 Counter left from Vargas..quick right..right to body..combo to head..left to body..hard counter right..right to body…39-37 Vargas

Round 5 2hqrd rights from Vargas..Vragas lands a combo on the ropes..lead right..49-46 Vargas

Round 6 Quick combo from Vargas.right to body..1-2..Combo from DeMarco..counter left from Vargas..59-55 Vargas

Round 7 Right to bidy from DeMarco..1-2…DeMarco bleeding around the right eye..Good exchange..Vargas working body…68-65 Vargas

Round 8 Jab from Vargas..Left from Deamrco..right from Vargas on the ropes..Body shot..3 punch combo..Straight left from DeMarco..left…Hard combo from Vargas….78-74 Vargas

Round 9 Right from Vargas…Hard left from DeMarco rocks Vargas into the corner..Great toe to toe action..hard 1-2 from Demarco..2 good uppercuts..hard left hook from Vargas...87-84 Vargas

Round 10 Left rocks Vargas..right from Vargas..right to body..uppercut from DeMarco..combo from Vargas…97-93 Vargas

Round 11 Jab from Vargas…counter right..107-102 Vargas

Round 12 Jab from Vargas..straight right..4 punch combo..117-111

116-112 on all cards for Vargas

By Norm Frauenheim–

Chris Algieri has had tougher fights than Manny Pacquaio, Algieri trainer Tim Lane said Thursday before Pacquiao trainer Freddie Roach said the Filipino would score a a knockout within three rounds.

From opposite corners, the trainers had widely — wildly too — different views on how things will play out in a 144-pound bout scheduled for midday Sunday in the Chinese gambling mecca of Macao and Saturday night (9
pm EST/6 pm PST) on HBO pay-per-view.

If Lane is right, it’ll be the biggest boxing upset in Asia since Buster Douglas’ 1990 knockout of Mike Tyson in Tokyo. If Roach is right, it’ll be a quick end to what would be Pacquiao’s quickest finish since a third-round stoppage of Erik Morales in 2006 and his first stoppage of any kind since a 12th-round TKO of Miguel Cotto in 2009.

In a conference call from China, there wasn’t much agreement, other than the respective degrees of difficulty. Neither corner is expecting it to be too tough. That wasn’t a surprise from Roach, who all along and in so many ways has been saying that Algieri is overmatched. But it was a surprise from Lane.

Pacquiao is Algieri’s greatest opportunity. But, Lane said in a matter-of-fact tone, Ruslan Provodnikov was a tougher fight.

“What he did to Ruslan, he did with one eye,” Lane said of a June 14 bout in which Algieri got up from two first-round knockdowns and fought with his left eye swollen shut for a stunning split decision over the favored Russian. “I thought he would have a flawless victory against Ruslan. I did not find that to be our toughest challenge. But he wound up getting hurt in the first round. When we were offered the Manny Pacquiao fight, I believed that this was not as tough a fight as Ruslan. Styles make fights. Manny Pacquaio, being a lefty and what he brings to the table, I do not find that to be as challenging as it was with Ruslan.

“So, I believe Chris will dominate Pacquiao more so than he did Ruslan. With two eyes.”

Safe to say, Lane’s bold comment was an eye-opener.

Algieri is at least an 8-to-1 underdog. That’s not quite the 42-to-1 underdog Douglas was nearly a quarter of a century ago. Nevertheless, it still means that Algieri’s chances are thought to be somewhere between slim and none.

“I’m absolutely expecting a KO,” Roach said. “He’s in way over his head.”

Algieri has advantages in height and reach. His educated footwork, Lane said, will allow him to elude Pacquiao’s power, which he launches from countless angles. But Roach said that Algieri has never encountered Pacquiao’s kind of speed.

“Once he gets in the ring, he’ll be shocked,” Roach said. “That’s why it won’t last more than three rounds.”

Pacquiao has beaten fighters bigger than he is. But Lane called them “zombies.” They were tough guys who didn’t know how use their feet in the subtle dance that takes thinking fighters out of harm’s way, Lane said. When asked if would he identify some of the zombies, Lane declined. Then, he was asked if he was talking abut Antonio Margarito, who was bigger than Pacquiao, yet lost a bruising unanimous decision to the Filipino four years ago at Cowboys Stadium in Dallas.

“Yeah, that’s the guy,” Lane said.

Roach’s confidence in an early KO is rooted in what he saw and felt in training. Pacquiao worked harder than he has in years on the heavy bag, Roach said. Renewed energy and power were so evident in sparring that Roach said that he jokingly warned Pacquiao not to stop Algieri too quickly. Talk about a Pacquiao-Floyd Mayweather showdown has been re-ignited in the build-up for the Algieri fight. If Pacquiao scores a quick and impressive KO, would Mayweather back away from the rumored possibility?

“Definitely, definitely,” Roach said.

No matter what’s next, however, Pacquaio might not be able to contain his power. Roach said the Filipino knocked him down with a left hand in training.

“Hit me in the chest,” Roach said.

The power, Roach said, was enough to launch him into a somersault, which also might have been one way to
celebrate an old feeling.

By Bart Barry

Saturday at the Venetian in Macau, Filipino Manny Pacquiao will defend his welterweight title against New Yorker Chris Algieri, a junior welterweight titlist. It is a fight somewhat intriguing because, while few aficionados imagine the match will be close, a number disagree on its likely victor.

Perspective plays a larger role than usual in determining where an aficionado finds himself on the question of Chris Algieri’s chances against Manny Pacquiao, prefight. Looking through one end of the telescope, Algieri is fully outclassed by the prizefighter after whom this era likely will be named, a man who, in going 6-2-1 (3 KOs) against the combination of Marco Antonio Barrera and Erik Morales and Juan Manuel Marquez, each a hall of famer in his prime when he fought Pacquiao, set a mark unrivaled by anyone currently plying the craft.

It is not stated often enough: Manny Pacquiao made nine matches with the best fighters in his and their best weightclasses, and six of them were rematches.

Much of what has transpired in Pacquiao’s career since his second match with Marquez, in 2008, is noteworthy for its remarkable promotion – by Bob Arum and HBO – and matchmaking by Top Rank’s brain trust. Pacquiao has grown his weight and stature by decisioning larger, slower, betterfed men than those whom he blitzed at 126 and 130 pounds. Recently Freddie Roach expressed equal parts awe and annoyance with his charge having gone to welterweight for a special-attraction purse against Oscar De La Hoya at the end of 2008, and then having been returned there nine more times.

Roach is mocking and scornful, edgier than usual, too, when he broaches the issue of Algieri’s advantage over Pacquiao in height and reach, and nutritional scholarship and culinary acumen, perhaps because Roach’s other charge, Ruslan Provodnikov, in losing a narrow decision to Algieri in June, became the New Yorker’s career springboard. Roach refuses to sing along with a promotional chorus that implies Pacquiao is new to fighting men longer than he is; forgotten to many aficionados, though fewer who were ringside at Cowboys Stadium four years ago this week, was the absurd physical superiority Antonio Margarito enjoyed against Pacquiao, the absurd chemical state into which Margarito placed himself with ephedrine and caffeine before making his ringwalk, and the absurd language Pacquiao employed in an abandoned concrete corner of Cowboys Stadium afterwards, saying Margarito hurt him badly enough with a body punch Pacquiao was lucky to have lived.

And no, Pacquiao has never been the same fighter since that match with Margarito. And no, Algieri has nowhere near Margarito’s physicality or championship experience.

The Manny Pacquiao who annihilated Ricky Hatton in 2009 would go through Chris Algieri and every male resident of his dad’s Long Island home in fewer than three rounds. That Pacquiao was, to employ trainer Nacho Beristain’s memorable phrase, “a wildcat” – and an indefatigable one at that. But the Pacquiao we last saw in April is a markedly different creature.

Five years removed from his last knockout victory, two years removed from his last knockout loss, Pacquiao now keeps a running scorecard in his head while he fights, ensuring no motion is wasted once a round is won. He’s still a man only the era’s purest offensive technician, Juan Manuel Marquez, should dare an even-terms exchange with, but he’s no longer a man who preys on timid opponents.

Algieri will be happy to use tactical timidity against Pacquiao, since not-fighting Pacquiao will discomfit Manny considerably. Algieri, as anyone near boxing is well past tired of hearing, is not a typical boxing story – though if he were the product of Harlem homelessness and a stepdad who abused him and a saintly retired cop who ran a gym in the basement of a church where he taught Chris to throw the old one-two, of course, we’d still hear he’s not the typical boxing story. It’s publicist twaddle.

Like most everything about boxing, Algieri’s likability is inversely proportionate to his distance from a ring; when he’s fighting offensive forces like Provodnikov or Pacquiao he’s quite likable, and when he’s appearing on heavily edited HBO infomercials he’s likable enough, and when he’s posting his meals and topless selfies and inspirational bromides on Twitter he is a douchebag – as the kids are saying it these days. What he has that should make him different from other of Pacquiao’s considerably better and consistently vanquished opponents, though, is a sense of entitled superiority Pacquiao may not be able to dent.

Pacquiao glides through life today, looking only forward, in a way few others can or have – though Arnold Schwarzenegger comes to mind as an analogous example. But Algieri still would not trade places with the Filipino. When Algieri says spending time round Pacquiao during their kickoff media tour convinced him he belongs in such company, there’s the faintest hint of disappointment in Algieri’s voice: I thought I would have my identity challenged enough to learn things about myself and others I didn’t already know, but, well, it turned out I was prepared for all this already, and Manny’s a good guy, I like him, and Freddie, too, honestly, even if he doesn’t like me.

Some of that really may be attributable to nutrition; coming of age when and where he did, Algieri’s access to what nutrients grow potent brains was likely greater than young Pacquiao’s and young Roach’s combined. Much of it is classifiable for the time being as luck; how certain experiences order certain person’s lives in unique ways. Little of it is attributable to what hard work and dedication American autobiographers fetishize; notice how infrequently someone like Pacquiao references his own work ethic – for coming from a place where working hard and being dedicated earn you about an extra $1/day.

Pacquiao should win Saturday, and not merely because no judge who wishes to enjoy his Sunday in Macau would score a close round for the New Yorker. Pacquiao should win Saturday, and neither fighter’s current career or life trajectories will be altered by it in the slightest.

Bart Barry can be reach via Twitter @bartbarry

Follow all the action live from Heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko defends his titles against undefeated Kubrat Pulev. The action begins at 4:45 ET / 1:45 PT

12 ROUNDS–WORLD HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP–WLADIMIR KLITSCHKO (62-3, 52 KOS’S) VS KUBRAT PULEV (20-0, 11 KO’S)

Round 1 HUGE LEFT AND DOWN GOES PULEV…ANOTHER HUGE EFT AND DOWN GOES PULEV..Klitschko lands a right…10-7 Klitschko

Round 2 Pulev lands a jab…right lands for Klitschko..hard left hook..20-16 Klitschko

Round 3 Pulev lands a body shot..Hard right wobbles Pulev..LEFT HOOK AND DOWN GOES PULEV..30-24 Klitschko

Round 4 Pulev lands a left and right…left hook from Klitschko…Left hook40-34 Klitschko

Round 5 Hard right from Klitschko..Hard rght from Kulev..HUGE LEFT FROM KLITSCHKO AND DOWN GOES PULEV AND THE FIGHT IS OVER

Round 5

By Norm Frauenheim-

Sergey Kovalev’s victory over Bernard Hopkins was one thing. His dominance was something else. After awhile, the benefit of hindsight will make Kovalev’s win look predictable. Nobody ever whips the clock, although Hopkins did it longer than anyone ever has. The shutout on the scorecards, however, was a stunning testament to a Kovalev skill set that had been unappreciated as much as it had been unexpected. It meant something else, too.

If there was ever a time and place to say that the ex-Soviet fighter has arrived, it was there, Saturday night in Atlantic City, with Kovalev’s thorough and patient triumph over an acknowledged master. There was an underlying assumption that the clever Hopkins would force Kovalev into an adjustment that would result in a critical mistake. There was a lot of talk about how Kovalev had never been beyond eight rounds. Translation: In the end, he would fight like a Russian. Didn’t happen, mostly because that stereotype no longer exists. For years, Soviet fighters were said to be tough, well-conditioned and powerful. But they were robotic and unable to think on their feet.

Like the Berlin Wall, that stereotype has fallen onto history’s scrapheap, gone for good. By going a full 12 rounds against Hopkins, Kovalev scored a symbolic stoppage of an assumption that might still linger had he knocked out a man just two months shy of his 50th birthday.

Kovalev proved himself to be more than a power puncher. He went the distance for a thorough, light-heavyweight victory over one the smartest guys ever in the ring. Fighters from the old Soviet Union aren’t thinkers? Think again.

Wladimir Klitschko has long been a thinking man’s fighter. For some reason, however, his smarts never captured
the U.S. imagination, perhaps because all of America’s best heavyweights are middle-linebackers and defensive ends these days. But Kovalev’s victory over Hopkins might awaken new found respect for Klitschko, who hopes to extend his eight-and-half-year-long heavyweight reign Saturday against Kubrat Pulev in Germany.

In the days since beating Hopkins, Kovalev has begun to show up in the pound-for-pound debate. P4P is an overrated exercise, to be sure. But it’s noteworthy this week, simply because of who else is already in many of the mythical ratings. In the ESPN edition, Kovalev is a new addition at No. 9. He’s one of three fighters from the old Soviet empire among the top 10. Middleweight Gennady Golovkin, of Kazakhstan, is No. 6. Klitschko, of the Ukraine is No. 8. Three fighters from old the Soviet bloc amount to more than from any other region in the world on a list hat includes two Americans, Floyd Mayweather Jr. at No. 1 and Timothy Bradley at No. 4.

There’s a theory that fighters from the discarded Soviet system are emerging because they now are forced to be creative. Dmitriy Salita, today a promoter and a former welterweight from the Ukraine, once told me that under the Soviet style every step in a fighter’s plan was marked down, rehearsed and memorized. Even the footwork was programmed, Salita said. But with the end of Soviet control, fighters, like entrepreneurs, had to hustle, which meant thinking for themselves. Hence, we have a Kovalev, a Golovkin, a Klistchko and others who one day might be included in the pound-for-pound debate. Featherweight Vasyl Lomachenko is a good possibility.

In 2014, it mean just one thing:

The collective — no pun intended — face of the fighter from the old Soviet Union should be Fighter of the Year.

By Bart Barry-

The most unexpected thing shared by guys who hit hardest is rarely how hard they hit or the speed of their attack. No, what surprises most about those guys is the nimbleness with which they take a backwards step the first three or four times you try to attack and smother them, their balletic willingness to move away from you in a tactical retreat and geometric adjustment that puts you at the end point of their punches. Where it hurts the most.

It was that willingness and ability with a backwards step or two, Saturday night in Atlantic City, that allowed Russian light heavyweight titlist Sergey “The Krusher” Kovalev to toss a shutout at American titlist Bernard “The Alien” Hopkins, in a unification match official scorekeepers had 120-106, 120-107 and 120-107.

Kovalev-Hopkins was, is, our sport’s fight of the year. Not its best fight, no, much nearer its worst, in fact, but the fight that best represented the state of our sport in 2014, the year a man nearing his 50th birthday challenged and imperiled himself more than any of our standard bearers in their primes. Sergey Kovalev, an elite-level fighter, was unable to knock-out Bernard Hopkins, despite trying to do so sporadically in the fight and sustainedly in its closing minutes. Hopkins is extraordinary, yes, but any path to alien extraordinariness is eased when one’s era is so fantastically ordinary.

There is a heaviness and a dullness, an ache more than a pang, about treating Saturday’s light heavyweight unification match. Postfight, the highest tribute paid its winner, a 31-year-old known as “Krusher,” was that he was disciplined in his pursuit of a 49-year-old man, that he did not do anything rash like throw a hundred punches every round or run his fellow titlist into retirement, that he demonstrated prudence in becoming the unified world champion of a storied division. So it goes this year: Prudence against a man Hopkins’ age is a blazon of excellence.

Is that revisionist? Yes, but only slightly. There was a healthy percentage of knowledgeable boxing folks, myself included, who thought Hopkins might beat Kovalev, when Saturday’s opening bell rang. But those ideas disappeared, went wanting in full, fewer than 60 seconds later. Following something like the strategy he followed against Kelly Pavlik, flying at a younger man with an unexpected aggressiveness he expected to have a disruptive effect, Hopkins wheeled and crossed-over, trying to hit Kovalev on his second or third step. But Kovalev was three steps out of Hopkins’ range before Hopkins’ back foot completed its odyssey to front. Hopkins moved – in Larry Merchant’s memorable phrase – like a man “in amber.”

It was a moment of instant sadness. That quickly, the air became full of worry those viewing the match were about to see a man well past his physical prime assaulted to unconsciousness or worse by someone 18 years his junior. Nearly worse still was the possibility a man so exaggeratedly beyond his physical prime might somehow become a unified world champion, through force of wiles, yes, but even more through opponent incompetence.

“I feel bad for watching this, jeez” – that was the first comment I heard after the opening bell, Saturday, in a roomful of knowledgeable boxing people, the majority of whom still attend boxing gyms regularly, and it was said by an astute observer who gave Hopkins a chance to win the match only a minute before.

It was that sort of start for Hopkins. He got dropped by a counter righthand thrown by Kovalev as the Russian hopped backwards in round 1. Hopkins rose and looked at the canvas, a tick of embarrassment more than a try at fooling referee David Fields, a man unknown to viewers as what three judges got assigned to the main event, and concluded the round, and the round after that, with a look that was more frightened than concentrated or studious.

Under John David Jackson’s tutelage, Kovalev took Hopkins’ strategy away from him, by quickly giving Hopkins a thought he’d not seriously had before – I could get hurt very badly tonight – and then using that disruption to keep Hopkins from ever executing anything the way he wished to. There were 10 or 15 seconds, in a fight comprising 2,160 of them, when Hopkins made an offensive maneuver that went according to plan, catching Kovalev with a left hook here and counter right there, but those punches had no effect on Kovalev, save provocation.

When Hopkins got Kovalev with a punch that stung, the Russian went after Hopkins, making him fight at a pace, and with a series of consequences, Hopkins wanted no part of. Kovalev succeeded, mostly, by taking Hopkins more seriously than any opponent Kovalev faced before, by giving Hopkins’ power considerably more leeway than it merited, and by mixing his flurries with enough inactivity that Hopkins never recognized a rhythmic pattern enough to do anything disruptive himself.

The fight’s final round was almost good enough to make folks forget how dreadful its 11 predecessors were, as Hopkins fought to win something much more important to him, by then, than his fight with Kovalev; Hopkins fought the final round to win a right to choose his retirement date. Had Hopkins, whose head got snapped in a bunch of directions by Kovalev’s fists in round 12, been dropped awkwardly or severed from his consciousness long enough to get a doctor in the ring, nothing about Hopkins’ pending retirement would have been voluntary.

Athletic commissions, even those representing poleis desperate for revenue as Atlantic City’s, would have banded together and helped Hopkins out of the sport, on terms other than his own. Journalists, too, might have followed Carlos Acevedo’s admonishment and asked how a PED-free athlete could improve after his 35th birthday in an era dominated by PED-using athletes.

Instead, by fighting fully the most-feared prizefighter in his division, and absorbing dramatically that man’s best punches, Hopkins won for himself a chance to announce his retirement at a leisurely pace. One hopes that pace nevertheless ends before 2014 does.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim-

Bernard Hopkins’ life as street thug, ex-con, Congressional witness, peace-maker, fighter, promoter, pundit, provocateur, butcher, baker and candlestick maker includes different nicknames, a couple of masks and roles only he knows are still within him.

“I’m not human,” Hopkins said in a recent conference call.

But he is.

There’s an endless array of humanity jammed into that one being who over the many years has been called Inmate #Y4145, The Executioner, B-Hop and today The Alien.

It’s what makes him so compelling. So challenging.

He shows us what is humanly possible on either side of those proverbial ropes. He’ll have to do it all over again Saturday night in Atlantic City against Sergey Kovalev in a light heavyweight-fight (HBO 10:45 pm ET/PT) as intriguing as any bout in the last year.

By now, circumstances confronting Hopkins have been documented and over-analyzed. Kovalev’s power and relative youth – he’s 31 – are a couple of factors that some think will finally stop Hopkins’ unprecedented defiance of time’s inevitability. He’ll be 50 in January.

Half-a-century is a long time anywhere. For anybody whose mileage has taken them past that birthday and deposited them in the senior-citizen division, Hopkins’ resilient ability to fight on is science fiction-like.

Hopkins swims as part of his training regimen these days. While watching him in the water during HBO’s pre-fight documentary, I wondered if there was a youth-restoring Cocoon from director Ron Howard’s 1985 Academy Award-winning movie at the bottom of that Philadelphia pool.

It’s alien all right, which explains that silly green mask that Hopkins wears. It’s not because he’s trying to hide a gray beard. He has always understood that boxing is a mix of sport and theater. Maybe, Kovalev will prove to be nothing more than just another vanquished face in his supporting cast. I think not. I predicted a Kovalev victory by decision for The Ring. http://ringtv.craveonline.com/news/362819-who-wins-bernard-hopkins-sergey-kovalev

Then again, I picked Hopkins to lose to Kelly Pavlik in 2008. Maybe, I should start wearing a fool’s mask.

Truth is, Hopkins is already a winner. The fight could get ugly, which might diminish what has already been accomplished. Nevertheless, Hopkins has done what you expect of somebody about to turn 50.

To wit: He’s become role model for a sport that badly needs one.

In stepping up to fight an emerging star and one of the game’s most feared punchers, he has embarrassed pound-for-pound contenders who are more than a couple of decades younger.

Hopkins reminds us – and hopefully them – that building a legacy is serious business. It’s a not a mere logo for a souvenir. Floyd Mayweather Jr.’s pursuit of legacy has begun to look manufactured. His TBE — The Best Ever – is on T-shirts and caps. Wonder if Manny Pacquiao has bought one? For a bonfire, maybe.

The Best Ever is not possible with a fight against the best. That’s what Hopkins is doing in his decision to face Kovalev. The build-up to the bout has included much of what is often attached to a Hopkins fight.

Race became an issue when he told ESPN that the fight is not a cover piece for Sports Illustrated or other major media, because he’s black. Because his last name isn’t Marciano or Stern, he said.

The comments, of course, generated some major-media coverage. It also was nothing new from Hopkins, who once said retired NFL quarterback Donovan McNabb wasn’t “black enough” and told Joe Calzaghe that he could never go back to the projects if he let “a white boy’’ beat him.

Any discussion of race these days is on the wrong side of the politically-correct fence. But when has race not been a part of boxing? It is the sport, after all, that created The Great White Hope, a term still used. Agree with Hopkins. Disagree with him.

But thank him for his honesty. He’ll never be able to mask that or anything else in a life full of evolving lessons about what humans shouldn’t do and what they can be. That’s a victory on any scorecard.

NEW YORK (Nov. 5, 2014)–-SHOWTIME Sports will close out its 2014 boxing calendar with the return of WBC and The Ring Magazine Light Heavyweight World Champion Adonis “Superman” Stevenson as he defends his title against top-10 ranked Russian challenger Dmitry “The Hunter” Sukhotskiy in the main event of a SHOWTIME BOXING: Special Edition on Friday, Dec. 19, LIVE on SHOWTIME at 9 p.m. ET/PT.

Stevenson will once again headline in his adopted home province of Quebec for his ninth consecutive fight and his fourth world title defense. The showdown will originate from Pepsi Coliseum in Quebec City and is presented by Groupe Yvon Michel (GYM) in association with Mise-O-Jeu and Videotron.

In the co-feature of the stacked quadrupleheader, former world title challenger and super middleweight contender Andre Dirrell (23-1, 16 KOs) will return to SHOWTIME for the first time since appearing in the Super Six World Boxing Classic in 2010. Dirrell will face an opponent to be announced in the super middleweight division.

Once-beaten Kevin Bizier (23-1, 16 KOs) will face the only man to defeat him, fellow welterweight contender Jo Jo Dan (33-2, 18 KOs), in a rematch of their 2013 split-decision showdown. The winner of Bizier-Dan II, a 12-round welterweight bout, will determine the mandatory challenger to IBF Welterweight World Champion Kell Brook.

In the opening bout of the telecast, undefeated light heavyweight contender and two-time Russian Olympian Artur Beterbiev (6-0, 6 KOs) will face fellow unbeaten Jeff Page Jr. (15-0, 10 KOs) in a 10-round 175-pound bout.

The 37-year-old Stevenson (24-1, 20 KOs) is coming off a hard-fought unanimous decision victory against Andrzej Fonfara in his SHOWTIME debut this past May 24 in which the champion was knocked down for just the second time in his career. Stevenson started strong, scoring two early knockdowns of his own and was cruising to an easy win until Fonfara battled back and floored the champ in the ninth round. The two went toe-to-toe from then until the final bell, with Stevenson prevailing with a convincing victory.

Stevenson, one of the most exciting and destructive fighters in boxing, had a breakout year in 2013. He won the WBC crown with a first-round knockout of Chad Dawson and then followed up that performance with two successful title defenses, against Tavoris Cloud and Tony Bellew, to close out one of the most impressive campaigns of the year.

Now, the Haitian-born slugger will face the 33-year-old Sukhotskiy (22-2, 16 KOs), a former world title challenger currently ranked No. 7 by the WBC and WBO, and No. 8 by the WBA. Sukhotskiy challenged for the WBO Light Heavyweight World Championship against then-champ Juergen Braehmer in 2009 and lost in the champ’s hometown in Germany.

Sukhotskiy, who has never been stopped, is currently riding a four-fight winning streak that features three knockouts. He’s just one fight removed from a career-best win, a fifth-round TKO of former world title challenger Eduard Gutknecht, and owns a 2011 second-round TKO over current IBF light heavyweight No. 1 contender Nadjib Mohammedi.

Ranked in the top 15 in all four sanctioning bodies (11th in the IBF), Sukhotskiy has fought in his native Russia for all but three of his professional bouts and has seven knockouts in his last nine fights.

Dirrell, of Flint, Mich., was one of boxing’s fastest-rising contenders entering the innovative Super Six tournament, which matched the top super middleweights in a round-robin tournament to determine the best in the division. Undefeated when he entered the tournament, Dirrell traveled to England in 2009 to challenge then-WBC champ Carl Froch in his hometown, losing a close, disputed 12-round split-decision.

In his next bout in the tournament, Dirrell faced then-unbeaten Arthur Abraham and was winning on all three judges’ scorecards when Abraham was disqualified in the 11th round for punching Dirrell while he was defenseless on the canvas after slipping on the wet surface. The former Olympic Bronze Medalist suffered neurological issues as a result of the punch, withdrew from the tournament and stepped away from boxing for 21 months.

The 31-year-old Dirrell, the older brother of WBC Super Middleweight World Champion Anthony Dirrell, is undefeated since his return to the ring, winning three of his four bouts by knockout. The switch-hitting southpaw has been called one of the most athletically gifted fighters of today. At this point in his career, he is looking to reassert himself as one of the top fighters in the sport.

Quebec’s Bizier, 30, a pro since 2008, was undefeated and the favored fighter heading into his first showdown with fellow contender Dan. The two battled for 12 action-packed rounds with Dan taking a split decision – 116-111, 114-1113 for Dan and 117-110 for Bizier. Dan controlled the early rounds; Bizier the later sessions of a thrilling fight.

Still a top contender at 147 pounds, Bizier has recorded consecutive knockouts in 2014 including his most recent performance, a first-round TKO of Laszlo Fazekas in Montreal this past September. Bizier is ranked No. 6 by the IBF and will get his first shot at a world title if he avenges the loss to Dan.

The 33-year-old Dan was born in Romania and has campaigned for most of his career in Canada. The only blemishes on the southpaw’s record are a pair of close, controversial decision losses to then-undefeated contender Selcuk Aydin – the first in 2010 and the second in 2011 – both in Aydin’s native Turkey.

Dan, whose full name is Ionut Dan Ion, has registered four consecutive wins since the 2011 loss to Aydin and is coming off a fifth-round TKO over Lukasz Janik on the Stevenson-Fonfara undercard in May.. A consensus top-10 fighter, Dan is currently ranked No. 2 in the IBF, No. 6 in the WBC and No. 8 in the WBA.

Beterbiev is fresh off a dominating second-round TKO of former IBF light heavyweight champ Tavoris Cloud on Sept. 27 in Montreal in which he floored the former champion four times in less than 4 minutes. An amateur standout who turned pro in June of 2013 and has campaigned exclusively in Canada, the highly regarded Beterbiev has knocked out all of his professional opponents in four rounds or less.

The 29-year-old Beterbiev, who holds two amateur victories over current WBO Light Heavyweight Champ Sergey Kovalev, is already ranked in the top-10 by the WBO (No. 10) after just six professional fights and 26 rounds of boxing.

The 24-year-old Page, of Andover, Kansas, is a former college linebacker. He turned professional in March 2013 and fought 10 times in nine months, facing limited opposition. Page has registered two consecutive knockouts and is coming off a fifth-round KO of Maxwell Taylor in October.

Tickets, ranging from $25.00 to $250.00, will go on sale next Thursday, Nov. 6, at 10:00 a.m. ET, in the branches of the Pepsi Coliseum in Quebec (418) 691-7211 or 1 (800) 900-7469, online at www.billeteck.com, at GYM (514) 383-0666 or Boxing Club Champion (514) 376-0980.

By Bart Barry–

SAN MARCOS, Texas – Three miles southwest of Texas State University is a mostly waterless stretch of terrain called Purgatory Creek Natural Area, a verdant place complete with trails named after Dante, Ripheus, Ovid and Beatrice, for those with an Italian literary bent.

Saturday at Boardwalk Hall in the American purgatory of Atlantic City, light heavyweight Bernard Hopkins and Russian Sergey Kovalev will make the most meaningful fight of 2014.

The above sentences are related, though how they are will not be apparent for a while to come.

What also may come is the day boxing makes a concerted – in the sense of coordinated – attempt to win back what fans it lost in the first half of the second decade of this 21st century, a time of fan exodus that began in the early weeks of 2010, the first time the world’s best and second-best practitioners refused to make a contest with one another despite occupying the same weightclass. A day of fans’ collective return to our sport, however, is of no consequence right now because boxing faces a nigh existential crisis this year of aficionado departures.

The casual fans are long gone, shuffling steadily if quietly away under a rainstorm of “good riddance!” from purists who didn’t know any better, and the consequences of their departure and ways they will be missed is not entirely knowable yet but guessable certainly. To indulge a hunt for those consequences, though, is an indulgence indeed in 2014 – the year our sport became so easy to abandon. This is not a crisis that will find remedy from a new television deal or browbeating about boxing’s redounding popularity in Dublin and Dubai and Dunkirk and Dongguan; boxing gyms are empty in all but a few cities in the U.S., a country that once dominated the sport and now anxiously hopes its next Olympic gold medal comes only a dozen years after its last.

This crisis finds illustration of the most ambiguous sort on Saturday, when a 175-pound American who is months from his 50th birthday makes a title-unification match with a talented Russian who is 31 years-old but still young enough to be his opponent’s son.

About a year ago, Sergey Kovalev’s first American trainer, Don Turner, said the difference between Kovalev and Hopkins was the Russian is “mean” where the American is “cunning.” Whatever the efforts at image revision – Snuggly Sergey Bedside with Wife / Speedbag Sergey Ringside with HBO – Kovalev remains the only prizefighter anyone can remember increasing his knockout percentage after causing another man’s death in a boxing ring. He smiles so much in interviews because he’s been told to do so, and because he hasn’t more than a kindergartner’s grasp of English, and because he doesn’t care what you are asking anyway. In a sport comprising exclusively men willing to hurt another man for a paycheck, there’s a good argument to be made Kovalev is the exact last man you’d wish to meet in the dark alley of badness’ proverbs.

And yet, Bernard Hopkins, a man willing to give a safety-first effort to the unlikeliest opponents, initiated a match with Kovalev, at the very moment it appeared Hopkins might have made the same dollars fighting the more limited, if possibly insane, Haitian titlist Adonis Stevenson. In an era of men burnishing their credentials as Most Avoided by avoiding bigger men, Hopkins rushes at them, men like Antonio Tarver, Chad Dawson and Kovalev, all considerably larger on their 30th birthdays than Hopkins was in 1995.

While ever a delight to himself, Hopkins is a blossoming embarrassment for most of his prizefighting countrymen, showing at age 49 a willingness to fail, and be badly injured, few of today’s best American fighters have shown since their bouts got computer-matched in the amateurs. Hopkins is not charming as he thinks he is, nor eloquent, but his willingness to fail in speech – giving answers unknowable to their questions, being open and vulnerable in ways he later pretends were calculated – when married to his extraordinary courage and self-belief, makes him uniquely heroic.

He is uniquely present in a prizefighting ring, too, and this is why he came to mind during a hike along Dante’s rocky Purgatory Creek trail. Undulating coffee-dark paths covered in bleached stones and white shards of much larger bleached stones are unpleasant for any who traverse them but particularly unpleasant for those obdurate enough to traverse them in “barefoot” attire – thin rubber soles and mesh. There’s a trick to it, though: If one concentrates on solely two things as he marches, breathing through his nose and looking no more than a yard before him, accelerating till anxiety and doubt haven’t time nor room, he is able to navigate nearly any surface quickly and painlessly.

It’s a mental-alignment exercise that surpasses self-belief and approaches faith; when the mind’s processor has unfettered access to the input of its eyes and the output and input of its feet, when decisions are rendered so fast they mimic reactions, when every algorithm is executed instantly and its result immediately then forgotten, one is able to move with astounding rapidity and never misstep. (This breathing trick works at excessive speeds in traffic, too, but you didn’t read that here.) It mimics a state athletes often, and often erroneously, call “the zone” because its results surpass what workaday feats can be accomplished with mere concentration – it is instead a form of mindlessness leavened by wisdom enough to keep the mind out its own way.

Hopkins finds this place and disrupts others’ pursuits of it. His reflexes are absurdly well-preserved, yes, but the access he grants himself to a mental database of other men’s physical patterns permits him to find matches so quickly, and unman others so fully, it approaches clairvoyance.

Fatigue can undermine Hopkins’ sense of presence like any other man’s, though, and fatiguing Hopkins is Kovalev’s best chance of winning Saturday. If Kovalev has trained for a 30-round fight and is willing to hit Hopkins anywhere at all a hundred times every round, without discouragement, Kovalev should win. Otherwise, Bernard Hopkins will be Fighter of the Decade, 2010-2020.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim

Drivers pass the Lonnie and Muhammad Ali Pavilion Center near downtown Phoenix all the time. It’s just another building at an intersection full of people en route to and from work, school and the mundane. But on Thursday it was something different.

If you looked up and saw the name that overlooks the traffic from its location at the northeast corner of a busy neighborhood, you were taken back to a day 40 years ago. Call it an intersection of time and place. A crossroads with history.

The anniversary of Ali’s eighth-round stoppage of George Foreman on Oct. 30, 1974 in Zaire has been recalled by those who were there and those who weren’t. My favorite is a column from columnist Jerry Izenberg, who was there.
http://www.nj.com/sports/index.ssf/2014/10/forty_years_ago_muhammad_ali_shocked_george_foreman_and_the_world_in_the_rumble_in_the_jungle_and_i.html

Reading Izenberg made me wish that I had been. Instead, I saw it as rookie sportswriter on closed-circuit in Jacksonville, Fla.
It was captivating then. It still is. It has stayed with us. It is an enduring piece of the public imagination, recalled vividly by those who were there and remembered by those of of us who saw it in black-and-white on tiny screens in dilapidated arenas. I’m not sure that anything in High-Def will ever be remembered the way Ali-Foreman is.

Floyd Mayweather Jr, has made a claim on being The Best Ever with his TBE caps and T-shirts. But will anybody recall his rematch victory over Marcos Maidana 40 years from now? Didn’t think so.

Forty years later, Ali and Foreman are a current lesson in what TBE really means. They were fearless, or at least courageous enough to fight despite countless reasons to be afraid of each other. They were willing to do it on the other side of the world in a locale as unpredictable, potentially volatile and exotic as any. It was a universe away from the MGM Grand, which in hindsight makes it that much more profound.

There was a price and a reward, but it not in the way it might have looked in the immediate aftermath of a right-hand lead that Ali landed in a stoppage heard-round-the-world.

For Ali, the victory ensured him of being the global icon he is today. As you drive past his name on the Pavilion that houses The Muhammad Ali Parkinson Center four decades later, however, you wonder whether the punches he absorbed from one of history’s most powerful heavyweights in in so-called “rope-a-doe” tactic contributed to his condition.

Doctors never link the punches to his Parkinson’s. Yet in the public imagination, the collective mind’s eye, that link is always there. I still remember a moment with the late Joe Frazier. He was in Indianapolis during the 1996 U.S. Olympic Swimming Trials for a lunch that the USOC threw to commemorate the 25th anniversary of his 1971 unanimous decision over Ali at New York’s Madison Square Garden. A film of that fight was playing in the corner of the ballroom. I asked Frazier about Ali’s condition.

“You see that left hand?’’ Frazier said as he pointed at the screen just as his potent left crashed into Ali’s face. “That’s why he is the way he is.’’

It was harsh. It was cruel. It was honest. It was 180-proof, an undiluted mix of what boxing has often been called: Life in a shot glass.

Ali, whose speech has been robbed by the terrible disease, has never complained about what the sport might have done to him. It was something he chose to do. The risk was known then. Today’s medical technology has told us more about the dangers that come with concussions. But even forty years ago, fighters knew they were walking straight into the jaws of potential harm. Ailing fighters have always been there, broken-down evidence of what can happen.

But Ali has used his condition and celebrity to further research into the disease that knocks down anybody it strikes. He and his wife, Lonnie, have devoted their time and energy to battling Parkinson’s at The Barrow Neurological Institute at St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center. He appears at spring-training games or Suns game while staying at his winter home in Phoenix. People gawk at his condition. They talk. But he’s there, as fearless now as he was 40 years ago.

Then, there’s Foreman. The loser 40-years ago has undergone an amazing transformation. In Zaire, he was as intimidating and scary as Mike Tyson once was.

A favorite story comes from Bill Caplan, Foreman’s longtime friend and the best publicist anybody could ever have. Ali arrived in Zaire as the good guy. He was staying at a string of viilas along a river that Zaire President Joseph Mobutu had built for himself.

Foreman played the opposite role. He was the bad guy, which was exemplified by a German Shepherd that reminded people of the dogs they feared when they were under Belgian rule. He had reservations at a Spartan-like military post.

“A stockade with barb-wired fences, guards and everything else,’’ Caplan said.

Caplan recalls that one day Foreman decided to pay promoter Don King a visit at the InterContinental Hotel. But King wasn’t in an ordinary room. When Foreman knocked on the door, he discovered King was in the Presidential Suite.

“George told Don, ‘You’re moving out and I’m moving in,’ “ Caplan said.

King didn’t argue.

He even got rooms at the InterContinental for Foreman’s entourage of 21 people.

Few argued with Foreman in those days. Few argue with him today, but for a different reason. The onetime bad guy has become as likable as anybody. A senior citizen, he’s become the genial grandfather everybody wants to be around. His hamburger grill made him a lot richer than any fight purse ever did. Younger generations remember him more for the grill than they do for heavyweight titles.

In the end, he’s thankful for the chance to have fought Ali, whom he calls a legend bigger than boxing. His loss to Ali put him on the path to who he is today. Ali’s victory turned him into an icon, yet at a steep price

For Ali and Foreman, that day 40 years ago was a personal intersection. Personal, too, for a lot of us who are reminded of it every time we travel through it.

By Bart Barry-

HOUSTON – Saturday this city’s largest art museum previewed for its members a fall exhibition, “Monet and the Seine,” that is unimpressive. Composed of middling efforts by the French Impressionist master, canvases from sundry places, some painted in cottoncandy hues and some deeply indebted to others’ influences and one so pedestrian Monet himself misdated it, this exhibition is wisely hidden across the street from Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s impressive permanent collection and the much better exhibition space and exhibition, “The Age of Impressionism,” through which the museum began its year.

Very much can be gathered about a master on a bad day, and seeing Monet’s lesser interpretations of his favorite French river serves to emphasize the transcendence of his best treatments of water, and water lilies – confirming his mastery absolutely. The disappointing exhibition and what mood it spawned, though, did, as it happened, mark an appropriate place for contemplating the coverage of Gennady “GGG” Golovkin’s recent victory over Marco Antonio Rubio and inevitable February victory over Martin Murray.

My colleague and friend Norm Frauenheim once wrote: Undefeated is untested. This evaluative approach appealed then and appeals still for a couple reasons: First, it delays declarations of greatness about modern fighters for a very long time indeed, and second, it encourages prizefighters to take increasingly larger risks before they can be called great.

In many senses this city, largest in Texas and fourth-largest in the country, was undefeated in my mind going into the weekend. But with the disappointment of its Monet exhibition, other disappointments began to arrive in the form of questions: Why does such a wealthy metropolis have grass growing in the middle of its surface streets and roads patchy enough to make a drive to its Museum District akin to off-roading? Why do bearded 130-pound boys who drive expensive German automobiles on those unkempt roads initiate collisions with much larger men in supermarkets? How can so many people in the Gulf’s velvety October air be so plainly miserable? Why is nearly every good downtown restaurant closed on Sundays?

Challenges beget defeats. Defeats beget more challenges.

While a heavyweight prizefighter, conceivably, could run through all competition and remain undefeated through a great career – one in particular springs to mind – it is nearly impossible for any smaller man. By remaining in weight classes long since scrubbed by himself or others, a prizefighter may have a profitable career, he may even make it in the hall of fame, but he will not be invited in conversations about all-timers by historians from generations after his own.

This thought came to mind a couple Saturdays ago while watching the Kazakh middleweight titlist Golovkin, whose entire career has happened at 160 pounds, dismantle another challenger, the Mexican Rubio this time, without a prayer of beating him. The straining by Golovkin’s print and television publicists to crown GGG a ticketseller was unseemly. HBO viewers were told of Golovkin’s record sales – in excess of 9,000! – at the former Home Depot Center tennis stadium in Carson, Calif., now named StubHub Center, and incredibly enough, Oscar De La Hoya was trotted out as an also-ran in the breathless comparisons. A little perspective: De La Hoya did not fight in the tennis stadium but rather the immense soccer stadium beside it – you may have seen it as an absence during the telecast, when HBO’s aerial view of the tennis stadium’s beacon revealed a sizable black hole on the left that made the tennis stadium a sparkly boutonniere on the lapel of a dark suit jacket – a venue at which, immediately after his loss to Floyd Mayweather, De La Hoya sold 300-percent as many tickets as Golovkin just did.

While we’re on the subject of De La Hoya, let’s treat briefly the “Golden Boy’s” career as a range of weightclasses to which he’d migrated by the time he was Golovkin’s age: lightweight, junior welterweight, welterweight, junior middleweight, middleweight – representing a 25-pound increase. Say what you will of De La Hoya’s sincerity and business acumen, but he challenged himself a hell of a lot more by his 32nd birthday than Golovkin has. Other comparisons? Sure. Roy Jones Jr. had covered three weight classes by the time he was Golovkin’s age: middleweight, super middleweight and light heavyweight – representing 15 pounds – and fans were so disgusted by Jones’ cashing HBO checks without challenging himself they staged a “Roycott.” Floyd Mayweather Jr., before his 32nd birthday, had gone from junior lightweight to junior middleweight, representing 24 pounds, and aficionados remain furious about the fights he did not make.

It says here if GGG were a flashy black prizefighter or pretty Latino, and not a Central Asian with a face easily confused for a suburban schoolboy’s in America, yesterday’s Roycotters would demand his next match be with the winner of November’s Bernard Hopkins-Sergey Kovalev match, not Martin Murray.

How dare you, sir, imply any of this Golovkin media mania has ethnic underpinnings!

You must be kidding.

Golovkin appears to be an exceptional talent, yes, but his promoters are beginning to protest too much about a dearth of viable opponents. While most of the men who spent their careers at welterweight and junior middleweight are understandably hesitant about being bludgeoned by a larger man for short money, one increasingly wonders what precludes Golovkin from moving to higher weight classes, what precludes his making an exceptional match with, say, super middleweight Carl Froch?

Because Froch, too, is afraid of . . . don’t even complete that sentence. Froch’s willingness to fight is beyond doubt, and if he becomes unwilling to make a match with Golovkin it will be for one reason only: money. This is the sort of problem HBO is uniquely empowered to solve. Instead of showing 1 1/2-percent of American households a 60-to-one mismatch wrapped in a hyperbolic banner about bringing 9,000 (of 16 million) folks in Greater Los Angeles to a tennis stadium, within months of Froch putting nearly nine times that many fans in a London soccer stadium, HBO ought to use what leverage it still has to make Froch an offer he likes, and show us how Golovkin acquits himself in a test.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim–

Chris Algieri is good enough to fight Manny Pacquaio, but he might not be good enough to beat some of his sparring partners.

That, at least, was Pacquiao trainer Freddie Roach’s suggestion Thursday in a conference call from the Philippines where the Filipino Congressman is training in his hometown, General Santos City, for a Nov. 22 bout with Algieri in Macao.

“We’ve got some great sparring partners …I think some better than our opponent, but we’ll see,’’ Roach said.

The comment from the ever-honest Roach caused a few ripples. It begged for a follow-up and, sure enough, Roach was asked to explain.

“Sometimes, the truth hurts,’’ Roach said later in the call.

In terms of world-class credentials and experience, two of Pacquiao’s sparring partners, ex-welterweight contender Mike Jones and emerging junior-welterweight Viktor Postol, have more on their boxing resumes than Algieri, who jumped to the head of the line with a victory over Ruslan Provodnikov for a dramatic upset that complements a good back story. The New Yorker magazine portrayed the college graduate with two degrees as a real-life Rocky. It’s hard to predict whether that’s the hook that will bring cross-over fans back into the pay- per-view audience, which Pacquaio promoter Bob Arum says could be between 750,000 and 900,000 for the HBO bout.

Algieri brings something different to the table at a time when PPV customers are heading for the exits. There’s been a decline throughout 2014. Maybe, a guy, a virtual unknown a year ago, can reverse that trend. Everybody is a sucker for the guy not believed to have much of a chance. Algieri has already created his own chances by getting up from two knockdowns against the feared Provodnikov. There’s some doubt about whether he could repeat that kind of drama. Against Pacquiao, however, he’ll get that opportunity. It’s intriguing.

But, as Roach suggested, some of that intrigue is tempered by facts. Consider this: If Algieri were fighting Jones or Postol instead of Pacquiao, who would you pick? Jones beat Jesus Soto Karass twice. The unbeaten Postol (26-0) is a ranked contender at 140-pounds. His record includes victories over DeMarcus Corley and Selchuk Aydin. Combine their records, and they’re 52-2. Compare that to Algieri’s 20-0 resume. There is no comparison.

Postol and Jones, Roach said, are in Pacquiao’s camp because of their height. They are taller than Algieri, who is listed at 5-10 and looks down on the shorter Pacquiao in news conference photos. By the way, Pacquiao has been getting ripped for playing basketball in the Filipino league for the team, Kia, he coaches. Pacquaio says he won’t play again until after the fight. On the floor, however, the 5-7 Pacquaio was competing with guys bigger than even Jones and Postol. In terms of competing with much taller rivals, a few minutes on the basketball floor might have helped. But that’s another story.

Algieri’s advantage in height is a factor, especially in his ability to sustain an effective jab. But there’s more to it than that. Postol, a Ukrainian, might be a key to Pacquiao’s readiness. Above all, Algieri is a thinker. That, he says, will be his advantage. Pacquiao has been an instinctive fighter. If he gets on a roll, he’ll roll over anybody. But Algieri has taken a page out of Juan Manuel Marquez’ four-fight book on Pacquiao. Marquez disrupted Pacquiao’s instinctive rhythm. He threw different looks at him, forcing him to stop and adjust. That was just enough for Marquez to finally catch him wide open for the right hand that knocked out the Filipino in their last edition.

“I’ll make him think,’’ Algieri said Oct. 18 during a news conference at StubHub Center in Carson, Calif., before Gennady Golovkin’s knockout of Marco Antonio Rubio.

Postol is also a thinker.

“He makes Manny think and that’s what Algieri will do,’’ Roach said of what might be the real truth as to why a current contender is in Pacquiao’s camp.

By Bart Barry–

HOUSTON – Saturday at Carson, Calif.’s StubHub Center, a great fight venue with a moronic name, Jamaican featherweight Nicholas “Axe Man” Walters hacked former world champion Nonito “Filipino Flash” Donaire to a stump, in the co-main, and stopped him at the end of round 6. It was a case of dessert served before dinner, increasingly common in boxing’s kitchen, as HBO’s main event offered all the competitiveness its 60-to-1 odds promised.

I forewent the trip to California – no fight in which a man hasn’t a chance, not even one that features Gennady “GGG” Golovkin, warrants a flight – and instead sat beside the stage at Houston Improv, where Chicago comedian Corey Holcomb played to a full house.

No regrets here.

“One of the significant fighters, of the last several years, in the lighter weight classes, Nonito Donaire.” That is how HBO commentator Max Kellerman described Donaire a few minutes after the Axe Man felled him without even a “Timber!” Kellerman, straining at his harness not to employ HBO’s stock quotient of hyperbole – Walters, as a Spanish-speaking Jamaican featherweight, is not, after all, nearly so marketable as a middleweight from Kazakhstan – might near as easily been describing his network: “One of the significant broadcasters, of the last few decades, within pay-cable’s limited reach” or prizefighting: “One of the significant sports, of the last 25 years, among Americans’ third-tier diversions.”

It’s instructive how a fighter HBO nearly made its flagship guy just two years ago was now merely significant for a short time among smaller men. It’s an accurate appraisal by Kellerman, exactly right for once; it is both a proper read of what Donaire is and was and, retroactively at least, a proper read of the import HBO’s blessing now carries.

Fortunately for Nicholas Walters, he is not an HBO-blessed fighter. He is a man who chopped his way from Arena Roberto Duran in Panama City, in 2012, to brutal knockout wins over two very good veteran sluggers, Donaire and Vic Darchinyan. What makes Walters’ story special is not that he arrived on American cable fully formed, Gennady Golovkin did that as well, but rather that his full form was tested decisively and immediately: Darchinyan and Donaire represent a quality-of-opponent, in Walters’ two HBO appearances, Golovkin has not approached in thrice that many.

Walters is the son of a prizefighter, and that pedigree tells. Saturday he got overconfident, emboldened so much by his own power he forgot Donaire once separated effortlessly very brave men from their consciousnesses, and he got clipped in round 2 by Donaire’s deservedly celebrated left hook. It hurt Walters and spun him, and had there been another 30 seconds to go in the second, there’s no telling how things might have gone. But given a minute to recuperate, Walters’ incredible conditioning – born of an island, like the Dominican Republic, whose residents’ miraculous feats of athleticism are becoming, ahem, commonplace – Walters resembled no one so much as Floyd Mayweather against Shane Mosely: Hands up, prudence restored, forward marching behind a textbook jab.

Walters’ jab is extraordinarily long, fast, accurate and concussing. Donaire, whose own reflexes are enviable, saw Walters’ jab happening and countered over it successfully in the earliest rounds. By the fourth, though, after he got dropped by the same rear-hand uppercut Walters also dropped Darchinyan with, Donaire couldn’t counter Walters’ jab – because Walters’ jab disrupted Donaire’s equilibrium in a way that obviated reflex. Without a jab or reliable right, Donaire was reduced to his old digs in Left Hook City. Walters anchored his right guard to his cheek, waited for Donaire to put his life behind a left hook, pulled away from that hook, and then dropped an axe blade on Donaire’s left temple. And that was that.

Donaire, now a featherweight, admitted quite frankly afterwards he wanted no part of Walters’ offering, and since he neither wants to be denuded a second time at super bantamweight by Guillermo Rigondeaux, Nonito is effectively retired, even while he sharpens his pencil, arranges his T-square and readies a protractor for his return to boxing’s ubiquitous drawing board. More interesting, though, was a prefight description of Nonito’s reconciliation with Dad, when both men, according to Nonito, were being “alphas,” and Nonito implored himself to be a man, be strong, be a man, before sobbing uncontrollably once his dad departed.

It was a reminder of a certain debility of spirit about Donaire that long made others a little uncomfortable around him: He was a very good athlete who learned to be a fighter, which of course is different from a man who knows only one way. Or perhaps the point is better made as a question: Do you think Sergey Kovalev gives himself silent peptalks about being a man?

There’s a certain harmony a man has when he enjoys being who he is, and it’s a harmony often more noticeable in its absence, in the dissonance, for example, one senses from Donaire. I was reminded of this Saturday as I watched comedian Corey Holcomb ply his craft. There he sat on Houston Improv’s small stage, in an admittedly ridiculous and sparkly outfit he called “when an old (man) tries to dress young,” entirely relaxed, under the spell of himself, being wildly offensive before an evenly mixed crowd of men and women. Holcomb began with jokes about abortion clinics and moved to jokes about other women – “side pieces,” in the vernacular the comic shares with Paulie Malignaggi – and the illegitimate children that often result, whom Holcomb called “side babies.” It was a routine designed to offend, and performed to appear theatrically oblivious of what offense it caused.

As each of Holcomb’s jokes met with equal parts ribald laughter and hateful silence, Holcomb, with wide eyes and an angelic face, mockingly imitated a man who realized he’d just gone too far – and then went much farther still. An hour of watching Holcomb from ringside, as it were, convinces one of nothing so much as the power a man possesses when he withstands the derision of others, when he is intoxicated enough by himself to alter others’ rejections of him.

It is a different sort of fortitude than what Nicholas Walters showed Saturday, but it is of a piece, a harmony, the way Walters and Holcomb’s type of self-belief forces others to harmonize with them.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

Photo by Chris Farina / Top Rank

By Norm Frauenheim

CARSON, Calif. – Marco Antonio Rubio lost money instead of weight in failing to make the 160-pound limit Friday for his attempt to upset favored Gennady Golovkin Saturday at sold-out StubHub Center.

Rubio forfeited $100,000 when he chose not to step on the scale for a second time two hours after he was 1.8 pounds heavier than the middleweight mandatory. It was no sweat for Golvkin, who came in one pound light at 159.

According to contracts filed with the California State Athletic Commission, the $100,000 price for being over-weight will be subtracted from Rubio’s $450,000 purse, which had ranked among the biggest in the Mexican’s long career. Golovkin (30-0, 27 KOs) will collect $900,000. If he loses, his title will be vacated, according to the re-done deal negotiated after the weigh-in.

Rubio trainer Robert Garcia was disappointed, yet not surprised. Despite several attempts at shedding the excess weight, Rubio (59-6-1, 27 KOs) couldn’t do it, said Garcia, who told reporters that his body “just shut down.’’

It’s hard to know what that might mean for Rubio’s chances against the heavy-handed, heavily favored Golovkin in an HBO-televised bout (10 p.m. ET/PT).

In the undercard’s featured bout, featherweights Nonito Donaire (33-2, 21 KOs) and challenger Nicolas Walters (24-0, 20 KOs) made weight, 125.6 pounds apiece.

By Norm Frauenheim–

CARSON, Calif. — The GGG at the belt of his waistband isn’t much of a secret anymore. But Gennady Gennadyevich Golovkin’s initials might as well be evolving into a marketing acronym. These days, it could be Gennady Going Global.

World class means more than a gaudy piece of tin on a plastic belt worth a lot less than the fee paid to the sanctioning bodies. It also means hitting the road the way Muhammad Ali did when he fought in Manila, Zaire, Ireland and Indonesia. Faraway places are part of the intrigue. More significant, perhaps, they are also part of the challenge. At least, they used to be.

Floyd Mayweather Jr. reigns as boxing current pound-for-pound champ. But when was the last time he answered an opening bell outside of Las Vegas’ MGM Grand? He’s become as much of a regular at the MGM as Cirque du Soleil. His last 10 bouts have been there. Mayweather plays it safe, stays at home mostly because he can.

But Golovkin has been on the move since his days as an amateur in Kazakhstan. There was a 2004 Olympic silver medal in Athens. Then, there were bouts in Germany and Monaco with a stop in Panama before a string of appearances in New York. Stamp-for-stamp, Golovkin’s passport has to be a contender. He must have more frequent-flier miles than a passenger on the old Space Shuttle.

Unlike Mayweather, Golovkin has to travel. The initial challenge was just to indtruduce him to an American audience that would have had hard time finding Kazakhstan on a map. Then, became boxing most-avoided fighter, which might be another way of saying that Mexican stars Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. and Canelo Alavrez won’t fight him in their backyard.

No problem. Golovkin will still go into that backyard anyway, albeit against a lesser Mexican name in Marco Antonio Rubio Saturday night in an HBO-televised about at the Stub Hub Center in Carson, Calif. It’s Golovkin’s first fight in Southern California and its loyal Mexican, Mexican-American fans. That audience, boxing’ most important demographic, makes this stop as significant as any in the wide, wide world of GGG.

If ticket demand is any indication, those fans are as anxious to see him live as he is to win them over. It’s a sellout. It has been for about month. The 8,000-seat outdoor arena has been expanded three times just to fulfill the demand

Make no mistake, the fans aren’t turning out to see Rubio, who is a competent enough challenger with just enough power to make things interesting. No, this is all about Golovkin and his debut in a key boxing market. If Golovkin (30-0, 27 KOs), the WBA’s 160-pound champion, impresses that crowd with another big victory, public pressure will mount on Canelo and Chavez Jr., to finally fight him. It’s just another piece in the marketing puzzle of turning Golovkin into a world-class star, who can’t be avoided anymore.

In part, Golovkin’s bout with Rubio (59-6-1, 51 KOs) has the feel of a political campaign. He’s making the Southern California stop to unleash the power in his hands, shake a few hands, win over the customers with a shy smile and leave them with no doubt about the world-class credentials possessed by a Gennady Going Global.

By Bart Barry–

Saturday at StubHub Center in Carson, Calif., in a co-main event broadcast by HBO and certain to be more entertaining than what follows it, Jamaican featherweight titlist Nicholas “The Axe Man” Walters will fight “Filipino Flash” Nonito Donaire in a WBA unification match – being that both men already have WBA featherweight titles.

Much as happened two summers ago in Dallas, when Terence Crawford looked decisively the better prizefighter at what was intended by HBO to be a Mikey Garcia showcase, 11 months ago in Corpus Christi, at what was intended to be the first steps on a path to rejuvenation for Nonito Donaire, after the birth of his child got him unswaddled by Guillermo Rigondeaux, the evening’s most impressive performance was not in the main event or even part of HBO’s broadcast. Instead, that night, in a climate that managed, still, to be sticky in November, the man who impressed most at American Bank Center was a Panama-trained Jamaican in his U.S. debut.

Nicholas “Axe Man” Walters did everything a little bit harder than expected, three matches before the main event, from swinging his invisible axe during introductions to punching Mexican Alberto Garza to smiling through his menacing postfight celebration. In a surprise bit of enthusiasm, promoter Bob Arum nodded excitedly on the apron afterward, even calling down to pressrow: “He hits hard!”

That the Axe Man does. He is long for a 126-pounder, too, quite long, and he is both more awkward and more skilled than his occasional gangliness betrays. He turns his punches over with ferocity and the tall man’s advantage of keeping his chin far from perilousness even as he imperils opponents. Vic Darchinyan, a much better technician than once believed, could not swim his way to Walters’ chin in four rounds of trying in May and finally rushed at last resorts and got knocked silly by Walters who, if he catches you turning into a punch, as he caught Darchinyan, has outage power.

Walters is marvelously well schooled, too, in a way subverted by his knockout ratio and his ringside prop, a carvedwood axe; against the southpaw Darchinyan, Walters used the length of his legs still more than the length of his arms to neutralize Darchinyan’s charges, causing Darchinyan’s feet to get tangled on his second and third step, two of every three passes. It was the type of cagey, veteran stuff one does not expect the first time he sees a man in a televised fight, which made it extra enjoyable.

Saturday Walters will fight Nonito Donaire in the co-main of what appears a good card at StubHub Center in Carson, Calif. Donaire is something of a symbol for HBO 3.0, the failed startup that happened after Ross Greenburg was sent looking for other opportunities at Showtime. Before the network realized there were fighters raised in the Soviet system and not named Klitschko, before Gennady Golovkin and Sergey Kovalev carried HBO’s 2014 Fall Calendar, in other words, the network casted about for someone it could prematurely declare great and put in non-pay-per-view showcase matches, and Top Rank happily fed it a prodigal son named Nonito.

Goodness but HBO had to lug this kid about: Nonito loves fashion, Nonito is Filipino – like Manny! – Nonito knocked out “The Raging Bull” with one punch, Nonito is PED free, Nonito is the fighter of the year because Nonito does not take PEDs! Before it all felt like such a dreadful ruse, aficionados stared intently at their screens, ready for Nonito’s greatness to knock them sideways in a flash of (Filipino) light, and instead got Nonito making an unwatchable mess with Argentine survivor Omar Narvaez in 2011, Nonito hurting his hand against Wilfredo Vazquez Jr, Nonito hopping about like an enkindled finch against Jeffrey Mathebula, Nonito dropping Toshiaki “Is Japanese for Cash-Out” Nishioka, and finally Nonito whupping Jorge Arce into his first retirement – to finish 2012.

Declared that year’s best fighter, and in retrospect it should have been a sign of all the badness to come that beating four guys with an aggregate of 14 career losses got a guy declared Fighter of the Year, Donaire talked a whole lot about becoming a father before his April 2013 match with the Cuban master Guillermo Rigondeaux, and then Rigondeaux handled Donaire so thoroughly that, in an instant, the boxing community collectively sighed, congratulated Nonito on fatherhood, and redirected the lot of its premature-greatness rhapsody towards Mikey Garcia.

Whatever came of Mikey anyway, you’re wondering, and the answer shall be revealed someday, one imagines. Why don’t we hear about that kid anymore, you’re also wondering, and that answer can be revealed directly: Gennady “GGG” Golovkin!

With all of Nonito’s charm, though interestingly never a whisper about VADA testing, and none of Mikey’s Oxnardian rebelliousness, Golovkin has supplanted both Nonito and Mikey as the prizefighter most likely to endanger a commentator’s descriptions with hyperbole overdose. And get this: Golovkin is older than both Donaire and Garcia, despite being discovered after them.

Golovkin is also dining on Mexican, Saturday, in HBO’s main event, when Marco Antonio Rubio, a man beaten soundly by “Son of the Legend” Julio Cesar Chavez Jr 32 months ago, will be brought to Golovkin’s table in Carson missing only an apple in his mouth. Far more sporting than anything to come in the ring during the main event will be the straining that goes on at ringside, as HBO’s promotional crew tries to convince viewers Rubio, the very same guy stretched in one round by Kofi Jantuah 10 years ago, has a granitic chin, moments before GGG performs the impossible feat of scoring an eighth-round corner stoppage on the unstoppable Mexican.

Saturday’s broadcast will illustrate elegantly the difference between an athletic contest and a promotional spectacle, with Walters and Donaire providing the former.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

Photo by Chris Farina / Top Rank

By Norm Frauenheim-

Sad spectacles are little bit like jagged scars. They are always there, an uncomfortable reminder that real estate between the ropes is as bizarre as it is dangerous. Jermain Taylor is another chapter in the never-ending tale of a love-affair with stories that unfold like accidents. They are doomed to fail.

Leave it up to others to judge whether Taylor should have been allowed to fight for the IBF version of the middleweight title, which he won Wednesday night with a unanimous decision over Sam Soliman in an ESPN2-televised bout in Biloxi, Miss.

We know about the brain bleed he suffered in a 2009 loss to Arthur Abraham. We know that he is facing two felony charges for allegedly shooting his cousin on August 26 at his home in suburban Little Rock. We know about the Facebook video in which he waves a gun and says he’ll never “lose to another white boy.’’

I should be outraged. But I’m not. We’ve seen it before.

Joe Mesi, who retired unbeaten, fought seven times after it was reported he had suffered two brain bleeds in a 2003 victory over Vassiliy Jirov. Floyd Mayweather Jr., who hopes to retire unbeaten, was allowed to fight and beat Miguel Cotto in 2012 before going to jail for domestic violence. Bernard Hopkins, 0-2 against Taylor, once raced across a crowded press room, confronted Joe Calzaghe and shouted that he “couldn’t go back to the projects if I let a white boy beat me.” Four months later, Calzaghe, who also retired unbeaten, scored a split-decision over Hopkins.

The story lines are familiar, because of compliant commissions, judges, legal loopholes, acronyms and money. In Taylor, however, they have come together in what looks like a perfect storm. The IBF’s 160-pound championship appears to be nothing more than a paper crown. But it’s a piece in a jagged puzzle put together behind the scenes by Al Haymon, who promised Taylor the title shot. Haymon fulfilled the deal by moving another one of his fighters, the young and dangerous Peter Quillin, into a position to take the title from Taylor, who also faces a mandatory IBF defense against Hassan N’Dam.

The light-hitting and hobbled Soliman was one thing. He’s 40-years-old. He had 11 losses in 55 fights before the loss. What qualified him to be the IBF’s middleweight champ in the first place? All of that, of course, mattered little to Haymon. Soliman added up to an easy target and that’s what Taylor has become. What might be easy for Quillin, however, is dangerous for Taylor.

It’s hard to know what to make of his Facebook video. It’s offensive, but perhaps it’s intended to be in what was a misguided attempt to sell the Soliman fight. He’s waving around a gun within seven weeks after he was arrested and charged with shooting his cousin? That’s not salesmanship. That’s stupid. It makes you wonder what Taylor is thinking, or if he’s thinking at all.

Nevertheless, Taylor is moving through a system that has pushed other star-crossed fighters into the cross-hairs they always seek and that the sport regrets after it’s too late. It’s not clear where Taylor is in the legal process. As of Thursday, there was still no court date. It could be months when he faces the only mandatory that should matter. Throw in a couple of delays, and he’ll be facing the unbeaten Quillin before he faces a jury. He has a better chance with that jury.

By Bart Barry–

DEL RIO, Texas – A few miles south of here begins the Mexican state of Coahuila, and about 40 miles north of here begins Devil’s River State Natural Area, and if you’re wondering which is more hospitable, it is Mexico – by far. There are lovely places whose brochures promise romantic getaways, and then there are mere getaways, places in America where one is likely to be found only by accident and a man on a burro. Devil’s River is the latter.

About 800 miles southwest of here, though decidedly in the same biotic region, Mexican Jhonny “Jhonny” Gonzalez beat down countryman Jorge “El Travieso” Arce, Saturday, causing referee Johnny Callas to wave the match off at 2:43 of round 11, in Arce’s home pueblo of Los Mochis, Sinaloa. Gonzalez, aficionados will recall even if Showtime programmers will not, stretched Showtime-developed titlist Abner Mares in one round, 14 months ago, and evidently got banned from the network for doing so.

Gonzalez-Arce was certain to be a better match than what last brought Arce to American premium cable, when Travieso was served hot to Nonito Donaire 22 months ago on an HBO platter, but Showtime, whose boxing coverage is in a shambles, televised instead another eyesore, this time from a casino in Connecticut, where a slate of shabby Al Haymon-managed fighters were plying their limited wares. Arce, who retired after Donaire iced him in 2012, returned, according to Arce, to win another title in another weight class, and while that might still hold meaning in noble and proud if benighted Mexico, here in the U.S. we measure greatness by a more-sophisticated metric: How many networks have you razed?

Word came last week, on a media shuttle no less, undefeated manager Al “The Annihilator” Haymon, having torn apart HBO in a six-year knockout and having destroyed Showtime in half that mark, has called-out NBC Sports Network, despite its eponymous relationship with a non-cable broadcaster, in a match that promises to include more offensive brilliance from today’s best technician. The Annihilator’s paucity of ruth raises this interesting question: If a pacifist who hated our sport set out to exterminate boxing’s American fanbase, and was willing to spend millions of his own dollars to do it, could that man turn the trick any better than The Annihilator? The match’s outcome is fun, if ultimately futile, for our generation to ponder the way previous generations pondered, say, Muhammad Ali vs. Rocky Marciano.

Meanwhile in Mexico, a country whose broadcasters are still blessedly out of The Annihilator’s reach, or too far below his weightclass, wonderful fighters still conduct wonderful fights, and yes, both Jhonny and El Travieso are wonderful fighters even if their Saturday match was not quite wonderful. Arce who, for being a fighter’s fighter, is more beloved by his opponents than just about anyone fighting today, continues to search for a chance to do to someone else what Michael Carbajal, in “Manitas de Piedra’s” 53rd and final career match, did to Arce 15 years ago. Alas, Arce had his Carbajal moment in 2011 against undefeated super bantamweight titlist Wilfredo Vazquez Jr, but Arce, at age 32, could not take yes for an answer.

Following fellow Mexican Juan Manuel Marquez’s example, Arce has grown himself a Body-by-Memo physique that features the shoulders of a statuesque middleweight and legs of a flyweight, a fitness choice that, for all its rejuvenating enhancements, makes Arce top-heavy as Marquez, causing him to fold over his lead knee whenever he throws in combination. Long known for the brawling style that immortalized him against Hussein Hussein in 2005, Arce actually has never wanted for ring IQ; you don’t get to Las Vegas as a 112-pound Sinaloan with mere toughness, because toughness is guaranteed in Sinaloa, a Mexican state of 2.8 million souls in which there is but one Jorge “El Travieso” Arce.

Toughness is guaranteed by a number of factors that mainly reduce to climate and topography. Once a shallow sea millennia ago, the North American region that ripples out from Sonora Desert comprises some of the Western Hemisphere’s more forbidding terrain. Traipsing towards, then away from, then back towards Devil’s River, Saturday, reminded me of nothing so much as marching barefoot over a rocky beach with a 25-degree incline and cacti needling you every third step. The beauty round such pristine spots is usually called “rugged” – a code word indicating every hour of pleasure must be accompanied by three of unpleasantness. All clichés spring from original truths, and clichés about the West and individualism are no exception; Saturday, 37,000 acres of Devil’s River State Natural Area were inhabited by fewer than a dozen persons, all day, and that ensures hundreds of minutes of solitude for anyone willful enough to wander unaccompanied through the expanse – and another 120 minutes of lacerating solitude for anyone dimwitted enough to misread a map and blaze his own trail through miles of thornbushes.

Jhonny Gonzalez, hailing from Mexico City though born in the more rural state of Hidalgo, is a prizefighter whose ruggedness is tempered by intelligence; Saturday he engaged Arce when the shorter man needed engaging and kept him at range the rest of the match. A man who truly likes to fight and truly knows how, Gonzalez struck Arce with perfectly placed and fully released hooks enough to drop Arce on the blue mat – complemented by a white “Playboy” bunny logo – three times, including a punctuating blow at the end of round 3, when Arce went for the knockout, his or Gonzalez’s, ¡que sea!, exactly as he did against Donaire, with a nearly identical result.

Saturday was a good way for Arce to end his career, as good as he’s likely to get anymore, but as ruggedness is not a synonym for wisdom, El Travieso surely will fight on.

Bart Barry can be found on Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim–

Dan Goossen’s death this week is a reminder that boxing survives because of the characters who have always understood that theater is as fundamental as a good jab. It’s balancing act that includes just the right mix of salesmanship, comedy, opinion and conviviality.

Goossen is the face of a passing generation that has worked hard to stay in the spotlight. He liked it. The brighter that light, the brighter the sport coat. Goossen’s colorful plumage could make sideline reporter Craig Sager’s blazers look dim. He was colorful because he wanted to be. But it was more than that. He had to be there, beneath a magnifying glare that burns out many and keeps others from ever daring to enter it.

Bob Arum understands the role. Arum never fails to enliven otherwise uneventful news conferences with a blend of jokes and insults that create headlines. Attendance is mandatory. Nothing is sacred when Arum assumes the bully pulpit. Then, there’s Don King. He has faded from the public arena, but there was a time when his malaprops and booming braggadocio were integral to the show and, more often than not, more entertaining than the card. They aren’t there to be believed. Goossen knew that. Arum and King know that. Good theater, after all, includes a lot of fiction.

There’s much to mourn in Goossen’s passing early Monday from liver cancer. He was a master at engineering the successful comeback. I remember James Toney. The media and rival promoters had already assigned Toney to the scrap heap after his career went sideways following a 1994 loss to Roy Jones Jr. Toney was woefully out of shape when he began showing up at gyms and local cards in Phoenix, where I worked for the city’s biggest daily in a forgotten era when newspapers still had fight writers. Toney had signed with Goossen, who proceeded to put together a Phoenix card in 2002 that featured him in a victory over Sione Asipelli. If memory serves, Goossen wore the purple sport coat for that one.

A reason to bring Toney to Phoenix was not without a plan. It was home to Vassiliy Jirov, then considered the world’s best cruiserweight. Goossen and Toney were in Jirov’s backyard to call him out. It worked. In April 2003, Toney scored a dramatic decision in Connecticut over Jirov in a bout the Boxing Writers Association of America voted Fight of the Year. Nobody could take the snoozer out of cruiser, but Goossen managed to with instinct that led to a Toney upset of Evander Holyfield in his next bout.

It was a brilliant one-two promotional punch, But it would not have happened without Goossen’s willingness to wage a public campaign that would have exhausted a career politician. That inexhaustible well of energy went into representing Pete Rose after the gambling scandal and Mister T, who was a bouncer in a Chicago bar when Goossen spotted him and transformed him into an offbeat movie star.

In mourning Goossen, I wonder where the business is headed without him. Can anybody imagine Al Haymon conducting a news conference? Amend that. Can anyone even imagine a Haymon quote in any media outlet? If Haymon is the example of what to expect, the spotlight might as well be a wildfire for the next generation of promoters and managers. They’ll stay away.

The spotlight enforces a level of accountability. An Arum, or a King, or a Goossen might talk, talk and talk around a looming issue or in defense of some indefensible behavior. But they are there. Buyer beware. With Haymon, however, there’s not even a chance for that caveat. The man said to be boxing’s biggest powerbroker is always in the background or in some back room. He doesn’t take questions, hence there are only suspicions.

It’s no way to run a show. Goossen was aways front and center, always in front of the curtain, instead of behind it. The show must go on. Without him, however, you wonder how it will. If it will.

By Bart Barry-

Another game changer happened Tuesday. It came with a series of email announcements and a conference call and probably a press conference, somewhere, too, so big the news this time. It was an official notice Mexican junior middleweight Saul “Canelo” Alvarez changed American cable networks.

If boxing historians return to this announcement someday, it will be to ask themselves why they returned to it.

Each purportedly seismic disruption to boxing’s landscape portends nothing but the worse for aficionados and fighters, boxing’s forgotten tribes, yet in a learned-helplessness sort of way, we ponder plethoras of possibilities and their consequences for our favorite active fighters – the few of us who still have such things. These massive upheavals in boxing began when Manny Pacquiao enjoyed a one-dreadful-night sabbatical from HBO sometime in the last few years, donned yellow gloves to fight world poverty, eradicated world poverty, and returned triumphantly to HBO, where he won a dubious decision over Juan Manuel Marquez, in red gloves, lost a decision to Timothy Bradley, then got dangled by Marquez above the unknowable plane betwixt life and death. Not long after that, another earthquake struck, and Floyd Mayweather and Al Haymon left HBO and took Richard Schaefer with them, during the conveniently forgotten years when Golden Boy Promotions’ Oscar De La Hoya was unavailable for comment.

Actually, all this may have happened in a different order or concurrently, or something, but none of it today is consequential enough to recall its exact sequence.

Tuesday, though, Tuesday! This was the big news boxing needed, when a redhaired Mexican-television creation changed from Showtime to HBO, or well, he returned, actually, to the network that manufactured him as an American attraction, such as he is – have we got an official number for Alvarez-Lara yet? – before he, perhaps unwittingly, changed American networks before his fight with Austin Trout. Why all this emphasis on American television networks? Because Alvarez isn’t beholden to them or De La Hoya or anyone else in this country: Cinnamon takes his orders from Mexican television, or at least he did till Grupo Televisa, Latin America’s largest mass-media company, watched his fight with Floyd Mayweather, realized, whatever else he was, Canelo was not a future legend of Mexican prizefighting, and filed unflattering reports that caused Alvarez to leave that network, too, and shop his services to TV Azteca.

¡O, impetuous youth! Had it not been for the unrelenting coverage, and soap-operatic scripting, of Grupo Televisa, a network powerful enough to get Alvarez an invitation to meet President Enrique Pena Nieto, husband of Angelica Rivera, a retired Televisa soap-opera actress, Alvarez might not have ascended highly as Julio “Baby Face” Garcia. What’s that, you never heard of him? Baby Face Garcia was a Mexican welterweight prodigy with a record of 40-2 (33 KOs) before his 20th birthday. His promoter dissolved into a blob, Garcia affixed that blob on his midsection, and before his 27th birthday Baby Face was an anonymous middleweight losing as often as he won in locales like Guanajuato’s Domo De La Feria and Michoacan’s Auditorio del Bicentenario – neither of which is Spanish for “MGM Grand Garden Arena.”

But Canelo is going to attack Miguel Cotto in the superfight of 2015! Prizefighting has come to this, hasn’t it? A Puerto Rican welterweight beaten to submission by Manny Pacquiao in 2009, decisioned lopsidedly by Mayweather in 2012, decisioned lopsidedly by Trout in 2012, and rejuvenated by the concoction of a new trainer and a broken-legged Argentine in June is about to make next year’s most-anticipated fight with a Mexican who won about 1/36 his match with Mayweather a year ago, beat Alfredo Angulo about convincingly as James De La Rosa just did, and squeezed past Erislandy Lara in an eyesore.

Show that to the rascals who say boxing is dead!

Marco Antonio Barrera told us this would happen, remember. A few months before his career’s penultimate match, a 2010 tilt with Adailton De Jesus in San Antonio, Barrera said the consequences of prizefighting’s being off Mexican public airwaves for a decade, because of one more depredating privatization scheme in the world, were en route and would be profound. Prizefighting off Mexican airwaves drained interest and the talent pool from Mexican gyms. It also coiled the spring of Mexicans’ undying interest in the sport. Once prizefighting returned to Mexico’s public airwaves, the people jubilantly sprung about in search of future greats. Barrera and Erik Morales subsequently attempted unserious comebacks, and Juan Manuel Marquez underwent a historic physical transformation.

TV Azteca, meanwhile, aligned itself with a goofball scion of legend Julio Cesar Chavez, and Televisa lassoed itself a redhaired horseman from Jalisco. HBO made icons of Pacquiao and Mayweather then watched with incompetent disbelief when they refused to fight each other, and Showtime placed its faith in HBO commentators and actually tried to anoint Adrien Broner. Now bereft of ideas, Showtime desperately empowers advisor Al Haymon to decimate its reputation, and HBO turns to a 32-year-old Kazakhstani middleweight whose greatest professional accomplishment, in 10 years of prizefighting, is a third-round stoppage of Daniel Geale – and Marvelous Marvin Hagler retired at age 33.

Like a downtrodden minimum-wage worker told by his millionaire master to be grateful he even has a second job to take public transportation to, though, an aficionado today feels gratitude merely at the news boxing will be televised at all this autumn, and anxiously awaits his next press conference announcement – when he ought to be yanking his cable box directly out the wall.

Bart Barry can be found on Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim

Canelo Alvarez’s jump to HBO from Showtime isn’t surprising. He follows Bernard Hopkins, who took the first step in a move that altered the business landscape with his decision to fight Sergey Kovalev on November 8. It’s hard to know what will happen next. A prediction is a fool’s exercise, especially with unresolved questions about who and how many fighters are under contract to Golden Boy Promotions and/or Al Haymon. But it’s safe to say it’s been a tough couple of weeks for Floyd Mayweather Jr., who suffered a fat lip on Sept. 13 against Marcos Maidana and then had his credibility trashed in an appearance before the Nevada State Athletic Commission.

The announcement about Canelo’s move to HBO and Mayweather’s appearance in front the of the commission happened on the same, Tuesday. Coincidence? Probably. Still, you have to wonder. This is boxing, after all. It’s a place where coincidence and conspiracy often mean the same thing. Let’s just say that Canelo and HBO celebrated while Mayweather and Showtime squirmed.

There was reason to celebrate the Canelo side of the equation.

It further paved the way for a Canelo-Miguel Cotto fight, probably next year, in a bout as big as any in the tradition of the great Puerto Rican-Mexican rivalry. It resurrected a chance at an all-Mexican showdown between Canelo and Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. showdown, although there are doubts about whether Chavez Jr. will ever get his act together long enough to be a reliable partner in any potential venture. It even generated talk about Canelo-Manny Pacquiao, but that one looks unlikely because of the weight disparity. Canelo is growing out of the 154-pound weight class and Pacquiao is considering a move down the scale, from 147 to a more natural 140.

What it took off the table, however, was just another blow for Mayweather and Showtime on an already difficult day. Forget a Canelo-Mayweather rematch. With two fights left on Mayweather’s landmark deal with Showtime, an encore with Canelo had to be at least a consideration. With 2.2 million pay-per-view customers, Mayweather’s majority decision over Canelo set revenue records. For the fighter who calls himself Money, that was the primary reason to do it one more time. Given ho-hum pay-per-view results for the other three fights on his Showtime contract — fewer than one million PPV for Robert Guerrrero and twice for Maidana, the network would have been happy to go back to the Canelo bank.

It’s hard to know exactly where Mayweather and Showtime go now. In his post-fight news conference after his rematch victory over Maidana, Mayweather suggested that he might take off a year, skipping his resumed May date for a fight next September. With talk about an imminent split between him and promotional partner Leonard Ellerbe, that looks to be as likely as any other possibility. Some quiet time might be the only option for Mayweather. The more he talks, the less believable he becomes. If the emperor has no clothes, the pound-for-pound king has no credibility. He said he had a personal goal of knocking out Maidana in the rematch, yet he danced away from the opportunity in the 12th round. He said he had no relationship with controversial conditioning coach Alex Ariza before opening bell and then Ariza tells Filipino media that he has signed a two-year contract with Mayweather.

At the Nevada hearing, he embarrassed Showtime by saying sequences shown on All-Access were staged. Don’t believe, he said, sequences showing 31-minute rounds of sparring in the so-called Dog House at his Las Vegas gym and of women smoking what was assumed to be marijuana at his home.

“That’s all for the reality show,” Mayweather attorney Shane Emerick told the regulator board. “It does not happen.”

Huh? Reality is the new fantasy, or vice versa, or some thing like that.

Then again, maybe there’s a chance at some good news in the Mayweather mess too. Now, more than ever, he needs Pacquiao to restore his credibility. Question is, does he really care about that? If he doesn’t, he might retire unbeaten, but with a legacy defined by Pacquiao, Antonio Margarito, Kostya Tszyu, Sergio Martinez, Paul Williams and everybody else he didn’t fight.

By Bart Barry–

SAN ANTONIO – Saturday night I attended “Jazz’SAlive,” a two-day, free-admission jazz festival in the newly restored Travis Park, which abuts St. Mark’s, the gothic-revival Episcopal church where Lyndon Baines Johnson married Claudia Alta Taylor 80 years ago. As always, the event happened two weeks before the lovely weather arrives, reducing crowds still more than the festival’s recent reduction in marquee names. There are few better places to be present and watch the mind play than a jazz festival, though, and so there I was, sitting on a shinyblack park bench between entrepreneurs and homeless men, reminiscing about how I got here.

And there was boxing. It was Manny Pacquiao against Jorge Solis at Alamodome, in April 2007, a staybusy affair during Pacquiao’s first, and unsuccessful, congressional campaign, that introduced me to a spot thrice as tropical, lush and verdant as I previously considered Texas might be. This town, birthplace of mentor and friend Norm Frauenheim who told me a few weeks before Pacquiao-Solis “you’re going to like that city,” became and remains my favorite place I’ve lived.

If you are reading this, you know fewer than one percent the fights you’ve seen are fights coworkers or uninterested familiars inquired about before they happened. You also know the best fights you’ve seen live are fights those same coworkers and familiars, the sorts of men who would pose for a selfie beside a fighter at a fundraiser, fist raised in an ironical nod to something they saw in an old b&w photo or to irony itself, so meta-ironical the lads, would neither know by name nor endure for what 40 minutes their complete viewing requires on YouTube. But they know you like boxing, and they’ve heard of Floyd Mayweather or Oscar De La Hoya or Mike Tyson or the one guy their dads used to watch back whenever whenever in the living room on Friday or Saturday night, whichever has the hour’s more nostalgic ring, and they wonder if you’re going to be in Vegas Baby! or The Garden or Staples for what they will call The Big Fight.

It happened often enough to me – and the frequency with which one hears these questions is directly proportionate to his dayjob’s figurative distance from prizefighting – I devised an easy way of justifying my travel plans, or at least explaining them away, in two questions: 1. Will it be a good fight? and 2. Is it somewhere I wish to visit? I must be able to answer in the affirmative one of those to consider making the trip, and I must have an immediately apparent conflict to not-make the trip if I answer affirmatively both.

The credentials scrum being what it is on the East Coast, the credentials scrum is often a conflict feasible enough to forego the boundless aggravation of playing tourist in Pennsylvania, New Jersey or New York. Most of the fights to which I have access and believe worthy their travel and expense, then, happen in Las Vegas, naturally, with Southern California placing a distant third behind Texas locales in Houston or Dallas. Las Vegas is not a place I have ever wished to visit, which allows me to judge Vegas superfights dispassionately, which allows me to forgo every Mayweather tilt and what Pacquiao matches are made for revenue and spectacle, not legacy, be they against De La Hoya or Ricky Hatton.

Generally, in a nod to my enduring love of novelty, a city’s best chance of being somewhere I wish to visit is being somewhere I’ve not visited. That brought me to Detroit Metropolitan Airport in Jan. 2011, and a Friday night rave with two young surgeons, too, before Timothy Bradley unmanned Devon Alexander, the man who went on to beat Marcos Maidana so thoroughly Maidana set his mind on an immediate retirement 39 months before he fought Mayweather. It sent me to Oakland two years ago to see Andre Ward ruin Chad Dawson in what may well have been the last meaningful fight of “S.O.G.’s” career. It sent me to Colorado last year to see architect Daniel Libeskind’s groundbreaking Denver Art Museum, its titanium cladding brilliant in the hyper-definition of mile-high air, and the Rocky Mountains, and Ruslan Provodnikov’s lambasting of Mike Alvarado. It brought me here, my adopted hometown in South Texas, 7 1/2 years ago for a Pacquiao fight more easily forgotten than the ease with which Cristian Mijares undressed Jorge Arce on the undercard, and an attorney from the ACLU I met in a coffeeshop across the street from where this is being written.

Boxing was more fun back then; promoters were still crooked and local commissions were still corrupt and managers still maximized purses and minimized risk, because the consumer is a television executive, not a boxing fan, but there was a spirit of chance governing events, a palpable chance an event’s power brokers had sliced things too fine in negotiations and favorites might lose or fall prey to unpredictable things. There was more of the sacred unknown back then, before dryasdust operators like Richard Schaefer and Al Haymon merged and acquired.

Like most things meaningful in life, like most permanent changes, the end of all this fun did not come with a blazon of trumpets or clash of cymbals. Historians will blame the Mayweather-Pacquiao saga, and we’ll go along with them – not because it’s necessarily true but because the culpable parties deserve lasting scorn – though the unwinding was present even before then, it was present the week Pacquiao battered Miguel Cotto in Las Vegas and fired the starter’s pistol on a half-decade of publicly failed negotiations.

What justifies travel is the joy of spontaneity. No spectacle is more spontaneous, less predictable, than what Juan Manuel Marquez did to Pacquiao in 2012 or Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. did to Sergio Martinez a few months before that. No elements of these trips were more memorable than what spontaneous connections formed with former strangers, away from hotel lobbies, away from conference rooms, away from promoters, away from scripted gatherings of all kinds. Away and away.

Bart Barry can be found on Twitter @bartbarry