By Norm Frauenheim-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Essentially impossible.

By Bart Barry–

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim-

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

Guess Rikers Island wasn’t available.

Turns out, nothing was.

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

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

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

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

A mounting death toll says something else.

Defiance isn’t a vaccine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s not.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Bart Barry-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

*

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe.

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

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

Best guess?

Expect a lot less.

By Bart Barry-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry 

By Norm Frauenheim-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Bart Barry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Happy to help,” said Mark.

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

*

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

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They don’t know.

Nobody knows.

Coronavirus has a mind of its own.   

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Bart Barry-

Initiative is the word for it.

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

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

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

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

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

Wilder: What?

Fury: Aye.

Wilder: Wait, what?

Fury: Aye.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim-

Deontay Wilder is a predictable target on sociopath media these days. Anybody, which means just about everybody, with a keyboard and an insult is piling on in the wake of his one-sided loss to Tyson Fury.

Everybody, that is, but Fury.

The fundamental goodness in Fury has been evident throughout interviews this week in the UK. Fury beat him up. Forced his corner to surrender in the seventh round. Within the ropes, he showed no mercy. Outside of them, he has shown empathy for a fellow fighter struggling to come to terms with his first defeat.

In part, perhaps, that’s because Fury has already been trashed by the virtual vigilantes, who have buried Wilder beneath their malice for blaming his loss on the collection of nuts, bolts and batteries that were part of his armored costume. The 40-pound get-up weakened him in his walk to the ring, Wilder said before video surfaced of him saying he trained while wearing a 45-pound weighted vest.

There’s been no bunker deep enough, no armored suit protective enough, to shield him from what has followed.

Fury has been there, a target of public shaming, during dark days of drinking, drugging, eating and agonizing in the aftermath of his 2015 upset of Wladimir Klitschko.

He was the heavyweight champ with heavyweight mental issues, an accident in the making and always in the headlines. He was stripped of his titles and stripped of his sanity. But he made it back, came back with a unique understanding of the kind of adversity now facing Wilder.

Fury came into the ring to Patsy Cline’s country classic, Crazy. Fury knows something about crazy.

“I can understand where he’s coming from,” Fury told ITV’s This Morning. “In every fighter’s mind, there’s got to be a reason why they’ve lost. It can never be a simple fact (of) I wasn’t good enough on the night and lost to the better guy. It’s always got to be: ‘The camp was wrong. It was the trainer’s fault. It was my suit, it was my toe.’

“With me, if I’m injured or whatever the problem is, it’s like, ‘OK, the performance wasn’t great. But I’m going to move on and crack on.’ ‘’

The question is whether Wilder will be able to move on. He’s already exercised a contract clause for a third fight, tentatively set for July 18 at Las Vegas MGM Grand, site of the last bout. With an interim fight, Wilder might be able to restore some confidence, which figures to be shaky after the beatdown he suffered on Feb. 22.

But business is business, and Fury promises to subject him to another business-like beating.

 “I beat him the first time,” said Fury, who fought Wilder to a controversial draw on Dec. 1, 2018 in their first meeting. “I beat him the second time. I’ll surely beat him the third time.’’

Hard to argue with that.

However, it’s also clear that Fury and Wilder like each other. Throughout all the trash-talking exchanges at news conferences before the rematch, there were moments when that was evident. You could see it in their eyes and their body language. After shoving each other at the final newser, there was a break. They smiled, an acknowledgement that those were friendly shoves.

Fury was also careful not to spark any racial controversy. Race has always been part of boxing. After all, it’s the sport the created The Great White Hope. Wilder dropped some racial hints. February was Black History Month. Wilder said he wanted to turn Fury into a Black History Month trivia question.

But Fury wouldn’t go there.

“This is not a racial war,’’ Fury said when asked about Wilder’s comment a couple of days before opening bell.

No, it was not.

Is not.

It simply was about two men who happen to like each other despite the war that awaited them.

And still awaits them.

“The one thing I will say about Deontay Wilder is he’s a very worthy opponent, and he’s a very dangerous opponent,” Fury said. “He has that eraser power of 43 knockouts, only the one defeat, and you can never write a guy off like that. It’s always one punch away from disaster with Deontay.

“Like he famously says, ‘They have to be correct for 36 minutes, I have to be correct for one second.’

“And that’s so true.”

Nice to hear something so genuinely true, too.Attachments area

By Bart Barry-

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ll take more of that, please.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

Follow all the action as Mikey Garcia takes on Jessie Vargas in a welterweight showdown.  The action starts at 6 PM eastern with an undercard that features two world title bouts that will have WBC Flyweight champion Julio Cesar Martinez taking on Jay Harris; WBA Super Flyweight champ Kal Yafai takes on former champion Roman Gonzalez

NO BROWSER REFRESH NEEDED. THE PAGE WILL UPDATE AUTOMATICALLY.

Round 1: Left hook from Vargas..Straight right..hook to body..quick hook…each land a jab

Round 2 Hard 1-2 from Vargas..Jab from Garcia..Hook from Vargas.Hook from Garcia..2 right to body from Vargas..

Round 3 Jab from Vargas..Jab from Garcia..Right from Vargas..1-2 from Garcia..Jab from Vargas..Jab from Garcia..Good right from Vargas

Round 4 Hard jab from Garcia..Counter left..Hook from Vargas..Hard left from Vargas..Hard right from Garcia..Jab to Body from Vargas..Right to body

Round 5 Right to body from Vargas..Jab to body,,,body and head…Blood from nose of Vargas..Hook from Garcia..Big right wobbles Vargas…RIGHT AND DOWN GOES VARGAS…Hard body shot from Garcia

Round 6 Uppercut from Garcia..Jab from Vargas..Good jab..

Round 7 Good right from Garcia..Hook from Vargas..Big right from Garcia..Big right wobbles Vargas again and in trouble on the ropes

Round 8 Right from Garcia…Left hook..2 jabs from Vargas..Right from Vargas

Round 9 Good Jab from Vargas..Chopping right from Garcia..

Round 10 Vargas lands a right to the jaw..Hard right from Garcia hurts Vargas..1-2 to the body..Body shot

Round 11 Right from Garcia

Round 12 Right from Vargas..Left wobbles Vargas..Vargas right eye swelled up..Right from Vargas

114-113, 116-111 twice for GARCIA

Round 1 Hook to body from Gonzalez..Body and Head

Round 2 Right from Gonzalez..Body and Head..Body..Body shot and uppercut..Body shot from Yafai

Round 3 Right from Yafai..Good hook to body from Gonzalez…right to head

Round 4 Good jab from Yafai..Right from Gonzalez..Good combination..3 punch combination

Round 5  Yafai lands a right to the body..Body shots..good action on inside..

Round 6 Gonzalez cut over right eye..Good uppercut from Gonzalez..Good body shot from Yafai..Right from Gonzalez..Good uppercut..Left hook..Bidy shot from Yafai

Round 7 Hard shot from Gonzalez..Gonzalez landing barrage..Yafai looking tired..Body from Gonzalez

Round 8 Uppercut from Gonzalez..Hook..Big combination..HUGE FLURRY AND DOWN GOES YAFAI

Round 9 BIG RIGHT AND DOWN GOES YAFAI…FIGHT OVER

Round 1:  Harris jabs..Good Jab..Hard shot and good uppercut from Martinez..Nice 1-2..Harris lands a good jab and right hand…Quick combination..Hook to the head from Martinez..Straight right and a barrage 

Round 2 Jab and Body shot from Harris…3 punch combination..Good right,,Martinez land a good right..1-2

Round 3 Good left from Martinez..Good left from Harris..Body shots from Martinez..Uppercut..Good right from Harris

Round 4 Hard body work from Martinez..Good body shots..Body and head..Right to body..Hard jab from Harris..Good hook to the body..Hook from Martinez..Blood around left eye of Harris..Good combination and right to head from Harris..jab and good right from Martinez.Good hook from Harris

Round 5 Hook from Harris…Hard body shots from Martinez..Body attack from Harris..Uppercut and body shot

Round 6 Harris doing well with body shots

Round 7 Hard power shots drives Harris back..3 punch combination from Harris..Hard jab drives Harris back..Good left..Good combination from Harris..Harris gets driven back from a jab..good body work from Martinez..Right from Harris..Right from Martinez…Harris snaps Martinez head back..Left hook and right

Round 8 Good combination from Martinez..Good right from Harris..Combination from Martinez..Good combination for Harris..Right from Martinez

Round 9  Hard right from Martinez..3 hard shots..Good back in forth..3 punch combo from Harris..Hook

Round 10 BODY SHOT AND DOWN GOES HARRIS..Right from Harris..good hook..Body shot.Body shot and hook to the head

Round 11 Hard right to body from Martinez..Good right to body

Round 12 2 body punches from Martinez…5 punch combination

Round 2 Right from Parker..Chopping right..Nice hook from Winter..Good right..Hook from Parker

Round 3 HARD RIGHT AND DOWN GOES WINTERS

Round 4 Double left hook from Parker…Hook from Winters..Parker cut under the right eye…Body shots from Parker

Round 5 Big right from Parker..hard right..RIPPING 3 PUNCH COMBINATION AND DOWN GOES WINTERS…FIGHT OVER

Round 1: Good left hook from Madrimov..Solid right..Counter right from Navarro..
Round 2 Good left hook hurts Navarro..Nice Combination..Right to the head..Navarro holding his eye
Round 3 Counter right from Madrimov..Nice Jab..
Round 4 Overhand right from Madrimov…Combination…Good jab..Hard Hook..Hard right
Round 5 Good right to the body
Round 6 Right hook snaps the head back of Navarro..Body shot..Head shot..Jabbing to the head..HARD BODY SHOT AND DOWN GOES NAVARRO..RIGHT AND DOWN GOES NAVARRO…FIGHT OVER

Round 1 Right from Pacheco
Round 2 hard right from Pacheco…3 more rights
Round 3  Pacheco continuing to land the right
Round 4 Straight right from Pacheco..Right to the face..Jab..
Round 5 Good right from Pacheco..Good hard right..3 punch combination
Round 6 Body shot from Riojas..Hard right staggers Riojas..2 more rights..Another right

By Norm Frauenheim-

Mikey Garcia has been called stubborn more than once. It’s a multi-edged adjective. There’s the good stubborn, as in the tenacious Garcia. There’s the bad stubborn, as in the obstinate Garcia.

Apply the good or the bad, it doesn’t make much difference. Garcia proceeds on his terms and always with his own idea of what he wants from an accomplished career that already includes titles at featherweight, junior-lightweight, lightweight and junior-welterweight.

That stubborn streak has taken him back to the city and the weight he was at a year ago in a disappointing loss to Errol Spence Jr. at AT&T Stadium, the Dallas Cowboys home field.

Garcia (39-1, 30 KOs) will be nearby in Frisco at The Ford Center against Jessie Vargas (29-2-2, 11 KOs) Saturday night on DAZN. He says he has something to prove, perhaps as much to himself as to his fans.

“I’m here to do one thing,’’ he said at a news conference this week. “I’m here to take over. I’m here to show that there’s a lot more to Mikey Garcia. I’m here to show all my skills, here to remind everyone that I can be a serious welterweight contender.’’

He last time we saw Garcia in the ring, he looked like a fighter who had moved too far up the scale. He looked sluggish. Out of sorts. It was forgettable and perhaps it could have been forgotten altogether by a fight at a lighter weight that would showcase, instead of suffocate, a disciplined skillset that had put Garcia among the top five in the pound-for-pound debate. The talk was that Garcia would be best-served back at 140 pounds, perhaps in a big-money bout against Manny Pacquiao.

But Garcia hasn’t forgotten the performance against Spence. Or the talk. Time is one way to forget. But Garcia wants to knock out the memory with a stoppage of the bigger Vargas. Vargas hasn’t fought in nearly a year since his stoppage of Humberto Soto last April in Los Angeles. But Garcia hasn’t exactly been busy either. He hasn’t fought since Spence dominated him in every way in scoring a unanimous decision on March 16.

Vargas’ superior size and world-class resume at 147 pounds are factors that could remind Garcia of what happened to him a year ago.

“He has everything, all of things that people say about what I shouldn’t be doing and fighters I shouldn’t be fighting,’’ Garcia said. “That motivates me.’’

Motivates him to be as stubborn as ever.

By Kyle Kinder–

Violence and boxing are inseparable.  For some fighters, the violence boxing demands is omnipresent.  It already exists inside their being when they enter the ropes and remains with them when they exit the ring.  It’s an unshakable part of their existence, and left unchecked, can land themselves or others in early graves.

In Slaughter in the Streets: When Boston Became Boxing’s Murder Capital, the third offering of Hamilcar Publication’s true-crime Hamilcar Noir series, author Don Stradley unearths an astonishingly long list of 20th century Boston boxers who failed to escape the city’s long shadow of violence, each ultimately dying unnatural, gruesome deaths. 

Written in sixteen brief, fast-paced chapters, Stradley highlights the tragic ends of different ex-Boston fighters in each, though murder is hardly reserved for the chapter’s main subjects. Readers begin in Prohibition-era Boston where a former South Boston flyweight-turned mob boss winds up face down in a pool of his own blood in an attorney’s office two days before Christmas, 1931.  Stradley chronologically bookends his work in the final chapter where he details the 1999 killing of a former amateur standout; an unlucky recipient of a round bullets pumped into his body in broad daylight.  

In between the Prohibition-era slayings and the murder near the close of the millennium, Stradley writes about the final moments of former fighters of all fistic skill levels — from regional titlists to career journeymen to amateurs.  And though these Massachusetts

men willingly partook in sanctioned violence, it was their shared fate, brought on by unsanctioned, criminal violence that binds their stories together in the pages Slaughter in the Streets.

For a few fighters, their deaths were simply a matter of wrong place, wrong time.  But most of

Stradley’s subjects were men who sought out a violent lifestyle, drawn to the bright lights and false promises of Boston’s underworld, but rarely ever amounted to anything more than wannabe gangsters — bodyguards, henchmen, and low-level criminals.

While there is no shortage of literature on boxing’s ties to organized crime, most stories focus on the Northeast’s other two big cities:  New York and Philadelphia. In Slaughter in the Streets, Stradley uses the murders of ex-pugilists to delve into Boston’s underbelly.  Readers first journey back to 1920’s Boston where they’re introduced to Southie’s ruthless “Gustin Gang” and their Italian rivals.  Eventually, they wind up in Whitey Bulger’s realm and learn of connections between the sweet science and his infamous Winter Hill Gang.

The brutal stories brought forth by Stradley in Slaughter In The Streets will appeal to a broad audience, including history buffs and New Englanders.  But if nowhere else, this book belongs in the hands of every boxing fan and true crime aficionado, for it’s sure to quench the primitive thirst for blood shared by both.

Slaughter in the Streets: When Boston Became Boxing’s Murder Capital

By Don Stradley

144 pages. Hamilcar Publications. $10.99.

Publication Date: February 25, 2020

Follow all the action as Deontay Wilder defends the WBC Heavyweight Title in a much anticipated rematch.  The action begins at 9 PM ET / 6 PM PT/2 AM in England with Charles Martin taking on Gerald Washington in a heavyweight bout; Emanuel Navarrete takes on Jeo Santisima for WBC Super Bantamweight bout and the action starts with Sebastian Fundora against Daniel Lewis.

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Round 1 Right from Fury..Right from Wilder..Good right from Fury.Jab…Left..Ripping jab..Fury outlanded Wilder 8-5

Round 2 Jab from Fury..another….Long right from Wilder..Jab to the body..Left from Fury..Right from Wilder..Right from Fury..Right from Wilder

Round 3 Jab and flush right from Fury..Right..Stiff jab..Good rightHUGE RIGHT AND DOWN GOES WILDER..Wilder is very hurt

Round 4 Guys tangle legs Wilder goes down..Body shot from Fury..Wilder looking spent already

Round 5 Huge right from Fury…LEFT TO BODY AND DOWN GOES WILDER..Wilder holding on..Big right from Fury..point deducted from fury for hitting on break

Round 6 Right from Fury..hard right to body..Clipping right..Straight right..Left from Wilder..Big left from Fury..left hook

Round 7 Left from Fury..Another big left..2 HUGE RIGHTS AND THE FIGHT IS STOPPED

Round 1 Left from Martin

Round 2 Left to Body from Martin

Round 3 

Round 4 Left to body from Martin..Straight left

Round 5 Right from Washington..Straight left from Martin..Lead left..Left to the head..Right from Washington..

Round 6  HUGE LEFT AND DOWN GOES WASHINGTON…FIGHT IS OVER

Round 1 Left to body by Navarrete

Round 2 Santisima lands a left to the body..3 punch combo from Navarrete..Jab

Round 3 Body shot from Navarrete..Another body shot

Round 4 Right from Santisima...Hard left

Round 5 Navarrete lands a series of rights..Left hook from Santisima….Hard right from Navarrete..he is starting to ramp up the attack..2 uppercuts and body shot

Round 6 Right from Navarrete..Body from santisima..Left hook from Navarrete..

Round 7 Left from Navarrete..

Round 8 Body shot from Santisima…Left and right from Navarrete..Jab..Santisima lands a body shot..

Round 9 Right from Navarrete…

Round 10 Combination on inside from Navarrete..Hard right to the head..

Round 11 Hard 11 punches UNANSWERED AND THE FIGHT IS TOPPED FOR NAVARRETE

Round 1 Right from Lewis..jab from Fundora..Right hook..Right to body..Uppercut from Lewis..

Round 2 Right from Lewis…Right to body from Fundora..Right from Lewis..Good right…Blood from nose from Fundora..Hard uppercut from Lewis..uppercut

Round 3 Uppercut from Fundora…Right..Right Hook..Right Hook..Right from Lewis..Lewis bleeding under the eyes

Round 4 Right from Lewis..Left from Fundora..Left…

Round 5 Right from Lewis

Round 6 Right from Lewis…Combination from Fundora..Right from Lewis…Left from Fundora..Straight left

Round 7 Body shot from Lewis

Round 8 Jab from Fundora

Round 9 2 lefts from Lewis…Left to body from Fundora..right to body…Straight left,..

Round 10 Straight left from Fundora.

By Norm Frauenheim-

LAS VEGAS – There been a lot of talk about what — who — awaits the Deontay Wilder-Tyson Fury winner of a long-anticipated heavyweight rematch Saturday at the MGM Grand.

The winner moves on to a bigger fight and a bigger challenge against Anthony Joshua, who holds most of the heavyweight belts. At least, that the presumptive plan.

But Fury promoter Bob Arum thinks the challenge is overrated.

Joshua is not among the elite, Arum said in a reference to Andy Ruiz Jr.’s stunning stoppage of Joshua on June 1 at New York’s Madison Square Garden.

“Any fighter that loses, not only loses, but gets knocked out by Andy Ruiz, who at best is a slightly above-average heavyweight, is not an elite fighter. Period,” Arum told a few reporters this week.

Arum also was not impressed with Joshua in a rematch victory over Ruiz on Dec. 7 in Saudi Arabia. Joshua decision was celebrated by fans and media, who called it vindication for the UK heavyweight.

“Secondly, when Andy Ruiz goes into the second fight obese – obese, not even really having trained – and Joshua doesn’t knock the guy out and destroy him, instead dances around for 12 rounds, he is not an elite fighter,” said Arum, who once promoted Ruiz.

Joshua scored a one-sided decision — winning 10 rounds on one scorecard and 11 rounds on each other two – with a cautious strategy.

Arum said Joshua fought scared.

“I think Joshua will fight all the rest of his fights in his career scared,” Arum said. “And you know what happens to scared fighters.”

If Fury wins and there’s no immediate rematch with Wilder, negotiations with Joshua promoter Eddie Hearn could get scary, too.

By Bart Barry-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

*

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

Follow all the action as Caleb Plant defends the IBF Super Middleweight title against mandatory challenger Vincent Feigenbutz.  The action begins at 8 PM ET with Austin Dulay taking on Diego Magdaleno.  Bryant Perrella takes on Abel Ramos

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Round 1 Plant lands a right to the body..Right to body..

Round 2 Right drives Feigenbutz back..Sharp Jab

Round 3 Right from Plant..Hard combination..Uppercut and hook..

Round 4 Body shot from Plant…Jab

Round 5 Combination from Plant..Uppercut

Round 6 Feigenbutz throws a barrage…Plant smiles at him..Jab to head and body from Plant..Plant outlanding Feigebutz 101-23

Round 7  Good body shot from Plant..Jab from Feigenbutz..Left to body from Plant..2 crisp jabs..

Round 8 Plant lands a left..Good hook from Feigenbutz..Uppercut from Plant

Round 9 Big right from Plant rocks Feigenbutz..3 punch combination..Hard right..Blood from Nose of Feigenbutz..Hard body shot from Plant..Another hard body shot

Round 10 Body shot from Plant..Good right..Feigenbutz taking a lot of punishment..Ripping body and head combo..Beautiful uppercut..Hrd 3 punch combination..Right from Feigenbutz..COMBINATION AND THE FIGHT IS STOPPED

Round 1 Left from Perrella…

Round 2 Blood from nose of Ramos..Body shots from Perrella

Round 3 Left from Perrella…Backing Ramos up

Round 4 Jab from Perrella..Left from Perrella hurts Ramos..Combination..

Round 5 Jab from Perrella…Right from Ramos..

Round 6 Combinations from Perrella..Jabs…

Round 7 Hook from Ramos…Good body shot..

Round 8 Ramos coming forward..uppercut from Perrella..Short shots inside..

Round 9 Perrella lands a left to the body..Good body shots…

Round 10 Good right from Ramos,..HUGE UPPERCUT AND DOWN GOES PERRELLA..BIG RIGHT AND DOWN GOES PERRELLA…THE FIGHT IS OVER

Round 1  Left from Dulay..Good combination from Magdaleno….Combination from Dulay..Hook from Magdaleno..

Round 2 Straight left from Dulay..Popping left..Good body shot from Magdaleno

Round 3 Good counter from Dulay..Good left..

Round 4 Jab from Magdaleono..Hard left from Dulay..Good combination from Magdaleno…

Round 5 Jab from Magdaleno…Dulay goes down from a low blow

Round 6 Good body shot from Magdaleno..Straight left…Combination..Uppercut from Dulay..Hard body from Magdaleno

Round 7 BODY SHOT AND DOWN GOES DULAY..Hard body shot…Dulay goes down from a low blow..MAGDALENO DEDUCTED A POINT…Body shot hurts Dulay..Hard left to the head…Body shot..Counter left

Round 8 Left from Magdaleno..

Round 9 Combination to body from Magdaleno..Another body shot..Another..Yet another..Good left from Dulay…Left

Round 10 Hard left from Magdaleno..Good 1-2..Body shot..Another body shot..Uppercut from Dulay..Hard body shot..

97-91 AND 96-92 TWICE FOR MAGDALENO

By Norm Frauenheim-

Tyson Fury moves from profane to prophetic in interviews in much the same way he switches from orthodox to southpaw in the ring. It’s subtle, almost seamless, which makes it hard to detect. It also makes him dangerous.

He’s a man with many sides. He’s fighter with many styles. The idea is to keep everybody guessing, especially Deontay Wilder, who believes his singular power will be enough to knock down and knock out whatever version of Fury shows up from round to round in their long-awaited rematch Feb. 22 at Las Vegas’ MGM Grand.

“I’m ready for war, one round or twelve,’’ Fury said during an international conference call this week.

Translation: It might — emphasis on might – mean that Fury is prepared for any eventuality in what many say is an extension of the 12-round fight than ended in a draw 14 months ago at Los Angeles’ Staples Center. This heavyweight rivalry could end in the 13th round or the 24^th round. But Fury is confident it will end in his favor. He’s also confident it will end in a knockout.

He likes his chances, in large part because he simply has more ways to fight than Wilder does. Fury has options; Wilder has only one.

“I learned that he can be hit quite regularly,’’ Fury said. “He’s one-dimensional, a one-trick pony, and on Feb. 22 I’m going to prove that.’’

Wilder’s dimension is in the power he possesses in a right hand that is delivered with leverage and astonishing speed. Wilder’s record speaks for itself. Forty-one stoppages in 43 fights is a formula to fear. But Fury isn’t afraid, in part because he has done something as singular as Wilder’s right hand. He’s the only one who got up from it, not once, but twice – first in the ninth round and again in an incredible twelfth.

“I felt the power,’’ Fury says. “Ain’t so bad, ain’t so bad.’’

Ain’t so good, perhaps for Wilder, who might be left wondering whether he has run into the one fighter resilient enough to survive boxing’s version of a weapon of mass destruction. If doesn’t work this time, what will?

“It’s not about getting knocked down,’’ Fury said. “It’s about what happens when you get up.’’ 

There’s controversy about whether the count from referee Jack Reiss was too long in the dramatic final round on Dec.1, 2018. Nevertheless, Fury got up in time to resume what was yet to be decided. He got up in time to work his body into even better condition. This time, there was no crash diet, no battle to a lose a reported 100 pounds over long year.  He looks to be in condition.

“You’re going to see the best Tyson Fury that’s ever been,’’ he said, promising still another version of a fighter who never quits re-inventing himself into someone Wilder never expected.

By Bart Barry-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

Follow all the action as Gary Russell Jr . defends the WBC Featherweight title against undefeated mandatory challenger Tugstsogt Nyambayar.  the action kicks off at 9 PM ET with Jaime Arboleda taking on Jayson Velez.  Guillermo Rigondeaux tales on Liborio Solis for the WBA Bantamweight title.

NO BROWSER REFRESH NEEDED…THE PAGE WILL UPDATE AUTOMATICALLY 

Round 1: Left from Russell..Left..Counter right from Nyamabyar..

Round 2 2 counter lefts from Russell..Jab…left..double jab

Round 3 Body and left from Russell..Triple jab..Right from Nyambayar..Right hook from Russell

Roun d 4 Left from Russell..

Round 5 Right from Nyambayar 

Round 6 Right from Nyambayar…Good right..Right..Jab…Left from Russell

Round 7 Body shots by Nyambayar…Left from Russell..Left to body from Nyambayar..Right to body..Left from Russell..Right to body from Nyambayar….Body work drives Russell Back,,

Round 8 Left to body from Russell,.quick combination..Straight left..

Round 9 Body shot from Nyambayar…Hard straight left from Russell..Right from Nyambayar..Straight left from Russell..Right from Nyambayar..4 Punch combination,,3 punch combination,,

Round 10 Long right from Nyambayar…Right in the corner.. Good straight left from Russell

Round 11 Russell works the body..Both working inside..Left from Russell..Quick combination

Round 12 Right from Nyambayar..Left from Russell…Body work from Nyambayar..Left from Russell..Right from Nyambyar..

116-112; 117-111; 118-110  FOR GARY RUSSELL

Round 1 Solis being aggressive lands a right..2 Hard lefts from Rigindeaux

Round 2 Left from Rigindeaux..

Round 3 Counter left from Rigindeaux..

Round 4

Round 5 Right from Solis..Left to body from Rigindeaux

Round 6 Right from Solis

ROUND 7 HUGE LEFT AND DOWN GOES SOLIS…Huge left..

Round 8 Left from Rigondeaux

Round 9 Good left from Rigondeaux..Counter left.

Round 10 Rigondeaux lands 3 hard lefts on the ropes..Left to body..

Round 11 Counter inside hook from Rigindeaux..Right from Solis..Left from Rigondeaux

Round 12 

115-112 Rigondeaux; 115-112 Solis, 116-111 Rigondeaux

Round 1 Arboleda lands a nice right
Round 2 Right and left from Arboelda…gHard right from Velez..Right from Distance
Round 3 Double jab and right from Velez..Double left to body..Jab from Arboleda..Left to body from Velaz…Jab from Arboleda…Right to body..Left…Left from Arboleda..
Round 4 Good body combo from Arboleda..Left and right…Right from Velez…Hard left hook from Arboleda…Good right from Velez
Round 5  Big right from Arboelda drives Velez to the corner..Left hook..Hard right..Solid right from Velez..Uppercut and right from Arboleda..Hard uppercut and right..God action on the inside
Round 6 Left from Velez..Right and left…Left from Arboleda
Round 7 Double jab from Arboleda..Jab..Good right..Jab..Right..Left hook..Straight right
Round 8 Jab from Arboleda…Uppercut…Left from Velez..Right…Left and right from Arboleda…Left from Velez
Round 9 Left hook from Arboleda..Left from Velez drives Arboleda back..Blood from Nose of Arboleda..Good right from Arboleda..Snapping left..Left…Good left from Velez..
Round 10 Right from Velez..Left from Velez wobbles Arbdela…Right drives him back..Right
Round 11 Good right from Arbodela..Right from Velez..Left from Velez
Round 12  Left hook from Arboleda..Hard left from Velez..3 punch combo..hard combination..BIG RIGHT AND DOWN GOES ARBOLEDA..Huge uppercut rocks Arboleda..Big right wobbles Arboleda again

115-112 Velez; 114-113 Arboleda; 114-113 Arboleda

By Norm Frauenheim-

The before-and-after photos are astonishing. The physical transformation of Tyson Fury continues. A couple of years ago, he made Andy Ruiz Jr. look skinny.

Now, he might be making Deontay Wilder nervous.

Come to think of it, that might be the reason for the photo of Fury looking fit and fight-ready for the heavyweight rematch Feb. 22 at Las Vegas’ MGM Grand. In an Instagram post this week, Fury poses with arms crossed and eyes focused directly into the camera and straight into Wilder’s eyes. 

It’s a pose intended for an audience of one.

A month ago, Fury predicted he would knock out Wilder in two rounds. Wilder laughed. So, too, did the media. Why would Fury even think about trying to counter Wilder’s singular power with power he has yet to deliver?

Tyson’s clever skillset had him ahead through eight rounds of their first bout in December 2018 at Los Angeles Staples Center. Then, he got knocked down, first in the ninth round and again in the twelfth. It ended in a controversial draw. Without the knockdowns, it’s a one-sided decision for Fury. So why-oh-why wouldn’t he just make a simple adjustment: Stay away for the full 12 rounds in the sequel.

Conventional wisdom dictates that’s what he – in fact — will do. But the Instagram pose is there, suggesting that Fury has done the work he needs to have any chance at a stoppage in any round, much less the second.

Fury says he is at his optimum weight now. He’s at 270 pounds, which he says will be his weight at opening bell. He was at 256 ½ in the first fight. Thirteen-and-half more pounds suggest he’s attempting to put some additional force behind his punches. He jumped from trainer Ben Davison to SugarHill Steward, a Kronk student of the late Emanuel Steward’s power-punching philosophy. The idea, Fury said, is to augment whatever power he might possess with technique, practice-practice-practice and a few more pounds.

Will it work? Probably not. In big fights – and this rematch is as big as it gets – fighters become who they have always been. Fury, who calls himself a student of the game, knows that. In the first couple of rounds, however, he might do something unexpected in an early attempt to confuse Wilder.

He’s doing that now. Fury-being-Fury means lots of talk, head fakes and moves calculated to distract, enrage and entertain.

He says he’ll win within two. He says he toughens up his hands by dipping them in gasoline every day. He’s on fire. Maybe, Wilder is listening, but don’t expect him to call 911.

Fury sticks out his tongue. He rolls his eyes in clownish disbelief. He’s joking. Maybe, Wilder is laughing.

This week, Fury poses. It’s a good photo-op, another app in the psychological game. Maybe, Wilder is watching. But who’s winning? That’s a maybe, too, despite the promises, photos, posts, predictions, pounds and poses.

By Bart Barry-

Thursday in the co-comain event of a Super Bowl
week fightcard broadcast by DAZN from a shady Miami venue called Meridian at
Island Gardens – check out its Google reviews for a chuckle – super
bantamweight Danny Roman lost his WBA and IBF titles by split decision to Uzbekistan’s
Murodjon Akhmadaliev in a very good fight worthy of a rematch.

They were there to make history, history be
damned.  Akhmadaliev was to break Leon
Spinks’ record, a record few knew existed till DAZN’s promoter unearthed it, and
if that meant the benefit of most every scoring doubt need go the Uzbekistani,
so be it.  Thursday evening’s co-comain
fare was very good, again, but not historic, even if everything broadcast these
days must be.

WBA
Scores Analysis, which seems founded on innovative logic, got the score
right, Roman 115-113, by weighing the three official scorers against each other,
in an ode of sorts to selforganization.  There
are far worse analysis tools out there.

Writing of which, punch statistics, too, appeared
to favor Roman, even if prefight research should indicate Roman did not strike Akhmadaliev
nearly so hard as he got struck by him.  That’s
the thing about research, though.  What
evidence did the eyes perceive that Akhmadaliev hits so much harder?  His was the more marked face at final
bell.  His was the much more fatigued
body for three minutes before final bell. 
And most replays showed him flurrying like a teenager whenever at close
quarters, pepperdusting Roman’s elbows and wrists and collarbone.

Akhmadaliev was not the better prizefighter in
Miami, and Roman, the unified champ, did more than enough golfing Akhmadaliev
with uppercuts to retain his titles on a traditional scorecard.

A note about that. 
Close rounds traditionally get scored for the champ, not the challenger,
because that’s where the eyes fall before each engagement.  I’ve written about this a few times before,
but even if you’re tired of reading it, methinks, I’m not yet tired of treating
it:

A truly objective scorer should begin his eyes in
the neutral space between the fighters and return his eyes to that space often
as possible, too.  From that neutral
space he should track any punch that crosses the threshold and grade its effect
thereafter.

Impossible, you say?  Quite right. 
There are no truly objective scorers.

The fighter upon whose fists a scorer’s eyes most
frequently fall has an appreciable scoring advantage, sort of like, and for
much the same reason, the actor upon whom audiences’ eyes most frequently fall
has a scoring advantage at the Oscars. 
In performance arts they call it presence, and in prizefighting it be
the champion’s gree to lose.  Except when
marketing or gambling concerns make it otherwise.

Such was the case Thursday when the barely tested Akhmadaliev
entered the ring with marketing and gambling concerns in his favor.  Of those two, of course, the gambling
concerns always be more honest, and the chalk had it that Akhmadaliev was
probably something very special while Roman was already something a bit
journeyman.

Instead, Akhmadaliev was a cross between Ukraine’s
Vasyl Lomachenko and Armenia’s Vic Darchinyan, and not the right cross
exactly.  Were a man to mix successfully Lomachenko’s
form and Darchinyan’s aggression he’d be a historic entity.  Trouble is, Akhmadaliev more often mixes Darchinyan’s
form – back elbow cocked for telegraphing – with Lomachenko’s aggression,
ballrooming his way away.

There’s a whiff of autoheadline-reading there; Akhmadaliev
believes he is more than he is by virtue of his historic career, and for reasons
both financial and patriotic nobody round him has yet to say it isn’t so.  Danny Roman kinda said it in round 12,
though, didn’t he?  Whilst Akhmadaliev tried
Will-O’-the-Wisp-ing his way to winning a round without throwing a punch for
its opening 5/6, Roman did the needful, as they say, walking forward and
winning the closing round with classic boxing.

O, but look how much Akhmadaliev did in all the
preceding rounds!  Yes, do.

Thursday’s fight was a modernday Vazquez-Marquez,
was it not?  Larger money, lower stakes, poorer
form, lighter punching, less conclusive ending. 
They aren’t making 122-pounders like Izzy and Rafa these days, even if
they’re commentating like they are.

Still, as Super Bowl fightcards go, this wasn’t a
bad one.  Skipping the amateur boxing on
the card, half the televised matches were good and competitive.

Twelve years ago I covered a Scottsdale, Ariz.,
card the week of Super Bowl XLII and the week before that a local promoter told
me: “They always try to do Super Bowl week, and it never works.” 

That wasn’t the best quote, though – that came
from “El Machito” Hector Camacho Jr., on the card to supply a patronym fiftysomething
East Coast lushes might recognize and pay some slight fraction of what $10,000 the
card’s visiting promoter initially thought he might charge for ringside seats to
a Monte Barrett mainevent in a converted carny tent called 944 Super Village at
Stetson Canal.

“I’ve disrespected the sport of boxing so many
times I’m surprised they let me put gloves on,” said El Machito (44-3-1) at the
Friday weighin, by way of promoting his Saturday afternoon battle with Luis
Lopez (13-11-1).

The reason Super Bowl week fightcards generally
don’t work is because while the Super Bowl attracts men in shiny suits, they’re
bespoke suits, generally, and boxing is decidedly off-the-rack.  By the magic math of a visiting promoter
there are at least 10,000 guys in town who could care less about $10,000, and
if he can just find 20 of them he’s on his way, 50 of them and he’s the new Don
King (who posted a Super Bowl XXX loss of his own 24 years ago in Phoenix on a
card that included famed ticketseller B-Hop). 
Shiny suits and carnival barking.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim-

Tyson Fury calls himself a boxing historian, which means more than a basic understanding of what it is to be the lineal heavyweight champion. Mostly, it means he understands deception.

He practices the art and even drops occasional references to Sun Tzu, an ancient philosopher quoted by Generals, cornermen, West Point professors and lineal heavyweight champs. Deontay Wilder calls Fury a con man and maybe he is. But a fighter without a good con enters the ring without a fundamental weapon. No feint, no chance.

“All warfare is based on deception,’’ Tzu said in his classic, The Art of War.

“Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak,’’ he also wrote.

Those are quotes to remember as Fury’s rematch with Wilder approaches on Feb. 22 at Las Vegas’ MGM Grand in a Fox/ESPN pay-per-view bout.

Between sticking out his tongue and mocking Wilder with dancing eyes, Fury talks. And talks. It’s hard to know what’s real and what’s fake, what’s true and what’s feint. But that’s the idea in the buildup, a series of news conferences that set the stage for the head games that precede any opening bell.

Fury is trying to confuse Wilder, who knocked him down twice with the most feared right hand in at least a generation. Wilder says there’s no eluding his power. Few have. His record includes an astonishing 41 stoppages in 43 fights. But the record also includes the draw with Fury Dec. 1, 2018 in Los Angeles.  In the twelfth round, Fury got up from the punch that landed with the concussive force that has finished virtually everyone else. But Fury got up, a singular answer to Wilder’s singular power.

Why Fury and nobody else? It’s a question Fury has been asking Wilder, again and again, in the face-to-face ritual for the cameras. Ask often enough, and maybe Fury plants a seed of a doubt, a crack in Wilder’s faith in his right hand.  Wilder shouts BOMB SQUAD and laughs at Fury, saying the right will keep Fury on the canvas this time. Maybe, it will. Maybe, there’s no way to avoid it. But Fury will continue to remind Wider that his resurrection on Dec. 1 is a reason to wonder whether that right is as all-powerful as he thinks. It’s a psychological feint from Fury, straight out of that Sun Tzu playbook: Appear strong when you are weak.

There’s also this: Fury promises to turn the tables on Wilder. He says he will knock him out in two rounds. He says he’s developing his own right hand in training with Emanuel Steward’s namesake and mentor, SugarHill Steward, of the Kronk school of power. Fury talks about a right he’ll deliver with Tommy Hearns-like leverage.

Wilder laughs at that one, too. How could he not? Conventional wisdom seems to dictate that Fury relies on his superior boxing skill to stay away from the right throughout 12 rounds. If he had done that in the first fight, there would have been no controversy. He would have won a clear-cut decision.

But Fury has never been conventional. Perhaps, he’s trying to confuse Wilder with a wild prediction. But think again. Fury goes into the fight with scar tissue from a cut above the right eye that required 47 stitches after a bloody decision over Otto Wallin on Sept. 14.

In the first of two news conferences in Los Angeles, he told www.boxingjunkie.com that he wouldn’t risk a further cut in training.

“If it ruptures, it’ll happen in the fight,’’ he said.

Translation: He might have to win an early stoppage. Nobody can be certain that the scar tissue can withstand 12 rounds. Repeated blows, even glancing ones, could result in a fight-ending rupture. Wilder believes that the fight with Wallin would have been stopped if not for the prospect of the February rematch.

Wilder has also looked into Fury’s face and sees what everybody else does. The scar is evident, a target if there ever was one. Wilder has joked that he intends to see how good Fury’s plastic surgeon is. It’s a signal he’ll go after the eye, early and often.

Fury seems to be inviting him to do exactly that. It’s as if he is urging Wilder to step inside in a head-long assault to bloody up a healing wound. Then and there, Fury might deliver his own right-handed power. The lure is that scar, also straight out of the Sun Tzu playbook.

“Hold out baits to entice the enemy,’’ he wrote. “Feign disorder, and crush him.’

Timeless advice from an ancient philosopher who could have been a corner man in any era.

Ivan Redkach had was fined and suspended for biting Danny Garcia last Saturday night at Barclays Center, according to Dan Rafael of espn.com.

The commission announced Thursday that it “issued the maximum fine [to Redkach] of $10,000 for engaging in dangerous, disorderly and unsportsmanlike conduct.”

Redkach (23-5-1, 18 KOs), 33, a Ukraine native who fights out of Los Angeles, also is supposed to forfeit his entire purse, which would be paid to the commission. However, collecting the purse could prove difficult: A source with knowledge of the situation told ESPN on Thursday that Redkach had already deposited his check for $300,000.

“Mr. Redkach has the right to challenge these penalties if he so chooses with a formal hearing,” commission spokeswoman Mercedes Padilla said.

By Bart Barry-

SAN ANTONIO – In the center of this city there’s a
Greyhound bus station.  In the center of
most U.S. cities there’s a Greyhound station. 
In the center of most American cities, Anchorage to Patagonia, come to
think of it, there’s a bus station.  Put
a checkmark, then, in the box beside a line that reads: “Begin column with
mundanity.”

What follows might be a treatment of current
events – Danny Garcia or Kobe Bryant, the Honduran refugee crisis or “Dance of
the Clairvoyants” by Pearl Jam – or a treatment of timeless events, the poetry
of Billy Collins or “Emergence: From Chaos to Order” by John Holland, but it likely
won’t fixate on any of these subjects longly because a dissolution of fixation is
what its writer is after.

Back to the bus station.  The cruel events that led wave after wave
after wave of Central American refugees to crash on this Texas bus station have
succumbed to still crueler events that preclude an arrival of successors – we
used to help 50 families of women and children every Sunday and yesterday we
helped exactly one, which is our current government’s solution currently: out
of sight, out of mind.

If that’s a cliché it’s because those six words
gathered thusly have proved elastic and apt enough often enough to be recycled unto
the commons.

We’re still here each Sunday morning because it
satisfies, barely, a philanthropic impulse catalyzed by a karmic virtue like:
Work without expectation of reward.  Too,
because the lead volunteers on Sundays exemplify both wisdom and vocation.  Sister Sharon and I had some time Sunday
morning to discuss my ongoing compulsion re compulsion.  We talked past one another, mostly, like good
Shakespearean characters do; Sister Sharon spoke of a book about addiction
whose author she met at a community gathering Saturday while I made irreverent
if serious inquiries about persons of the cloth who feel compelled to control
events while professing faith in an omnipotent God.  Context is essential here as everywhere: After
20 months of such passing conversations neither of us is faithful nor faithless
as our uniforms imply.

The concentration muscles upon which we call for creative
endeavors are the very same that lead us into addictions.  A capacity for fixation on one’s algebra
homework, say, locking one’s mind away and forbidding distractions, other
thoughts, is a universal virtue the same way fixing oneself on a singleminded
pursuit of heroin, say, is a universal vice – but they’re the same muscles.

Context is essential there as everywhere, even if
only to pettifog (a wonderful verb resurrected last week).

As I type these words spontaneous Kobe Bryant tributes
outbreak everywhere.  These are
sincere.  Soon to be followed by obligatory
tributes, sooner to be followed by insincere tributes overlapped by profit-motivated
tributes.  Competitive grieving, as it were,
an expression of our species’ originality amplified by social media, a
manifestation of our species’ originality.

Danny Garcia fought in Brooklyn on Saturday.  The fewer words about that, the better.

What the Seattle band Pearl Jam just did with its
new single is inspiration remarkable.  Across
29 years and 10 studio albums, three decades, in other words, and five or six
hours of music, nothing anticipated the sound of its new song.  To reinvent a successful artistic specialty
so completely and effectively is a feat and a half.

Billy Collins, twotime American Poet Laureate, is
a wonderful man fully anticipated by his wonderful poems.  I met him in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas 18
years ago at a threeday literary festival headlined by the not-yet-Noble laureate
Mario Vargas Llosa (whom I met in the men’s room the first night, when he was
anonymous as me).  I was in Tampico to
get married, simply, but ever since I’ve enjoyed telling uninterested strangers
I met the American Poet Laureate while honeymooning at a literary festival in
an exotic locale.

A few months later I mailed Collins a letter, and
he replied immediately and graciously and generously.  I’ve been revisiting Collins’ poetry this
week, putting “Aimless Love” in my promiscuous rotation, and while his poems
were primarily humorous to me in 2002 they are quite a bit more than that to me
in 2020.  Of all literary forms poetry is
the one I read poorliest, I freely admit, but I recommend Collins nevertheless
(and I pretty much just got done recommending Pearl Jam, too, without ever
getting a useable note out any musical instrument in my life).

What all this has to do with Santa Fe Institute
and John Holland – a Michigan professor of electrical engineering and psychology
and computer science, all three, amazingly enough – is next to nothing, which
is about how much it has to do with our beloved sport, too, in its winter
doldrums, but I’ve got at least four books on complexity currently colliding
with Collins and others in the aforementioned rotation, so in the name of
selforganization . . .

I’m reading this way, and have been reading this
way for 18 months now, I realize, to dissolve compulsion, an intermediate level
of anxiety one doesn’t come upon till he’s observed his way past a burning
stomach and garrulousness and financed consumption and moral judgment and
travel and some forms of achievement (but before he’s gotten past aesthetic
judgment), and dissolving compulsion currently requires challenging every
thought that endures more than 60 seconds. 
Which makes writing this column during the winter doldrums an admittedly
skittish happening.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

By Norm Frauenheim-

Andy Ruiz Jr., who needs as many friends as he can find, fired the best one he had.

He fired Manny Robles.

The move isn’t exactly a surprise. It didn’t even surprise Robles. Let’s just say it was dumb, double-down dumb.

Ruiz, the first heavyweight champion of Mexican descent, has followed up his embarrassing rematch loss to Anthony Joshua with a public-relations debacle hard to explain and harder to excuse. A People’s Champ lost more than a title. He lost the people.

Those people will be harder to win back than titles. There are plenty of belts, even a few that might fit Ruiz’ expandable waistband. But loyalty, once squandered, is hard to regain. Ruiz grew up in a community where loyalty is a currency valued more than money. In Loyalty We Trust. You hear it from Canelo Alvarez in his criticism of Oscar De La Hoya.

Canelo delivered a stinging rip of De La Hoya in an interview with The Athletic before his Nov. 2 stoppage of Sergey Kovalev. He called him disloyal, yet he stays with De La Hoya, loyal to his commitment to the Golden Boy promoter. He stays with his original trainer and manager, Eddy and Chepo Reynoso. He has been with them and evolved with them from the beginning and throughout criticism of their work in the wake of a loss to Floyd Mayweather Jr. in September 2013.

Canelo is the reigning example of what to do.

Ruiz is the sad face of what not to do.

His fans would have forgiven him for his one-sided decision loss to Joshua in a rematch of Ruiz’ Rocky-like upset in June at New York’s Madison Square Garden. They would have even forgiven him for partying more than training for the rematch. Who wouldn’t? They would have partied like a lottery winner, too. They identified with him, each and every flabby ounce. But firing his trainer is unforgivable.

Robles is a convenient fall guy for what happened in Saudi Arabia. He got thrown under that proverbial bus, which happens to be something else fans understand. They’ve been there, tossed aside and into the expendable exhaust.

“It is what it is, I don’t know what to tell you,’’ Robles told ESPN, which broke the story.  “It’s not the first time it’s happened to me. I’m sure it’s not the first time it’s happened to other coaches.

“It happens time and time again. We always end up getting the short end of the stick. But it is what it is, you keep moving forward.”

Robles knows all about picking himself up. He did it after Oscar Valdez Jr. left him for Eddy Reynoso in August 2018. But the circumstances were different. Valdez moved on, still unbeaten and still a featherweight champion. He wasn’t coming off a loss and looking for a scapegoat.

Robles never expressed any anger at Valdez. Instead, he thanked Valdez. He called him friend and said he would always be a Valdez’ fan.

The split with Ruiz is different, both in proportion and style. Ruiz’ upset of Joshua and his subsequent loss were magnified, made bigger by untold multiples by a media captivated by an epic moment on a huge stage. In June, was the everyman, fat and fantastic all at once on an improbable night in New York. In Saudi Arabia, he was just a fat fool.

But Robles thanked him, too.

“Absolutely, look I’ve got to tell you I’m absolutely grateful and blessed to have been able to experience everything that I was able to experience in 2019,” Robles told ESPN. “I mean, we made history, and I have to be thankful for that. I have to be thankful to Andy and his dad for giving me the opportunity to be part of something special, to have made history — for him to become the first Mexican heavyweight champion of the world.’’

Thanks, Manny Robles, a good guy who got a raw deal.

By Bart Barry-

Saturday at Philadelphia’s Liacouras Center in a super welterweight title-unification fight broadcast by Fox, Dominican slugger Jeison “Banana” Rosario beat-down Philadelphia’s Julian “J Rock” Williams, stopping Williams in round 5 and snatching his WBA and IBF titles the right way.

In the beginning it had all the trappings of a
homecoming coronation – slick graphics, venue, dazzling biography, management
organization, Watson, sycophantic commentary team – and then a curiosity turned
up in the corner labeled Designated Opponent right about the time introductions
got made.

Sampson Lewkowicz. 
His is not a flawless eye for talent but it’s very close, and multiples
better than PBC’s.  Most famous for his
effective discoveries of Manny Pacquiao and Sergio Martinez, for seeing past
their blemished records, a few years ago Lewkowicz
saw which of the Hermanos Benavidez had the true upside, and when he was right
and promoter Top Rank wasn’t and tried to poach their ways out of such
shortsightedness, Lewkowicz went to the mat with them and won.  Lewkowicz, an Uruguayan, of all things, sees
qualities other talent scouts do not. 
His stable is not huge or assembled at premium prices but comprises a
type of prizefighter you’d be foolish to schedule for a homecoming showcase.

Which is exactly what PBC did, of course.  There’s more to this story, surely, depending
which lens you watch it through – a bout of flu in camp or a hellish style
matchup some sage or other warned somebody about – but there’s exactly no
chance the braintrust at Fox on PBC on Fox, “preeminent” though they be,
anticipated what befell Williams.

What told very early on and does not portend well
for Williams in the rematch is how little Williams’ flush punches affected
Banana.  Despite what trickeration drives
replay selection between rounds Williams’ technically proper rightcross
counters did nothing to shortcircuit Rosario’s attack or even much dissuade it.  Had Williams sliced open Rosario’s eyelid or
had Williams’ own eyelid proved more durable things might have gone differently,
but that’s all in a fight, and if Williams’ sight problems came via reopened
scar tissue, as explained during the broadcast, if in other words Williams was
already accustomed to fighting through blood in his eyes, he sure didn’t act
like it.

Let us not pile on Williams for the sins of his
management company, though; good people opine Williams is good people.  It’s hard to cheer against him as it is to
imagine his becoming a world titlist in a different boxing ecosystem – the
enduring lesson of Pacquaio-Thurman.

In his fascinating book “The Soul of the Ant” suicidal
19th-century South African poet Eugène Marais posits a termitary, the
laboriously constructed habitat of what termites Marais studied for a decade,
functions as an organism little different from the human body, stretching his
metaphor to include termites of ferocious mien acting like white blood cells
whilst constructionworker termites act as red blood cells.  Whatever modern reductionists have proved or
disproved about this metaphor in a century since its publication, it is
wellbuilt as it is imaginative, with cells, in the form of near-mindless
termites, racing through their termitary to ensure its health, like blood
racing through human veins and arteries. 
It calls to mind a similar if more modern metaphor of the world wide web
acting as our species’ brain whilst its billions of cells labor away oblivious
of our contribution to its thoughts or thinking.

So let us stretch these stretched metaphors to
include in our beloved sport’s ecosystem (ostensibly red) blood cells like
Sampson Lewkowicz and Jeison Rosario, cells scheduled for anonymity all their
days till an unscheduled tear happens in boxing’s protective membrane and
suddenly they burst out in violent spurts. 
Rosario, dropped thrice at Sam’s Town Hotel & Gambling Hall in 2017
by Nathaniel Gallimore a year before J Rock decisioned Nate the Great, was
essential as he was replaceable; boxing needs such men to make coronations for
other men but doesn’t expect them to be memorable to any but their friends and
family.

What do you know about, say, Herb “Gorilla” Siler?

He was a 20-12 heavyweight who died 19 years ago
and surely beloved to someone even while anonymous to all but a handful of
aficionados.  Too, he was the first
knockout of Cassius Clay’s prizefighting career – four years before there was a
Muhammad Ali.  Essential as he was
replaceable in boxing’s ecosystem, Gorilla is a permanent part of The
Greatest’s resume even though men like Tony Esperti and Jimmy Robinson were
just as likely to make the same history had their schedules properly coincided.

Let coincidence neither lose an idea like: At
26-1-1 eight months ago in Virginia, J Rock was the homecoming b-side for
undefeated titlist Jarrett Hurd, raised but 30 miles from the EagleBank Arena
where Hurd’s coronation was to happen.  A
less cynical scribe, then, should marvel at PBC’s marvelous matchmaking,
bestower of rich parity, rather than mock the organization for apparent
incompetence.

Well.  In my
defense I watched Saturday’s match live on Fox in the hopes of seeing J Rock do
something ultimately decisive in a competitive scrap.  The scrap was competitive and something
decisive surely did transpire.

I’m on the Banana wagon now, while we wait for
whatever Naoya Inoue does next.

*

Author’s note: Hearty congratulations to us!  As
announced late last week, 15rounds.com was the 2019 home of not only our
sport’s co-best exemplar of courage, Marc Abrams, but also our sport’s co-best
exemplar of benevolence, Norm Frauenheim. 
Two, more-deserving winners cannot be found.

*

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry

Follow all the action as Julian Williams defends the IBF/WBA Super Welterweight titles against Jason Roario.  The action kicks off at 6:30 Pm ET with Vito Mielnicki; Also Jorge Cota faces Thomas LaManna.  The main undercard is featured with the WBA Junior Lightweight Interim title bout between Chris Colbert and Jezreel Corrales.

NO BROWSER REFRESH NEEDED. THE PAGE WILL UPDATE AUTOMATICALLY.

Round 1:  Jab from Williams..Uppercut..
Round 2 Williams lands a right to the body..Jab..Counter right..1-2..2 body shots..Right from Rosario..Jab..Good counter right..Body..Right and body..Williams cut around the right eye
Round 3 Right from Williams..Right from Rosario..Right..Hard right from Williams..Right to body..straight right
Round 4 Right from Williams..Double jab from Rosario..Good counter right..Hard body shot..Jab
Round 5 Good body shot from Williams..Left by Rosario..Williams is hurt and hurt badly..He holds..hard shot ..FIGHT IS STOPPED…ROSARIO BY TKO

Round 1 Right from Colbert
Round 2
Round 3 Right from Colbert..
Round 4 Left shakes Corrales..Left to body from Corrales..Good right from Colbert..
Round 5 Colbert switching southpaw
Round 6 Right from Colbert..Right to the body..Quick hard right..Left to body from Corrales..
Round 7 Good straight left from Corrales..Left/Right from Colbert
Round 8 Ripping left from Colbert..Hard counter right…
Round 9 Right from Colbert..Body shot from Corrales..Right hook..
Round 10 INSIDE LEFT AND DOWN GOES CORRALES..Hard left from Colbert
Round 11 Good right from Colbert..Good body shot..Jumping right..Good exchange…Corrales knocked out of ring but ruled a slip
Round 12 Left from Corrales..Right from Colbert..Left from Corrales..Right to body by Colbert..Left

117-110 twice and 116-111 for Colbert

Round 1:  Spencer lands a right
Round 2 Quick right from Spencer..Hard counter left..left hook
Round 3 Left from Spencer…
Round 4 Left from Spencer
Round 5 Body combination from Spencer…Right from Spring..Right from Spencer..
Round 6 Right from Spencer..Hard right rocks Spring

Round 1 Cota coming forward…Right from Cota…2 body shots..Hard right..Jab from LaManna..Good right

Round 2  Good right from LaManna…Straight right..Left from Cota..2 lefts..Good right from LaManna..

Round 3 Left from Cota..Combination..2 rights from LaManna..left from Cota..Counter right from LaManna

Round 4 Cota landing hard shots…Good uppercut

Round 5  Cota walking right in…Landing on the ropes.  Blood from LaManna’s nose…FIGHT STOPPED BY THE CORNER…COTA WINS VIA TKO

Round 1:

ROUND 1 CRUZ LANDS A LEFT TO THE BODY THAT SENDS GARCIA DOWN..Left From Cruz..HaRD LEFT AND DOWN GOES GARCIA..THE FIGHT IS STOPPED