I have a new piece up on nomas about Malignaggi/Diaz that you should check out. The fight was much more enjoyable than I expected and had the added bonus of the Malignaggi meltdown in the postfight and a memorable press conference afterwards.
In the piece I referenced recent interviews with both Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Bernard Hopkins, which absolutely must be read and listened to in full. I find Floyd’s interviews on Bossip particularly rewarding, as we get to hear him at a comfort level that he never gets reaches with the gatekeepers of white sports purity; Brian Kenny, Larry Merchant, and the rest. It’s interesting that even when the athlete says something in this context that under more official circumstances would come off as petulant, paranoid, or racist, there seems in these interviews the natural patter of the pugilist at rest. It makes all the difference. Not that I find either Mayweather or especially Hopkins grating, but they are more charming when amongst friends, and I wonder whether it might take the edge off for those who consider Mayweather specifically the exemplar of a world gone wrong. While I find Stephen A. Smith somewhat odious, he was often the one most able to get worthwhile material from his interview subjects, which is difficult given the restrictions placed on the athletes he normally worked with. Boxing, as I wrote in the piece for nomas, has many fewer restrictions, meaning the athlete needs much less rope to go much further. I hope the trend continues, for Floyd most of all I think there is a personal redemption in his less guarded moments that might allow him to retain his status as villain, but provide the depth to make it a lasting and meaningful role.
Wrote a prediction piece on Diaz/Malignaggi over at nomas, please check it out.
I want to say a quick word on Jones/Lacy, which I haven’t been able to see yet other than the highlights. I’m a bit surprised that Jones has been getting even this limited amount of heat for the win, but not altogether dismissive of the matter. First, let me say that from the looks of it Jones performed quite admirably. He seems to have his speed back and some of the confidence that Tarver jarred loose with that fairytale left he landed.
That being said I find it hard to be too impressed given the opposition. I actually kind of like Jeff Lacy, who seems to me the sort of decent guy who was simply set up with expectations that were beyond his capacity, but the truth is he’s so long gone any proper judgments related to his performance are impossible to make. I was ringside for Taylor/Lacy last year, one of the few who cheered for him, but it was immediately clear he was a lost cause. One of my favorite things about going to a live fight is the slow build in class and speed as the card progresses, like watching a series of basketball games beginning with grade-schoolers and culminating in a playoff game. When Lacy fought it was shocking in the other way, a chiseled man who labored about the ring like a spent thoroughbred. He looked as though he was sparring underwater, using resistance training to increase his speed.
So it was unsurprising to me when even this faded Jones gave him a lesson. It was not Jones’ speed that faltered, rather his stamina and his legs. The hands are still there, it’s just the peripherals that have gone. Still, it did leave me with a bit of intrigue. Roy is a strange character, his caution first style robbed us of potentially seeing one of the most accomplished fighters in history, rather than merely one of the most impressive. While he often displayed such mastery that his fights ceased to be competition and became performance, he seemed to hold back in the ring, letting inferior opponents linger. It left you with the question of what he was really capable of.
So it’s interesting that in his late career Roy Jones seems desperate to give us his finest. I don’t think it’s lack of money, rather some personal axe he has left to grind. I suspect the Calzaghe fight might have been particularly important. Roy never liked taking punches as a young fighter. He was so averse to it that he would stink out the joint rather than close the show; and then when Tarver and Johnson abused him it seemed as though his hesitation had been proved correct; one doesn’t want to take a shot, particularly when there seems to be an inherent vulnerability.
But with the Calzaghe fight there seemed to have been some sort of paradigm shift within him. He got as good a hiding as one is likely to see and survived. It’s almost as if he realized that, contrary to his guiding philosophy, getting whipped isn’t so bad.
It’s a matter of boxing lore that Muhammed Ali, a defensive mastermind, discovered that he could take a shot in his first fight with Frazier, and that liberated him to go beyond pain and into history. I wonder if something similar happened to Roy. he doesn’t have the tools anymore to make an extended run, but he seems to have the outsized sense of self-belief to try to push himself. He might have been better served losing somewhere along the way, (the Montell Griffin fight doesn’t count.) If it would have taken the edge off and allowed him to really let loose. Sometimes that 0 on the record can be more crippling than invigorating. Maybe if Floyd had slipped up things would be different where he is concerned as well.
All that being said, I hope Roy continues on his current path, fighting fringe guys and exhibiting the athletic gifts he alone possesses. While his heart might be in the right place, I don’t want to see him take another beating. It's the same way I feel about Holyfield. Let them keep going, there’s nothing wrong with acting like a still relevant fighter; as long as you don’t use it as your address.
So that’s why, despite the greatness of this interview between Hopkins and Jones Jr., I hope the long awaited rematch remains a fantasy. A win by Hopkins wouldn’t mean anything, and one by Jones would confuse matters too much. I'll be rooting for Jones to get his mini-redemption, not that he even really needs it, but the relevant pages have already been written for Jones, and that's the way it should stay.
*** Update: Please check out the new piece I just did for nomas on Mayweather/Marquez.****
I might be one of the few, but when I heard that negotiations between cruiserweight champion Tomasz Adamek and geriatric wonder Bernard Hopkins had been restarted it sent my mind racing. Behind only Pacquiao/Mayweather it’s the fight I most want to see. Tomasz Adamek is a former light heavyweight champ and in the last couple of years has carved out a place for himself as a can’t miss action fighter and a top figure in the cruiserweight division’s, admittedly short and neglected, history. It would be a big fight for Adamek; if he should win he would really stamp his name as a fine champion, and move beyond a mostly Polish attraction to an HBO headlining fighter.
But, of course, the main focus of my excitement is Bernard Hopkins and his quest for the grail. Part of me wants him to quit, certain as the grave that if he keeps pushing his end will be no more glorious than the others whose time came much earlier. My god, though, what if he does it? What if he managed to, at the age of 46 move up thirty pounds from his last bout, itself a certified miracle, and win another legitimate title from a borderline p4p champion? He is already, to my mind, the greatest “old fighter,” of all time, but this would really bring it home.
I know some think Hopkins should fight the winner of Dawson/Johnson, but to me there’s something special about the audacity of the task in an Adamek fight. It’s also something tangible and bold. It would go right in the opening line of Hopkin’s CV, something like…
“Bernard “The Executioner,” Hopkins was the longest reigning middleweight champion in boxing history and won the light heavyweight and Cruiserweight championships after the age of forty.”
I’m no historian, but I think it would actually lift him above his contemporary Roy Jones Jr. as the greatest fighter of the post Whittaker era. (Holyfield, and Pacquiao or Mayweather, might have some dispute depending on the future)
A lot of people dislike Hopkins because of his cautious style and confrontational black identity, but to me he is a monument to discipline and soul. There is such a righteous fire inside him that it sometimes burns through the screen. He’s an old man, but he’s made of shoe leather and sinew, and the miasma of creation.
The thing that I’ve always loved about him is that he is not particularly physically gifted in any area. He has decent power, good handspeed, prodigious strength for a natural middleweight; but nothing compared to the genetic freaks who share his lofty ranks. What he has is a hardness and completeness of spirit that few can match. He is always on balance, always planning, always has his hands properly positioned and his chin tucked tight as though gently holding an invisible egg. He would have made a fine general in the era of cavalry, or a formidable knight in the age or heroes.
As a man constantly at odds with himself I admire his stalwart discipline. He has physically declined, but the fundamentals remain, the tricks and the insights and wisdom of the ages. I love to watch his feet in the ring, the rhythm gained through decades of shadowboxing and sparring. But even moreso one feels he is the rightful heir to generations of African-American prizefighters who passed through the gymnasiums of Philadelphia and the East coast. A true disciple of the sweet science, he may not have been born from a family of fighters, but it is in his blood.
Mike Seeger died this week, a folk singer and preservationist of roots music, he called his life’s study the “true vine.” It was a sound that came from the mountains, deep and lasting and American. That’s what Bernard Hopkins is; he is the true vine.
On some level the fight with Adamek is incidental to Hopkins’ career, he has already been etched into the book of names. For most I would say let it go, the glory of the Pavlik fight is good enough, but I want to see the old master at work again, want to see what tricks and old-tyme music he can play. He isn’t exciting or athletic or even particularly relevant to the sport anymore; but he is something more. He is an ambassador for an age and a philosophy that is largely gone. He did it his way, and I hope he does it one more time.
*I’m going to try to make a list of Hopkin’s ten best moments this week as a way of framing what I think a fight with Adamek might mean.
Forgive my tardiness, but I was still trying to come to grips with the phantasm of last week, it seemed to linger longer because it was so short, so definitive and exact and rote. The meanings and readings of the impact more difficult and fixed, like the atom bomb versus the before the flood.
But that’s for later (including tomorrow, when we’ll have our first guest post!), when I plan to do a more precise blow by blow of the destruction, and a look ahead to the possibilities; the elements of combustion deserve both respect and distance, and the left that Pacquiao landed had to cloud the mind of anyone who saw it to an extent that it’s worthwhile to clear the air.
And that happened on Saturday, with an event as somber and emotionless as last week was outsized and apocalyptic. Nobody was particularly interested in watching Chad Dawson and Antonio Tarver fight the first time, and in the interest of full disclosure I didn’t watch the fight live, nor all the way through when I finally did. It was boring and uninspiring, and the only reason this fight even happened was the rematch clause Tarver invoked, one that he probably wouldn’t have if there were any other choice.
And the fight went roughly as expected, a virtual mirror of the first, with perhaps a few more moments by Tarver and conversely more vulnerabilities by Dawson. It was no surprise, and the only reason this fight happened on HBO is they are looking for a new hope, an American to follow in the middleweight to Light heavyweight divisions now that we know Jermain Taylor isn’t the one, Hopkins is too old and hard to deal with, and Kelly Pavlik doesn’t seem interested in fighting anyone of note following his rude education.
We’ll see what happens with Dawson. He has the fast hands, excellent technique, and left-handed rigmarole that seem to mark him not just as a belt-holder, but maybe someday a real champion. So now Dawson is the future, the new order they tell us, and they very well might be right. Two clear wins over Tarver, Thomas Adamek, and a debatable but formative decision over Glen Johnson are excellent for a fighter still coming into his own. Very few can match those accomplishments, and they should be appreciated and recognized, but for me there is something missing, and not just fans and excitement as HBO announcer Max Kellerman tries to tell us.
I think he’s missing the stakes. He seems to treat boxing like a sport or a game, and I feel that will always come back to haunt you. And by that I don’t mean only that he lacks killer instinct, though that’s part of it, but he also seems to lack disdain, repugnance for his opponent, and joy in the task at hand. Floyd Mayweather lacks killer instinct, but he rightly looks at boxing as an exercise in dominion. I don’t see it in Dawson yet, more the gentleman boxer role left open by the departure of (forgive the racializing, I mean for that to come later) Jermain Taylor. Perhaps I’m unfairly marking his bland personality on his fighting style, but I believe that, as in most cases, they are the same.
Some people are agitating for him to take on Bernard Hopkins next, and while I think it would be a waste for Hopkins; both too dangerous and too much of a non-event for a fighter who should only go for cash and glory at this point, I wonder if it might not be what Dawson needs. In many ways I feel Hopkins ended the possibilities for both Taylor and Pavlik, or at least limited and made clear what they are. Hopkins is the exact opposite of how I described Dawson; marginal physical tools mixed with all stakes, with all purpose and meaning and dominion and dark will. A fighting (forgive the dorkiness) gom jabbar; after that we’d know if Dawson was the new king. It won’t happen, I hope not, but if it did I think Dawson would finally receive an education in what it is to be a prizefighter.
But now I’ve nattered on for too long, and won’t give the person I meant to write about the respect he deserves. They say old politicians and prostitutes eventually become respectable, and I feel the same about old boxers. I’ve never particularly liked Antonio Tarver, like Dawson I felt he didn’t really take it all that personal, like he was playing a role in the ring. The only time it seemed serious was against Roy Jones, his white whale, whom he finally, after years at sea, harpooned through the chest with a blind left hand in the second round of their second fight.
And maybe that was part of my dissatisfaction with him. He wasn’t big enough to bring down the ring legend, he felt like an accidental hero. Roy Jones wasn’t supposed to lose to the likes of Tarver, he didn’t seem the man for the job. He lost the first fight against Roy by sheer caution, it was his to win and he let it go. Tarver had been hunting him for years, but when he had him, alone and vulnerable, he didn’t get his man. It took that second fight for him to step into his future, and after we’d seen Roy so weak and vulnerable in the first match it seemed to lack the impact and was more depressing than inspiring.
There was also his personality. A whinging, parodic yearning for respect that he seemed to feel was owed rather than bought in the ring. While brash black fighters are invariably my favorites: James Toney, Bernard Hopkins, Floyd Mayweather: Tarver’s clownish stretching of the role seemed insulting. It was an expanded, cartoonish act that descended to vaudevillian parody, so silly that he actually had to tone it down when he played Rocky’s opponent in the last movie. Like the Chappelle Show skit about racial pixies that led to his resignation, Tarver’s outsized humorless routine was more disturbing than entertaining.
But like all those who work for their pay age and loss leads to respectability. I couldn’t help but root for him Saturday night as he tried his best to figure out a way to beat the faster man. Tarver was always limited and cautious, slow but powerful. He used to have a move where he would tap with punches at one speed and then explode with a hard fast one. He still did it on Saturday, but the two levels he had were painfully slow and just slow. But there was determination and serious mindedness, as though at the last he finally realized it meant something.
It ultimately did mean something for him, and for me, and somber defeat can wipe clean many ungracious victories. I won’t think of him that often. Tarver ultimately wasn’t the right man for the task appointed him, the legend killer, but in the end he was a man, and that’s more than most can say.
