Nowhere Confidential

Fists Of Fury: Boxing Reports

THE CHANGING OF THE GUARD

19 July 2005

What I like about Bernard Hopkins, the great middleweight champion, is exactly what I dislike about him -- he fights by craft and guile and never does more than he needs to do to win. This is probably the smartest way to proceed as a fighter but it's rarely the most exciting or inspiring. Hopkins is the Odysseus of the modern prize ring, and while I admire Odysseus above all other Homeric heroes, I'd rather follow the exploits of Hector and Achilles when it comes to mixing it up in combat.

At 40, Hopkins is getting on in years, for a fighter, and it was inevitable that sooner or later some young gun would show up and send him into an honorable retirement. A lot of people thought that Jermain Taylor would be that young gun and would prove it at the MGM Grand Garden Arena last Saturday.

It wasn't quite that simple.

Taylor won a controversial split decision over the champ, but hardly triumphed in a fashion that would settle the matter once and for all.

I happened to agree with the decision, watching the fight from some distance away in the MGM arena, but I'll need to reserve final judgment until I watch a tape of the fight. So many rounds were nearly too close to call.

I had trouble giving Hopkins any of the first six rounds. He ducked and bobbed and slipped but still got hit repeatedly by Taylor's beautiful fast jab, and often enough by a follow-up right. He offered little offense in reply.

Hopkins came on stronger in the second half, and won most of the last six rounds, but to my eye not all. So I had Taylor ahead on points by about one round -- more or less the way two of the judges had it. (The other had Hopkins defeating Taylor by an even greater margin, which was clearly preposterous.)

It wasn't an exciting fight, or a dramatic one, except for the first six rounds, when it seemed that Taylor had gotten Hopkins's number, but the rematch should be thrilling. Taylor, who's a great young fighter, will have studied this first meeting carefully and I suspect he will learn from it -- and then it really will be time for Odysseus to set sail for home.

(© 2005 Las Vegas Review Journal/John Locher)

GOLDEN AGE

16 May 2005

For sheer scientific interest it's hard to beat a Winky Wright fight. Wright is a very skillful champion without a heavy knock-out punch, so he has to find other ways to win, and those ways are always instructive and often fascinating in the extreme.

Last Saturday at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas he put his skills to work against the great Felix Trinidad, a boxer whose technique has decided limits but who commands one of the hardest punches in the game. His power has made him one of the most beloved of boxers, a true celebrity, and carried him to an awesome record of 42 wins, with 35 knock-outs, against only one loss, to the great and crafty Bernard Hopkins. Wright had moved up a weight class, from 154 to the middleweight limit of 160, for the occasion.

As the contest began on Saturday, the betting and the crowd's affection were all with Trinidad.

Trinidad has good upper-body and head movement and his killer punches are thrown with lightning speed. His great flaw as a boxer is that he doesn't move well on his feet. He tends to stay in front of a man and look for the one opening he needs to put him on the floor.

Wright moves exceptionally well on his feet -- he works his angles with fine calculation. He is also a great counterpuncher -- used to dodging his opponents blows and then delivering short, sharp scoring blows in response. Over the course of a match these blows are usually enough to gain him a decision.

The problem for Wright was this -- Trinidad's fists are so fast that dodging them in anticipation of a counterattack might be impossible, and Trinidad only needed one of them to connect to put Wright down and out.

Wright, a lefty, solved the problem with classical elegance -- with his jab. He came straight in to Trinidad, from the first moments of the first round, showing enormous courage in the tactic, and whipped out his right jab with blinding quickness. It was enough to discombobulate Trinidad, to distract him from his head-hunting. Wright would then sometimes follow up with a straight left, or double up on the jab -- and then dance away.

The strategy disconcerted Trinidad, but whenever he took the initiative to counter it, Wright would cover his head with his gloves and his midsection with his elbows and let Trinidad pound away in a kind of rope-a-dope routine, with Winky as the rope. Trinidad threw thunderous punches at Wright's gloves, hoping I guess to get him to drop one of them long enough to make an opening for a more effective blow, but Wright kept to his defensive posture with iron discipline and never gave Trinidad that opening. In frustration, Trinidad would go for Wright's body, but Wright's defense was such that Trinidad could only find a good target below Wright's belt. Referee Jay Nady had to warn Trinidad twice about this infraction and in the 9th he finally took a point away for it.

Between these infrequent and ineffective charges by Trinidad, Wright came back with his jab -- which stayed fast and accurate. It was a brilliant display of boxing -- a perfect plan perfectly executed.

About midway through the match I had the feeling of watching something beautiful and sublime -- a work of art. But there remained a twofold danger for Wright -- one, that the awesome body blows by Trinidad, legal or illegal, would wear Wright down eventually and reduce his hand speed, on which everything depended, and two, that Wright's utter domination of Trinidad would make him ambitious to put him away in dramatic fashion, and that in any such attempt Trinidad might find his chance to connect with a terminal blow.

In the event, Wright's hands stayed lively to the very end -- his jab a thing of wonder to behold. And even when he rocked Trinidad badly in the 9th, he was not tempted to press the advantage -- perhaps remembering last week's fight between Corrales and Castillo, with its demonstration of how dangerous an almost beaten fighter can be.

I gave only one round to Trinidad -- the last, in which he mounted a desperate attack to try and rescue the bout. Wright's defense held, and he got off some good counterpunches of his own, but Trinidad was the busier and more aggressive man, and I felt he earned the nod for the 12th, if only for the display of heart.

If you want to know why they call it "the sweet science", watch Wright's performance in this fight. The science of pugilism was on full display, and it was as sweet as a lyric poem.

I've now been living in Las Vegas for a little over six months and I've seen three extraordinary prize-fights in that time. The epic duel between Morales and Pacquiao, the sublime and almost unbelievable slugfest between Corrales and Castillo, and Saturday night's poem on the art of boxing by Winky Wright. We are, suddenly, in a golden age for the game, at least beneath the heavyweight ranks, where sloppiness and clownishness reign. Boxing is seen by our culture at large only through the prism of the heavyweight division -- but for members of the Fancy, who can look past the bumbling of the big boys, these are fast becoming legendary times.

For a brief glimpse of Winky's jab, in an exclusive Nowhere Confidential video clip, those with a high-speed Internet connection can click on the link below (that's Winky in the red trunks:)

Winky's Jab

There were a bunch of high-profile professional poker players sitting near me at the fight, including Mike Sexton, co-host of the World Poker Tour broadcasts and a respectable player himself, and Scotty Nguyen, former World Series Of Poker champ and still a rounder to be reckoned with. People would shout at him, "Hey, Scotty -- all in!" and he'd laugh delightedly in response. That's him in the picture above, wearing sunglasses and posing for a picture with a fan.

Celebrity sightings are common in Las Vegas, and always mildly amusing, but when I saw Diego Corrales enter the arena on floor level below me (too far away to photograph) I got a chill. Corrales, victor in the already-legendary fight with Jose Luis Castillo on 7 May, is way more than a celebrity. He's a hero -- and that's not something you see every day.

Promotional decor for the fight outside the restaurant Aureole at the Mandalay Bay

CORRALES-CASTILLO

8 May 2005

They're already calling it a classic, one for the ages, the fight of the year -- a year which isn't even half over and which has also seen the epic combat between Morales and Pacquiao, covered at length in my Nowhere Confidential report of 25 March [now in the Nowhere Confidential Archive section and here in the Fists Of Fury boxing section, below.]

If you're a member of the Fancy you know I'm talking about the awesome battle between Diego Corrales and Jose Luis Castillo at the Mandalay Bay Events Center in Las Vegas last night. If you're not, take a look at the fight when it's rebroadcast on Showtime and try to believe your eyes. I was there, and I still don't believe mine.

The arena was barely a third sold-out for the event and when I got there for the second of the undercard fights it looked almost empty. The non-televised fights on the card were all goofy and highly unscientific but entertaining. One of them featured a preview of the sort of startling turn-around that would electrify the crowd (continually) in the main event.

Carlos de Leon, Jr. of Puerto Rico is a terrific-looking middleweight prospect from Puerto Rico -- 12 and 0 going into last night's fight, with a high percentage of knock-outs. He's big, seems to be in top condition and has some boxing skills. He was scheduled to fight an "opponent" named Shannon Miller, a boxer with a lot of experience, most of it on the losing end, but for some reason not announced he found himself facing a journeyman named Marcos Perera, who clearly must have taken the fight on short notice due to some problem with Miller.

de Leon easily dominated the much smaller man in the opening round and looked to be cruising to his 13th win. But in the second round he delivered a low blow to Perera which sent him to his knees for several minutes in what looked to be excruciating pain. When Perera made it to his feet he walked around slightly bent over at the waist, in a silly-looking variant of the Groucho Marx gait. For some reason the crowd found this very funny, and I could hear several women in my section giggling uncontrollably. (Aren't fight fans wonderful?)

The whole thing seemed to piss Perera off and he came back with a fury in the rest of the round. It wasn't enough to win the round, but it was surprising, considering the way things had been going.

From then on Perera never let up. In the next round he knocked de Leon down. In the 4th he knocked him down twice and the referee called the bout. Which goes to show that you need to be careful when you assault a man's dignity in the ring, since you never know what reserves of pride might be unleashed in the process.

The first televised fight was an undistinguished contest between Juan Manuel Marquez, who holds two title belts in the featherweight division and fought Manny Pacquiao to a draw in a memorable bout in which Pacquiao had him on the canvas three times early in the fight but couldn't put him away. Marquez battled back for the rest of the fight to overcome the deficit on the scorecards and proved himself a warrior to be reckoned with.

He fought Victor Polo at the Mandalay Bay on Saturday night. Polo is a respectable contender and a southpaw, and his style gave Marquez trouble. The result was a tactical battle without much action which got the small crowd restive. "Somebody throw SOMETHING," one guy near me cried out plaintively at one point. "Why don't you take him out to dinner?" another advised Marquez. Marquez mostly threw sharp clean punches from way outside, building up points towards an inevitable win. In the 7th round he threw one of these punches so suddenly and so swiftly that it put Polo on the canvas -- less it seemed from the power of the thing than from its incalculable speed. That provided the only real excitement of the bout. Polo got back up and finished the fight -- the two men avoided each other cordially as much as honor allowed and Marquez won handily on all the judges' scorecards.

The fighters take the ring for the main event

The goofiness and/or caution of the undercard fights did not prepare one for what was to come -- but looking at the faces of Corrales and Castillo on the big video screens as they made their ways to the ring one could see that the mood of the night was about to shift. These guys had the air of grown-ups facing something terrible but inevitable.

Castillo is a fighter who doesn't move exceptionally well on his feet or punch exceptionally hard, but he's a skillful enough boxer. He likes to go forward and pound away at an opponent and grind him down. Corrales is taller and rangier, with more speed and a harder punch but not known for his sturdiness. Like many rangy fighters he can't always absorb punishment well and has been knocked down, though not out, a lot. Both men have awesome wills, though, and never give up, so the fight did not figure to go the distance.

My sense of it was this -- either Corrales would knock Castillo out sometime in the first four rounds, or Castillo, if he survived the early going, would knock Corrales out sometime in the last four rounds. Beyond that, prediction would be foolish.

In the end it went much (though not quite) as I had foreseen, but on a level no one could have imagined.

The main event

Corrales did indeed dominate the early rounds, but just barely. He hit Castillo repeatedly with combinations that would have felled a lesser man, and almost felled Castillo. But Castillo gave almost as good as he got and the rounds were very close.

When the fourth ended, I thought -- now Castillo's time has come . . . now he will win.

But the balance never tipped too far in either direction and as the battle wore on I was gripped by a strong feeling of sadness at the thought that someone was going to lose this fight. It had become a battle of wills, a contest on a moral and spiritual plane. By the 8th round I had a feeling that Corrales had the edge. He seemed to be landing the harder blows and he seemed, surprisingly, fresher. But that just made Castillo's refusal to surrender all the more admirable. Still, moral determination can take you only so far -- in the end the body has its limits. But anyone who watched this fight now knows that those limits are sometimes wider than the mind can easily conceive.

In the 8th Castillo made a startling comeback, fighting it seemed on willpower alone. He opened a cut under Corrales's eye and nearly closed both of them. By this point both men seemed to have abandoned defense altogether, willing to take any amount of punishment to find the opening that would end things decisively.

And then, in the 10th, it happened -- exactly as I had predicted. Castillo landed a combination that put Corrales down. He got up to continue but he looked dazed and unsteady on his feet. The crowd, which heavily favored Castillo -- Las Vegas boxing fans are overwhelmingly pro-Mexican, and Corrales was a mere American -- had been roaring incoherently throughout the fight. The roar turned mournful in the middle rounds, with an undertone of shock and anger. Now it soared into the realms of delirium.

A guy behind me screamed, "It's over!" And I agreed with him. Corrales's destruction was now just a matter of time, and not much time at that. Castillo struck with more combinations and Corrales went down again. Somehow he got up on all fours and then up on his feet to beat the count, but he looked like he was somewhere else, far from Las Vegas and this ugly beating he was getting.

Both times he went down Corrales lost his mouthpiece -- by crafty design or simply from punch drunkenness. Fighters who are ready to give up often spit out their mouthpieces in unconscious anticipation of surrender. In any case, retrieving the mouthpiece and getting it put back in by his cornermen gave Corrales a few extra seconds to get his head together and his legs coordinated.

Referee Tony Weeks, a seasoned veteran, seemed to take his time transferring the mouthpiece to Corrales's seconds -- I had a feeling he was giving them a chance to stop the fight, because Corrales looked on the verge of absorbing some vicious and possibly debilitating further punishment. But Joe Goosen, Corrales's trainer, obviously had no intention of throwing in the towel. Indeed, after the second knockdown he gave his fighter a stern and admonitory look -- as though trying to convey to him the gravity of the situation. Goosen appeared serious but oddly calm -- which may have had some influence on what happened next.

The fight resumed. Corrales didn't yet seem to be all there, but his dislocation from reality took an astonishing form. He stood up straight, with no attempt at defense, and attacked Castillo fearlessly. There was no time to tie up and regroup -- he'd lost three points in the 10th, two from the knockdowns and one from Weeks, who had penalized him, quite correctly, for spitting out his mouthpiece the second time.

At times in the middle rounds I'd had a sense watching Castillo of seeing a ghost in action. Physically beaten, he was operating by pure will, transcending the physical. Now Corrales seemed to have entered the same disembodied territory. His body was beaten -- something else was fighting in the ring in its place.

He hit Castillo with a punch that stunned him, sent him back into the ropes. He hit him again four times as he leaned against the ropes, his hands down, his eyes rolling upwards, out on his feet. Weeks called an end to the fight to prevent certain permanent damage to Castillo and possibly his death.

(AP)

Corrales had come back from the dead and was now champion. Castillo, who'd had the fight won in merely mortal terms, had lost. I discovered, when my mind settled a bit, that my mouth was wide open and that I was holding my head in my hands -- a perfect cartoon-figure expression of shock.

The cry from the crowd was indescribable -- filled with sorrow and astonishment and an almost inhuman excitement. The place seemed suddenly crowded to the rafters, bursting its seams -- a case of emotional standing-room only.

An earlier fight had been postponed to accommodate the television schedule but almost no one stayed for it. The crowd and the emotion and the noise surged out of the arena. I followed it, in order to have a cigarette outside the lobby area, and it seemed to me as though everyone was screaming, though it was simply a question of many people talking at high volume, in a state of extreme excitement about what they'd just seen. A fight broke out in the lobby between partisans of the two fighters -- I was nearly knocked off my feet by a female security guard racing to quell the disturbance. I remembered that there had been no metal detectors at the ticket gates, as there usually are at boxing matches, and decided to distance myself from the fracas just in case any of the post-bout combatants were packing.

The last fight

I went back in to the almost deserted arena to watch the last fight -- as a way of winding down, I guess, and to do honor to the toilers in the trenches of boxing, who would get no glory from this historic night. I watched a pretty good lightweight named Razman Palyani defeat a journeyman fighter named Ortiz. In the middle of it, Steve Albert and Jim Gray, the Showtime announcers, made their way past me out of the arena. Someone shouted something to Gray, who turned back and said, "You'll never see a better fight than that."

I'm sure I never will. Joe Goosen, when asked about the possibility of a rematch, on everyone's mind after such a contest, said, "These two should never fight each other again -- it's too much." They will, of course, boxing economics being what they are -- but it's hard to imagine any other outcome than one of them killing the other in the bout.

I went over to RM Seafood, an ultra-moderne restaurant at the Mandalay Bay, for some soothing crabcakes and beer. I couldn't think about the fight -- there didn't seem much to think about. All its meaning had been fully explicated and exhausted in the ring. What remained for me was a kind of wonder, an expanded sense of the horizons of the human will.

The night was still young by Vegas standards, barely midnight, and I had more adventures in store, but I'll have to write about them some other time.

[Postscript: Referee Tony Weeks was certainly right to intervene when he did to prevent serious injury to Castillo, but he could have done it in a different way -- by ruling a knockdown on the grounds that only the ropes were keeping Castillo on his feet, which was in fact the case, and giving Castillo a countdown, in which he might have had time to recover. I'm glad it didn't go that way, because Castillo had taken enough punishment for one night, and might have only recovered enough to get himself into more serious trouble -- but given Corrales's remarkable recovery from two knockdowns, I can certainly see merit in the argument that Castillo deserved his own second chance at turning things around yet again.]

TALES OF THE FANCY

26 April 2005

Pierce Egan, chronicler of the prize ring in Regency England, called it The Fancy -- that improbable crowd of swells and degenerates, experts and amateurs who followed the sweet science in his day. (It is sometimes said that the modern term "fan" derives from "fanatic", but I think it's much more likely to have come from "fancier", as does Egan's term.) I doubt if this crowd is much different today and you can find it on parade at any notable prize fight, particularly one held at a Las Vegas casino.

Casinos host prize fight not so much for the gate, or the publicity, as for the impact a big fight has on the house drop -- the amount of money put in play during a particular gaming cycle. Fight fans like to gamble and drink and eat well -- just the sort of folks a casino likes to have hanging around its attractions.

My friend John Sosnovsky, a member of The Fancy in good standing, flew into town late Friday night (actually early Saturday morning) for a fight card at Caesars on Saturday night that had the makings of a corker. True to form, John likes to play poker, so after dropping off his bags at my place and grabbing a bite to eat at Mr. Lucky's 24/7 at the Hard Rock, we headed to the poker room at the Palms, which was quite lively at 2am, as it is at most times of the day or night.

John took a sudden notion to sit down at a $4-8 table, the highest stakes game he'd ever played in. He did extremely well, as he usually does, and when morning dawned he was up about a yard. I had a great night, too. For me a great night means not losing -- and at this session I actually walked away five dollars up. It felt like a major triumph.

We went back to my place and got a little sleep -- the fight would start early, at 4:45pm, to accommodate the East Coast pay-per-view audience, and we wanted to leave a little time beforehand to place a few wagers on the scheduled bouts.

We got to Caesars early enough. John and I put down a little money on David Estrada, a good and tough young fighter going up against Shane Mosley, who has dropped back down to the welterweight division, which he once briefly dominated, after making a poor showing (but lots of money) in the light middleweight division. Estrada was not likely to defeat the wily older champion but he had a chance to, so the better than 3 to 1 odds made for an intriguing bet. John also put a little money on Calvin Brock, a promising heavyweight going into his first really tough match, against the much bigger veteran and almost-contender Jameel McCline.

We had a couple of drinks at the bar at Cleopatra's Barge, a bizarre little lounge at Caesars, where the musical acts perform on a replica of an ancient Egyptian barge set in the middle of the club, with a moat around it. This prepared us for the surrealism to come.

We walked over to the venue, where there was already a long line forming outside the open-air amphitheater in which the fights would be held. As we waited for the doors to open, a small platoon of beefy guys in full Roman centurion regalia escorted the rings girls, wearing terrycloth robes, into the arena. The centurions' armor and weaponry set off the metal detectors.

When we got inside we found that the amphitheater was tiny -- there wasn't a bad seat in the house and we had terrific ones in the third row of the elevated bleachers, very close to the ring . . . a bargain, by boxing standards, at $100 apiece. This was to be a night of matches between fighters highly regarded among The Fancy but, with the exception of Mosley, virtually unknown to the public at large. The crowd was thus made up of what Egan would have called "knowing coves", true students of the sport, or those who fancied themselves as such.

My friend John is a genuine knowing cove, and he quickly became the resident expert in our section of the stands, pointing out the many boxers in attendance as spectators, filling folks in on the backgrounds of the lesser known fighters on the card, and offering well-considered previews of the contests of skill and character about to unfold.

As it turned out the three featured matches, and one of the bouts on the undercard, were superlative and fascinating in the extreme.

The only really negligible fight was an eight rounder between an unseasoned young heavyweight named Malik Scott and an "opponent", Shane Swartz -- one of a class of fighters whose job it is to give up-and-coming kids a work-out under the lights, and be defeated. Scott did not look good -- tentative and sloppy -- against his opponent, but the opponent was duly defeated, by unanimous decision, and maybe the kid learned something in the process . . . if only that he's got a lot to learn.

The first televised fight of the evening was between Raul Martinez, of San Antonio, and Jose Tirado, of Culiacan, Mexico. It was a six-round bantamweight slugfest between two courageous boxers -- but Martinez was the harder puncher over the long haul and won the decision in a very close fight. This was in some ways the most exciting match of the evening, though the three that followed, in presenting starker contrasts of style and character, had greater philosophical and scientific interest.

The colors were presented by a Marine guard -- all veterans of Iraq -- who were accompanied into the ring by the Roman centurions. Between fights, and sometimes during them, the centurions also escorted a man dressed up as a Caesar and a woman dressed up as Cleopatra around through the aisles. The impersonators waved regally at the patrons and sometimes paused to let their photographs be taken. There was something delightfully cheesy about this -- with the air of an old, ridiculous Las Vegas promotion from the Fifties. The innocence of the Caesars brand of vulgarity is genuinely charming.

Calvin Brock was an untested heavyweight prospect who'd only fought "opponents" before going up against Jameel McCline in the next bout. McCline is not quite a heavyweight contender, having lost a decision to Chris Byrd, a bona fide player in the heavyweight ranks. But it was a split decision, and McCline sent Byrd to the canvas at one point in the fight -- so he promised to provide Brock with his inaugural test, and he delivered on that promise.

McCline is a lot bigger than Brock, with a lot more experience. He's known to fade if he gets hit hard, and he showed up in the ring at Caesars looking a little flabby. But he gave Brock almost more than he could handle Saturday night.

He didn't fade when Brock hit him hard, as Brock did often, and he adopted the wise though not quite legal tactic of tying Brock up and leaning on him, tiring Brock visibly by the middle rounds of the contest. (Referee Joe Cortez really should have stopped this monkey business after a few rounds, but for some reason he didn't.)

Brock had the best of it in the early rounds but seemed to be punched out by the 7th, when a vicious uppercut by the bigger man sent him down to the canvas for the first time in his professional career. It was a defining moment in the young fighter's life -- a chance to see what he was really made of.

Stern stuff, as it turned out. Brock got up before the count ended and went back to work like a man reborn. He attacked McCline methodically and effectively for the rest of the round, to a degree that had some judges giving him back one of the two points he lost by way of the knockdown.

Brock went on to dominate the last rounds and to win a unanimous decision on all the judges' scorecards. I saw the fight as closer than the judges did, but I was no more inclined than they were to give McCline any more credit than absolutely required, because of his unseemly tactics, effective as they were. Leaning on a man is not the same thing as fighting him, and it would have been ugly to see McCline rewarded for the strategy.

Brock has much to learn about ring generalship, as they call it -- he should have found a way out of playing caryatid to McCline's architrave -- but he showed tremendous spirit and will in his late-rounds comeback. It was inspiring.

The next fight, between the veteran Mosley and the prospect Estrada opened with four rounds of extremely beautiful boxing -- and for those 12 minutes the fight looked destined to be a classic. Mosley had his old hand speed back but Estrada was a match for him in that department -- one had the impression of watching two swarms of bees attack each other. It was old-style boxing at its best and aesthetically thrilling.

But experience told as the fight wore on. Estrada tired and his punches lost their zip. And he started missing -- a lot -- which never goes down well with judges, no matter how many times, and how hard, a fighter hits his opponent between punches gone astray.

Mosley hung in there and built up points with his jab -- not a punishing jab but sharp enough to register as a clean scoring blow. Clearly Estrada hadn't paced himself psychologically for a contest like this, against a fighter with Mosley's years of experience and genuine skills. Mosley looked rusty himself at times, and his footwork wasn't always energetic or effective as a defensive tool, but he had what it took to overmaster the younger man mentally, and he won a unanimous decision from the judges. I had the fight much closer than they did, but an old favorite like Mosley always gets the benefit of the doubt in a match like this.

Now it was time for the main event and the atmosphere was electric as Kermit Cintron and Antonio Margarito made their ways to the ring. Margarito, from Tijuana, came out very gay, as Egan would have said -- grinning and bouncing on his toes and high-fiving the people crowding up to the aisle he proceeded down.

Cintron looked grave and menacing by contrast -- ready for serious business. And serious business the fight was -- right from the start.

Cintron is thought by some to have the hardest punch in the welterweight division at the moment. The problem is that he doesn't have the ring savvy or boxing skills to go with his power. Margarito is known for terrifying combinations, delivered with surgical precision, that can render a man unconscious just as effectively as Cintron's bombs.

As soon as the two men started mixing it up the fight engendered a mood of excruciating suspense and dread. It was like watching a duel fought with razor-sharp machetes. Cintron landed some terrifying blows to Margarito's head. "That one rocked him!" I remarked to John. John shrugged dismissively. "He's from Tijuana," John explained -- meaning it would take more than a couple of terrifying blows to put Margarito down.

In the end it was Margarito who put Cintron down. He opened a bad cut over Cintron's eye in the third. It didn't seem to affect Cintron's vision so much as his concentration. Margarito went to work with his combinations, and after a few of them Cintron's legs seemed to disconnect from his body. He was punching cleanly and scoring, but his legs were executing some alien choreography of their own design -- perhaps trying to find a way back to the dressing room.

Cintron fell to his knees three times -- not so much from hard blows as from the discombobulation of his stems, though that discombobulation was brought on by many hard blows delivered with speed and power and accuracy by Margarito.

The ref stopped the contest in the 5th -- not a moment too soon. Cintron just wasn't all there anymore.

So it wasn't the epic fight many predicted -- rather a case of a better-rounded fighter outclassing one with more limited weapons at his disposal. It was exciting to watch, but not entirely pleasant. There was something chilling about Margarito's methodical destruction of Cintron. Bigger names in the welterweight division will certainly feel the same chill, watching tapes of the bout, and it will be hard for Margarito to make a money fight. But when he does -- and it will have to happen sooner or later -- it will be worth much to watch.

Exalted as one usually is after a fine display of boxing, especially if one sees it live, John and I went off in search of superlative food and drink, fit for the occasion. We found it at Joe's Stone Crab, in the Forum Shops arcade at Caesars.

A branch of a famous Florida eatery, Joe's has a wonderful bar section with high tables, dark wood paneling and vaguely deco appointments. There we feasted on fried oysters, lobster, stone crabs and key lime pie -- all of which were sublime. (I found out later that Sugar Ray Leonard, who'd done color commentary for ESPN's broadcast of the fight, was dining there at the same time, with a big party in a private room. This was not surprising, since members of The Fancy usually have good instincts for the most righteous places to hang.)

After a meal like that there was nothing to do but hit the poker room at the Palms again. Sleep was simply out of the question. I got good cards all night and played them extremely well, I must say, and left the room $108 up. John, having moved down to a $2-4 game, couldn't get a streak going. He moved back up to $4-8 and recovered his lost buy-in, but not a lot more, standing about pat as we staggered home in broad daylight and collapsed.

It had been an awesome night -- million dollar stuff.

We visited Sonny Liston's grave the next afternoon, to pay our respects and to remind ourselves that glory and pleasure are fleeting. This did not stop us from going back to the Palms poker room to spend a few hours before John's return flight to New York. John chanced into a tight game with little betting, and watched his buy-in dribble away in small increments. I lucked into a table with spirited bettors and a couple of dolts in the mix, and made $30 on the session. At one point I was down to my last three chips and went all in on a full-house -- sixes full of sevens. The pot had grown enormous because one of my opponents had trip sevens and another a flush to the ace. I thus went from nothing to $10 up in a matter of minutes, and added another $20 to my winnings after that. (I am now down $97 at poker -- lifetime -- after my birthday reset.)

The Fancy is an occasional congregation, brought into being by a prize fight at a venue surrounded by action of one sort or another -- betting and public houses in Egan's day, the all-purpose degradathon of a big casino in ours. But when The Fancy assembles, and I take my place in it, I feel as though I've never been away, and as though I'm with friends . . . all those congenial strangers who share a taste for life in extremis, for delirious excess -- of courage and skill and chance and food and drink (and other less innocent pleasures of the flesh.)

They live like kings (like Caesars!) for a brief moment, then return to the daily grind, and all the cost of it is accounted as little enough beside the exhilaration gained and pocketed forever.

© Sharon Gaines

COMBOS, BABY!

29 March 2005

I saw Sharon Gaines in action at a fight at the Silverton Casino in Las Vegas last January. She lost an unpopular decision, but in my report of the fight I agreed with the judges, who gave it to her opponent. Sharon disagrees, and says the tape of the fight proves her right. In the interests of fair play, here is Sharon's perspective on the contest:

"I do feel I won that fight v Salinas, for the record. I out-pointed her round after round and she had trouble getting off the ropes. She did hit clean and had a lot of power, when she landed, but she NEVER followed up any of those great shots with 2 or 3 more punches. Combos, baby!"

My guess is that Sharon will win her next bout decisively, just to prove the critics (like me) wrong, and all I can say to that is -- you go, girl!

Click Here To Visit Sharon Gaines's Web Site

My report of all the girl fights at the Silverton can be found in the Nowhere Confidential Archive section, under the heading GIRL FIGHTS and the dateline 31 January 2005.

A CONTEST OF HEROES

25 March 2005

I saw an awesome thing in Las Vegas last Saturday, at the MGM Grand Garden Arena. It was indeed what Piece Egan, the A. J. Liebling of the early 19th-century prize ring, would have called, with a certain gaiety of spirit but absolutely no irony, a Contest Of Heroes. Liebling, following in the footsteps of his beloved Egan, would have called it the same, and so do I.

Erik Morales of Tijuana went twelve rounds with Manny Pacquiao of the Philippines, in a combat that took one back to the epic days when boxing was both art and science, when men's souls were tried in the prize ring for the genuine edification of those wise enough to know what they were seeing and humble enough to appreciate it. I'm still reeling from the experience.

Morales is a warrior -- a skilled technician whose reckless bravery has made him a legend among Mexican fight fans. He'd recently lost a controversial decision to perpetual rival Marco Antonio Barrera -- a fight he thought he'd won and which initiated talk that perhaps his best days were behind him. With more bravura than discretion, it seemed, he immediately made a fight with Manny Pacquiao, the lightning-fast Filipino with a lethal left hand. The betting money in Las Vegas favored Pacquiao, because he was the fresher and faster man -- and perhaps from a feeling, which I shared, that Morales would be too brave, run into one of Pacquiao's killer lefts, and have no further opportunity to reconsider his rashness.

Or maybe not.

It looked to be one of those fights whose potential complexities approached the nature of imponderables -- as well as a hell of brawl -- so I got a ticket to go see it.

I headed to the MGM Grand early on Saturday so I could polish off a pre-fight oyster po' boy at Emeril's New Orleans Fish House there. The sandwich is filled to overflowing with small, fresh, tasty Gulf oysters, fried in a light and spicy cornmeal batter. To say that it's good eating is putting it mildly. Then I wandered around the MGM, a casino I don't know well.

It doesn't make a good first impression -- with the exact feel of an upscale chain department store in a fancy suburban mall. What redeems it are the restaurants. It has a good, though overpriced, coffee shop on an elevated terrace with a fun view of the casino floor. Nob Hill, a high-end eatery, has wonderfully fresh food and superb service, and eating at the bar at Emeril's is always pleasurable (besides being the only place in that establishment where you can smoke.)

I haven't eaten at Shibuya, Craftsteak, Seablue, Fiamma or Diego, but all of them are well-reviewed establishments with dazzling decor -- which makes for quite a line-up of dining opportunities.

I checked out the sports book, which was jammed with people following the college basketball games. I was tempted to put some money on Morales, because I figured the true odds on the fight were dead even, which made the line in Pacquiao's favor a bargain bet for Morales. But I couldn't get the image of Pacquiao's redoubtable left out of my mind, where it kept colliding with Morales's face, and the lines at the betting stations were long, so I just grabbed an iced latte and headed to the arena.

The partisans in the crowd assembling there, waiting for the doors to open at 4pm, split about 70/30 Mexican to Filipino. A lot of people carried flags. The mood was friendly -- because each side could giver honor to the other's champion. I eventually ended up sitting between a young man born in Mexico and an older man born in the Philippines. They talked respectfully to each other across this ethnic neutral, bearing a name concocted in France, which has no fighters of note and hasn't since the lyrical loser Georges Carpentier. (It will be remembered that George Blanchine once admonished his dancers not to be too lyrical. "Georges Carpentier," he offered by way of illustration, "was the most lyrical boxer who ever lived -- but Dempsey took him out in four." Balanchine wasn't the only artist who learned from that fight -- it shocked Hemingway, too, at an impressionable age . . . and he had money on the Frenchman which he couldn't afford to lose. This undoubtedly contributed to his lifelong suspicion of the high-falutin'.)

Each of my neighbors desperately wanted his man to win, but seemed more concerned simply that he not prove an embarrassment. They needn't have worried.

I saw Harold Lederman, HBO's unofficial scorer, wandering around the lobby of the arena before the event. In real life he looks exactly like a cartoon character, short, with an enormous head and a goofy, infectious smile.

The arena holds about 15,000, which makes it intimate compared to Madison Square Garden, the only other place I've witnessed a big fight in person. I had a $125 seat, which in the New York Garden gets you a place up under the rafters, but here got me a one about halfway up from the ring with a superb view. It was the second cheapest seat in the house.

The three preliminary bouts, before the TV coverage started at 6, included two typical joke fights. Everything that Liebling, back in the Fifties, feared that television would do to boxing has been done -- killing off the local club fights which used to be a training ground for young fighters. Now promising kids are thrown out on undercards against bums until they have enough stats to get a shot at something televised, whereupon they sink or swim. The general skill-level of The Sweet Science has thus been dreadfully degraded -- which is why most of the great fighters of our time come from places where local boxing traditions have survived.

The young man from Mexico I sat next to had been a professional boxer, briefly, and had started fighting when he was about 8 in the small village where he grew up. "They'd give me five pesos," he said, "which used to be a big coin like this --" (he made a circle with his fingers about the size of a silver dollar.) "They said, 'Who do you want to fight?', pointing to the other boys, and I said, 'I don't care -- I'll fight anybody.'" That's how Erik Morales grew up, too, in the tough Zona Norte section of Tijuana, and Pacquiao is probably a product of a similar tradition.

Products of the risk-free routes to male self-esteem in our culture are not likely to find themselves fighting their hearts out for a world boxing title but are increasingly likely to find themselves paying large sums of money to watch other men do so. It's in the nature of a make-up class.

In the first prelim, two Filipino fighters waved at each other and butted heads. Then one of them suffered a flash knockdown, told the ref he couldn't see too well, and retired from the contest.

In the second prelim, a big tall Polish Heavyweight named Sosnowski went up against a pudgy Teddy Bear named Fulton from Cedar Falls, Iowa. Sosnowski looked a lot like Vitali Klitchko, the current top-ranked Heavyweight, and seemed to be trying to fight like him, as well -- in a sort of robotic way. Fulton had clearly been doing most of his training at Fatburger and he went down easily in the second.

The third prelim was a lot more interesting. Hilario Lopez, a tall, rangy Super Lightweight from Boise was matched against the more compact and harder-punching Mike Alvarado from Denver. Lopez leapt at the smaller man and delivered blinding combinations -- but his blows were glancing for the most part, sometimes discombobulating but never really hurting his opponent. Alvarado counterpunched sharply and cleanly and clearly did some damage to Lopez. But Alvarado hardly ever threw a body punch -- the classic technique for taking the legs out from under an elongated fighter like Lopez and neutralizing his height and reach advantage. It was pleasing to watch Alvarado's skillful counterpunching but frustrating -- he could have saved himself so much time and trouble by going to the body. This is the sort of basic ring technique which kids coming up in the sport today simply do not learn. Alvarado won handily on points, to the disapproval of the crowd dazzled by Lopez's apparent punch-count advantage.

In the first of the televised bouts, a spirited WBA Super Flyweight title fight, Eric Morel of Puerto Rico duked it out with Martin Castillo of Mexico. It was a back-and-forth brawl, with Castillo attacking and seeming on the verge of stopping Morel -- only to find Morel springing back at him with furious combinations. Overall Castillo had the best of it -- some well-considered early-round body punching paying off in the later stretches. It was a unanimous decision for the Mexican fighter.

A curious bout then followed. Julio Cesar Chavez, Jr., son of the near-mythological Mexican champion, faced off against a not-quite journeyman fighter from Indianapolis, Ryan Maraldo. Julio, Jr. is just 19, with 16 (now 17) wins -- probably all over opponents like Maraldo -- and no losses. His name is box-office magic, so I guess he's being brought up very carefully. He came out fighting tentatively, as though weighted down supernaturally by the burden of that name, as though he'd rather be doing anything else than standing in a ring with someone who might hurt him and tarnish the family's honor. The wild exclamations of the crowd whenever he did land a blow, and the increasingly obvious fact that Maraldo couldn't hurt a fly -- try as he might (and did) -- finally got the kid going. He hurt his opponent badly in the second, then hurt him some more -- to the point I really thought the ref should have stopped the thing. But he let it go on into the third and finally called an end when the beating got too savage.

The last match before the main event was a WBC Flyweight elimination bout between Hussein Hussein, fighting out of Bankstown, Australia, and cocky, insouciant Jorge Arce of Los Mochis, Mexico. It was a furiously contested fight, in the course of which Hussein knocked the cock and insouciance right out of Arce, as the two traded barrages that seemed ever on the verge of ending things, one way or the other. My note for round two is simply "back-and-forth (H?)" -- meaning, maybe Hussein took it by a hair's breadth. My note for round three is "back-and-forth (A?)" My note for round five is "back-and-forth (?)". I don't know how anyone could have scored this one, and fortunately Arce saved us all the attempt by summoning some last reserve of fury and knocking Hussein out in the tenth. The wildly partisan Mexican contingent in the arena had been on the edge of its seats throughout this fight, and all but silenced for much of it by Hussein's courageous attacks on its favorite. I think it only deepened the mood of suspense over what was to come next.

I didn't take notes on the Morales-Pacquiao fight. I couldn't have averted my eyes from the ring even to jot down an abbreviated memorial of what was happening, not even between rounds, when it seemed most important to watch the fighters in their corners and try to read their body language in repose. Someday I'll look at a tape of it, I guess, and try to reconstruct the details of it -- but the details of it will never tell its story, which played out deep inside each fighter, and deep inside all of us who watched them tell it, to us and to each other.

Watching two men fight each other is to eavesdrop on the second most intimate conversation possible between human beings. Unlike sex, the most intimate, the conversation is accessible to an onlooker, because the interior give and take of the dialogue has a close correspondence to its physical expression. Sexual intercourse is opaque by comparison -- unless you're a participant, everything important about it must be inferred.

When the national anthem of the Philippines was sung, beautifully, the cheering and palpable emotion that rose up in the arena was enough to make you think that Pacquiao's supporters had filled up most of the place. When the Mexican national anthem was sung, less beautifully, the floor-shaking roar and delirious shouting made it clear that things were otherwise. I found it all very moving. Most of the folk on both sides were Americans, after all, and it is the genius of America to make a place for national sentiment originating beyonds its borders. It has ever been thus, and though I have long since lost my identity as a descendant of French immigrants, I know the feeling involved, as a Southern-born American, through my unaccountable emotional response to the song "Dixie", something which transcends both intellect and moral wisdom. It is the national anthem of a long-vanished country that went to war with the United States of America, for the most questionable of motives, but is still, in some sense, my country.

Pacquiao has the face of a boy always on the verge of tears -- as though any failing in his chosen profession would break his heart. This belies, but perhaps explains, the viciousness of his attack. He's light on his feet, fast and apparently flighty, until he jumps forward to throw his deadly left, often quicker than the eye of a spectator or the brain of an opponent can follow.

Morales has the grave and mournful face that you sometimes see in photographs and films of great matadors -- or in antique Spanish paintings of saints. Some great boxers can sell a jaunty confidence to the public, but even the cleverest of these, like Muhammed Ali, cannot quite conceal a sadness behind the eyes. It is the sadness of one who has looked beyond Eternity and seen the end of all things, of someone on intimate terms with the inevitability of physical ruin and death. Jaunty confidence counts for nothing in the bull ring or the prize ring, where there is serious and difficult work to be done.

Styles make fights, they say, and styles made this one. Morales is a fine boxer who likes to attack, even when attacking is not the best policy. He likes to please the fans, he says, especially the Mexican fight fans who want to see two guys really mix it up -- but there must be more to it than this, some element of fatalism connected to his deepest self, which would rather fail bravely following his courage to its uttermost end than win comfortably using only his skill.

Pacquiao is a great defensive fighter, who uses speed to dodge the weapons of his opponents and speed to exploit any opening they give him. And he doesn't need much of an opening -- his left, when thrown from slightly outside an opponent's guard, is so hard and so fast that it can decide a fight all by itself.

Both fighters have awesome wills, awesome courage -- not just great chins but the determination of a true champion to stand up to any punch, to survive any assault.

The most likely mistake Morales might make in fighting Pacquiao was to expose himself too much in pressing the attack -- to give Pacquiao the opening he needed to end things quickly. He might do this knowing full well how foolish it was, just for the chance to demonstrate his bravery. So for Morales the drama of the fight would be his own struggle to balance that bravery with cunning.

Pacquiao's challenge was simpler -- to keep moving, to keep calculating the angles, timing Morales's moves to find the space and the moment for a coup de grace.

In the end, Morales kept his head for the most part -- he fought the fight he needed to fight to win, though it was close from start to finish, and victory was never out of Pacquiao's reach. What Morales did, what his more reckless demons allowed him to do, was exploit Pacquiao's limitations as a fighter.

Pacquiao can't do much damage fighting close in -- his power punches must start from outside. He also does not fight well going back -- he dances in retreat, looking for room to regroup. So if you back him up, you have a lot of time and space to hit him in, without much danger of being hit hard in response. You risk passing through the killing field of his left hand when you move to back him up, but Morales used his jab effectively to distract Pacquiao when he came forward, and for most of the fight it worked wonderfully.

Every time the system broke down, when Morales was too unscientific in pressing his attack, Pacquiao made him pay dreadfully for it. But every time the system worked, Morales took it all back and then some out of Pacquiao's hide. This give and take involved moments of intense excitement, when one fighter or the other seemed on the verge of ending the match decisively by knock out. But neither man would let himself go down -- and every near disaster for one summoned forth the strength to inflict a near disaster on the other in reply.

Pacquiao got a bone-deep cut above his eye in the fifth. The ref ruled that it was from a punch, though ringside observers said it came from an accidental head butt. The cut caused a swelling that seemed to affect Pacquiao's sight in his left eye. If the ref's ruling had been other than it was, Pacquiao might have been wise to retire and let the decision go to the judges. I had Morales just slightly ahead on points at that stage of things, but I wouldn't have quarreled with anyone who had it just as slightly in Pacquiao's favor. But Pacquiao would have lost the fight if he'd retired because of a cut ruled to have come from a punch, so he fought on. At times it seemed that he was missing and getting hit as a result of his diminished vision -- at other times he seemed right back at the top of his form, and a late rally in the twelth and final round almost had Morales on the ropes.

The was an element of paradoxical monotony in the endless exchange of thrilling near-climaxes. One's nerves simply grew numb from the intensity of it, the suspense of it. And one's spirit finally gave up trying to imagine what reserves of discipline and pride and gallantry it must take to equip a man for a contest like this one. The fight stopped making narrative sense to me at the end -- it fractured into a series of tableaux, of still images, like the ring paintings of Bellows or old black-and-white newspaper photographs of great fights from the 40s. A kind of incoherent chant rang in my ears -- like the music of Homer's hexameters, in Greek. I wanted it to be over -- to pass into legend. It became too much to comprehend in the moment, in the flesh.

All three judges scored the fight 115 to 113 for Morales, which is just the way I saw it. Pacquiao's blurred vision in the middle of the fight might alone have accounted for the tiny margin of Morales's victory. The predominantly pro-Mexican crowd cheered -- but less enthusiastically than might have been expected. The glory of the night seemed to have transcended national sentiment. The young Mexican fellow on my right shook hands gravely with me and with the older Filipino man on my left -- he almost seemed to be apologizing for feeling so happy. I shook hands just as gravely with the Filipino gent -- he seemed sad but hardly devastated by his fellow Filipino's loss. I congratulated him on the fight, and he nodded. He knew what I meant.

Afterwards, I needed a dose of blue ruin -- slang in Egan's day for gin. I was befuddled by incoherent emotions and worried that I might burst suddenly into tears.

The bar at the edge of the MGM's gaming floor, near the front entrance, was jammed, but it seemed like the place to be. I managed to get a gin and tonic at the bar and to find a place to perch at a high narrow table just in back of the crowd at the rail. Larry Merchant, HBO's resident boxing sage and commentator, came and perched right across from me, in the company of two young men who seemed to have been his guests at the fight. He was drinking a Bud Light.

"Beer, Larry?" asked one of the young men. "You usually drink wine."

"I know," Merchant said, "but I felt like I need something cold after that one. I felt like I fought it myself."

I've often quarreled (in my mind) with Merchant's sometimes baffling fight commentaries, but I liked him a lot at that moment. He looked as emotionally drained as I was. A celebrity buff came up and shook Merchant's hand. "Did you call the fight tonight, Larry?" he asked, moronically.

"Yeah, I did," said Merchant, almost to himself, "but that one didn't need to be called."

Didn't need to be -- couldn't have been. It would take a bard in Homer's weight class to put it into words.

GIRL FIGHTS

31 January 2005

This past Saturday I went to see some professional girl fights at the Silverton Casino. It was my first visit to the place, which is west and way south of The Strip, in that wonderful part of Las Vegas still surrounded by vast parcels of undeveloped desert -- it reminds me of the way the whole town felt when I first visited it in 1971.

The Silverton is what they call a "locals's casino" but it's by far the coolest of these I've visited. It has a hunting/fishing lodge theme, with lots of rough-hewn timbers, good, warm lighting and cozy, inviting bars tucked around the edges of the gaming floor. One of the bars has a view of the central attraction of the place, a gigantic water tank visible through big stone portals where ladies dressed as mermaids and other fantasy creatures perform underwater dances. I wasn't able to see one of these performances on this visit but I can't wait to catch one on my next.

Buying my ticket at the Player's Club desk I ran into a young man who asked excitedly if I was buying a ticket for the fights. When I said yes he beamed. He looked like a boxer so I asked him if he had a girl on the card, and he said he did -- Bose Ijola. I shook his hand and wished him good luck and he beamed even more. He and his fighter were in from Chicago and I guess he wasn't sure people would actually show up for a girl fight in a Vegas casino, but he needn't have worried -- the place was packed.

I lucked into a table at the Twin Creeks restaurant, the casino's premiere dining joint, always heavily booked on a Saturday night. Some people with a reservation hadn't shown up and the kindly maitre d' gave me their spot. The staff was extremely friendly, even though the service was a bit slow, and I had a fine meal of fried oysters, shrimp and catfish.

Then I headed off to the casino's small theatrical venue, transformed for the night into a miniature boxing arena. The ring was set up in the middle of the floor, with straight-backed chairs and bleachers around it -- VIP seating on the stage. There wasn't a bad seat in the house, though -- it had an intimate feel that gave the event a real charge.

The night was all-girl -- mostly way below championship level, with one fighter making her professional debut and several with just a few fights under their belts. But I would argue that you see better fighting, pound for pound, with girl boxers than you do with guy boxers on this level. As I've written before, girls, because of their relatively lesser upper-body strength, really need to learn to box -- unlike so many guys who try to get by with an undeveloped style and a big punch to get the job done.

In fact, the fights on Saturday were excellent. In a four-round bantamweight bout, Sharon Gaines, who fights out of Kansas City, went on permanent offense against Jennifer Salinas of Grand Rapids. The problem was that Gaines's rapid flurries of punches rarely landed squarely while Salinas's counter-punching was sharp and effective. The crowd, not the most discerning I've ever been part of, booed the judges's unanimous decision in favor of Salinas, but it was absolutely correct. In the post-fight interview Salinas greeted her five-month old daughter -- "I do it all for her," she said. Salinas must have gone back into the gym the day after she had the kid -- she was in terrific shape and razor-sharp, tactically speaking. An awesome woman, obviously.

Gaines, undaunted, appeared out among the spectators soon after the fight, all dolled up and looking like a total babe, to sign autographs and promote her web site (still under construction.)

Click Here To Visit Sharon Gaines's Web Site

Bose Ijola, one of whose seconds I'd met buying my ticket, turned out to be a sturdily-built, powerful-looking super middleweight making her professional debut. She went up against a tall, strong Swede named Asa Sandell, whose second fight it was. Ijola looked nervous, as well she might, and seemed to have a hard time getting going. The Swede was cooler and in better command of her arsenal. I thought Ijola's only hope was a full-on body attack against Sandell, which is often effective against a tall fighter with an elongated body mass -- body shots against such fighters can take their legs right out from under them at times. But Ijola just kept swinging wildly for the Swede's head and never seemed to find it. The Swede won handily on points in the 4-round bout.

The tall and lanky versus short and compact match-ups continued in a 6-rounder between junior middleweights Daira Hill, from Philadelphia (the tall and lanky one) and Angie Poe (short and compact) from Denver. It turned out to be an interesting fight. Poe was by far the more skillful boxer and the aggressor throughout. She was well ahead on points in the 5th, but her many scoring blows were rarely directed at Hill's midsection -- and suddenly, Poe seemed to run out steam. Hill, battered but fresh, threw a series of downward-aimed blows at Poe's head, which dazed her. She took a few more unanswered shots before referee Joe Cortez called an end to things. It seemed like a sudden stoppage, and heartbreaking because Poe was so close to winning the bout, and the audience booed lustily, but Cortez is a seasoned pro and you had to give him the benefit of the doubt -- he had a better view of Poe's eyes in the crisis and Poe's career is just getting going . . . no use risking a beating that might end it altogether.

Elizabeth Kerin, a tall, powerfully-built middleweight from Chicago had the best of it the first couple of rounds of her fight with Shelly Burton of Kalispell, Montana. But the shorter, stronger Burton hung in there, got inside Kerin's guard and pounded away at the taller girl, whose spirit seemed to flag under the assault. Decision for Burton.

The best fight of the night was the featured bantamweight match-up between title-fight prospect Elena "Baby Doll" Reid of Phoenix (close enough to Vegas to make her an overwhelming crowd favorite) and Lakeysha Williams of Philadelphia. The most experienced fighters of the night they were both superb boxers as well -- Williams tall and fast, Reid shorter but equally fast. It was thrilling to watch such skills on display -- a real privilege to witness. The fight was pretty much even until the 7th round (I think it was) when Reid sank a terrifying punch into Williams's gut, doubling her over in what looked like excruciating pain, then landed another hard blow to her head as she crumpled to the floor. Williams lay writhing on the canvas as the ref counted her out and the crowd went wild.

Reid's nickname is well-taken -- she's a real doll, and the flush of her victory made her radiant, with an almost supernatural glow.

The crowd, as I say, was not entirely admirable, with a lot of drunken young males shouting out ill-advised advice to the fighters, mixed with crude insults. Salinas and Reid between them could have reduced the whole gang of these louts to hamburger in about two minutes -- which fact probably accounted in large part for their pathetic posturing.

The auxiliary conversations between my bleacher-mates were sometimes amusing, though. I heard one guy say, "I don't really collect art, but I do want an original Red Skelton clown painting. What do you think those things go for?" None of his pals seemed to know. Another guy near me asked his companion, an older woman, "Have you seen much boxing?" "Oh, yes," she said, "I used to watch it a lot when I was in the army."

As I lit up a cigarette outside the theater I saw Asa Sandell, the big blonde Swede, exiting the place in street clothes with her trainer. She had a beatific smile on her face and a spectacular black eye. So I guess Bose Ijola's glove did find Sandell's head at least once -- though I suspect that the shiner won't bother the Swede too much . . . just a reminder, like a medal of honor, of her moment of glory in the ring at the Silverton, under bright lights in the middle of the Mojave desert.

JONES V. JONES

16 May 2004

For a while now George Shelps, a friend from the silent film newsgroup alt.movies.silent, has been comparing Smarty Jones to Seabiscuit. It seemed a bit of a stretch until Smarty's stretch run in the Preakness yesterday. It wasn't just that he won by eleven lengths, it was the controlled fury of his race that got one's attention and reminded one of that earlier and equally unlikely champion who seemed to take such joy in trouncing, in obliterating his competition.

Later that night, Roy Jones, Jr., another smarty who was also a great champion, tried to get his legs under him after a blow from Antonio Tarver sent him to the canvas for only the second time in his professional career. He didn't make it, and the whole boxing world was suddenly turned upside down.

My friend John Sosnovsky and I had split the pay-per-view costs and convened in the half-packed loft here to see if Jones could redeem himself after a lackluster split-decision win over Tarver last year. Neither of us really doubted that he would, and as we waited out three undistinguished fights on the undercard we speculated about the ways things might unfold.

I imagined that Jones would come out fast, try to overwhelm Tarver with his hand speed and power, and foresaw an early-round victory for Jones. I felt, though, that if Tarver could survive the first three rounds it might turn into a battle -- and then all bets would be off.

But Jones looked dry as he entered the ring and neither man took charge when the opening bell rang. Both are counter-punchers by instinct, and since neither was throwing much, there wasn't much for either to counter. Jones eventually got in some good body punches in the first, enough to win the round, but that surprised me -- suggesting that Jones was anticipating a long bout and trying to slow Tarver down for the later stages of the thing.

Tarver's defense was exceptionally good, though, which contributed to Jones's failure to score much. Whenever Jones went for Tarver's head he found him leaning back with his hands up, and could land nothing solid upstairs.

But Tarver wasn't running -- he was stalking in his own intense way. Watching a replay of the second round I seemed to see a kind of controlled fury in his eyes -- just like that of the quadruped Smarty Jones -- and when he saw daylight he went for it with the same violent burst of energy.

One minute and forty seconds into the second round, Jones threw a right that missed and was moving forward slightly to throw a left. He'd pulled his right back to the side of his face with textbook defensive skill, but Tarver's left suddenly shot out and found its way past Jones's right to the the side of Jones's head. Jones had probably never been hit so squarely and so hard in his whole professional career, with a punch he simply didn't see coming, and it took him somewhere he'd never been before.

He hit the canvas, his head on the apron of the ring outside the ropes. You could see he was hurt but it still didn't seem possible that he wouldn't get back up and continue the contest. But when he dragged himself back into the ring and tried to get to his knees he crashed back down again and was so wobbly when he did finally get to his feet that the ref wisely stopped the fight.

Jones didn't handle his defeat well. His only other loss had come on a disqualification, when he punched a fighter while he was down on one knee, in the course of a fight Jones was winning handily. But Tarver beat him fair and square, and in spectacular fashion. Jones reacted by dismissing the fight as a mistake, suggesting he should have stayed up in the heavyweight ranks instead of coming back down to the light heavyweight division for the fight with Tarver -- as though the whole thing were simply a question of career strategy.

I said before that Jones was a great champion, but it would be fairer to say that he was great fighter -- and he was that, for ten years considered the best, pound-for-pound, in the world. But as many have observed, he never had the kind of competition that's needed to make a great champion -- someone to play Joe Frazier to his Ali.

Never had it, that is, until Tarver, in a fight he seems to want to dismiss as an ill-advised career move. He said he wasn't much interested in a third fight with Tarver, and I'm not sure he could beat Tarver in a rematch -- but I think less of him for not wanting to try.

Both men will probably move up to the wide-open heavyweight division, where Jones has already notched a win against a much bigger man in John Ruiz. Both could probably get past everyone now making noise in that division -- everyone but Vitali Klitchko, a giant with excellent boxing skills, some real, terrifying power and a killer's instincts. Jones and Tarver probably both have the defensive skills to hold their own in the ring with him, but it's hard to see how they could beat him, easy to see how he could beat them -- with one good punch landed solidly.

As Smarty Jones gears up for a run at immortality in the Belmont Stakes, Roy Jones, Jr., maybe too smart for his own good, gears up to salvage what he can for his legacy post-Tarver. Top dog going down is always less fun to watch than underdog going up, but both have lessons worth studying, worth taking to heart.

GIRL FIGHT

October 2002

When she was 26 my friend Beth worked for a sports gambler in Vegas by day and by night started training to be a boxer. I'd seen her first serious sparring with a boxer from outside her gym -- an experienced amateur visiting from California who needed some work while she was in town. Beth attacked fearlessly, throwing short, straight punches, including a very effective jab, but she wasn't bobbing and weaving and she kept coming in at the same angle. She got banged up pretty good by a fighter who knew how to take advantage of that sort of thing.

A month or so after that I saw her go a couple of rounds with Layla McCarter, a pro and title holder in her weight class. This time Beth bobbed and wove, and came in and out on good angles, but never got close -- threw punches from way outside that left her dangerously exposed. She didn't get banged up at all, neither did she bang.

When she puts those two styles together, I thought, she's going to be something. There were, of course, other possibilities, and I was thinking about all of them as I flew to Vegas a week later to see Beth's first official amateur bout.

I landed in the strange desert town Saturday afternoon, only to learn that Beth's fight had been pushed up, so I sped in a taxi to the venue -- a gym in North Las Vegas, which is a very long way from the bright lights of The Strip.

Got there in plenty of time, found the place packed with a hundred or so spectators, the kid fights in progress. Lots of wild swinging, not much connecting. Found Beth, who was very nervous -- and how could she not be? There was an ambulance parked outside, a doctor and some EMS workers inside, with a gurney -- just in case. Beth's opponent looked scary, too -- shorter and much stockier than Beth, and apparently very confident.

There were fourteen scheduled bouts -- Beth went on near the end, so she (and I and all her friends) had plenty of time to worry. Hers was the only girl fight of the meeting. But Beth kicked ass -- keeping her opponent totally off balance with her jab, scoring consistently. I just kept yelling "Stick the jab! Work off the jab!", like an idiot, knowing it was the best way for Beth to keep from being hurt -- but somewhere in the second round Beth realized that she didn't need to fight defensively. She was enjoying the defensive benefits of a well-executed offense. The Sweet Science, they call it -- and sometimes it really is sweet. Two or three times Beth hit her opponent with a jab that snapped her head back really hard. I completely forgot I was watching Beth, then, or women, or amateurs. I just thought, "Man, that's nice."

Only three rounds, and the last one seemed to go on forever, because I knew Beth was winning on points and that only a lucky knock-out could turn it around for her opponent, and I was terrified of that lucky knock-out. But it never came, and so Beth won her first amateur bout.

The last fight of the night did end in a terrifying knock-out -- the recipient seemed to be lifted off his feet and to hang in the air for a long dreamy moment before hitting the canvas. But he got up eventually and left on his own steam, so the ambulance wasn't needed after all.

After the fights I went over to congratulate Beth's trainer, Senor Morales. "You're turning that girl into a fighter," I said. He smiled briefly, with genuine pleasure, then frowned. "More roadwork," he said. "She needs to do more roadwork!" If you want to know what a really good trainer says half an hour after his fighter has won her first amateur bout -- that's it.

We went to the Fireside Lounge to celebrate -- a classic Vegas joint which is just as it was in 1972, Jetsons chic. I insisted on bringing Beth's trophy in with us -- carrying it before her through the lounge, as people cheered and asked what it was for. The women, especially the hard-bitten cocktail waitresses, were visibly thrilled when we told them.

On from there to a tragically unhip dance club to see a friend of Beth's, who was working as a lounge singer there, then Beth, still flying high but utterly exhausted, dropped me off downtown at my hotel. A bizarre night ensued.

Just before leaving Ventura for the airport I had noticed the giant piles of quarters on my bookshelf here, which have been growing for years. I suddenly realized I was going someplace where it would be very easy to dispose of them. So I brought them with me, about $25 dollars worth, retreieved them from my room when Beth dropped me off, and hit the slot machines. But I couldn't dispose of them. I just kept winning. Finally I changed them in for about a hundred bucks of folding money and hit the roulette tables.

I couldn't get rid of the money there, either, and drifted into a wild gambling run -- up a hundred, down to forty, up two hundred, back to forty. Hadn't eaten a thing all day except some Twizzlers and peanuts on the plane, and was plied with free drinks all night by the crafty casinos I visited. Finally, after about nine hours of gambling, I passed out at a roulette table and was gently awakened by a security guard, who said he thought it was time for me to go home. This was, of course, self-evident. He asked me if I needed any help getting back to my hotel. I said I might. He asked what hotel I was staying at. I said the Fremont. At this point he noticed the six or seven chips in my hand and said that this was the Fremont, and I was welcome to continue gambling.

So I gambled the last chips away and stumbled up to my room and into bed just before ten in the morning. Awoke to find a hundred and twenty-five dollars in my shirt pocket, from the last casino I cashed out at before returning to the Fremont, in my vague attempt to retire. I remembered where this had been -- Binion's Horseshoe -- where it was down to me and another guy playing, both winning, and his wife appeared and said, "Honey, it's nine in the morning!" He was hauled off and I realized it was time to haul myself off . . . only . . . I had to pass the roulette tables to get to the elevators at the Fremont, and the result was one more chapter in the history of personal degradation . . . Vegas style.

Thus the saga of the Ventura quarters and where they took me. In truth, I loved every minute of it . . . especially telling Beth about it the next day. "You just don't seem like the kind of person who would pass out at a roulette table," she said seriously, between fits of giggling. She was still high from her triumph of the night before, and secretly pleased that I referred to her only as "champ". Later that night I lost back my $100 profit of the night before.. Beth, by contrast, was still champ -- which supplies us with the moral of the tale . . .

FIGHT NIGHT IN BAKERSFIELD

One Thursday afternoon in November of 2002 I jumped in the 'Vette and drove north from Ventura to see the first world championship prize fight ever held in Bakersfield, California.

It was a girl fight, between IFBA featherweight title-holder Layla McCarter, 10-7-4, and Kelsey Jeffries, 16-1, the California State Champion -- the only girl fight of the night.

For all that, it was just the semi-main bout on the card. The main bout was what turned out to be a clown fight between heavyweights, which gives you some idea of the state of boxing these days. Two big men trying to land bombs on each other, with whatever degree of skill, or lack thereof, is considered a bigger draw than a superb world championship match between first-rate fighters -- who happen to be women.

It drizzled all the way from Ventura to Bakersfield, but I didn't have to put the top of the 'Vette up -- the sleek lines and raked windshield kept me dry as long as I kept moving, and I had a clear run on uncrowded roads the whole way.

In Bakersfield I made my way to Truxtun Avenue, where the Centennial Garden, venue for the fight, is located. I was sorry I didn't have more time to explore the town, legendary cradle of Western Swing music in the Forties and Merle Haggard later. The part I passed through was filled with churches, schools and hospitals.

I checked into a Best Western near the Garden and walked over to the box office for a ticket -- this trip had been a last-minute decision. Got a seat that wasn't bad -- second row of the first elevated section -- probably better than the back of the ringside section on the floor, which was all sold out.

I ate a lackluster dinner at the Street Bistro in the Holiday Inn next to the Garden, then wandered back to the arena.

Lots of people gathering, and they seemed to be in a good mood -- the crowd mostly Hispanic, with a few working-class blacks and Anglos mixed in.

The arena is basically a basketball stadium -- oval, with the seats at the ends of the oval roped off and unused for the boxing event. I'm told there were about 4500 in attendance.

The night was promoted by Oscar De La Hoya's Golden Boy organization, and Oscar was introduced in the ring before the fights got going. He then introduced Julio Cesar Chavez, who spoke to the crowd in Spanish. Oscar translated Julio's first words -- "It's good to be in the ring with Oscar again -- and not have to fight him!" Then Julio said something with the word "Bakersfield" and the phrase "Viva Mexico!" in it, and the crowd went nuts. Oscar didn't translated this.

The mayor of Bakersfield entered the ring to present Oscar with the key to the city -- presumably for bringing a championship fight to his town. The mayor was an older, Anglo fellow, with white hair and a white pencil moustache. He had the air of a successful used car dealer and was greeted with thunderous booing by the crowd.

Then the action got under weigh with a four round fight in the featherweight division. A fighter named Reyes from Oxnard had his way with a fighter named Hall from Palmdale. Folks around me took the mismatch in good spirits, crying out such encouragement to Hall as, "Go ahead and bite his ear!" . . . "Dance with him!" . . . and "Get a dress!"

This was followed by another mismatch in the same division. "Dangerous" Ryan Davis, from Pomona, beat up on Josh Zurfluh from Long Beach, knocked him down a couple of times in the second with horrifying body shots, and Zurfluh chose not to retake the ring for the third round.

Two heavyweights appeared next for a scheduled four-rounder -- Milan Roldzak from Slovakia, by way of Northridge, and crowd-favorite Manuel Quezada from nearby Wasco. Roldzak looked small but fit -- Quezada looked like he'd done most of his training at Burger King, rolls of fat jiggling at his waist. But he got in quick and obviously had a killer punch. Two body shots sent the Slovakian to his knees two times in the first, in what looked to be excruciating pain, and when a combination felled him a third time and left him hanging on the ropes, the ref put a stop to it.

Then on to the championship match.

Kelsey Jeffries, as the challenger, entered the ring first wearing a white hard-hat, with some sort of emblem on it that I couldn't make out. When she lifted it up and presented it to the crowd, they cheered wildly -- and basically never stopped cheering for Jeffries the rest of the night. She was born in Bakersfield.

In her jersey and oversized construction hat, Jeffries at first looked like a little girl, but when she lost the trappings, she looked formidable, with strong upper-body and arms.

The Amazing Layla McCarter entered the arena to almost total silence from the crowd.

I'd seen McCarter sparring a few times in Vegas, the town she fights out of, and I was impressed by her toughness and spirit, but her style was troubling. She kept her hands low, relying on her quickness for defense, and seemed content to box sporadically, looking for a decisive opening. I wondered if this was just her style with sparring partners, a method of luring them into ill-advised advances, but she fought that way against Jeffries, as well, and it was a big mistake.

Jeffries was well-schooled -- kept her hands up by her head, threw short, straight punches, and moved just enough to keep McCarter off-balance most of the time. And when she scored against McCarter, she hit hard, and sometimes put together combinations that had the champ in real trouble.

McCarter seemed willing to take serious punishment in return for counter-punch opportunities, and she had plenty -- hitting Jeffries with good solid shots that rocked her. But Jeffries took it, always found a way out of the danger, and never let McCarter put together a string of punches that might have ended things. Whatever happened, Jeffries came right back at McCarter again, the aggressor in every round, with McCarter always backing away, looking for the one good chance.

McCarter never gave up, though, and the action stayed fast and furious to the final round. Just before the start of the eighth, McCarter turned before taking center ring, put her arms on the ropes in her corner and looked into space -- as though trying to summon whatever it was she needed to take charge of things. She opened the eighth boxing, for a change -- staring hard at Jeffries, as though wondering how to dismantle Jeffries's classical defensive style. At one point she tried a jab from too far out and shook her head impatiently -- no, that's not it.

In the last two rounds she fought desperately, and bravely -- but no smarter. She tagged Jeffries several times with good punches, and sometimes got in another shot before Jeffries gave her the slip, but Jeffries took the shocks in stride and kept scoring.

In the last seconds of the 10th and final round, McCarter hit Jeffries with a punch I didn't see clearly but which, to judge by the moan from the crowd and Jeffries's wobbly knees, almost put the challenger down. But Jeffries stayed on her feet, it went to the cards, and that was that.

You knew that the judges would give the edge to Jeffries on her home turf, in front of a wildly partisan crowd -- and one judge had it ten rounds to none for Jeffries, which struck me as way out of line. But even with the most generous sympathy for McCarter, a fair judge could hardly have given her more than three or four rounds, and a judge who had it close on points would have had to favor Jeffries, for her non-stop aggression and superior boxing skills.

McCarter stared out at the wholly unsympathetic crowd after the decision was announced and raised her arms -- as though she couldn't believe the injustice done to her. Maybe she really thought she'd pulled it out in those last rounds. But Jeffries had the championship belt now, and she'd won it, fair and square.

The "main event" didn't last long, mercifully. A gigantic, beautifully fit heavyweight from Nigeria named Dokiwari squared off against a smaller, flabby fellow named Sample, from Topeka, Kansas. Sample looked liked he'd been training on his couch -- he wasn't fat, but there were no muscles discernible under his pasty, slack flesh. A couple of nauseating body shots finished him off in the first. There wasn't time or competition enough to tell if Dokiwari was as good as he looked, cosmetically speaking.

It was drizzling as I walked back to the motel, with that mix of exhilaration and sadness one feels after seeing a good fight between good fighters, in which one has to lose. It must have been a tough night for Layla McCarter, staying in some depressing motel in town like mine, or starting the long wet drive back to Vegas.

I felt privileged to have seen what I saw in the semi-main bout -- I thought perhaps it was what fights would have been like between skilled, promising club fighters in the Forties, affairs of great seriousness and heart and skill. So different from the spirit of so much male boxing these days, in which undertrained, apparently slothful bums with big punches try to luck their way into a spectacular payday and what passes now in the sport for glory.

Women, smaller, with less upper-body mass to work with, have to learn to fight. They may not represent the salvation of the commercial enterprise of boxing, but they may very well represent the salvation of the art of it. Jeffries and McCarter had a little taste of real glory in Bakersfield that night, and I'm grateful to them for sharing the spectacle of it with me.

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