El Vindicado

By Bart Barry

LAS VEGAS -- There were many reasons to cheer for Miguel Cotto -- class, poise, intellect. You didn’t have to be Puerto Rican to admire him deeply as an athlete and prizefighter. But no matter how much you loved Cotto or the island whose fans he captivated, there was just something about Antonio Margarito. You couldn’t cheer against the guy.

You could pick against him, of course. Most of us did. We picked with our brains more than our hearts and outsmarted ourselves doing so. Live and learn.

Saturday night at MGM Grand in a fight no one who was present is going to forget, Margarito beat up Cotto, forcing his corner to stop the fight at 2:05 of the 11th round. Over the course of those 32 positively brutal minutes Margarito also became the world’s best welterweight.

But before we deal in the how’s, let’s first pause and look at the why.

Yes, there’s a strong fighting tradition in Margarito’s Mexico. Yes, Tijuana is one of the most difficult places to live in North America. But Mexico is only what made Margarito climb off his stool, round after futile round, not what made him believe he could win.

Deservedness, in a word, is what brought Margarito to victory. Not entitlement -- not a whining plea that others make good on some obligation to him. But a resolve born of the sacrifice, monotony and abuse of the 42 often-thankless fights his career comprised. An individual trait. A matter of character.

Some of those early rounds were awfully futile, however. Through most of the fight’s opening half Cotto glided around. He waited till Margarito waded in and missed with a right cross and then repeatedly snapped the back of Margarito’s head between his shoulder blades with left uppercuts.

It was masterful violence. All Margarito could do was nod in approval. He had no answers. Margarito had self-belief backed up by almost nothing tangible. At first, when Cotto retreated to his perch on the second rope, Margarito saw opportunities. But after five rounds of absorbing three- and four-punch counter-combinations, Margarito saw mostly traps.

Cotto did other things to encourage resignation in Margarito too. After each assault, he did a two-step skip and pace, a patented way of walking to his left, admiring his work and resetting. Margarito could do little more than follow Cotto around, eyes wide, promising things would change eventually.

While Cotto slipped punches and mixed in hooks to the body, Margarito threw wide right crosses and left uppercuts that caught little but Cotto’s right elbow, forearm and glove.

Until the seventh round. After a sixth round that saw cracks appear in Cotto’s defensive wall, the seventh changed everything -- including the career trajectory of its participants.

Cotto retreated to the second rope and caught Margarito’s left uppercuts with his right glove. But he let one too many come. How an evenly matched fight becomes a rout. One fighter gets in a defensive posture and says to himself, “All right, just take one more. He thinks he’s getting the best of me, but it’s really not that way. Just one more. Then I’ll throw mine. He’ll see.”

For Cotto, it was a fourth or fifth left uppercut from Margarito. A lone barbarian that crashed through the gate. Cotto eventually got off the second rope, did his skip and pace and found his legs weren’t there. Not only was he striding shorter and slower but Cotto found, to his horror, that Margarito now ran after him.

That can’t be right. How did this happen?

Cotto was no longer the crafty counterpuncher. No longer the composed tactician. Cotto was the hunted. Everything Margarito had denied himself, everything Margarito had been denied by others, all of it, the frustration, the anger, the umbrage, now got concentrated on Cotto. In three minutes, Cotto’s and Margarito’s careers crisscrossed -- Margarito thinking only of the attack, Cotto’s brain racing in circles for a survival idea.

Cotto called on his entire arsenal, survived the eighth round and won the ninth. But he was a changed man. The energy that marked the opening 2:30 of his early rounds was now spent in the first minute.

And there was Margarito, boxing’s portable lie detector, bearing down, ready to present to his feral countrymen -- now hoarse with screaming -- Cotto’s transformation.

By the time Cotto’s corner hoisted the white towel, their charge was emptied of ideas. He’d tried combination punching, pot-shotting, slipping, blocking, southpaw, orthodox, holding and retreating. Margarito had tried only relentlessness. A pure offense to those clever chaps who never tire of singing, “Hit and don’t get hit! Hit and don’t get hit!”

To see Margarito’s euphoria in the moment the fight stopped was to be reminded that, ultimately, boxing is a sport about being hit -- being hit and carrying on. Margarito, after all, took many more clean punches to the head than Cotto. But Margarito also ended up the winner, the vindicated.

Will Cotto be back? Sure. Will Cotto ever again be the same crushing force he was on Saturday morning? Not sure. There were shades of Trinidad-Vargas in what happened to Cotto. A complete beating, both physical and mental. Men don’t always recover from those.

After the fight, in a packed and raucous media center, Margarito would say, “The whole world knows that Cotto is faster than me, but now the whole world knows that I am stronger than him.”

As good a closing note as any. But here are a few more. To see Margarito’s wife in tears was to be reminded of what boxing requires of its participants. To see Julio Cesar Chavez’s gleeful face, fists pumping like a 10 year-old, was to be reminded of the glory boxing brings its participants.

And when he awoke Sunday morning, if never before or again, Antonio Margarito -- for all his abstention, courage and hopefulness -- was the most famous Mexican in the world.