By Bart Barry-
Saturday in Los Angeles once-defeated Ukrainian lightweight titlist Vasyl “Hi-Tech” Lomachenko will successfully defend his title against Britain’s Anthony Crolla on ESPN+ in a match that challenges prefight scriptwriters to excavate some superlative as yet unused on Lomachenko. Hi-Tech will look sublime, spiteful, special and spectacular against Crolla. And for a low monthly rate subscriber aficionados will witness all of it.
When this preview strays from Anthony Crolla, and it surely will, indulge me please, since it won’t be a straying of laziness or complacency but desperate boredom.
If there’s occasion for plumbing the depths of Crolla’s highlight reel such occasion escaped me nimbly as I set out to do so. Bygone years this sort of thing was risky. You figured the late Vernon Forrest was so much better than his next challenger, such a prohibitive favorite, you didn’t bother returning to silly episodes of The Contender to see if Latin Snake was any sort of a boxer, and then the prohibited happened and you looked a fool – and back then readers abounded enough to tell you as much.
These days temptations are very much other; go outlandish and put all eggs in the underdog’s basket because the only way anyone will remember any prediction is the occasion of an unthinkable upset, and nobody has attention span enough to bury himself in the archives and see how many times you picked outlandishly for this one ticketcashing score, has he? This column is too regular, though, to make such irregular efforts as fruitypicking the oneoff for a singular story, which is exactly what a Crolla victory over Lomachenko would prove be for a week at least or until some wiseass remembered Orlando Salido had exactly twice so many losses as Crolla when Salido did the unimaginable and fouled his way to a clear victory over a man we later learned was a generational talent.
One needn’t set out for the gloatful score, then, when sturdier intentions favor beginning with a possibility of the champ’s upset and looking for how it might happen then deciding after an appreciable review, say two or three minutes, it cannot happen. This is when you turn boxing sage and answer one essential question: If there were no more important phrase in the English language than “I told you so”, in a couple years how would posterity read your preview? Satisfy that criterion and build nothing to dam what accolades flood your DMs.
Anthony Crolla is a fine, basic lad who won a world title the right way from a Colombian named Darleys Perez, in his second try, defended the title once then made a pair of losing scraps, one of them close, to the man last seen getting wet-tissued in Madison Square Garden not long after being designer-distressed by Lomachenko, chinny Jorge Linares. There was that moment, though, wasn’t there, when Linares dropped the prodigy and made us hopeful something other than yet another woeful mismatch was in the offing. Of course you’ve forgotten; that happened nearly a year ago, and can you remember what Lomachenko has done since?
Oh, in that case, you’re a better man than I. I recall more about Lomachenko from highlight videos and overwrought profiles, and the requisite ESPN fare (Lomachenko, a man very accomplished at violent acts, turns out to share a complicated relationship with his father – in a twist no one saw coming) than anything he has done in the 11 months since he won his lightweight title from the man who won his lightweight title from Anthony Crolla, the man who lost to the man who lost to the man and is about to lose to the man. If that’s not circular symmetrical it’s because it’s not much any geometrical shape that has symmetry; it’s a linear thing. The wrong sort of linear thing, definitively not a lineal thing, then, but a linear one nonetheless.
It’s not too early to start salivating at the prefight Loma footage, pingpong pops in Spidey spandex, it’s not too . . . oh, enough pretending.
Here’s what happened when I looked for Crolla highlights a while ago: YouTube used years of my viewing activity to recommend yet another Lee Trevino video. This has almost nothing to do with boxing save that Trevino is of Mexican descent the way most of the last generation’s best prizefighters were. But whereas those men came out a prizefighting lineage Trevino came out of nowhere, many years ago, an El Paso club pro raised on a dirt floor by a gravedigger grandfather, a marine and autodidact whose first professional victory was American golf’s greatest prize, a master ballstriker and shotmaker who needed no lessons to torque the clubface in just such a way to visit maximal inertia on the back of a golfball.
If YouTube history can be trusted, no visual spectacle delights me much as Trevino’s swing, and not prime Trevino, either, but the 50-year-old version I saw drive a golfball at the Digital Seniors Classic 29 years ago, in a move unmatchable for power, grace and violence. Not since Juan Manual Marquez snatched Manny Pacquiao’s soul has anything in our beloved sport transferred to me what energy a glimpse of Trevino’s swing does.
There, just above, that’s the way I would like to write about Vasyl Lomachenko but cannot. It’s all too precious and prescripted with Hi-Tech, too white-earbuds, not enough analog. He’ll stream through Crolla on ESPN+ and aficionados will get dangled and promised, the usual maybe-Mikey-Garcia-next canard, and made to feel unappreciative for not thanking hard enough what promotional benefactors give us semiannual glimpses of Lomachenko’s otherworldly talent. Then it’s back to the Trevino videos for me.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
