Television, a medium silly as it is ubiquitous, tells very few truths and perhaps none disinterestedly. In keeping with its current place in sports, boxing, as a gathering of only free agents, is, on television, a less-disinterested place than most. Praise any bubble of truth, then, that somehow rises through television’s thick, shifting filters and brings a spectacle honest as Oscar De La Hoya’s face. Whatever he is as a promoter, De La Hoya very apparently loves to see men punch one another, and his face, 25 feet back from the ring, visible between the ropes, center of the screen for most Golden Boy Promotions telecasts, is, anymore, the most honest television commentator boxing has.
De La Hoya’s face on Saturday, while Robert Guerrero was beating Andre Berto 116-110 and 116-110 and 116-110 in Ontario, Calif., in an interim title match on HBO, was often a picture of euphoria. De La Hoya’s face spoke to a couple happenings: His fighter, Guerrero, was not genuinely imperiled for a moment of the match (doubters should find contrasting footage of De La Hoya’s face during Johnathon Banks’ Nov. 17 dismantling of Seth Mitchell), and the fight itself was a spectacle of punching performed by two men who knew how – which anyone reading this ought love as much as De La Hoya helplessly does.
The most important discovery Saturday brought was that Andre Berto, a career welterweight, was unable to hurt Robert Guerrero, who, recently as last year a lightweight and recently as 2009 a super featherweight, took Berto’s flush right uppercuts, thrown with what appeared to be perfect leverage and ferocious intent, much better than he took Selcuk Aydin’s same punches in July. Is Guerrero that much tougher than he looked just four months ago, or is Berto, after a suspension for PED use, not the force, or not capable of summoning the force, he was or once did?
If Saturday’s excellent fight lacked suspense at times, and it did no matter the assiduous sales pitch tossed HBO viewers’ ways, it was because Guerrero never once appeared out of control or discomfited by Berto. Guerrero’s lead eye closed, as did both of Berto’s, but that wasn’t the ordeal it might have been if either guy had space enough to throw a full combination from proper range in the fight’s final nine minutes. One detected genuine panic in Guerrero’s bearing during his July match with Aydin, whom Guerrero held for desperation more than strategy, but that panicked bearing never materialized against Berto, regardless of how many Berto uppercuts put the top of Guerrero’s head nearly between his shoulder blades.
Saturday Guerrero settled accounts with aficionados who long ago tired of his promoter and publicists. Guerrero won a fight much more than a boxing match. And for that referee Lou Moret deserves a spot of praise. That he had limited control of the fighters from the opening bell to well past the match’s closing is much the reason Saturday’s fight was much better than anticipated; Moret appeared to be from a very old school, with a founding text that instructs if a man wishes to make a million dollars fighting another man, he should not be protected from that other man if it can be helped.
An officious referee would have broken the fighters each time they locked arms, likely precluding one, if not both, Berto’s slumps to the blue canvas, and issuing another round of invitations to future athletes-cum-prizefighters to believe, as Berto does, every event of pugilism is a showcase of his athleticism in which a superior athlete’s personal injury can be attributed only to governance gone missing. After beginning the match in a crisis of identity crisis – “My Mayweather is better than Broner’s!” – Berto occasionally bodied Guerrero in rounds 3 and 4 to create separation enough to pull his right fist back towards his own chest and strike Guerrero behind the ear several times along the way, a trick that brought few complaints from Guerrero and not much of a warning from Moret. But Guerrero adjusted to it, kept his chin pressed to Berto’s collarbone while marching him backwards, and in round 5 those punches behind Guerrero’s left ear became punches to the center of Guerrero’s brainstem, a patently illegal place to put them – as Berto, Guerrero, Moret, and everyone else knew.
This gave Berto his desired opening: the referee was against him! – an inanity championed by Berto’s cheering squad on the HBO broadcast team and voiced by Berto in a postfight interview Guerrero gracelessly but gratefully interrupted to remind viewers they’d just seen neither the fight of the century nor a very even match but actually one unanimously scored 116-110 in which Robert Guerrero beat Andre Berto’s ass.
If you came to Saturday’s fight without a rooting interest, because neither guy is fractionally compelling as the heroic images force-fed to boxing fans about both – hurricane relief worker, cancer survivor spouse, victim of chemistry – you left the fight thinking much more highly of Guerrero than Berto, since Guerrero, from the very first minute, wanted to fight a hell of a lot more than Berto did, which, as Lou Moret’s inaction reminded us, is what the men signed up for, an obligation no less meaningful for the numerous instances lesser entertainers find ways round it.
Maybe it marks a change. When one considers the way Miguel Cotto was allowed to pin Floyd Mayweather to the ropes in May, the way Andre Ward was able to brutalize Chad Dawson in and out of clinches in September, the way Abner Mares obstinately purpled Anselmo Moreno’s beltline three weeks ago, and the way Guerrero was able to hold and hit Berto Saturday, one detects a possible pattern wherein the aggressor of a match is given more leeway than its superior athlete appreciates. If this is the pendulum reversing course and beginning its descent, let it swing, friends, let it swing.
Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com
