Editor’s note: For part 1, please click here.
The seven-day stretch in mid October that began the Saturday Timothy “Desert Storm” Bradley decisioned Juan Manuel “Dinamita” Marquez found contrasting studies of how pain is treated, how humiliation is considered, and how vulnerability is concealed or exploited otherwise. Bradley, capable as any prizefighter of emoting when asked a fair question, showed no vulnerability to Marquez, striking instead an uncharacteristically arrogant mien, one intended to disarm boxing’s apex predator. And it worked insofar as Marquez found nary an opening, geometrical, physical or psychological – nary a fissure in Bradley’s expressive countenance, a dark and intense face on a head he self-deprecatingly calls too large (when not driving it in opponents’ chins or foreheads).
Ruslan Provodnikov and Mike Alvarado both admitted, in a wondrous for rare bit of prefight candor, they were afraid of being badly hurt or killed in a prizefight, the sort of concession Bradley might make privately but Marquez was and ever will be incapable of making – for reasons cultural, traditional and perhaps biological. After Provodnikov laid waste to Alvarado, though, one almost wondered if the Russian possessed actually a fraction the empathy of his prefight demeanor, if he didn’t, at least for a 48-minute stretch a couple times each year, cease seeing men set across from him as fellow sons/brothers/fathers/friends and merely sides of beef that, curiously enough, could be made to emit whimpering sounds when knuckled just right.
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The seven-day stretch in mid October that began the Saturday Timothy “Desert Storm” Bradley decisioned Juan Manuel “Dinamita” Marquez showed that if one puts away his prejudices and looks often and close enough at art of any kind, from its finest manifestations in Rembrandt or Velazquez to its fallenest manifestations in pornography like Stagliano’s, he finds wonderment and originality, he finds better men than himself treating troubles like his own, and he finds, desperately and essentially, a form of solace.
If Andy Warhol and Fernando Botero had little in common, they had an uncommon sense of color, even for visual artists, to unite them along art’s rocky sort of continuum, and it was a sense of color Warhol quite possibly permitted Botero to use some years later, for as much as the Colombian credits his influences to Pablo Picasso it remains true that Picasso, intellectual always before beautiful and cynical always and always, appears less in the vibrancy of Botero’s paintings than does Pittsburgh’s father of fashion art.
If DAM’s shape was ostentatious, finally, its structure comprised none of the conspicuous consuming that is modern America’s specialty; it was Libeskind’s proper recognition that while largeness of scale assures no greatness, architectural greatness often does desire awesomeness.
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The seven-day stretch in mid October that began the Saturday Timothy “Desert Storm” Bradley decisioned Juan Manuel “Dinamita” Marquez brought a celebratory air for Provodnikov and Bradley, men who made an incredible spectacle with one another seven months before, bringing them finally the victories both deserved, and with those victories a codification of their status in prizefighting’s impassioned, subjective, weird, hyperbolic ratings, an ongoing appeal to orderliness that proves man must have hierarchy even when he hasn’t an inkling why.
The clarity of Colorado’s air sets its vistas in a visual space that might better be called hyper-definition than high-definition, akin to the early HDTVs with whites that blitzed viewers and induced aching brains if not temporary blindness, and when one exits the western mouth of Eisenhower Tunnel, a blossoming of sun-reflected snowy whiteness after 1 1/2 miles of gray darkness, he wonders aloud if this mightn’t be the sole place in the world a visual experience of such arresting magnitude can happen.
Mike Alvarado, the Coloradoan who lost on his stool against Ruslan Provodnikov that Saturday night in an unlikely suburb north-northwest of Denver, wore open and suppurating facial lacerations to camp for his March rematch with Brandon Rios, lacerations courtesy of a mishap with his flesh and shards of a glass bottle and at least one other man’s rage, and reminded those who followed his career how unlikely a happy ending will be for “Mile High.” A reminder that came once more, two hours after the main event in Broomfield, when I returned to Ramada Denver Midtown, a recently re-acquired and -signaged property, luxurious 30 years and gaggles of property managers ago, where the frontdesk attendant, young, pretty, edgy, pierced – Denverstyle – told me: “Alvarado? I know Mike! My friends partied with him.”
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The seven-day stretch in mid October that began the Saturday Timothy “Desert Storm” Bradley decisioned Juan Manuel “Dinamita” Marquez made Marquez once more threaten retirement, once more price his way out a lucrative rematch with Manny Pacquiao, once more remind his adorers genius is divisive, not unifying or transferable, and a force that renders a man like Marquez many more times admirable than likable, a man to observe and delight-in but never invite for a beer.
Timothy Bradley ended 2013 finally esteemed like a man with his resume should, regardless of what bigotry aficionados routinely show volume punchers. Ruslan Provodnikov appeared in a California ring across from Bradley in March a wholly unknown entity and finished October as the third piece of a triumvirate of former-Soviet fighters now used to scare disobedient young boxers before bedtime: “GGG”, “Krusher”, “Siberian Rocky”.
Mike Alvarado, finally, found what solace might be had from an adoring hometown, a prudent choice, and a vindicating fulfillment of what natural gifts oddsmakers long had him tragically wasting.
And I had the great good fortune of more time spent within our craft’s fraternity, both in Nevada and Colorado, a fraternity that, at its best, is a mutual-admiration society.
Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com
