By Bart Barry-
Two Saturdays ago in Manhattan’s Madison Square Garden our sport bade a tempered farewell to former middleweight champion Sergio Martinez, squinting at a hobbled impostor sent hobbling to his stool by Miguel Cotto, even while recalling fondly the innovator who once, as a 154-pounder, stood brazenly, gloves on thighs, before middleweight world champion Kelly Pavlik. Saturday in Brooklyn’s Barclays Center our sport bade a fond hello to New York junior welterweight Chris Algieri, a smartly stylish innovator of his own who just unmanned boxing’s most-feared puncher, Russian Ruslan “Siberian Rocky” Provodnikov, to score 2014’s biggest upset by split-decision scores of 114-112, 114-112 and 109-117.
After weathering a one-punch knockdown and a timeout knee in Saturday’s opening round, Algieri proved himself intelligent and unflappable as a man might be in his world-title-fight debut. Perhaps no tactic employed by Algieri Saturday betrayed the cleverness of his unorthodox craft better than how he repeatedly thrust himself at the ropes each round, performing a feat of balance and leverage that would merit bonus ring-generalship points from judges, were our sport’s scorekeepers reliably able to observe from a mindset more sophisticated than “hit the damn guy!”
A man driven to the ropes by another, the way, say, Mike Alvarado was driven ropesward by Provodnikov in October, generally gets flattened against them, his feet and shoulders squared in tacit agreement his better deserves the largest conceivable target upon which to whale. But Algieri was rarely found in such a helpless posture when his back touched the ropes, ropes against which the New Yorker was rarely trapped by Provodnikov. Instead Algieri’s left leg remained well in front of his right, and his weight shifted dramatically from front to back each time he arrived within a meter of the ropes. He exploded, in other words, backwards to the ropes, employing them much as a slingshot from which he hurled himself forward, either to smother and clinch and counter Provodnikov, or to pivot more quickly away.
It was an innovative and innovatively ballsy way to fight the hardest puncher in the junior welterweight division, a man whose blows temporarily claimed Timothy Bradley’s consciousness any number of times, and in one half hour succeeded at transforming Mike Alvarado from a tatted badboy to a wincing pragmatist – a feat still eluding Colorado’s criminal-justice system in a decade of trying.
Algieri’s achievement was still more impressive when one considers Provodnikov did not have an off night. His head movement under trainer Freddie Roach’s instruction has improved steadily, and his footwork, while perhaps plodding, is nevertheless Mexican-like in its efficiency. Provodnikov was on, Saturday at Barclays Center, and did not appear dismayed or frustrated during the first defense of his WBO title. Both guys made the fights they drew up in camp, both men executed their gameplans, and Algieri was simply the better prizefighter.
He hit Provodnikov with every punch in the boxing lexicon, from uppercut counters to a left-wheeling righthand lead thrown like a jab with more than a tincture of Muhammad Ali. Algieri suspected, and quickly proved, that while the acceleration Provodnikov applies to the mass of a fist is unique among even professional punchers, Provodnikov is not physically stronger than most 140-pound prizefighters, and certainly no stronger than Algieri – part of a riddle of human musculature, flexibility and form that finds a man who can military press his body weight often incapable of hurling a football more than 20 yards using the same deltoids. Bounding off the ropes, time and again, Algieri met Provodnikov in full forward press and stopped the Russian’s momentum, and in some cases drove him backwards – and only one man was in any way able to punch while moving backwards, Saturday, and it decidedly was not the Siberian Rocky.
Every punch Provodnikov landed was ferocious, though, do not doubt; until a man has been ringside while Provodnikov is punching, until he has heard the quantitatively louder sound Provodnikov’s leather makes when it smacks flesh, he cannot appreciate quite how brutal the Russian’s attack is. Better put: Perhaps only those aficionados who have been ringside for a Provodnikov prizefight fathomed judge Max DeLuca’s dissenting 109-117 score, a card to make roseate the cheeks of even professors in the “hit the damn guy!” school of scorekeeping. Rumor is, HBO’s unofficial scorekeeper, too, awarded too many points to Provodnikov, though that faux-pas is pardonable for an entirely different reason: Steve’s job is to ratify whatever Jim and Max shout in his headset through the preceding three minutes; these days, HBO’s unofficial scoring could as easily be done from the production truck.
After the match, Algieri, as cogent a postfight interview as memory retrieves, said only the first left hand Provodnikov landed, the one that unceremoniously dropped the New Yorker on the blue mat in round 1, actually hurt him. That is nearly believable, as unflappable as Algieri appeared while fielding Provodnikov’s other clean punches, even with Algieri’s right eye closed or closing for the fight’s final 33 or so minutes. Or perhaps, in a counterintuitive twist, Algieri’s closed right eye helped him.
As demonstrated two Saturdays ago by Miguel Cotto, Roach-trained fighters are particularly adept at throwing left hooks their opponents do not detect; Sergio Martinez stubbornly believed he could see Cotto’s left-hook lead coming, even though he couldn’t, while Algieri, well aware he could peripherally detect nothing right of his nose, relied instead on what data his left eye recorded of Provodnikov’s shifting weight well before Provodnikov had his hook fully cocked, allowing Algieri to block and duck Provodnikov hooks in a way that looked perfectly magical to casual fans.
For his part, after the match Provodnikov implied Algieri ran away instead of fighting him, a curiously slanderous thing to say of a man whose knuckles just touched one’s head and body some 250 times. Such was the one-eyed Christopher Algieri’s masterful control of space and time, though, that a man who stood within arm’s length of him for a minimum of 300 instants Saturday still openly wondered where the hell Algieri had been during their fight.
Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com
