By Bart Barry–
SAN ANTONIO – Saturday night I attended “Jazz’SAlive,” a two-day, free-admission jazz festival in the newly restored Travis Park, which abuts St. Mark’s, the gothic-revival Episcopal church where Lyndon Baines Johnson married Claudia Alta Taylor 80 years ago. As always, the event happened two weeks before the lovely weather arrives, reducing crowds still more than the festival’s recent reduction in marquee names. There are few better places to be present and watch the mind play than a jazz festival, though, and so there I was, sitting on a shinyblack park bench between entrepreneurs and homeless men, reminiscing about how I got here.
And there was boxing. It was Manny Pacquiao against Jorge Solis at Alamodome, in April 2007, a staybusy affair during Pacquiao’s first, and unsuccessful, congressional campaign, that introduced me to a spot thrice as tropical, lush and verdant as I previously considered Texas might be. This town, birthplace of mentor and friend Norm Frauenheim who told me a few weeks before Pacquiao-Solis “you’re going to like that city,” became and remains my favorite place I’ve lived.
If you are reading this, you know fewer than one percent the fights you’ve seen are fights coworkers or uninterested familiars inquired about before they happened. You also know the best fights you’ve seen live are fights those same coworkers and familiars, the sorts of men who would pose for a selfie beside a fighter at a fundraiser, fist raised in an ironical nod to something they saw in an old b&w photo or to irony itself, so meta-ironical the lads, would neither know by name nor endure for what 40 minutes their complete viewing requires on YouTube. But they know you like boxing, and they’ve heard of Floyd Mayweather or Oscar De La Hoya or Mike Tyson or the one guy their dads used to watch back whenever whenever in the living room on Friday or Saturday night, whichever has the hour’s more nostalgic ring, and they wonder if you’re going to be in Vegas Baby! or The Garden or Staples for what they will call The Big Fight.
It happened often enough to me – and the frequency with which one hears these questions is directly proportionate to his dayjob’s figurative distance from prizefighting – I devised an easy way of justifying my travel plans, or at least explaining them away, in two questions: 1. Will it be a good fight? and 2. Is it somewhere I wish to visit? I must be able to answer in the affirmative one of those to consider making the trip, and I must have an immediately apparent conflict to not-make the trip if I answer affirmatively both.
The credentials scrum being what it is on the East Coast, the credentials scrum is often a conflict feasible enough to forego the boundless aggravation of playing tourist in Pennsylvania, New Jersey or New York. Most of the fights to which I have access and believe worthy their travel and expense, then, happen in Las Vegas, naturally, with Southern California placing a distant third behind Texas locales in Houston or Dallas. Las Vegas is not a place I have ever wished to visit, which allows me to judge Vegas superfights dispassionately, which allows me to forgo every Mayweather tilt and what Pacquiao matches are made for revenue and spectacle, not legacy, be they against De La Hoya or Ricky Hatton.
Generally, in a nod to my enduring love of novelty, a city’s best chance of being somewhere I wish to visit is being somewhere I’ve not visited. That brought me to Detroit Metropolitan Airport in Jan. 2011, and a Friday night rave with two young surgeons, too, before Timothy Bradley unmanned Devon Alexander, the man who went on to beat Marcos Maidana so thoroughly Maidana set his mind on an immediate retirement 39 months before he fought Mayweather. It sent me to Oakland two years ago to see Andre Ward ruin Chad Dawson in what may well have been the last meaningful fight of “S.O.G.’s” career. It sent me to Colorado last year to see architect Daniel Libeskind’s groundbreaking Denver Art Museum, its titanium cladding brilliant in the hyper-definition of mile-high air, and the Rocky Mountains, and Ruslan Provodnikov’s lambasting of Mike Alvarado. It brought me here, my adopted hometown in South Texas, 7 1/2 years ago for a Pacquiao fight more easily forgotten than the ease with which Cristian Mijares undressed Jorge Arce on the undercard, and an attorney from the ACLU I met in a coffeeshop across the street from where this is being written.
Boxing was more fun back then; promoters were still crooked and local commissions were still corrupt and managers still maximized purses and minimized risk, because the consumer is a television executive, not a boxing fan, but there was a spirit of chance governing events, a palpable chance an event’s power brokers had sliced things too fine in negotiations and favorites might lose or fall prey to unpredictable things. There was more of the sacred unknown back then, before dryasdust operators like Richard Schaefer and Al Haymon merged and acquired.
Like most things meaningful in life, like most permanent changes, the end of all this fun did not come with a blazon of trumpets or clash of cymbals. Historians will blame the Mayweather-Pacquiao saga, and we’ll go along with them – not because it’s necessarily true but because the culpable parties deserve lasting scorn – though the unwinding was present even before then, it was present the week Pacquiao battered Miguel Cotto in Las Vegas and fired the starter’s pistol on a half-decade of publicly failed negotiations.
What justifies travel is the joy of spontaneity. No spectacle is more spontaneous, less predictable, than what Juan Manuel Marquez did to Pacquiao in 2012 or Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. did to Sergio Martinez a few months before that. No elements of these trips were more memorable than what spontaneous connections formed with former strangers, away from hotel lobbies, away from conference rooms, away from promoters, away from scripted gatherings of all kinds. Away and away.
Bart Barry can be found on Twitter @bartbarry