By Bart Barry–
FORT WORTH, Texas – The understated perfection of architect Louis I. Kahn’s soft marble masterpiece, Kimbell Art Museum, known round the world as The Kimbell, is so palpable one cannot fathom hoarding its charms, if architectural charms were somehow hoardable, and feels a compulsion to share. Long a fan of friend and mentor Thomas Hauser’s accounts of meals enjoyed between his mother and sundry boxing personalities, I thought to have my own mother, with whom I shared The Kimbell’s charms Saturday, participate in this column in a sort of “Watching Pacquiao-Algieri with Mom” bent. I am evidently incapable with coordinating as this piece shall prove itself with the third-person.
Saturday Manny Pacquiao made an inspired sparring session in gray Macao or Macau, in the same country, China, whose capital is either Peking or Beijing, with Long Island junior welterweight Chris Algieri, a match Pacquiao won by a football-like points spread, dropping Algieri numerous times upon his metalblue trunks and allowing Algieri a chance to win the fight not once. Even before receipts are counted this event should be called plainly what it was for its hundreds of thousands of viewers: a failure.
But I was sound asleep by the time Manny Pacquiao began his long-awaited ringwalk through the cheering throngs of Cotai Arena. My laptop, whose volume I muted for the third undercard scrap, due mostly to my bottomless indifference for the future of Chinese boxing under Freddie Roach’s tutelage, flashed what high-definition images TopRank.tv sent its way, I do not doubt, as my mom, sporadically awake through the main event, later confirmed, in a faux if empathetic enthusiasm for her son’s favorite sport, “Pacquiao won!” But I saw none of it. I do not recall so much as stirring from my hardwon slumber, despite a Friday payment of $59 to Top Rank, to see the event for which I’d paid such a stipend because, truth be told, I paid that stipend for little but plausible deniability to you, dear reader, when I was unable to write intelligibly of the last meaningful fight of 2014, this, the most meaningless year of boxing I’ve yet covered.
And I will not cover three such years in-a-row.
Sometime after midnight, when I awoke to a shinyblue announcement from TopRank.tv my event had ended, I panicked for all of a second. Then my fright subsided, as I realized a column about not-watching Pacquiao-Algieri, at this point, likely would be more entertaining than watching Pacquiao-Algieri proved. Once panic subsided, again instantly since little written about this sport, anymore, would be consequential if you were paying to read it – which, coincidentally, you are not – I found a videostream on YouTube of a guy recording on his cell camera the very same TopRank.tv feed I purchased and used to remedy my hypothetical insomnia, as well as the hypothetical insomnia of my hypothetical children and their hypothetical children and so on for three generations more (if Twitter accounts of Pacquiao-Algieri are believed), and that stream, grainy and skipping, showed me what needed showing, which was very much not much at all.
Mark me down with the other naifs who believed Algieri might have a solution for Pacquiao, long and skittish as Algieri was, able with leftward wheeling as he was, and was a little surprised the Long Islander won nary an exchange, while losing quite a few rounds by more than his gentlemanly one point. Nothing about big-league kickboxing, as it turned out, prepared Algieri for big-league boxing, and what disparate rhythms and sophisticated traps a man of Pacquiao’s extraordinary experience and accomplishments might access in milliseconds in any ringside emergency – nothing of whose sort Algieri managed to create.
Disrupted. That was how Algieri looked on a video stream just as disrupted by whatever guerilla band succeeded several times in hijacking the internet server in whichever agrarian wasteland my anonymous YouTube postfight broadcaster uploaded his stream from; watching a master prizefighter like Juan Manuel Marquez time and occasionally neutralize Pacquiao, watching a fantastic athlete like Timothy Bradley survive Pacquiao’s onslaught after being rendered stationary, both, likely convinced Chris Algieri, who, in a nod to his entire generation thus far, has a greater competence for self-belief than another activity, his athleticism, for being greater than Marquez’s, and his boxing acumen, for being greater than Bradley’s, would help him jigsaw a puzzle Pacquiao couldn’t possibly piece together.
But Algieri and his witling chief second both had it all wrong, as we all now know. Pacquiao, even at this advanced stage of his career, is still a better athlete than Bradley; Pacquiao, even when reduced to savagery, is still nearly good a technician as Marquez (even if his tactics are not transferable or teachable as the Mexican’s). Algieri is not nearly the athlete Bradley is, and no better of a technician, and Algieri is not nearly the technician Marquez is, and no better of an athlete. Algieri is a C+ prizefighter who found a perfect stylistic mesh with Ruslan Provodnikov, a Siberian with A+ power and C- everything else, finagled it to a million-dollar payday and now will recede into supporting roles on HBO and then Showtime and eventually ESPN, however much sorrowful howling or barking or squeaking Algieri’s beloved fellow Stony Brook Seawolves make when they experience their grief at losing a smug nutritionist from the pack.
Oh, what could have been is not, and meanwhile, and frankly, who cares if Pacquiao ever does fight Floyd Mayweather? Regardless how good a match the men subsequently make now, it will serve mostly as a reminder how very much was squandered by all parties in the five-year hellbroth boxing’s powerbrokers began brewing of our beloved sport in the moments that followed Pacquiao’s 2009 stoppage of Miguel Cotto. Lots can change in five years, anyway, and let me provide further proof:
In 2009, like many another boxing writer, I might have reached for the easily grasped and metaphorical cliche of Pacquiao-Algieri putting me to sleep. But it’s now 2014, and my commitment to journalism is deepened. I am a participatory journalist, in the spirit of George Plimpton or Hunter S. Thompson, and Saturday night, as it pertains to the dull affair of Pacquiao-Algieri at least, I went full-gonzo.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
