Column without end, part 5

By Bart Barry–

Editor’s note: For part 4, please click here.

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It is a question of competence much as intent.

That is where boxing now stumbles in an exaggerated way that defies expectations more than most things in America do anymore. Whether the larger part of this country was ever competent is a question for fantasy, not history, but it is not uncommon now for the world to accept American incompetence, raising awareness of it till the printing press rolls and the dollars fan out. Today, payoffs are what we do better than we do anything: We shower problems with money till they resolve themselves or drown in our largesse.

Do not mistake that, either, for a form of contemporary competence. It is not. We own the world’s reserve currency because of what the Europeans, Russians and Japanese did to one another in the last century, and what we helped do to them once we finally participated in their carnage. Whatever autohagiographies America’s private sector pens to itself about itself, there is nothing essential being done here, and there hasn’t in 50 years. Most of the technology required to read this column, whether on your phone or laptop or PC, came from the Department of Defense, or at least financing from the Department of Defense – whose primary purpose is to kill others, or threaten to kill others, before others can kill Americans.

Your technology came from the public sector. The shiny, white-plastic cover with a glowing piece of fruit in its middle? That’s the private sector.

Probably this system is unsustainable, but that hardly passes for an indictment. Whenever it ends, our system has already proved more resilient than expected. There’s solace in that.

Most people are bad at most things, and Americans are no different, whatever exceptionalism we attribute to ourselves. We are outfitted with extraordinarily overgrown minds that conjure up 10,000 inane patterns for every workable one, and if you doubt that, and you have a biological impulse to do so, of course, ask yourself what activity in your day might impress another species on Earth. There’s efficient acquisition of food, and reproduction. After that, the list thins.

We invent goals and reward ourselves for their accomplishment, in a way all other creatures must regard with something between amusement and fright. If an announcement were made tomorrow Homo sapiens is a virus devouring its host, not a predator, would it surprise you?

There’s precedent for being bad at most things: The human mind does not abide repetitive tasks. No sooner is the mind asked to concentrate on the same thought more than five or so times, and it wanders elsewhere, pulling any one of the six or seven fully developed cinematic storylines playing at all times on its edges to center stage, and the repetitive task immediately begins to suffer in its execution. It’s a large reason computers fascinate us; even more than their speed, their competence at repetitive tasks strikes us as supernatural. Computers do not have our creativity, and will not, but they have a sort of concentrated presence we struggle to fathom even while watching it.

A moment after we successfully complete some task a half-dozen times, we declare mastery in a quietly triumphant way, fold our hands behind our heads, and begin rummaging about for a new task. Mastery, meanwhile, requires thousands of repetitions, hundreds of hours of aching boredom, and finally informed risk-taking that brings some new efficiency. But who wants to dedicate his life to something trite as all that when he can do badly a thousand trite things every year?

What has happened with Mayweather and Pacquiao negotiations, playing vacuum to the oxygen of interest in our sport, reduces, once more, to competence. The fighters themselves, whatever leverage they fancy they have, are both destined for what punchy bankruptcy awaits men who make a career doing what they do. The heads of participating television networks, whose compensation is, in the contemporary corporate tradition, proportionate to the amount of culpability they will accept in a case of failure – a failure American corporations now dedicate more resources to obfuscating than research or development – have been plainly hoodwinked by the fighters’ handlers and now dodder about, having serious conversations about infomercials and announcing crews.

Realize this, if you realize nothing else: These are the concerns of a cabal looking to trick consumers one time.

Nobody involved in any of this expects a good fight that births a three-part franchise, a historic trilogy that brings a billion dollars to be split four or five ways, for if they did, all of this could have been resolved with a profit-sharing agreement years ago. No, these enervating, incompetent negotiations are about wringing all that can be got from the desiccated towel of American interest in prizefighting. “History repeats itself!” will sing philistines in a chorus that implies this has all happened before and boxing survived it. But history only repeats itself until it doesn’t, and it doesn’t-repeat itself far more frequently than it repeats itself.

There is no reason, then, to be assured boxing will survive the final consequences of 2010-2015. And so, we bear witness . . .

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Editor’s note: For part six, please click here.

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Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry