By Bart Barry–
Editor’s note: For part seven, please click here.
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San Antonio Museum of Art currently features a retrospective exhibition of works by American painter Jamie Wyeth, son of Andrew. There is real talent in his paintings. Innovation, too. In a series of works that has seagulls depicting the seven deadly sins, Wyeth uses watercolor paint thickened with honey – a trick Wyeth attributes to his time working in Andy Warhol’s Factory – painted on cardboard. The gulls are ravenous, wild, and terrifying if one imagines himself prey. Wyeth also uses every part of a brush, his fingers, and even his tongue to make a large, gulls-and-waste-disposal piece called “Inferno” for its fire and hellish air.
Innovation without talent produces little but anxiety, and fortunately Wyeth has plenty of talent, even if not so plentifully as his dad did. Would that boxing had fractionally so much talent as innovation, lately.
This sport is increasingly difficult to write about. Last week’s performance by Nicaraguan Roman “Chocolatito” Gonzalez, unfortunately, served like nothing so much as a reminder how much better and easier it was to write about prizefighting a decade ago. About a decade before that, of course, the newspapers abandoned the sport shortly after the larger American public did, another marvelous example of the free market’s creative destruction, but part of the reason writers let it happen – and writers did have some control over the matter – was because there was less to write well about.
The writer is not yet born who can write compellingly about a subject for which he feels no passion, and fleshings-out of box scores and television ratings and polls fool only undiscerning readers, and boxing now accelerates its descent into a place about which no smart being can feel passion. There’s habit, of course, but last week’s end of ESPN’s relentlessly mediocre “Friday Night Fights” stamps an epitaph on that. ESPN always had the budget to outbid HBO and Showtime put together – look what it pays for “Monday Night Football” and “Sunday Night Baseball” – but chose, instead, to treat boxing as a shamefilled filler between collegiate softball games, doing less than Telefutura, much less than Telefutura, to advance interest in our beloved sport.
Manager Al Haymon saw an incredible resource being resolutely squandered and moved on it. Bless him for that. Al Haymon will now fill ESPN, over time, with Just For Men-quality matchmaking. Damn him for this.
One has to care exponentially more about Olympic medals and British boxing than I do to watch garbage like James DeGale versus Andre Dirrell, regardless of whichever network televised it Saturday. Dirrell, whom writer Steve Kim nicknamed “Dirreadful” back when boxing was fun to cover, has been unwatchable for years, and Saturday was by no means his opus – he did get floored a couple times, after all. No, Dirrell’s opus was the opening act of his agent-provocateur role in Showtime’s “Super Six” tournament way back when. Before he refused to fight Andre Ward because Ward would beat him, before he “Matrix-ed” his way into defenselessness and then unconsciousness with Arthur Abraham, Dirrell set a precedent for insipidness against Carl Froch. It will be a long time before a muscular, 168-pound man shows a greater commitment to conflict avoidance than Dirrell showed against Froch in 2009.
Dirrell was the blueprint for an Al Haymon fighter, even before most knew who Haymon was: Telegenic, athletic, a lion in a mismatch – look at that handspeed! – and a pussycat in a fair fight.
Haymon now uses venture capital to corner boxing on American public airwaves, a strategy that, if successful, will end boxing writing, but his approach has one oft-overlooked flaw: Haymon does not appear to like seeing men fight even a little. Never mind the existential resistance to Haymon’s plot from an outfit like Golden Boy Promotions (and never ever mind the token rebuttals from Haymon’s puppet promoters), the meaningful resistance to Haymon’s plot is right here: People who like to watch boxing don’t enjoy the fights Haymon makes.
Aficionados, a romantic and tragically flawed bunch, play an imaginative game with ourselves, perhaps the best escape: We dismiss the most obvious explanation for each happening in our sport and replace it with ideas that are daft. We dismiss what is obvious – Haymon hoodwinked a number of cable guys then moved on to hedgefund managers, without attracting one new fan to boxing – and replace it with a savvy plot to attract with bad fighting Americans who don’t even like good fighting. “Better than feared” is not a growth strategy in a market so tiny that fewer than one-percent of American households even know to have fear.
There is no faking inspiration, regardless of special effects and dramatic lighting, and there is nothing inspiring about Haymon’s stable of fighters feinting at one another, especially if matches continue to happen at an hour not even boxing fans are yet drunk. Haymon’s personal finances will do fine – he’s now the patron saint of every entrepreneur who salivated simultaneously at combat sports and Wall Street but couldn’t think how to marry them – but his brand is no more likely to endure than writers’ collective interest in boxing . . .
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Editor’s note: For part nine, please click here.
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Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
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