By Bart Barry
Editor’s note: For part eight, please click here.
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CARLSBAD, NM – This town is an overpriced outpost on the border of two western states, a dilapidated homebase of sorts for those who might venture to Guadalupe Peak, 8,000 feet in the air, or Carlsbad Caverns, 1,000 feet below ground. It is the nature of adventures they should feature the unknown, and if the unknown were but a roster of pleasant surprises, why, it would be the already-known.
Portrait of a column that nearly was not written:
A half hour lost to suffering through Amir Khan’s latest match, Friday, a glance at HBO’s upcoming fight schedule, Saturday, and Sunday a six-hour drive across terrain unchanging as it is forbidding, a particularly unappealing hotel in a particularly unappealing town, and nothing to do but eat poor barbecue or survey the Wal-Mart parking lot – not the best of Sundays but possibly the worst of them. It brings a sensation like nostalgia’s bullying twin, a reminder what hopelessness Sunday afternoons can hold if you’re not careful with them, if you’re not in a place where forward lamentations are forbidden or gnawing past-tense conditionals do not know to look.
There are oranges and yellows and reds everywhere here, and a washedout blue sky, too, but these are colors, one ought remember, one enjoys in shade or from shade. Blazing-on-blazing, instead, are what the colors of New Mexico are and portend in June.
Hopelessness in the sense of being without hope, being near enough to a moment to caren’t a whit for the future, where hope resides, is a very good thing; hopelessness in the sense of being through a checklist of reasons to go on drawing breath, to be past experiences and disappointments enough to think it probable the future will be worse than this, however bad this is, is a very bad thing. This city has a hopelessness to it in the worse sense of the word. Maybe that changes as you read this (for it certainly does not change as I write it); if you’re reading this on Monday, there’s a good chance I am somewhere near the top of Texas, the peak of Guadalupe Mountains National Park, 55 miles southwest of here, hiking alone in the wilderness, part of an act of faith that goes: Hiking may not get better, but life gets better because of solitude and nature.
It’s an ongoing embrace of the unknown, the necessary ingredient in adventure – what justifies a man’s life. Adventure is duly celebrated in every culture, but a caveat exists that explains the upwards spiral adventuring catalyzes: The more one converts the unknown to the known, markedly, the more one’s tolerance for the known diminishes. It’s another quirk that argues modestly against any perceivable universal order whatever; it’s the reason “mysterious ways” retains such a philosophically seductive sheen.
The 450-mile westwards drive from San Antonio is blessedly open and devoid of the petty competitiveness one finds on most interstates across the fruited plain, the way motorists cluster tightly, surrounded by miles of open space, angling to deny strangers the satisfaction of a spot in the imaginary future area they plan to occupy. Texas has lots of guns and lots of road-rage, and blossoming billboards about road-rage, and if one were to think arming the populace would decrease the likelihood of strangers confronting one another, well, he would be wrong. Arming the populace invariably grows the self in self-protection more than the protection, expanding the perimeter of offense and probably the perception of offense, too.
Writing of which, some might be offended to have come all this way to a boxing column only to encounter a pining-away about flat western spaces and traffic patterns and Sundays. Very well.
Friday British welterweight Amir Khan decisioned American Chris Algieri in a match that was, like most things PBC, somewhat better than feared. British fans are loyal fans – frankly, they are like Mexicans without a fraction the talent pool – and their loyalty is continually tested and occasionally rewarded by Khan, good a representative of this era as any. Khan does not win his career’s biggest fights, or perhaps the fights he loses that he is supposed to win retroactively gain in stature, but he provides suspense because his chin is so poor that it distracts from his footwork, which otherwise would be glaringly awful.
However many trainers he’s had, Khan has never had stricken from his repertoire a sideways-skipping escape that looks frightened no matter the juncture of a fight in which it appears. It is incredible that Algieri, a man who barely survived Ruslan Provodnikov at 140 pounds and lost every minute to little Manny Pacquiao in November, at times looked aggressive and imposing as Antonio Margarito against Khan. Algieri thinks and listens in a way Khan never does, and when he goes in the hard way he emerges from it much better than Khan, too.
“So little from so much” – that ought to be the tagline in September if it turns out Khan looked badly enough Friday to win the Floyd Mayweather retirement-match lottery. Since Algieri couldn’t miss Khan with wildman rights in the opening five rounds, it stands to reason Mayweather might possibly, conditionally, conceivably, tentatively, haltingly go for a knockout to close his career. The Brits would have to acquire from scalpers 15,000 of the MGM Grand’s tickets, with the remaining 1,000 split between celebrity comps and Mayweather fans, but why not?
Enough of this. I’d rather be in Barcelona . . .
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Editor’s Note: For part 10, please click here.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
