By Bart Barry-
Saturday in Oakland former undisputed super middleweight champion and current number-one ranked contender for the HBO light heavyweight championship Andre Ward completely decisioned undefeated Cuban Sullivan Barrera. Despite controlling every minute of the match Ward displayed enough vulnerability to whet hopeful aficionados’ imaginations something dangerous and competitive might happen in the late fall if Ward has the stones to risk life and limb in a match with Sergey “Second Most Feared Fighter on HBO” Kovalev.
It was a typical Andre Ward fight comprising technical precision and relying on its opponent’s craft to provide emotion. Barrera had some craft but mostly strongman assertiveness. As Ward boxes most every opponent the same, a manifestation of his obsessive control, there weren’t many surprises after the first three minutes passed. While the mammalian mind specializes in pattern recognition, the human mind specializes in pattern completion, recognizing patterns with less data than other species – abstraction, that is – and so there was nary a human who watched round 1 of Saturday’s match and didn’t intuit about exactly where it was going in the next 33 minutes, and that was where it went.
That marks Ward at once an extraordinary craftsman and substandard entertainer. But his entertainment value is evidently others’ concern – though neither of his copromoters, Roc Nation Sports and Home Box Office Sports, seems fractionally good at its craft as Ward is at his. For the best part of his professional career Ward has understood his status as American boxing’s last and probably final Olympic gold medalist and the weight of that metal, ignoring any who endeavored to move him anydirection he did not choose himself. Ward is a bright dude, too, and that precluded others’ convincing him their direction for him was his own direction.
If and when Ward chooses to redeem HBO’s matchmaking by matching himself with the network’s light heavyweight champion it will be on terms that do not appear favorable to anyone but Ward, and this will happen because Ward doesn’t need the fight because his selfworth is too well established to bend very much. Kovalev will bend in negotiations, one assumes, because he probably wants the Ward fight more than Ward does. Kovalev doesn’t need the fight, but he does want it; Ward seems neither to need nor want to fight Kovalev.
Having emptied a once-exceptional 168-pound division and failed to lure Gennady “He’ll fight anyone between 154 and 168 pounds!” Golovkin to fight him at super middleweight, Ward now tentatively, carefully, controllingly moves himself to 175, requiring three tuneups to ascend seven pounds, a tuneup-per-pound mark unlikely to be surpassed until Cinnamon Alvarez’s eventual ascent to 160. And that’s not a criticism of Ward either. He knows it’s HBO’s credibility, not his, that requires a 2016 match with Kovalev, and he knows, too, the only equalizer Kovalev has in that fight is size. So Ward patiently acclimates himself to the new weightclass, caring very little for what arbitrary timelines a broadcaster sets, gradually and decisively removing the sole advantage the network’s light heavyweight champion has.
If one draws up a chart of things Kovalev has more than Ward, it probably stops here: 1. Size, 2. Right cross. Notice meanness and ferocity didn’t make the list. Kovalev might have psychopathy going for him, but he is no more ornery in a fight than Ward is and not nearly so adept at fouling. Ward has approximately twice Kovalev’s craft and can effectively fight while moving in three times as many directions as Kovalev, who does incredibly well while moving forward and moving forward. Ward will tangle him and frustrate him in a way Bernard Hopkins was too old to do and no one else’s had the chops to try.
Early Saturday Ward reviewed Barrera’s physicality and class and decided it was better to slip punches and keep distance than go shopping inside. He’ll decide otherwise against Kovalev, planting his shoulders in the Russian’s chest and his head all over the Russian’s face, yes he will. Kovalev will make the bully’s choice and endeavor to outmuscle Ward, and Ward will have him. Ward is good an infighter as we’ve seen in a generation, and the secret of that goodness is his footwork; Ward churns his hips and feet where others stand still and wrestle above the waist. There are lots of ways Ward can prepare for Kovalev and not one way Kovalev can prepare for Ward, and one senses nobody who knows that in Kovalev’s circle will tell the Russian, making the proper assumption th’t refitting Kovalev at this point is a fool’s errand; go forward with full confidence, Sergey, or don’t go.
Talk of Ward’s rust or slippage, too, is irrelevant. Ward has been sharp enough to control every opponent he’s faced since his 13th birthday, and that will be true of Kovalev or Ward will not make the fight. Ward takes through all his life the confidence and distrust Floyd Mayweather brought in the prizefighting ring; where Mayweather played the buffoon in promotions then got real serious when the bell rang, Ward stays real serious.
Immediately before and after the dullest spectacles of his career Bernard Hopkins warned us how much we’d miss him when he was gone. He’s been gone for nearly a year and a half, and he isn’t missed – in large part because we still have Ward. There is neither another Andre Ward in the pipeline nor even much of a pipeline: In the end we may miss Ward more even than Hopkins assured us we’d miss Hopkins.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
