By Bart Barry-
Editor’s note: Eleven months ago we asked Bart Barry to interview himself about the state of the craft. On Tuesday Bart sent a note saying he’d no idea a subject for this week’s column, his seventh such note of the year. To spark his flagging interest, once again, we asked him to return to the subject of writing and boxing.
BB: Sometime soon, maybe even next month, Conor McGregor fights Floyd Mayweather in what is widely expected to be . . .
BB: . . .
BB: . . .
BB: Go on.
BB: You were supposed to interrupt and rail against this mess.
BB: Nah.
BB: Then you support it?
BB: I won’t be watching.
BB: That’s slippery.
BB: I have no strong feelings about it, pro or con. I saw enough enthusiasm on Twitter to watch some clips of those staged performances in the cities, and it didn’t do much for me.
BB: Were you familiar with McGregor’s work previously?
BB: No.
BB: Were you impressed by his gift for trashtalking?
BB: Are we considering that a gift now – like athleticism or perfect pitch or eloquence?
BB: Aren’t we?
BB: No. As you know from watching Mayweather it’s a con created for five-second sound clips. It’s like a live rehearsal with a hundred takes. They say the same thing over and over and over, and then they keep the best one for YouTube.
BB: Floyd was outgunned.
BB: He’s a great, great fighter. But he’s not witty or creative. He’s a miserable dude. The best sorts of performers in the hiphop set, which has never seen Floyd as one of its own – unlike, say, Tyson – take the craft of wordplay incredibly seriously but not themselves. They wink at you. Floyd gets this backwards. He takes himself altogether too seriously and says the same unoriginal thing every promotion. During the best performances, the artist interrupts himself to say he’s only kidding, then at the end you realize how serious he was. Floyd interrupts himself to say how serious he is, then after the fight he tells you he was kidding the whole time.
BB: Not sure that works as an analogy.
BB: Then edit it out.
BB: And defeat the purpose of this?
BB: Don’t take ourself so seriously.
BB: Name one professional athlete you’ve never met but would like to.
BB: Bode Miller.
BB: Last year you’d given up on boxing but were approaching the craft of writing with immense enthusiasm and hope. This year, that has switched.
BB: Started to, anyway. Something started to happen in January, it’s too early to say what, but the compulsion to write, and by extension to read, dissolved very quickly. It was like waking up one morning, looking in the mirror, and discovering I was now a seven-foot woman from Beijing. An attractive, intelligent woman with a loving husband, maybe, but still an entirely different identity than I took to bed the night before.
BB: Seventeen years of saying “Hello, I’m Bart, a writer” sort of became “Hello, I’m Bart.”
BB: Yet there’s an optimism in your view of our beloved sport you haven’t had for years.
BB: Very true. It coalesced during the Horn-Pacquiao broadcast.
BB: You sure about this?
BB: Yes. Because it was unplanned. The opposite was planned, frankly; it was to be a chance to criticize ESPN’s approach to sports broadcasting and roll eyes at Arum telling the truth tomorrow, again.
BB: But instead you enjoyed it?
BB: I really did. The volume was off, so I don’t know what that commentary did to the experience for others. But the sunshine, and the vindication for the longshot, and Pacquiao’s always infectious enthusiasm. It just felt warm. It felt good. It felt authentic. Real fans, really smiling, really caring.
BB: Yet your column was satirical.
BB: In retrospect I didn’t trust my own enthusiasm. The last few years have taught us to trust reflexively our doubts but rarely our enthusiasm. I trust my enthusiasm for a fighter, for Chocolatito as an example, but not for events. Boxing was always cynical, but somewhere within that cynicism there was authenticity – genuine men genuinely bleeding. PBC changed that, methinks.
BB: A Mayweatherization of boxing.
BB: Yeah.
BB: That’s changing because of Top Rank’s alliance with ESPN?
BB: I’m almost ready to say yes with an exclamation mark. Top Rank has the best development plan for its fighters and the best matchmakers. But for the longest time they’ve trapped themselves in this premium-cable-capture game, where they try to get one over on HBO or sell Showtime a dud. There’s nothing to save it for now.
BB: And they don’t have a Pacquiao in the pipeline.
BB: There’s no obvious pay-per-view star in their stable, no. They have to make the best fights on the best network. It’s no longer about Arum outsmarting a few corporate guys. It’s now about the entirety of Top Rank’s outfit proving it is what it thinks it is.
BB: Why didn’t PBC’s model work?
BB: That’s the sweet irony of this. It did! PBC sold its product at a massive, anticompetitive loss for a couple years in order to get a major network interested enough in boxing to pay for the rights to broadcast it. That network was ESPN. But it chose to pay Top Rank instead.
BB: The longer a fight goes . . .
BB: The more class tells, yes.
BB: Whither HBO?
BB: Who cares?
BB: Go on.
BB: That’s not flippant. Does an NBA fan worry about the health of basketball based on what “Real Sports” says? Does an NFL fan think football is dead if “Hard Knocks” gets cancelled? Some of HBO’s cards this year are good, and that one in September is perfectly excellent. But more and more, if you’re not ordering HBO PPV, you halfway expect to see a Just for Men ad between rounds.
BB: Showtime?
BB: They’ve got the heavyweight champion of the world. And he’s another reason for a recrudescing excitement about our sport. They’ve got PBC’s stable whenever they want it.
BB: Why couldn’t Haymon go back to HBO?
BB: HBO’s no longer that rich or that dumb.
BB: You look healthy, kid.
BB: I feel good.
BB: This was fun.
BB: Dave Grohl looks at Paul McCartney and says, “Why can’t it always be this easy?” And McCartney says –
BB: “It is!” Touché.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry