By Bart Barry-
CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas – A mile south of American Bank Center stands the Selena Memorial, known as Mirador de la Flor. It overlooks a small harbor that abuts Corpus Christi Bay, which floats to Mustang Island, a crescent sliver of land separating this city from the Gulf of Mexico. Far as coastal cities go, this is an ugly one, truly, but Selena, as both an ideal and a memory, is beautiful, and it feels good when I tell folks I’m heading southwards that they ask about visiting Selena, now, rather than an aircraft carrier.
I’m here because of a fightcard at American Bank Center, of course, one that wasn’t good as its February predecessor, here, though probably better than its Saturday successor in New York, an interminable DAZN insomnia cure with Canelo Alvarez’s tri-spiking of hapless Rocky Fielding’s liver like its Sundaymorning alarm. Fielding was what we knew he was, and Canelo did exactly what a dominant force should do a submissive one. Aside from what matchmaking gripes all sounded months ago the only fair complaint about Canelo’s debut on a new network was the ungodly hour it finally happened.
Does that suffice for a topical summary? It does.
“El Zurdo” Gilberto Ramirez, a Mexican super middleweight titlist who neither participated in WBSS’ first season nor seems slightly interested in matching himself with those who did, gained a lukewarm vengeance on the halfdozen or so aficionados who told people they thought Jesse Hart won his first match with Zurdo 15 months ago, by decisioning Hart narrowly Friday night. Ramirez is the better fighter, the harder puncher, even the handsomer man. He may ultimately have more grit, too, than Hart. But if Ramirez won acclaim from official judges in Friday’s rematch he surely won no new fans and lost some old ones.
Ramirez explained his poor form in rounds 8-11 by citing an elbow injury. Could be. Hart obviously sensed something and stopped hesitating to walkdown Ramirez after the seventh. But Hart did something else, too: He showed how limited Ramirez is. A rangy frontrunner who’s very good from his preferred distance Ramirez hadn’t an inkling what to do with a man inside said distance, even while that man was not punching or holding but mostly just leaning on him. Hart turned the boxing match to a shouldering chesting necking contest and Ramirez didn’t do nothing about it. He planted his feet and waited for the ropes to break or the ref to yell it.
Soon thereafter Ramirez said he wants to move to 175 pounds, where his lack of infighting should adhere itself to a lack of power and get him either decisioned or protected so unflinchingly by Top Rank’s matchmakers he might as well have been.
The more interesting story was Hart, who looked a feral beast against Thomas Awimbono 10 months ago. Still scowling when he approached press row after merely 88 seconds of uberviolent work in February, Hart demanded a rematch as his proper due and convinced those of us who were listening. How much more fragile Hart looked in the opening half of that rematch, though! Talking to himself through an open mouth as he absorbed bodyshots and retreated from Ramirez’s feints Hart appeared like no one so much as a fighter ready to reveal, postfight, a trainingcamp injury or case of foodpoisoning (preceded necessarily by the “I don’t make excuses” tagline).
It led me to a ringside thought like: I have no idea what this man is thinking. Not in the sarcastic sense of “what were you thinking?” but in the much larger sense of an unknowable inventory of factors in Hart’s life that brought him to that moment, as a lubricated female voice a few rows back besought him to do what only she believed he could do, over and over and over, and over, and his corner urged him on, and the rest of the arena cheered heartily against him. Probability says I shouldn’t have had any better idea what Zurdo was thinking – regionally at least, I’m from a part of the world much nearer Hart’s Philadelphia than Ramirez’s Mazatlan – but Hart felt so deeply unknowable it was a thought and word into which I burrowed as Hart went dispiritedly backwards.
This isn’t a pledge to understand a fighter like Jesse Hart better in the future but a confession I probably never knew a thing about a fighter like Jesse Hart and a soft promise not to act like I do.
Which gets me thinking about the art of matchmaking and those who do it better than others. Top Rank does just about everything better than every other promoter, save perhaps signing prospects, but its complexion has changed noticeably these last few years. There are the legends on its staff, another of whom deservedly goes in Canastota next June, and they occupy the same ringside seats as ever they did. But tucked in the left corner of pressrow now sits a braintrust of laptops and tablets and smartphones, and what youngsters understand their mechanics and reach, that represents Top Rank today, a company endangered by economics two years ago and now a lesson in adaptability. Such adaptation has bestowed on Top Rank’s legends a sheen of fated contentment, pleasant to observe as once it was unlikely.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
