By Bart Barry-
Saturday in a junior welterweight title-unification match broadcast by the aficionado’s network, DAZN, California’s Jose Ramirez stopped Texan Maurice Hooker midway through a wonderfully compelling fight that ended with extraordinary abruptness. Eighteen-and-a-half minutes in, the men looked equally formidable. Eighteen seconds later, Hooker lay collapsed on the whiteropes, a blueshirt his only protection from Ramirez’s ferocity.
Both men distinguished themselves by daring to ratify their once-vacant titles. Promoters and their matchmakers are too good to be believed, and so the winner of a vacant title is not credible till he’s fought a fellow titlist. We now know Ramirez is the real thing. And we know Hooker is the real thing, too, though slightly less of that thing than Ramirez.
If neither man was allowed comfort before the other, a minutely tally’d’ve found Ramirez acting as discomfitter, not Hooker. There was the promise of Hooker’s substantial rightcross to keep Ramirez sober at every charge, a source of instant anxiety for Ramirez to be sure, but it was a tool Ramirez solved and dulled in the fight’s opening quarter. Ramirez did this with timing and footwork, somethings he doubtlessly learned before joining trainer Robert Garcia’s stable.
If you have an amateur pedigree – which means you’ve involuntarily boxed through your youth against every style and ethnicity – before you pilgrim to Oxnard, Garcia takes your skillful foundation, puts it in smaller gloves and commands you attack. If you haven’t a skillful foundation, Garcia nevertheless puts you in smaller gloves and commands you attack. As we saw in his younger brother’s spring whitewashing contra Errol Spence, Coach Robert carries no plans B to ringside in his spitbucket; any exam question whose answer is not “more aggression” gets left blank for later – a generation later.
Fortunately for Fresno aficionados Jose Ramirez, an Olympian, brought skills galore to Oxnard when he arrived a year ago. That meant Garcia’s plan A, more aggression, was exactly matched to Saturday’s moment. It wasn’t necessarily that an Olympian like Ramirez couldn’t stay outside and win a boxing match with Hooker, that was about a 40/60 proposition, it was that there was no reason to try it. Hooker’s every advantage disintegrated once Ramirez was within his arms’ length of Hooker. And Ramirez’s advantages multiplied proportionate to every inch nearer after that. Hooker knew this, Ramirez knew this.
Hooker outsmarted himself, though, figuring in round 5 he might do a little sabbatical on the ropes and let Ramirez get tired of punching. That was the lapse that cost Hooker his title. What happened in a couple seconds in round 6, Hooker’s straightback headpulling that set his chin on a tee for Ramirez’s left fist and the legs’ jellying and Ramirez’s swift adaptation and Hooker’s utter defenselessness, all that, came of Hooker’s vanished judgement the round before.
There are ways to discourage and fatigue volume punchers like Ramirez, but none of them permits him to put knuckles on you. Knuckling you puts that breed of man in his most comfortable place. He’s no longer burning calories at fractionally the rate you think he is, especially if you’re a rangy puncher accustomed to throwing on your preferred timetable.
Ali rope-a-doped Foreman, remember, not Frazier. You rope-a-dope a slugger, and he autodiscourages by failing to harm you the way experience told him he would. You rope-a-dope a boxer, and he retreats to the opposite ropes, and y’all feint at one another till the ref starts deducting points. But you rope-a-dope a volume puncher, and you leave in an ambulance.
Too soon?
Let’s have a treatment of our beloved sport’s deadly past week, then. We are expected to examine our collective conscience at times like these, I know, perform public acts of expiation, and especially if we write for daily periodicals whose pacifistic editors tsk-tsk our ways.
Good news, there. In 2019 none of us writes for daily periodicals.
That means much of last week’s atonement was habitual more than sincere. We know this because it all reduced to a massive shrug from the moral lowground, or else niggling about pet safety issues – like tiptoeing a matchstick bridge across a firepit licking.
Here’s an easier calculus for you, the aficionado: Do you watch fights hoping to see a brainbleed or death?
No, you don’t. Then that’s that. You’re not obligated to justify yourself further. Those who would ban our sport are unserious; if they coulda, they woulda. Those who wish to make prizefighting safer verily miss the point – our sport survives by dint of its peril; safe prizefighting is oxymoronic.
Some primal, though enduring (and thus still not vestigial), human trait requires public acts of violence. In this sense the ban-boxing brigade recalls a Chris Rock joke about needing bullies, because a couple decades of banning bullying in our schools meant that when an actual bully showed up in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, no one knew what to do.
Jose Ramirez would know what to do, and for that matter so would Maurice Hooker, and if watching them punch one another doesn’t quite tell us what to do it at least reminds us occasions for punching one another still exist, however many millennia since our ancestors emigrated from their caves. There is real violence within most of us, and it thrills the spirit. That isn’t a solution for prizefighters’ deaths and damages or even a prescription for a solution. It is an amoral report of where and what we are – an act of acceptance, not contrition.
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Editor’s note: This column will be on summer vacation next week.
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Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
