A thrilling act of violence: Ramirez razes Hooker in Texas

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