By Bart Barry-
SAN ANTONIO – Saturday the emergency alert came on everyone’s cell at 7:00 PM local time and read STAY HOME, a first of its kind. This county, Bexar, has become one of the most fecund places in the world for COVID-19 less than a month after our mayor’s effort to slow his city’s reopening got gutted by a governor whose party presumes to be about small government and local rule. Unless local rule should thwart plans to keep people from collecting unemployment insurance.
A premature reopening driven by business interests now becomes a tardy rollback driven by mortality projections, and whatsoever does a governor say to restaurants and bars that closed and lost inventory and staff then reopened and rehired and repurchased and now, weeks later, reclose and lose inventory and staff anew? He’s floated the idea of saying he never said to do any of it, one more cock crowing at the sun, and maybe he’s right. Maybe all these flags and uniforms and offices and guns belie the fact no one is in charge, whatever their hardwon titles and salaries imagine, and maybe this American experiment never could’ve gone another way.
Too many hours after Saturday’s emergency alert came another weak boxing card on ESPN, this time from TV Azteca’s Mexico studio, not Top Rank’s in Las Vegas, and Mexican super featherweight titlist Miguel Berchelt hunted hopeless Mexican journeyman Eleazar Valenzuela to a round 6 stoppage that BoxRec says goes on the ledger like an NC because Mexico City refuses to sanction combat sports during a pandemic.
Immediately after referee Cesar Castanon stopped the match Berchelt sprinted to a nearby corner and leaped on a ringpost to salute his fans. Nobody was there. He lowered his gloves and self pretty quickly, realizing there was, appropriately enough, no one to celebrate his stamping a 13th loss on Valenzuela’s ledger. Earlier that afternoon, unbeknownst to Berchelt, professional golfer Phil Mickelson had made some of the same futile gestures in Connecticut, giving his so-humbled-by-your-devotion smiles and nods to empty stretches of sod where habit told him fans should congregate. It’s a quibble, really, but it sort of marks these insincere acts for the selfaggrandizing things they ever were; when you robotically acknowledge your fans whether they’re present or not, it’s a matter of muscle memory, not connection.
But what about Berchelt’s activity and pop! Sure, I guess, but who cares at this point? It has been so long since a meaningful fight and so many more-meaningful things have happened meanwhile, it’s a disservice to y’all to feign excitement.
There was no drama and only a sadist’s suspense. The match was a disservice to Berchelt, too, as five rounds with Eleazar Valenzuela made him less competent for a fight with Vasiliy Lomachenko, against whom he has truly little chance regardless of layoffs. Timmy and Dre were bored from bell to wave and it was good to hear them husbanding passions for another day.
I know the media cycle has moved-on from racist police violence and all, but I want to return for a spell to something Timothy Bradley spoke about (4:00) a few weeks ago. He described being pulled-over with his four-year-old son on their way to school, pulled-over because of the color of their skin.
“My heart was pumping a hundred miles per hour,” said Bradley, and that’s the part I wish to treat.
No less a hero than Bradley, someone who spent 144 minutes in pitched fistic combat with Manny Pacquiao and Juan Manuel Marquez, the man who fought Ruslan Provodnikov unconsciously for 11 rounds, that guy, was struck by a fear so visceral he eschewed a career of hiding all selfdoubt to tell a national television audience how afraid he was, a year later.
What does that say about the way our system tortures millions of Americans as they do things so mundane? That Tim Bradley felt more afraid for his life driving his son to school than fighting his generation’s most dangerous men is an indictment that should strike aficionados in a place most anecdotes do not.
Recently Barack Obama recommended for aspiring antiracists a 1963 collection of essays, The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin, and I found nothing so striking as Baldwin’s imparting that African Americans do not seek acceptance from white Americans; they just wish to be left in peace. Here in Texas the right to be left alone is embraced, at least publicly, with religious fervor, and yet for millions this lowliest expectation goes routinely unmet. People in this state, whether black or brown, have been on this land or in this country full centuries longer than their uniformed oppressors – uneducated folks who, a couple or three generations removed from Europe, risibly call themselves “real Americans” in front of people who, through hundreds of years of crimes against them by the American system, have incredibly, irrationally, not given up on their country.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
