By Bart Barry-
Florida’s Erickson Lubin decisioned Cleveland’s Terrell Gausha by unanimous scores nobody cared to contest. The prizefight’s quality, and the year’s economic developments, loosened tongues during the broadcast, with all Showtime’s employees expressing record levels of empathy with Saturday’s viewers. Afterwards Lubin likened the match to chess.
This allusion to chess by boring prizefighters and their enablers has lost its effect. Chess is invigorating to its players. On extremely rare occasions it is captivating to spectators who are themselves masters of the game. Watching chess is never not-awful for casual observers.
What happened Saturday in Showtime’s mainevent was not chess in the Kasparov-Topalov sense either. It was, to a casual fan’s eyes, Lubin tentatively moving his horse in an L shape, followed by Gausha tentatively doing the same, followed by Lubin tentatively returning his horse to its previous position using the same L shape, followed by Gausha tentatively doing the same, for about a halfhour, until Lubin’s eyes overglazed and he tipped accidentally forward and knocked a few of the pieces across the board, whereupon Gausha, his horse in its 137th tentative retreat of the match, leaped forward with every pawn he had while Lubin tried to get the board reset. The board quickly reset, Gausha got most of his pawns back to their starting position, Lubin moved both his horses in L shapes, and the final bell clanged.
Halfway through this spectacle, I removed myself from the action, went to the kitchen and began eating something, I don’t recall what, more from boredom than hunger. My pace was leisurely. I returned in time to see the Gausha balance shot that breathed life in the evening for a round. What surprised me about this trip to the kitchen, upon review, was not that I walked away from live prizefighting without pause or that I ate without a sense of urgency but that I didn’t notice either thing.
A few minutes before the match concluded my wife came in the room and said, “It’s still on? I thought it was over.”
“Oh?”
“You were in the kitchen.”
“Yup.”
Such was the chess match. It cleansed the home of meaningfulness and made even courteous communication feel futile. More minutes deeper in this pastoral of minimalist repose, came like a bolt of lightning Erickson Lubin’s maniacal selfassessment. A branding exercise, of course, Lubin’s words about himself and the fight he’d just made were from a different time – San Jose, 2001? Bogota, 2031? – that led to a startling thought: Someone watching this might be doubting his own memory, right now, as Lubin tells him what he saw was somehow tactical, planned, a product of Lubin’s mastermind trainer.
That’s not the worst of it. What Saturday’s mainevent did more potently than bore its viewers was cast doubt on this weekend’s product. I now doubt I will purchase the Charlo doubleheader. The price is too high for one Charlo, and the price is too high for two Charlos. That’s not new; boxing pay-per-views are generally priced by asking what any reasonable adult might pay then multiplying it by three, assuming the whole mess gets offset by parties of 12 or more viewers crammed in friends’ livingrooms (in a bygone era).
What frightens me away from Saturday’s pay-per-view, then, is the prospect of being stuck in a series of chess matches and stapled to my seat by the guilt of having spent a week’s groceries on a purchase I regret before, during and after.
Credit where it’s due: The Showtime commentating crew’s honest assessment of the dreariness of Saturday’s mainevent brings hope. For once a boxing booth didn’t bother selling us our own suffering. One wonders if this is about the way PBC treated Showtime these last few years, as an off-Broadway farmleague for future Fox stars, as what former Showtime commentator Paulie Malignaggi would call a “side piece”.
Without a pandemic and the disappearance of half the American economy and its advertisers, how likely is it there’d even be boxing on Showtime these days? Review Showtime’s 2019 boxing calendar before you answer incredulously.
Welcome back. You didn’t have to go do that. It’s instructive, though, isn’t it?
It reminds you of a time when all this felt essential, when serious writers did serious work about things like shoulder programming and terrestrial-v-cable broadcasters. DAZN and ESPN and Fox blew all that to pieces then got blown to pieces by COVID-19.
The recent bubblewrapping of club-level prizefighters has put local promoters on an endangered list. Major promoters, Top Rank and PBC, at least, have sought to educate their fighters about what economic realities arrived over the summer. Top Rank appears to have told its marquee names they can fight for smaller purses or stay iced. PBC is using the more traditional and ultimately harsher freemarket model, whereby you give fighters a percentage of their pay-per-view receipts and wish them Godspeed. That should prove humbling.
Perhaps it was that, ultimately, that turned me against the Brothers Charlo event – the lack of humility to its promotion, the pathology of promoting this pay-per-view like nothing’s changed, like this is the twins’ just due for all they’ve given us. I watched some of The Journey after Saturday’s mainevent and waited to hear something like: “Look, we know a lot of y’all have lost your jobs and this is a lot of money we’re charging, but we promise to give you the best show you’ve ever seen!”
Instead it was the usual brand idiocy about lions and dens and jungles. Jermell’s match with Jeison Rosario is a legitimate unification fight worthy of a mainevent on Showtime. Jermall’s match with Sergiy Derevyanchenko is not. I still might buy the show.
If I don’t it will be a function of competition. WBSS has its finals on DAZN and its last winner on ESPN+. Lions Only, survival of the fittest, etc.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
