By Bart Barry-
Saturday afternoon, Central Time, Scotland’s Josh “The Tartan Tornado” Taylor broke in half undefeated Thai super lightweight Apinun Khongsong with a round 1 lefthand, on ESPN+, sometime shortly before or after Latvia’s Mairis Briedis narrowly decisioned Cuban cruiserweight Yuniel Dorticos to win the WBSS tournament on DAZN. Sunday morning Houston’s Jermell Charlo stopped Dominican junior middleweight Jeison Rosario on Showtime PPV.
An advantage of apps like DAZN and ESPN+ is that nothing must any longer be seen live. So long as one abstains from social media, never a bad idea, he needn’t watch boxing at any moment but his most convenient. In a pandemic live sports resemble YouTube uploads, in any event, and whosoever imagines a YouTube channel successfully forcing viewers into appointments?
I enjoy reading fight tweets much more than doing them, I’ve learned; the consensus I gather from eight or 10 opinionated lads watching a match often entertains more, and much more efficiently, than watching live action does. I sit in a large La-Z-Boy chair upon which I now log more weekly hours than any mattress, read contemporary fiction and poetry, and check Twitter sporadically to see how things get on.
My regular survey of boxing tweets is how I know pandemic purchases of the Brothers Charlo were light and actual viewers of the 1 AM mainevent were nighnil. No, of course I wasn’t awake at that hour. Sunday morning I scrolled my timeline and saw my 10 regular commentators were down to three by the time Sunday’s result happened. I did not regret foregoing the pay-per-view, as I never do. I felt a quick twinge of elation for Jermell Charlo when I read he’d won by knockout; it’s great to have a unified champion, and Jermell is worthy as any. When I did the math on what time the mainevent happened, I felt relief, honestly, I’d not lashed myself to that mast.
I am already way too old to watch sports at that hour. I can’t fathom who the target demographic for these schedules is, though I assume some sort of market research informs network decisions else they’d not keep making them. I fear the market research might only be something like: Well, no one ever purchases a pay-per-view just before the mainevent, even if that’s all he watches, so we’ve already got all the money we’re going to get by, say, 10 PM ET, and who cares? That would be too fine a fit for boxing’s brutally shortsighted self.
This is fairly well on everyone, including Jermell, who has to be told logistical things like what time he ringwalks, in order to plan his day, days in advance, and evidently doesn’t pipe-up with something decisive like: “That’s after midnight in Houston, and the people who really care about boxing aren’t staying up that late.”
I don’t know what time Josh Taylor’s match went off in London nor what time Briedis-Dorticos happened in Munich. I didn’t watch either of those live either.
The pandemic has removed much of the weight from much of my life this last halfyear. Without a fraction the events and obligations that once filled my calendar I began the pandemic believing I should hold to a schedule, just the same, or else. By the first week of April I’d contemplated else quite a lot and recognized it held no meaningful consequences for me. With nothing on the calendar I was loosed to do whatever I wished from Friday at 5 PM till Monday at 8 AM. By May I realized I wished to read – more than I wished to do anything else.
Read promiscuously. It came as a surprise. Decades of using the television mostly as a device for falling asleep built a suspicion I was only just keeping 30-hour binges at bay. I worried I might give the entire pandemic to episodic television and action movies. Nope. By June I was no longer worrying I might sound priggish if I told coworkers I liked reading books better than watching comicbook movies.
One such book I’ve been reading occasionally all through the pandemic, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert Sapolsky, a neuroendocrinologist and excellent writer, mightn’t be surprised as I was by this turn towards the written word. Everything to Sapolsky is an amplification system; genes lead us to select environments that amplify those genes that amplify previous selections that amplify those genes. The pandemic has merely amplified who I was before the pandemic. If that’s true it’s both a relief and a disappointment, a result Sapolsky might enjoy.
I wish Taylor’s match with Khongsong had gone much, much longer. That was the match that, judging by its opening minute, held the most potential delight and a chance to deliver something stunning as Gonzalez-Sor Rungvisai 1, wherein a world champion finds himself against a man’s power he cannot solve-for. Instead Taylor felt his left fist “go in” Khongsong’s liver. That was that.
Briedis-Dorticos was neither suspenseful nor decisive as its predecessor WBSS cruiserweight final had been a few years back. Neither man has a sixth gear but only Briedis knows it and plans accordingly; at the elite level Dorticos has warning-track power but fights like his next righthand ends things, and it doesn’t; both guys’ gloves were too big, ultimately, and there’s no such thing as a great fight in which neither man bleeds or loses consciousness.
You don’t need ratings to know professional sports are not back and will not be till there are spectators. Networks should continue to budget accordingly.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
