By Bart Barry-
Saturday at Arena Riga in Latvia in a pair of prizefights broadcasted by DAZN the World Boxing Super Series arrived at its cruiserweight-finals pairing violently. Two evenly matched matches ended in competitors’ unconsciousness, with a Cuban clipping an American’s circuits and a Latvian doing somethings awful to a Pole.
First, Mairis Briedis’ mainevent manhandling of Krzysztof Glowacki: In an officiating context what transpired was shoddy-cum-catastrophic and ought result in a pension for Robert Byrd. In a prizefighting capacity, though, it was handsome sporting and something others might try.
We’ve all seen the preamble hundreds of times: Fighter A overthrows the right cross, and disbalances himself, while Fighter B ducks the punch and arrives 90-degrees right of square when he resurfaces; Fighter A protects his brainstem with his right glove, elbow out, while both men wait for the ref to untangle them. Nearly never does Fighter B wing a left hook at the back of Fighter A’s head. But in round 2 Glowacki thought it a capital idea.
Then Briedis showed us promptly why no one does this by driving his raised right elbow directly through Glowacki’s unguarded jaw. Glowacki received the shot, realized what’d happened and went full soccer-player. This, more than the infractions that preceded it, offended Robert Byrd’s sensibilities, and he slapped Glowacki on the back and demanded he rise to play audience to Byrd’s deducting a point from the Briedis tally, without anybody, including Byrd and Glowacki, realizing how ruined Glowacki was.
A charitable read of what followed is the Latvian crowd’s zealous disapproval of Byrd’s ruling jarred Byrd such that he was unable to hear the round’s closing bell. A realistic read is that Byrd is too old to be refereeing a scrap between 200-pound, non-English speakers, and Briedis’ scorn for Queensberry’s marquess reduced Byrd to a doddering elder.
Whatever it was, after Briedis dropped Glowacki on the blackmat a second time, this time with punches, and Glowacki rose, the round ended and the Latvian bell began to tinkle, insistently if euphoniously, and Briedis and Glowacki continued to make war while Byrd went to that tranquil, nostalgic place grandads do after disabling their hearing aids. The timekeepers stood and waved frantically, to no avail. Fact is, had Briedis not dropped Glowacki at 3:11, causing Byrd to glance the timekeepers’ way for a 10-count, round 2 might still be happening as you read this. Briefly returned to lucidity, Byrd acknowledged the round’s end like an NFL ref stopping the playclock, which sundry folks, including the Glowacki corner – by then approaching its 30th second on the apron – understood to be Byrd’s waving-off the fight.
In all of Latvia, only Robert Byrd knew what the hell Robert Byrd was doing.
Both fighters stood in their corners awaiting a ruling, and not resting, while the 60-second respite ticked by and Byrd pantomimed his inability to hear the very bell he successfully heard close round 1. Glowacki’s chief second ran all the way across the canvas and pantomimed for Byrd a threeminute duration on his wristwatch. Byrd scolded the man then turned and scolded the timekeeper for not ringing loudly enough a bell everyone else heard. Glowacki did not receive time enough to recuperate from Briedis’ elbow (which, quite probably, Byrd missed altogether and only thought to penalize via inference) and did not receive time enough to recuperate from his first legal knockdown.
And recovered Glowacki wasn’t when round 3 began and Briedis made quick work of his remaining consciousness. Odds are fair Briedis would’ve won one way or another had all things happened fairly, and frankly a well-leveraged elbow may be just the remedy for a well-leveraged rabbit punch; legal or not it’s exactly what the word “fight” conjures in innocent minds.
But the Byrds must be helped into retirement (yes, Robert’s wife, Adalaide, and yes, that Adalaide Byrd, was an official scorekeeper for Saturday’s mainevent). Over and again, beginning with the prefight instructions, Robert Byrd played the role of a senior American who comes upon a foreigner and thinks if he just yells English at him, rather than speaking it, the foreigner will understand. Byrd explained to the fighters, who’ve been hearing “break” their whole fighting lives, that Byrd wouldn’t wrestle with them and expected an immediate cessation when he called “stop” – which of course didn’t happen. Then Byrd got his branded-for-TV tagline in, and the fight began. Then the fight turned into one, between two large men who knew how, becoming no place for a 74-year-old, something one assumes the WBSS, if not the Nevada Athletic Commission, will remember henceforth.
Before all that, in the comain and fellow semifinal, Cuban Yuniel Dorticos drycleaned TMT’s Andrew “Beast” Tabiti with a round-10 right hand that was gorgeous. There was something aesthetically piquant about DAZN’s closeup of Tabiti’s goldtoothed-vampire gumshield as Tabiti’s involuntary breaths went round it while his Money Team hangerson sheepishly footdragged to his aid. They were there for the victory party, not the cleanup, and hadn’t an inkling what to do while their man spent two minutes rigid.
What now will follow is another excellent WBSS cruiserweight final that complements its bantamweight and super lightweight finals. There’s lots more to be written about the natural power of selforganizing entities, but for now let us marvel once again at how much better the tournament format serves our interests, as aficionados, than what promoter-driven swill generally befalls us.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
