The narrative of Cotto-Margarito II will say Miguel Cotto, inspired by tens of thousands of his countrymen within Madison Square Garden, gained a richly satisfying vengeance on Mexican Antonio Margarito in 2011, confirming everything he believed about Margarito’s criminality in their 2008 match and restoring Puerto Rican pride across the land. Ah, sweet revenge.
That narrative will have plenty of technical accuracies but will be, in its general fabric, something quite different from what happened. It will extirpate the anxious moments fans, and Cotto, endured through the match and sue posterity to change its semi-satisfying conclusion for what great imagery is conjured by: Cotto, TKO-10.
That was the official mark Saturday. After Margarito’s surgically repaired right eye swelled shut in the middle part of the fight, a ringside physician could abide no more of its closure before round 10 and waved the match off, one Cotto was winning by wide margins on all three official scorecards. Cotto was relieved and content. Margarito was defiant. It was a result whose satisfaction will grow with the years, one imagines, because right now it’s less than Cotto’s fans hoped for.
Before anyone rebuts that assertion, straining his voice to declare full satisfaction, he should ask himself: On Friday afternoon, if someone told me Margarito would be smiling and whooping at Cotto in Saturday’s final round, before giving an obstinate postfight interview and leaving the ring under his own power, would I have told that person “Completely satisfied in every way, thank you”?
How this fight is remembered, though, does tell us something about the way a known result affects subsequent reviews. For three years, knowing Cotto ultimately succumbed to Margarito in the 11th round of their first meeting, we have watched the precise combinations Cotto landed in that fight’s opening 15 minutes and told ourselves they were not effective as they appeared. Margarito walked through them; look, he’s nodding and smiling the whole way! And knowing the probability Margarito had hardening pads over his middle knuckles, we have also imagined Margarito’s every awkward right cross as ruinous to Cotto’s head and heart.
When we revisit Saturday’s rematch, we’ll play a similar trick on ourselves, admiring Cotto’s precise combinations, and forgetting the tension we felt as Cotto opened his eyes and bleeding mouth, wide, in the sixth round and hurriedly retreated the length of the canvas, post to post.
If the absence of a plaster-like substance on Margarito’s knuckles made a difference, its difference was not large as Cotto’s change in tactics. Though he never did manage to show Margarito a well-leveraged left hook to the body, not once in their 20 rounds together really, Cotto did do one thing much better in the rematch: He got on Margarito’s chest.
Margarito is a wild-swinging confusion of long limbs when he is comfortable and significantly less than that when he is not. Cotto’s trainer, Pedro Diaz, caught this while studying tapes of Margarito’s match with Shane Mosley and told Cotto to put his forehead under Margarito’s chin and push him backwards to the ropes – off of which Margarito fights worse than a novice. Cotto was able to lean on Margarito and endure the Mexican’s cuffing right hands, because without a running start Margarito doesn’t hit very hard at all.
Or maybe the knuckle pads were the difference. Ask someone who was at ringside.
At the risk of offending egalitarian sensibilities, sensibilities that tell an American his perspective is usually better than anyone else’s, it’s worth mentioning that a guy at ringside always has a better bead on a fight than a guy at home. There are elements to home viewing that are superior, yes – sometimes you’re even able to hear between-rounds corner instructions over network sales pitches – but you do not have the same feel for a fight that you would at ringside.
The punches sound different, with television microphones somehow flattening their acoustics and making them all equal. The crowd is an altered entity. From ringside, you are able to see the arena and all its moving parts in a panorama that, while noisy, lends you a deeper perspective on the event’s mood. The benefits of being in a press box are often overstated, but the benefits of being within 75 feet of gloved combat cannot be.
Does this mean every ringside scorecard is correct? No. There’s a herding element to ringside scoring – the way consensus-seekers fan out among press-row tables, telling you others’ scores before asking your own – that compromises what is later published. But when a ringside writer tells you his general sense of a result or crowd, give him the benefit of every doubt, no matter what you saw through television’s narrowing eye.
The ringside consensus seems to be that Saturday night was a joy for Puerto Rican fans who turned out to see Cotto gain vengeance. Is it possible a deep sense of relief is being misinterpreted as euphoria? It is. If Miguel Cotto didn’t think Antonio Margarito’s punches were nearly so hard this time as they were in their first fight, he did a hell of an impersonation of a guy who did.
But then, there is something about a larger man with a maniacal grin on his face and cornrows chasing after you that will always be unsettling – Margarito racingracngracing after Cotto, whooping, his feet a messwards back, his overright hand throwing, his heading bob a target, his up leftercut sailing.
There is something equally undoing, though, in Cotto’s cold precision, left hands followed by rights, all landing flush till victory.
So goes the seasoning of memories that shape a narrative hardening into fact.
Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com
