FIGHT NIGHT IN RIYADH: BETERBIEV VS. BIVOL (PT 2/3)
Memories of miscellaneous bouts at home and in bars
The bouts come back to mind, but in bits . . . watching Roy Jones, Jr. over at a vague and not entirely pleasant acquaintance’s apartment in 1998, my first year of grad school, but who was he fighting? (The boxer, not the acquaintance.) Looking now at a list of Jones’s fights, I’m guessing it was Virgil Hill, no slouch himself. My strongest memory of that night is the perception that Jones was incredibly fast with both hands. (He was also the last person before the winner of the Bivol - Beterbiev fight to hold every light heavyweight belt at once, and that was 25 years ago.) What an athlete! But what boxer isn’t . . . but even still, there are levels . . . what other boxer ever played guard in a semi-professional basketball game and then went 11 rounds in a championship fight later that night? In 1996, Jones suited up for the USBL’s Jacksonville Barracudas—not a onetime gig; he legitimately played for the team—and then beat the Quebec-based Eric Lucas in the ring. (A running diary of that day in SI notes that he was eating Gummy worms at 9:34 AM and espousing the merits of Burger King. Oh, for such a metabolism.)
You might have seen him in his 2020 exhibition match with Mike Tyson, the “Lockdown Knockdown,” not his finest hour—Tyson carried Jones in a sleeper—but whatever, it had 1.6 million PPV buys and made more than $80,000,000. Not bad for a couple of AARPers. (I skipped buying that one. Will I likewise skip the rapidly approaching November 15 fight between a 58 year-old Tyson and a 27 year-old Jake Paul, astonishingly a sanctioned match? It’ll be hard to show restraint. Plus the Katie Taylor vs. Amanda Serrano rematch is on the undercard, and that will be a wicked fight.) Jones, who I always enjoyed as a commentator (winningly stilted yet at the same time perceptive and clear), continues as a pro, I guess—his last bout, an 8th round loss to Anthony Pettis on April Fool’s Day last year, marked the then-54 year-old’s 76th pro fight.
The 1998 Jones fight I’m recalling was one of those where everybody pitched in their five or ten bucks. Same with a couple of the several Manny Pacquiao bouts I saw in real time on TV—was there ever a more fun fighter to watch with a bunch of people? (Incidentally, like Jones, Pacman also played b-ball, moonlighting in the Philippine Basketball Association.) Fights of his that stand out, let’s see, well . . . There was a kind of Manny - Miguel Cotto - Antonio Margarito nexus for a while: Margarito beat Cotto in a bout that just looked and even sounded off, as the Mexican’s punches were absolutely thudding and Cotto was getting utterly pulverized but wouldn’t go down, and then it turned out that Margarito’s gloves were loaded (i.e., his wraps were covered in plaster); then Manny beat a diminished Cotto and a shamed Margarito in turn within the space of a year; then Cotto got revenge on Margarito, forcing him to retire from the fight in round 9.
There was the fight with Ricky Hatton, when Manny knocked out the Brit in almost sickening fashion at the 2:59 mark in the second round. Curiously, Pacquiao was similarly knocked out in sickening fashion at the 2:59 mark in the sixth round of his fourth fight with Juan Manuel Márquez. I bought both of those and watched them by myself. For several fights I just waited until the bootleg DVDs got around to the bootleg DVD store in the Pacific Mall in Markham—Pacquiao vs. De La Hoya, vs. Joshua Clottey, vs. Sugar Shane Mosley . . . but I couldn’t always hold my horses, say, as with Manny vs. Money.
The Floyd Mayweather versus Manny fight—another “Fight of the Century”—happened way too late, of course (after the fact, some jokesters re-dubbed it “Better Never Than Late”). Recovering from an undisclosed injury to a shoulder that he reinjured in the fourth, Pacquiao was at three-quarters speed, and even if he hadn’t been, Money was his always unhittable self, doubtless a pugilistic genius but truth be told I’ve never relished his fights.
There’s a big difference between being able to appreciate someone’s superlative, generational skills and absolutely loving to watch someone ply their trade and exercise their craft. Unlike a lot of people, I never rooted against Floyd in particular, but I definitely never wanted Manny to lose no matter who he was fighting and I was sure he would be the first person to beat Mayweather, but alas it wasn’t to be. Still, lackluster as the whole shebang was in the end, I felt like I was a part of something almost universal by plopping down my ducats to see it, even if those ducats were just a drop in the bucket of the $410,000,000 the contest drew in Pay-Per-View buys in the US alone. When you can participate in an event that is the Biggest Ever Of Its Kind In The History Of The World, my belief system demands that one is obligated to do so as long as it doesn’t cost more than a hundred dollars, which it didn’t, even if you count the beer and the chips, although the pizza and wings raised the tally into more philosophically ambiguous territory.
Actually, I did once watch a Mayweather fight that proved memorable, but it was rather the setting than the fight itself that brought panache to the proceedings. It was in my early days in Newfoundland (Carbonear, to be precise, an hour and a half away from St. John’s) and I didn’t have a TV hooked up back then and I wanted to see the Mayweather - Connor McGregor fight. Now in a way this seemed like a stupid matchup that should have just been an exhibition, staged merely for pay-per-view dollars and shits-and-giggles and so that partisans of boxing and MMA could respectively argue over who was tougher and whether or not the octagon people could box as well as kick and wrestle and, as in some recent elections, if your side loses then the game was rigged against you (the Red side was so good at this that they contaminated some of the Blue side) and if your side wins everything is on the up and up, even if you’ve been squalling for an entire administration that the whole thing is always already fake, except whad’ya know? well, we’ll be damned, we won in a landslide, so it must be honest (even though we know that you know that we know that we’re not).
As it stood—sorry, I blacked out there for a minute—the McGregor - Mayweather fight was a real match that would count on Mayweather’s record, and apart from the fact that he was fighting a storied MMA champ (which thus gave it inherent interdisciplinary interest), one who was almost as full of irritating “personality” as Mayweather was himself—they being two bullying self-bloviators who also think they’re super cute and sometimes even are, before they lapse into being assholes again—it was the professional record situation that made this one-off hodge-podge a must see event. Because if Mayweather won (and he was going to win—that was the point of the fight, that and money) he would be 50-0, with a perfect undefeated professional record, after which he could retire, but with one more win than the only other great to retire with a perfect professional record, Rocky Marciano, who called it a day at 49-0 after beating almost ageless Archie Moore, known as “The Mongoose” and one of my personal favorites, and certainly one of the most intellectual practitioners of the game, who could both talk and write with much eloquence (I’ve got a couple of letters Moore wrote to an acquaintance that I bought from a rare book and ephemera dealer and even there he’s got a way with the pen) but when I say intellectual I don’t mean that alone, but more so that he was the thinking man’s pugilist, and the middle-aged man’s as well, as he fought well into middle age and continued to fight well as he did so.
Archie Moore was really a light heavy and was no spring chicken so I guess it’s not surprising he went down to Marciano but he still has to be rated much, much, much stronger competition in relation to The Rock than McGregor could be rated in relation to Money. Still, it was bound to be a spectacle and it had historical value and I wanted to see it. So I went out that night, an awful dark and sloppy stormy pouring-down-rain of a night, walked down the hill to the harbor, and went to a place called West Side Charlie’s, which I figured might be showing the fight. Turned out I was wrong about that.
The place—I’d been maybe twice during the day to get toaster-ovened chicken fingers, french fries, and a beer, but had never been there at night—is a bar and a pool hall but nobody was playing pool. There was a small dance floor set up and nobody was dancing, either, but there was a deejay playing—DJ Dy5lexc (some name)—and against all odds he was good, but it all seemed out of whack. Of course, it wasn’t meant for me, and I don’t know how many bars you’ve been in late at night when you’re the only person there who’s not a local, but you kind of need to keep your guard up but you can’t appear to be too guarded, which brings on its own kind of problems.
There was a beer-and-a-shot special on and even as the crowd dwindled as the clock passed the midnight hour everyone who remained was getting more and more soused. Out of a sense of self-preservation I was holding steady, uncharacteristically slowly nursing bottles of Coors Light, but around me the chaos was growing. And it got later and later and since they did have a TV over the bar (probably showing curling), I finally asked if there was any chance of putting on the fight.
There wasn’t, it cost too much, but since almost every one of the locals, being Newfoundlanders, were also more-or-less Irish (or most of them were and they weren’t hesitating to say so) and since Connor McGregor was Irish, they wanted to see the Irishman fight, and they were sure that the Irishman would win. By then it must have been 2 in the morning and there were only about seven or eight people left, but some dude somehow got the fight on his phone, streaming it through glitches and buffering, and we all huddled around the glowing rectangle in his hand and watched a contest that was more competitive than you might have imagined, but it couldn’t last and Mayweather won, as there had never been any doubt that he would, unless you were a handful of piss drunk but optimistic patrons of West Side Charlie’s with Irish ancestry at 2 AM, and anyway win lose or draw their man had acquitted himself well, so I shook their hands and said my too-rah-loo-rah-loo-rahs and walked back home in the rain, happy to have seen what I wanted to see and relieved that it turned out to be fun instead of some of the other ways I could have seen it turning out.
Boxing in bars . . . I was at a bar in Chapel Hill, NC the night Tyson bit Holyfield’s ear. That was shocking and the place was full so there was a lot of residual hubbub. Mostly I try to avoid it. I would definitely never go to a bar to watch a big MMA fight. (I never watch MMA anyway. I take no interest in it.) Chances are 10 to 1 there are 10 times 10 young guns wanting to act out their fantasies of what they see on the screen. Hard pass, or soft pass if that suits you better. My Platonic ideal of a good boxing-watching-in-a-bar experience took place in the summer of 1995, when I sat alone at a corner table in a venerably dark and almost empty pub in Oxford (that’s England, not Mississippi) in the vicinity of New College and saw “Prince” Naseem Hamed knock out Juan Polo Perez in the second round in the Royal Albert Hall to retain his super-bantamweight belt. The flamboyant Naz and I were only four months apart in age but I guess our trajectories were different. In a couple of days I had a paper due on Samuel Beckett. No one was knocked out and no belts were retained. But it was a pretty good account of the theme of enclosure in Endgame and Happy Days.
Live? A few. I saw a future Hall of Famer, a Hall of Famer whose home of Canestota, NY is the home of the International Boxing Hall of Fame, and a Canadian legend who fought Muhammad Ali with aplomb . . .
—Andrew DuBois