By Terence Dooley
After destroying Glenn Kelly with the counter-punch to the chin while luring him in while holding his hands behind his back, Roy Jones had a lot to say about perceived slights on his stature.
Jones reeled off a list of fighters: the list included Shane Mosley, Oscar De La Hoya and Naseem Hamed. As Jones was quick to point out all these men had come up the Pound-for-Pound rankings fast yet he was still putting it down despite the fact some of them were falling by the wayside.
Longevity is the measure, or one of them, to adding up those Pound for Pound dollars. Longevity is the key to the career of Marco Antonio Barrera and as he prepares for this Saturday's clash with Juan Manuel Marquez, it is high-time to add up the numbers that make Marco such a special brew of boxing brains and Mexican machismo.
Eighteen is the number of years that Barrera has been in the boxing business, from boy to man he honed his craft, adapted it to his creaking limbs and ensured that he rarely, if ever, makes the same mistake twice.
In those eighteen years, Barrera has answered the first bell an impressive sixty-eight times, twice he has failed to hear the final bell and twice he has lost on points.
On two occasions he fell hard, he was DQ’d (it should have been a stoppage though, Barrera was down, heavily, twice.) when losing to Junior Jones (the first time) and TKO’d by Manny Pacquiao yet both times he dusted himself off then went about his business. Every time he has been knocked off his game he has rose to the top of the pile again, cream rises no?
One of the problems with P4P lists is that they are dedicated victims of fashion, often these lists follow the latest trends and support streaking fighters as opposed to guys whose sprinkle of losses have come over a long period of time.
Most ‘0’s go down over time yet it is the manner of recuperation from a defeat, as opposed to the loss itself, which shows us a fighter’s mettle. For this reason Marco is high on my personal list, when I think of the best fighter in the world I think of Barrera and all that he has done both in and for boxing.
Plus, subjectively I thank him for all those late night of quality boxing he has provided for my delectation, all the elation he has brought to my appreciation of boxing. Intensity even shows itself sporadically late in his career as he moves intelligently around then pops-out shots like snot bubbles on a runny-nosed kid in trouble.
Barrera won his first title way back in 1995 and give or take the odd loss or four, he's been amongst the title jive ever since.
Floyd Mayweather, rightly, is the consensus number one worldwide yet how are we to say one-hundred percent that Floyd could take a big loss in his gait the way Barrera has?
Barrera last defeat came at the hands of Manny Pacquiao in 2003, and this loss is a burning question mark over his immediate reputation yet Barrera did bounce back strongly from that loss to underline his superiority over Erik Morales – who failed to learn from his loss - and the fight with Marquez is yet another step on his road to complete rehabilitation.
A long-overdue Pacquiao rematch will settle this issue on his legacy once and, assuming a rubber match, for all.
In the meantime Barrera produces either quality in his matches or quality matches whilst basking in the glow of the longest current top-level career. Co-runners such as Bernard Hopkins or Roy Jones either had long breaks from the spotlight (Hopkins) or fell apart alarmingly and failed to learn from defeat (Jones).
After showing Naseem Hamed that boxing amounted to more than pot shotting with a porous defence Barrera avenged his disputed loss to Morales before being derailed by Manny. Then he came back, improbably, from a fight that is increasingly looking part off-night part-Pacquiao, to beat Morales decisively in fight three.
So now we have the improbable scenario of the ‘Baby-Face Assassin’, now a hard-faced skill-killer, still fighting quality fights at the right time in order to ensure that his permanence goes noticed.
Marquez is an exceptional boxer himself. This one shapes up as a boxing master against the young skilled sorcerer. Marquez can also be a means of psychologically exorcising that Pacquiao loss.
Juan was down three times in the first round of his fight with Pacquiao. This is certainly impressive, three minutes of pure punching that left Marquez bloodied and almost bowed.
Yet these three minutes of madness were followed by an eleven-round clinic administered by a calculate Marquez. That this boxing seminar followed such an abject first round was even more impressive.
Now Marquez is getting another huge fight. Most people think this encounter will be a skill, science and timing clinic yet when two Mexicans are in the ring, or so the cliché goes, fireworks will emerge at some time. This combination is guaranteed to get us at least a round of slugging this Saturday. Ten times five percent of the time the cliché works, all the time.
Even this late in his career Barrera mixes high percentage power punching with jarring jabbing. Marco fires out punches like drumbeats with a technique that can be accurately labelled neat.
Marquez upped his power punching percentage over the years, he hit the forties a number of times against Manny, beneath this increased aggression is a boxing technique that will present the well-travelled Barrera with fresh puzzles.
At some point in the bout there is a possibility that fire will join the silk of the respective fighter’s techniques.
When the bell rings for the sixty-ninth time in Barrera’s career, this stoical soldier will once again answer the call to arms and produce skills for our enjoyment. Ok, Pound for Pound there have been a few bumps in the road, but at least Barrera is a road well traveled.
Others have, as Roy said, fallen-off yet Barrera is still here. Perhaps a little underrated over the years, he is Nas to The Jay-Z who came and went. Barrera's stock may have slipped occasionally but his appeal was never spent.
Marco is the Mexican who was a warrior who learned his skills the hard way, kept his nose to the grindstone and stayed tougher than solid rocky crystal rhinestone. He will escape with the glory when his final boxing breath is blown.