By Patrick Kehoe
Photo © Ed Mulholland/FightWireImages.com
HBO boxing might not quite have the galaxy of superstars it had during the late 1990s and early 2000s when Oscar De La Hoya, Evander Holyfield, Lennox Lewis, Arturo Gatti, Felix Trinidad, Roy Jones, Shane Mosley, Eric Morales, Marco Antonio Barrera and Bernard Hopkins were plying their near enough to prime talents for the adulation of North American boxing fans. Yes, Home Box Office still does support a battery of battling beauties who collectively constitute a ‘Featured Fighters’ listing that remains the envy of boxing broadcasters the world over. It’s just that in 2007, HBO’s talent pool seems super-stardom light, the semi-retired Oscar De La Hoya eternally exempt.
We need not expound upon the 4 kings of the heavyweight throne(s), once known as the heavyweight championship of the world, question mark, question mark. Pound for pound king of the ring Floyd Mayweather, newly un-retired, still un-defeated and systemically un-challenged has deemed Ricky Hatton – surrogate slugger extraordinaire for the faded Arturo Gatti – thee most worthy of a public workout pay per view hiding. Details of why that’s a credible match up to be detailed by HBO over the coming months, stay tuned. Some fight fans even await the return of Marco Antonio Barrera into the jaws of the southpaw typhoon, Manny Pacquiao, but then again, big fights are never just about prime talent facing prime talent, are they? Without the themes of revenge, blood feuds, exchanged public humiliations, turning back the clock, dueling trainers, squabbling promotional houses, denying various enemies such as Father Time and good old Destiny itself, what is a big boxing match but high paid gloved martial combat?
Without the theatrics of melodrama, real and imagined, the elementary contest of boxing shrinks into near oblivion in a world awash with hyper stimulating video gaming and synthetic sporting historicism. Still, boxing has the pay per view vehicle with which it can sell itself to its hardcore base, with the hope of bleeding out into as many demographic target audiences as possible.
In the post-De La Hoya pay per view age, manufacturing of championship ring product means tele-genetic engineering often has to present as icons mere mortals. For let us never forget that once the cover boys of HBO strutted imperiously, blazing their way to a kind of cross over sporting glorification, De La Hoya himself redefined non-heavyweight championship boxing as mainstream entertainments, boxing’s one true multi-demographic celebrity, wading into Grammy nominations, while avoiding steroid enhancement scandals and rap sheet notoriety. British-Canadian-Jamaican Lennox Lewis was patently pedestrian in his simple march toward heavyweight dominance and the historical significance of being the last world heavyweight champion, as in Jack Johnson, Jack Dempsey, Joe Louis and Joe Frazier kind of world heavyweight champion, without qualifying debate, political distinction or legal decree.
We could end with Roy Jones, who at least set new standards for ring athleticism; but, we defer to Arturo Gatti’s retro-everyman determination just to be ‘a champ’ as surely as he made history live, reprising the Brill Cream, fedora topped, black and white boxing wars that once heralded boxing’s sporting and cultural symbolic relevance. That was, just a half decade ago, HBO boxing; yes, we compress to compliment.
Boxing fans understand that HBO isn’t all that interested in settling the question of the heavyweight championship, at least not for the balance of 2007. In the mean time, we have the middleweight division to sort out with champion Jermain Taylor taking up the challenge of the quietly disrespectful Kelly Pavlik before, it seems, jetting off to 168, Wales if necessary, and the ultimate honour of trying to dismantling the 168 pound legend Joe Calzaghe. Note: Calzaghe will have to dispatch monster in the making Mikkel Kessler, before any such USA vs. Britain revolutionary warring can even be confirmed. Yet, team Taylor and certainly HBO are beginning to dream bigger dreams, suddenly. We cannot forget to mention Shane Mosley has none other than Miguel Cotto to try and knock off his welterweight perch; things are about to get very heated and soon. No kidding. Desperate times call for desperate measures.
“The best fighters now want to fight the big fights,” Oscar De La Hoya – wearing his promoters hat – wants to make clear for boxing fans and any champions thinking about doing business as usual in this Boxing vs. Mixed Martial Arts Era. “I think that my fight with Mayweather did save boxing… and it made other fighters, other champions want to step up and be part of saving boxing… of trying to put boxing back on top.” In effect, that means putting the entire stable of HBO contracted players on notice. No playing it safe, no more pulling a Roy Jones. Even Roy Jones, now in his ring dotage is getting frisky and down right daring in his contemplations, if not yet his ring outings.
No wonder Bernard Hopkins, the aged scourge of big time boxing - along with he from Atlanta who cannot be named – will not retire. Things are getting too interesting. Old champions come at a true premium and the next gen is not exactly scaring them into retirement. Everyone with a title belt, a title claim, a marketable contender’s pedigree or a verified blood oath just MIGHT be in a big fight before fall 2008. The rash of fall 2007 cancellations aside, cached fights are being made, egos are about to be tested, tried, and all in all, fed to the lions.
HBO’s greatest wish – and Bob Arum’s too - is that Puerto Rican welterweight titlist Miguel Cotto matures into something like a certifiable fan boosted challenger to Mayweather, preferably for the spring or summer 2008. If ever there was a logical fight for Cotto it has to be against Shane Mosley, the one time pound for pound boxing man in waiting. Mosley himself sees Cotto as a point of reentry into the elite level of championship boxing. And so the clash almost compels itself into being. Generational fights are made exactly for this reason, with Cotto and Mosley perfectly fitting their respective roles. On toward a Mayweather-Cotto showdown, the cogs of internal HBO corporate necessity grinding around and around, Mosley can only smile and say they just don’t understand me yet, do they?
Then HBO only need find a way past the transition of the current talent pool, big fights being cued to reassert boxing itself as a sporting marker within free marketeering capitalism? Of course, we know that’s false; boxing cannot attract the kind of mainstreaming advertising dollars with which to realize a place of general marketing prominence. Unlike the mixed martial arts machinations, boxing since the dissolve of the International Boxing Club has never been a closed shop, studio system of indentured acolytes, at least not since Don King lost the powers of contractual servitude by the early 1990s. So boxing persists all the more as an international big tent spectacle sport, randomly regulated more than governed; as Larry Merchant said 30 years ago, it’s the circus coming to town. At least America’s diaspora of a gaming community loves a good fight and so, one has to presume does the boxing industry. The niche programming logic of specified consumption that fuels the existence of cable entities – subscriber based patrons, such as with HBO, have always accepted the two pillars of their always rabidly ‘in need’ viewing market share: sex and violence.
Sex sells and violence compels.
But one has to wonder in the post De La Hoya era, with Mike Tyson about to reprise his role as a jail bird and the plow horse, Evander Holyfield, about to sacrifice himself upon the alter of his title ambitions, where is the boxer to compel us? Manny Pacquiao has kept his people in the Philippines spellbound. Puerto Rican fans have Miguel Cotto to suspend their disbeliefs, British fans have Ricky Hatton to raise a glass to, Danes have Mikkel Kessler, and all that nationalistic atomizing of what in other times would have been superstar champions leaves us sadly nostalgic. What HBO can offer up is the expectation of what might happen, what might discharge, might explode into something of significance. The bait of anticipation has spoilt and yet we wait, bated, agitated, in a terminal state of longing for an updated Roberto Duran.
The best of this fistic generation, unlike Roger Federer in tennis or Tiger Woods in golf, appear smaller in the flesh, off listed from newspaper itemizing, less formidable against the statistical achievements of superstars past and generally capable of only predictable outcomes in title fights we have the gut feeling never quite live up to our hopes, let alone the over produced hype-promos. Even Oscar De La Hoya taking on Floyd Mayweather over sold the notion of boxing greatness – the fight to save the sport of boxing - as its thematic refrain, all the while setting records for pay per view disgruntled viewing. The Sports Illustrated featured showdown more box office than masterpiece.
When exactly will an HBO fight live up to not just the promo hyping but reasonable expectation? Kelly Pavlik beating the stuffing out of a dehydrated Edison Miranda isn’t enough, no matter Jim Lampley’s emphatic falsetto. And America, Canada and Mexico are hardly holding their collective breath waiting for the Joe Calzaghe-Mikkel Kessler super-middleweight showdown and that in itself tells a tale about how much of what passes for great boxing in our time remains culturally obscured, marginalized by promotional and media segregation. Well, perhaps world middleweight champion Jermain Taylor has been silent on the issue of his own measured talents long enough. Perhaps, Kelly Pavlik’s challenge for Taylor’s world middleweight crown will effectively end the long night of boxing’s self-mitigating performance standards. Taylor and Pavlik might not want to think about it, but so much depends on that fight re-establishing the event status momentum that great boxing title fights used to engender. We say this because only the short term matters in boxing economics, the current quarter means everything.
Every generation has a high water mark, the time of absolute combustion. And casino owners, publicists, fight managers, no less fighters and cable entities expect something to start happening soon in elite boxing rings. Champions not only have to start presenting themselves as determined to fight the epic fights, as De La Hoya has rightly pointed out, but they have to start fighting with a vengeance, with uncommon merit creating topical meanings by the very nature of their performances.
Boxing has to start giving us championship fights that establish memory, affixing to the central nervous system, filling our imaginations with reference points for wonder.
Frankly, HBO and boxing need Taylor and Pavlik to be a classic or at least as ritually compelling a contest as the two undefeated fighters can make it. Manny Pacquiao and Marco Antonio Barrera likewise, Cotto and Mosley waging an intergenerational war for dominance would be the perfect place setter for Floyd Mayweather’s unctuous return against the battling Brit, Ricky Hatton, Manchester’s favourite son not coached by Sir Alex Ferguson. Memory links into itself and conflates the perceptible: Dempsey and Tunney and their long count controversy; Erik Morales and Marco Antonio Barrera nationalizing the very nature of rivalry as opposites attracting.
Is Jermain Taylor really the true heir to Bernard Hopkins? Does the brain really orchestrate the happenings for boxing legends? Marco Antonio Barrera tires to reassert that very maxim, the Ali maxim, which states that where the will and mind direct the body shall follow. Can Miguel Cotto confirm or deny for public notice that he might be the one to authenticate Floyd Mayweather’s assertion he is a peer to Ray Robinson, Muhammad Ali and Ray Leonard? So many questions lay buried within conjecture and possibility.
The best, call them Jermain or Kelly, Manny or Marco Antonio, Miguel or Shane, or just leave it at Floyd, tend to perform best over time, keeping variation and mitigation at bay; call it winning by all legal means necessary, come what may, come what will. The best win because they suffer to prepare, endure to finish and resolve never to quit upon the task at hand, adapting, adjusting, over riding, calmed throughout the storming circumstances eating away at their blunting advantages, their agile practices, thee very fact of their experience as certitude.
The best tend control random factors that distract the mind, deflect the gaze, altering the tested trajectory which leads to success. No wonder the best fighters in the world tend to look as if they are peeking, not just for every fight or every championship round, but have at their controlling command the very moment when everything matters, when the fight is there to be won and not lost, be that the continuous struggle or a single punch of a life time. Look also to Floyd Mayweather and you will see that merit over time is the final distinction, the final measure.
And that’s what HBO expect of their champions, that or the ritual of bravery, such as Arturo Gatti performed for most of his professional career, after scaling to the heights as IBF jr. lightweight champion against Tracy Harris Patterson. No one looks to be another Arturo Gatti; still, HBO have the hopes of Cotto-Mayweather and even Taylor-Calzaghe, if all the right punches land where they must to make those fights happen. Without the ability to make a determination as to the mock throne of the heavyweights in our time, HBO will have to offer up some nostalgic re-encounters, if only to get us closer to the final proofs for Pacquiao, Cotto, Mayweather and even Taylor or Pavlik some time in 2008.
The furry of the moment is always a preview anyway. That’s boxing. That’s entertainment. That’s what it means to live in an era of mortals who take on the guise of gods. At least we get amazing fights and all those talking points to ponder over.
You always have to get through the nausea of miasma to find something exceptional. And HBO boxing is now coming out of the cold, for the heat seems real and everyone who matters is in play. The HBO stable – read: all the best fighters – appear inspired, as if hungry to fight the best of the best, as if boxing were itself on the line. Managers are braving the worst case scenarios
Ceremonial lights in the arenas are now ablaze, lighting the true way… and the movement of men has begun, again, at long last.
Patrick Kehoe may be reached at pkehoe@telus.net
