Hustle and Blows
By Milo George
Two weeks ago, the author sent “First” this commentary on the state of boxing.
Last night, HBO aired the best thing it has shown all year: a live broadcast of a middleweight championship boxing match between champion Sergio "Maravilla" Martinez and Paul "The Punisher" Williams. Both are widely regarded as two of the top five fighters active in the sport, and the drama and ferocity of their first match earned it widespread acknowledgement as the Fight Of The Year 2009.
That two of the best athletes in the sport would face each other might make perfect sense to a person unfamiliar with the state of boxing today; every other sport is focused entirely on answering the question "Who's the Best?" In boxing, however, the question is rarely asked seriously, much less answered. It's a sport controlled more by financial/contractual leverage and business savvy outside the ring than physical conditioning and fighting prowess inside it. Anytime you hear or read something about boxing that doesn't make a lick of sense, all you need to remember is that a formidable checkbook always beats a formidable left hook.
Last night's broadcast led off with a replay of the previous week's pay-per view mismatch between boxing's (current) brightest star, Manny Pacquiao, and its greatest (current) shame, Antonio Margarito, for a vacant junior-middleweight title. The commercial/technological mega-structure of Dallas Cowboys’ Stadium obviated any chance the audience would grasp the scale of human drama being held inside the ring -- an objective correlative for the slick packaging and promotion required to sell such a bill of goods as a legitimate championship match. The fight was action-packed but drama-free, playing out exactly as anyone who has seen any of Pacquiao's and Margarito's recent fights would imagine.
Depending on how you ask, Pacquiao is either the best, tied-for-best or second-best boxer in the world today, with Floyd Mayweather Jr. his direct competition. Margarito, on the other hand, hasn't legitimately made any division's Top Ten list since he was caught with illegal loaded hand-wraps before being destroyed by an already faded "Sugar" Shane Mosley and then suspended by the California State Athletic Commission for a year. After serving his time, he returned to the ring to collect a lackluster decision win over a journeyman opponent in Mexico before being offered a championship fight with the most popular and #1/#1A/#2 best fighter at the technological marvel and temple of Mammon, Cowboys’ Stadium.
For this, plus an undercard presenting a few hours of younger Top Rank (Pacquiao and Margarito's promoter) boxers beating the crap out of has-beens and never-weres, casual fight fans and what remains of boxing's loyal fan-base was expected to pay a suggested retail price of $54.95US. The Pacman is expected to make somewhere between $15-20 million; Margarito should receive roughly $3 million, enough to pay for the facial reconstruction he'll probably need after the beating he took.
This was not the best fighting the best; this was boxing as usual. But last night’s live fight was an exception to the rule. So, how did Martinez and Williams manage to fight each other not once, but twice, you ask? Quite simply, each time there was no other option available to either man.
Few contemporary fighters have been more avoided than Williams, a towering 6’2" left-handed freak of nature who has a heavyweight’s reach yet somehow made the 147-pound limit for the welterweight division. So many “name” WW fighters ducked him that he moved up to junior-middleweight and middleweight divisions in search of big fights. There is no mechanism in boxing to compel specific matches, beyond the meaningless threats of hopelessly corrupt self-appointed/self-promoting sanctioning bodies, the scope of imagination and determination of promoters and the unseen hand of sports-television executives. So Williams put on weight and eventually managed to land a fight with middleweight champion, Kelly "The Ghost" Pavlik. But after months of delays and cancellations on the champ's end, the Williams camp moved on to sign the then-junior-middleweight Martinez to fight Williams instead, giving both men just a few weeks to prepare.
Sergio Gabriel Martinez is a handsome southpaw who brings a consistently crowd-thrilling style to every fight. He punches with an intimidating, Pacquiao-like mix of speed and power and, not surprisingly, he’s also had tremendous difficulty landing significant fights. Unlike Williams, however, he’s found himself left out in the cold even after extraordinary, exciting performances on HBO, presumably due to the lack of juice his management and promoter have with the channel, which retains much of the aura (and moola) it earned during its golden age as The Place for boxing in the 1980s and early '90s.
Williams is managed by Al Haymon, a man often described in Palpatine-like terms, who clearly wields considerable clout with the channel, consistently landing his clients million-dollar paydays for fights … held in barely quarter-full arenas. The most entertainingly disastrous recent example being the Andre Berto-Carlos Quintana "championship bout." Haymon's client, Berto, is a Haitian-American who's theoretically a welterweight champ. The fight was held in his Florida home town as a "Fighting For Haiti" charity fundraiser not long after the tragic earthquake in that country. The fight drew a pitiful 3,508 spectators … with only a truly pathetic 972 patrons actually paying to see the show. The spectacle’s "live gate" amounted to only $105,759, but Berto took home the lion's share of $1.25 million purse HBO paid for the fight. This is normal for modern boxing; a champion beats unheralded opposition in heavily comped but still mostly empty arenas, and then makes millions from Powers That Be hellbent on being kingmakers through sheer force of will, negotiation and marketing. (Some wags claim that "HBO" stands for "Haymon Boxing Organization"; this may be true, but that's still better than its old meaning, "Hey, BEASTMASTER's On!")
So, Martinez replaced Pavlik as Williams' opponent on short notice last year, and the two produced high drama and a classic example of "the sweet science.” Their first meeting has been compared to a high-speed chess match waged with fists and wills, but this gives short-shrift to the awkward beauty and danger that occurs when two left-handed fighters face each other. Southpaws are a pain in the ass for a conventional-stance boxer to fight, with the asymmetry in body mechanics often resulting in heads smashing together as one fighter moves into position to punch. A head-butt is the most damaging common blow a boxer can sustain in the ring, often causing fight-ending cuts over the eyes or concussions. For some inexplicable reason, this danger generally increases when two southpaws fight, adding yet another layer of drama to such bouts.
Last year, the two lefties traded knockdowns in the first round and went to war with each other over the following eleven, with each man solving pugilistic riddles presented by the other and then taking control of the action for himself until the other readjusted and took the lead back from round to round and sometimes even minute to minute. In the end, a bloodied Williams took a majority decision, the fight's three judges scoring it: A draw (six rounds awarded to each man), a squeaker for Williams (seven rounds for him, five for Martinez) and the absolutely insane claim of a Williams blowout (11 to Williams, one to Martinez). Rounds in a professional boxing match are judged as discrete three-minute events, taking into account clean punching, effective aggression, solid defense and ring generalship. I'm no judge, but when I rewatch this fight, I usually have it a draw or 7-5 for Martinez. Regardless, a rematch was a no-brainer and the cries for one began even before the judges' scorecards were totaled.
Williams went on to a listless performance against hard-luck B-lister Kermit Cintron before a bizarre accident catapulted Cintron out of the ring and into the hospital. Martinez, on the other hand, turned in an astounding drumming of middleweight kingpin Pavlik, sweeping the early rounds with his high-speed power punching and then digging deep inside himself once again to wrest back control of the fight when the champion started to come on strong in the middle stanzas. At the post-fight press conference, Martinez's promoter, Lou DiBella offered an impression of the final "Championship Rounds" of the match that is as accurate as it is vivid: Martinez somehow found and shifted himself into an entirely new higher gear, and then Pavlik never had a chance.
The new undisputed middleweight champion of the world did something even more elevating shortly after the fight: He used his media platform to talk about something other than boxing hype. A few hours after the Pavlik upset, news broke that emerging Venezuelan lightweight superstar Edwin Valero (27 wins, no losses, all 27 by knockout against nobodies) had been arrested for the stabbing murder of his wife, Jennifer Viera. Valero had already been arrested a number of times for assaults outside the ring, with reports of serious substance-abuse problems and previous attacks against his wife, mother and sister. Shortly after the arrest, Valero was found hanged in his jail cell and later died.
Boxing has never been a sport known for being woman-friendly; legion are the stories of boxers' wives and girlfriends being beaten and repeatedly cheated on by their men. Even icons like Joe Louis and Muhammad Ali have terrible track records as husbands. The initial allegations that Valero had broken some of his wife's ribs were reported around the same time as his debut fight on U.S. television, leading to the common locker-room/message-board sick joke asking if that should be counted as his 28th KO. Our pal Andre Berto used Twitter to unwittingly open a window on the misogynistic core of the boxing business with the following tweets:
9:51am 4/19/10
R.I.P to Edwin Valero after killing his wife yesturday he just killed himself in jail today. WOW women are a Motherf***er boy RIP E.V.
10:19am 4/19/10
YO YO relax people relax I don't know what happened with Edwin Valero and his wife I just feel its a sad day he was a great fighter
10:19am 4/19/10
Its terrible he killed his wife and killed himself the situation was prolly a lot deeper behind closed doors but R.I.P. Edwin Valero
Classy. Even when scrambling to do career-damage control, Berto couldn't be bothered to give Viera an RIP shoutout. Then again, women are a Motherf***er boy. This is a man being groomed to be a superstar in HBO's boxing program after Mayweather and Pacquiao retire, so it's little surprise that rank & file fandom largely shrugged off the murder and fretted about what the arrest would do to Valero's boxing career and (after his death) mourned chiefly over their lost hopes for a Valero-Pacquaio mega-fight.
It took guts for Martinez to speak out against domestic violence the day after the Valero couple's deaths:
I love and respect women. Violence against women is simply unacceptable. The great number of cases, too often involving athletes, requires action. I have always confided in my mother and consider myself to be a momma’s boy; women must be respected, not abused. My middleweight championship gives me a voice. I will use this voice in an effort to protect women from senseless violence and abuse.
The boxing world shrugged in response; I've not seen any articles about his stated plan to petition the sanctioning bodies and various industry players to "create a foundation that makes a world of difference to women everywhere." Even if it was just talk, it's important talk. Especially since Martinez comes from Argentina, home of the legendary middleweight champ Carlos "Escopeta" Monzon. Monzon was an icon to his people. He was also an inveterate woman beater who was convicted of murdering his wife and later died in prison, possibly a suicide. It took integrity for Martinez to win what was once Monzon's belt and then call for an end to the sort of misogynist violence that his countryman regularly committed. (I wonder how powerfully that message went over in Argentina though, again, I've never seen any mainstream media attention to it.)
Earlier this year, Martinez and Paul Williams found themselves in the same predicament they were in back in 2009. Since no "name" fighter (i.e. an opponent who promoters already know how to market and has a name that HBO Sports execs recognize) was willing to fight either man, they were forced to take each other on again.
Their first fight's December 5 date was well-timed for soothing fan psyches after a 2009 of endless gross mismatches salted with the occasional competitive fight, making it just a little easier to believe the promoters' and TV executives' annual New Year's Resolution PR that next year will be different. Of course, 2010 brought endless gross mismatches salted with the occasional competitive fight, bringing us to last night's Martinez-Williams II (in real time): It was appropriate that Martinez wore red and Williams green trunks, as their clash would be the closest thing to an Xmas morning that boxing nerds got all year.
Some griped the rematch was held at a catchweight of 158 pounds, two under the middleweight division limit. It’s true catchweights have lately looked like just another piece of leverage a powerful promoter can use to weaken an opponent by forcing a bigger man to kill himself to make the weight limit (and thus be drained at fight time). But catchweights may also enable fairer competition, allowing men from neighboring divisions to meet in the middle for the special fight. (One of the most exciting recent middleweight bouts prior to Williams-Martinez was division legend Bernard Hopkins defending the title against popular welterweight Oscar De La Hoya in 2004 -- a fight also held at a catchweight of 158 pounds. When catchweights are fair, they're a great tool for match-making.)
Williams’ side team dictated much of the rematch's set-up, from the catchweight to the fight's tradition-inverting stipulations: The three-million-dollar purse that HBO reportedly put up for the fight would be evenly split (instead of champion Martinez getting a bigger cut). Williams' promoter, Goossen-Tutor, would be the promoter-of-record and not only get whatever profits the live gate brought in, but also had leverage over the choice of referee and judges -- a huge advantage considering the first fight could have gone either way. Even the order of intros and corner choices were reversed, with the champ being announced first and taking what's normally the challenger's corner.
Was Williams’ team out for a psychological advantage? Were thay aiming to remind everyone Williams got the "W" in the first fight? Or were his crew simply reveling in the Spoils of Contract War. Not that any of this mattered much once the bell rang.
Now would be a good time to visit YouTube and watch the fight. I'll wait -- no worries, you'll be back in about six minutes, depending on how many times you rewind and watch the Knockout Of The Year 2010 as delivered by the Fighter Of The Year 2010. Take your time.
Amazing, huh? I thought the guy was dead for half a second after he landed face-first, eyes-open-but-nobody's-home on the canvas.
Paul Williams is still a great fighter, he's just not a middleweight. He can also take solace in the reality that, thanks to those connections, he'll likely get another juicy HBO paycheck before Martinez. True to form, the “what's next?” chatter wasn't “Who will challenge Martinez for middleweight supremacy?” but rather “Can a fight be made between Martinez and Pacquiao or (the Haymon-affiliated) Mayweather … at junior middleweight?” and/or "Can Martinez bulk up to yet another weight division and fight super-middleweight champ Lucian Bute?"
Sergio “Maravilla” Martinez just had the most challenging, triumphant year of any of his peers. He already has a substantial lead on the pack for consideration as Fighter Of The Decade. It's long past time he stopped being treated like a hired gun brought in to fight the promoter-of-record's guy for short money. If the boxing business were run more like a sport and less like a business, he would be richly rewarded for having fought the best and beaten them emphatically. But that's often not where the money is in boxing, so next summer Martinez (and Williams) may find himself in the same spot he was in the previous year. Remember, a formidable checkbook always beats a formidable left hook.
From November, 2010
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