FanPost

What That Was

I didn't watch the final HBO card, partly because I still don't have cable and partly because none of the fights on there were overly appealing to me. Juan Francisco Estrada won and Clarissa Shields won and Cecilia Braekhus won and why would they not? It would be an affront to their legacy if HBO were to stack a card with anything other than mismatches. I kid. Mostly.

I did, this weekend, get Nicole settled away into what is now our home. Some kid from the south coast is shipping my car up here on the flatbed of his truck and he is stuck in Blanc Sablon, which is somewhere near the harbour that connects Labrador to Northern Newfoundland. Today it is minus four and we all agree that it is quite mild. The road is closed because much of it is unpaved so when it snows it becomes a death trap and so he is stuck and therefore I am often stuck.

I did watch the card on ESPN, partly because I found a great stream for it and partly because the fighters, if not the fights, were all appealing to me. Teofimo Lopez in particular is fascinating to me, because he represents a common problem for boxing people. His talent and more specifically his punching power and even more specifically his ability to land his power early in fights means that your regular old gatekeeper is going to get blasted out. It doesn't matter if he's got 34 wins on his record, something that Mark Kriegel wanted very badly for us to know. Lopez is stuck in a way, too good for these middling fighters and still - probably - too green for the real stars of the division.

It snowed all weekend, and it was my first glimpse of steady snowfall without any wind in some years. It falls like snow should, as opposed to being whipped about, slashing through any exposed skin and making all roads impassible. I went to a bar on Saturday that affords its patrons the honour of grilling their own meat. This sound stupid, and it is, but it also provides people a chance to talk at length about how they grill their steak and why you are doing it wrong. Nothing brings people together like bickering over meat.

That said about Lopez, his knockout of Mason Menard was sensational. Impressive without requiring context because even the best in the world often need a few rounds to set up that kind of shot. Granted, despite what Kriegel would tell you, Menard was very much there to lose. When you have a decent career but fall short of becoming a name guy, as Menard has, your options come down to retiring or fighting for next to nothing against fighters you could hope to beat or signing up to be beaten by the next big star. The latter option pays the best. I like to think Top Rank floated him a few extra dollars for being on the receiving end of the best looking kayo since Lemieux exacted sweet, maple flavoured revenge against O'Sullivan.

We ate steaks and we drank and we drank and we played pool and we drank and we went home. A man approached me looking for a ride up North which is apparently something that I should expect to hear more of. The snow was falling in a silence while we waited outside. It was falling until three in the morning. It was falling all day. When I woke up there was a new apartment behind mine. It was probably a prefab that they'd brought in but I prefer to think it grew naturally from the ground and is filled with soft snow. The silence here has a suction to it. Each individual sound rips through the night air with unclear but malevolent intentions. I saw a wolf outside my window, and people tell me there are no wolves around here.

I wonder what Isaac Dogboe could see by the tenth round, when his eye was effectively shut. Dogboe, ESPN told us, is a great fighter whose number one attribute is his belief in himself. I am sure they meant this as a compliment. Emanuel Navarrete did many fans and broadcasters a big favour in explaining that faith - no matter how holy or supreme - in oneself is not by itself a necessarily great thing. Dogboe started well, but by the end of round two his efforts to get inside were being repeatedly thwarted. Navarrete was doing something the old boxing heads would have called being tall. That does not always mean milling backward and keeping the shorter man at the end of your jab, either. Navarrete appeared to learn early on that Dogboe was either not the kind of puncher he was billed as being or that he could simply take it, and began walking Dogboe down with winging, wide shots that really had no business landing on a boxer of Dogboe's repute. How many sweeping lefts from three feet away have to land before your trainer decides to have a chat about that?

No wolves, they tell me. Maybe it was a stray dog. Dogs don't get that big. I need to buy a new mattress. I have not had a dream since I've been here and this soft and pillow topped bullshit is not nearly firm enough for my back. I gave up last night around two in the morning and slept on the couch, which is something I often laughed at my father for doing. If your back hurts why are you sleeping on the couch? I am calling the authorities. But it works. To a degree. Mostly I don't want her to suffer my writhing and turning when I know she has to be up in the morning. I'm accustom to getting four hours of sleep. She is more likely to get fourteen.

Navarrete did something that I thought was very impressive. It started months ago, when he was training. He sparred with boxers, and trained to hone his skills. He sat with his trainer who gave him a game plan that went beyond a plan A. There was clearly a plan B and I would be surprised if there was no plan C. Navarrete made adjustments early that led to him winning and Isaac Dogboe and his father/trainer failed to do anything of the sort. I have long been down on father/son corners and this kind of thing is why. Dogboe spars his uncles and cousins which is fucking insane unless they are boxers approximating the dimensions and style of his opponent. Paul Dogboe, from what I heard, gave his son nothing in the way of actionable advice for dealing with Navarrete's long range attack. Having a war cry and putting on for your country and culture is a great thing, but training for each title defense as though your victory was preordained is foolish. Isaac is a tremendous fighter, but he should ditch the family camp and bring in someone who will make him train and give him something in the way of a backup plan should punch him in the face and ribs fail. Boxing has a way of taking the sentimental narratives about family and bathing them in a river of their own blood.

When I woke up it was six in the morning and when I woke up again it was seven. No snow today. Cloudy. Windy. Just like home. By eight it was beautiful. Sun rising over the tundra in a wash of colours and the wind seemed to be chased away by the light. I'm still waiting on the car. She is writing an exam and I am off to work and the world is working in harmony and I am certain it was a wolf. What troubles me is if it was not a wolf, what does it all mean?

Anyway, the real show was Vasyl Lomachenko. He was fighting Jose Pedraza, which matters only insofar as he was fighting someone. Pedraza lost badly to Gervonta Davis which meant a lot of my twitter feed was a mess of people using this as a kind of measuring stick between Tank and Loma. I think that this was stupid, but it was funny to watch boxing twitter melt down about it. Either way, Lomachenko was coming off a very tough fight and is fighting in a division he is frankly way too small for. It's a credit to him that he is seeking out the challenge, but I question the long term viability of it.

The question was not would Lomachenko win; it was how would he look and how was his shoulder? The answer to the first part was that he looked about as well as anyone can against Pedraza without hurting him early. The footwork wasn't quite on full display and I thought his hands looked a little slow, especially early, but by round six he was in complete control and Pedraza could only hope to gum up the gears a little here or there.

The second part of the question is more interesting. The answer is that - and someone let me know if I missed it - I did not see one right hook thrown with conviction by Lomachenko in the whole fight. No signature pivoting right uppercut to the body, either. Not one that Lomachenko would consider up to his standards. I asked Gabe Oppenheim what he was reading into it at all and his takeaway was the same as mine. Neither of us know if we should read into it. His shoulder is probably not fine, a torn labrum takes time to heal and the human body almost never feels the same after a traumatic injury like that. And yet, even with a fucked up shoulder and being at least one division too high, Lomachenko looked good. He did not look like a God the way we might be used to seeing, but he was very good. If his off nights look that good, he'll be okay.

We're all going to be okay.

I think it was a wolf.

*****

I wanted for a while to write something, for a friend who died just a few weeks ago. Words, as they so often do, failed me and I was left wondering what right I had to be writing about that anyway. On some level, this is a selfish thing to do but her sister told me that when once I mentioned her in a fanpost it validated her boxing knowledge. So, for the last time, I mention my friend Aja. She would have loved to have watched the fights this weekend and would have loved even more to talk about having watched them. راحة سهلة يا صديقي. We will miss you.

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