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By Bart Barry



Quick, off the top of your head, name the contracted terms of Sugar Ray Robinson’s rematch with Jake LaMotta in 1943. No? OK, how about the purse split between Marvelous Marvin Hagler and Thomas Hearns for “The War” in 1985? Not springing to mind. What about the name of Israel Vazquez’s advisor during cable-network negotiations for his second fight with Rafael Marquez?

It’s hard to recall such trivia because, contrary to today’s coverage of our beloved sport, history rightly consigns these details to its dustbin, recalling only the swapping of punches. And it does not remember at all fights that were never made – hell, not even a YouTube search can find Floyd Mayweather’s matches with Kostya Tszyu or Antonio Margarito.

Saturday, Russian light heavyweight titlist Sergey “Krusher” Kovalev stopped someone named Cedric Agnew in forgettable fashion to set-up a long-longed-for fight with fellow titlist Adonis Stevenson, one Kovalev and Stevenson’s network, HBO, dedicated quite a lot of its subscribers’ time to setting-up – except that shortly before Kovalev’s match, subscribers learned Stevenson was no longer with HBO, rendering them suckers for caring a whit about Kovalev’s meaningless tilts with Agnew and someone else named Ismayl Sillah, or Stevenson’s 13 forgettable rounds with, let’s see, Tony Bellew and Tavoris Cloud.

As 2014 continues along, matters become incrementally more futile. If an aficionado took every fight worth seeing this year and added them together, he would have trouble paying for a month’s subscription to HBO or Showtime, and no chance of justifying both, much less both and a gaggle of overpriced pay-per-view offerings. Everything is marketed to him like it is portentous; nothing is meaningful in and of itself, but each thing might be consequential someday in a where-were-you-when sort of way.

HBO has taken two Russian-speaking prizefighters, Sergey Kovalev and Gennady Golovkin, and promised its subscribers historic things from them, creating hours of highlight reels in lieu of paying meaningful opposition to fight them. After losing Floyd Mayweather, the network locked-in Andre Ward as its pound-for-pound superstar, giving him a microphone without requiring that he fight. It marketed Nonito Donaire in all his portentous finery only to see him lose the first meaningful fight of his HBO tenure, only to have no apparent opposition for Donaire’s vanquisher, only to transition to Mikey Garcia – as settled along a path as the network’s Next Nonito as any fighter currently plying his wares.

Maybe Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. is not serious about his craft as Ward or Donaire, but he does a lot more fighting than they do, and he does it in matches that sell tickets and happen on HBO. That’s scheduled to change, though, as it appears Chavez may fight Golovkin on pay-per-view in the summertime, in a fight with no right whatever to an additional tariff: Chavez is 0-1 against world class opposition, and Golovkin has yet to face any. In a serious era, Chavez-Golovkin would make a fantastic Boxing After Dark main event and a passable World Championship Boxing offering, and so it takes tremendous chutzpah to threaten beleaguered subscribers, the long-suffering fools who’ve sat through meaningless Golovkin match after meaningless Chavez match, seasoned in Golovkin’s case with hysterical allusions to all-time greats before Golovkin has proved himself even an all-time good, with tollgated access to their match.

Last week’s machinations with Adonis Stevenson’s migration to Showtime, after a pair of preparatory Stevenson fights on HBO to prepare us for more preparatory fights on HBO, since HBO hadn’t the budget to cajole Stevenson’s signature onto a contract with Sergey Kovalev – a possibility too absurd to consider – are relevant to Golovkin and Chavez, and Mikey Garcia and Andre Ward and Guillermo Rigondeaux and a roster of hitherto anonymous lads whose greatest collective attribute is being unmarketable enough not to interest Al Haymon, for this reason: HBO’s want of credibility now subverts its marketing of every fight and fighter.

Kovalev appears to be an excellent puncher whose offense may be susceptible to a touch on his chin, but he’s fighting in a division Roy Jones Jr. dominated in bygone days, and even Krusher’s kinfolk might have a konniption at komparisons between Kovalev and Jones. When Jones fought meaningless matches, that is, at least subscribers knew they were seeing a once-in-a-generation talent icing unknowns, instead of a man who may or may not be better than a hard-punching Haitian journeyman unhinged when unhooked from his canary-yellow bra-cape.

Kovalev-Stevenson was the fight aficionados most wished to see in 2014, and it was wholly makeable, and HBO deserves all the blame for not making it; it shall be remembered as the greatest failure of the current regime and possibly its last. So much of the promotion of Kovalev’s fight with Agnew focused on Kovalev’s fight with Stevenson that not-overlooking Agnew was the advice served to what journalists attended Kocktails with the Krusher in San Antonio a month ago, when Kovalev was in town for Chavez-Vera II and answering questions, sort of, in his rich Russian brogue.

Kovalev is a large man, an alpha male, who should have no trouble being moved to cruiserweight, if Andre Ward cannot be enticed out of semi-retirement to fight him, but Kovalev probably will not go anywhere, or fight Ward, because, you know, promotional issues and purses and all the complications of making a prizefight, ideas so legally entangled and algorithmically indecipherable no member of the laity should expect to understand them. No member of the laity should be expected to understand them, regardless of complexity, because they make not a whit of difference to the experience for which any audience member at any spectacle pays.

There is nothing Adonis Stevenson will do on Showtime that will have him remembered long enough to show up on a Canastota ballot after he retires – he chose currency over legacy, and his accountant will have to render ultimate judgment on him because boxing historians shan’t be bothered. By agreeing to fight the Ismayl Sillahs and Cedric Agnews of the world, Kovalev now unwittingly ambles a similar path to well-paid obscurity, or however one says “if it makes dollars it makes sense” in Russian. If Krusher hopes to be remembered at all, he’ll have to do something far more audacious than Saturday’s offering.

Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com