The first sign that fight night in Brooklyn on Saturday might not be a big success was the disparity between the line at the front entrance, which was nonexistent, and the line at the side door where you picked up credentials, which was long. This indicated that while there were few paying customers, every last promoter, relative, weed carrier, self-declared entourage member, and media vulture from Philly to New York had scammed themselves a free ticket. Right behind me in the credential line was Fat Joe. I mean, an exact dead ringer for Fat Joe. I only figured out it wasn’t Fat Joe by peering at him for a long time before I noticed that no one else was paying him any attention. He could easily find work as a Fat Joe celebrity impersonator, though.
There was another man in an ankle-length fur coat, Gucci loafers, and a thick platinum chain who kept setting off the metal detectors, over and over. The woman working security, who was young and pretty, looked at him with unmitigated disgust. Her lip curled involuntarily as he rifled his pockets. Since the whole reason a man would wear an outfit so ridiculous is to impress pretty women, the incident raised some philosophical questions. The futility of our pathetic collective determination to transcend one another, the pathetic wrong turns we take in our attempts to find love. For the man, the night was a performance. But for the woman, the night was just work.
Boxing is work. More than anything else. The stars are outnumbered by the universe of those who necessarily serve as stepping stones to the heavens. The days of glory are outnumbered by the days of toil. The blows given are outnumbered by the blows taken. The dreamy, cinematic moments are just the sweepings off the floor of the fight factory. Most of the moments are just work.
Danny Garcia, a counterpuncher with thick dark eyebrows and a crazy dad, is one of the best welterweights of his generation. He’s been fighting most of the best guys for the past 15 years, and most of them, he beat. He has a click-clack automatic left hook, perfect 90 degrees off his shoulder, and with it he has knocked the hell out of many men. He smacked Erik Morales with a counter left hook that spun Morales around one way and then back the other way, like an unwinding tether ball. He caught the hapless Rod Salka with a left hook so mean, you suspected that Salka might be dead. It’s a beautiful punch, a signature punch, enough to float a whole career.
Those knockouts and many other of Garcia’s biggest career moments happened in Barclays Center in Brooklyn. Now he’s 37, competent but over the hill, and ready to retire, and he wanted his last fight to be in Barclays as well. Fine. He has his own promotion company and he rented the place out and put on the event. But Barclays is a big arena, and Danny Garcia is no longer a very relevant fighter, resulting in the emptiest major arena show I have ever seen. Vast swaths of floor seats were unoccupied. You could walk up and down the rows and take your pick of hundreds of open spots. It was novel, kind of fun, as long as you weren’t the one trying to make money on the whole thing.
At least the space was put to good use. There were 14 fights on the card. Fourteen! That’s a lot. I arrived halfway through, and there were still so many fights left to go. It was as if you rented out Yankee Stadium for your retirement party and then invited all your friends to come run the bases. It is to this profligacy of scheduling that I attribute my decision to go home and go to bed before the main event, which Danny Garcia won by KO in the fourth. If he wanted me to stay, he should have been a little choosier with the warmup acts.
Atmosphere aside, for the fighters, fights are serious business. They are a job with a poor workplace safety record. For regional fighters still trying to make their names, a fight in Barclays is a big deal. Reshat Mati, an undefeated middleweight from Staten Island, is the most popular current Albanian fighter in New York City, which is enough to build a career on. Knots of Albanian fans waved the red and black Albanian flag—which is fantastic, by the way, a top-tier flag—and a crew of nervous men in warmup suits shouted instructions at Mati from the floor seats. A security guard kept telling them to sit down, but it was not possible. “I’m sorry! I’m nervous!” one of them said apologetically. “Reshat—one two fast! One two fast, Reshat!”
It looked to me like Mati lost the fight, but the judges gave it to him anyhow. A whiff of hometown deference. Likewise, Brooklyn’s own Chris Colbert, with a bright pink streak in his hair, was harassed rudely for eight rounds by the Argentinian Blas Caro, but was granted the decision as well. (There is a fine line between boxing wisdom and racist stereotypes, but “Argentinians with chest tattoos are going to give you a hard-ass fight” is one that has historically proven to be true.)
Young fighters need fights to establish themselves, established fighters need fights to climb the ladder, old fighters need fights just to stash a few more dollars before they need to learn a new trade. Nobody on Saturday night was earning millions. It was all work. You could not find a better demonstration of this fact than the matchup between Gabriel Rosado and Vaughn Alexander. Rosado is an extremely likable Philly veteran who has always fought a bit above his own talent level, propelled by heart, earning himself the right to be brutally damaged by many of the biggest punchers of his generation. Alexander, bow-legged and V-shaped, is the less successful brother of former welterweight champ Devon Alexander. Both guys are 39 years old. They both have 17 career losses. There is nowhere further for these men to go in boxing, no upward step on the career ladder, no crowning moment of ascendance to be had, no pot of gold at the end of their rainbow. Their fight could produce no forward progress. Nor was it a grudge match, an in-demand battle, something that fans wanted to see. It was a fight with no momentum coming in or going out. So why do it? Why? Because they are fighters.
Rosado, at least, still wants to fight. He has a fighter’s heart and will go out on his shield and all of the other slogans. He fundamentally comes to try as hard as he can to win the fight, and that will very likely be the case even when he is doing exhibitions in the nursing home. Alexander is the counterpoint, the opposite type, a man who has gained the skills to be a professional boxer but has lost all of the illusions of wealth and fame accompanying it, and understands now that he is there to preserve his health and pick up his check. If he were, say, a construction worker, we would all say he was wise for having this attitude, but in boxers, it tends to be looked down upon. Alexander moved around and curled up in a Philly shell while Rosado chased him and fired away. They both came out relatively unharmed, and in the long run, that is more important than the meager portion of prestige to be had in that half-empty arena. I hope that they both invest their modest winnings and live long and healthy lives.
Another type of work in boxing is that of the man whose job is to help rising prospects rack up enough wins on their records that they can start getting better and higher-paying fights. If you are managing, say, a young heavyweight with potential, you want to find 10 or 15 guys he can beat without too many problems in order to be able to tout him as a real potential contender. On Saturday, the rising prospect was Damian Knyba, a 17-0 Polish heavyweight whose softie body is balanced out by the fact that he is 6-foot-7. (I only saw one lone Polish flag waving in the crowd, a truly paltry turnout for one of NYC’s most fervent boxing micro-fandoms.) Knyba’s opponent was Joey Dawejko, 28-14-4 lifetime, 5-foot-10 and built like a dumpster, a stout and swaggering man who looked like he should be winning the toughman contest at a seedy bar in Abilene.
Not to get too technical with the boxing analysis, but a 6-foot-7 heavyweight has a number of significant advantages over one who weighs about the same but stands 5-foot-10. Dawejko, though, knew his business. Despite his evident un-athleticism he possessed a very rubbery waist, which allowed him to plant his feet and slip back and left and right and under almost all of Knyba’s punches for the first several rounds. Joey made few attempts to punch back—understandable, since he had a reach disadvantage of roughly a hundred feet—but he put up his high guard and slipped and rolled and confounded his rudimentary opponent long enough to win the respect of the crowd, who cheered him on in the way that you would cheer a drunk guy who had volunteered for a bullfight. This lasted until the seventh round, when Joey ran out of steam and Knyba was finally able to corral him against the ropes and chop him down. The ref stopped it then. After sitting for a few minutes to regain his breath while Knyba got his hand raised in victory, Joey climbed up on a stool in the middle of the ring and raised his arms to the sky, basking in his own triumphant sense of survival. He went to work and people clapped and he went home at night. That’s something to be proud of, too.
