Life is what you make it. Attitude. It snowed a week ago in New York City, but it hasn’t warmed up since then, so the dirty snow piles are still stacked along the sidewalks. Even in Midtown, commuters have to line up at corners and walk single file through narrow paths cleared on the icy pavement. It sucks.
Then again, it shows cooperation. It’s about how you look at it. The man dressed like Afrika Bambaata wandering through Penn Station screaming “My bitch bad! My bitch bad!”—he may even be telling the truth. Don’t be quick to judge. Look for the positive side of things.
Boxing can get you down. It’s easy to see the bad parts. Saudi Arabia is taking over the sport as another of its cultural sportswashing programs. In Madison Square Garden this weekend, they had all the press up in the rafters, so they could sell the ringside seats to dudes who wear fur coats and big black shades indoors. The big blue ring was adorned with sponsors’ logos: The Ring magazine, also owned by Saudi Arabia; some ambulance-chasing law firm; freaking Door Dash; Draft Kings; what the hell. It’s all crass leering, exploitation, and blood. Turki Alalshikh, Saudi Arabia’s man in charge of the whole boxing industry, lounged in a padded front row seat, looking like a schlubby rich kid who finally found a hobby. Two seats away from him sat Spike Lee, in bright white eyeglass frames and a ridiculous twee white beanie rolled up to the size of a small cinnamon roll, perched atop his head. He prowled ringside as if he owned the Garden, which I guess he kind of does.
But look–don’t dwell in the muck. Spike Lee makes great movies. Brooklyn’s own Jarrell “Big Baby” Miller weighed in for his heavyweight undercard fight at a cool 317.6 pounds. Not svelte. That could be a problem. When he fights, though, he puts his hands up and his head down and leans his enormous bulk against his opponent, Kingsley Ibeh. Now those 317.6 pounds are his opponent’s problem. Positive thinking. At the end of the second round Ibeh cracked Miller and Miller’s hairpiece, unnoticeable until then, flaked straight up off his bald head. This moment was caught in high definition and replayed several times on the big screen to the delight of the squealing audience. When Miller got to his corner he didn’t sulk. He ripped the hairpiece the rest of the way off, tossed it out of the ring, stuck his arms up and his tongue out. He went on to win the fight bald, his head ringed by a thin black line of hair where that hairpiece should have been tied in. He embraced it. You can always get another hairpiece, man.
Not everyone can open themselves to a sense of hope, though. Some people have anxiety. Everyone has a temperament. This is the hardest thing to change. In boxing, fighters can evolve in many ways. They can get stronger, faster, quicker. They can get smarter. They can throw more intelligent combos, improve footwork, and get more stamina. They can get better. But very, very few are able to evolve their own temperaments. It’s baked in deep. Most everyone improves only within the framework that temperament grants them.
Part of that temperament is believing you are going to win. Champions do that. Not everyone, though. Don’t listen to what fighters say in prefight interviews. Everyone says they’re going to win. But do they believe it? Many don’t. That temperament whispers in their ears. Teofimo Lopez: explosive, fluid, athletic, knockout power in both hands, straight outta Brooklyn, fighting in a main event in the Garden. Every reason to believe in himself. And yet, you know he doesn’t. He has an insane boxing dad, and it is not uncommon for people with insane boxing dads to be very driven fighters who are also plagued by deep feelings of inadequacy no doubt instilled by their lifelong struggles to earn the love of their crazy dads.
That’s Teofimo. You can see it when he unsuccessfully clowns around, when he wears a “Make Boxing Great Again” hat, when he tells jokes that don’t really land. Desperate for approval. You could see it in his walkout music on Saturday night. Most fighters have one song. Bruch “Shu Shu” Carrington, one of the undercard fighters, who’s from Brownsville BK, had M.O.P. personally walk him to the ring while doing “Ante Up.” Now that’s cool. That’s pretty fucking hype. Teofimo, on the other hand, had a whole damn medley. Greatest hits of NYC hip hop, 2000-2020. It went on and on. Too long. One of the songs in the medley was “Ante Up,” which was kind of pathetic since Shu Shu already did it with M.O.P. themselves. Derivative.
Finally, Teofimo emerged from the tunnel with the white-masked Jabbawockeez break dance crew. Instead of just walking behind them, he struck a pose and did a little dance with them, all together, a little something they had choreographed. Embarrassing dude. Some people could have pulled this off, but in this case it smelled like the culmination of a desperate attempt to curry favor with the NYC crowd. My analysis of Teofimo’s chances, already low, kept plummeting the longer his walk-in went on.
There’s a saying in boxing: “Styles make fights.” It means that styles make fights. If you want to understand boxing like a real expert, this is all you really need to know. People see highlight reels of Teofimo Lopez walloping past opponents and knocking them stupid and doing celebratory backflips in the ring and they say, “Wow, he has a good chance of walloping somebody tonight.” Does he? He doesn’t. Because styles make fights.
Here is the stylistic matchup we were looking at on Saturday night: Shakur Stevenson, the undefeated pride of Newark, is a defensive master. There are different kinds of defense in boxing. Some defense is based on upper body movement, slipping punches, dipping and rolling under things. Other defense is based on blocking, keeping your hands up, showing a tight, high guard that’s hard to penetrate. Shakur’s defense is based on distance. It’s mostly his feet. He will read exactly how far you are able to punch at any given moment, and he will be standing just outside that range. He will move his feet to maintain that distance at all times. He sees invisible walls, like a mime. You’ll see him move forward, then stop suddenly, warned by his internal radar that he has reached the edge of range. It’s a gift.
He’s also an extremely accurate puncher. Accuracy is one of the most unappreciated skills in boxing, because it conceals itself amid flashier qualities like speed and power. It is, however, more important than those flashier skills. A subtle punch landed is worth a million scary punches that miss.
Teofimo Lopez is a counterpuncher with knockout power. He’s athletic, and he can move, yes, but fundamentally he wants to stand back and knock you out with a counterpunch. This is his temperament. Like his need for approval, it is very hard to change.
What will happen when an accurate-punching defensive master like Shakur faces a counterpuncher with power? What will happen is, Shakur will stand on the outside out of range and snipe the counterpuncher to death. Because the counterpuncher wants his opponent to come in, to attack unwisely, and that is the opposite of anything that Shakur would ever do. And so eventually the counterpuncher will be forced to come forward and press the attack himself, and he will always be trying to close the distance on Shakur, and Shakur will just move his feet and kill him with that accurate jab on the way in. Teofimo has the physical ability to press forward, yes, but it’s not his way. It’s not his temperament. And so he will be unhappy, uncomfortable, not at his best, fighting a way he needs to but doesn’t want to. His frustration will grow as he misses, and fails, and is sniped and sniped, and is slowly humiliated.
That is exactly what happened in the fight. Teofimo ate that right jab with his eyeball all night. By the eighth round the whole left side of his face was all red and fucked up, and it just got worse from there. A cut opened over his eyelid, and his corner would try to stop it between rounds, and then as soon as he got out of his stool blood would run down his cheek like a teardrop. And he would just whiff and whiff and eat that jab again and again. The progression of this fight and its outcome was baked in. The styles in question made it a certainty. Shakur is a precision machine, and Teofimo is a talented but flighty and anxiety-plagued man, so you knew that a successful mid-fight adaptation would not be in the cards. You knew that Teofimo would fail to crack that defense and would then get frustrated and throw himself upon the rocks of Shakur’s own counterpunching like a distraught bride who just gives up on life after her husband drowns at sea. Styles make fights. Temperaments don’t change.
I could have stayed home and written this story before the fight even happened instead of going way out to 34th street in the cold. But this is my own bad temperament. This is my own failure to look on the positive side of life.
Five years ago, Dan McQuade sent me a message: “I'm not sure who else to tell this but I am giddy with endorphins so: had my first boxing lesson this morning and it was great.” These messages carried on periodically. “I threw 500 punches today!” A few weeks later: “1300 punches today!” A year later, he was in New York City. We talked about going to my boxing gym together. Couldn’t make the timing work. Later, he came back, but I was out of town. He went to Gleason’s by himself. “I just boxed with Hector. He was very exasperated with me. It was fun,” he wrote me afterwards. “I definitely was humbled, which is what I was looking for!”
In 2023 he was back in NYC, looking to box, but I was leaving the day he got there. We went on like this, for years. Back and forth. Never did find a time to go to the gym together. Then he got sick. I missed my chance. His last message to me, in January, said “one thing i realized while going thru all of this is that i had started sparring. and taking a liver shot might've led this to be discovered a bit sooner. but on the other hand... i was a way better boxer than i believed.”
That man knew how to look on the bright side. He would have loved Big Baby’s hairpiece. It makes me remember it's always worth it to get your ass up and go do what you want, today. You never know what good things might happen.
