A Krushing Konclusion to a Bad Year's Worst Week
A Krushing konclusion to a bad year’s worst week 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.
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