Portrait of HBO’s most-viewed fight of 2014, part 1

By Bart Barry-

The week that began in February, ended in March and became the pinnacle of HBO boxing’s viewership feats in 2014 began on a Thursday with dinner at La Gloria restaurant in the Pearl Brewery complex of the northern part of downtown San Antonio, a dinner that marked the first of the year’s biannual meetings of the Irish-American Boxing Writers Association and concluded with a trip to the airport to retrieve a perennial winner of awards from the Boxing Writers Association of America.

Those 7,323 of us gathered at cavernous old Alamodome on March 1 were wholly unaware we were witnessing HBO history when Mexican “Son of the Legend” Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. beat up Austin’s Bryan Vera in a super middleweight match legally conducted below the 168-pound limit, but we were. It was that rarest-of-all historic event: One forgotten entirely for nine months by its witnesses. Not until HBO announced a few weeks back no boxing broadcast of this lamentable year surpassed in viewership Chavez’s sole match of 2014 did we, its witnesses, realize our great good fortune.

Those who might otherwise conflate the wordshistoric and historical, take note: Chavez Jr.-Vera 2 was historic because every time Son of the Legend dons the gloves, something “famous or important in history, or potentially so” – and do mind that last clause – happens, and it was historical because HBO’s announcing not one of its boxing broadcasts in the final 297 days of the year had more viewers marked on HBO’s enduring record that Chavez Jr.-Vera 2 was indeed “of or concerning history.”

Forget not, either, this historic and historical broadcast featured Mexican Orlando Salido’s relentless assault on the protective cup of an undefeated Ukrainian, , who, it turned out, was fighting for a title in only his second professional match that was actually his eighth.

There was a prefight promoter meet-and-greet followed by a special-access dinner that Friday, too, with , the Russian light heavyweight who would decision while barely imperiling a 49 5/6-year-old in November.

Friday’s weigh-in, the most suspenseful part of Chavez-Vera 2, found a hardworking friend of mine, and co-founder of the IABWA, who now has more readers on Bleacher Report than all my other hardworking friends put together, Kelsey McCarson, filming a preview of Saturday’s matches, a preview I happily participated in, looking stupendous enough to gain international acclaim as a boxing fashionista.

And yet, the best part of the weekend that brought HBO’s most- viewed boxing broadcast of 2014 was my houseguest and fellow Monday columnist, and perennial BWAA-award recipient, David Greisman.

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The week that began in February, ended in March and became the pinnacle of HBO boxing’s viewership feats in 2014 personally marked an enduring departure from considering seriously coverage of our beloved sport, though that marking went initially unmarked.

It was born of lost access: Nine years, 450 weekly columns, 83 ringside fight reports, 28 articles for The Ring magazine and website, and nine writing awards from the BWAA, all, were replaced in 2014 by a simpleton’s rating system that sat me far enough from the ring to make accurate reporting impossible, hundreds of feet farther from the ring than ever I had been previously, including my first credential in 2005, when my readership comprised fewer than 10 friends and familiars. The nature of boxing credentials, ever impenetrably arbitrary, met in 2014 the budding trend of diminishing ringside seats and an automaton’s reliance on site-traffic ratings – which might begin a meritocracy if such things were not open to such naked manipulation, #PacquiaoWillFightMayweather – and brought our sport ever closer to the promoters’ nirvana of promoters’ employees exclusively covering promoters’ events, with a definition for promoters expanded to include cable-television networks, as it should be evermore.

There were fairminded concerns for Bryan Vera’s health, when the remarkably unserious Chavez who nevertheless missed Vera with hardly one punch in their first match arrived at Friday’s weighin for their rematch a half pound below a limit he ate right through in 2013, but those concerns were only slightly well-placed. Trainer Ronnie Shields praised himself for revising mightily the style Vera arrived in Shields’ Houston with – and Vera’s own postfight allusions to needing to become a smarter fighter did not belie Shields’ praise for Shields’ work – but Vera’s defense was porous, still, in San Antonio, porous as it was in California months before, though Vera’s pride and chin were stout as ever, thankfully for aficionados who did not wish to see Vera’s candle snuffed by Chavez.

Coincidentally, the wisest act I took the entire weekend was snuffing in a booth at The Esquire a Friday evening PED debate between David and Kelsey, rescuing Kelsey’s wife and me from hours more of a topic no more likely to find resolution in 2014 than it was in 2013 or 2012 or 2011 or 2010.

* The week that began in February, ended in March and became the pinnacle of HBO boxing’s viewership feats in 2014 marked the beginning of the end of Son of the Legend’s affiliation with promoter Top Rank, though no one imagined it possible in San Antonio.

Instead, gathered members of the media were fed a report Chavez Jr. was offered by Bob Arum, earlier on fightday, a match with Kazakh middleweight titlist, and HBO junior middleweight and middleweight and super middleweight champion, Gennady “GGG” Golovkin. Chavez, who has sparred enough with Golovkin to know two things – Golovkin would likely win a decision, and Golovkin’s made-for/by-television power is unlikely to travel to 168 pounds with him – chose to request via his new manager a pay increase, promptly and publicly and loudly rejected by Arum, before Chavez signed with his other new manager, Al Haymon.

At the Kovalev meet-and-greet before the special-access Kovalev dinner, I handed the Russian’s Russian manager a copy of an issue of The Ring magazine that featured my 1,800-word treatment of his fighter, and he regarded it with as much interest as a lion looking at buttered popcorn.

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Editor’s note: Part 2 will be posted next Monday.

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Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry