Canelo Alvarez, cable networks, and learned helplessness
By Bart Barry-
Another game changer happened Tuesday. It came with a series of email announcements and a conference call and probably a press conference, somewhere, too, so big the news this time. It was an official notice Mexican junior middleweight Saul “Canelo” Alvarez changed American cable networks.
If boxing historians return to this announcement someday, it will be to ask themselves why they returned to it.
Each purportedly seismic disruption to boxing’s landscape portends nothing but the worse for aficionados and fighters, boxing’s forgotten tribes, yet in a learned-helplessness sort of way, we ponder plethoras of possibilities and their consequences for our favorite active fighters – the few of us who still have such things. These massive upheavals in boxing began when Manny Pacquiao enjoyed a one-dreadful-night sabbatical from HBO sometime in the last few years, donned yellow gloves to fight world poverty, eradicated world poverty, and returned triumphantly to HBO, where he won a dubious decision over Juan Manuel Marquez, in red gloves, lost a decision to Timothy Bradley, then got dangled by Marquez above the unknowable plane betwixt life and death. Not long after that, another earthquake struck, and Floyd Mayweather and Al Haymon left HBO and took Richard Schaefer with them, during the conveniently forgotten years when Golden Boy Promotions’ Oscar De La Hoya was unavailable for comment.
Actually, all this may have happened in a different order or concurrently, or something, but none of it today is consequential enough to recall its exact sequence.
Tuesday, though, Tuesday! This was the big news boxing needed, when a redhaired Mexican-television creation changed from Showtime to HBO, or well, he returned, actually, to the network that manufactured him as an American attraction, such as he is – have we got an official number for Alvarez-Lara yet? – before he, perhaps unwittingly, changed American networks before his fight with Austin Trout. Why all this emphasis on American television networks? Because Alvarez isn’t beholden to them or De La Hoya or anyone else in this country: Cinnamon takes his orders from Mexican television, or at least he did till Grupo Televisa, Latin America’s largest mass-media company, watched his fight with Floyd Mayweather, realized, whatever else he was, Canelo was not a future legend of Mexican prizefighting, and filed unflattering reports that caused Alvarez to leave that network, too, and shop his services to TV Azteca.
¡O, impetuous youth! Had it not been for the unrelenting coverage, and soap-operatic scripting, of Grupo Televisa, a network powerful enough to get Alvarez an invitation to meet President Enrique Pena Nieto, husband of Angelica Rivera, a retired Televisa soap-opera actress, Alvarez might not have ascended highly as Julio “Baby Face” Garcia. What’s that, you never heard of him? Baby Face Garcia was a Mexican welterweight prodigy with a record of 40-2 (33 KOs) before his 20th birthday. His promoter dissolved into a blob, Garcia affixed that blob on his midsection, and before his 27th birthday Baby Face was an anonymous middleweight losing as often as he won in locales like Guanajuato’s Domo De La Feria and Michoacan’s Auditorio del Bicentenario – neither of which is Spanish for “MGM Grand Garden Arena.” But Canelo is going to attack Miguel Cotto in the superfight of 2015! Prizefighting has come to this, hasn’t it? A Puerto Rican welterweight beaten to submission by Manny Pacquiao in 2009, decisioned lopsidedly by Mayweather in 2012, decisioned lopsidedly by Trout in 2012, and rejuvenated by the concoction of a new trainer and a broken-legged Argentine in June is about to make next year’s most-anticipated fight with a Mexican who won about 1/36 his match with Mayweather a year ago, beat Alfredo Angulo about convincingly as James De La Rosa just did, and squeezed past Erislandy Lara in an eyesore.
Show that to the rascals who say boxing is dead!
Marco Antonio Barrera told us this would happen, remember. A few months before his career’s penultimate match, a 2010 tilt with Adailton De Jesus in San Antonio, Barrera said the consequences of prizefighting’s being off Mexican public airwaves for a decade, because of one more depredating privatization scheme in the world, were en route and would be profound. Prizefighting off Mexican airwaves drained interest and the talent pool from Mexican gyms. It also coiled the spring of Mexicans’ undying interest in the sport. Once prizefighting returned to Mexico’s public airwaves, the people jubilantly sprung about in search of future greats. Barrera and Erik Morales subsequently attempted unserious comebacks, and Juan Manuel Marquez underwent a historic physical transformation.
TV Azteca, meanwhile, aligned itself with a goofball scion of legend Julio Cesar Chavez, and Televisa lassoed itself a redhaired horseman from Jalisco. HBO made icons of Pacquiao and Mayweather then watched with incompetent disbelief when they refused to fight each other, and Showtime placed its faith in HBO commentators and actually tried to anoint Adrien Broner. Now bereft of ideas, Showtime desperately empowers advisor Al Haymon to decimate its reputation, and HBO turns to a 32-year-old Kazakhstani middleweight whose greatest professional accomplishment, in 10 years of prizefighting, is a third-round stoppage of Daniel Geale – and Marvelous Marvin Hagler retired at age 33.
Like a downtrodden minimum-wage worker told by his millionaire master to be grateful he even has a second job to take public transportation to, though, an aficionado today feels gratitude merely at the news boxing will be televised at all this autumn, and anxiously awaits his next press conference announcement – when he ought to be yanking his cable box directly out the wall.
Bart Barry can be found on Twitter @bartbarry