Horsing around in Jalisco, watching David Lemieux

By Bart Barry-

GUADALAJARA, Mexico – This city is 4,500 kilometers southwest of Laval, Quebec. That’s sensible a place as any to start a column like this.

There be nary a Canelo statue to report in the center of this old and noble capital of Jalisco nor a great interest in searching one out. If I wasn’t here to visit San Agustín de Tlajomulco de Zúñiga, birthplace of Cinnamon Alvarez, the redhaired horseman of Jalisco (that’s a halfassed alliteration that works like a pronunciation key: hair and horse and Jalisco all begin with the same general sound), I cared at least enough to google the lineal middleweight champion’s hometown. Then I forgot all about it till an uber took me past a lowend bar called Canelo’s in a spotty neighborhood. A better columnist’d’ve alighted the car and done some investigative stuff but it didn’t fully register till just now when I sat down to write a column tenuously linking and Billy Joe Saunders, and forcing such symmetry, I’ve found, is only fun to do if you admit it first. Saturday evening Saunders craftily denuded David “. . . ah . . . The Canadian” Lemieux then advised Montreal authorities to file charges of indecent exposure against a man who, it’s naughty to admit, rounds out Gennady Golovkin’s career Top 3 Greatest Challengers list.

The indecent-exposure line is not mine but sprung to mind as I watched Saunders and asked myself where I’d seen such a thing before. Firing sporadically on the fuel of tortas ahogadas (drowned sandwiches) and carne en su jugo (meat in its juice) – the wet food beloved by Tapatíos in this city – my query returned: vs. . On the undercard of ’s 2007 Alamodome demolition of Jorge Solis, Mijares took a formidable favorite and stripped him bare at center ring. So bare, in fact, someone from then-promoter Gary Shaw’s outfit, then representing and goading Arce and his promoter at every chance, sent a press release pleading for Arce to be arrested in Texas and charged with indecent exposure, which still brings a chuckle.

Maybe was more fun then or maybe I was, but I can’t think of a press release in years combining so tidily the caustic and the clever.

Saunders carried the same panache Saturday as Mijares carried a decade ago; Saunders knew exactly what Lemieux would do next long before Lemieux decided to do exactly what Saunders already knew he’d do. It’s an incredibly dispiriting sensation, that – to realize you’re best chance of striking an opponent is by accident and then to see in his eyes, within an instant, he just heard you think that, too, damn it.

A fighter and trainer with whom I once did some illadvised sparring one time came off a perfect slip of my righthand (“perfect” defined as: moving the least distance possible to make me miss, ensuring with such economy I would expend all the energy required to stop my fist and perversely feel encouraged by how close I’d come to walloping him, the better to break my spirit and body) and pinned his right glove to right temple at least a halfsecond before I knew I was going to waste more resources on a useless hook.

I dropped both hands then and there, spitting the gumshield in my left palm, and said, “How the hell did you know I was going to throw the hook next?”

He shook his head contemptuously and said, “It’s the only thing you could throw.”

He’d taken the few and simple algorithms that composed my offensive arsenal, downloaded their defenses and counters, and not wasted one more cycle on thinking. He would ponder some new ways of punching me hard in the face, I gathered, but he had defense on autopilot.

Imagine his surprise when I later leapt out my crouch and . . . yeah, right. I avenged absolutely nothing that day or any other with him.

Where were we? Oh yes, Saunders and Mijares, Arce and Lemieux.

Saturday’s match was supposed to be a good one. If it was intended as anyone’s showcase by HBO it was Lemieux’s – the better to burnish retroactively GGG’s superlinear power and class. At one point, even, there was an allusion to an assault on Saunders proving Lemieux was ready to rematch his KO-8 with Golovkin, of all risible suggestions. Instead the network lucked its way into a formidable challenger for the winner of Alvarez-Golovkin 2 (Saunders makes a very good fight with Golovkin and a good fight with Canelo) or a spoiler for the network’s legless Danny Jacobs rehabilitation tour (Saunders makes a miraculously dreadful spectacle with The Miracle Man).

What does any of this have to do with Guadalajara or Jalisco or even Mexico? Very little, admittedly.

There’s a cosmopolitan quality to this city that now informs my recollection of interviews with Canelo, though. He was unfailingly courteous and professional, if not insightful or imaginative; to interview Canelo was to interview an equal in every way, not a cultural or intellectual inferior, not a superior in some sort of compensatory machismo, either – just a man who did his job very well and anticipated the same from others. There’s a cultural pride in Guadalajara that might be arrogance were the peso exchanging better than $0.05 (US). From the arresting Orozco frescoes in Hospicio Cabañas and Museo de las Artes de la Universidad de Guadalajara (Musa) to the majestic cathedrals and fountains in Zona Centro this city and its inhabitants consider themselves equal to or better than any American or European. I find myself agreeing with their assessment, too, even without a pilgrimage to San Agustín de Tlajomulco de Zúñiga.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry