Torerazo

"...the matador, if he knows his profession, can increase the amount of danger of death that he runs exactly as much as he wishes. He should, however, increase this danger, within the rules provided for his protection. In other words it is to his credit if he does something that he knows how to do in a highly dangerous but still geometrically possible manner. It is to his discredit is he runs danger through ignorance, through disregard of the fundamental rules, through physical or mental slowness, or through blind folly."


As far as I'm concerned, the best book ever written about boxing is Death in the Afternoon, which, of course, is Hemingway's classic combination memoir and textbook of bullfighting. Just about every passage seems to have great bearing on the sweet science, and it's clear reading it that Papa's aesthetics were consistent throughout both of his bloody preoccupations.

I thought about passages like the one above, and many others extolling the virtues of the artfully dangerous matador, while I watched Joe Calzaghe on Saturday night, dismantling a fearsome and ferocious opponent in a display of courage and skill that for me was almost as much performance art as it was sport.

What was so compelling about Calzaghe's approach was the sense that he courted danger right to the edge of the point at which it was bearable, and then drew back before sallying forth for another death-defying pass through the lion's maw. Early in the bout, about the third round or so, I was certain that Mikkel Kessler was going to knock Calzaghe out. In fact, the fight reminded me at that point of the early stages of the Taylor/Pavlik fight, without the knockdown. Like Taylor, Calzaghe fought awkwardly and frenetically at first, to the pleasure of the crowd but to little real avail with his opponent. Meanwhile, Kessler, like Pavlik, comfortably measured his laser-like right hand, which, when it landed, landed with frightening effect. The Welshman ate an uppercut in the third round that might have decapitated him. That he was merely stunned, that ten seconds later he was whipping off a five-punch combination, seemed to me at the time to be a feat of magic worthy of Houdini.

After that shot I thought to myself, it's only a matter of time. One more of those and they'll be scraping him off the canvas. Two more of those and we'll have a dead man on our hands.

By the end of the fight, I'd venture to say Calzaghe had absorbed maybe five more such blows, and yet by the end of the fight it was clear that Calzaghe was indeed a magician. Somewhere in the middle of the fourth round, he completely solved the Great Dane, and then the show was on. At one point, his dad/trainer, Enzo Calzaghe, said something to the effect of "son it's time to shine now," and it was if a switch had been flicked. Such a dizzying array of punches, such impossible angles, and such narrow margins of error I have not seen since the heyday of Ray Leonard. Once Kessler realized that he did not have a chance to win the fight on points (which he realized early, maybe by the eighth), he started to throw punches with truly bad intentions, and Kessler, like Pavlik, is a born puncher. Still, Calzaghe waded forward, walked the tightrope, dodged the bombs by a hair's width and then launched another four, or seven, or nine-punch flurry. I'm telling you the man was like Henry Armstrong crossed with Evel Knievel. I love violent fights and still there were times when I almost couldn't watch, because the clearcut winner of the thing seemed so goddamn close to death over and over again that the dread anticipation was just too much to take.

Of course, there was no cause for my anxiety, because like Hemingway's ideal toreador, Calzaghe was well within himself, measuring his risk against the awesome reward of a single perfect performance, allowing for the maximum amount of danger while remaining in complete and utter control of the situation. It was exhilirating, everything you want to see from a fighter, mastery of his art, bravery bordering on absurdity and a sense of theater to appease even the angriest gods. Afterwards, in his interview with Max Kellerman, despite his habitual modesty, I thought Calzaghe beamed with the awareness of his accomplishment, and Kessler too seemed compliant in the moment, shaking his head with the resignation of a great man who knows he has been blindsided by forces beyond his control.

If you like boxing, and you missed this fight, then do whatever you have to do to see it. You won't regret it. If you think I'm overstating the case, consider this: After one particularly thrilling round - I think it was the eighth - I heard one set of hands clapping particularly hard amidst the general clamor, clapping as if they were doing it right into one of the HBO microphones. Who the hell is that, I thought, and then Lampley told us. It was his right-hand man, Manny Steward, joining in the standing ovation. And you know Manny Steward don't stand up and clap for no average-ass run-of-the-mill bullshit.