When the End has Already Ended
If you're as organised as I am, then you would have had the experience of turning up at a party that was already over and, you're told by the girl who can't take her booze and no one wanted to take home, that the party was crap anyway. Arriving after the end is a feeling that mixes that sinking 'Duh! I brought the wrong tool' (clang!) with that 'Who are you again?' embarrassment. I am trying to elegantly work my up to describing what it was like watching Shane Mosley fight an avoid fighting fight against a Pacman who spent twelve rounds wondering when Shane Mosley was going to turn up.
Bunching knots in my neck as I urged Mosley to try, just try to take this guys title and shock the world into realising that Boxing can be the most exciting event in your life. By round three my fight fan urge to throw my chubby arms into air as if I can telekinetically make a fight out of a drifting contest went away. The gravity of the sinking realisation took hold of me and I watched only in the hope of seeing a spark. Just a tiny Tinkerbell-esque spark. But no, it was the end. Only the end was some time ago. And I didn't see it, until the Mosley who couldn't take his fight and no one wanted to take home, showed us that the party was crap anyway.
What can you do, when the end has already ended?
Never Quit. Never Forgotten. Arturo Gatti.
There are always going to be inevitabilities. Often their timing is unknown. Taxes will rise. Natural disasters claim lives. Celestial objects propel themselves through space and warriors, will, eventually...fall.
Arturo Gatti's ability to put off this inevitability in the boxing ring, is just on thing that made him great. His chartered course was to evade destiny, to rise from the pain of certain defeat, to defy, to look inevitability in the face and smack it with a left hook.
In the blast furnace of the fiercest battle, with broken bones, a bleeding swollen face and flourishing exhaustion, this warrior's heart beats loud and hard. Defiant and brave. The drum that drew us near, eyes wide with awe. Then the hair stands and you find yourself making sublingual sounds.
I have never seen a boxer to whom throwing a punch was so natural. Gatti made it look as innate as breath. He made boxing mean something, because he couldn't quit, even when it was inevitable.
And so, he was fallen. Now the colours and lights of the ring look dull. The ding ding notes from the bell are flat. Suddenly those memorable minutes are hauntings. Writing about such a fighters death, is tearing.
I salute you and raise a glass to your name. The thunder, the warrior, the boxer, the man, Arturo Gatti. There is no rest, for the loved.
Ding Ding!
The Last Bell
Punch and pain. Blood and balls. Courage and crash. The differing battles that make up a fighters career mosaic, all have these. But one thing, an unpredictable thing, the pitiless peal of the last bell, beats all the gloved heroes.
For Oscar De le Hoya, the last bell tolled during round five of his beating against Manny Pacquaio. Showing an inability to keep step with the energetic movement of Manny, he had no snap, no spirit, always responding too late as if he were in a different time. He even aborted some attacks altogether. Nodding at the end of the round, as if he knew, the last bell had already rung out.
On April 27 2001, a 37 year old Pernell Whitaker gloved up against Carlos Bojorquez. Pernell, a boxer once so good he could use his defence as a means of attack, took wild punches from the try hard Carlos. Slow bends from the waist, heavy legs. Clowning, holding and even falling. Even an old champion's bravado couldn't overcome the shoulder injury and the silent thunder of the last bell.
For Shane Mosley, the chime came in round two. A pair of right hands, which would in earlier years had more snarl and repeat failed to knock over a buzzed and wobbling Mayweather. The chance to be great, to be his previous self, slipped away.
The first fresh peal, at the dawn of the very first round, now a distant root in a garden of glory. The flourishing belief in beating the odds, forces the greatest to tape up for a fight too far. To crack their hull upon the hard reef that time had waiting all along.
A bell unheard. No fighter, no fight fan wants to know of it but, as it sounds, our hearts sink and the applause of tribute to the greatness begins.
