Tag: HBO

Ceremonial Ten Count: A Requiem for HBO Boxing

Posted on by Eric

HBOBOX

The other day, while discussing boxing in detail with a knowledgeable co-worker – and there’s a opening I never would’ve thought I’d possibly write five years ago – I casually reminded him that Saturday night’s Boxing After Dark card would technically be the final telecast of HBO Boxing after 45 years of standard-bearing quality and omnipresent, sport-influencing significance. He professed mild disappointment when hearing that the best card the network could apparently assemble as its swan song was a triple-header featuring two matches from the nascent and still relatively obscure realm of women’s boxing. I found myself neither particularly surprised by his knee jerk response nor my general agreement with it. Boxing fans are always hungry, after all, rarely satisfied, and can be exceedingly hard to impress. Continue reading “Ceremonial Ten Count: A Requiem for HBO Boxing” →

DVR Hindsight #16 (7/17/17): Game of Thrones – Season Seven premiere

Posted on by Eric

GoT

Game of Thrones – “Dragonstone” – Season 7, Ep. 1 (HBO) SPOILERS

“Through it all, the Wall has stood. And every winter that has come has ended.”

I can’t have been the only person yesterday whose afternoon and evening were spent keeping vigil in fairly rapt anticipation of the Game of Thrones premiere. “Are you ready for Sunday?” asked the amiable bartender (on Thursday), who’d seen me reading George R.R. Martin’s A Dance with Dragons in his fine establishment not two weeks earlier. Unprepared for the question, I was momentarily nonplussed. What the hell was Sunday? When he clued me (of all people) in, I did feel a touch foolish, but also realized at just what a remove from the hoopla surrounding Thrones’ return I’d inadvertently placed myself. This is, after all, a global phenomenon I heard not incorrectly described the other day as, “the last great water cooler discussion show in the history of television,” and I, as unabashed and informed a casual fan as you’d want to find without expending terrible effort in so doing, had paid the prospects of its revival embarrassingly short shrift. Much of that has to do with the fact that while the bulk of the show’s fans have waited with bated breath and rapidly deteriorating patience to re-enter the world of Westeros, I never really left Continue reading “DVR Hindsight #16 (7/17/17): Game of Thrones – Season Seven premiere” →

Pure Mexican Vintage: Francisco Vargas D12 Orlando Salido

Posted on by Eric

salido

Boxing is a sport at perpetual cross-purposes with itself. We, as fans, watch intently, fascinated and occasionally breathless, but also with a palpable, underlying unease. These are impossibly courageous athletes, destroying one another and themselves for our entertainment. We intellectually want the best lives possible for them and their families, now and going forward. We also want war. Intellectually, we can train ourselves to appreciate the all-world tactics and superhuman reflexes of a quick-hitting escape artist like prime Floyd Mayweather, or the thrilling dominance of an overpowering dynamo like prime Manny Pacquiao. Neither man approaches his prime now, of course, and both, by certain accounts, are busy off enjoying their hard-won and well-deserved retirements. Thus scoured of its two biggest names, boxing, as it must, scrambles to manufacture new ones, but also, if it is smart – a fair and open question, if ever one was spoken – works overtime to provide the less starry-eyed among its fan base with the visceral, unadorned combat that is, was, and ever shall be the sport’s lifeblood. Continue reading “Pure Mexican Vintage: Francisco Vargas D12 Orlando Salido” →

Drop the hammer, Hammer the nail: Gennady Golovkin TKO8 David Lemieux

Posted on by Eric

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For a taste of the degree to which boxing was both predominant within and invaluable to the twentieth century sporting landscape, one needs look no further than its numerous, enduring idiomatic contributions to the greater sports lexicon. Most are so subtle and ingrained that we don’t even realize the origin as we say them. “On the ropes,” “down for the count,” “below the belt,” “roll with the punches,” “cornered,” “laying the leather,” “going the distance,” “delivering the knockout blow,” “sucker punch,” “ringside seat,” “throw in the towel,” and so on, to infinity and beyond. It will take generations yet of studied, institutional indifference to effectively work boxing metaphor and terminology completely out of the play-by-play calls of all your other favorite sporting events, particularly on Saturdays and Sundays, and even then only if boxing cooperates by finally succumbing to the all-encompassing “death” that so many observers, whether casual or, more often, anything but, have prescribed and pronounced for it over the past 25 years or so. Continue reading “Drop the hammer, Hammer the nail: Gennady Golovkin TKO8 David Lemieux” →

“Money’s” Worth: Floyd Mayweather UD12 Manny Pacquiao

Posted on by Eric

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Excessive time spent in the game has weathered me, and, consequently, I’m not nearly the boxing evangelist I was even a year ago, let alone five. Used to be, I was insufferable in addition to being long-winded, but now I’ve bumped up against the walls and limits of indifference (and that weird species of unsolicited antagonism that fans of other sports sometimes offer up to boxing) so much that I’m generally content to live, let live, and keep the majority of my opinions to myself. I can show you an entire parade of boxing matches that might curl your toes and make your hair turn white, not that it particularly matters. I am forced to admit that the sport will probably never again have a transcendent moment in the national sun of the likes that happened so regularly in the ‘70s, ‘80s and before. It’s just a different world. Continue reading ““Money’s” Worth: Floyd Mayweather UD12 Manny Pacquiao” →

Baptism by Fire: Lucas Matthysse MD12 Ruslan Provodnikov

Posted on by Eric

Lucas-Matthysse-vs.-Ruslan-Provodnikov-Edit-by-John-Garita

Of all the televised sports, boxing is arguably the most visceral, the most capable of transmitting the action on screen directly into the brain and gut of its viewer with straight line speed and deadly accuracy. Most everyone, after all, can appreciate and wonder at the artistry of a transcendent basketball player like LeBron James soaring some four feet off the ground and covering an eight-foot distance on his way to a ferocious slam dunk, though very few could imagine ourselves in the same position, except maybe as comic relief. Every American kid dreams growing up of throwing the game-winning touchdown in the Super Bowl, or catching it, but the event itself, and the giant men who take the field for it, still seem otherworldly to us as adults. But almost every weekend, a cross-section of American sports fans sit on their couches, attentions fixed on in-ring competition between skilled and supremely willful combatants, men who are paid to punch each other until the other can take no more, and, once immersed, it takes a certain amount of will in itself to not react to particularly hard, clean, or thudding connects with a wince, an involuntary, spasm-like affirmation, or an audible indication of appreciation for the aggressor, or sympathy for the assaulted, or both. Continue reading “Baptism by Fire: Lucas Matthysse MD12 Ruslan Provodnikov” →