Mosley vs. Alvarez: Violent Proof

Just after 10 P.M. on Saturday night, between Round 6 and Round 7 of a dull warmup bout, the HBO pay-per-view broadcast cut to the commentator Larry Merchant, who was conducting a pre-fight interview with a boxer half his age. Merchant is eighty-one; the boxer, Shane Mosley, will be forty-one in September; both have outlasted their contemporaries. Mosley did not sound like a man who expected to stage a thrilling late-career resurrection and Merchant did not sound like a man who expected to witness one.

“Shane, there are so many fans of yours who’ve admired and respected you over the years, and they’re concerned about you tonight,” Merchant said. “What do you want to say to them?”

“I want to tell them that I’m in perfect health, I trained very hard, and it’s going to be an excellent fight,” Mosley said, shrugging. “I know the kid—the young kid—has probably trained very hard, too, as well. And I’m just ready to go.” Mosley is a soft-spoken stoic, not much given to pre-fight bluster; when he gets punched, he sometimes responds with a wincing smile, like a musician acknowledging a wrong note. But even by his standards, this declaration seemed ominously mild. When a boxer promises nothing more an “an excellent fight,” he often delivers significantly less.

The “young kid” in question was Saul Alvarez, known as Canelo—cinnamon—because of his rust-colored hair. He is twenty-one, about half as old as Mosley, and already an A-list celebrity in his native Mexico, where boxing remains an A-list sport. Alvarez was due to earn $1.2 million; Mosley would earn half as much.

These two were not the headliners—in the main event, Floyd Mayweather won an unexpectedly rough fight against Miguel Cotto. In fact, plenty of people didn’t believe that Alvarez-Mosley was even worthy of second place on a high-profile fight card. Merchant is right that fans are concerned about Mosley, and the fans are right to be concerned: his technique seems a bit more disjointed and a bit less precise than it used to be; more worryingly, so does his speech. In an online chat the day before the fight, Dan Rafael, the boxing writer for ESPN.com, was asked whether he thought it was “insulting” to let a kid like Alvarez fight a legend like Mosley. Rafael’s answer deftly captured the unsentimental nature of the boxing business:

Why? He is a young rising star who is popular being matched against a faded name. That is boxing promotion 101.

Only a few years ago, Mosley seemed defiantly unfaded. In January, 2009, he delivered a brutal beating to Antonio Margarito, who seemed to deserve it. (Just before the fight, Margarito had been caught with a foreign substance—a kind of plaster, it turned out—concealed in his hand wraps.) Since then, Mosley has looked tentative: Mayweather beat him easily, a less renowned fighter named Sergio Mora held him to a draw, and then Manny Pacquiao beat him even more easily than Mayweather had. After the loss to Mayweather, Mosley’s erudite trainer, Naazim Richardson, seemed disappointed. A few weeks later, watching that fight on DVD, he described Mosley as “mentally not there for the fight.” He said, “Me talking in the corner don’t even matter no more. Because the guy not there no more.”

On Saturday night, Mosley was there, fighting hard. The fight wasn’t competitive—the judges had Alvarez winning ten or eleven of the fight’s twelve rounds—but it wasn’t boring, either. Maybe it wasn’t, as Mosley had predicted, “an excellent fight,” and maybe not even a good one, but it was nevertheless a satisfying one, in the way that a movie ending can be satisfying, even if it’s neither happy nor surprising, so long as it really feels like an ending.

Alvarez supplied Mosley with plenty of wrong notes to wince at, and by Round 10, Merchant was pondering the fate of older fighters. “They don’t believe they’re beaten until they’re beaten up,” he said, and they’re not the only ones. Plenty of fans don’t believe it, either, until there is some violent proof. Before, Mosley had looked somewhat uninspired against Mayweather and Pacquiao, the two best boxers in the world. But this time, facing a guy who hasn’t (yet) earned a place among the era’s immortals, swinging hard and getting hit, he convinced the fans (at first) and himself (at last) that no amount of hard fighting would change the outcome. It was a performance to be proud of, for both fighters.

After the fight, Merchant interviewed Mosley in the ring. “I haven’t seen you look like this,” Merchant said, referring either to Mosley’s performance, or to the puffiness that flattened his eyes from above and below, or to all of it. They chatted about Alvarez for a few moments, and then Merchant asked, “Is this it, Shane?”

“It can look that way,” Mosley said. “You know, I mean, when you get the kids starting to beat you up, you might have to start promoting”—that is, organizing fights, instead of fighting them.

Back at the announcers’ table, Jim Lampley broke in with a statistical update. Apparently the punch-counters had finished their work, and they had determined that, so long as anyone has been keeping score, no one has ever punched Mosley more than Alvarez punched him on Saturday night. And with any luck, no one ever will.

Read Kelefa Sanneh on Mayweather’s defeat of Mosley, Ariel Levy on women’s boxing, and more of our coverage at the Sporting Scene.

Photograph by Isaac Brekken/AP Photo.