Danny Garcia vs Lamont Peterson
Photos by Sue Jaye Johnson
by Sarah Deming
BROOKLYN, N.Y.–First of all, I would like to thank God and Al Haymon.
If they had only given us Daniel Garcia vs. Lamont Peterson but not Peter Quillin vs. Andy Lee, dayenu.
If they had only put the bouts on primetime television but not put them at the Barclays Center on a sunny spring afternoon, dayenu.
If they had put the card at the sunny Barclays but not given me those Calexico loaded nachos, dayenu.
You get the point. But I do have a bone to pick with God, Al, or whoever else was in charge of bout order on Saturday night.
Heather “The Heat” Hardy sold thirty-one thousand dollars worth of tickets to the event. She shilled faithfully for her promoter, appearing the week before her fight on Eyewitness News, CNBC, Hot 97, in The Wall Street Journal, the Village Voice, am New York, SI.com, and Yahoo Beauty, who asked what beauty products she carried with her at all times. (Vaseline and deodorant.)
Yet someone programmed her eight-round super bantamweight contest at 4:30 PM, a Siberian region of the undercard as far as possible from television and so early that most of her fans missed it.
True, the fight itself kind of sucked. Renata Domsodi was a 40-year-old Hungarian road warrior who had possibly taken the gig just for the free airfare. After three rounds of running away, Renata managed to absorb an accidental head butt, then bleed and whine until they ruled it a no-contest. Maybe women’s boxing really is making progress if we’ve got crappy European opponents just like the men, but if Heather Hardy is supposed to be “the First Lady of Dibella Entertainment,” they should stop treating her like the intern.
I milled around for a while in the Barclay Center’s torus-shaped corridor drinking more gin and missing Luis Collazo’s quick knockout win. When I checked back in, Prichard Colon was in the ring wearing a copper chainmail skirt with Puerto Rican flag waistband, red hot pants, and a white jock strap. There was a word across the skirt’s crotch that might have been “TIME” and a white shape below it that looked like a polar bear from the 100-level. That’s all I remember about his fight, but I will absolutely pay to see this guy again.
After that was some boring Ukrainian, so I broke for Calexico loaded nachos (dayenu) before settling back down to watch Peter Quillin and Andy Lee’s tense, high firepower battle.
This looked to be a blowout early for Quillan with knockdowns in the first and third, but Lee roared back, putting Kid Chocolate down in the seventh and closing well. It was ruled a split draw, which is always unsatisfying, but the whole night was kind of bittersweet. April is the cruelest month.
In the other half of the Premier Boxing Champions broadcast on NBC, Lamont Peterson made Danny Garcia miss a whole lot, but he didn’t make him pay for real until after the eighth. The majority decision for Garcia was booed by the drunk guys behind me and, virtually, by Olympic gold medallist Claressa Shields, who tweeted that “Decisions like that hurt my heart.”
I was saving my heart for Tito Bracero.
By the time he came on it was almost midnight and I had been in the Barclays Center for over seven hours. My date had gone home, as had almost everyone else, but the streets of Sunset Park must have been eerily quiet because Tito’s whole neighborhood was here. They wore Puerto Rican flags and shirts that said “Team Bracero,” and they yelled things in Spanglish at the few brave Dominicans who turned up for Felix Diaz.
I had been following Gabriel “Tito” Bracero for several months leading up to the fight. For a while it had looked as though Tito would get a shot at Danny Garcia, but Garcia moved up in weight and fought Rod Salka instead.
Felix Diaz sounded dangerous to me. He was an undefeated southpaw, an Al Haymon guy who won a gold medal for the Dominican Republic at the Beijing Games. But everyone assured me he wasn’t as good as he was supposed to be.
Besides, Tito had won fights he wasn’t supposed to win before. He had boxed circles around Dmitri Salita. In his sole loss, he got up off the canvas to knock down Demarcus “Chop Chop” Corley.
“My son is not a gym fighter,” said his father Quiro.
This is the highest praise he can give. Gym fighters wilt under pressure. If you are not a gym fighter, that means you have heart.
Tito stayed busy in the early rounds, as a man with only four knockouts in 24 fights must. Sunset Park screamed its approval as he spun Diaz, touching him with the jab, showing off his slick little tricks on the inside.
“I want him to have fun in there,” said Quiro, who works the bilingual corner with Tito’s head trainer Tommy Gallagher. “I say ‘Be happy. I want you happy.’”
But at the end of the first, Diaz was the one who crouched low and swung his long arms side to side, clowning. My stomach sank. I sensed that the power in the ring had shifted, and it never went back.
In the second and third rounds, Diaz started to open up with the left hand. Tito landed a good hook in the fourth, but he was having trouble finding his distance. The fifth was filled with holding, and the sixth was bad.
Sunset Park watched their fighter backpedal now, a knee brace peeking out from below his trunks. Ever since Sergio Martinez vs. Miguel Cotto, the knee brace has seemed to me the kiss of death.
Diaz stabbed and danced, stabbed and danced. When he caught Tito with that left at the end of the eighth, Tito fell straight backward. He looked graceful even as he fell. He always looks graceful. He fell again in the ninth, got up, and fought to the end.
“I’ve been to all Tito’s fights,” said Orlando, who has women’s names tattooed on his hands and did not stop cheering for his friend, not even after the final bell. “I boxed a lot of years ago, but I gave it up to the streets. When Tito fights, it’s like I’m in the ring.”
His mother goes to all his fights, too. Tito calls her his road dog. She smuggled Chicken McNuggets into jail for him. She taught him the meaning of unconditional love.
When they called it for Diaz, she said, “It’s time to go home.”
Originally published at StiffJab.com.
