A WONDERFUL thing happened in Texas at the weekend. After years of only ever throwing out the odd word of English here and there, Saul ‘Canelo’ Alvarez unloaded his full artillery after stopping Billy Joe Saunders in his tracks.
In an expletive-riddled post fight press conference, he took umbrage at the unwelcome intervention of Demetrius Andrade, the American who holds a version of the world middleweight title and has been chasing a showdown with the flame-haired Mexican for yonks.
Following a polite initial exchange, ‘Canelo’ grew weary – “hey maannn, it’s my night” – before cussing Andrade out of the building in high-pitched, Pretty Fly (for a White Guy) fashion.
That was good, but the best bit came roughly an hour earlier, just past the midway point of the eighth and, as it turned out, final round. Up until that point Saunders had been holding his own - more than that in fact, the previous stanza arguably his best of the night.
With dusk turning to dawn, you could almost feel the beads of sweat forming on the foreheads of BBC Sports Personality of the Year organisers as the Englishman grew in confidence heading down the stretch.
Increasingly loose of limb, sticking out his tongue to taunt the superstar across the ring, the fear did not only belong to those Beeb bods back in Blighty. Saunders is, to put it mildly, a hard man to warm to.
A few years back footage emerged of him offering a homeless woman cocaine to perform a sex act on his friend. During the first Covid-enforced lockdown last year, Saunders recorded a video telling men how to “best domestically abuse their female partners”. These are just some of his many indiscretions.
And this isn’t just recent form either, as Belfast boxer Paddy Gallagher so succinctly recalled a previous encounter with his MTK stablemate during an interview last year.
“I was over in Liverpool for a four nations tournament in 2006 and Billy Joe Saunders was one of the ones there… just the way he looked at us, he was growling.
“He was just the same obnoxious dick he still is now.”
Karma was about to call though. With 90 seconds left in the round, he overcommitted for the first time in the fight, missing with a shot and leaving himself wide open for a crunching right hand, smashing Saunders’s eye socket and breaking his cheekbone in three places.
Twenty seconds after the punch that effectively ended the fight (Saunders did not come out for the ninth round) came the real magic. His prey badly wounded, ‘Canelo’ threw both arms into the air, the partisan crowd responding by cranking the volume up to previously unimagined levels.
Another 14 seconds after that, the right eye of Saunders blackening more with each passing second, the Mexican played the matador again, this time curling one arm high above his head, a solemn stare never leaving his vanquished opponent.
This time the primal, bloodthirsty roar that followed brought an exhilarating surge of electricity, even as the clock hands edged towards 5am. This is what it’s all about.
After a year of making do with stale, sanitised sport, elevator muzak ‘atmosphere’ piped into living rooms while underwhelming action unfolds in benign arenas, this was real. And it was beautiful – brutal, but beautiful.
It is in moments like this you realise what we have been missing.
A record crowd of 73,126 fans packed into Arlington’s AT&T Stadium on Saturday night, an all-time attendance record for an indoor boxing event held in the US. Yet, earlier that same day, the 2021 inter-county GAA season began life behind closed doors.
Imagine the noise that would have greeted Neil McManus’s wonder-score as Antrim put the boot on Clare necks at Corrigan Park on Sunday?
Remember the western wall of sound that filled Croke Park when Cillian O’Connor’s late free sailed between the posts in the drawn 2016 All-Ireland final? Or the pandemonium when Petey Harte’s raking shot crashed high into the ball catcher behind the town end goal in Clones, all but ending Donegal’s challenge in the sun-soaked Ulster final earlier that same summer?
There are countless other examples you could reach for down through the decades, each capable of stirring the soul still upon mere mention.
In Texas, it is over two months since governor Greg Abbott ended virtually all restrictions – including even the wearing of masks - introduced during the pandemic. As of Monday, 11.6 million people have received at least one dose and 8.9 million people, or 30.8 per cent of the state’s population, are fully vaccinated.
We are not there yet, in the south especially, but the lack of urgency to get at least some supporters back through the gates is increasingly bizarre, considering the upward curve the country is on in terms of increased vaccination rollout and falling Covid cases in hospitals.
Given the biteback that followed some scenes of post-Championship celebration both on and off the pitch last autumn, when another lockdown was looming just around the corner, proceeding with caution in the governmental and GAA corridors of power has been understandable. Public health is, and always should be, the priority.
But the goalposts have shifted significantly since those troubled times. Over 65 per cent of the adult population in the north has now received their first dose of the vaccine, around 19 per cent in the south. Case numbers and Covid-related deaths have been on the decline.
Hairdressers are open again, in the north gyms, restaurants and beer gardens are back doing a trade, with indoor opening given the green light for May 24 alongside indoor leisure facilities and the likes of amateur boxing clubs whose doors have been closed for most of the past 13 months.
Yet Healy Park, MacHale Park and Nowlan Park will all remain echo chambers as another weekend, and another missed opportunity, rolls by.
Yesterday the Stormont executive gave the go ahead for up to 500 spectators to return to grounds across all codes from May 24. Given the GAA’s all-island approach, it remains to be seen how – or if – this will affect the Association’s thinking by the time the Ulster Championship commences at the end of June.
Irish sports minister Jack Chambers indicated earlier this week that tester events could take place in early July as part of the government’s phased reopening. Be patient, he urged. And we will, because we have been all along.
But displaying some kind of lateral thinking to aid the process of reconnecting people with their games, and each other, is surely something worth fighting for.
