Thank God for the Marquez Brothers. Juan Manuel and Rafael are like a panacea for the multi-symptom woes of boxing. Whenever faced with the inevitable moment of doubt that is generally spawned after witnessing some travesty of professional prizefighting, such as Wladimir Klitschko-Sultan Ibragimov or Sam Peter-Oleg Maskaev, in which the layers of love and devotion reserved for the sport of boxing in the hearts and minds of each and every fan the world over are suddenly being stripped away, we should always be so lucky as to have the event washed away by the pure, sweet waters of pugilism in its most true form like we saw in Rafael Marquez vs. Israel Vazquez or Manny Pacquiao vs. Juan Manuel Marquez. Bouts like these are just what the doctor ordered to replace the memory of why we were drawn to this ?dying? sport in the first place.
In the past month, these two products of the same gene pool have treated the boxing world to such spectacles of intense bravery, that the poetic soul can?t help but recall the song dedicated to Charlemagne?s most famous guard Roland. It is not a stretch by any means to claim that ring wars such as those fought by R. Marquez-Vazquez, and J.M. Marquez-Manny Pacquiao are the reasons why we continue to watch; why we continue to offer up fifty dollars a pop in an economy where gas prices rise at a rate equaled only by the decrease in the value of our currency. We do not watch in order to see limited fighters such as Tye Fields or David Diaz feed off of even more limited fighters than themselves in order to collect the kind of low risk/high reward paycheck that would leave Wall Street?s most scandalous inside traders feeling dirty and in need of a hot shower. We watch rather, for those rare moments when Pluto is rebuilding the Seventh House of Aquarius and two world class fighters, who are evenly matched, engage in a battle that exceeds expectations. Larry Merchant had it right when he said that the boxing world had never known anything like the Marquez brothers, and I dare say it never will again.
And even though both men were ?defeated? in this month of March 2008, neither man can be said to have been beaten. A sort of testament to their abilities comes in the fact that despite their ?losses,? Juan Manuel and little brother Rafael will both remain ranked in the top ten of any Pound-for-Pound list. For my own part, I will continue to place the terms ?defeat? and ?loss,? in all of their ignoble forms, within quotation marks when referring to what has transpired most recently within the careers of the brothers Marquez. To put it bluntly, I watched both men fight this month and failed to see either man defeated. What I did do however, was bare uncomfortable witness as Rafael and Juan Manuel were saddled with ?losses? that they didn?t fully deserve.
Vazquez and Pacquiao fans need not be outraged. I am not here to cry foul or make the claim that some sort of robbery took place, for it did not. I will freely state, unequivocally, that there was nothing inherently wrong or suspect in regards to either decision that was reached. Yet, what is wrong with the situation is that it fell to fallible human eyes and naturally biased human minds to decide, in both cases, who was deserving of the title ?Victor? and who should be forced to wear a scarlet ?Loser? on their garments for the span of their lifetime. To be completely fair, I could easily be writing this article about Pacquiao and Vazquez instead of the Marquez brothers, and would be had the roles been reversed, for in my heart of hearts I know it to be a source of deep shame that any of these four fighters, who so courageously contested these conflicts with their steadfast refusals to accept defeat, even when it appeared imminent, should have triumph ripped from their grasp when they had conceded nothing in the ring. It would have been a tragedy in the cases of Vazquez and Pacquiao just as it is in the cases of Rafael and Juan Manuel.
As fans, we are conditioned to view a draw as an outcome far worse than a loss since it leaves matters unsettled, but we forget that often it is the only noble conclusion to be drawn. In bouts as close and as important as these two were, there should be an exit strategy available for the judges that would allow them to be angels of their better natures and accept the fact that the subjective scoring system currently in place is inadequate in certain special circumstances, and offer the option of declaring themselves insufficient to judge such matters despite their credentials. In plainer terms, at the end of those fights, which from time to time occur in our sport, where the end result is simply too close to call, the judges should reserve the right to proudly declare, ?I have no clue who won!? As things stand now, these poor people are expected to score each round as fairly as they possibly can using the ten point must system, turn in their cards, and wash their hands of the whole ordeal, no matter how uncomfortable they may be with the end numerical result. We rarely ask them how they feel about the way in which the numbers work out, just as we rarely hesitate in lambasting them as biased idiots who?ve never seen a boxing match before when they draw a conclusion that differs from our own.
The simple fact of the matter is that nothing underhanded or shady occurred at the Pacquiao-Marquez bout no matter what was suggested at the post fight press conference, just as nothing of the sort occurred on March 1st. In each fight, three judges sat down at a table with their pen and a score card and did their best to reach a fair judgment, and in each fight three judges ended up scoring it a different way. The real tragedy of the thing is that inside one month, two professional prize fights were fought in which the outcome was too close to call, and six human beings were charged with deciding the outcome and, to some extent, the futures of the four modern gladiators who fought each other as hard and determinedly as men can fight, and two men were told that they lost when in fact they hadn?t.
Providence has determined that the Marquez brothers must see their stars involuntarily dimmed, at least in comparison to those newly formed Super Giants Israel Vazquez and Manny Pacquiao, and the only thing that we can offer them as consolation are these words, meager though they be: Thank you.
Thank you for reminding us all that the reason we follow this brutal sport in the first place is because of men like you; true poets of the ring whose brilliance in their craft is parallel only to that of Keats in his, and whose nobility of spirit enable them to turn violence in its most brutal form into high art. With a palette consisting of courage, heart, skill, speed, power, and the simple, raw, natural drive to succeed, you have both painted such masterpieces that would make Caravaggio, Titian, or Rembrandt envious. Thank you. We cannot say it enough.
?Courage is reckoned the greatest of all virtues; because, unless a man has that virtue, he has no security for preserving any other.?–Samuel Johnson
