Watching a heated exchange in the Juan Manuel Marquez ? Juan Diaz fight on Saturday night, in which Diaz momentarily dropped his ?boxer? strategy and was moving in headfirst on Marquez, brought me to thinking about commentary from Max Kellerman in their first battle.
?Diaz is trying to follow in the footsteps of boxing greats like Jake Lamotta, Jeff Fenech and others who were great pressure fighters,? Kellerman said. ?Even though they weren?t big punchers but they were able to establish themselves with their volume of punches and their physical strength.?
Remembering the comment made me glance around the fight watching environment, McCann?s Pub and Grill in Astoria, New York, and wonder how a bar located so close to boxing?s mecca, Madison Square Garden and much of boxing?s past would fare back in the days of Lamotta.
In the days of Lamotta, famed boxing writer A.J. Liebling , author of ?The Sweet Science?, loved to write not only about the fight itself, but the atmosphere of the fight filling the streets, bars and arena pre and post-battle.
One of Lieblings favorite boxing haunts was Sugar Ray?s on 7th Avenue in Harlem, owned by boxing arguable greatest, Sugar Ray Robinson. After one of Robinson?s untelevised fights Liebling decided to stop by Sugar Ray?s for a drink to soak in the scene.
Sugar Ray at Sugar Ray’s
?Just then I sighted a cab heated uptown empty, and I stopped it and got aboard,? Liebling wrote in ?Sugar Ray and the Milling Cove?. ??Drive me Downtown, past Sugar Ray?s,? I said. As we approached the Theresa, the avenue was so jammed up with traffic that we could barely move. People were packed around the safety islands and overflowed onto the street. Somebody was beating an oilcan like a tomtom, and a tall, limber man was dancing in the street. Any idea I may have had of stopping Sugar Ray?s for a nightcap left me when I saw the crowd in front of the door.?
Sugar Ray?s has long been closed, but for Marquez-Diaz, Liebling would have had plenty of room for a nightcap at McCann?s.
A blackboard sign outside of the bar read ?Marquez vs. Diaz, ($10 cover)?. Inside the bar, throughout the undercard and much of the main event, plenty of seats could still be found, a rarity on a Saturday night where the bar would usually be packed from stools to back wall. From the inside, you could see street traffic passing over the bar on the discovery of a cover charge.
The volume on the televisions was turned up for the fight, but a couple patrons at the end of the bar near the exit, attention focused elsewhere, were asking if the volume for the ballgame could be turned up.
Richie, the bartender, could only shake his head. The wooden walls of the Irish bar are always adorned with fight posters showcasing the next upcoming event but few seem to be interested.
?I think the manager was just trying it one more time to see if it was worth it,? Richie lamented about the Pay Per View boxing card. ?We charge a cover for this and no one comes, nothing like the UFC events.?
Richie was right. At a recent UFC event I attended at the bar, Chuck Liddell vs. Rich Franklin the bar was packed like a sausage, elbow to elbow, front to back.
For a bar to show a Par-Per-View event the pricetag can range anywhere from $1,000 ? $4,000 to air and is based around factors such as bar capacity. The cover charge is one of the bars ways of recouping or making a profit on the event aired. No money recouped for boxing events in bars such as McCann?s will result in fewer and fewer bars airing cards.
Boxing events in public places seem to be more nowadays for the antiquarians, the lovers of things past. On very rare occasions, such as a Floyd Mayweather or Manny Pacquaio fight, will the energy of a large boxing crowd fill an area.
As less and less fights such as Mayweather and Pacquiao are made, the less and less fans there are, the more boxing?s place might be a museum.
