SUPERFIGHT PREVIEW
Will we stop and stare, or will we stand and cheer? Either way, for however long it lasts, and whatever fight it becomes, Vasyl Lomachenko and Guillermo Rigondeaux – the two most gifted boxers of the current era – will have our attention, writes Oliver Go
Analysing this weekend’s brilliant Lomachenko-rigondeaux matchup
SATURDAY night in New York pits almost a thousand amateur fights’ worth of experience in the ring when Vasyl Lomachenko defends his WBO super-featherweight title against Guillermo Rigondeaux at Madison Square Garden. That they’ve fought between them no more than 27 times in a professional ring is not so much beside the point as it is the point itself: Lomachenko and Rigondeaux are bona fide virtuosos in the classical sense, equipped with a degree of mastery over the tools of their trade that is as dazzling as it is uncommon. Whether that is sufficient to give satisfaction, though, is the larger question at stake.
Rigondeaux, Miami, Florida, by way of Cuba, has largely languished on PPV undercards and low budget shows since April 2013, when he tickled both Nonito Donaire and his wider audience into submission over 12 desultory rounds on HBO. That was followed by a deleteriously bad defence of his twin super-bantamweight titles against Joseph Agbeko in December, which mostly led HBO to conclude that Rigondeaux was better served as an amuse bouche elsewhere rather than a fully paid up main course. Since then, the Cuban has fought five times, in Macao, Osaka, Las Vegas twice, as well as Cardiff. This was not how Rigondeaux’s career was meant to pan out.
By contrast, Vasyl Lomachenko, Oxnard, California, via Bilhoroddnistrovskyi, Ukraine, is big news
already, perhaps reflecting recent adjustments in American palettes to handle Eastern European flavours. Entering on the back of six straight stoppages, even if the past three have all been corner-led, Lomachenko has learned from Rigondeaux not to mistake disinterestedness as a virtue: if you’re not going to let your opponent hit you, Lomachenko reasons, at least make the not-hitting look dramatic. Lomachenko beat Nicholas Walters into quitting in a fight almost certainly as bad as some of Rigondeaux’s lesser fare, but he still managed to give it the atmosphere of high drama. Walters quit with despair in his soul.
Perhaps if people went to fights as they go to view art in museums, Rigondeaux would be better appreciated. That is often the implicit suggestion made by those who take Rigondeaux for an important fighter, given the way excuses and explanations are trailed by the language of aestheticism, transcendence, and other other-worldly pursuits. But boxing is an art form in the same way that chiseling is: no one wants their wood to be transcendent. It takes a mind of pure abstraction to appreciate boxing as ballet, given the feet should be intimately caught up in more important tasks: like hitting, for example.
Lomachenko has a background in ballet, which perhaps explains why he knows the difference so much better than Rigondeaux. The Ukrainian does not use his feet only to beguile and hypnotise his opponents, but rather makes of them an especially dramatic torture weapon: opponents cannot be lulled into watching Lomachenko’s feet precisely because he moves with such speed and because he so insistently moves himself that they’re there one moment, here the next, and all in the flash of an instant. One of Lomachenko’s favoured recent maneouvres, again with a taste for the dramatic, is to steal in upright on top of opponents as they rear back or hold themselves earnestly in defence, in such a way that he loses leverage on his punches but flaunts his superiority in the apparent unnecessariness to him of such conventionalities as leverage and distance. Lomachenko fights taut with disdain for his opponents.
Still, there’ve been scant pickings to delight in from more recent outings: Walters, as noted, found himself drowning in melancholy (even if he was never hit with the regularity that might have been its common cause), while both Jason Sosa and Miguel Marriaga never had a dog in the fight. Whether that’s enough to take pleasure in depends on your taste, as well as the stiffness of drink: Lomachenko has fought his recent fights with the virtuosity of a man who knows he needs to introduce to them the aspect of the
IF RIGONDEAUX WAS AMERICAN, AND HAD THE PHYSIQUE TO STAND THE HEAVIER WEIGHTS, HE MIGHT BE MORE OF A NAME
THE CUBAN IS SPECIAL ENOUGH TO MAKE VASYL FIGHT SERIOUSLY
exhibition if they’re going to pass as digestible. But there’s a reason exhibitions belong in the circus, not the ring. Bad for Lomachenko, viewers know this. Hands down hip swaying may serve once or twice, but it’s a scant substitute for competitiveness. Clowning makes for far better highlight reels than it does 12-round fights. Accordingly, about 100,000 people that had tuned in to see the Ukrainian treat Jason Sosa like he was a barely animate piece of gym equipment then chose to pass on his next offering against Marriaga. Even if a midway channel shift by ESPN caused a few problems – the network’s broadcast of a Hall of Fame football ceremony ran over, which saw the Lomachenko telecast shunted to ESPN2 and then re-incorporated on the headline channel in time for the main event – the decision by the network to work around a poxy ceremony implies just how unnecessary and how bad a sell this fight was. Marriaga had lost his most recent fight to Oscar Valdez at featherweight, and yet here he was a weight class higher against one of the lead fighters in the world.
Even worse, folks aren’t lastingly interested in watching Lomachenko play striptease with lesser challengers
because they know he’s beatable. And not just theoretically beatable—in practice. Top Rank has done its best to bury Lomachenko’s second fight loss with Orlando Salido at the foot of his record, and Lomachenko himself is pronouncedly uninterested in talking at any great length about it: when I interviewed him for this publication in June 2016 and asked about the mugging Salido had pulled off, his manager, Egis Klimas, translating between us, scoffed quickly: “Are you guys gonna forget any day about that Salido fight or what?” But aficionados have long memories and simple tastes: the bout with Salido remains Lomachenko’s most interesting to date. Which isn’t to say it’s likely to be reprised any time soon. Salido is a fighter in decline (even if he’s been a fighter in decline seemingly forever, with a chin that vacillates between concrete and limestone depending on the day). And Lomachenko was a fighter on the rise then, taking an extraordinary risk in just his second bout. It remains absolutely one of the most creditable things about him that he pursued such a clash and then fought so gamely when far safer routes were possible. Lomachenko is probably better now than then. But perhaps not?
It seems fairly easy to predict that Rigondeaux won’t ask the same questions of Lomachenko as Salido did. The Cuban is jumping eight pounds in weight, from bantam to super-feather, in a move that reflects his total lack of currency at the negotiating table. Lomachenko, at 5ft 6ins and a little bit, has grown into a full size 130lb fighter with pretensions to moving to lightweight soon, who flaunted substantial physical advantages over Marriaga other than just the obvious speed differential. Rigondeaux, at 5ft 4ins, was barely a standard size super-bantam. The upper hand that Salido grabbed for himself by coming in overweight and dwarfing Lomachenko simply will not be available to Rigondeaux.
Still, the Cuban is special enough to make Lomachenko fight seriously, which should already lift this bout from the category of exhibition into far more rarefied territory. “El Chacal” is now 37, with a chin that hasn’t exactly borne abuse phlegmatically, but he is also blessed with quick, powerful hands, fantastic timing, exceptional balance, and defensive instincts that, if we are completely honest, might not belong in the professional ranks, such is their hold on him. If Rigondeaux was American,
named Mayweather, and had the physique to stand the heavier weights, he might be more of a name, but he’s destined to remain a fringe attraction with a propensity for conducting low level keyboard spats between 140 and 280 characters online.
This doesn’t make him any easier for Lomachenko. It’s hard to imagine Rigondeaux winning, despite the mostly warranted hype this fight has bought for itself, in part because while it’s hard to distinguish between these fighters for technique and talent it is yet fairly easy to separate them on bases intangible (desire, perhaps) and easier still when it comes to the tangible (weight, size). But it’s also hard to imagine Lomachenko doing so while looking like himself: Rigondeaux has too much talent, and feet too quick, to let Lomachenko take ownership of the ring in the ways he likes. Where Lomachenko has become accustomed to imposing his own unique sense of rhythm upon essentially stand-up, faceforward, static fighters, it’ll be harder to dictate the direction of the bout against a fighter as distinctive as Rigondeaux. Nonito Donaire, who made his career invading other fighters’ sense of time and terminating them, still found himself locked out of step against the Cuban. There’s still, too, the potential for this to be fun. Lomachenko has such a deep, versatile punching arsenal that it’s impossible to imagine him not getting his fair share of licks in. And while Rigondeaux tends to take fights to a level of abstraction even Kazimir Malevich would have backed away from, he has also long needed the right dance partner if he’s to make manifest any of those vast, virtuosic talents. Malevich, whose obsession with non-representational geometric canvases saw him removed by the Communist Party from his position as director of Artistic Culture in Petrograd in 1926, was still able to turn his considerable abilities to the more concrete concerns of socialist realism and representational art toward the end of his life. Lomachenko may be the spur Rigondeaux, himself an escapee from another revolutionary regime, needs to realise his capacities in ways more bodily than heaven.
It’s hard to predict what sort of fight this will look like. It’s harder still to pick against Lomachenko. But if there’s any guarantee, it might be this: given each other, Lomachenko and Rigondeaux should have the capacities to concretise the art form of boxing as art work. Whether it’s a museum piece or something juicier to savour remains to be seen.