tastes so sweet for Joshua
IN the end, all he left him with was his desperation. The desperation of a man who knew it was over, the desperation of a champion who knew he was beaten, the desperation of a man who tried to throw kitchen sinks but time and again dropped them on his foot.
And so Andy Ruiz pounded his fleshy chest, he called him on, begged almost in those final 10 seconds. The last 10 seconds of a reign that ran for six months and six days and was wonderful in its way but was unpicked by the clubber who became a surgeon.
How brilliant it was. Anthony Joshua fought the fight they all said he needed to fight and which many thought he could not deliver. The control. The discipline. The resistance of instinct. The opposite of each and every facet that made his demise on June 1 so resounding and concussive.
When he was done, in those initial seconds after he had pulled off the resurrection and won the numbers game by a landslide, Joshua barely mustered a grin. Stern-faced and expressionless, for a moment or two he was good to his word that getting back to where he belonged would be nothing special.
And then the mask slipped. He climbed to the four posts of the ring and screamed loud to all corners of this new stadium in a hard kingdom in a big desert. When his belts were looped around his right arm, he screamed some more. Special? It meant the world. And now he has it back. And how he did it.
Again, to the fight — the other half of the narrative can wait. He was brilliant. Not in pure performance terms — this wasn’t the dance of an Andre Ward or Floyd Mayweather. It wasn’t pretty like that, the way they make poetry of angles and movement and management of distance. It wasn’t dramatic, either, in the manner of a great sporting spectacle, like that win over Wladimir Klitschko.
But he was brilliant because he wasn’t brilliant. He was brilliant because he did what we do not expect of him. Most of the time, anyway. There were glimpses of what he was warned against, of course.
Such as the second, when he stepped in and did what they ordered him to avoid — an exchange — and got cut. Or the fourth when he did it again and swallowed the punch that fogged his brain in New York — the left hook. Or the sixth when it happened again. Same shot, same circumstance. ‘AJ, no,’ screamed two men in that swarming entourage of his. They were trapped in a state of high anxiety for most of the 36 minutes.
But their man was bossing it.
Back foot, light toes, sharp jabs, a big right on occasion and only a few forays into the red zone. He was probably up by five rounds to one at halfway.
Then into the seventh, the doomsday session of Madison Square Garden. When Ruiz loaded up for the haymaker left to end all haymaker lefts, Joshua arched back, shuffled his feet and made Ruiz miss by a mile. If we are to overblow such moments, heaven forbid, it was the symbolic point at which Joshua got the measure of this short, tubby and excellent riddle called Andy Ruiz.
He got to the end, he resisted the final invitation for the kind of exchange that would risk everything, and he got back those belts.
Now, his reputation as a fighting man is even greater than before. Not just anyone can be a champion.
Even fewer return to the peak after having their ropes cut. Even fewer again do it in immediate rematches — in heavyweight history, there are three to be precise, Floyd Patterson, Muhammad Ali and Lennox Lewis. To that gilded company add Joshua.
And that is what he will bring back from Saudi Arabia — the legacy of a great fighting man.
But it is also necessary at this point to wonder just a little about what he will leave behind, because this was not a perfect trip. We have committed plenty to that line of thought this week, but it must remain relevant because some things are bigger than the heavyweight championship.
That feeling reappeared in the wake of victory when Joshua started thanking the princes of a regime that, in the educated eyes of
Amnesty International, have used him as a pawn in a deeply cynical game.
The feeling grew stronger when he blundered into a comment about finding a way to ‘decapitate’ Ruiz. Deary me.
Joshua has to accept any blowback as the tax for his payday. He took the money and he must swallow any judgements that come from his willingness to be deployed as a wash cloth by the Saudis. Maybe, in time, no one will even care. That is the way of boxing and nowhere, perhaps, has that been better showcased than on a fight card on which four fighters had either served a doping ban or submitted an iffy sample.
Time and again the main thing that seems to matter is getting the show on and the trading of punches. Ethics are usually sent scurrying to the neutral corner or out of the building altogether.
That is the smudge in all this. The blight. An asterisk of sorts.
But, as we all know, governments such as ours have taken money from the same source. So who would blame a boxer? It’s an interesting debate.
Far more clear cut is the sporting status of Anthony Joshua. He is back on top of the world.