Welcome to Crazy Town; or, Any Old Night of Boxing

I’m a nutcase, and no other sport satisfies my appetite for lunacy like boxing does. The closer you watch a fight on TV, the more strange, delectable nuggets you’re likely to find. And while there are plenty of famous examples — Teddy Atlas’s recent “We Are Firemen!” rant; the suggestion from Erik Morales’s corner that they “put some water on your balls” to wake Morales up midway through a listless performance against Zahir Raheem; Chris Algieri’s ex-trainer bragging that Algieri was about to put Manny Pacquiao to sleep moments before a Pacquiao left floored Algieri — the sport sometimes feels most rewarding when you’re watching an undercard fight of little consequence, and suddenly you start spotting wonderful details. Sometimes these moments are poignant, sometimes they’re gruesome and sometimes they’re hilarious.

This was my experience watching the first fight on a Showtime tripleheader that aired last Saturday. The bout, between junior middleweight prospect Tony Harrison and former middleweight prospect Fernando Guerrero, ended as expected — with Harrison knocking out his weak-chinned opponent after a little more than five one-sided rounds. But it wasn’t the action in the ring that made this fight so much fun, it was the unexpected and strange and fun details that enlivened the bout from beginning to end. Start with the fighters’ entrance outfits.

Fernando Guerrero says “thank God for year-round Halloween shops!”

While Detroit’s Tony Harrison looked like he had arrived directly from an audition for Kick-Ass 3 and never bothered to get out of character as a bootleg superhero.

I have a hard time not loving Harrison. The guy is such a natural hot dog. Even when he’s trying to be humble, he still sounds like he’s showboating, but it’s hard to get annoyed with Harrison the same way fans tired of Adrien Broner, whose flashy antics always seemed like a half-assed Floyd Mayweather Jr. imitation. Harrison swaggers because there doesn’t appear to be any other way for him to carry himself. Even though Harrison lost for the first time in his career last year (to a middling contender named Willie Nelson), he still struts like he’s cock of the walk. There’s something admirable about a guy who can dress up like a giant, bedazzled banana and walk to the ring for the earliest televised undercard bout at some casino in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, thinking “that’s right, I’m the man.”

Once the action started, Harrison controlled the action and scored his first knockdown against Guerrero near the end of the second round. Guerrero, who spoke before the fight of his plan to pressure and crowd Harrison, to make him fight off the back foot and to get nullify the rangier boxer’s reach advantage. Instead, from pretty much the moment the bell rang to start Round 1, Guerrero spent the first six minutes of the bout backing into corners and getting whapped on the end of Harrison’s looping right-hand power shots. This led to an exchange in Guerrero’s corner heading into Round Three that won’t go down in history as a great “boxing trainer tells it like it is” moment, but was still plenty good enough for me to crack a smile:

Boxing spits out these moments of raw truth like no other sport. “What the fuck are you doing?” was the question pretty much anyone would have asked Guerrero after two rounds. His sheepish, halfway oblivious, response, “I don’t know,” is sorta funny, since it’s so wildly incongruous to his situation (another loss might mean he’s no longer viable as a TV fighter, not to mention he’s been getting his butt kicked). And if you want to see it this way, the response can also be bone-chilling, given that Guerrero has just had his brain rattled and might have grinned and said “I don’t know” even if the question was “what year is it?” I don’t need to explain this to boxing fans, but most folks who love the sport know that it can be both funny and deeply disturbing at once, and they make their own peace with that dissonance.

And hey, the trainer’s tough love kinda-sorta worked! Guerrero woke up after the second round and started throwing punches, even forcing Harrison backward for stretches of the next few rounds. Guerrero landed a counter left near the end of Round Four or Five that shook Harrison up and forced him to retreat to the other side of the ring to regain his bearings. Harrison probably won Rounds 3–5 (or all but one of them), but they were competitive. Guerrero turned it into a fight.

Then he got put down hard on his ass by a Harrison left in the corner. With his mouth and nose bloodied and a plaintive look on his face, Guerrero made it to his feet, but he had nothing left. Seconds after the referee finished Guerrero’s eight count and called out “Fight!” Harrison was on top of Guerrero, forcing a stoppage with one last flurry in the corner.

And somehow, at the very end of the bout, we arrived at its kookiest moment. After the ref jumped in to wave off the fight and give Harrison a TKO win, Harrison ran a quick celebratory lap around the ring and then knelt beside Guerrero (who was still crumpled in the corner) to pray over his fallen opponent.

It’s customary for boxers to embrace in a show of compassion and mutual respect after a match. Only professional fighters know the trials they put their bodies through to prepare for a bout, and only they have a true, visceral understanding of the risks they take every time they enter a ring. (As fans, we acknowledge the danger and we can pay homage and lip service to the way they put their lives on the line, but that’s about it.)

But although it’s totally normal for fighters to hug it out in the center of the ring after the final bell or for a victorious boxer to check on an opponent after a knockout, it’s definitely not normal to kneel beside one’s opponent ten seconds after he’s been defeated, cradle his head with one glove, and then flamboyantly pray over him. Especially since, in this case, Guerrero didn’t lose in some scary, knocked-out cold, Pacquiao-Marquez IV fashion. He just got beat. He probably didn’t need Tony Harrison to come say a few Our Fathers over his head and then kiss his glove fifteen times the way Sammy Sosa used to kiss his hand and tap his chest and point to the heavens after hitting a home run.

The looks on the faces of the Guerrero and the ringside physician, who was still examining Guerrero when Harrison came over to pray, were priceless.

Is this mofo really praying right now?

Tony Harrison’s hot-dogging is so pure that even when he attempts a compassionate gesture for Guerrero and a show of faith, he looks like he’s just showing out. And I love this about him. It’s not an act, his shtick doesn’t seem focus-grouped or put-on. It’s just Tony Harrison. If the Willie Nelson loss is any indication, he might not have the stamina, punch resistance, or all-around tools to become a world-class fighter, but I hope he sticks around as a contender for a while, because the guy is a showman. Not even a minute after his prayer, Harrison was once again swathed in gold sequins, rose-tinted sunglasses over his eyes, bouncing in front of the cameras and talking himself up. He can’t help himself, and I can’t help but like him for it.