Sergio De La Pava - A Naked Singularity

When Alana and I were but squirts, a trip to the airport was as good as it got. To begin with, such trips almost always occurred late on Friday nights, an already magical time of the week where what passed for pressure and responsibility was drained from our little lives. Then there was the airport itself with its tiny coin-operated Televisions, beeping golf carts, and revolving luggage carousels. We liked pretty much everything about it, especially the end result because a trip to the airport almost always meant someone was coming from Colombia and they would be staying with us, which would mean chaos in our home; chaos being almost universally welcomed by squirts growing up in highly stable homes like ours and probably loathed by our opposites. I for one would have to sleep on the sofa if, for example, my twin bed and Alana’s had been joined and tied together at the legs for Buela and Buelo to sleep in. And I loved sleeping on that sofa because whatever inexplicable material it was covered in managed to maintain itself at a temperature ten to twenty degrees cooler than room temperature and what could be better than that for sleeping?

And no one in our family ever, for any reason, did something like take a cab home from the airport or stay in a hotel while visiting family. So expensive and wasteful. Other people permitted those things when their families visited but they were the wrong kind of people. Quiet, unemotional people who at all times thought of nothing but their self-interest. People unwilling to make even temporary sacrifices. People who viewed things like trips to the airport and overnight guests as extreme impositions and so declined or threw money at the problem.

When I told Alana about my travel plans for that Monday she said she feared I was beginning the not-terribly-long process of becoming one of those cab and hotel people. She said she would come to the airport, in my car, and pick me up; thereby avoiding, or at least delaying, my probably-ineluctable descent into that unfeeling frost.

All of which sounded nice and helpful until I found myself sitting in the precise area we had agreed to meet and there was nobody around who even resembled Alana. I began to lose even the scant hope I initially had that the great many number of things that could go wrong with an endeavor like ours would not go wrong on this occasion. For one thing, Alana could quite easily have forgotten our arrangement entirely as I was unable to make the customary night-before-reminder phone call and in fact during my three-plus days in Alabama, despite repeated attempts, I was never able to execute a simple phone call to a location outside The Orchard. Then there was the matter of the airport itself with its many gates, flights, and screens with changing numbers and letters, none of which represented great Alana strengths. I could be there all day.

I knew what I was going to do in now less than two days and I wanted to go in there with the right mindset. I wanted to think positive thoughts so I thought about Benitez and what happened after he lost to Leonard. The problem with the loss to Leonard, well one of them anyway, was Wilfred’s reaction. The great boxer hates to lose. More than that really, he fears and despises it down to the final gasp of his soul’s air. In fact he can so little accept loss that even obvious losses are followed by inevitable, sometimes insane, excuses. And this is not a generalization about a group of people called Great Boxers . Rather this is a partial definition of that term: a concept that has great intuitive appeal when correctly considered. Losing a boxing match is not at all like discovering that another person is better than you at a particular skill. Remember that Boxing is basically fighting. If someone outfights you then you have to come to grips with all that entails. Being outfought, or worse knocked out, means you have been emasculated and are subsequently less of a man than your opponent. In other words, if the world consisted of just you and him, he would get what he wanted and you wouldn’t. You have to understand that notion to be a great boxer because there is nothing that will motivate you to continue taking an obvious beating, not love of money or fame, not enjoyment of athletic competition, other than the fear inspired by this realization. The great fighter’s arrogance will not allow him to concede that another person is better than him and this refusal makes him perform better. The problem with Benitez in the loss to Leonard was how easily he seemed to accept defeat. When the referee stopped the fight handing Wilfred his first loss, a TKO loss no less, Benitez didn’t argue with him even though only seconds remained in the fight and he didn’t seem badly hurt. Instead he smiled as if no big deal then exerted almost as much effort trying to congratulate Leonard as he had the previous fourteen rounds. It was almost as if he was relieved he had finally lost and more than one observer thought they saw this.

But every fighter eventually loses if he fights long enough and takes anything resembling appropriate risk and all the Leonard fight proved was that Benitez was no different. What truly matters is what happens after that first loss. After Wilfred’s first loss he climbed back into the ring on March 9, 1980 in Florida against someone named Johnny Turner. Benitez knocked Turner out in the ninth round and followed that victory, five months later, with another knockout win, this time over Tony Chiaverini.

In between those two Benitez fights, a new Welterweight Champion was crowned. After successfully defending the title he had taken from Benitez with a fourth-round knockout of Dave Green, Sugar Ray Leonard then defended his title against former lightweight champion Roberto Duran. Duran basically disliked everyone, especially opponents, but he seemed to reserve a special malice for the pretty boy Leonard. During the press tour leading up to the fight he did charming things like give Leonard’s wife the finger (meaning his middle one) and essentially questioned Leonard’s manhood at every opportunity. Many later characterized Duran’s actions as an attempt, ultimately successful, to draw the slick Leonard into the kind of chest-to-chest fight he could not win, but more likely they were simply evidence of a genuine hatred and arrogance from an insanely intense Man. The fight took place on June 20, 1980 in Montreal, the site of Leonard’s Olympic triumph four years earlier, and, whatever the motivation, Leonard did principally stand toe to toe with Duran and he did get outfought and lose; a loss that featured Leonard absorbing a short right/left hook combination from Duran midway through the second that almost dropped him on his face and that had him in serious trouble. Toward the end of the fifteenth round Duran taunted Leonard by pointing at his own chin, a chin that had proven surprisingly difficult for Leonard to hit. When the fight was over Leonard extended a glove toward Duran as peace offering but Duran dismissively waved him off. Then when Leonard raised his arms in the universal boxing sign for I think I won Duran pushed him away, a look of complete disdain on his volcanic bearded face. When the close majority decision was announced, Duran was the new champion, there was no longer any dispute over who the best pound-for-pound fighter in the world was, and Duran had gone a long way toward securing his spot as one of the ten greatest boxers of all time. Leonard, who would later show a distinct aversion to granting rematches to vanquished foes, requested and was given an immediate rematch. The fight was scheduled for November 25, 1980 in New Orleans.