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Sporting

Want to Visit the Jazz Age? Try Fight Night in Vegas

Sergey Kovalev, right, punching Andre Ward during their boxing match in Las Vegas in November.Credit...John Locher/Associated Press

It’s always 1926 at the fights. A horse-and-wagon tang of atavism drifts in the air as boxers throw traditional punches — jabs, crosses and hooks — and voices from the crowd call out timeless advice: “To the body! The body!”

Floating somewhere behind the hip-hop and jock-rock cranked on the sound system at a match today are ghostly echoes of a theater organ playing “Beautiful Dreamer,” and the eternal verities apply: Styles make fights; speed is power, and ring generalship can be both; a good big man beats a good little man, except when he doesn’t.

Other sports may fetishize innovation and change — set shot to jump shot to windmill slam dunk; single-wing to shotgun to West Coast offense — but the fight world mostly tries not to forget what it knew in bygone days.

This atmosphere of 1926-ness intensifies when the faithful gather for a big fight, as they did in Las Vegas last month for a light-heavyweight title bout between Andre Ward and Sergey Kovalev. Boxing isn’t anywhere near as popular as it used to be, but as you join a converging herd of fellow fight people, it becomes easier to sustain the fantasy that the coming battle matters deeply to everyone.

This time, at the departure gate at the airport on the evening before the big fight, the herd started as one guy, Evan. He caught me peeking over his shoulder at the weigh-in streaming on his laptop and turned the screen my way. We watched Ward and Kovalev, stripped down to shorts, weigh in right at the 175-pound limit. Evan had a gracious stoopside manner and combed his hair straight back from his forehead, an old-neighborhood guy. He favored Kovalev as a matter of policy, preferring pressure fighters to cutie-pies. I favored Ward, and counterpunching technicians in general.

It was a cordial difference of opinion, and the two undefeated champions in their physical prime were too evenly matched for a reasonable observer to allow more than a slight edge to either. The betting odds were almost even, shaded slightly in Ward’s favor. As we watched them enact the weigh-in rituals, culminating in a cool rendition of the usual staredown, Evan and I performed familiar analytical routines. We talked about analogous matchups in which the big hitter or the master boxer prevailed — Marvin Hagler and Sugar Ray Leonard, Tito Trinidad and Bernard Hopkins, Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney — and we measured Kovalev’s long-range punching power and larger frame against Ward’s infighting prowess and superior stamina. On the airport terminal’s sound system, Frank Sinatra sang “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.”

The practice of flying to a big fight goes back to 1927, when in the aftermath of Charles Lindbergh’s trans-Atlantic crossing a handful of airborne swells joined the many thousands hastening to Chicago for the rematch between Tunney and Dempsey. Princess Xenia of Greece arrived in a TriMotor in time to hear the rumor that Al Capone had placed a large bet on Dempsey, the consummate pressure fighter. But it was Tunney, the master technician, who prevailed for a second time.

Back then there was no bigger deal in sports than a major boxing match, and few comparably big deals in the culture at large. The Dempsey-Tunney bouts rivaled Lucky Lindy’s feat as newsmaking occasions, and Rocky Marciano’s and Muhammad Ali’s title defenses qualified as front-page news well into the television era. But boxing has gradually slipped to the status of a niche enthusiasm, and a big fight has become an esoteric throwback experience.

Much later that night, in a casino in Las Vegas, I eavesdropped on two guys down the bar who were studying a sheet of gimmick bets offered by a sportsbook: 20-1 on Kovalev by KO in Round 7, 40-1 on Ward by KO in Round 4, and such. One was considering risking serious money on a draw, at 18-1 odds.

At ringside the next afternoon, fight writers exchanged knowing chatter before the first undercard bout. “He’s old-school, the way he rolls with the shots,” said one. Others nodded sagely. Nearby, Jim Lampley recorded voice-overs for the HBO telecast later that evening, switching his Dramatic Announcer Voice on and off.

The undercard, nine bouts in which anointed winners teed off on designated losers, began six hours before the main event. After a while I began to feel gorged on boxing, as if I were eating one meat course after another, starting with baloney and working up to wild boar and cerf à la royale. I tried to save room for the main course.

As the main event approached, the crowd grew giddy with the realization that Kovalev and Ward were actually about to fight. The tacit shared knowledge that looking forward so keenly to a fight probably made us all bad people strengthened the crowd’s sense of itself. Those who disapprove of boxing might well regard us as embarrassing holdovers in a supposedly more-evolved age of remote-control violence, but morally indefensible blood sport can still teach you something meaningful about being human — and, anyway, what competing agonistic spectacles qualify as morally superior these days? Football? Electoral politics?

The color guard entered the ring for the Russian and American national anthems. Patriotism always strikes me as out of place at the fights, where the tribal identification that matters most is not national or even ethnic but stylistic: in this case, the seek-and-destroy hitter from Chelyabinsk versus the cerebral tactician from Oakland.

It was time to put everything else aside and watch the two men figure the complex problem posed by their matchup. At first, Kovalev seemed to hurt Ward every time he touched him, even with his jab. Ward grabbed him around the waist and hung on, trying to adjust to the force of his power. In the second round Kovalev caught Ward coming in and dropped him to all fours with a crushing right.

Ward got up. He was in trouble, but he hadn’t lost his poise. It was as if he found himself suddenly marooned in a strange land where safes and anvils fell from the sky at the behest of a malign regime. The story of the fight was the story of his working out how to survive in this terrible place, then to prosper, and finally to overthrow the government.

As Kovalev tired, Ward used his highly educated left hand to score with jabs and surging hooks. Ward tied up Kovalev in clinches and worked an arm free to maul him with short, ripping punches — a sophisticated stylist employing junkyard dog tactics at close range. Even at its nastiest the contest was conducted with advanced subtlety, both men expertly feinting to induce a counter that could be countered in turn. I found myself nodding along, as if to well-played music.

In the sixth round Ward feinted and Kovalev overreacted to it, but Ward didn’t have a punch on the way. Satisfied with the flinch the diagnostic feint had elicited, Ward settled in to win rounds. They never did work out a tacit agreement on the crucial question of which of them would attack, so the initiative passed back and forth between them all the way to the end.

There was general uproar when all three judges awarded the victory to Ward by a single point, 114-113. Kovalev’s promoter complained that the referee allowed too much wrestling, which might have been true, and that Ward ran away, which was not true. A ringside blowhard announced that he had it 116-111 for Kovalev, and there was dark talk of robbery.

But there was no need for conspiracy theories. Four of the 12 rounds were extremely difficult to score, and the decision could plausibly have gone either way or come out a draw.

On my flight out of town a few hours later, the lights of Las Vegas receding in the predawn desert darkness below, I reflected on the fight. I didn’t care much about the judges’ decision or the controversy. What mattered to me was that the combatants had given of their best and would have to meet again to continue working out the problem of their matchup.

It mattered, too, that all present, awash in the perpetual 1926-ness of boxing, had been reminded that the eternal verities still applied: Styles still make fights; speed is still power, and ring generalship can still be both; and a good big man still beats a good little man, except when he doesn’t.

Carlo Rotella is director of American studies at Boston College and a co-editor, with Michael Ezra, of the forthcoming “The Bittersweet Science: Fifteen Writers in the Gym, in the Corner, and at Ringside.”

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