by David P. Greisman
In a week where days were spent questioning whether (and where) the rematch between Miguel Cotto and Antonio Margarito would occur, it took less than half an hour to remind us of why it must.
This was the challenge facing the producers of HBO’s “24/7” series — how do you turn boxing fans’ attention to the fourth major pay-per-view in three months and the second in three weeks? How do you bring the conversation away from the third bout between Manny Pacquiao and Juan Manuel Marquez and direct it toward the second bout between Cotto and Margarito?
You do it by letting the fighters speak for themselves.
Let us let the first episode of “24/7 Cotto/Margarito,” which aired this past Saturday, do the same. There was much about it that got people talking, and for good reason.
With a nod to syndicated columnist Norman Chad, I took notes:
10:01 p.m. Eastern Time: We open, fittingly, with a shot of a hand being wrapped in gauze and tape. For however great the first fight between Miguel Cotto and Antonio Margarito was, it has since been overshadowed by conspiracy and controversy.
Margarito had defeated Cotto by stoppage in the 11th round in July 2008. Six months later, in his first defense, Margarito was caught before the fight with tampered hand wraps, with a hard object inserted within that athletic commission investigators later determined to have calcium and sulfur, ingredients of plaster of Paris, on it.
The inserts were confiscated. Margarito’s hands were rewrapped. And he subsequently was beaten up and defeated by Shane Mosley. Since then, past Margarito opponents, and Cotto in particular, have wondered whether Margarito had cheated against them.
Margarito was suspended but let back into the sport. Cotto had said he’d never fight Margarito again, but changed his mind. The allure of money might have played a part in that. So, too, has the weight of wounded pride.
10:02 p.m.: The first fight itself is deserving of attention, though. Some people get wrapped up in drama. Others are just drawn in by action. We see footage of the war that was, and hear Jim Lampley describe the battle as “a fight not soon to be forgotten,” selling people on the possibility the sequel will be the same.
Not every boxing match is borne out of a rivalry. But the most gripping fights are ones in which those who have been following the characters and the storyline become heavily and emotionally invested in the outcome.
Those who support Margarito see him as a man maligned, allegations unproven concerning the tampering before the Mosley fight, assertions unfounded concerning the possibility of tampering for the Cotto bout. They see him as a man whose honor has been challenged and who must stand before his accuser and strike him down again.
Those who support Cotto see him as a brave hero who could not overcome odds that had been stacked against him. This is the attitude that Cotto himself must bring to the rematch. It is far more comforting to say you gave your all in an unfair fight, only to find it was not enough.
“He used the plaster the night of the fight with me,” Cotto says to the camera. “He looks and he acts like a criminal.”
Cut to a shot of Margarito spitting to the side and glaring at the camera, and then to a scene of Margarito, dressed in dark clothing, his hair slicked back, sunglasses covering his eyes, his arms held out at his sides, defiant.
“If he wants to take it personally, he can take it personally,” he says. “I’m a clean fighter. There was nothing illegal. And that’s it.”
The past fuels the future. These are combustible personalities debating explosive allegations. “This,” says narrator Liev Schreiber, “is the only way to settle the fiercest dispute in all of boxing.”
We’re three minutes in and that would be enough of a hook. This isn’t just a commercial, however, but a documentary.
10:04 p.m.: And so we move to Cocoa Beach, Fla., 60 miles east of Cotto’s training camp, where Cotto is on the sand, wrapping his own hands and hitting the pads with his trainer. This would seem like a contrived scene set up for the scenery and a cool shot, except Schreiber informs us that this happens once a week.
Why in the world does Team Cotto go to the beach to do this? Well, if I could write once a week by the ocean, I sure as hell would.
The silhouette of Cotto in the sun makes for a great picture, and the bright colors of the light, Cotto’s yellow hand wraps and his red and yellow shirt give way to the sunset. From light to dark, we transition to Antonio Margarito…
10:06 p.m.: We are in the rural mountains of Mexico, where Margarito is training for the first time. We’re several minutes in, and no mention of the fact that these men are not what they once were when they met in July 2008. It’s not just the beating they put on each other back then. Margarito had the Mosley defeat, and each has also suffered a brutal loss to Manny Pacquiao in the time since.
10:07 p.m.: And here’s Margarito’s fight with Mosley. I should wish for things more often. Oh, if only I could have a date with Mila Kunis. Or Scarlett Johansson. Or both.
“Just minutes ago,” Larry Merchant says, the start of his bombshell that he dropped just as Margarito-Mosley was about to begin, “an illegal pad was found in Margarito’s gloves, something that would harden would wet, and his hands had to be rewrapped three times.”
We watch Mosley beat Margarito down. Believe it or not, but this effectively sells Margarito’s rematch with Cotto. Earlier, we saw Margarito defeat Cotto. Next, we heard the speculation that Margarito had used tampered hand wraps for other fights besides the one in which he was caught. And then we see Margarito get destroyed without his having those hand wraps.
This is selling the possibility that Cotto has more of a chance in a rematch — assuming that Margarito was indeed cheating for their first fight.
10:09 p.m.: Margarito says he’s lost touch with Javier Capetillo, his longtime trainer and the man who put the tampered pad into Margarito’s hand wraps. “We are moving on,” Margarito says, but this is a scandal that will never go way, particularly when it is so integral to the storyline of this fight.
The documentary crew finds Capetillo in a boxing gym in Los Angeles, where he is training fighters but is otherwise barred from working their corner in this country. He, too, looks like a villain. If Margarito is reminiscent of a combination Ra’s Al Ghul from the Batman cartoons and Jafar from “Aladdin,” then Capetillo looks like a cross between Gollum from “Lord of the Rings” and the Penguin from “Batman.”
“He simply arrived in the dressing room late that night,” Schreiber says, giving Capetillo’s story of the Mosley fight, “and gave Margarito a pair of wraps already sitting on a table without knowing they were tainted.”
That’s right, officer, those aren’t my drugs. Someone must’ve left them in my car.
10:10 p.m.: “The stigma of suspicion still trails both men,” Schreiber says. And we hear HBO blow-by-blow man Jim Lampley with a great line following Margarito’s loss to Mosley. “Now we all remember how those thudding blows in Las Vegas beat down Miguel Cotto last July. There weren’t any thudding blows tonight. Did Margarito just cast a large shadow over his giant victory over Cotto last summer?”
Words can be as powerful as pictures. The producers have scoured their archives for some money quotes…
10:11 p.m.: We return to the first Cotto-Margarito fight, and delve deeper into the allegations. Cotto’s camp says they never had anyone in Margarito’s dressing room to watch his hands get wrapped. Margarito and Capetillo say that’s not true.
We see Cotto boxing Margarito early, only to break down under Margarito’s pressure and punishment. At the end of the fight, we get another reminder that, even without the storyline of the hand wraps, Cotto-Margarito 2 should be something worth watching. “That is a modern boxing classic,” says Max Kellerman during the flashback.
Not coincidentally, “24/7” shows Margarito raising his arms in the air in victory and does a close-up on his wrapped hands.
10:16 p.m.: Cotto points to a printed-out photograph of Margarito’s wraps, saying he sees a suspicious break in the wrapping over a knuckle on Margarito’s left hand.
Now Margarito holds the same photo. “It doesn’t look to me like the wrap is broken,” he says. “I think it could have been twisted. It could have been a booger that I had there.”
Now Capetillo holds the same photo. “I can’t really tell you what it is,” he says. “Understand, because when you land those uppercuts, with all the shots you land from here, it’s possible that would break the wraps.”
Neither Margarito’s nor Capetillo’s explanations (twisting, mucus, uppercuts) make sense. But I also don’t see what Cotto sees. Perhaps it’s that I’m looking at a photograph being captured by a video camera on what is admittedly not a high-definition screen. But all I see is what looks like a piece of thread.
We see that red dye from Margarito’s gloves has rubbed off on one knuckle. We see dye in the same shape in the same place from Margarito’s wraps that were confiscated prior to the Mosley fight. This is circumstantial evidence that some use to say that the wraps Margarito used for Cotto were the tampered ones found six months later, particularly as Margarito had yet to don gloves for Mosley when the wraps were confiscated.
10:18 p.m.: We’re still on this. HBO is really giving a lot of time to the allegations, but in this case it’s okay. This is not the network lending credibility by doing this as much as it is “24/7” presenting a personal issue that has clearly nagged at Cotto for years, and a question that Margarito should have to answer for the rest of his career.
“I’ve never fought with anything illegal,” Margarito says. “And I never would.”
But he almost did against Mosley. Now Margarito says Cotto himself can wrap his opponent’s hands in their rematch. “I’m going to beat you again,” Margarito says.
You begin to wonder: What if Margarito hits and hurts Cotto in the second fight? What does Cotto do if he suddenly realizes the boogeyman is real?
10:19 p.m.: We move back to Margarito’s training and hear, nearly 20 minutes in, our first reference to Manny Pacquiao, and to the broken orbital bone and vision problems that Margarito suffered due to that defeat. He had an operation to remove a cataract, Schreiber said. The narrator mentions that Margarito’s still not officially licensed for the Cotto fight — a last-minute addition to this first episode that the producers must’ve scrambled to get in.
The camera focuses in on Margarito’s right eye, which just doesn’t look right, no pun intended. “Everything is perfect,” though, says Margarito. “Three or four months ago, my doctor told me my eye was fine.”
Joe Frazier fought half-blind, mind you.
(And we never hear anything about Cotto’s loss to Pacquiao.)
10:20 p.m.: Much of the remainder of the episode goes to humanizing the men involved. We see the joking and camaraderie between Margarito and other members of his training camp. We hear about how Cotto’s mother has stepped into a role in his training camp after the death of his father. We are touched when learning about the tattoo of Cotto’s father over his left shoulder blade, where Miguel Cotto Sr. can literally watch his back.
We’ve had 20 minutes of the past. Now it’s time to transition into the present and look toward the future, toward the rematch that will be sold over what little remains of this episode and then the one remaining episode in the series.
10:26 p.m.: Schreiber sends this episode out with one heck of a run-on sentence:
“So this is where three years of ecstasy and agony, confusion and defiance, anger and tragedy have left them: as two men who agree on just one truth — that the only way to resolve their saga is to reunite, and to renew its scrutiny right where it began, in a place that has no tolerance for conflicting narratives, and no room for accusation or explanation, only a simple capacity to render the most direct of verdicts.”
We end with a bang. With a total of just two episodes of “24/7” being aired due to the limited time between the Pacquiao-Marquez pay-per-view and the Cotto-Margarito pay-per-view, the show’s producers didn’t have the luxury, or perhaps the curse, of needing to stretch out material over four episodes.
Instead, we got all the tension, all the exposition, and all the reasons why we need to buy the rematch, all in a compact 27-minute package. With the fight coming up, the second episode will likely include more from the fighters’ training camps, as well as touching on the latest on the licensing battle between the New York State Athletic Commission and Margarito’s team.
HBO also has its “Overtime” and “Fight Day Now” segments that it recently introduced to help bolster its promotion.
Now it’s just a question of where the fight will take place. That was the talk last week as the NYSAC and Top Rank debated over getting Margarito’s eye examined by a commission-appointed doctor so he can be licensed. That will be the talk this week, when the examination actually happens.
But that’s the business end of things. This fight is personal. And it is the personal aspect that has been a conversation starter.
We’ve heard what the fighters have had to say, and because of that we’re more ready than ever to see what Miguel Cotto and Antonio Margarito are going to do.
The 10 Count
1. Oh, what I’d give to hear Liev Schreiber adjust his normal narrative element in episode 2 of “24/7” if New York refuses to license Margarito and Cotto-Margarito 2 gets moved, say, to Phoenix:
“The fight is seven days — and now more than 2,400 miles — away.”
2. Oct. 17, 2009: Jermain Taylor gets knocked unconscious by Arthur Abraham and suffers a head injury that keeps him out of the ring for an extended amount of time.
March 27, 2010: Andre Dirrell gets knocked unconscious by Arthur Abraham and suffers a head injury that keeps him out of the ring for an extended amount of time.
Dec. 30, 2011: Jermain Taylor is due to return for the first time. His fight will be aired on “ShoBox.”
Dec. 30, 2011: Dirrell is due to return for the first time, according to Lem Satterfield of RingTV.com. His fight will be on the undercard to Taylor’s bout.
3. An amazing statistic, via Kevin Iole of Yahoo! Sports:
A total of 11,504 people bought seats in Nevada for a closed circuit broadcast of the Nov. 12 fight between Manny Pacquiao and Juan Manuel Marquez. That brought in $575,200 in revenue.
A total of 3,888 people bought tickets to be in Staples Center on Oct. 15 for Bernard Hopkins vs. Chad Dawson. That brought in about $286,000 in revenue, or about half what the closed-circuit broadcast for Pacquiao-Marquez 3 brought in.
4. Bigger acting job:
The dive that Likar Ramos appeared to take in his, ahem, first-round “knockout” loss to Juan Manuel Marquez this past July…
…or the dive that Florencio Castellano appeared to take in his, ahem, first-round “knockout” loss to Joan Guzman this past Friday?
5. If taking dives really is that easy, perhaps I should eat my way up to 154, protect my eyes for the next two weeks and nominate myself as a last-minute replacement for Antonio Margarito.
6. Boxers Behaving Badly: Former 122- and 126-pound title challenger Michael Brodie has been arrested after allegedly being caught in the United Kingdom with £268,000, or around $425,000, worth of cocaine, according to the Manchester Evening News.
The 37-year-old and another man are facing charges of possessing cocaine with intent to supply, the newspaper said. Both were in a car that police stopped and subsequently searched.
Brodie last fought in 2009, a defeat that brought his record to 36-4-1 with 24 knockouts. He fought four times for world titles, going 0-3-1.
7. And if you think that Michael Brodie’s car allegedly had a lot of cocaine, that was only about one-tenth of what was allegedly found in a house owned by Ivan Calderon.
The former 105- and 108-pound beltholder does not yet qualify as a Boxer Behaving Badly; he has not been charged with a crime. But it nevertheless raised eyebrows last week when federal agents swooped upon a home in Puerto Rico and found more than $4 million worth of the drug, according to the Associated Press.
Calderon told local media that the house is one of many he owns as an investment, and the AP report noted that the police raid came after an alleged Puerto Rican drug trafficker had been arrested for allegedly trying to bring cocaine into the United States.
The 36-year-old is 35-2-1 with six knockouts.
8. Authorities found 225 kilograms, or 495 pounds, of cocaine. That’s nearly five Ivan Calderons.
Friend of the column John Olson asked whether this means Calderon’s nickname will change from “Iron Boy” to “Powder.” If so, it’d be fitting for him to share a card with Hasim “The Rock” Rahman, who wants, erm, another crack at the heavyweight title.
9. From the “I Also Cared About Ozzie Canseco” Files:
Glenn Donaire, older brother to Nonito, has signed a contract with Don King, according to the Philippine News, via BoxingScene’s Ryan Maquinana.
Donaire hasn’t been in the ring since July 2008 and clearly hasn’t been paying attention — does he actually think signing with Don King will END his inactivity?
10. Because a rich, powerful 80-year-old man and a rich, powerful 79-year-old man will say whatever comes to mind without concern of consequences, here’s Top Rank head Bob Arum, World Boxing Council head Jose Sulaiman, and a pair of headlines on BoxingScene.com:
“Arum Rips Sulaiman Over Marquez Jab: He’s an Asshole!” — Nov. 13, 2011
“Sulaiman Fires Back at Bob Arum: No Class and No Heart” — Nov. 16, 2011
This either needs to be the beginning of a fight between the two being signed, promoted by Top Rank and sanctioned by the WBC, which will award the winner suspenders instead of a belt — or Hollywood needs to pair these two for another sequel to “Grumpy Old Men.”
David P. Greisman is a member of the Boxing Writers Association of America. His weekly column, “Fighting Words,” appears every Monday on BoxingScene.com.
Follow David on Twitter at twitter.com/fightingwords2 or on Facebook at facebook.com/fightingwordsboxing, or send questions and comments to fightingwords1@gmail.com
