As the Undertaker’s WWE ring-entrance music concluded, Jaron “Boots” Ennis emerged at the top of the ramp at Boardwalk Hall on Saturday night with Philadelphia 76ers guard Tyrese Maxey by his side, carrying his welterweight title belt.

There probably was no deep thematic meaning intended in the pairing. It was just one top young star of the Philly sports scene supporting another.

But deeper meaning was available if you dug for it.

The Sixers were wrapping up their relentless season from hell, a campaign that began with championship aspirations and ended with three solid months of intentional losing. And Maxey, the 2023-24 NBA Most Improved Player award winner, missed 30 games, plateaued statistically after four straight years of exponential development and, for the first time in his pro career, was on the receiving end of real criticism.

Ennis strode to the ring amid similar circumstances to how Maxey and the 76ers will begin their next season: out to prove a recent bump in the road was just that – a blip, an aberration, a half-step back in advance of three steps forward.

The big difference is Maxey’s team lost more than 70% of the time this season. Ennis had to reverse the criticism and doubt despite sporting a perfect record of 33-0 with 29 KOs (and one no-contest) without so much as a close call along the way.

If not for the fact that it’s something we see all the time in boxing, I’d say it was strange how much doubt and negativity Boots endured for the crime of one flat performance (in a fight in which he still won nine or 10 out of 12 rounds) in his rematch with against Karen Chukhadzhian.

OK, in fairness, there was a little more fueling the doubt and negativity than that. 

Ennis got hit a few more times than he needed to by David Avanesyan in the fight prior to the Chukhadzhian rematch. He was negotiating late last year for a salivary-gland-activating bout against Vergil Ortiz Jr. and then seemed to be to blame for it not happening. And, bigger picture, he’d turned 27 years old and gotten nine years deep in his pro career without having truly tested himself.

But mostly … it was that one blah performance that had the boxing world turning on Ennis and declaring him unworthy of the hype. He underwhelmed against Chukhadzhian last November at the Wells Fargo Center in Philly. It didn’t matter that he won by six, eight, and 12 points. It didn’t matter that it was a fight he never wanted, a fight that was forced upon him by absurd alphabet rankings and rules. 

To the fans, the media and the Twitterati, all that mattered was that they expected Ennis to look spectacular against Chukhadzhian, and he didn’t.

It calls to mind the title of the 2022 Nicolas Cage movie The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. Full disclosure: I haven’t seen the movie. But I know it’s a meta concept film wherein Cage plays a fictionalized version of himself, and the title is an acknowledgement of his numerous career missteps as an Oscar winner and sometimes A-lister whose IMDb is littered with straight-to-video schlock.

That Boots Ennis has massive talent is pretty much beyond dispute. And for the past several months leading up to Saturday’s unification bout with Eimantis Stanionis, it weighed on him. He was dragged for minor imperfections because he was so obviously capable of achieving greatness.

Through his first 32 pro fights, Ennis was pretty damned close to perfect. Then came his July 2024 bout in Philly against Avanesyan. Coming off a 371-day layoff, Ennis dominated the fight and stopped his challenger in the fifth round – requiring one fewer round than Terence Crawford did to stop Avanesyan a couple of years earlier. But Boots also took a handful of clean punches, particularly in the second and third rounds, mostly in the form of counter right hands.

One fellow media member knee-jerk lamented to me in conversation at ringside immediately after the fight ended: “If it’s Crawford landing those punches, Boots gets knocked out.”

Sorry, but Ennis-Avanesyan is and was almost completely irrelevant to a hypothetical Ennis-Crawford fight. That Ennis took punches against Avanesyan was not cause for panic. It was cause for recognizing that Boots felt unthreatened by his opponent on this night – which surely wouldn’t be the case against Crawford.

The concern was much more widespread after the Chukhadzhian fight that followed four months later. That one left boxing observers concluding that Ennis had stagnated. Some even went so far as to say he was always overhyped and built his record against bums.

Ennis undoubtedly was a disappointment against Chukhadzhian. But he still scored the fight’s only knockdown and won with plenty of room to spare against an opponent with a somewhat negative style – an opponent Ennis had beaten by shutout the previous year and thus understandably couldn’t get fired up for.

Well, now that he’s coming off a six-round obliteration of Stanionis, getting back to his winning-every-round ways against his most highly regarded opponent – in what pretty much everyone is calling a career-best performance – it’s time for an alternative theory to “there’s something wrong with Boots.”

I have two:

First, Ennis is the sort of fighter who’s vulnerable to fighting up or down to the level of his opposition; and second, his massive talent causes people to hold him to an unreasonable standard.

After the fight, Ennis’ quotes backed up the level-of-opposition theory:

“When I fight top-of-the-line guys – good guys – that’s what you’re gonna see,” he said of his performance against Stanionis. “You’re gonna see a whole different me. When I’m in the ring, I’m in my happy place. When I got a top guy and I’m fighting for something, it’s a whole different story. Can’t nobody mess with me.”

Whether against top-of-the-line guys or not, however, the fact of the matter is that Boots Ennis will get punched in the face sometimes. Every boxer does. It’s part of the job description.

But when a heavily hyped fighter who’s a massive favorite takes a clean shot or two, there’s a tendency to press the eject button, to ask what’s wrong with him, to declare him fatally flawed defensively.

One-time light heavyweight prospect Tony Jeffries related a story to BoxingScene’s Tris Dixon a few months ago, recalling how he got clipped with a right hand in what was supposed to be an easy fight against Nathan King, and even though he shook off the punch and comfortably won the fight, Jeffries saw people writing him off based on a single punch.

“The criticism that I got after that fight was ridiculous,” Jeffries said. “‘This guy’s shit, he’s not going to do anything, he’s not going to go anywhere, how was he an Olympian?’ I just got so much criticism for getting caught with one bloody punch, and I couldn’t believe it.”

It doesn’t matter how skilled you are defensively, you’re going to get hit flush sometimes. Willie Pep took shots. Pernell Whitaker took shots. Floyd Mayweather took shots.

Even in his athletic prime, not every Mayweather fight could be his masterpiece against Diego Corrales. He stood and traded with Emanuel Augustus more than he perhaps should have and got a bloody nose as a result. He lost a few rounds while going the distance with overmatched Carlos Hernandez. He damned near lost the first fight against Jose Luis Castillo.

And still he went on to acclaim as the best boxer of his generation. He ultimately became Floyd “Money” Mayweather even if there were iffy moments along the way, moments largely forgotten now because they turned out not to be determinative.

Talent is no guarantee of greatness. For every Mayweather, there’s an Adrien Broner.

But talent is a guarantee of high expectations, and with that comes a low tolerance for uninspired decision wins against softer opposition.

When Roy Jones failed to finish off someone like David Telesco, there was a tendency to focus on the negative and not on the “120s” for Jones on every scorecard. When Shakur Stevenson went the distance back-to-back against Edwin De Los Santos and Artem Harutyunyan – and it was difficult to hear the booing emanating from your TV speakers over the sound of the snoring coming from your couch – we collectively cut him very little slack.

It’s difficult to achieve perfection in the ring, but the great talents are cursed by the fact that we’ve caught occasional glimpses of it. We’ve seen Muhammad Ali against Cleveland Williams. We’ve seen Bernard Hopkins against Felix Trinidad. We’ve seen Joe Calzaghe against Jeff Lacy. We’ve seen Crawford against Errol Spence.

If this Boots kid is so great, why is he losing rounds to Chukhadzhian?

Whether because of a more conducive style, superior motivation, an easier time making the weight, or just which side of the bed he got up on that morning, Ennis delivered one of those near-perfect performances against Stanionis. Yeah, he took some punches again. But we forgave it this time because the opponent was perceived to be championship-caliber. For the most part, Ennis’ jump-off-the-screen talent was on full display Saturday night.

And that means everyone will go right back to holding him to a ludicrously high standard going forward.

There are a few possibilities for what Ennis will do next.

He has a mandatory defense due against Shakhram Giyasov. But that mandatory can get delayed if Ennis further unifies belts against either Mario Barrios or Brian Norman Jnr.

He could move up to 154 pounds for the fight that seems to be everyone’s first choice for him, a showdown with Ortiz.

Or he could stay put at 147 and wait for the stars rising in weight, like Ryan Garcia, Devin Haney and Teofimo Lopez, to come to him. Today happens to be the 40th anniversary of Marvin Hagler vs. Tommy Hearns; the upside for Ennis in making like Hagler and defending his turf against those slightly smaller stars should require little explanation.

The expectations for Ennis will vary depending on what he chooses. No offense to the likes of Giyasov or Barrios, but if Boots isn’t spectacular against them, bordering on flawless, his victories over them will be graded with copious use of the red pen. If he gets in the ring with Ortiz, who knows – Ennis could rise to the occasion and win, but he could also even have his stock rise in defeat.

Here’s what we know for now: Ennis isn’t a fraudulent hype-job because he provided some listless moments against Chukhadzhian, and he isn’t a god walking among mortals because he appeared that way against Stanionis.

But he’s closer to the latter. His talent is legit.

Criticism is fair. Hoping for more is fair. But expecting him to neither lose rounds nor absorb punches is not.

We would all do well to keep each individual performance in perspective and not overreact to a single showing. Although Ennis makes switching stances work for him, fans and media shouldn’t make a habit of doing so themselves.