New Year, Same Story: Barthelemy Stops Mendez After the Bell
AP photo by Paul Beaty
A spate of conjecture about what happened Friday night in Minnesota is certain to flood boxing circles, if it hasn’t already, but for whom the bell tolled was inconsequential: One man ignored it, as he was trained to do, while the other, bewildered by a volley of punches administered to his face, simply could not hear it.
Confounding the expectations of many fight fans, Cuban defector Rances Barthelemy stopped top junior lightweight contender Argenis Mendez, according to official records,at 2:59 in the second round of their junior lightweight contest at the Target Center in Minneapolis, where an historic deep freeze is expected to arrive on Sunday.
The fashion in which the season premiere of ESPN2’s Friday Night Fights, now in its 17th year, concluded was unfortunate yet cogent. Few observers of the bout, however discerning, can feign surprise at the outcome. Protesting its punctuality will not grant the loser longer arms or a stronger chin to be exploited in a rematch, which now seems inevitable.
Iron Mike Productions plans to appeal the stoppage and demand that the IBF, whose fatuous title was at stake, mandate an immediate rematch, according to Mike Tyson, Mendez’s promoter.
“The guy was winning the fight, there’s no doubt about it,” said Tyson in a post-fight interview. “But he hit Mendez after the bell.”[[MORE]][[MORE]][[MORE]]
Nobody likes to see a fighter blitzed when he should be resting on his stool. Boxing is precarious enough when the action is clean and judged with efficacy. A deferential referee is a dangerous one, but a docile fighter is even worse.
Barthelemy, typically a passive boxer and awkward stylist, seemed to know this during the closing seconds of that fateful round, when the barbaric cheers from the crowd spurred him on, three punches past the bell, until the job was done. Only then did referee Peter Podgorski begin the futile charade of a ten-count, which Mendez had no chance of beating.
Results like these are especially polarizing. They flout boxing’s fickle sense of integrity, until nothing short of a redemptive win for the victim will quell the uninformed message board banter. The fight itself, however, presented little evidence to warrant such a fantasy.
Exploiting a pronounced reach advantage, Barthelemy frustrated his opponent early with a steady output of jabs that bore through Mendez’s low guard. The cuban then corralled Mendez him into the ropes, where he battered the IBF “champion” with short hooks to the midsection. This was the Barthelemy I’d first heard about years ago, when he arrived in Miami following a standout amateur career. Here was the undaunted pressure and the crisp shots that snapped against the solar plexus with authority.
I imagined young boys around the country, sitting in front of their televisions shuddering at the portentous sound, expecting their disapproving fathers to suddenly appear in the doorway brandishing a leather belt, whipping it in time with the blows.
Mendez, a native of the Dominican Republic, attempted to close the distance between himself and Barthelemy in the second stanza, but found little success. Inside the ropes Mendez is clever and always calculating. He measures and measures, until finally he explodes with violent outbursts of precision punching. But where other fighters found Mendez elusive, or at least oblique, the Cuban found him accessible. Now his devious nature in the ring was a liability. He was like a painter with all the tools in the world, but no canvas to display his work.
With his powers of improvisation neutralized, the challenger approached Mendez patiently late in the second stanza, like an experienced killer, and chopped him down. The two short hooks slipped inside Mendez’s gloves and ripped across his jaw; Mendez fell to the canvas and landed flat on his back, arms spread wide, as if floating in a pool of water. The Cuban then climbed atop the ropes, exultant, in nearly every corner, screaming. It was over.
Later, ESPN analyst Teddy Atlas posited that Mendez may have been overworked in camp, considering how he was hurt so early in the fight. Mendez weighed in at 128 ½ pounds for the bout, which is by no means an alarming deficit, though worthy of further consideration.
“I’ll be happy to give him a rematch,” Barthelemy told ESPN2’s Bernardo Osuna after the fight. “I’ll fight anyone, I’ll fight the Lion of Damascus.”
A fighter needs that kind of confidence, however unfounded, if only to stave off the harsh reality of what really goes on inside the ring. Argenis Mendez had it before last night. Rances Barthelemy still has it. The loss of such a thing can’t be imagined until it occurs, then the real work begins. Then the heart takes over. And the lies.
Rances Barthelemy improves to 20-0 (13 KOs); Argenis Mendez drops to 21-3-1(11 KOs). Local middleweight Caleb Truax and Ghanian veteran Ossie Duran fought to a ten-round draw in the televised co-feature, while Miami teenager Erickson Lubin scored his second first-round knockout in as many fights against the overmatched Luis Santiago in the welterweight swing bout. The walk-out bout saw Javonte Starks edge Limberth Ponce by split decision in a matchup of unbeaten junior middleweights.