PHILADELPHIA — I was sitting in a cool dark booth at Moriarty’s Bar with Dave McKenna and his two teenage sons eating chicken wings when one of the TVs flashed something about Donald Trump being pulled off stage at his rally. That would be about 250 miles west of where we were in Center City, Philadelphia. We sat around saying “Huh” and dipping celery in bleu cheese for a while until one of the waiters came over and said someone shot Trump in the ear. I wondered to myself, if that bullet had killed him, would they cancel the fight? I don’t think so. There’s more than one important thing in the world.
Then Dave McKenna got cheesesteaks for the road and we drove on over to the arena to see Boots Ennis. Boots is a Philly guy and this was his homecoming fight and there were fourteen fucking thousand people there to see him, even though he was only fighting a mediocre opponent. It was the biggest boxing crowd in Philly for decades. Philly is a big boxing city, you know, but you can’t just produce a Joe Frazier or Bernard Hopkins out of thin air every decade. Sometimes there’s a dry spell.
But now there’s Boots. He’s a welterweight and he’s easily one of the five best pound-for-pound fighters in the world right now. Probably top three. People will say, He hasn’t fought anybody real good. Well, nobody real good wants to fight him. He’s in the frustrating career space of not yet being a flashy enough name to sell millions of pay-per-views, but being freakishly talented, so the guys who sit on top of the sport and are out for the cash see little upside in taking a fight with him. If you ask me what Boots is good at, I’d say everything. He’s a super crispy, sharp puncher who hits like a middleweight and has great footwork and moves with precision and is well schooled and it’s hard to come up with pat descriptions of his style because at age 27 he has no weak spots left. He’s 32-0 with 29 knockouts.
A few years back I was in Vegas and Boots was fighting Thomas Dulorme, so I went there intending to write something about it. He knocked Dulorme out with a little chopping right hand halfway through the first round. It was so quick I couldn’t even think of anything to write, so I just let it go. That was right after Boots beat the shit out of Sergey Lipinets, a tough veteran guy who is no slouch. Pretty frequently I tell people to watch that Lipinets fight for a demonstration of the concept of total and complete domination in a boxing fight, which is no slight to Lipinets himself.
These sort of homecoming fights are fun because you can see the whole city–if we’re being specific, most of the time it’s the whole black part of the city—turning out to bask in the shared glow of a newfound champion, a new hero, a new representative of themselves and their place who can step on the world stage and say, “We’re all from Right Here.” So probably 10,000 of the people in the crowd would have told you that maybe they didn’t know Boots personally, but they know someone who knows someone who knows Boots’s family, or whatever. The city shares ownership of the fighter, and they all lift him up. All the dudes turn up in their best clothes, and the DJ plays all the Philly music loud, and it’s the closest thing you’ll find to a true civic pride rally for a slice of the city that doesn’t get a lot of shine all the time.
On press row, people’s eyes were flicking back and forth from the ring to their computer screens to see what was up with Trump. There was a crazy rumor going around that Trump was going straight from the hospital to the UFC fight that was happening that night. That fight was in Denver. There was no rumor that Trump was going to show up at the Boots fight, even though it was in the same state where he got shot. I guess you can imagine why.
Philly is central enough for people to turn up from any city between D.C. and New York. So the undercard had a light heavyweight fight between a Jersey City guy and a Baltimore guy (Khalil Coe, from JC, won with a smashing second-round knockout, and the DJ hollered out, “That boy good! He from Jersey City!” as if he had never contemplated something like that to be possible), and also a welterweight fight between a DC guy and a Bronx guy. The entire meaningful part of the eastern seaboard was represented. It’s nice to let some of the fights that would usually be held in NYC trickle down to Philly, in the interest of maximizing the fan base.
I saw in one video that right before the bullets started flying at Trump, he was talking about his plans to round up and deport the illegal immigrants who he says are ruining the country. The best undercard fight of all was between Dyana Vargas, from the Dominican Republic, and Skye Nicolson, a 28-year-old Australian former Olympian who could pass for a high school softball player. She’s fucking good at boxing, though. She fights in a very Olympic amateur style, always moving, circling, turning, on her toes, sticking the jab, accurately, her punches usually more like touches than like cracks. She stuck that jab in Vargas’s mouth over and over and over all night, and sometimes would zip in a straight left for variety. Boxing trainers will often tell you to “be first,” and Nicolson showed why. She led every exchange and then moved so that Vargas—who was physically stronger, but less crafty—spent 10 consecutive rounds swallowing jabs and taking a swing at the place where Nicolson had been one second before, but no longer was.
There must be a theoretical amount of time at which taking light punches would make you collapse. But it might be days. Ten rounds didn’t do it. Vargas did end up with a bright red face and a cut under her left eye. More viscerally, though, you could see her wallowing in the deep frustration of being dominated by skill, rather than by power. She knew that she could knock Nicolson’s head off if she could reach her. But she couldn’t. The stronger person was tamed by the more well-schooled one. This is not America’s style, but we should try it some time.
The DJ in the arena was not unbiased. “If you from Philly, say yeah!” he demanded of the crowd. “Shine a light for Boots! Boots! Booooottttttsssss!” Philly was in there. Ennis’s opponent was David Avanesyan, who was a credible last-minute replacement for another opponent who dropped out. Avanesyan, short and dark-haired and holding obscure European championships, has fought several world-class welterweights, including Terence Crawford, the best in the world, who TKO'd Avanesyan in the sixth round in 2022. In that sense, he was a good measuring stick. Could Boots stop him in less than six? Not a role that a boxer aspires to, perhaps, but useful. They did play the Armenian national anthem for Avenasyan, but they had to play it from a recording rather than have someone sing it, which in a way was more disrespectful than just skipping it altogether.
Boots came out in elaborate gladiator-style trunks covered in blue and white fur. Wearing such hefty trunks is a statement of confidence from a fighter: I can beat you while carrying around enough fabric to make a bathrobe, it says. A minute into the first round Boots hit Avanesyan in the nuts, hard. Not on purpose, but still. Fighters are allowed five minutes to recover from low blows, by rule, but the reality of this experience is you’re on one knee holding your nuts and grimacing while 14,000 Philadelphians scream “Get up, bitch!” at you. So most guys get up too early, out of pride. Avanesyan wisely spent most of the fight trying to stay right in Boots’s chest, and keeping his high guard vacuum-sealed around his head, making himself at least somewhat impermeable. Boots acquiesced to this arrangement and, instead of trying to dance back and circle and pop Avanesyan with those sizzling jabs, put his forehead against him and just ripped hard shots to the body and head, over and over, seeing how long it would take to wear down the eight ounces of padding in Avanesyan’s gloves that were standing between him and oblivion.
The crowd knew how good Boots was. They expected great things. In the third, a guy hollered, “He’s a five-dollar Halal guy, Boots! Get him outta there!” That remark is unfairly dismissive of David Avanesyan’s status as the European Welterweight Champion, a title that is kind of like being the NFL Football Champion of Brazil, but I get the sentiment. In the fifth, Boots dropped Avanesyan with a straight left counterpunch, then looked ringside and almost winked. Avanesyan got up and Boots continued to just beat the hell out of any exposed body area for the remainder of the round. The ring doctor stopped the fight in the corner after that. So Boots TKO’d Avanesyan one round faster than Terence Crawford did. Life as a measuring stick is not easy.
It was a glorious night for Philly. Nothing that happened in Butler, Penn. or in Washington, D.C. could intrude on it. The next morning I woke up and took a run up the Rocky stairs at the Museum of Art, striking the arms-up pose at the top even though I know it probably makes all the locals roll their eyes. On the way I thought about what has been, and what might be coming. I ran past the Free Library on Vine Street, where I did a talk for my book earlier this year. I guess the “free” part of free libraries might go away pretty soon. I ran past the big playground of Ben Franklin Parkway, where hundreds of homeless people built a well-organized encampment in the summer of 2020, demanding real housing from the city. I imagine the federal funds that support that kind of affordable housing might go away pretty soon. And when I finally hit the top of the hot museum staircase, I remembered that the last time I was standing on that spot was a couple of years back, at a rally for the museum’s unionized employees, who were in a fight with their bosses. I guess the government agencies that help workers like that not get crushed might be very different pretty soon.
Trump got a lot of credit for pumping his fist while he had a bloody ear and a whole team of commandos was surrounding him. Every fighter in the ring on Saturday night did a hell of a lot more than that, even the ones who lost, and they were mostly just left to trudge back to the locker room with a few scattered fist bumps. Philly is a rough city. Too many people are homeless and forced to wander the downtown streets. There are drugs and guns and hopelessness all over. Guns made America rich, but they didn’t make us happy. Now, though, Philly has a real live champ named Boots, ready to whip anyone’s ass in a fair fight. That might be the purest thing we can have, for a while.
