“How long could it possibly take to go 2.1 miles?”

I asked that of myself while sitting in a Las Vegas hotel room recently, debating when to pull myself away from the college football game I was watching and head over to the MGM Grand Garden Arena.

The undercard was just about to start, but it would be hours before Juanma Lopez and Rafael Marquez would enter the ring for the WBO World Featherweight Championship. And I already had my ticket in hand. So I sat back and watched the rest of the game before venturing out.

In answer to the question above, I’m pretty sure that salmon can complete the full upstream journey to spawn in the time that it takes to navigate two miles on The Strip, find the right place to park, and wend your way through the MGM Grand catacombs to your seat. And the salmon probably have an easier time of it.

Once I got there I got all nostalgic. “It seems like just yesterday that I left my hotel room – where does the time go?”

There was a silver lining to the cloud of frustration however, because when I arrived at the gate and cleared security I found out that I’d been upgraded! It was obviously my Lucky Day!!

Then again, soon after entering the arena I figured out that I was sharing my Lucky Day with virtually everyone who had pre-purchased a ticket in the arena’s upper reaches. Apparently having sold just a relative handful of tickets at the middle and lower price points, the event producers made the decision to consolidate everyone into the mid-tier area of the arena.

And lest you think that this was done to reward us for our patronage…I’ve got some Death Valley waterfront property I’d like to talk with you about.

The final few bouts of the evening were to be shown live on Showtime, and let’s just say there was probably some concern over “appearances”. They had even gone to the effort to draw huge black curtains over the now-vacant upper tier. And as I spread out comfortably in my upgraded semi-private row through two undercard bouts, it occurred to me that with just a little more work, they could have put all of us in the pricey seats.

With the Mixed Martial Arts, Ultimate Fighting Championship and World Wrestling Entertainment products so popular (the latter of which I was stunned to find was not a genuine competition), I was really taken aback at the evidence before me of how much boxing has fallen out of favor. Can it be that the self-inflicted wounds of the sport – especially those wounds named Don King, et al – have finally culminated in the demise that had been predicted for years?

The crowd, especially in the early going, redefined the words diverse and eclectic. A quick glance in any direction revealed everything from the clichéd grizzled boxing vet, to vacationing retirees who probably got free tickets from their hotel, to wholesome-looking servicemen on leave. And of course there were the usual suspects at any given pro sporting event, which sadly these days includes a healthy dose of loud, drunken young men.

All of the early bouts were scheduled for six-rounds of three minutes each, which it turned out was just about the right amount of time to invest in sizing up two fighters I’d never heard of. I was able to come up with an appallingly uninformed opinion on both fighters and generate the most rudimentary of rooting interests, so that by the time six rounds were completed I actually had a passing interest in who won the fight.

Coming up to speed quickly is enabled by the fact that boxing is pretty much the most basic of sports. You don’t need a scoreboard or an intelligible P.A. announcer to keep abreast of what’s going on. It’s all right there in front of you, and every man, women and child knows the difference between winning and losing a fight. No additional explanations are needed – unless the outcome of the fight defies what people have seen with their own eyes, a disturbingly common occurrence throughout the history of boxing.

Sure enough, the first fight that I witnessed, between Anthony Lenk and Danny Escobar, looked to my admittedly untrained eye to be a draw. This was apparently a sentiment that many in the crowd shared, because when a unanimous decision in favor of Lenk was announced, the reaction wasn’t, well…it wasn’t warmly supportive. I considered it my personal Welcome To Boxing.

Still conducted in front of a small crowd of mostly uninvolved people, there seemed to be a little bit more energy around the second fight I saw as Mickey Bey of Cleveland dominated and eventually won on an undeniable decision against Eric Cruz. I say “undeniable” because Cruz is from Puerto Rico, and not a single catcall was heard from a crowd swelling with Puerto Rican pride in anticipation of countryman Juanma Lopez’s title defense.

Yes, you could say that the peeps were peep-less when the decision was announced. You could – because of course I wouldn’t be caught dead saying something that lame.

By the time my third fight of the evening rolled around, there was a noticeable elevation in the talent level of the fighters. Probably not coincidentally, there was also a conspicuous buzz to the arena. Was it perhaps because this was the first fight that employed the Round Card Girls (who hadn’t exactly “snuck” into the arena late in the previous bout)?

Now this was boxing in Vegas! Buzz! Action! Scantily-clad showgirls!

Unfortunately, this scheduled eight-rounder between Derrick Campos of Topeka and Diego Magdaleno of Las Vegas ended before it really got rolling, with a fourth round TKO by Magdaleno.

During the slow spots in the evening’s programming to that point, I had struck up a running conversation with others seated nearby, and in doing so gradually came to realize that Magdaleno’s TKO was not actually the first contest to end prematurely. What I had taken for the first fight of the undercard was actually the third – I had missed two bouts that ended quickly with early-round knock-outs.

And now, because the start of the next-to-last fight was dictated by the Showtime broadcast schedule, the swelling excitement in the arena had to be put on hold. For the better part of 30 minutes we basically sat and stared at each other. Fortunately there were some compelling people to stare at.

As the crowd started to stream in for the featured bouts, it conjured up images for me of what a Las Vegas title fight must have been like in the days of Foreman, Frazier and Ali.

There could not possibly have been a broader sartorial range in any single building in America that night. While many were studiously dressed like slobs in the fashion of the day, others were dressed to kill – or at least to seriously maim.

It was particularly noticeable among the women, who in an apparent case of tragic memory loss had somehow misplaced all clothing acquired when they were much shorter and smaller people. If nothing else, I was destined to come away from the evening with a newfound respect for the strength and flexibility of modern technical fabrics.

To be concluded in next post…