Where there was once doubt, uncertainty, even hope, there is now only fact, only inflexible and iron truth. Naoya Inoue, the undisputed super bantamweight champion, is the best and greatest fighter in the land of the rising sun, the best and greatest fighter anywhere illuminated by that same sun’s rays. If that second claim is more fragile than the first, let the greatest threat to it prove his superiority against neither a retread opponent nor one whose threat is halved by the terms of engagement. 

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Junto Nakatani had his chance at the Tokyo Dome Saturday, before a crowd 55,000 strong: an opportunity secured by the kind of swift and tidy negotiations that speak to motivations more intrinsic than financial. What did he do with it? It depends on what you think can be redeemed and salvaged from a loss. Not all losses are equal, and Nakatani acquitted himself well if you subscribe to the calculus that yielded the 116-112, 116-112, 115-113 scores. But his typical fire, fire that immolates opponents and satisfies expectations—where was that?  Nakatani’s was a puzzling performance, one that revealed a small but insurmountable disparity in talent, which was to be expected, and an unflattering deficit in daring. This second quality, given the fighter and the magnitude of the event, was as unexpected as it is unforgettable. 

Luis Nery, Roman Cardenas, and Nonito Donaire each gained a more intimate and acute understanding of Inoue’s greatness, just reward for hazarding it. Nakatani took no such gambles, and almost none in the first half of the fight, conducting himself more like an actuary assessing risk and probability than a fighter confronted with a heretofore unsolvable riddle. “Naoya is quite a good learner,” he said afterwards, explaining a strategy that seemed to prioritize preservation over victory. “He learns a lot in such a short period of time, so I didn’t want to disclose everything that I have in the early rounds. That’s why I fought that way.” Nakatani might ask Vasilii Lomachenko what charity is earned by ineptitude and inaction performed under the guise of reconnaissance. 

The problem for Nakatani was that his coyness held victory at bay—all the while, Inoue was looking to hurt him, taking risks that conveyed genuine intent and control. Inoue’s successes in the first half of the fight were few—a sharp jab, a right hand to the body—and reflective of his own caution, proof of the challenge Nakatani posed. But there is a stark and undeniable difference between studying to survive a monster and studying to dismantle a man. Though Nakatani was largely unscathed midway through the fight, he had but six rounds to win the majority of twelve. 

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What has always charmed about Inoue is not his preternatural athleticism, the command of body and space that warps the interplay of limbs in a manner not seen since Doris Law was stitching trunks for Pensacola’s finest. Nor his sudden and frightening power, his verve, even his ambition. It is his penchant for fighting to the level of his competition, this humanizing flaw that found common ground between audience and spectacle. For Inoue, this resulted in desultory or reckless moments, rounds, even entire fights where he slackened his focus and technique, attempting to break with forceful belligerence what might be solved with clinical precision. Not so against Nakatani, who Inoue handled with the caution of a herpetologist, his precognitive reflexes attuned to every possible counter yet barely sharp enough to escape them. 

But by the middle rounds, Inoue seemed taxed: the punches that landed, those that found only Nakatani’s guard, those that missed entirely—all exacted an outlay. The contortions of his torso, that balletic defensive wizardry needed to escape the clever counters, the accumulated extra steps needed to negotiate range, to outmaneuver the lead foot of a southpaw three inches taller, who lurked like a crocodile eyeing the herd at water’s edge—there was a levy on these, too.

When that payment was collected, the fight shifted strikingly, validating for Nakatani, a strategy that for six rounds seemed bafflingly acquiescent. Beginning in the eighth round, Inoue looked increasingly haggard, his technique and defense dulled, as might be expected of a 33-year-old super bantamweight. A less effective night dispelled the notion that Inoue had taken the eighth off. The tenth was Nakatani’s best, a round of pressure and artful combinations that introduced Inoue to a new peril. “The Monster” has faced determined opponents before, men who have stymied him, hurt him, even floored him. But he has never looked as battle-worn as he did getting outworked by Nakatani, when a hint of desperation crept into his movements, when the end that awaits every fighter menaced even this generational one. Despite being cut over the eyebrow by a headbutt, Nakatani returned to his corner with a smile.

***

In Maupassant’s The Duel, the protagonist, M. Lantin, experiences a moment of internal conflict, friction between his desire to act bravely and the involuntary but no less intense resistance of the body in a moment of danger; between “the being that wills and the being that resists, each prevailing in turn.” It would be a feat were Inoue able to act bravely under such duress; this is what Wladimir Klitschko confronted whenever his chin wagged and knees weakened. It would make for a better story, a more dramatic retelling, could one romanticize the psychology of so great a fighter. But no such conflict or complexity exists in Inoue. Refreshed by a minute recovery, invigorated by the potential of that tentatively staunched cut, Inoue fought the eleventh with a ferocity yet unseen in the fight. As if to settle accounts, to even the score between accident and intent, Inoue broke Nakatani’s orbital bone with an uppercut.  

It was a reminder, one reiterated hours later by another monster, another multidivision terror, one even more cruel, that some fighters have a malice and capacity for violence that separates them even among their peers. It more than separates—it exalts. And whom should we exalt more than Inoue?

***

There is a time in a man’s life when his perspective shifts, when he wonders less about what the future holds for him and more about what will unfold in his absence. A similar shift occurred in that harrowing tenth, when Inoue, a fighter who for years has shattered the hourglasses of others, finally betrayed the effects of time. In those three minutes of fragility and weariness, there was a glimpse of the vacuum left by his absence—the void that cannot be filled by the calculations and reconnaissance of those who inherit the expectations of aficionados old enough to favor the past. What the future holds for Inoue is whatever he chooses, but what will unfold in his absence? What can we expect of these fighters who can populate but not popularize an already niche sport? Let the question remain rhetorical for now. 

For now, revel in the present.

What passes for a spectacle in boxing today? The answer requires a cracked window, a struck and shaken match, and advanced warning. The YouTube Cruiserweight champion of the world, who, thwarted in his oh-so-genuine pursuit of a not-yet-grey heavyweight opponent, chose instead a lightweight in an exhibition. This same lightweight, after the only debatable outcome of a celebrated yet middling career, is again muffling the echo of his hollow ambition. Is that what drives your interest, what softly billows the sails in boxing’s current doldrums?

If you are reading this, the answer is surely no, because you are a relic, an anarchoronism, consuming your sports coverage in words at a time when podcasts are, for some incomprehensible reason, watched, when reading stamina is crippled by Instagram captions and the brevity of Grok, and because you could give less than a fuck about such spectacles as the aformentioned farce. 

Was the last time you felt your pulse quicken—not just at the action but in anticipation of it—two years ago, before what felt like the only fight that mattered, the one you might sacrifice all others to have realized? If so, a common denominator between your engagement then and your engagement now is Terence Crawford. The generation is his—the years that stretch back to Floyd Mayweather Jr., and those on the horizon, littered as they will be with a mostly loud and utterly forgettable horde of fighters jockeying for clout with bandwidth and hypothetical victories.

Had you doubted Crawford’s ownership (perhaps whenever Naoya Inoue or Oleksandr Usyk put paid to their invaded divisions), that doubt was silenced Saturday, when Crawford soundly and easily defeated undisputed super middleweight champion Saul Alvarez, before 70,000 people at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas.

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Long considered the defining fighter of his generation, Alvarez was an improbable blend of otherworldly skill, ambition, adroit matchmaking, and feverish popularity. How could it be that the greatest fighter in the world was also historically popular? By the sort of inversion of causation Nietzsche warned us about. A popularity so passionate it augmented Alvarez’s ability, his ambition, even the estimation of his opponents—this is what amplified his greatness. But that mythologizing cannot recover him from what Crawford did, and only Alvarez’s proximity to the end will spare him the refashioning of legacy that accompanies so ugly a defeat.

Because Crawford didn’t just beat Alvarez, he interrogated a confession out of him. This fight was supposed to remind us, and Crawford most painfully, that weight classes exist for a reason, that they are protective. Instead, it was a referendum on Alvarez and the super middleweight division. 

That particular weight class is certainly protective—protective of fighters unwilling to move to light heavyweight, and of middleweights who are unable to shed recalcitrant pounds. Super middleweight is a pseudo-division, a waystation, and a refuge; Alvarez, a former 154-pound fighter, cleaned it out before relinquishing ownership to a former lightweight. This was not Roy Jones fighting John Ruiz for a fraction of the heavyweight title: Crawford fought the man at 168 pounds. It took but six rounds for the question to shift from whether Crawford could take Alvarez’s punch to whether that punch was the only hope Alvarez had. And that second question was answered emphatically well before the final bell. Alvarez didn’t have a puncher’s chance—he had none at all. What does that say of the division he so easily conquered, and of the glory accompanying that feat?

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Above middleweight, Alvarez adopted a style that calls to mind a line from Houellebecq’s The Elementary Particles: “Not determined, it determines, not conditioned, it conditions.” This version of Alvarez, the elusive pursuer who throws singular power shots to cow opponents and marshal his stamina, might reasonably be expected to yield results against a smaller fighter, especially a counter-puncher who welcomes the risk of aggression. Perhaps Alvarez expected Crawford, like so many before him, to be intimidated by the event, pacified by the payday, to offer a soft belly and eager neck, as Jermell Charlo, the last junior middleweight to wield the golden ticket, did in 2023. But such thinking grossly misunderstands Crawford, who sees in every opponent impudence and responds mercilessly to that insult.

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What might those withering punches have done had Crawford not anticipated them, deadened them on his arms and gloves; had he not welcomed what sent so many into retreat, and demanded Alvarez either fight for his title, or forfeit it. Parsed, disassembled, what was Alvarez to do? 

Nothing. There was only the next telegraphed left hook, the next futile right hand. For his fleeting daring, Alvarez was strafed and turned in the clinches, forced to reset, and reset by force. Alvarez punished by a desire for greatness that surpassed his own—this was a spectacle befitting a bloodsport. Even light heavyweight kingpin Dmitrii Bivol, who chased Alvarez back to super middleweight behind an onslaught of ones, twos, and threes, never threw them as murderously or articulately as Crawford. Nor with the sadistic glee, the pleasure in cruelty that produces the only histrionics Crawford indulges in—those that amplify the discomfort of his victims.

You might expect this humiliation to inspire Alvarez; alas, he was largely passionless, aware enough of impeding defeat that he reverted to his habit of ostentatious defense, as though the secret to stealing victory lay in preserving the image of himself as the untouchable, the unhittable, the one who must be protected (as he had been by the list of sorry challenges that delivered him the division). No, there was no saving Alvarez on this night, on that point, even the judges were unanimous in their agreement.

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What to make of Alvarez’s post-fight comments, where he declared himself a winner because of the magnitude of the event, because of the success of his personal life. The words of a fighter minutes removed from the crucible should be judged charitably, if at all. There was a concession in Alvarez’s in-ring reflection, however, one he later concretized: Crawford was in every way his better. In the ring, microphone in his face, reality on his shoulders, Alvarez consoled himself with the only victories available to him. None could be salvaged from those twelve rounds. Such was Crawford’s greatness.

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In The Human Stain, Philip Roth writes of the “human desire for a beginning, a middle, and an end—and an end appropriate in magnitude to the beginning and middle.” Is this not what Crawford has achieved? A career trajectory of determined, if sometimes frustrating, ascent culminating in a historic victory? Criticisms of Crawford, the former undisputed junior welterweight, former undisputed welterweight, and now undisputed super middleweight champion, were very often a tell, issued most forcefully by those who had a fighter (or promoter) to protect. Because it was obvious even then that the fighting pride of Omaha, Nebraska, lacked for nothing but opportunity. 

Those opportunities finally came, and just look what he did with them.

July 23, 2023, felt like a beginning. 

The stakes suggested otherwise; the hardware and other credentials indicated a culmination—a burst of violence and the afterglow of achievement. What transpired in the Ariake Arena that July might have functioned as just such an end had Stephen Fulton’s hand been raised, had he left Japan not only the unified super bantamweight champion of the world but the man who halted the inexorable. Because where do you go from there?

Instead, it was a beginning; a confirmation that expectations needed to be calibrated to an unmatched ambition, an unparalleled talent. Naoya Inoue’s demolition of Fulton did more than unify the super bantamweight division—it rendered its remains irrelevant. Because if Fulton had nothing for “The Monster,” what 122-pound fighter did?

Not Marlon Tapales or Luis Nery, who earned their pounds of flesh proudly before being heaped on the pile of shattered aspirants. Not TJ Doheny, not Ye Joon Kim. You could run a charitable finger down the list of super bantamweights—better: start at the bottom and work up!—and find nothing but underdogs, placeholders in an extraneous series, their rankings applying only to each other, not to the fighter in whose shadow they toiled. For Inoue, Fulton should have marked the beginning of a new assault, added pounds and a fresh invasion, one that would have spared the fighters that “The Monster” bypassed a visit to the shadow realm—and done them the further kindness of letting each overlooked challenger pretend that Inoue’s avoidance of those lingering (and middling) threats was the source of his preservation.

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Ink seals the mismatch, not blood; it should be the business of matchmakers, not fighters. And yet, Inoue pushed back against this maxim because his mismatches materialized most strikingly after the bell. They manifested not in the results, which stopped being in doubt long before people stopped doubting Inoue, but in the ease of dispatch. He atomized opponents, sending even the stern into crisis. Ending early, brutally, or both, the Inoue mismatch retained its charm in having to be proven. Was he expected to win the WBSS bantamweight tournament? Yes, but the manner of victory augmented his path to the championship. The twelve rounds Nonito Donaire demanded of him in the finale only further ratified Inoue’s absurd precocity. Their rematch two and a half years later, a mismatch sealed in ink, served as confirmation—however superfluous, however undesired—that Inoue’s celestial ascension outpaced Donaire’s decline.

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Heading into Sunday, and Inoue’s return to the US, where he would face Ramon Cardenas from the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, had expectations changed?

Tapales was the IBF champion, pursuing his title immediately after dispatching Fulton, when most fighters would have gladly taken a victory lap—seriousness like this sets Inoue and his ilk apart. More importantly, it was typical of him, of his accelerated ambition, that, like an express bus, skips all stops between major intersections. The Nery fight allowed Inoue to massacre a mandatory challenger who had vilified himself in Japan for failed weigh-ins and drug tests alike.

But what justified Doheny, who represented barely a stay-busy fight for a fighter who had already stayed busy butchering the world-class? Kim was a poor replacement for Sam Goodman, who was twice injured in preparation for Inoue rather than once concussed for answering the opening bell. Good man, Sam, but you hadn’t a prayer.

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To borrow from JM Coetzee, Inoue post-Fulton felt like a fighter in the “gyroscopes of the Grand Design,” one fixed in the orbit of a larger celestial body, part of a plan that kept him in a controlled and predictable motion. But should Inoue be promoted like a regular fighter, guided by the principles applied to maximize the earnings (and safety) of fighters well beneath his ability?

Some promotional material for Inoue’s return emphasized his activity, with Cardenas being Inoue’s fourth fight in a year. Too many fighters have decided that biannual combat is sufficient to achieve the accolades they have bestowed upon themselves, no doubt because such a schedule has proven enough to sustain a lifestyle that justifies controlled risk. Thankfully, Inoue is not one of them. But the emphasis on quantity seemed a tell, as though more of who we want should supersede more of what we want: think Deftones’ B-Sides and Rarities, an exhibition of profound talent in service perfunctory obligation.

One might argue that Inoue’s return warranted another fatted calf for an opponent. This sacrifice to confirm the esteem of the headliner is part of the grand design; one need only look at the unenterprising career of Gervonta Davis for proof of what treasure can be surfaced by treading water. But even those who traveled to the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, who lined up for hours just to see Inoue weigh in, would rather a fight than a fighter be the reward for their time and money.

They got both.

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With sound strategy and the irreverence needed to shatter an idol, Cardenas was that fighter. Inoue, who, on the brink of disaster, rallied to reaffirm his greatness—he, too, was that fighter. And the eight ferocious rounds they shared were the fight.

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In the second round, a vicious counter hook planted Inoue violently on the canvas. Should Cardenas relive that moment for a lifetime, its sweetness will likely come with the bitter fantasy of a few seconds more. Inoue was up with only eight seconds remaining in the round, but in such a state that it is fair to wonder whether thrice that would have made history.

Alas, Inoue made it to his corner, and used the remaining six rounds to eliminate first the predictability in his attack that Cardenas was, with incredible charm, masterfully and maliciously exploiting—and then to grind this defiant and sturdy man to pieces. But it must be said—because Cardenas deserves it—that despite being dropped in the seventh round, the San Antonio fighter remained defiant. For all the telltale signs of his disintegration, Cardenas remained committed to the fight, to the life-altering counters he launched—and to paying victory’s ultimately ruinous price. The fighter that referee Thomas Taylor rescued a round later was upright and eager to sacrifice whatever he had left.

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There was always the chance that Inoue would fall victim to the drudgery of his profession, surprised in one of the valleys on the EKG monitoring his engagement, and he came precariously close to such a comeuppance on Sunday. Cardenas, this would-be saboteur, hurt Inoue like no one before; his technique and toughness humbled an arrogant destroyer. But Inoue is at his best when threatened. In those harrowing moments, however few they may be, Inoue finds a joy mere victory cannot provide and the excellence demanded to achieve it.

Is that instructive? Could it be that the best version of Inoue is achieved only when genuinely threatened? And if so, does it make sense for someone so preternaturally competitive to be sped to his end if he wills it? That he wills it, not defeat so much as a near-disastrous intimation with it, is something that Inoue’s more arrogant and imperfect performances seem to suggest.

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Imagine every fighter obstructing the path to Inoue becoming the undisputed featherweight champion, swelling with confidence as they watched Sunday. The years, the rounds, and the scale demand a reckoning. Inoue has, in the words of Martin Amis, “lost the advantage of being unbelievable. The decisive asset of being beyond belief.” Ironically, his being beyond belief mortalized him. Fighters who can exploit the outlay of Inoue’s greatness, exacerbate it with ill-intentioned means, know now that the end—that other grand design, that other inexorable—lies in wait. And these men, surely they can usher it forth. Or so they think.

May 4, 2025, felt like a beginning, too.