“Floyd Mayweather, Jr. meets Manny Pacquiao at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas Saturday night. By then, the wringing of hands, the self-aggrandizing, and the opining of week-old experts will conveniently desist in time for even the most outraged of the moral brigade to try their best—bless their hearts—to enjoy a prizefight few believed would ever happen and all are glad will. The braying cynics, those who know better than to want to see two of the very best boxers of this generation settle a score, will hold their tongues if only for a few hours. They, of course, know what will happen when Mayweather and Pacquiao face off; they have always known—such is the curse of their expertise. For the rest, those too slow to catch the ambulance being chased since the fight was announced, and those too foolish to recognize they are being fleeced by a foregone conclusion, at least there is the fight. What a relief.”

Read Prime Movers: Floyd Mayweather, Jr.-Manny Pacquiao Preview on The Cruelest Sport.

Chris’ weekly column, “The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly” or “GBU” was exhaustive yet concise, managing to distill a weekend of action into a few hundred words. This week, TCS offers its own take on the GBU, a poor imitation of course, but one intended primarily to honor the man as much as the action, and to bid goodbye to Chris in the way many of us first said hello to him: by talking about boxing.

Read The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly: A Weekend Wrap Up in Tribute to Chris Herrera on The Cruelest Sport.

If any fight from this past weekend is to dominate discussion in the coming days it is the HBO main event from the Turning Stone Resort and Casino, in Verona, New York, where junior welterweight Lucas Matthysse barely survived, and narrowly outpointed, Ruslan Provodnikov. And the attention Matthysse-Provodnikov receives as its dust settles is well-deserved. While perhaps not the apotheosis of violence the unbridled enthusiasm that preceded it anticipated, Matthysse and Provodnikov arrested a collective attention for twelve brutal rounds, the type of rounds that obscure futures.

Read Ungodly Punishment: On Matthysse-Provodnikov, Terence Crawford and Styles on The Cruelest Sport.