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Please, Dadashev. Please. __________ Part snuff film, part promoter-pivoted judging -- with just enough intrigue for me to care about the little stuff in the face of the big stuff, to my personal discredit. All of it broadcast live on an app -- because the revolution was never quite televised, but our hate-driven divides and fractured society viewing perversions will almost certainly be streamed. ___________ This dark reverie has me mulling a Pernell Whitaker story no one knows now, if it was even recalled then for a week. The day he fought Chavez, a 25-year-old working the NYC Subways, in a power-distribution shack by Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, was fatally shot in the head by a coworker at 930 am over some grievance the loner gunman had (he took himself out afterward). It was just across the highway from the school I was attending -- I was a kid in a classroom not five minutes away. The slain 25-year-old -- Richard Charles -- turned out to be from Elmont, Long Island -- he lived in a basement apartment to which The New York Times sent a reporter the next day. Three years later, that reporter, Robert McFadden, would win a Pulitzer for such spot coverage and after that, he'd move to the obituaries desk. On this Saturday, back on Sept. 11, 1993, he interviewed Charles' neighbor and buddy. "I can't believe it," the friend said. McFadden: "Last night, he said, they had planned to watch the Julio Cesar Chavez-Pernell Whitaker fight for the welterweight title." This kid working for the Subway didn't live to see Sweet Pea robbed. He would've been 50 last year. Meanwhile, on the other side of the highway, I graduated that Bronx school a couple days before Manny Pacquiao won his first title on HBO PPV, in June 2001. There's senselessness to who stays on and who goes. And why and how it happens. I remember part-truths, I stitch them together. It's purely a compulsion with me. There's no thought of elevation or encomium. Whether we all deserve any credit for our biologically-induced recall, whether there's free will enough in the gesture for us to call it noble, I don't know. So that's a story of man who missed the Sweet Pea robbery. Please, Dadashev. Please.  |