Fight Night: Boxing in the Bar

Denizen415, used with permission

Don't take it outside, boys...

​The definitions of both "sports bar" and "bar fight" are malleable, it would seem. In a good way.

Last night marked another edition of Tuesday Night Fights put on by the San Francisco Boxing Union. Patrons of Roccapulco Supper Club ate, drank, and made merry -- this is normal -- while watching amateur fighters unload on one another an arm's length away -- not normal.

Perhaps the ultimate compliment to the night's entertainment was paid by an enthusiastic viewer upon leaving the establishment: "There weren't no goddamn dogshit fights of the bunch!" And this is true. Grammar aside, there weren't no goddamn dogshit fights of the bunch.

There were seven bouts last night, as well as an intermission act who pulled off the best bilingual rapping you've ever heard delivered from a boxing ring within a bar.

And while the quality of the fights -- double negatives notwithstanding -- was noted above, the two best bouts of the night were the two last. In the sixth match Andrew Moy of San Francisco's 445 Boxing Club and Alan Vasquez of Oakland's Phight Club spurred the crowd to their feet with a series of furious exchanges; this was the only fight of the night in which a boxer knocked back into the ropes somehow summoned the strength to immediately knock his attacker into the adjacent set of ropes. Like so many amateur bouts, the judges' task was not clear-cut. Vasquez outpointed the hometown fighter.

Finally, in the main event, Phight Club's Terry Fernandez nearly knocked out Ricardo Pinnell of San Mateo's B Street Boxing in the first round, only for the crafty southpaw to batter him with jabs in the second, and add combos to those jabs in the third. The West Bay boxer was declared the winner, and patrons stumbled to the bar. With "sports bar" and "bar fight" already redefined, it was time to work on "punch drunk."

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