Before we go any further let’s just get this out of the way: twins are creepy. There’s no way around it. Over three percent of the world has a nearly exact genetic copy and no one ever talks about it. There’s a sentient flesh mound walking around with a Xerox of your genome and we’re all supposed to just be okay with it. This is Twilight Zone shit and normalizing it will be done at our own peril.
Now, if you’re a twin and you’re offended by this please understand, from the bottom of my heart, that I do not care. You and your Plan B, spare parts, mutant offspring should be in cages and I’ll gladly be there to throw the key into an active volcano once you are.
That being said, I have a theory.
Within every set of twins there’s a self-contained, cosmic power balance that must be maintained or else their atoms conjoin in a particle acceleration that makes the Hadron Collider look like a cap gun, thus forming a large, single, cretinous mongoloid who serves no other purpose than to sit comfortably in its own waste and drool and that’s how Republicans are made. The process is not dissimilar from the two Stations fusing together to form one big Station in Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey except these are filthy human twins and not ageless space geniuses with “excellently huge Martian butts.”
But I digress.
This theory explains the finishing of one another’s sentences and the good twin/bad twin thing. Every scale needs a counterweight. Every action needs an equally creepy and opposite reaction. We can’t both sit on the same side of the boat or the goddamn thing is gonna tip over.
In the case of the Charlo brothers, Jermell (32-1, 16 KO) and Jermall (29-0, 21 KO), this concept manifests itself in the yin and yang of violent knockouts from one answered by pedestrian decisions from the other. The magnificent and the mundane.
Jermell goes for a walk in the park against Mario Lozano, Jermall crumples Lenny Bottai into a pile of wet laundry. Jermall white knuckles it against Austin Trout, Jermell bombs out John Jackson. Jermall implodes Hugo Centeno’s brain; Jermell goes life and death with Austin Trout. Hmm, I’m starting to think that maybe this only applies to Austin Trout fights.
You can go down their entire Boxrec page and do this, though please don’t, mainly since I’ve already done it for you and definitely not because this theory has more holes in it than Harambe.
Nevertheless, as Jermall prepared to face Brandon Adams (21-3, 13 KO) at the NRG Arena in Houston on a Showtime-televised card last night, one needed to look no further than Jermell’s sensational third round ethering of a hapless Jorge Cota last weekend to surmise what kind of fight it would be. Adding another highlight reel beat down to his resume would’ve been nice, but the elder Charlo was bound by the laws of nature to grind it out over the distance. He is, after all, a twin and you can only spit in Mother Nature’s face so many times before there’s a price to pay.
Adams is certainly a tough dude and his stocky, muscular frame allows him to fight in close quarters while staying underneath his opponent’s punches and forcing them to swing down on him. I’m told he won some reality show or something but it wasn’t about extreme ghost hunting so I didn’t see it. He’s also, as far as I know, not a twin so he still has a chance at getting into heaven. All good things.
For his part, Jermall, when not busy being a crime against nature, is doing all he can to tread water and keep his name in the mix in an increasingly crowded middleweight division. With Saul “Canelo” Alvarez and Gennadiy “I Guess That’s How We’re Spelling My First Name Now” Golovkin still working out their fall schedules and Demetrius Andrade river dancing his way to irrelevancy across the street on DAZN, Charlo would need to make a statement and in Adams he found the EXACT wrong opponent against whom to make it.
The rounds would all play out relatively similarly. As Charlo loaded up right hands and uppercuts on the inside, Adams would attempt to get under them and bull his way in as Charlo then backed up and reset.
There were some good exchanges on the inside and Adams showed a hell of a chin as he took some hard shots. The fight played out like a tennis match with long, back and forth volleys that gave the appearance of parity, but in the end were all won by the same player. Someone has to win the round and even though these weren’t blowouts, Charlo was clearly getting the better of it, as the near shutout scorecards would reflect.
Boxing is like a conversation, in that equal contribution from both participants is required, and also because it’s insufferable when you see women do it. I’m almost positive that’s a joke but there is a back and forth, I-go-then-you-go nature to it, and if Jermell’s one punch cratering of Cota seven days ago was a monologue, Jermall’s fight with Adams was a spirited debate. Neither one is necessarily better but when a violence-starved audience with a Beavis-like attention span is paying the bills, brutal knockouts are the more stable currency.
As we’ve established though, Jermall didn’t have that option. The unchallenged laws of ghastly mutations decried that he must balance the scales with an impressive yet workmanlike performance.
In the end, unanimous scorecards of 120-108, 120-108 and 119-109 will add a tick to Charlo’s win column but not much else.
The middleweight division is in a bit of a holding pattern, and Charlo is caught in the middle. I don’t know where this win gets him but I can tell you where it won’t get him: into heaven.
A mutant’s soul can never be cleansed.
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