(Joshua Clottey, photographed by Howard Schatz)

Now that we're done with the autopsy of Floyd Mayweather-Manny Pacquiao, it's worth glancing forward to the separate ways each of them are going. These are, after all, the two top fighters in the world, and while I'm still scrunching up my nose in revulsion at both welterweights for not fighting one another, it's big news whomever they fight next instead.

Pacquiao is set to fight Joshua Clottey March 13. Mayweather is set to fight somebody March 13 -- yes, these goofballs are threatening to hold fights on the same day even though it would undercut everyone's pay-per-view buys, once again proving that pride can trump greed in boxing -- and there's a list of people under consideration. How do all these combinations match up?

(An illegal Antonio Margarito hand wrap. Photo: California Attorney General's office)

Boxing fans and followers are still shaken by the failure to make the proposed Manny Pacquiao-Floyd Mayweather, Jr. fight. Many blame Mayweather, some blame Manny, and others (like Tim and myself) blame everyone involved.

Yet as the shock subsides and the sport trudges along and attempts to pick up the pieces, the future of the two biggest stars of the sweet science takes shape. Mayweather is close to signing with a “mystery opponent” (could it be The Shockmaster?). Meanwhile, Pacquiao – seemingly the instant the fight with Floyd was pronounced irrevocably dead – signed to fight Joshua Clottey on March 13 at the new Dallas Cowboys stadium in Texas.

While these consolation fights do little to erase the painful memories of the failed Pacquiao-Mayweather negotiations, Pacquiao-Clottey is a pretty damn good-looking fight on paper. Many argued that the tough Ghanaian beat Pacquiao’s last victim, Miguel Cotto, so it will be interesting enough to see how he fares against Manny. He’s a big, strong, tough welterweight. It’s extremely unlikely he beats Manny, in my opinion – a guy with a habitually low work rate is unlikely to seriously challenge a whirling dervish like Pacquiao – but the fight should provide enough action to satiate fans.

I don’t begrudge Top Rank for moving on and making Pacquiao-Clottey. I do, however, seriously begrudge them for the following news item in a recent Dan Rafael blog post: Antonio Margarito, he of the sordid past, could be fighting in Dallas, too.

Mundine hasn't fought a world class opponent since Mikkel Kessler in 2005. While Danny Green is the man of the moment right now, when Mundine fought him in 2006 he was coming off two losses to Markus Beyer and was probably a little drained at super middle. Daniel Geale, who Mundine narrowly beat last year, is probably only RING-rated because of his good performance against Mundine. "The Man" has one knockout from his last eight fights, while earlier in his career he routinely ended fights within the distance.

So is Mundine losing it? Maybe. It's hard to tell without seeing him fight someone on his level -- which may never happen again. At 34 he's no spring chicken, though he's not all that old for a medium-sized fighter. He's still very fast, but he obviously no longer has the power he once did. It might be that losing and gaining weight over his career has had some effect on him. When he quit as a footballer he was effectively a cruiserweight, and he's jumped between middle and super middle ever since. Maybe a lack of quality opposition and his own psychology (he obviously has issues with truly challenging himself) has had an effect. Unless he steps up to challenge more meaningful fighters soon, it's going to be harder and harder to take him seriously.

Everyone has their favorite culprit in the blame game for how each side walked away from an estimated total of $200 million and gave the sport of boxing and its fans the Abner Louima treatment. But I'm of the view that there's plenty of blame to go around. Everyone involved -- Top Rank, Golden Boy, Mayweather and Pacquiao -- is tarnished by this, and deserves deep, lasting scorn for it.

For much of the debut main event in the ESPN2 "Friday Night Fights" season, rickety 37-year-old middleweight Roman Karmazin was not looking his best, getting wobbled as he did by Dionisio Miranda in the 3rd round and largely surviving with ring savvy against a low-skilled, one-handed but powerful fighter in his physical prime. Then in the 9th, Miranda floored Karmazin with his overhand right after setting it up with a jab, and Karmazin, who previously only had to dodge the overhand right by itself, staggered so worryingly it was surprising he made it out of the round.

But this is boxing.

And while sometimes that means a bunch of stupid asses can't figure out a way to give the fans what they want, it's not what it meant on FNF.

What it meant for Karmazin was the other thing: It's a sport where you can hit a seven run home run or score a 24 point touchdown.

That's what he did in the 10th, delivering Miranda to the canvas with a straight right hand. Then, when Miranda got up and was staggering as worryingly as Karmazin did before, Karmazin landed another straight right hand square on Miranda's button. He wouldn't get up this time.

I giggled. Smirked. Yeah, I still love this sport.

Sometimes a fight where one or both of the fighters aren't among the elite takes away from a dramatic bout. Miranda isn't elite. He hits hard, but he's inept in the ring. Karmazin isn't. He didn't look anything like the fighter who dismantled Kassim Ouma four and a half years ago, like the fighter Oscar De La Hoya was set to fight before Oscar pulled out citing an injury and left Karmazin without the payday of a lifetime. Karmazin is old, and unlike some old fighters in these days where old fighters can thrive, he looked it -- slow, vulnerable.

But really, that made it all the more dramatic. Karmazin said he would quit if he didn't beat Miranda. His career was on the verge of coming to an end. But somewhere, somehow, he found some way to win, and he'll get one last shot at a big pay day, now that he is the mandatory title challenger to Sebastian Sylvester. It really is an amazing spectacle, this boxing, when it's done right.

Oh, you kids out there in Never Never Land. Your optimism about the possibility that Floyd Mayweather-Manny Pacquiao may still happen -- it helps open the door in my brain just enough that when I see items like this one, about the remotest possibility of the fight being revived, that it gives me a glimmer of hope. But I still expect it will be crushed! So thanks for contributing to my future disappointment, you sunny basterds!

The "using one's imagination" theme spread to the headline of this Quick Jabs column, you might notice. Also here: Trainer switches of the huffy and non-huffy variety, misbehaving teenagers, press releases that sound cooler than they are and assorted fights in the works. There's the Squeakquel, there's Electric Boogaloo and yes, there's Jabs: The Quickening.

When critics used to trot out the reasons for boxing's decline, the word "greed" inevitably made the list. They were wrong. I'm not saying it doesn't exist in boxing. But boxing is the only sport I know of where irrational emotion and excessive pride regularly trump greed.

That's what seems to have happened when Floyd Mayweather, Jr.-Manny Pacquiao collapsed Wednesday evening, apparently irrevocably, for its tentative March date. There were credible predictions that the fight, expected to be the richest ever, would make as much as $200 million total. Everything was agreed to, save one item: Mayweather's demand for random blood testing for drugs. If both sides are to be believed (no small leap of faith), Pacquiao's side agreed to random blood testing at any point up to 24 days from the fight, with a test after; Mayweather's proposed a 14-day cut-off.

Ten days. Ten days. That's how minute the difference was between making and not making a fight that would have etched history in all kinds of ways, had it happened. Motives in boxing are complex, opaque. The best explanation I can think of is that somebody, maybe everybody, was catering to his ego more than his wallet.

Because it doesn't stop at -$200 million. The imaginary winner of Mayweather-Pacquiao -- maybe even the loser -- is now out whatever massively increased baseline price he could have commanded in his next fight by virtue of having come out ahead in the fight more people would have viewed on pay-per-view than any fight ever.

But there is one way in which boxing ruined itself with greed by letting Mayweather-Pacquiao fall to the wayside. By each party catering to their own selfish whims, they robbed boxing fans of the fight everyone wanted to see, a match between the two best fighters of the past decade, its two biggest stars, its two best fighters of today aligning for a rare potential showdown in the same welterweight division.

These are men who so prefer to indulge their own basest desires that they would rather send a giant "f-you" to their customers than set those base desires aside for a moment. They don't care what harm comes to the sport that earned them their livings, whether boxing pisses away every bit of momentum it had gained since 2007, when everyone began to realize it was a good idea to regularly have the best fighters fighting each other, to give their customers what they wanted. Immediate gratification of short-term urges is more important than anything. Anything.

How... small. Like 10 days.

I'm not kidding. I'm so despondent, I can hardly write about this sport at all right now. This was the best I could do for the night, and I had far grander plans. This would be a good moment for me as a boxing writer to "rise to the occasion," but I can't muster it. I can't even be passionate in my anger toward everyone who failed us. I invested a lot in the idea that boxing had finally "gotten it," at least in the most meaningful way -- giving fights we wanted, more often than not. I feel so naive, so stupid for caring or believing.

In that vein, I took a gander at Dan Rafael's essential boxing schedule and culled the potential highlights of January and the first week of February, since action is slow to get going this month. In chronological order:

Both BoxingScene and the Las Vegas Review-Journal are reporting that what would have been the richest fight in boxing history, Floyd Mayweather, Jr.-Manny Pacquiao, is dead. The Review-Journal reported that Mayweather turned down an unspecified compromise Top Rank and Golden Boy worked out during mediation. BoxingScene reported that Mayweather wouldn't accept a 24-day cutoff for blood testing proposed by Pacquiao's side [UPDATE: Top Rank boss Bob Arum says the same thing]. The Review-Journal says Top Rank will soon announce Pacquiao would move up from welterweight to junior middleweight to fight Yuri Foreman.

So is Mayweather-Pacquiao dead, or dead-dead? Nothing's dead-dead in boxing until it's dead-dead-DEAD, but this is bad news, news that borders on heart-breaking. It won't happen in March, according to the reports. The possibility that they'll fight in September isn't good enough for me. This was a chance for boxing to seize back the days when a fight could be a massive pop-culture event; some have suggested this fight could generate a Superbowl-like excitement, and I don't think that's overstating the matter much. There's no guarantee that the fight will happen in September, even, since the same issues will persist that prevented both boxers from wanting $40 million apiece more than they wanted some stupid shit. At the most pivotal moment in the sport's renaissance that began a couple years ago, boxing has once again apparently found a way to squander it away.

Barring a dramatic reversal, I have to consider quite seriously whether I can bring myself to care about this sport again. It's that dire. If the two best boxers alive inhabit the same weight class and can't manage to fight each other, what's the point? Athletic competition is about the best pitted against the best, and the ultimate example of that in boxing is Mayweather-Pacquiao. If this is truly the end of that fight, all I can say to Top Rank, Golden Boy, Pacquiao and especially Mayweather is this: Enjoy life back like it used to be, when the sport you have soiled was more of a backwater curiosity than it's become. You'll be a lot poorer for it. And because of some stupid shit. Some blood testing. It even sounds like a joke. Try and live this one down.

As we know, Marciano defeated Moore by 9th round knockout, wearing down the older fighter with a relentless assault, just as he had done to Walcott, Charles, and Louis before him. Liebling frames the fight in "Ahab and Nemesis" less in boxing terms -- though he elegantly renders Moore's 2nd round knockdown of The Rock as "a crisp right thrown within the arc of Marciano's left hook" -- than as a clash of personal styles, of two men who stand in starkly different relation to their work. As Rotella puts it, "Liebling stages Marciano's defeat of Moore as a resonant confrontation between force and intellect." For Liebling, Moore represents a hard-won mastery of the self, Marciano a kind of cheerful atavism. Liebling would later apply this same conceit to his account of the three title fights between Floyd Patterson, whom Liebling admired extravagantly as a man and as a fighter, and Ingemar Johansson, whom he thought likable but basically unserious -- a "slugger."

Rotella, who is Professor of American Studies at Boston College and the author of "Cut Time: An Education at the Fights," adroitly connects Liebling's feeling for Moore's plight against Marciano to Liebling's own ongoing problems of craft. Literature, as the critics tell us, always refers to the problems of its own making, and Liebling had perfected as a writer a wry and subtle tone that constantly risked misreading. Rotella is very sharp on this point:

The slippery work of extracting nuggets of meaning from a fight is Liebling's great subject, the problem that shapes not only the themes but also the form of his writing about boxing. He mixes registers and allusive gestures up and down the highbrow-lowbrow spectrum, assembling an interpretive repertoire suited to the challenge posed by the fights.

The Marciano-Moore confrontation might have been an interpretive conundrum, but for Liebling it also represented a cultural moment, the coming of a cruder tone to American life. Moore, with his long forced apprenticeship as the uncrowned light heavyweight champion, and his hard-won mastery of the subtleties of the game, was linked imaginatively to a broader philosophical tradition of craftsmanship and self-reliance. Marciano, by contrast, was pure power, the machine to Moore's John Henry. If this characterization is unfair to Marciano, who never asked to be a cultural symbol, it nonetheless speaks to our collective sense of the mythological freight of the heavyweight championship, its place in the vocabulary of the masculine American ethos.

As Rotella points out, Liebling was writing as an elegist, marking the passage of the organic tradition of small fight clubs and live attendance in favor of what he thought of as the grosser spectacle of a television sport dominated by the needs of advertisers. The impact of the age of television on boxing has been written about in many places since, but Liebling remains the standard, in this as in so many other things. In linking Moore's defeat at Marciano's hands to the rise of television, Liebling perhaps betrays a certain anxiety regarding the place of his own kind of writing in a country grown louder and coarser than the one he thought he knew.

What Liebling could not have known as "Ahab and Nemesis" went to press was that he had witnessed Marciano's last fight. The champion announced his retirement six months after knocking out Moore, toyed briefly with a comeback fight against Johansson, and then gave up the game for good. Perhaps in destroying Louis, Walcott, Charles, and Moore -- the best fighters of a very good era for heavyweights -- he felt that he had made his definitive statement. The Rock retired young, and he would die young, in the company of a gangster in an Iowa plane crash on the way to a surprise party for Marciano's 46th birthday. Moore, meanwhile, would fight on, becoming a beloved champion and living into the late 1990s as a bebop icon and community activist. So perhaps, in "Ahab and Nemesis," at least, Liebling was too much the pessimist. Perhaps the old values do sometimes endure.