On Nov. 25, I purchased the $75.00 pay-per-view boxing card on Showtime, headlined by David Benavidez vs. Demetrius Andrade. This is, on the face of it, an insane decision. Watching people hit each other is not a pastime any reasonable person would recommend, and parting with the best part of a hundred bucks to do so…well, you know what they say about a fool and their money.

But I thought I had a good reason to buy the fights on Saturday. Boxing may be violent, terribly run and possibly corrupt, but its participants have irresistible stories. I wanted both Benavidez and Andrade to win. Benavidez is a wonderful fighter, a powerful beast of a guy with an inexhaustible gas tank, and he is in line for a shot at Canelo Álvarez, the face of the sport (who I happen to strongly dislike and hope Benavidez beats). Andrade, 35, is a skilled defensive boxer and has been avoided by fighters of note his entire career due to his tricky southpaw style. He has seen his resume lag well behind his talents as a result. This was his big shot.

Then there was the co-main, between José Benavidez (David’s brother) and Jermall Charlo (brother of Jermell, who Álvarez crushed last month). José was once a highly touted prospect, but was shot while walking his dog in 2016 and hasn’t been the same since. Charlo has not defended his middleweight title in years due to personal issues. When Brian Custer of The Last Stand podcast recently asked Charlo how bad things had gotten, Charlo got quiet and talked about how he would look at his life and feel many degrees removed from it. Again, I wanted both fighters to win.

Then Charlo weighed in almost four pounds over the 163-pound catchweight for the bout. He tried to make weight again later that day and somehow weighed more. This is a grave offense in boxing; weight classes and catchweights exist for a reason, and being heavier than mandated can result in an unfair advantage in punching power. And it had an extra sting here, since José Benavidez was not as naturally heavy as Charlo and had to climb the weight classes to get the fight (basically, he was a sacrificial lamb for Charlo’s return). “Hard to defend this guy anymore,” said Dan Cannobio of the Inside Boxing Live podcast on Twitter. “Coming in overweight for a catchweight fight is insane.”

That may be. But I liked Charlo after watching his interview with Custer, and my heart went out to him after hearing him talk about his personal issues. It was hard for me to mentally condemn him for the transgression…until I started thinking about José Benavidez, and how his career had been crippled by him getting shot, and how Charlo had just increased the chances that he would knock Benavidez out by breaking the rules.

And then the fights started, and Charlo looked completely unbothered by everything José Benavidez did, and I felt bad for Benavidez because of the weight discrepancy. Charlo landed some colossal punches on the smaller Benavidez, who, to his credit, walked through them and kept trying until the final bell. They started jawing at each other towards the end. I felt awful for Benavidez, who took a prolonged beating for no reward and had essentially been fed to Charlo to give him a soft touch in his delayed return to the ring.

David Benavidez thrashed Andrade, soaking up his opponent’s speed and quick combinations of punches in the early rounds before breaking him down with one heavy shot after another. Andrade went down in the fourth round, and though he got up and threw a few more spirited flurries, you could see in his eyes that he was done. The fifth was a beatdown. After the sixth, the referee told Andrade’s corner that he would stop the fight if another round like the previous one happened. They threw in the towel after that.

Andrade’s career is essentially over. At the very least, he will not get another fight of this magnitude. He did not do much wrong, he just ran into an unstoppable opponent in Benavidez. But the business cares not. Having waited so long to get his chance, it was over in eighteen minutes of brutality. My heart broke for him a little.

I was glad for David Benavidez, who has done more than enough to earn a fight with Canelo. But then I remembered something he had said in Showtime’s All Access series in the leadup to the fight. He had been talking about how his father had been hard on him as a child. They had nearly parted ways before eventually reconciling. “Without trauma, there can’t be no greatness,” Benavidez said. And then in his press conference: “I love fighting.” Then my heart broke for him too.

Showtime Boxing is ending at the close of 2023. Showtime’s new corporate overlords at Paramount Plus are going in another direction, which is weak billionaire speak for “we’re going to lay off dozens of hardworking people and kill a decades-old institution because we think it will save usmoney.” Custer’s The Last Stand podcast will need a new home. All Access is done. The Showtime Boxing Podcast hosted by Eric Raskin and Kieran Mulvaney, which I spent exorbitant amounts of time listening to in 2023, is done at the end of this year.

“It sucks, but it’s reality,” is the appropriate attitude to take about the demise of Showtime Boxing, and, for that matter, the appropriate attitude for Andrade to take about his crushing loss. Sometimes I wonder how people can accept the “it’s reality” part of the equation. Imagine training at something all your life, going undefeated as a professional until 35 years old, then getting shellacked on the cusp of greatness. I suppose Andrade, José Benavidez, and everyone at Showtime Boxing will find consolations and other joys at some point. But I hate that they have to.