by David P. Greisman

The first boxing card I covered live was Mike Tyson’s final bout, when he quit against Kevin McBride and I asked a question in the post-fight press conference that made him curse. It probably didn’t ever take much to make Tyson curse.

Over the years I have been on press row nine times in Washington, D.C., which I grew up near and where I now reside. I’m fortunate enough to be able to travel to see people punch each other in the head, and also to see a small sampling of wherever is hosting said brutality that week. Yet there’s also a sense of joy at being able to work, in essence, from the comfort of home.

This past weekend brought an HBO doubleheader to the D.C. Armory, which is where most major boxing matches are held these days in the nation’s capital. Tyson-McBride was the last to take place at the Verizon Center (where our pro basketball, pro hockey and Georgetown Hoyas college basketball teams play). Lamont Peterson’s victory over Amir Khan took place at the convention center.

Heavyweight contender Luis Ortiz knocked out Tony Thompson in six rounds. Jessie Vargas stopped Sadam Ali in nine rounds to win a welterweight title. The undercard brought a featherweight tilt between Oscar Escandon and Robinson Castellanos, while the rest of the preliminary action largely featured local prospects.

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My drive home (well, to a neighborhood bar) gave me plenty of time to think about what I — and many of the rest of you — had just seen:

 - This card didn’t need to end up in D.C., but it did anyway. And that wasn’t because of the main event (Ortiz-Thompson), but rather due to Vargas-Ali. Vargas is from Las Vegas. Ali is from New York City. Neither wanted to fight in the other’s hometown.

I tend to prefer that fight cards go where they can sell the most tickets and build fan bases for the stars of the show. But I also see a value in bringing an event to a major metropolitan area and building an appetite for people there to become repeat customers in the future (a Showtime tripleheader featuring Bernard Hopkins-Beibut Shumenov, Peter Quillin-Lucas Konecny and Shawn Porter-Paulie Malignaggi was held at the Armory in 2014).

Although Thompson is from D.C., it seemed in the arena as if plenty of the ticket sales came from the local prospects. There also were loyal contingents for Ali, as New York is about a four-hour drive away, and a pair of guys from Philadelphia, which is even closer.

Nevertheless, it made sense for Ortiz-Thompson to go on last, even if it wasn’t a title fight and even though it wasn’t expected to be competitive. The audience cleared the arena immediately after Thompson lost. Had the fight been in the co-featured slot, we may have seen a repeat of when Glen Tapia lost to James Kirkland in Atlantic City, leaving a largely empty room for the main event between Guillermo Rigondeaux and Joseph Agbeko. Of course, Vargas-Ali was much better than Rigondeaux-Agbeko.

I wish there were more major shows in D.C. There are enough upcoming prospects that the undercards could becoming a proving ground and a farm system for future stars, similar to how boxing in Montreal groomed its talent, getting fans familiar with the young fighters and building followings for them as they move up in the rankings.

Even if many of these prospects don’t pan out, it still creates a desire in local boxing fans to come out and watch the sport. That’s how we grow our audience, which in turn may convince more local media to cover boxing, which then feeds into this cycle.

Lamont and Anthony Peterson have fought in D.C. on occasion. Featherweight titleholder Gary Russell Jr. never has. Seth Mitchell did. Despite all of his limitations, he could’ve continued on and tried to become a local attraction.

- Ortiz won as expected, and his hand speed and power continue to look impressive. It’s hard to judge him based on his wins over Thompson and Bryant Jennings, yet what he does show is enough to make us want to see how he’ll fare against the other top heavyweights.

That’s going to have to wait until he defends his interim heavyweight title against Alexander Ustinov as what is supposedly part of a tournament to winnow the World Boxing Association’s many belts down to just one champion in the division. The winner of Ortiz-Ustinov will be ordered to face the winner of the Tyson Fury-Wladimir Klitschko rematch. Lucas Browne, who beat Ruslan Chagaev this past Saturday, will face Fres Oquendo and the winner of that will face the winner of the Fury-Klitschko/Ortiz-Ustinov bracket.

HBO is clearly building toward Ortiz vs. the Fury-Klitschko winner. It’s why the network aired such a mismatch, as it wants fans to follow the storyline and have some familiarity with Ortiz.

I understand that, but it’s also a shame that so many of the network’s decisions are based on relationships and storylines rather than making great fights. There are obligations to show certain boxers. HBO is reportedly tightening its budget, and yet so much money is going toward building fighter and building toward fights without actually putting on great fights.

So when an interesting fight like Vasyl Lomachenko vs. Nicholas Walters gets passed on by the network — which likely thinks that the show costs too much money for too little reward — the logical next question is “What better fight is that money going toward?”

Then again, that situation is also the fault of the promoter, which has contractual obligations to pay its fighters certain amounts and which ratchets up how much fighters expected to be paid as they reach a certain level. Promoters are increasingly reliant on television license fees to subsidize their boxing matches.

And boxing fans also play a role in this. We don’t always show up for competitive fights but will follow individual fighters.

I’d still rather we get competitive matchmaking instead of seeing Gennady Golovkin, Sergey Kovalev and Terence Crawford get guaranteed wins while we wait for better bouts to be made. Promoters feel less compelled to make those competitive matches when they can push them off and get paid to prolong the process.

- The D.C. athletic commission needs to have a talk with Lloyd Scaife, a boxing judge who BoxRec lists as having worked 87 matches dating back to 1995 (that list may not be complete). Scaife somehow had Ortiz-Thompson as a 48-47 fight after five rounds when the other two judges had it 50-43.

Scaife scored Round 1, in which Ortiz knocked Thompson down, as a 10-9 round when the other judges had it 10-8. Scaife scored Round 3, when Ortiz knocked Thompson down again, as a 10-9 round — for Thompson. Even though Thompson may have been winning the round until the knockdown, the round belonged to Ortiz. Scaife also was the only judge to give Thompson the fifth.

- A week ago, we watched Carl Frampton and Scott Quigg look too tentative and too unwilling to put themselves out there in the biggest and toughest fights of their careers. So it was all the more refreshing to see Jessie Vargas and Sadam Ali fight with the urgency of their situation. They weren’t reckless, but they were clearly trying to win — and look good in the process.

Vargas didn’t distinguish himself while at junior welterweight, given his controversial wins over Josesito Lopez in 2011 and Khabib Allakhverdiev in 2014. He’s continuing to grow. While he lost to Timothy Bradley last year, I believe the experience — hurting Bradley badly in the final seconds — gave him confidence and also taught him a lesson about waiting too long to try to land with power.

The power — which hadn’t been seen in years as Lopez rattled off 10 straight decision wins — came against Ali because Vargas worked to set it up. Vargas has seen a number of changes in his corner in the past year and a half, going from Roy Jones Jr. to Erik Morales to former kickboxer and cruiserweight boxer Dewey Cooper. It’s clear that Cooper did good work. Sometimes it’s not a big name that is best for you; Emanuel Steward was never a professional fighter.

- And on another note, Adrien Broner is next for D.C. His fight with Ashley Theophane will be at the Armory on Friday, April 1.

Broner sometimes trains at the same gym as the Peterson brothers, and his name is big enough that the show will have an event feel. Anthony Peterson and other local guys will also be on the undercard.

I’m sure his team, including the publicists from Swanson Communications, couldn’t have been happy that Broner’s best quotes at the press conference in D.C. last week were full of expletives — and that he then skipped out on meeting with the media afterward.

The press conference had drawn at least one local television station. That kind of coverage is hard to get in a city where the other sports franchises get so much attention. It doesn’t help build a good relationship when the star leaves them lacking.

But Broner doesn’t feel obligated because he, like so many other stars, gets paid big money whether the show sells well or not.

“Fighting Words” appears every Monday on BoxingScene.com. Pick up a copy of David’s book, “Fighting Words: The Heart and Heartbreak of Boxing,” at http://bit.ly/fightingwordsamazon or internationally at http://bit.ly/fightingwordsworldwide. Send questions/comments via email at fightingwords1@gmail.com