A History of the Pretty Boy: From Tony Janiro to Ryan Garcia

[thenonpareil]

In Raging Bull, Jake LaMotta (as played, in ferocious Method mode, by Robert De Niro) discusses plans for his next opponent, the handsome welterweight Tony Janiro: “I’m gonna open his hole like this. Please excuse my French. I’m gonna make him suffer. I’m gonna make his mother wish she never had him. Make him into dog meat. He’s a nice, a nice kid. He’s a pretty kid too. I mean, I don’t know, I gotta problem—if I should f--k him or fight him.”

Of course, Janiro had a bigger problem, and that was the prospect of being trapped in a ring with an infuriated LaMotta. On fight night, Janiro took a beating that left his winsome face temporarily misshapen. This, of course, is an occupational hazard of a pretty boy in boxing, one that Ryan “KingRy” Garcia hopes to avoid as long as possible.

The unlikely rise of Garcia, the twenty-two-year-old Instagram luminary who recently signed an endorsement deal with Gatorade, hints at both the future and the past. For the future, Garcia seems to presage the inevitable arrival of the reality-star boxer, the concept of famesque finally downloaded into a blood sport.

As far as his link to the past goes, Garcia is the latest in a longstanding tradition of boxing pretty boys such as Tony Janiro. Although his career has been considerably augmented by the tech advances of the last decade or so, his key selling point—good looks—links him to an era that goes back to the halftone.

https://hannibalboxing.com/a-history-of ... an-garcia/