When the tears spilled out of Aaron Hernandez’s eyes last Friday after being acquitted of a double homicide, you couldn’t be sure who they were for. Now we’ll never know.

That’s been the only truth we can be sure of since the moment the former New England Patriots tight end was implicated in the murder of his friend Odin Lloyd, a semi-pro football player Hernandez was eventually convicted of shooting in cold blood in a dark industrial park a mile from the $1.3 million mansion he lived in when he wasn’t shacked up in a flophouse near Gillette Stadium hiding from whatever fears were tormenting him.

We’ll never know is all we’ll ever know of him.

We’ll never know why he hanged himself five days after that acquittal and three days after the second anniversary of his conviction in the Lloyd case that left him locked in a prison cell at the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center in Shirley with no possibility of parole. He’d been acquitted of the drive-by murders of Daniel de Abreu and Safiro Furtado but still judged guilty of Lloyd’s death so nothing really changed when the tears flowed except Hernandez himself.

That was the first time he’d shown anything more than a smirk toward the world or a smile toward his fiancee, Shayanna Jenkins-Hernandez. Something snapped when he heard the words “not guilty” and for the first time since this all began he lost control.

He was no longer the alpha male of the football field or the prison yard. He was a child, weeping we know not for what.

What went through his mind when he found himself behind bars on Easter Sunday, a day of redemption for many but not for him? Even though his high-powered defense attorney Jose Baez had gotten him off in part by implying without a scintilla of evidence that perhaps the two dead men had been drug dealers involved with Hernandez’s nefarious friend turned hate-filled enemy, Alexander Bradley, he was still alone with whatever dark thoughts filled his mind in a cell he shared with no one.

Baez was claiming there were grounds for a new trial in the Lloyd case and reasonable doubt could be created. Baez, undefeated in murder trials, is the king of creating doubt. The reasonableness of that doubt is often debatable, but doubt he could create.

So why would someone seemingly finally in possession of some good news, choose the wee hours yesterday morning to hang himself with a bedsheet tied to a window?

We’ll never know.

Was it too many hours alone with regret? Was it too many hours alone with rage? Was it too many hours alone with the knowledge of his innocence, which he proclaimed to the end, or the knowledge Baez got a guilty man off and might do it again? Only God and a handful of people, half of them dead, know the truth. For the rest of us there is only speculation and confusion.

There is so much we’ll never know, yet there are a couple of things we do know.

We know Aaron Hernandez was no victim. From the time the anchor in his life, his father Dennis, died during a routine hernia operation, he went from goofy kid to wannabe gangbanger, tatted up and loaded for bear. He made one bad choice after another with a nearly unbroken string of lowlife associates, violent acts and days and nights wrapped in a cloud of dope smoke. Some who knew him say the dope was laced with PCP, a drug so potent most people stopped using it long ago because it leads to paranoia and worse.

He starred on the football field because of an uncanny ability to shake himself free but could never shake free of the life he chose. Trouble didn’t follow him, he sought it out.

A psychological test he took before the 2010 draft found him to favor “living on the edge.” He registered the lowest possible score in social responsibility, one out of 10. That plus the baggage he’d laden on himself at Florida while becoming the top tight end in the country led to every team in the NFL passing on him at least three times before the Patriots took him with the 113th pick.

Two years later he was a Pro Bowl alternate. Three years later he was in handcuffs, marched into a cell he would never leave. He would be implicated or charged in the shootings of six men dating back to a 2007 drive-by in Gainesville, where Florida police wanted to question him but his lawyers refused and no charges were filed.

We don’t really know who shot those guys in Gainesville or Lloyd, Furtado, de Abreu or Bradley, who claims Hernandez did before leaving him for dead. We do know what juries said, what lawyers said, what Bradley said, what the evidence said. Yet all we really know is Aaron Hernandez couldn’t live anymore with the weight of what he was carrying.

What that was, we’ll never know. But an old boxing philosopher named Cus D’Amato once told me, “Guys born round don’t die square.” Aaron Hernandez chose a life filled with violence and shady characters, it wasn’t thrust upon him.

Sometime around 3:05 a.m. yesterday he died the way he’d lived, making one last bad choice and letting others suffer the consequences.

Brad Marchand looked stunned when he first heard the number before finally looking up and conceding the obvious.

“Yeah I didn’t know that so, yeah, it’s a good stat,’’ he said, even though it was anything but a good stat for the Bruins.

The number in question was 12. Actually 12 minutes and 58 seconds to be precise because that’s how long the Bruins went without putting a shot on goal in the final period of last night’s crushing 1-0 playoff loss to the Ottawa Senators at the Garden.

For 12 minutes and 58 seconds of that period they put nary a shot on Craig Anderson. None. Zilch. Zippo. You don’t have to be Lord Stanley to understand if you can’t put the puck on net, you can’t win a hockey game.

Yet Marchand did put the puck on net both early and late last night and came away empty every time, being left frustrated by Anderson at the start on a breakaway and late when the seemingly always rolling and bouncing puck in the final 90 seconds wouldn’t quite go through the small openings Marchand saw because, well, sometimes that’s how it goes in hockey.

“I thought we did a pretty good job down there (in the offensive zone),’’ Marchand said after the Bruins had lost for the third straight time and second straight on home ice to fall behind 3-1 in the series as it returns to Ottawa tomorrow night with elimination staring the Bs in the face.

“We had a lot of really good opportunities and their goalie made some big saves, so you’ve got to give him credit. We had a good start. It’s frustrating when I had two Grade A chances and should have capitalized on at least one of them. That’s tough, yes.’’

Perhaps the toughest to swallow was when Anderson came clamoring out of the net, diving toward Marchand as he broke in alone and diverting the puck with his arms rather than his stick. Had Marchand chipped it over him, there was nothing behind Anderson but air but he didn’t as Anderson channeled his inner Johnny Bower, the old Maple Leafs’ Hall of Fame goaltender.

“You know, when I was a junior I had Johnny Bower for a day and that was the story,’’ Anderson said of his sprawling save. “The first time he ever came out sliding into a guy he was nervous. And I was nervous. I’m just glad it worked out.’’

Everything seems to have lately. Frustration is the goal of the Senators’ smothering defensive style and frustrated the Bruins have become. Ottawa comes to the arena each night with a singular notion — score once and go home. It’s taken a bit more than that to go up 3-1 but all of their wins have been of that razor-thin margin and last night’s was the stingiest of all.

The Bruins pressed them hard early and Marchand pressed them all night, getting off six shots which was more than 25 percent of the team’s total of 22. Several of them were indeed “Grade A’’ chances and several more were B+. But all, in the end, got an F for they failed to light the lamp.

“He got a lot of chances,’’ centerman Patrice Bergeron said of Marchand. “I’m not too worried about that. He’s getting the chances and they’re going to go in for sure. He’s got one (goal) already in the series. He was on the puck tonight, finding a lot of plays. We just have to keep fighting. Keep pushing.

“We have to find ways to fight a little bit more in front of the net and around the area, make it a little harder for their goalie. I think we’re having a lot of one-and-done. We got to find a way to get to the inside a little bit more.’’

Marchand was in that position several times and came away empty. For a finisher, which has become his role, one cannot accept that yet the truth is Anderson had more than a little to do with that last night.

Certainly there were long stretches where the Bruins achieved little on offense, taking only five shots in each of the last two periods compared to 12 in the first when they seemed to get the jump on Ottawa. But they could not sustain that early pressure and because they didn’t convert those chances the Senators continued playing the suffocating, patient defensive style that has put them on the brink of sending the Bruins home for the summer long before summer arrives.

“That’s a bit of their identity,’’ Bruins’ coach Bruce Cassidy said. “They’re always five back. We knew it would be difficult (to score). First period we did have our ice. We did have our opportunities and we didn’t bury them. When you have opportunities you have to bury them. That didn’t happen. We need a little bit more from our offensive guys but their goalie earned his keep tonight.’’

He did and nobody knew that better than Brad Marchand.

WORCESTER — They started off as pen pals.

That’s how the jailhouse relationship between former Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez and fellow inmate Kyle Kennedy started. It began at the bottom of a letter Hernandez wrote to an inmate at MCI-Cedar Junction, the jail once known as Walpole State Prison. Typically for Hernandez it seems, it centered on a violent encounter.

While Hernandez was already incarcerated at the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center, where officials say he committed suicide last week, he became aware of a dustup between two rival factions at Cedar Junction. He was told Kennedy acquitted himself well and wrote a few lines to him at the bottom of a letter to another inmate, acknowledging his “respect” for Kennedy’s actions and that he hoped they would meet.

Not long after that, they did.

Kennedy was somehow transferred to Souza-Baranowski and according to Kennedy’s lawyer, Larry Army, Jr., they quickly formed a relationship so close they asked to become cell mates.

“I can also confirm at this point in time, in approximately September 2016, Mr. Hernandez and my client had requested through the regular course of events at the Shirley House of Correction to be cell mates,” Army said yesterday. “The request, while initially approved, was later terminated by the supervisor of the jail.

“The issues, as my client understands them, was the size difference between Aaron Hernandez and himself. The superintendent of the jail informed them they typically attempt to house prisoners of the same race and of basically same size so if an altercation breaks out there is at least the appearance of equity.”

If there is one thing that doesn’t exist in thug life or jail life, it’s equity.

Love? Who knows? Army refused to confirm or deny if the two were jailhouse lovers, as has been alleged. But he did confirm that Hernandez regularly wrote to members of Kennedy’s family of their relationship and he read briefly from one such letter.

“They are very personal letters and they speak candidly of the close friendship and the mutual respect that my client and Mr. Hernandez had for one another,” Army said. “Mr. Hernandez refers to my client in both letters not by his legal name only but also by his prison name ‘Pure.’ ”

Army then read from a letter to Kennedy’s father written last September: “Mr. Kennedy, it’s Aaron. I’m writing to you but Pure doesn’t know. I wrote to him just to let him know I wrote to you out of respect for him. He’s my brother and he always will be.”

Army said he couldn’t discuss the details of their relationship.

“My client has made it very clear he will in fact talk about that relationship, the nature and the extent, but he wants those words to come directly from his mouth to the world,” Army said.

“I will tell you there are portions of letters that I have seen that were addressed to members of Kyle’s family that talk about the depth of the relationship between Aaron Hernandez and Kyle Kennedy. I never said that they were lovers. I’m not at liberty to say one way or the other that they were. My client is the one who is going to make that statement when the time is right for him to make that statement.”

Kennedy is believed to be the last person to see Hernandez alive, but was put in segregated population the evening of Hernandez’s suicide for violating jail rules. He was informed the following morning and immediately put on suicide watch himself because jail officials were aware of the depth of their connection.

Kennedy told Army he first thought it was all some kind of sick jailhouse joke but once the reality of it hit, he recalled what he thought had been a meaningless note Hernandez sent him approximately three weeks earlier.

“My client remembered at that point … a letter … where Mr. Hernandez did state ‘I think I’m going to hang it up. LOL.’ ” Army said. “My client at the time didn’t read into that. He thought it was a joke. Obviously, three weeks later, when we see what happened, it has a different meaning.”

Everything about the case of the Gangsta in the Huddle does, it seems. But as Kyle Kennedy learned that day and the world keeps being reminded, nothing about Hernandez’s strange life and stranger death was a joke. It was just a sad, sick story of a broken boy who was never the man anyone thought he was.

“My client told me that Aaron Hernandez is one of the most powerful forces as a person that he has ever known,” Army said. “Aaron could take any situation, no matter how bad it seemed, and turn it into a positive. That’s the way my client described him.”

Maybe his client, like everyone else who encountered Aaron Hernandez, saw what they wanted to see and not what was there … which frankly wasn’t very much.

This time of year, as the NFL draft consumes everyone involved in football, league personnel spend a lot of hours watching old films. Commissioner Roger Goodell must have been doing the same thing this week.

At a time when 29 states and the District of Columbia have legalized at least some form of marijuana use and eight states plus D.C. have legalized recreational marijuana, El Jefe launched into an anti-marijuana tirade Friday that seemed to reaffirm that the league that once was a societal leader has fallen well behind the times. It may not be 1936 in the NFL, but Roger Goodell sounded like that’s where he was mired.

“I think you still have to look at a lot of aspects of marijuana use,” Goodell said on ESPN’s “Mike & Mike” show. “Is it something that can be negative to the health of our players? Listen, you’re ingesting smoke, so that’s not usually a very positive thing that people would say. It does have addictive nature. There are a lot of compounds in marijuana that may not be healthy for the players long term. All of those things have to be considered.”

Addictive nature of marijuana? A league that regularly pumps its players full of Vicodin, OxyContin and other powerful opiates and fills their joints with so much butazolidin that many of them would be disqualified from running in the Kentucky Derby yet are regularly cleared to play in the Super Bowl is worried about marijuana use? Really?

If the addictive nature of substances is Goodell’s concern, then why is the NFL advertising alcohol consumption and charging liquor companies millions of dollars to advertise it on their games? Has he never heard of AA? What’s more addictive, marijuana or bourbon? Weed or whiskey?

Goodell sounded like he’d just watched “Reefer Madness,” the 1936 anti-marijuana cinematic screed that became a 1960s joke among the counterculture with its poster that warned “Women Cry For It! Men Die For It!”

In a league that regularly asks its players to perform with injuries that would debilitate every other professional athlete except hockey players, Roger Goodell thinks marijuana is what’s bad for his players?

Maybe, but it’s not as bad as actually playing football is bad for his players. Frankly, that’s a big part of the reason so many of them are smoking weed in the first place. They’re self-medicating.

“We look at it from a medical standpoint,” Goodell claimed, although that has yet to truly be the case when players test positive for using a little medicinal Chronic. “So if people feel that it has a medical benefit, the medical advisers have to tell you that. We have joint advisers, we also have independent advisers, both the NFLPA and the NFL, and we’ll sit down and talk about that. But we’ve been studying that through our advisers and to date they haven’t said this is a change we think you should make. That’s in the best interests of the health and safety of our players.”

Well, as we all know, if there is one thing that is uppermost in the minds of NFL coaches and executives, it is the health and safety of their players. That’s why they send them out to play each Sunday with broken bones, sprained knees, separated shoulders, concussions and filled with enough Toradol that they could be run over by a freight train and not notice until midnight … after which they might well feel the need to smoke a little ganja or some gangster to dull the pain.

According to a lawsuit against the league filed by 1,800 former NFL players alleging rampant abuse of prescription drugs, in 2012 each team prescribed, on average, 5,777 doses of anti-inflammatories and 2,270 doses of narcotics. The NFL has 32 teams with rosters of 53 players. If one does the math, that amounts to an average of nearly 150 doses of drugs per player per year.

“Opioids … have killed more Americans than any other plant I have ever seen in my life,” former New York Giants Super Bowl defensive end and medicinal marijuana advocate Leonard Marshall told Peter King’s “Monday Morning Quarterback” website recently. “You can’t tell me that pot or the smoking of pot is as bad as an opioid or has killed as many Americans as opioids.”

Roger Goodell is worried about marijuana use? How about opiate abuse? 

The biggest danger weed provides NFL players is getting them suspended for testing positive for it. As marijuana becomes legalized in more and more states and teams tire of losing top talent like Cleveland’s Josh Gordon and Dallas’ Randy Gregory for smoking a drug legal in some cases in the very state where it’s being used, the hypocrisy of the NFL’s position becomes ever more apparent.

“We are actively looking at the issue of pain management of our players,” NFLPA assistant executive director George Atallah said. “Studying marijuana as a substance under that context is the direction we are focused on.”

As CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta recently put it during a pro-marijuana piece, “It can be tricky, I learned, to be on the right side of science but on the wrong side of ideology.”

It can be even trickier still, as commissioner Goodell proved Friday, to be on the wrong side of both.

LAS VEGAS — There is no sporting tradition more deeply embedded in the soul of Mexico than boxing. It is a country created by warriors and sustained by them today inside the most dangerous piece of real estate in sports — the boxing ring.

To be a boxer there is to accept the harsh demands of the warrior’s code, a code embraced by feverish fans who demand you not only win but do so in a fashion keeping with the great traditions of the past. They are bloody traditions that will tolerate defeat but never retreat.

Into this world, Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. was born. His father is universally considered the greatest boxer in the country’s long history, and that carries with it baggage young Chavez has never been able to shake no matter what he accomplished after making the choice to enter the family business 14 years ago.

Young Chavez could never approach the heights of his father but that is not his great sin. His great sin is that he quit on his stool two years ago against a fringe light heavyweight contender named Andrzej Fonfara, a sin compounded by past transgressions like thrice failing to make weight and for testing positive for marijuana in 2012.

They are sins he will try to absolve Saturday night at the expense of Mexico’s newest great champion, Saul “Canelo” Alvarez, in front of the largest indoor crowd for boxing in Las Vegas’ history. They are also sins Alvarez keeps throwing at him in flurries.

“He has shamed his country with what he has done with his career,” Alvarez said during a recent facedown with Chavez on HBO. “He has done many things that have placed in doubt the sport of boxing. I can’t respect an athlete like that. I can’t do it. That’s the truth.”

Truth or not, the consequences of those words have turned this from merely a highly anticipated fight into a passion play that carries with it for Chavez Jr. far more than a victory over a popular opponent. That is a fact even his father acknowledged both in words and by the frantic way he was chewing gum throughout yesterday’s final press conference at the MGM Grand.

The elder Chavez looked fit enough to fight himself and seemed intense enough to do so. He understands what is on the line Saturday night for his son is something more important than pay-per-view numbers or even purse numbers. What’s on the line is how his countrymen will view him for ever more.

“We accepted this fight for my son’s dignity, for the pride. ” Chavez said. “Pride is the most important thing in this fight. Not money.”

Actually the first important thing is to make the 1641⁄2-pound catch weight the two fighters agreed to. Alvarez recently renounced the WBC middleweight title he held after that organization tried to pressure him into making a deal to face unified champion Gennady Golovkin, so there are no belts on the line. But in addition to pride there is a $1 million per pound penalty clause Chavez had to agree to because of his checkered history with the scales.

Yesterday he said he was already at 168 and would easily make the limit, but assuming he does a larger hurdle remains. That is the one to win back the country of his birth and their hypercritical and often hyperbolic fans, who turned on him over the past three years when his intensity and interest waned after he nearly knocked out then middleweight champion Sergio Martinez in the final round after bravely absorbing a terrible beating most of the fight.

He went from being a co-equal with the rising Alvarez (48-1-1, 34 KOs) in the eyes of Mexicans to a harshly treated joke. But Saturday night Chavez can erase all that in 12 rounds if he boxes adroitly and ferociously. It is his opportunity, he knows, to rewrite his story.

“The person who loses is going to lose a lot,” Chavez (50-2-1, 32 KOs) admitted. “That’s the same for both of us.

“This fight has created a lot of passion in me. This is the biggest fight of my career just because of who I’m fighting and because of the opportunity. All my career they don’t give me credit. That’s what always happens. I’m not just the son of Julio Cesar Chavez. I’m the new Julio Cesar Chavez.

“Right now there is not one fighter everybody is following. Whoever wins this fight will be that person. For Mexico this fight is important for the making of an idol everyone can follow. This is my opportunity to show people who I am.”

Who the former middleweight champion had become over the past few years was a bloated mess who trained indifferently and fought the same way. But for this fight he fled to the same isolated mountains where his father once prepared himself for battle. There he trained with Nacho Beristain, who is considered Mexico’s top trainer, laboring in a world devoid of internet connections, cable TV and far more dangerous distractions.

Now he has emerged from that two-month exile, he claims, prepared to answer to the demands of his fervent countrymen in a moment that may be his last.

“I think this is one of the most important fights in the history of Mexico,” Chavez Jr. said. “I feel it’s my last opportunity and I’m going to take advantage of it and make the best of it. I’m the type of fighter people want to see.

“I can tell you this. I am the son of a legend but all of my accomplishments have come from my work. I’m the one who won those fights. I want to prove to everybody that I still can fight at the very top levels.

“I don’t fear my opponent. The only thing I worry about is myself. I’m the only thing I have to worry about. Boxing is not about luck. I don’t believe in luck. It’s about hard work and it’s what you have in your heart.”

What that is, of course, is what all Mexico is waiting to see Saturday night. Only after that will they decide who Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. is to them.

LAS VEGAS — Canelo Alvarez is literally facing the biggest challenge of his career tonight. Whether it will be his toughest is debatable.

When Alvarez steps into the ring at T-Mobile Arena to face former middleweight champion Julio Cesar Chavez Jr., he will be looking at the biggest opponent he has ever squared off with. There is no denying Alvarez will be at a significant physical disadvantage facing someone who will likely outweigh him by 10 pounds or more, will stand four inches taller and will hold a nearly 3-inch reach advantage, all assets Chavez the Younger believes have left Alvarez in a dark place with which he is not familiar.

“I think Canelo has never been tested with a bigger and stronger guy,” Chavez argued. “I’m ready. I don’t know if he is ready.”

Neither does longtime boxing promoter and matchmaker Don Chargin. Chargin is an expert in understanding what makes good matches and when one boxer or the other has cause for concern. Although in recent years he has been an adviser to Golden Boy Promotions CEO Oscar De La Hoya and company president and chief matchmaker Eric Gomez, this was not an opponent Chargin would have taken lightly, or at all, if he could have avoided it.

That the match is good business and hence necessary is without question. Whether the risk equals the potential reward however is something Chargin has found himself fretting about for weeks.

“I like Canelo to win the fight but the size concerns me,” Chargin said. “Chavez is a lot bigger than what Canelo is used to. He’s strong, has a good chin and can hurt you. That’s a concern. And then there’s Nacho.”

“Nacho” is Nacho Beristain, who is considered to be the best trainer in Mexico. Chavez has at times been reluctant to properly prepare himself and it has shown in his recent outings. He has failed to make weight several times and often seemed ill prepared and disinterested, but by all accounts that has not been the case since Beristain came on board. He took Chavez 90 miles into the mountains above Mexico City for a two-month training camp at the Otomi ceremonial center, where Chavez’ legendary father used to steel himself for his biggest fights.

There were no distractions and few breaks. Weight was removed properly. Sparring was harsh. Excuses were nonexistent. Chavez was not always happy, which frankly is the point of a boxing training camp.

Several weeks ago, the story goes, Chavez (50-2-1, 32 KOs) suggested it was time to leave for final preparations in Las Vegas, a city with far more bright lights than Otomi, which has none. Beristain told him, “Go ahead but I won’t be there.” Chavez didn’t leave.

He now looks to be in the best shape of his career and needs to be to make the 1641⁄2-pound catch weight Alvarez insisted upon. This was done to hopefully weaken Chavez, who has fought only once in the past four years below 170 and normally a pound or two higher.

On the other hand, Alvarez (48-1-1, 34 KOs) has never fought above 155 and has been accused by Chavez of facing either pumped up welterweights or refusing to allow challengers when he held the middleweight title to fight above 155 pounds even though the division’s weight limit is 160. There is truth in those criticisms.

Alvarez knocked out blown-up welterweight Amir Khan with one punch, forced an aging Miguel Cotto to fight at 155 despite it being a middleweight title fight and in his last fight returned to junior middleweight to face Liam Smith for the WBO 154-pound title. He has no idea yet if he can carry the bigger weight load and retain his power and speed, nor does he yet fully understand the kick of a punch coming from a fully grown super middleweight, which is what Chavez has become.

The question then is will having to get down to 1641⁄2 so drain Chavez as to take away his natural advantages or will the effort to go up nearly 10 pounds reduce Alvarez instead? (Both fighters weighed in at 164 yesterday.)

“Beristain has him ready,” said Chargin, who explained one of his fighters served as Chavez’ sparring partner and warned him how good he was looking. “(Marcos) Reyes has told me he looked fantastic. I’m worried about that size.”

If there is reason to worry it is not simply because of the size difference. It is that that difference has been enhanced by one of the best trainers in the world, one whose approach was a shock to Chavez.

“The difference is I was listening to Mr. Beristain,” Chavez claimed this week. “He had me doing certain training and I did it. It was very difficult in the beginning getting used to his regimen, but it is something that I did. I think that’s the difference in the fight. I saw some type of connection with him that I felt would be very good for me.”

If it is, it could be very bad for Alvarez, who is a 6-1 favorite and the possessor of faster hands and a more complete arsenal. Another advantage for Alvarez is that even with the presence of Beristain in Chavez’ corner, Alvarez can predict how Chavez will attack him.

At 30 years old, Chavez is unlikely to alter his aggressive, come forward style. He tends to crouch, reducing his height advantage and jabbing infrequently as he approaches while always looking to land a looping right hand that carries real power. Neither he nor Alvarez tend to use the jab much, but Alvarez is more prone to work the body, something in recent fights he’s done about 40 percent of the time. Can a dried-out Chavez take it there? We’ll see.

Chavez is vulnerable to the uppercut because of the low way he comes in and to a right cross behind it if he tries to block or parry. Alvarez is well capable of landing that combination, but he will have to get at close quarters to do it, which opens him up to risks if Chavez can bully him to the ropes.

Alvarez is most vulnerable there because he tends to cover up with his hands high and if he’s not strong enough to push his way free he may have difficulty escaping against the bigger man. Yet Vegas’ wiseguys have him as a heavy favorite for a reason that has been comforting for Alvarez.

“Because they know,” he said when asked the reason. “They know based on my history, my discipline, my abilities, my talent. All the experts see that.”

What they don’t know is if the bigger man will negate Alvarez’ speed edge and his power while retaining his own. If he does, Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. could make this a Cinco de Mayo with more fireworks than Canelo Alvarez expected.

LAS VEGAS — Canelo Alvarez never really hurt Julio Cesar Chavez, Jr. last night but he never let him into what became a decisive boxing lesson at the T-Mobile Arena either.

For nearly all of what became a one-sided points victory for the former middleweight and present WBO junior middleweight champion, Alvarez controlled the ring with his hand speed, accuracy and enough harsh right hands and uppercuts to convince Chavez that this was a night to concentrate on survival not victory.

In the final two rounds the crowd booed robustly because of Chavez’ unwillingness to engage and Alvarez' decision not to push too hard to make his point. For two guys who claimed they had deep animosity toward the other it was, frankly, a somewhat muted ending to a fight that was not in doubt from the halfway point on.

Judges Dave Moretti, Adelaide Byrd and Glenn Feldman all ruled emphatically for Alvarez, 120-108, each giving him every single round. The Herald was only slightly kinder, scoring the bout, 119-110, for Alvarez, giving Chavez the seventh round and scoring the first a draw since neither did a thing in the opening three minutes.

Predictably, when it was over, Chavez declined to take responsibility for his performance, implying the battle plan of his new trainer, Nacho Beristain, had derailed him.

“I wanted to box but he went to the ropes and I just needed to throw more punches,’’ Chavez said later from behind a puffy face and half-closed eyes. “I would’ve attacked more, I would’ve been countered by his punches. Nacho told me to do that, but the strategy didn’t work.

“We wanted to fight in the middle of the ring. When he went to the ropes I didn’t have the strength to get him. He was very good. He knew what he was doing in there. He didn’t risk too much.

“The speed and the distance was the key. I didn’t feel that much power because I felt dwindled, I couldn’t throw as many punches as I wanted. My father kept telling me to throw more punches from the ringside.”

Truth be told, if you throw sporadically and catch regularly it doesn’t matter what the plan was because you didn’t execute it. You executed yourself and your chance at victory, as Chavez did last night.

Wisely, Alvarez deflected some of the crowd’s disappointment when he announced immediately after the fight that he had agreed to face unified middleweight champion Gennady Golovkin Sept. 16 in this same T-Mobile Arena. That turned the booing that had washed over him and Chavez during the final two rounds into cheers, and when Golovkin showed up in the ring all was forgotten because Alvarez had delivered both a victory and news of a fight the boxing world had coveted for the past four or five years.

Interestingly, Chavez had entered the ring first to thunderous applause and a smattering of boos. It would be the reverse on the way out.

Alvarez, meanwhile, surprisingly received a more mixed reaction. While he may be the most popular fighter in Mexico, he was not in Las Vegas. At midweek he was a 7-1 favorite, but by last night Chavez supporters had bet him down to 4-1. Usually it’s said the “smart money’’ comes in late. Last night it was the dope’s dough.

“Tonight I showed I could move, I could box, I showed as a fighter I can do all things,” Alvarez said. “I thought I was going to showcase myself as a fighter that could throw punches, but he just wouldn’t do it (engage).

“I’ve shown I can do lots of things in the ring, anything a fighter brings — I’ve shown I can showcase myself. I wanted to try something new. I never sit down in sparring and I didn’t want to sit here. GGG —y ou are next, my friend. The fight is done. I’ve never feared anyone since I was 16 fighting as a professional.

“When I was born, fear was gone. I never got my share of fear. I’ve had difficult fights, and that will no doubt be a tough fight. But, I always say, Canelo Alvarez is the best because I fight the best."

He was facing far less than that in Chavez. Things started slowly with both taking a cautious approach, mostly fighting from the outside and keeping a safe distance. Chavez landed his jab with some effectiveness and Canelo managed to land several quick flurries in the first two rounds but neither was imposing his will on the other.

Alvarez was landing the heavier blows and finding ways to slip in close without paying a price despite Chavez’s 3-1/2 inch reach advantage. Chavez failed to use his size advantage with any kind of regularity.

With about a minute left in Round 4, Alvarez finally caught Chavez with a big right hand that sent the sweat flying off Chavez’ face. He then landed the first of what became three short uppercuts, each of which caught Chavez hard in the face when he tried to move inside. From that point Alvarez began to turn up the pressure and Chavez was unable to find a safe punching distance from which to respond.

When he thought he had found one midway through Round 5, he ate a solid right hand as Alvarez continued to bore in on him with the patience of a paid assassin, which in a sense he was, scoring ever more frequently with hard rights to the head and body that were beginning to unravel Chavez like someone picking at loose threads on an old sweater.

Alvarez chose to take most of the sixth round off, standing with his back against the ropes as Chavez moved in and landed, but nothing that had enough behind it to change the arc of the fight. Alvarez made that clear when he came out the next round and landed two hard flurries early, absorbed a brief assault from Chavez on the ropes, and came off them to slam a hard combination to the head and body that drove Chavez back in retreat.

This fight was beginning to resemble Chavez’ loss to then-middleweight champion Sergio Martinez five years ago on a night when he seemed totally baffled and bewildered by the man attacking him until he suddenly rallied in the final round and a half and nearly knocked Martinez out. By the eighth round last night, there was little sign of the latter but a stinging replay of the former as Alvarez built up a wide points advantage with a steady, two-fisted attack that seemed to leave Chavez no punching room as he absorbed more and more punishment while dishing out little of his own.

Chavez (50-3-1, 32 KO) was never hurt, but he was hurting as the fight wore on and he wore down during the final four rounds. After each, Chavez slumped on his stool, tired and confused, while Alvarez stood between rounds as if anxious to get back to work.

By the 10th round, Chavez’ face had begun to grow puffy and his eyes seemed to have a look of resignation. He continued his fruitless search for openings but no longer with authority. He was now mostly circling and in retreat, like a wary homeowner approaching a hornet’s nest filled, he knew, with a dangerous cargo he was not anxious to challenge.

The record-setting crowd of 20,510 at T-Mobile began to boo as the action slowed, Chavez taking few chances and Alvarez seemingly content to maintain what he knew was by the final round a broad lead on a night when he had put together a comprehensive victory.

Considering how one-sided a fight it had become by then, who could blame them?

LAS VEGAS — The fight was not the climax, it was the preliminary bout. Considering how lopsided the former was Saturday night, having another main event in the wings after the one just concluded was a stroke of genius. Those are three words you seldom say about boxing, but Saturday night they, unlike the fight that preceded the need to utter them, seemed warranted.

As was widely anticipated, Saul “Canelo” Alvarez dominated a shadow of his father’s greatness named Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. over 12 one-sided rounds at T-Mobile Arena. He did not win every minute of every round, but in the opinion of the judges he won every round, each scoring the bout a 120-108 shutout. Not even Julio Sr. had much incentive to quarrel over that accounting.

By the final two rounds the record-setting crowd of 20,510 was booing Chavez lustily for not gambling his state of consciousness to try and win and booing Alvarez because he couldn’t put him in a state of unconsciousness and didn’t seem inclined to try. Then Oscar De La Hoya, Alvarez’s promoter, showed why he’s been the Golden Boy all these long years since the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona. He showed he could not only see the future but knew when to make it.

“Show the video,” De la Hoya said during a post-fight press conference and up popped the fighting image of undisputed middleweight champion Gennady Golovkin, the man everyone in boxing has been crying out for Alvarez to fight for half a decade now. “So there you go! I’ve always said that fight would happen in September. I always said that. The fight is signed, sealed and delivered.”

Unbeknownst to all but a handful of people in boxing, a showdown long awaited between Golovkin and Alvarez had been agreed to several weeks before the biggest fight among Mexican fight fans was contested.

Alvarez-Chavez was a neighborhood brawl in the oldest of boxing traditions, a fight for king not of the sport or even a particular weight division, but for the beating hearts of boxing’s most fervent fans. They didn’t get much of a fight for their money, but when it was over, De La Hoya wisely had a bonus for them, which is to say the biggest and best matchup in the sport at the moment.

De La Hoya was always brilliant at timing and marketing, understanding instinctively the heartbeat of the average fight fan. Canelo was a heavy favorite over Chavez to everyone who understood what prize fighting is all about and fought like one from opening bell to last. His skills were more defined and honed than the scattershot Chavez, Jr., and his dedication to training and preparation were well in excess of anything the former middleweight champion had shown during his career. De La Hoya understood he needed an antidote to the disappointment likely to follow such a lopsided boxing match and he was ready. Far more ready for that challenge than the one Chavez faced in Alvarez.

Chavez always seemed to be riding on the flowing coat tail of his father, who is nearly universally recognized as Mexico’s greatest boxer. In fairness to the younger Chavez, that is a heavy burden to carry even if it does open doors to the kind of $3 million payday he received on Saturday night. That’s because it also opens you up for the kind of comprehensive beating he took before the true main event — Golovkin vs. Canelo — was announced.

Less than an hour after it was over, Chavez arrived without his father. Some might say it was the first time he’d shown up that night.

Both his eyes were half closed, a dark tint of bruising surrounding each. The right side of Chavez’ face was swollen and there were enough lumps on his forehead to make it resemble a relief map of the mountains above Mexico City. Whatever external pain he was experiencing was nothing compared to the embarrassment he was carrying within. It was the kind of internal injuries his fans had inflicted on him with their catcalls as the fight wore on and Alvarez wore him out.

“We wanted to fight in the middle of the ring,” Chavez said. “When he went to the ropes, I didn’t have the strength to get him. He was very good. He knew what he was doing in there. He didn’t risk too much.”

“One side showed up tonight,” De La Hoya crowed as Alvarez arrived just as Chavez and his reduced posse were leaving the debating hall. “I’ve already had several calls from around the world wanting to stage this fight. I literally had a missed call from Dubai, a missed call from the U.K. There’s interest all over the world. Those negotiations, those talks, will start in the weeks to come.

“This is the most anticipated fight, right next to Floyd Mayweather-Manny Pacquiao, but the difference is this fight will have a lot of action, non-stop action.”

Golovkin promised the same, acknowledging he has long waited for this moment. So too have boxing fans, who always seem to believe the next fight will be the great fight.

Maybe it will be this time or maybe not but just the announcement of it was like cleansing fluid being thrown over what had just happened.

Golovkin now will have his chance at capturing his dream on Sept. 16, but Saturday night he did something equally as important. He wiped out the memory of Julio Cesar Chavez, Jr.’s nightmare performance within seconds of its conclusion. Fortunately for him and Alvarez, boxing fans have a short memory and nobody in the arena understood that better than De La Hoya.

“Everyone understands this is a tough fight for both of us,” said Golovkin, as he sat next to Alvarez fittingly draped in a business suit. “This is an amazing fight for everyone. Everybody wanted this fight.”

As things turned out, it couldn’t have come soon enough. It was a reminder to us all of what is the most essential thing in boxing — perfect timing.

The list grows and so does the sadness. One wonders if it will ever end.

One fears it will not.

In the May 15 issue of Sports Illustrated, S.L. Price pens a moving piece about another fallen NFL warrior, but this one, for those of us who lived through an uncertain time in Patriots history, the sadness hits closer to home.

Nick Buoniconti, the undersized altar boy from the south side of Springfield who gave all of us normal-sized kids hope when he went off and became a 5-foot-11 All-American linebacker at Notre Dame and a Pro Football Hall of Famer, can’t figure out how to put on a T-shirt.

He can’t remember how to tie a tie.

Or how to lace his shoes.

Or how to make his left arm listen to the muddled commands of his damaged brain.

The epitome of agility and aggressiveness, Buoniconti once said when comparing his style to that of the greatest linebacker who ever lived, Dick Butkus, “When Butkus hits you, you fall down the way he wants. When I hit you, you fall down the way you want. But you still fall.”

Now it’s Nick Buoniconti who falls down for no apparent reason but that his mind no longer works.

Buoniconti is a casualty of hand-to-hand combat fought on football fields from Cathedral High to South Bend to Boston and finally on to Miami. Fought for our viewing pleasure for 14 years, seven with the Boston Patriots and seven more years of glory with the hated Miami Dolphins. That’s where Patriots management, in its infinite wisdom, sent the future Hall of Famer in 1969 for a quarterback named Kim Hammond, a linebacker named John Bramlett and a fifth-round draft pick who became linebacker Bob Olson. At the time, we thought the Patriots had brain damage for making a deal like that. We were right. In 2001, Buoniconti entered the Hall of Fame while we were still saying “who?” when looking at what he was traded for.

Buoniconti went on from the Patriots to win two Super Bowls, including one with Miami’s undefeated 1972 team that finished 17-0. After retirement he served as a successful agent and lawyer before becoming a multi-millionaire running U.S. Tobacco and working for 23 years as host of HBO’s “Inside the NFL.”

No matter how successful you become, you are never bulletproof from life though. In 1985, his son Marc was paralyzed with a broken neck making a tackle in college for the Citadel and together they turned that pain into the Miami Project, a charity that has raised millions and helped many suffering from similar injuries through research and services.

Buoniconti never blamed football for that pain he, his son and their family shouldered, but faced with what he believes the game has done to him he tells Price when asked if he knew then what he knew now would he still play, his answer is damning.

“The answer would be no,” he said. “I would not play football.”

Nick Buoniconti now wishes he never played? If you remember the kind of player he was, that thought boggles the mind. Maybe fittingly so.

At one point Buoniconti tells Price, “Someone said I took 500,000 hits to my head,” and if you ever saw him play back in the day you wouldn’t doubt it. Tiny even by the reduced standards of the game back then, he wasn’t even drafted by the NFL, but that was all right with us because it meant the Patriots got him on the 13th round of the 1962 AFL draft. Maybe he only weighed 215 pounds, but he was an instant hit when he came home, emphasis on hit.

His college coach, Joe Kuharich, once said when theorizing he was too small for pro football that “He’ll run through a brick wall for you but he’ll leave a small hole.” Maybe so but he made a big hit for seven years with the Patriots and a bigger one in Miami.

He’s in both teams’ Halls of Fame as well as in the one that counts the most, and he’s got the rings to prove it. He also has, according to Dr. David Ross, “holes in his brain.”

Nick Buoniconti is not alone among NFL players in that, as we’ve come to learn. In fact, Price also writes about one of Buoniconti’s now-suffering former Dolphins teammates, running back Jim Kiick. He, too, is struggling with football-caused brain damage. The difference between them is Buoniconti became wealthy enough to pay for full-time aides, a driver and a long string of doctors, tests and experimental therapies, while Kiick became lost and nearly destitute, a former player cast aside by a league that seems still to consider these broken men acceptable casualties in a sporting war that gets bigger and bigger but has left them little to show for their role in its growth.

Buoniconti is critical in Price’s piece of the NFL’s nearly billion dollar settlement of the concussion lawsuit that for a time threatened the game to its core, claiming it was “for the NFL. Not for the players.” Many others feel the same, just as they feel the NFL denied for decades any connection between concussions and head trauma with long-term brain damage, a lie they perpetrated long after they knew otherwise.

Now 76 and believed to be struggling with the three most feared letters in sports — CTE not NFL — Nick Buoniconti is broken in ways that cannot be repaired. S.L. Price’s story on the Sports Illustrated website will tell you that, but a video that accompanies it and runs for only 88 seconds says it louder than any words.

For those of you who remember the kid from Springfield who made a lot of us believe you didn’t have to be a giant to play like one, watch Nick Buoniconti try to figure out how to put on a T-shirt. Then wipe away a tear and ask yourself what you’ve really been watching all these years.

There’s a reason this is the seventh straight year LeBron James’ team has been to the Eastern Conference finals that begin tonight at the Garden.

The reason is LeBron James.

The Celtics may be the No. 1 seed and hold homecourt advantage over James’ Cavaliers but as near as the wise guys in Vegas can tell that’s the only advantage they hold. The odds makers installed the Celtics as 5-1 underdogs and that number has been growing the past 48 hours and could be even bigger by tipoff tonight.

Why? Well, not only is LeBron the greatest player of his era but he’s playing better than ever.

The Cavs are 8-0 in these playoffs and James has been immense even by his own otherworldly standards. He is averaging 34.4 points per game in the playoffs, is shooting 56 percent from the field, 47 percent from behind the 3-point arc and averaging nine rebounds, 7.1 assists and a blocked shot and a half every outing. He’s also playing over 42 minutes a game, so it’s not like he’s taking a breather any time soon.

The Celtics have been the ultimate overachievers this year but let’s be honest. They have no one who can approach James at his best, which is what he’s been playing like since these playoffs began.

James’ resume is lengthy: three NBA titles, six straight Finals appearances and seven overall, four MVPs, three Finals MVPs and two Olympic gold medals. But what is more astounding is that despite the heavy workload he shouldered this season in leading the league in minutes played per game, he has come into the playoffs and tore things even further apart.

The fact the Celtics will play Game 1 off a tough seven-game series against the Washington Wizards while James and the Cavs have been resting for 10 days may have something to do with the odds makers’ opinion. But, to be honest, James could have been working in a tire plant in Akron the past 10 days and it wouldn’t change the odds or improve the Celts’ chances.

“They didn’t give us a chance in this series,” the Celtics’ scrappy star Isaiah Thomas said after eliminating the Wizards. “They didn’t give us a chance when we were down 0-2 in Chicago. We got the No. 1 seed, and they didn’t give us a chance. They don’t ever give us a chance, and we just keep going. We don’t care about what others say.”

That’s what you would expect Thomas to say and you know he believes it and he should. He’s a great player even if he’s so small you would have to stitch two Isaiahs together to build one LeBron.

Great players refuse to consider the obvious and what’s obvious is James is playing basketball at the moment not as if he’s mastered it. He’s playing as if he invented it. To that Isaiah rightly says, like a prophet, “So what?”

If there is any chance to upset the Cavaliers it would be to adopt a “Joust with James” approach, hacking and fouling him in the probably vain hope his recent struggles at the foul line continue and you can push him to a seventh game in which he’s so black and blue that instead of playing like King James he plays only like a Prince.

Don’t count on it.

James and the Cavs are 3-1 against the Celtics this season primarily because Cleveland has the most dominant player on the floor, but it’s not the only reason, although he’s part of the rest of it too.

The Celtics live and die with the 3-ball, ranking second in the NBA by averaging 13.1 made 3-pointers per playoff game, hitting them at an accuracy rate of 37.3 percent. The 3-ball is Celtics coach Brad Stevens’ thing and it’s damn sure Isaiah Thomas’ thing.

The only problem with that is the one team better at the Celts’ game is the Cavaliers. Cleveland is averaging 14.4 made 3’s per playoff game with an accuracy rate of 43.4 percent. The long ball is as much a part of what they do as jamming the ball down low or running the floor, and James can do them all with equal alacrity.

It is certainly no news bulletin that James is the best player in basketball and the Celtics are unlikely to find an antidote to the poison he brings. All you can say is he better bring his “A” game because if he doesn’t Thomas’ little band of warriors will push him hard for as long as it lasts which, frankly, is all you can demand.

“I believe any team that I’m a part of, not just saying me, but we have a chance, and this team believes we have a chance, and we know we have a chance,” Thomas said. “We’re the No. 1 seed for a reason.”

They are and many people will tell you it’s because James and his starting rotation took more than a few games off late in the season to rest up. Well, now it’s here and the King better be ready because the Celtics are coming to win, even if nobody believes they can.

Well that didn’t take long.

Any lingering doubts that “anything can happen” in the Eastern Conference finals came to a crashing end by halftime of Game 1 last night when the Cleveland LeBrons took a 22-point lead over the Boston Isaiahs and never looked back.

Truth be told, it would have been 25, but Thomas managed to finally hit a 3-pointer from out around the Half Shell at the buzzer to make it, well, not close but closer. Slightly.

Actually the Cavaliers did look back to be fair. They kept looking back at the poor Celtics, who seemed both star-struck and stunned at the way Cleveland came into their gym and made a simple, declarative statement.

Simply put, it went like this: “You have been a nice story this season, Isaiah, but your team is the first seed in the East only because we didn’t care to be nor needed to be. You are finished.”

In theory the Celtics had home court advantage last night at the Garden, but they could have played that game in Danny Ainge’s back yard and it would have made no difference. The LeBrons were well rested after a 10-day wait for the Celtics and the Washington Wizards to get done with their foolishness, but they were not ill focused. They were ill tempered.

When that is the case with the Cavaliers, it is not long before the crowd becomes what they were last night at the Garden. They become ill at ease, then they become a disappearing act, using the excuse “Hey, love to stay but I’ve got work tomorrow.”

So do the Celtics after the beating they took, but the truth is no amount of work in the next 24 hours is going to do much to alter the advantages the Cavaliers have over them. They are, as we feared, better. Not better as in they have an edge. Better as in the Marines against the Boy Scouts.

When both sides regroup for Game 2 tomorrow night after last night’s 117-104 beating, pride being one thing this group of Celts have in abundance, it is unlikely it will be the same kind of wipe out. But any thoughts anyone was laboring that there will be some titanic Game 7 in this series melted the way most New Englanders did earlier in the day when the thermometer approached 90. Too hot for us, folks.

A friend in Dallas texted before the game “Cavs in 5.” At the end of the first quarter he texted “Cavs in 3.” By halftime he tweeted “Cavs in 2.” At that point LeBron James had not only the Celtics’ number but his own. He had 23 points and a plus-minus of plus-21.

Worse for the Green, Kevin Love had a plus-25. The Celtics, to a man, had a minus plus minus, as you might expect when you’re shooting 34 percent from the field and your opponent is shooting 55.3 percent and hell-bent on improving on that as the game progressed.

Despite what happened in Game 1, the Cavs will not win this series in two or three games, as my friend in Dallas suggested, unless he’s talking psychologically. In fact, they still might finally lose their first game of this year’s playoffs, although one now highly doubts it.

What was essential last night for the Celtics to be competitive against a superior opponent in this series was that they do what they have done much of the year. They had to hit 3s. Instead their 3s hit the rim, with a clanking sound.

By halftime they were a collective 2-for-16 from beyond the arc, a shooting percentage of 12.5 percent and an obituary being written. Considering the C’s were second among playoff teams in 3-point shots made going into this series, it was obvious they had to continue on that track. They did not. To be fair, Cleveland was first in that playoff category and went 2-for-9 in the first half, so it wasn’t like they were lighting it up themselves.

But they didn’t have to because they were blinding in every other aspect of the game.

In the early moments of the third quarter, the Cavs continued to dominate, going up by 30 in only two minutes. At that point Celtics fans had two choices. They could leave or they could begin chanting “No. 1 pick! No. 1 pick!”

The night before, of course, the Celtics had finally won the draft lottery, landing that first pick courtesy of the largess of the Brooklyn Nets. One last time Paul Pierce had paid off big-time for the Celtics, Brooklyn’s interest in him costing them what became that pick.

But the truth is, not even The Truth would have made much of a difference last night. The King had reigned and his court had rained down on the Celtics like a hurricane.

Will it be different tomorrow night? It is difficult to imagine it won’t be, but not as difficult as it is to imagine the Celtics can come back from last night’s pummeling with the belief that they can do anything about LeBron James’ march toward his seventh straight visit to the NBA Finals in a week or so — but watch it.

Why would Floyd Mayweather Jr. risk becoming the object of an unexpected but possible rear-naked choke hold? And why would the potential deliverer of such a hold, the UFC’s Conor McGregor, risk complete embarrassment trying to land a boxing glove on a guy seldom hit by people who actually know how to use them?

Money would be the short answer, as it always is in boxing, but not this time. The money is a given because if it happens, Mayweather-McGregor will be a freak show, and freak shows sell. But if Mayweather strikes a deal with UFC president Dana White to face mixed martial arts’ resident loudmouth later this year, it primarily will be because, in the end, the craziest things in sports always happen in boxing.

Certainly there will be millions of reasons to stage the match because it will attract the attention and the dollars of not just two unrelated, rabid audiences but actually three. There will be boxing fans, MMA fans and fans of the circus, which is what this will be from the moment it begins until it mercifully ends very likely with McGregor’s face red as much from frustration as from being pelted by Mayweather’s fragile but facile fists.

This kind of a match has been talked about for years and was engaged in once, unfortunately, at the Garden when UFC heavyweight legend Randy Couture took down former middleweight and super middleweight champion James Toney nearly seven years ago with some kind of sleight of foot that sent the latter to the floor, where he soon found himself ensnared in a choke hold from which he had no idea how to extricate himself.

The entire affair lasted three minutes and 19 seconds, but the action lasted about 19 seconds, if you call a large man sitting on the chest of a fat man and occasionally punching him in the side of the head action. This time, of course, it will be different.

One thing for sure, neither of these guys will be fat. Second, in theory at least, no one will be doing anything but boxing. Other forms of combat having been rejected at Mayweather’s insistence.

What’s not guaranteed is that McGregor will steadfastly follow the Marquess of Queensbury rules as required by contract but not necessarily by contact once the heat and the embarrassment start to rise. That, not money, is Mayweather’s only real concern.

No arm bars allowed. No double-leg takedown. No spinning back elbow. No kicks to the thigh. Most certainly no rear-naked choke holds. Just jabbing and moving, flurrying and moving. And, knowing Mayweather, more moving than any of the other.

But once the bell rings, what’s Mayweather’s guarantee of that? We all know he’ll be guaranteed the lion’s share of the pay-per-view sales, but who knows if McGregor will follow the script?

Considering Mayweather got a 60-40 split when he fought Manny Pacquiao, a name as big in boxing as his own, sources close to him tell me he will demand an even larger share from McGregor.

Will UFC go for it?

That depends on two factors. The first is that UFC is only in this for the money because White understands McGregor has no chance of out-boxing Mayweather. To take that approach it means UFC doesn’t believe a one-sided loss is any threat to its brand.

Second, because it already has a deal with McGregor, it’s now just about UFC’s side of the promotion. The UFC doesn’t intend to run the show but does intend to get paid handsomely from it.

“This is strictly a boxing show,” White said after reaching agreement with McGregor. “It’s going to be a typical boxing match where it’s all about the main event and not the undercard. That’s boxing. This won’t be a UFC event. It’s going to be a boxing event. So international is wide-open, the slate is clear on our side to do whatever. I don’t know what obstacles or hurdles they have to jump over.”

It’s also good business for both sides. Let’s be honest about it. This is a business deal more than an athletic contest.

What makes this inviting to White is that UFC will make more than McGregor to put him in the potentially mortifying position of doing to Mayweather what Toney did to Couture, which is to say never lay a glove on him. What makes it inviting to Mayweather is pretty much the same thing. Plus the money, of course.

“They said Conor McGregor signed his end of the deal,” Mayweather said Sunday from London. “I look forward to signing my end of the deal. I haven’t signed my end of the deal yet, so once I get home, I’ll talk with (adviser) Al Haymon, I’ll talk with Leonard (Ellerbe, his longtime assistant and the CEO of Mayweather Promotions), and we’ll see what we come up with. We’ll put all our great minds together, and we’re going to have another superfight.”

The fact UFC made clear this is a boxing event rather than laying claim to the promotion beyond its contractual vice grip on McGregor is one of the things leading to the feeling it might actually happen.

Normally, UFC never relinquishes its hold on any part of a promotion, from conception to concession. In this case, it is making a clear exception. Why? Because if it does, the bout will not be impeded by its network obligations or pay-per-view partners.

As for Mayweather, he’ll probably let his longtime partners at Showtime/CBS run the pay-per-view and fill it with his young fighters, giving them audience exposure they cannot get on their own. Hence it’s a win-win even before the win.

At one point last week, Mayweather went so far as to say there is a 90 percent chance the fight will happen. To that McGregor tweeted, “Sign your end Floyd or you are just a mouth.”

Actually, McGregor has that wrong. He’s an ATM not a mouth, and he shouldn’t bite the hand that will feed him. There’ll be plenty of time for that when he’s eating one quick jab after another and wondering why the hell he ever thought this was a good idea.

A week ago, Tiger Woods, or somebody working for Tiger Woods, wrote on his blog that “I haven’t felt this good in years.” In the dark hours of Monday morning, we learned why.

Sometime between 2 and 3 a.m., Woods was found passed out by the side of the road, the right blinkers of his car flashing on and off, on and off, on and off. For the past eight years, his once-dominant golf game has been flashing the same signal.

Palm Beach (Fla.) County police rousted him up, and he reacted the way you might expect. He had no idea where he was or what he’d been doing. He claimed he’d been playing golf in Los Angeles. Then he thought maybe he hadn’t. He could have said that about every round he’s played since 2013.

Woods was asked to recite the alphabet backward (which, frankly, I’m not sure I could do at the moment, let alone at 3 a.m. with my eyes half-shuttered). He replied, “Yes, recite the entire national anthem backward.”

Double bogey there.

To see the mug shot of a scruffy looking Woods, his eyes vacant and his hair thinning, was sad, but Woods never was someone who did much to gain people’s affection or empathy. He often was dismissive to fans, media and those he thought to be subordinate to him, which it seemed was nearly everyone he encountered in his lofty opinion.

I’ve spent a lot of time around Tiger Woods during the past decade but don’t feel I know much about him except for this: He has no idea what a friend is or how to be one. The latter is, frankly, more damning than the former.

Some folks once thought his surly, longtime caddie, Steve Williams, might have been that guy, the one who could and would tell him the truth when he needed to hear it while also having his back. Turned out that relationship, like many things about Woods, was fiction. Williams claimed in his 2015 book Woods treated him “like a slave.” He was just another bag-carrier, their “relationship” really nonexistent beyond employer and employee.

It has long been clear Woods never fully recovered from being unmasked as a colossal public fraud 71⁄2 years ago on a Thanksgiving night for which he had little to be thankful for. The combination of his father Earl’s death in 2006 and the death of his seemingly perfect marriage under seamy circumstances that Thanksgiving night began an unraveling that fully came to fruition only after his back and over-built body fell apart, too. Piece by piece, he broke down, first personally and then professionally.

In the end, his back became his game’s ultimate saboteur. He has suffered through four back operations and years of pain and discomfort. As was revealed during his 2009 battle with sex addiction, he also became a man who could not sleep. Anyone who knows much about psychology knows an inability to sleep is often a sign of depression and a restlessness of the soul.

Predictably, after his arrest on drunk-driving charges Monday, Woods did not appear, but he offered a cobbled-together statement saying it wasn’t him, it was the prescription drugs that did it. Sure they did.

“I understand the severity of what I did, and I take full responsibility for my actions,” his statement read. “I want the public to know that alcohol was not involved. What happened was an unexpected reaction to prescribed medications. I didn’t realize the mix of medications had affected me so strongly.”

Once again, it was his caddie’s fault, in this case a pharmacist. What did he think happens when you swallow Vicodin and who knows what else? You become more alert?

Where Tiger Woods goes next in his embarrassment is up to him. There was that odd shirtless pre-Christmas photo he posted a year ago, in shades and a Santa hat, with the banner “Mac Daddy Santa.” Social misfit? It has always seemed so.

Few people can understand the burden Tiger Woods has had to carry all these years, dominating a sport played in places that for many generations had been so unkind to African-Americans and other minorities. He was not the Jackie Robinson of golf, but his path was nearly as difficult and lonely. He walked a hard road he made look easier than it really was.

Now he’s on a new path, one he cannot dominate with a driver or a wedge. He is past his prime and never going back to what he once was. He will never be 25 again.

He might play golf sometime, but only as Eldrick Woods, not as Tiger. He might even win again, but not at the level he seeks. What he finds to fill that void will determine what the second half of his life becomes.

He’s on the back nine now and standing over a bad lie. How he plays it will determine who he is to become, because while golf is hard, life is harder.

For Tiger Woods, apparently a lot harder than any of us could imagine.

In two weeks, former unified light heavyweight champion Sergey Kovalev will get his wish. He will have the opportunity to avenge his hotly and highly disputed points loss to Andre Ward. Frankly though, it sounds as if he’s already spoiling for a fight.

Last week at his Oxnard, Calif., training base, Kovalev spoke ominously of the bad intentions he will carry into the ring at Mandalay Bay Events Center on June 17 — a night he seems to think is about payback for more than the losing of the IBF/WBA/WBO belts he once wore.

“I don’t like this guy and I want to punish him because he puts his nose really up right now,” Kovalev said. “I don’t care if he shows respect to me or not. I know only one thing: I will kick his ass! I want to destroy him.

“I want to destroy this guy as a boxer, as a champion. For me, he is not a champion, he’s fake champion. He lives right now with this status (but) he’s a fake champion. He believes in his victory over me and right now he’s trying to get belief of people in this victory. He knows he didn’t win. It’s wrong, for me, it’s wrong.”

Boxing is the sport of threatening words as well as threatening acts, the former often more for show and dough than anything else. But Ward and Kovalev had no love lost between them when they first met last November and even less now that they’ve grown to know each other in a way few men ever get to.

While each surely respects the other’s boxing skills whether they can admit it or not, there honestly seems to be little respect for the other as a man or a champion. Ward believes he out-gutted Kovalev for the win after getting off the deck in the second round. Kovalev admits he faded late in the fight but said that was due to overtraining. Yet he also believes the titles he held were stolen from him that night by compliant judges.

If that were all there was to it this might well be just a skirmish of words (war being too harsh a connotation). But the truth is neither fighter likes the other much, and their camps feel the same way. Enmity only grew in the months leading up to the Nov. 20 fight. And when you combine that with the controversial nature of Ward’s victory, you have the breeding ground for the kind of ill will Kovalev made clear he carries for Ward.

“It’s not the first fight where I’m angry, I’m always angry when I am fighting, but last two fights were very disappointing for me,” Kovalev said. “I want to prove that he didn’t deserve these belts. It’s my goal. I want to punish Andre Ward too because he doesn’t deserve this money, these belts, this status and to be champion. He’s not champion. In my eyes, he’s not champion. . . .

“I have a goal: to get belts back. It’s more to motivate me than any test.”

Although Ward (31-0, 15 KOs), the last U.S. Olympian to win a gold medal, has not lost a fight since the age of 12 and is a two-division world champion, he is a boxer by inclination and skill. Ward wins not with the kind of raw power for which Kovalev (30-1-1, 26 KOs) is known but rather with movement, agility, body punching and the accumulation of points and punishment.

None of that seemed to have made much of an impression on Kovalev, who mocked his opponent’s power last week while threatening his destruction as well.

“One day in my hometown Chelyabinsk (Russia) a girl, 25 years old, slapped me on my shoulder,” Kovalev said. “When Andre Ward punched me in the fight it was same. I didn’t feel any hard punches from him. I didn’t feel his uppercut and so I didn’t block his uppercut.

“I didn’t feel his punch but judges counted this punch. It is touches, not punches. Punches is punches. His was like a tap. Judges counted any tapping as punches.”

Whatever they counted was enough to give Ward the victory by a single point on all three cards. In contrast, media scoring had only 16-of-63 polled scoring the bout for Ward, a disparity from which Kovalev took some solace but not enough to assuage his pique whenever Ward’s name comes up.

In two weeks’ time, none of those scorecards will matter. Kovalev will again have Ward where he wants him. Standing in the same ring with him, although seldom right in front of him for long.

“I didn’t know that my energy will finish in the fifth round,” Kovalev said, alluding to his trouble in the first fight. “In the fifth round, I lost the speed, I lost the energy and I was empty, 100 percent empty. My body fought because my heart doesn’t say stop. I’ll be like fighting until I die. Andre Ward got like four rounds of victory with empty Kovalev. We’ll see what happens on June 17.”

Yes, we will and you can expect whatever we see it will arrive with bad intentions.

Dirrells mess deepens

The mess created on May 20 by the Dirrell brothers’ uncle and trainer, Leon Lawson, when he sucker-punched Jose Uzcategui after the latter was disqualified for landing a knockout punch to Andre Dirrell at the end of the eighth round of their fight, may not be over.

Lawson has been suspended indefinitely, perhaps permanently, and is facing two assault charges, but the fallout may also effect a planned world title fight between Callum Smith and Dirrell’s brother Anthony, who is also trained by Lawson. The problem is not with finding Dirrell a new trainer. It’s that video showed the former WBC super middleweight champion also involved in the pushing and shoving and punch throwing following his brother’s “victory.”

That now vacant WBC title was to be fought over by Smith and Dirrell Sept. 9. The fight is set for California and Smith hopes it will not be affected by Lawson’s actions and the chaos that followed the fight’s ending.

In a bit of a statistical oddity, if Smith were to win the vacant title, three of the four major 168-pound belts would be worn by Brits. James DeGale is the reigning IBF champion and George Groves recently won the WBA title. Odd but that’s boxing — odd.

A weighty problem?

Mikey Garcia has agreed to take a dangerous step July 29 when he’s to face four-division champion Adrien Broner on Showtime. WBC lightweight champion Garcia (36-0, 30 KOs) settled on a non-title fight with the mercurial Broner at a catch weight of 140 pounds because it was more lucrative than any bout for him in the lightweight division — but it comes with a potential heavy burden.

Broner has had repeated battles with weight and most recently campaigned as a portly welterweight. He failed to make the 147-pound limit in his title fight with Ashley Theophane by a half-pound and refused to come to the scale a second time to try to make it, and also struggled to make 147 in his next bout. Broner said the problem was he’d begun training for it weighing 180 and could not cut away 40 pounds in time.

Although this is the most lucrative fight Garcia could make, what happens when Broner (33-2, 24 KOs) comes in over the agreed 140-pound limit the day before the match? Does Garcia face losing both the payday and the goodwill of Showtime and take the risk even though he continues to argue he is still really a 135-pounder?

That is a question Garcia may yet have to answer, and if he does the options are not good ones.

Short jabs

Junior lightweight prospect Casey Ramos is trying to make it in boxing while also trying to succeed in the real world. The 27-year-old Ramos recently received a degree in economics from St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas. Ramos (24-1, 6 KOs), is promoted by Bob Arum’s Top Rank Promotions. He decisioned Miguel Beltran Jr. April 28, his first fight after losing to undefeated Andy Vences last November. Ramos suffered a cut around his left eye from an accidental head butt and could not continue, thus losing a technical decision. He won far more than that by earning his degree. . . .

On a sadder but perhaps hopeful note, former Cuban-born heavyweight prospect Mike Perez will try to restart his flagging career June 10 in Belfast as a cruiserweight. Perez (21-2-1, 13 KOs) has gone 1-2-1 since defeating Magomed Abdusalamov on Nov. 2, 2013 — a brutal fight that left Abdusalamov with irreversible brain damage. Perez was stopped in the first round in his final outing as a heavyweight by former WBA champion Alexander Povetkin two years ago. Whether he can come back remains to be seen but the demons he must face inside the ring may have little to do with his next opponent, Tommy McCarthy (9-1, 4 KOs). . . .

Miguel Cotto, the only Puerto Rican-born fighter to win world titles in four weight classes, signed a promotional deal with Oscar De La Hoya’s Golden Boy Promotions last week only months after his promotional deal with Jay Z’s Roc Nation was dissolved with one fight remaining. Roc Nation vastly overpaid to sign Cotto and although he fought for it twice, he did not deliver the kind of profits or performances they hoped. Cotto will face Japan’s Yoshihiro Kamegai Aug. 26 at the Stub Hub Center in Carson, Calif., for the vacant WBO junior middleweight title. . . .

Four-time heavyweight champion Evander Holyfield will begin his career as a boxing promoter June 24 when his new company, Real Deal Sports & Entertainment, stages its first card at Freedom Hall in Louisville, Ky. The card will air live on CBS Sports Network at 10 p.m. as part of a six-week “I Am Ali” festival honoring Muhammad Ali’s memory in his hometown.

If the Golden State Warriors are interested in winning their second NBA title in three years, they would be wise to cease concerning themselves with the 2001 Los Angeles Lakers.

The portions of the world still interested in basketball probably exclude most Green Teamers, who are now fixated only on the upcoming NBA draft and the Celtics’ hold on the overall No. 1 pick. But the remaining hoop holdouts have often brought up lately the remarkable ’01 Lakers, who set an NBA record run to the championship by going 15-1 in the playoffs and, technically, swept every series.

How can one lose a game and still sweep a series? Well the Lakers stormed through the first three rounds of the playoffs like the Warriors did this season, going a perfect 12-0. Then they lost the first game of the Finals to the 76ers. After which they swept them as well, winning the next four straight.

Talk of the Warriors’ possibilities only heightened in ESPN’s circle of influence (which is shrinking along with its job force but still sizable) after the Warriors blasted the Cleveland Cavaliers Thursday night, storming to a 113-91 victory in Game 1 of the Finals with nearly total dominance of the paint, the arc and all the real estate in between.

No NBA team has ever gone unbeaten throughout the playoffs. And considering the deep well of talent the Cavaliers possess, it would seem unlikely the heavily favored Warriors will either, but that has become a growing secondary topic of conversation for some time. Yet if the Warriors want to beat LeBron James’ Cavs for the second time in three years in the Finals, that’s where they must keep such thoughts — a secondary topic.

That will not be as easy as it might seem, however, because the Warriors are made up of human beings after all. They read the papers — or at least Twitter — and are as susceptible as the rest of us to letting their reach exceed their grasp. They are not immune to a momentary failure to stay in the moment, and certainly are not unaware of the historical feat within their reach.

Yet to seek that historic moment is to put the Warriors in danger of a repeat of what the Cavs did to them last season, when Golden State blew a 3-1 Finals lead and succumbed to the LeBrons, much to the astonishment of Steph Curry & Co. Last year they wore the crown before they won the crown, an almost always fatal misstep, and thus lost it.

Thursday night the Warriors did not look likely to repeat that collapse, however. Curry was fully healthy, which he was not a year ago when suffering from the lingering effects of a sprained knee. He poured in 28 points and combined with new recruit Kevin Durant to break down Cleveland’s suspect defense all night long.

Cleveland appeared to have no answer for Durant, who drove by anyone who tried to jump out on him (as six first-half dunks made clear) and shot over anyone who tried to play back. That one-man mismatch allowed the Warriors to score 21 baskets in the paint in the first half, and that’s despite missing a stunning 15 layups. If that continues, Cleveland fully understands, its season will soon be over.

The mismatches Golden State created with the addition of Durant are considerable, and how Cavs coach Tyronn Lue intends to solve them is beyond me. If they are also beyond him, it is not beyond the realm of possibility the Warriors could surpass the 2001 Lakers. But they won’t do it if they fixate too much on it, a fixation that could result in losing the larger prize — the NBA title itself.

The Warriors are the better team, but so what? They were the better team a year ago too, even with Curry limping, yet found a way to lose when the oddsmakers gave them a better chance of winning after going up 3-1 than the Atlanta Falcons had in the third quarter against the Patriots in the Super Bowl. Of course, that’s why they call them odds, isn’t it?

Lue seemed peevish after Game 1 when the talk turned to how great the Warriors looked and it seems likely his players will feel much the same tonight when the two go at it again at the Oracle in the East Bay. At one point Lue characterized thusly: “They’re the best I ever seen.”

The sarcasm was dripping from his lips as he spoke, and understandably so if you have LeBron, Kevin Love and Kyrie Irving on your team. Is it likely Cleveland will turn the ball over 20 times and shoot 34.9 percent in four straight games? No it is not. Are they not the defending champions, not the other guys? Indeed so.

None of that means they win but it means there is not 22 points difference between these two teams and the Warriors need remember that even if ESPN’s and ABC’s talking heads may forget it.

The Warriors need to be careful to remember that tonight and when they head to Cleveland later in the week for Games 3 and 4. They need also remember LeBron and his teammates are a proud lot who actually believe it when they say, “we can play better.” They can and they will, but that doesn’t mean the Warriors couldn’t still sweep them out of the playoffs.

It only means if the Warriors start thinking about something as esoteric as that, they may suddenly find themselves where they ended up a year ago. Which is to say, a team that left the floor holding a participation trophy instead of the Larry O’Brien Trophy.

“They are a high-powered offensive team,” James said. “They can shoot the ball from the perimeter, they can get into the paint. They do everything exceptionally well, if not great.”

ERIN, Wis. — Sergio Garcia laughed at the suggestion yesterday but agreeably embraced it as a simple fact of his golfing life at the moment. He is the only one left. So be it.

Left to do what, you may ask? Well, since this is golf, let George Trevon writing in the New York Sun in 1930 describe what only Garcia has the opportunity to do this week in a way the scions of the great game might find eternally appealing still.

“(He) stormed the impregnable quadrilateral of golf,” Trevor wrote when Bobby Jones became the first and only golfer to win the Grand Slam in the same calendar year. Having won the Masters in April for his first major championship in a nearly 20-year career of excellence laced too often with the bitter absence of any portion of golf’s “impregnable quadrilateral,” Garcia alone has a chance to match the great Jones this year. The only golfer in the world with a chance to win the Grand Slam, 2017 version.

To keep that hope alive, Garcia must win the 117th U.S. Open this weekend on a reformed, 600-acre cow pasture known as Erin Hills Golf Course. It will be a stern test of not only his skills, which are often majestic but sometimes mischievous and occasionally malevolent, but also his will. A sterner test, many would argue, than the one Jones passed 87 years ago, when the makeup of the Slam was reflective of the times.

There was no Slam until Jones created it by winning the U.S. Amateur, the U.S. Open, the British Open and the British Amateur. Lost for a way to describe this unthinkable feat, O.B. Keeler, writing in the Atlanta Journal, dubbed it the “Grand Slam” not in a reference to baseball’s ultimate feat, but in tribute to bridge, a sport more akin to golf at the time.

That began to change with the advent of the Masters, which Jones helped create in 1934 and eventually built into the most revered golf tournament in the world. The Slam was further altered when the amateurs were eliminated and it became the Masters, U.S. Open, British Open and the PGA Championship. The New Age Slam, grand in its own way.

No one has performed that, although the great Ben Hogan might have in 1953 were it not for a bad ferry schedule. Hogan won the Masters, U.S. Open and British Open but because of more lengthy travel times and bad scheduling he could not also play in the PGA. Ever since, golfers have chased the mythical Slam, Tiger Woods once holding all four titles in a row but not in the same year, thus creating the Tiger Slam, which was an illusion not a Slam.

Now it is Garcia’s turn, for only the Masters winner has a chance. Garcia finally got his opportunity by winning a playoff with his old friend Justin Rose, holing a birdie putt in the 73rd hole when a 2-putt par would have sufficed.

Garcia had failed to win in 73 previous majors, finding ways to elude victory that were sometimes baffling and, in recent years, so spirit-crushing Garcia once pronounced he would never win one because he lacked whatever it takes.

This was nonsense, but until you do it, a sense of doom lingers. Now that is gone and Garcia was talking about something far different. He was talking laughingly about the Slam.

“I guess the guy that wins the Masters every year has the potential of doing that,” Garcia said when the subject came up. “It’s something nice to have the possibility of doing, but we all know how difficult it is. I just want to . . . give my best this week and hopefully by Sunday night we can keep having that talk.”

For that to happen on a course many feel has the links feel best suited to his commanding drives and deftness around the greens, Garcia insisted he must possess two things. They are no guarantee his Slam hope survives, but without them it is guaranteed it will not.

Those necessities had nothing to do with putting or driving the ball, although both will be essential at soggy Erin Hills. The necessities are commitment and patience. The latter is self-explanatory to anyone who ever stood over a 5-foot putt to win a $20 Nassau, but the former is more difficult to grasp for it is not so much about golf as it is about belief.

But then, isn’t that what hitting a proper golf shot is really about? Belief.

“Every week is different, so some weeks you feel a bit calmer than others and your patience is better,” Garcia said. “Hopefully this week will be one of those weeks where I feel calm and collected and my patience level is way, way high.

“When it comes down to commitment it’s just a matter of believing. I think that at the Masters I did that very, very well with all aspects of my game. The last three weeks at the Players, Byron Nelson and Colonial, I struggled a little bit with that. My commitment wasn’t as sharp as it was at the Masters. I don’t know if it was because everything that’s been going on after the win there (at Augusta) and stuff, but we have to kind of collect ourselves again and make sure that when we get there on the first tee on Thursday that we’re fully committed, no matter what happens.

“Like I said, before the Masters, the only thing I can do is keep putting myself in that situation as many times as possible and now I can maybe rely — is that right, rely? — on what I felt on Sunday at Augusta and hopefully it gives me a little bit of an edge when it comes down to that situation.”

If he is standing in that situation on the last tee Sunday, the par-5 18th many feel may decide the tournament, with a chance to remain the only one Slam eligible, that is all Sergio Garcia will have to rely on. His commitment to his shot and himself.

The U.S. Open begins today at Erin Hills Golf Course in Erin, Wisc. It is the first time the tournament will be played at the course, which opened in 2006. The par-72, 7,741-yard track is the longest in U.S. Open history. Here’s a look at five to watch as well as three to keep an eye on:

1. HIDEKI MATSUYAMA

World ranking: 4 | 2016 finish: Missed cut

Best U.S. Open finish: T-10 (2013)

Reason to watch: Matsuyama has had a solid season with two wins and two seconds in 14 starts. He has all the shots, including the drive you need to win at Erin Hills. But he’s 88th in driving accuracy, which could get him in a heap of trouble if he can’t control his landing zone. Since finishing T-11 at the Masters, Matsuyama is T-32, T-22 and T-45, so he is not coming into this tournament hot. Still, he’s fourth in the world because he’s a threat in any tournament.

2. JON RAHM

World ranking: 10 | 2016 finish: T-23 (low amateur)

Best U.S. Open finish: T-23 (2016)

Reason to watch: The 22-year-old Spaniard has exploded on the scene since turning pro after last year’s U.S. Open. Rahm finished T-3 in his first pro tournament and hasn’t looked back. He has seven top-10 finishes in 15 starts, and only Tiger Woods and Sergio Garcia reached the top-10 world ranking at a younger age. Erin Hills’ contours seem to fit his game. Kids seem to be taking over the leaderboard and Rahm is often leading the charge.

3. SERGIO GARCIA

World ranking: 7 | 2016 finish: T-5

Best U.S. Open finish: T-3 (2005)

Reason to watch: Garcia’s Masters win — his first major at age 37 — means he’s the only golfer in the world eligible to make a run at the Grand Slam this year. To his advantage, Garcia should have driver in hand all week and the softened conditions from several days of rain will make the place play longer. His nifty short game can bail him out of problems the deep rough and linksy nature of the course could create, making this an ideal place for him to win his first Open.

4. DUSTIN JOHNSON

World ranking: 1 | 2016 finish: First

Best U.S. Open finish: First (2016)

Reason to watch: No one is more feared at the moment than the defending champ, who has three wins, a second and a third this season, plus eight top-10 finishes. Johnson failed to make the cut at the Memorial last month but that means little. He’s first in both driving distance and reaching greens in regulation, so his game will benefit from the course’s length. A minor back injury scratched him from the Masters but he seems unaffected by any lingering effects and is a heavy favorite to be on the leaderboard this week.

5. JUSTIN THOMAS

World ranking: 13 | 2016 finish: T-32

Best U.S. Open finish: T-32 (2016)

Reason to watch: Thomas has been a bit of a mystery. His seven top-10 finishes this year place him right behind DJ and Rahm for consistency, but he’s also been consistently terrible in major championships. Still, he seems poised to challenge on golf’s biggest stage as he arrives having finished T-5 at the Zurich Classic and T-4 at the Memorial. If this was a regular week you’d say he’s primed to win, but this is a major so Thomas has to get that monkey of consistent lackluster performances off his back.

KEEP AN EYE ON THESE 3

RORY McILROY

World ranking: 2

2016 finish: Missed cut

Best U.S. Open finish: First (2011)

Reason to watch: The big question with McIlroy has nothing to do with his game and everything to do with the rib injury that has limited his play this season. He’s played only once since the Masters in April and admits to limited practice time because he did not want to risk enhancing his physical woes. He does have four top-10s but was T-35 in his last outing at the Players. He has the game to win on Erin Hills’ links-style course, but does he have the good health?

RICKIE FOWLER

World ranking: 9

2016 finish: Missed cut

Best U.S. Open finish: T-2 (2014)

Reason to watch: Fowler is paired the first two days with Rahm and Matsuyama in an annual grouping of the best players yet to have won a major. Long predicted to be a future star, Fowler has a win, a second and a third this year and was T-2 at the Memorial, so he’s in decent form. Nevertheless, Erin Hills doesn’t seem likely to be the place where Fowler finally breaks through. Still, he has the talent, so we wait and watch and keep an eye on him this week.

JUSTIN ROSE

World ranking: 11

2016 finish: Missed cut

Best U.S. Open finish: First (2013)

Reason to watch: Many believe Erin Hills is a course that will play well for veterans of the European Tour’s links golf courses. If so, keep your eye on Rose. He has already bested one U.S. Open course, winning his only major at Merion in 2013, so he has shown he can handle the withering pressure these courses play on a golfer’s psyche. While Rose hasn’t played well recently he has four top-10 finishes this season, including a second at the Masters when he lost a playoff to Sergio.

AND THE WINNER IS: Justin Rose

Rose withdrew from the Memorial to go back to the Bahamas to work on his game. He hadn’t done much leading up to the Masters, but had been preparing for weeks for that major, and was ready from the first tee shot, finishing tied with Sergio Garcia before losing a playoff. He’s done the same prep work pointing toward the Open. He has the game to win here and is primed and ready.

ERIN, Wis. — Keegan Bradley could feel it. He was on the razor’s edge. He felt alive.

As he walked toward the 18th green of Brookside Golf and Country Club on June 5 in Columbus, Ohio, Bradley knew he had survived his latest test, one that not so long ago he would have had no reason to consider.

Of a field of 9,485 competitors playing in sectionals around the country, he became one of the few to qualify for the U.S. Open. Only a few years ago the thought that he would have to endure such a struggle would have been laughable but in golf the road can curve suddenly, like an errant ball’s flight.

When Bradley tees it up this afternoon at the 117th U.S. Open just putting his tee in the ground will be an act of defiance over a game that has tormented him of late. It’s the same game he once had under tight control not so many years ago but golf is a game difficult to dominate for long.

After two years on the Hooters Tour and one on the Web.com circuit, Bradley exploded onto the PGA Tour in 2011, winning the first major he ever entered, the PGA Championship. He won the Byron Nelson as well and was PGA Rookie of the Year. He was on his way.

A year later he finished 10th on the money list, earning $3,910,658, with another Tour win. In 2013 he had a career-best seven top 10 finishes, finished second twice and banked $3.6 million and in 2014 he had six top 10’s, finished tied for fourth at the U.S. Open and second at the Arnold Palmer. And then it stopped.

Bradley had to adjust to a USGA decision to ban the anchored putter while also facing a sudden hitch in his swing that demanded self-examination and hours of work. But how can you work on your swing and develop a new putting stroke at the same time? You can’t. So you struggle.

His game hadn’t deserted him all together but it was hiding somewhere, returning from time to time but not often enough to keep him from slipping outside the top 100 on the money list and down the world rankings.

“I wasn’t swinging it my best,” Bradley said yesterday, after a thunderstorm curtailed his final practice round at Erin Hills. “I had to get more technically sound with my swing but I also had to get a new putting stroke and there’s only so many hours a day you can practice.”

He put in the hours but golf is a demanding lover. It wants more time than you can give and so you keep swinging, callouses developing on your hands. If you’re wise, they also develop over your emotions.

“It was definitely a different feeling having to qualify,” Bradley said. “I felt a lot of pressure at the end.”

Now 31 and recently married, it seems another lifetime when he won the PGA.

“I know a lot of people have written me off,” Bradley said. “You can’t let that bother you.”

Bradley has shrugged it off enough to rally with what he called “a halfway decent year,” but it’s not 2011 again yet.

The worst of it came last year when the Ryder Cup was played and he was not selected. Team competition fits Bradley’s fiery temperament and it showed in the 2012 Ryder Cup at Medinah, even though the team lost on the final day. He did the same in 2014 but last year his absence was a jolting moment.

“That was a bummer,” Bradley said. “It was very hard. The world keeps on turning, even if you’re not there. It’s really kind of shocking but it’s no one’s fault but mine.”

Bradley hasn’t enjoyed the past couple years but because this is not his time does not mean he’s out of time. It doesn’t mean golf isn’t the same sport he fell in love with as a kid playing on the frozen links of Vermont and Hopkinton, where he was once Massachusetts state high school champion.

It’s the same game his father Mark taught him. The same game his aunt Pat Bradley dominated so completely she’s in the World Golf Hall of Fame. Most important, it’s the same game he’s loved all his life.

“Golf is everything to me,” Bradley said. “There’s never been a time I thought, ‘That’s it!’ There’s been months it was miserable. I won’t deny that. But I’ll battle every day, every round. I believe if I keep plugging away I’ll come all the way back. That’s part of the process of coming back. Actually, it’s kind of fun.

“The great thing is you have an opportunity every week. I have an opportunity this week to change the course of my career. The player who had to qualify for the U.S. Open and the exempt player have the same chance to win.”

That’s what he wants most to do. To win again. Not for trophies that just collect dust but to be back on the razor’s edge, fighting.

“I absolutely love being in contention,” Bradley said. “I love feeling the heat. At times that holds me back because I can push too hard. But if I’m in contention on Sunday I’ll be so pumped!”

Maybe it will be this Sunday. Maybe a few more Sundays will pass before it happens. Either way, Keegan Bradley will fight the good fight against a confounding game, loving the battle as much as the victory.

ERIN, Wis. — Late Friday afternoon Justin Thomas pondered his predicament at the 117th U.S. Open. He was 5 shots back with a bus load of players between him and the top of the leaderboard, so he knew what he needed. He needed the course at Erin Hills to start grinding down the competition.

One could hardly say that’s what happened yesterday, but Thomas still got what he needed. He just got it the hard way. He did it himself.

Thomas is a small man who played big, carding a remarkable nine birdies and a closing eagle on the par-5 18th to shoot 9-under 63 for the day and finish 11-under for the tournament, a shot behind leader Brian Harman.

In the process, Thomas had moved up 22 spots on Moving Day, which is akin to moving from Massachusetts to Maui. It’s a long haul.

To do it, the 24-year-old sprite from Kentucky, who barely weighs 145 pounds if it rains on him for three days, required a 63 that tied Johnny Miller’s score in the final round of the 1973 Open at Oakmont, but relative to par was the lowest score in U.S. Open history. To dent the field full of red numbers, it had to be.

The U.S. Open is not supposed to have 13 guys at 7-under or better with a day to play. That’s for the Quad Cities Open. The U.S. Open is supposed to be a nerve-jangling test of patience, with the average winner over the past half dozen years doing it at only 1.1 strokes over par on average.

It’s supposed to be stern test not an open book one, but the latter is what the wide fairways and soft conditions at Erin Hills have provided. Until Thomas assaulted the place, it was being criticized as unworthy of the Open’s stringent demands, even though six of the top 10 players in the world failed to make the cut.

But now it’s a record setting place, and so the golf world will remember the old cow pasture fondly even if the Open never returns here.

“I feel like the U.S. Open is supposed to be very uncomfortable,” Thomas said. “What the USGA and U.S. Open is known for is making you kind of hate yourself and hate golf and just really struggle out there.

“But this one’s different because it’s soft. Usually the roars are for pars and stuff like that.”

No one took better advantage of the kindnesses the course has provided than Thomas. More than likely he was awake when the sun rose because to lead the U.S. Open is a dream but also a nightmare.

“It means I have a lot better chance to win the tournament than I did when the day started,” Thomas said of his record-breaking 9-under. “It means I’m part of history. It’s all pretty self-explanatory in terms of what it means.

“For me, I felt like I’ve been playing pretty well all week and didn’t have quite the numbers to show for it. Obviously, today I definitely had something to show for it. I don’t know how I’ll feel tomorrow.”

Size is of little consequence in golf if you hit it like Thomas did on a cloudy Saturday, which is to say long, accurately and with firm conviction. Yesterday he had the latter in spades and he needed it to climb so far up that red-stained leaderboard. He will need even more of it this afternoon when his nerves will argue with his thoughts on every shot.

His control was never more apparent than when he stood sideways to the hole over a putt on the fringe of the fifth green. For a moment one wondered if young Thomas had taken leave of his senses, but then he tapped the ball and it rolled parallel to the hole, caught the slope, turned right and loped right down the ridgeline and into the cup for, what else, a birdie.

“I was trying to get over the fact of how mad I was that I didn’t have an 8-footer for birdie like I felt I should have,” Thomas said. “I just tried to find the fall line. My main goal was to try and get it in a good spot for making a second putt, but once it started rolling it looked good. That was definitely a bonus.”

Thomas could not have started his afternoon much better, with birdies on the first two holes and six birdies on the front nine. He bogeyed 10 but then was at it again with birdies on 12, 15 and 17 and that eagle on 18. Frankly, with a slightly better putting stroke on 15, Thomas might have had two eagles and catapulted himself into the lead — but, hey, let’s not get greedy.

“It was an awesome day,” Thomas said. “I’m not sure when it’s going to sink in or when I’m going to realize what I did. I know one thing: If it happened tomorrow and the result is what I want it to be, then I’d probably have a little different feeling. I’m just so excited to give myself a great chance to win this golf tournament.”

The trick now is for Thomas to remember for all the hosannas over his 63, it didn’t win him anything. It didn’t even give him the lead, which belongs to Harman. So for all the good it did him to go 9-under yesterday, he must play with equal focus and ferocity today if he’s going to leave here with anything but an agate line in the record books.

“It’s going to be weird,” Thomas said of his likely emotions. “I don’t know what I’m going to feel tonight, if I’m going to sleep well. I’m sure I won’t sleep in. I usually don’t. I know I’m going to be nervous but it’s a good nervous. That’s why I play, to get myself in this position.

“You don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t know what tomorrow’s going to be like. I don’t know how I’m going to feel, but I’m excited for it. Obviously the scores are low but it’s still the U.S. Open.”

Regardless of the sea of red on the leaderboard, it is indeed the U.S. Open, and young Justin Thomas is about to find out what that truly means. It can be a dream or it can be a nightmare. The beauty of golf is that’s up to you.

CROMWELL, Conn. — Chad Reynolds glanced over at Keegan Bradley yesterday on the fourth hole at TPC River Highlands and knew what he was seeing. It was Mount Vesuvius rising.

If Bradley has one weak spot, it’s that at times he wants to win too much. So much so that being 1-over for a round, as he was early yesterday, can cause him to erupt internally (and occasionally externally) and end up getting in his own way.

Unfortunately for Bradley, golf is not a game that rewards raw emotion. Rather, golf rewards the comatose.

It is a game of low-key responses and few expressions beyond deadpan. The occasional fist pump is fine, but there will never be a need to institute a rule limiting exuberance on the pro golf tour.

Unlike some sports, anger is counterproductive on the golf course and aggressiveness must be greatly tempered by good judgment and sometimes by a caddie who knows you well. So it was for Bradley yesterday early in the third round at the Travelers Championship.

Bradley had bogeyed the par-4 second hole to slip back to 2-under for the tournament and could feel his fortunes shifting under his feet. To win on a birdie factory like River Highlands, Bradley knew, things could not continue the way they had begun.

The more he thought about it, the more the bile began to rise. The more it did, the more he began to boil until, Reynolds sensed, something needed to be said.

“I was on the fourth fairway, 1-over for the day, and not happy,” Bradley said. “My caddie (Reynolds) looked right at me. He said, ‘You all right?’ I said, ‘I’m good.’ He calmed me down.”

Reynolds’ intervention was quickly followed by a 40-foot putt for birdie on No. 4 that evened Bradley for the day both on his scorecard and in his mind. More than that, it started him on his way to six birdies, including 12, 13 and 15 coming home for a round at 4-under that got him to 7-under for the tournament and in the place he likes best.

“I absolutely love being in contention,’’ Bradley told the Herald on June 14 as the U.S. Open was about to begin. “I love feeling the heat. At times that holds me back because I can push too hard.”

That may be what Bradley has to guard against most today, a day that begins with him 5 shots behind Jordan Spieth at 12-under. Spieth beat back a late challenge from Boo Weekley for the lead. Weekley birdied three of his final four holes to get to 11-under and a share of the lead only to watch Spieth match him with birdies on 15, 16 and 18.

With six golfers in front of him on the leaderboard, the heat will be rising inside Bradley today, nerves edging against anticipation until he finally tees off in search of his first PGA Tour win in five years. It’s the feeling he’s craved for so long, a mix of anticipation, elation and fear that comes only when you stand on the cusp of winning a million-dollar purse.

It’s an emotion Bradley hasn’t really felt since finishing 1 shot out of a playoff with Dustin Johnson, James Hahn and Paul Casey at the 2015 Northern Trust. That’s an eternity in golf and a long time to not feel that kind of pressure. Now that it’s back, Bradley insisted he’ll be ready for it.

“I’ll be fine,” Bradley said as his young nephew tugged at his pants leg outside the scorer’s trailer. “It’s just a matter of managing my excitement.”

Bradley has something more to manage than excitement. He’s also managing a swollen index finger that aches every time he grabs a club and has ever since he reached into his bag on the practice range during the week and jammed a tee under his finger nail.

The finger wore a puffy, angry look as Bradley explained that teeing up his finger was not quite as troublesome as it appears, except when he’s back on the driving range.

“It hurts but I can’t tape it on the course because it’s too hot,” he said. “You sweat and the tape just comes loose. But I can deal with it. It doesn’t really bother me when I’m playing. He hurts more on the range when you’re hitting shot after shot.”

Today, Keegan Bradley does not intend to hit shot after shot. He intends to hit just enough shots to do what he hasn’t done in five years. Hit just enough of them to win.

“I’ve been playing well for a while and just trying to pull it together, like we always say,” he said jokingly. “All the cliches. But I’m really liking where my game’s at.

“I’m so excited, especially to do it here. It’s really fun here. The fans are very excited, very loud New England fans. Nothing would give me more pleasure than to go out and shoot a good one for them.”