AMERICA AT LARGE:The worldwide boxing picture for the next five months would appear the brightest in years
IF YOU didn’t know better, you’d swear the whole sport of boxing underwent some massive crisis of conscience over the past few weeks.
Ours has been an era characterised by the disinclination of the world’s top fighters – and their promoters, and their television networks – to mix it up with one another. Now, it is as if the floodgates had suddenly opened, and beginning in early July it appears there will be as many as eight megafights in which the 16 participants will comprise at least 13 of the world’s top 21 practitioners, as ranked on BoxRec.com’s pound-for-pound list.
(The British record-keeping site might not be the be-all and end-all when it comes to these matters, but since BoxRec has no axe to grind and no sanctioning fees to collect, it is probably as close to a neutral party as you’re apt to find in evaluating the overall boxing landscape.)
A couple of these fights were already on the books – the Klitschko Brothers’ separate-but-equal heavyweight title fights against David Haye and Thomas Adamek in Europe this summer being an obvious case in point – and a couple more had been foreordained by facts on the ground.
WBA super-middleweight champion Andre Ward was already waiting in the wings pending the outcome of the other semi-final in Showtime’s Super Six tournament last Saturday, for example, in which Carl Froch beat Glen Johnson by majority decision over 12 rounds, and two weeks earlier, in Montreal, 46-year-old Bernard Hopkins had not only captured Jean Pascal’s WBC light-heavyweight title, but inherited Pascal’s mandatory obligation to defend against former champion Chad Dawson.
Some of the matches derived from the economic imperative, while still others were face-saving manoeuvres, but the sum effect has been a five-month stretch paved with attractive and crowd-pleasing fights.
A week ago in New York, with Froch and Johnson in town to ballyhoo their fight in Atlantic City Saturday night, Showtime leaked word that its cameras had picked up an exchange later in last month’s Manny Pacquiao-Shane Mosley fight indicating Mosley had wanted to quit on his stool just before the 11th round, only to be browbeaten out of it by trainer Nazim Richardson. When the network aired the pertinent footage prior to the Froch-Johnson bout, it was even worse than that.
“You’ve got to stop the fight,” pleads Mosley, even as Richardson implores him to suck it up. “I can’t move.”
In the expanded version that played on Showtime, on the long walk back to the dressingroom after the fight Richardson offers a half-hearted explanation: “You’d never have been able to live with yourself.”
Mosley, in return, fixes him with a withering glare, and in the dressingroom pulls off his boxing boot and sock to reveal a grotesque patch of bloodied skin, the result of a blister that had first broken and then worked its way loose.
Pacquiao normally goes off into periods of extended self-examination after a fight like this, but within days of the Mosley fight he had announced a fourth fight against his old rival Juan Manuel Marquez.
The knowledge that the Moseley footage would shortly be made public, affirming that Pacquiao hadn’t been able to take out a 39-year-old opponent who was trying to quit, may have had much to do with the seeming haste in which the Marquez match was made.
Other dominos fell in short order. Unable to consummate a unification bout against Timothy Bradley, Amir Khan leapt straight into the arms of 33-year-old retreat Zab Judah, and then this week Floyd Mayweather Jr, who had been inactive so long even BoxRec had dropped its loyal support, announced he was coming back and would challenge WBC welterweight champion Victor Ortiz on September 17th, possibly at Cowboys Stadium.
So in a few short months we’ve come from staring at a bleak canvas to a summer-fall line-up that looks like this:
July 2nd:Imtech Arena, Hamburg: Wladimir Klischko (#2 pound-for-pound) vs David Haye (#19), for WBA, IBF and WBO heavyweight titles.
July 23rd:Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas: Amir Khan (#12) vs Zab Judah, for WBA and IBF light welterweight titles.
September 10th:Stadion Miejski, Wroclaw, Vitaly Klitschko (#3) vs Tomasz Adamek (#20), WBC heavyweight title.
September 17th: TBA: Victor Ortiz vs Floyd Mayweather Jr, WBC welterweight title.
November 12th:MGM Grand, Las Vegas: Manny Pacquiao (#1) vs Juan Manuel Marquez (#6), WBO welterweight title.
To those five you can add the Super Six Grand Finale between Ward (#9) and Froch (#11), which awaits only a precise date and a final site, and the obligatory light-heavyweight brawl between Hopkins (#4) and Chad Dawson (#14) certain to take place over the last half of 2011.
You can also pretty well take it to the bank that Lucian Bute (#8) and Mikkel Kessler (#21) will mix it up before the year is out. Showtime effectively acknowledged its sin of omission in not making Bute part of its original Super Six mix when it signed the IBF super-middle champ last year, and last weekend televised Kessler’s stoppage of Mehdi Bouadla in Copenhagen as its lead-in to Froch-Johnson. Bute is scheduled to defend against Jean-Paul Mendy in Bucharest next month, and a Bute-Kessler fight would have a viable challenger waiting in the wings for the Ward-Froch survivor.
With one glaring exception, then, the worldwide boxing picture for the next five months would appear the brightest in years, but when everyone else started snapping up dance partners, Sergio Gabriel Martinez would appear the odd man out.
“Well, it certainly doesn’t help,” said promoter Lou DiBella of the WBC middleweight champion and 2010 Fighter of the Year, who ranks fifth on the pound-for-pound list. “He’s the guy few boxers want to fight to begin with, and this flurry of activity has left him without a natural rival for a big-money fight on the order of the others you’re talking about. Right now Bob Arum has been talking to us about Julio Cesar Chavez Jr, Miguel Cotto and Antonio Margarito, and if I were a betting man I’d say Martinez will fight someone from among those three before the summer is over.”
