General

Round by Round: Weekly Boxing Notes

May 8, 2009, 8:00 PM UTC

It’s Manny’s World Now
â†µWhat an exhilarating week to be a fight fan. We spend so much of our time as sweet scientists having to justify our existence while at the same time enduring either the subtle or overt disdain of the mainstream sports world. We watch amazing fights like the Vazquez/Marquez trilogy and feel as if we’ve witnessed something worthy of all-time human history, and yet we’re aware that to the general public it probably doesn’t rate in importance with a so-so women’s college basketball game. â†µâ†µSuch is the life of the dedicated boxing maniac, and though it’s frustrating at times, I think most of us have made our peace with the situation. To quote Hyman Roth, this is the business we’ve chosen. â†µ

â†µâ†µBut people, people ... suddenly business is very good. Manny Pacquiao’s virtual electrocution of Ricky Hatton last Saturday night after an awe-inspiring two-round onslaught was quite simply the best thing that has happened to boxing since the meteoric rise of Oscar De La Hoya in the mid-90’s. And actually, probably the most appropriate antecedent to the Pacquiao phenomenon is that of Mike Tyson and those two heady years, 1987 and 1988, when he was capturing heavyweight belts left and right while leaving his adversaries near-comatose and bleeding. â†µ

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â†µCertainly, you have to go back to Tyson’s heyday to find an event like Pacquiao/Hatton, where a fighter so quickly, brutally and thrillingly disposed of his opponent on such a gigantic stage. The packed house that gathered at the MGM Grand last Saturday included the elite A-list scene -- Jack Nicholson, Jay-Z, Puff Daddy, Mariah Carey, Denzel. And though the initial excitement about the pay-per-view take has dampened somewhat (right after the fight there was talk of it cracking the two million mark), there’s a very good chance that it did upwards of a million buys, making it among the most successful pay-per-view fights of all time that did not involve either Mike Tyson or Oscar De La Hoya. â†µ

â†µâ†µIn other words, Pacquiao had an enormous and enormously influential audience watching him work against Hatton, and what they saw -- six minutes of fury and precision capped by a knockout to end all knockouts -- all but guarantees that they’ll be back for more. Provided that Pac Man’s next fight is against another marketable opponent (which seems like a lock at this point) I would imagine that the buzz surrounding it will be worthy of De La Hoya and Tyson in their primes, and that it will do even better PPV-wise than did Pacquiao/Hatton.â†µ

â†µâ†µA few weeks ago, right here at The Sporting Blog, I posed the question, “Can Pacquiao fill De La Hoya’s Golden Shoes?” It was one of the main questions on the minds of fight pundits around America heading into the Pacquiao/Hatton fight, and a week after perhaps the greatest knockout of the decade, the answer is crystal clear. Yes. Yes he can.â†µ

â†µâ†µFrom the Sublime to the Shameful
â†µ Such is the path we travel in a week, from the highs of Pacquiao/Hatton, to the lows of Dawson/Tarver … II! Sheesh. There really is no angle to take on this rematch other than utter shock and dismay that anyone would bother staging a rematch of what was such an uninspiring fight in the first place. â†µ

â†µâ†µIf you are unfamiliar with Chad Dawson, he is young, he is exciting, and yet he has some problems, the main one being that there’s just nobody out there for him to fight who can help turn him into a crossover star. Bad Chad plies his trade at light heavyweight, and the big names in that weight penumbra have just retired -- Joe Calzaghe and Bernard Hopkins. Plus, even when they were fighting, Calzaghe and Hopkins showed no interest in fighting Dawson, and why would they? Dawson is too dangerous and too obscure to warrant a look from big stars on the back ends of their careers. â†µ

â†µâ†µSo Tarver was the best that Dawson could do, and that was a natural make, in that Tarver once was the undisputed light heavyweight champ of the world and always will be remembered as the man who first floored the seemingly undefeatable Roy Jones. incredibly boring. Though he won a lopsided unanimous decision, I ended up killing Dawson at No Mas because I thought he took it easy towards the end of the fight and, despite having Tarver in trouble a few times, didn’t do nearly enough to get the stoppage. I took some heat for that, but I stand by my point. To my mind, if you’re Chad Dawson and you’re trying to make it to the next level, and you’re fighting a past-his-prime former A-lister who you’re destroying, and what’s more, who’s never been stopped in his career, then you got to go for broke to stop that man. â†µ

â†µâ†µAnd so that is my urgent advice to Bad Chad for tomorrow night -- be bad. Be very bad. There’s going to be way more people watching you fight tomorrow than there should be, because of the fact that HBO will be re-airing the Pacquiao/Hatton fight during the same broadcast for the first time on free TV. So Chad, take a page out of Mighty Manny’s book and try to turn some of those Pacquiao fans to Dawson fans by going in for the kill. And try and do it with some flair, man, because I’m telling you -- another lackluster twelve-round domination of Tarver is a one-way ticket to Nowheresville so far as your career is concerned. â†µ

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This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.

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