by David P. Greisman

Every other stare down before then, from the afternoon of the opening press conference until the day of the pre-fight weigh-in, is ceremonial. Not so for fight night, just before the bell rings and the action finally begins, when all the publicity appearances are done and all their supporters are behind them.

All that separates them from each other are a few feet in distance, a few seconds in time.

And so this final stare down is real, a poker player pushing all of his chips to the center of the table and looking straight at his foe to see what he’s got. The other man might exude confidence. He might betray a bluff. He might just look away, to the sky or to the side, all to avoid giving his opponent the satisfaction.

Juan Manuel Marquez and Juan Diaz locked eyes before their second fight, moments after each made his way to the center of the ring. Marquez stepped forward deliberately but not heavily, hands at his side like a gunslinger raring to draw and sizing up the man just paces away. He raised. Marquez had taken Diaz’s best shots 17 months before and then gunned him down. He had the upper hand.

Diaz called, joining the fray. He pursed his lips and tilted his back slightly and defiantly, shifting his weight from side to side, looking like a son building up the courage to challenge his father.

Marquez glared forth, unmoving, unmoved, a father prepared to give his son another beating.

In February 2009, Diaz had started out aggressively, attempting to overwhelm Marquez with activity. Marquez had ended it efficiently, overcoming the onslaught through accuracy. His pinpoint punches broke Diaz down, his uppercuts again and again catching the forward-charging Baby Bull on the chin until his chin could take no more.

Marquez had handled Diaz’s best and shown himself to be better. He had adjusted and discovered precisely what he needed to do to win. Diaz, however, had not yet figured out a solution to Marquez.

“I know that the game plan that I had in the first fight was working,” Diaz said two weeks before he was to face Marquez again. “Yes, I was applying the pressure, but leaving myself wide open and exposed to his uppercuts.

“What Marquez does very well is that he thinks every second of the fight,” Diaz said. “You throw a punch and you might hit them with that one punch, but the next time around you’re not going to hit him with that punch, or you’re going to get hit with two or three of his punches. What makes him so great in the ring is that he’s a great counter puncher. You throw two or three punches, and if you don’t throw them right, he’s going to find an opening and crack you with his punches.”

Diaz had to train to be different in the rematch, incorporating a new game plan over a period of several weeks. Marquez has the intelligence and ability to react in the middle of a fight.

“I’m not thinking of any way I can be different or do anything differently,” Marquez said in the weeks before the fight. “We’re going to do a great fight in the ring with a lot of technical boxing, a lot of finesse, a lot of movement and angles, and that’s how we will counter his aggressiveness.”

Marquez knew exactly what he could do to win. Diaz could only come in thinking he might have something that would work.

Marquez put it simply: “He has a lot to prove.”

Under the gun. Diaz had lost three of his last five. Under pressure. Diaz was facing the only fighter to ever knock him out. This would have to be Diaz’s last stand.

Brawling hadn’t worked. Diaz would have to try to box against the master boxer.

Diaz worked behind a jab, throwing 336 of them over 12 rounds, an average of 28 per round. The punch was meant to deliver opportunity. Most missed, though, 255 of them either being blocked or going off-target. Only 81 hit Marquez, just one in every four thrown, an average of less than seven landed per round.

His power punches weren’t much better. He hit Marquez with 74 of 243, a 30 percent connect rate, an average of six landed per round. Only two rounds saw power-punch connect rates in the double digits. Seven of the 12 rounds saw Diaz hit Marquez with just six or less.

It was a thinking-man’s fight, and Marquez was always going to be the superior thinking man.

Less pressure meant Marquez had time to work from a distance and then, undeterred, to jump in with several shots before moving back away. He landed 120 of 324 jabs, a 37 percent connect rate, an average of 10 per round.

Those jabs allowed for a total of 168 landed power shots out of 348 thrown, nearly one connecting for every two thrown, an average of 14 landing per round – more than twice Diaz’s connect rate. Marquez landed in double digits with power punches in 11 of the 12 rounds.

Diaz had trained for his last stand, and he did remain standing at the end. His training had been enough for him not to get knocked out, but not enough for him to win. He was constantly searching for an opportunity to hurt Marquez but rarely finding one, his best moments coming, not too surprisingly, when Marquez jumped in range and allowed for both to trade. For Marquez, meanwhile, the opportunity to land on Diaz was always there.

After the fight, the camera zoomed in on Diaz’s face, showing redness around his right eye and high on his right cheek, and dark, dried blood on the right side of his lower lip. He has now lost four of his last six, a 26-year-old who reached his peak and found out that he could not reach the same heights others could.

Not in the ring, at least. He had gone to college throughout the best years of his pro career. Now a college graduate, he is eyeing law school while both his body and mind were still intact. There was more to life for him to think about than boxing.

Marquez showed swelling around his right eye, but that was the product of what he said was a thumb. It didn’t matter – he was setting his sights on but one thing, a third fight with Manny Pacquiao, with whom he had battled to a close, debatable draw and a close, debatable decision loss.

At 36 years old, and 57 fights into his Hall of Fame pro career, there is still more to be done in boxing. Life can wait.

Marquez had followed Pacquiao to junior lightweight, where they had their rematch in 2008. He had followed Pacquiao to lightweight, spoken of fighting at junior welterweight, and even tested the waters at welterweight, losing handily via decision to Floyd Mayweather Jr.

Pacquiao is Marquez’s white whale, his unfinished business. Nothing else is as important. Alas, he may never track Pacquiao down again. Pacquiao is now a welterweight, vying for a super-fight with a fellow superstar in Mayweather, settling for secondary bouts with others.

Pacquiao will face Antonio Margarito this November and presumably attempt, once again, to get Mayweather in the ring for a 2011 bout. He has referenced retirement before, especially with his increased political presence in his native Philippines.

Marquez could retire himself and be satisfied, eventually, in his accomplishments, even without a victory over Pacquiao. Still, he remains capable of defeating a number of viable contenders to his lightweight championship. There are other good matches to be made, whether at 135 against Michael Katsidis or at 140 against Amir Khan.

Those stare downs are secondary. This ace is still so set on going all in for another shot at the king.

The 10 Count [ Click Here For The Ten More Count ]

1.  Option No. 1: Watch Marquez-Diaz 2 at the local movie theater for $25, plus the cost of refreshments. Also: No beer.

Option No. 2: Split the cost of the Marquez-Diaz 2 pay-per-view with my father, paying $25 to sit at the family home in a big, comfy chair. Also: Free beer.

Some decisions are real, real easy to make.

And an extra perk came from a surprising place: a power outage with HBO’s production that sent the pay-per-view off the air for about two minutes. They were able to bring the international broadcast feed up, and while crews worked to get the HBO broadcast power back, we got to see replays of two undercard fights from before the pay-per-view began.

Those fights were junior-welterweight prospect Frankie Gomez’s first-round knockout of Ronnie Peterson, and the first-round disqualification of super-middleweight Sakio Bika, who knocked Jean Paul Mendy down and, with Mendy on his knees, proceeded to knock Mendy out.

Six fights on one pay-per-view. Now if only we’d gotten more than one thrilling bout on the televised undercard…

2.  How fortunate for the HBO Pay-Per-View broadcast that the aforementioned thrilling bout – Dmitry Pirog’s fantastic one-punch knockout of Danny Jacobs – ended early. Otherwise they might have rushed to get the main event in or faced the possibility of running out of airtime.

The first televised undercard bout, Jorge Linares’ decision win over Rocky Juarez, went the full 10 rounds. Then the power outage delayed the second undercard bout by close to 17 minutes.

That second bout, Robert Guerrero’s decision win over Joel Casamayor, went the full 10 rounds. The third undercard bout, pitting middleweights Danny Jacobs and Dmitry Pirog for a vacant world title (read: paper title), was scheduled for 12.

Pirog sent Jacobs packing in Round 5.

As it is, Marquez-Diaz still didn’t get started until around midnight.

3.  Two more thoughts on Pirog’s victory over Jacobs:

No. 1: Danny Jacobs had made fun of Pirog’s punching power in an interview conducted and posted on YouTube by something called “Barstool Boxing Brooklyn” (and passed along on the BoxingScene message board by someone called “Mikhnienko”).

“I don’t see me being concerned about his power,” Jacobs told the interviewers. “I don’t think he has that devastating knockout power that his record stands for. You know, I think his knockouts have been a variety of punches, and arm punches, and just the referee coming in and stopping the bout. I don’t think he’s knocked anybody out. Like when you go to YouTube and you type ‘Dmitry Pirog knockouts,’ it’s zero.”

“This’ll be the first one,” one of the guys from Barstool Boxing Brooklyn says in response. But I doubt this end result was what the dude meant…

No. 2: The real test of HBO and its supposedly cozy relationship with ubiquitous boxing adviser Al Haymon is whether the network has Pirog back on the air again soon defending his middleweight title belt, the same way we know HBO would’ve had Jacobs – whom Haymon advises – won Saturday night.

4.  It is too, too easy to be scammed in this Internet era. And so we need to be careful of being too trustful of sources on sites such as Twitter, Facebook and MySpace.

Last month, someone set up an account on Twitter claiming to be his “official Twitter page.” The first few tweets were interacting with Andre Berto – the welterweight beltholder has a “Verified Account,” which means the site has taken steps to ensure it is actually Berto on Twitter. That might’ve given the Bradley account a little bit of credibility. It didn’t give it enough.

Other fighters’ accounts have been confirmed as real through less official means, be it through the boxers posting pictures of themselves or by their promoters or managers noting (also on Twitter) that the accounts are real.

Nobody took steps to ensure that this account was really Bradley. And yet when the account got into a Twitter war with Amir Khan (the real, verified Amir Khan), articles were posted on a few websites, including this one.

And then Andre Berto posted this Thursday evening: “Got off the phone wit my boy Tim Bradly confirming his Twitter he said he doesn’t have one.”

Shortly thereafter, the fake account posted this: “ok ppl this ain the real tim bradley but boy did i create some contreversey,” And later: “im a legend i made a fake acc and got onto boxingscene.”

Remember: Trust, but verify…

5.  There were too many boxers behaving badly this week to fit them in here, especially with all the other news worth noting. So if you need your fix of pugs in cuffs, click here for an edition of “The 10 (More) Count.”

6.  Both fights on last week’s episode of ESPN2’s “Friday Night Fights” ended controversially. In the first, we ended up with the right winner (but in the wrong fashion). In the second, we ended up with the wrong winner.

Let’s do the first fight first:

Francisco Sierra was pummeling Donovan George in a super-middleweight bout when, just after the bell sounded to end Round 7, Sierra landed a jab and a right hand that sent George down hard.

Referee Gary Ritter – who was out of position for getting between the fighters following the final seconds of the round – rightly noted that the punch came after the bell. He said George had five minutes to recover from the foul – but those five minutes, by rule, are only applicable for recovering from low blows. Soon, however, the fight was stopped, as George was in no condition to continue.

Here’s where the problems began. A commissioner from the Oklahoma Professional Boxing Commission asked Ritter for a ruling: “I need to know whether the punch stopped the fight or not,” the commissioner asked.

“I don’t think the punch stopped the fight,” Ritter responded.

They agreed, then, that there should be a two-point deduction from Sierra for the foul and that they would then go to the scorecards.

This was incorrect – by their rules, and by the rules of the Association of Boxing Commissions.

If the punch didn’t lead to the injuries that stopped the fight – as in, if George was more damaged from the sustained beating he had taken through seven rounds – then George not being able to continue would mean the bout should’ve been a technical knockout victory for Sierra.

If the punch after the bell was ruled to be an intentional foul – as in, if the foul was preventable and not just a matter of circumstance – then two points should’ve been taken from Sierra AND, if George were unable to continue, Sierra should’ve been disqualified.

But if the punch after the bell was ruled to be an accidental foul – as in, there was clearly a foul but Sierra had not purposely committed such an act – then no points would be taken and, if George were unable to continue, the bout would go to the scorecards (if four rounds had been completed).

Sierra deserved the victory, and he got it. He’s fortunate that the Oklahoma commission, in bungling its own rules, didn’t take that away from him.

7.  As for the decision in the welterweight main event, which gave Ashley Theophane a majority decision over Delvin Rodriguez in a bout that Rodriguez clearly won?

Inexcusable.

At best, I could’ve given Theophane three rounds – and I didn’t – not the five and six rounds that the judges gave him.

Not a good night for the Oklahoma commission. Time for the powers that be in the Sooner State to have long talks with their commissioners, referees and judges.

8.  Two more quick notes regarding the Pacquiao-Mayweather imbroglio:

No. 1: Can we please get past calling fighters cowards? There’s plenty of reason to get on Floyd Mayweather Jr. for not signing to fight Manny Pacquiao this year. But to say he’s scared? Come on, now. You can dislike the guy, but you have to respect that he’s beaten everyone that he’s faced, using excellent skills to put together a Hall of Fame career. I sincerely doubt that Mayweather is scared of another fighter, even one as superlative as Pacquiao.

This isn’t grade school. I’d say this is more a matter of Mayweather’s ego than it is a matter of Mayweather’s guts.

No. 2: The back-and-forth about whether there was actually a second round of negotiations for a fight between Pacquiao and Mayweather has gotten ridiculous.

To recap, in paraphrases:

Bob Arum (who promotes Pacquiao): There were negotiations with Ross Greenburg of HBO acting as an intermediary between myself and Al Haymon, who advises Mayweather Jr.

Leonard Ellerbe (who manages Mayweather): Either Arum is lying or Greenburg is lying. It’s probably Arum.

Richard Schaefer (CEO of Golden Boy Promotions, which promotes Mayweather’s fights): There were no negotiations (even though I suggested that there were negotiations in past discussions with several reporters).

Oscar De La Hoya (controlling owner of Golden Boy Promotions): There were no negotiations, and I was making things up when I was talking about negotiations in the past.

Ross Greenburg: There were absolutely negotiations.

Leonard Ellerbe: No, there weren’t.

9.  The Pacquiao-Mayweather negotiations controversy would sound less maddening if it took the form of “Nuh-uh!” “Yah-huh!”

10.  Dad: “To paraphrase a former president, I guess it depends on what your meaning of ‘negotiations’ is.”

David: “And, like the key act in that scandal, not having Pacquiao-Mayweather blows…”

David P. Greisman is a member of the Boxing Writers Association of America. His weekly column, “Fighting Words,” appears every Monday on BoxingScene.com. He may be reached for questions and comments at fightingwords1@gmail.com