By Jake Donovan
Monday morning will mark the 60th anniversary of the infamous – and erroneous – headline to grace the front page of the Chicago Tribune. The first edition of the publication read “Dewey Defeats Truman,” based solely on projections that had Republican candidate Thomas E. Dewey prematurely named the 33rd President of the United States.
Much to their surprise, America would instead wake up to Harry S. Truman wearing the crown, in fact winning the electoral vote by a considerable margin.
As we rapidly approach Super Tuesday, the nation will for the first time since the 1984 election vote in a President not named Bush or Clinton. History will be made one way or another, so long as it’s either Democratic candidate Barack Obama or Republican nominee John McCain who wins.
All indications point to one or the other coming out on top, with most polls presently showing Obama in the lead, though the margins vary depending upon who you ask. As the weeks have passed by, more and more have anointed the Illinois-based Senator as the chosen one, as if, much like many (including the Chicago Tribune) suggested 60 years ago, what was once a race has now become a foregone conclusion.
Boxing matches don’t quite boast the same data prior to event night. No matter how the two fighters match up from a styles standpoint, the game still has to be played out in the ring, not merely decided on paper.
Just don’t tell that to the so-called experts of the sweet science, many of whom (this particular hack, chief among them) took it upon themselves to call a couple of recent races long before the opening bell sounded, never mind when the final returns arrived.
Among the many reasons to enjoy everything the sweet science is its flair for being predictably unpredictable. Anyone paying attention to the sport’s biggest fights in recent weeks might’ve noticed a couple of fights that didn’t just result in upsets, but completely flipped the script in the process.
October 18 was supposed to serve as the farewell party for former middleweight king and modern day legend Bernard Hopkins. Three months shy of his 44th birthday and considerably removed from his best days as a prize fighter, Hopkins was asked to share ring space with one the sport’s brightest rising stars, undefeated middleweight champion Kelly Pavlik.
By his own team’s admission, the fight was not the first option, but the belief was that it was a calculated risk. There was no guarantee that the lights out middleweight puncher could carry his power 10 lb north to the 170 lb catchweight limit. But if you ventured a guess based on any given pre-fight exit poll, you’d have been led to believe that Pavlik would eventually find a way to win.
Some had him struggling before eventually taking a decision. Others had him dominating from the opening bell, forcing old man Hopkins to shut down, and fight either to survive, or dare open up, at which moment he’d get got for the first time in his 20-year career. But just about everyone had a premonition of the October 19 headline reading “Pavlik Defeats Hopkins.”
The closest most came to being correct was predicting Pavlik struggling early. He did. Only it didn’t end early; in fact, it didn’t end at all.
Entering the fight as an undefeated middleweight champ whose star was on the rise, Pavlik left the ring with just his title still intact, since it was an over-the-weight non-title affair. None of the rest any longer rang true.
A single loss, especially just your first career defeat, shouldn’t result in career suicide, but dropping a virtual shutout has a unique way of draining the enthusiasm that surrounds a previously anointed superstar.
You’d think that many would learn from their own mistakes, though it can be argued that this same generation of experts never learned their lesson from the last time Hopkins entered a fight as a considerable underdog against a reigning middleweight titlist. Hopkins was a 3-1 ‘dog prior to beating the crap out of Felix Trinidad and the reality into all of the naysayers who thought that, at age 36, he was already on borrowed time.
But if they didn’t learn it then, surely the message finally resonated as he gave a menacing glare toward press row shortly after turning back the clock against Pavlik. Never again would so many in the media opine on a future fight in such dismissive fashion. The next time a prediction was solicited for a major fight, every possible outcome would be exhausted before offering a well-researched hypothesis on how said fight would eventually play out.
Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.
“Mijares Defeats Darchinyan” was the general translation of the media poll conducted by Showtime last week, prior to their junior bantamweight unification match between Cristian Mijares and Vic Darchinyan.
It appeared that many in the media had finally warmed up to the notion that boxing actually exists below 122 lb. Just about every notable boxing scribe had an opinion on this fight, though more than 80% of those on record saw the fight going one way: with Mijares in control throughout, most likely taking a decision and going on to collect three belts as well as end his 2008 campaign as the leading candidate for Fighter of the Year.
Just 14 days after oh so many got it very wrong, the masses were once again miles off course in how they believed the action would play out.
It’s one thing for upsets to simply happen. It’s another for such a heavily favored fighter to barely win a round the entire night. Mijares managed just that, taking one round on each of the three scorecards among the eight that required pencil to paper.
The scorecards would only tell half of the story on this night. The most vocal message delivered was that by the brash Armenian, who lived up to his pre-fight promise of not just beating Mijares, but knocking him out cold.
A cynic would argue that Darchinyan makes the same prediction before every fight, but so what? How can you not love a fighter who didn’t just want to win, but wouldn’t be happy unless his night ended with the referee waving his arms in the air, officially rendering his opponent unfit to continue?
It’s a quality that many in fact love about Darchinyan. Most in the media just didn’t have the sense to foresee this outcome. Perhaps too much time was spent in the editing room, finding the perfect font and type size for that banner headline declaring Mijares the winner.
Fortunately for those working rewrite, Darchinyan provided an ending early enough in the evening to clean up the first edition. It was barely 11:00PM on the East Coast (8PM local time in a rain-soaked Carson, CA) when the two-division titlist would land a flush right hand and overhand left, the latter sending Mijares crashing to the canvas and flat on his back as the ninth round came to a close.
Even if he beat the count, Mijares was never getting back into the fight. Not with three rounds to go in a fight where he was lucky to even win one of the previous nine. Referee Lou Moret put an end to any hypothetical that could posed, waving off the fight, ending Mijares’ title reign and Fighter of the Year bid.
So came the new headlines, that Darchinyan was now the top dog at junior bantamweight, with boxing experts now pondering his chances against Fernando Montiel in a bout that would determine divisional supremacy. Two days ago, so few believed that such a matchup would carry stakes so high. It could even be suggested that “Mijares Defeats Montiel” banners were already being prepared, in the off chance that the two would tango some time in 2009.
It’s also conceivable that many are already searching for the perfect headline to describe how Joe Calzaghe will ultimately defeat Roy Jones Jr this Saturday in New York City. Who’s to say that anyone learned their lesson taught by Vic Darchinyan last weekend, or even by Bernard Hopkins two weeks before that.
History will show come Monday morning that lessons were there to be learned sixty years ago.
Jake Donovan is a voting member of the Boxing Writers Association of America. Comments/questions can be submitted to JakeNDaBox@gmail.com.
