by David P. Greisman
BRONX, N.Y. – We talk of boxing as war, an unarmed microcosm of armed conflict. The boxers, then, are variations on themes, versions of warriors, historic and contemporary.
There were the soldiers who marched up to battle bolstered by drummers and backed by flags. And then there were the silent assassins, those samurai and sharpshooters who approached each mission with the same quiet dedication, emotionless but effective.
Yuri Foreman began his march to the ring to the sounds of the shofar, a ram’s horn, the blowing of which is steeped in Jewish tradition. That gave way first to Hebrew singing, and then to heavy metal chords, the signature start to Pantera’s “Walk,” the aggressive anthem whose refrain demands respect.
Miguel Cotto’s walk was unexceptional, briefly accompanied by music that was nothing worth noting. He would soon pick up the beat in three-minute bursts.
Every second of every minute, every minute of every round is its own little battle. Miguel Cotto did not win every battle. But he was more capable than Foreman and more confident than him. That won him the war.
Cotto was smaller but stronger. Foreman was bigger but faster. Foreman couldn’t capitalize on his height advantage, nor could he handle Cotto’s power. Cotto, meanwhile, offset Foreman’s size and speed from the outset.
Cotto is naturally left-handed but fights from an orthodox stance. He worked behind a strong jab to close the distance between himself and the taller fighter. Foreman’s jab lacked conviction. When it wasn’t aimed at air, it hit harmlessly against Cotto’s gloves.
Foreman couldn’t keep Cotto away with his hands. And so he tried to keep him away with his feet.
Sometimes Foreman bounced in and out. Sometimes Foreman shuffled left and right. Rarely did he plant in one position and punch.
Whereas Cotto used his jab to get in range, Foreman advanced without covering fire. Cotto didn’t need to chase after Foreman so long as Foreman put himself in the strike zone.
Cotto landed 32 punches over the first three rounds. His timing countered Foreman’s movement and speed. There was the stiff jab in round one that caught Foreman as he shuffled sideways, knocking him backward to the ropes. There was the stiff jab in round two that caught Foreman as he jumped forward, and a right hand later that stanza that hit Foreman as he moved.
Before that second round ended, Foreman, with his back to the ropes, stopped moving and sent out a strong left-hook counter. Cotto barely blinked.
The trick, then, would be to blind him.
Foreman’s jab, taken alone, was ineffective. When paired with a right hand, however…
Foreman started the fourth by shooting out a sharp jab and immediately followed with a hard right hand that connected flush. Later, he feinted with the left and again landed with the right. He went back to that feint-cross combination two more times.
It was the only round that Foreman won on all three judges’ scorecards (one judge also gave Foreman the third).
“I didn’t use my jab much in the fourth round, and that was the point of Yuri Foreman taking advantage over me,” Cotto would say after the fight. “And then I am back with [trainer Emanuel Steward’s] instructions in the next rounds.”
Steward told Cotto to go back to the jab. But instead it would be left hooks and a left uppercut that brought the momentum back in Cotto’s favor in the fifth. Foreman, emboldened by his success in the previous round, was there to get hit by all of the above.
Foreman retreated, returning to moving around the ring. Cotto’s pressure and power were breaking him.
Sometimes a fighter will land his best shot and know he can land another. But sometimes that best shot won’t deter his opponent, nor will it damage him.
The song Foreman had entered the ring to unwittingly foreshadowed how the fight would go.
“Can’t you see I’m easily bothered by persistence?” the song begins. And later: “Be yourself. By yourself. Stay away from me.”
Foreman couldn’t keep Cotto away. Foreman couldn’t get away either, though he tried.
The crowd booed. They had come to a stadium, more than 20,000 strong, most of them there to see Cotto win. Like the crowd at a bullfight, they wanted blood.
The matador has the advantage because the bull has already been wounded. It has been slowed, and it is slowly bleeding out.
Forty-five seconds into round seven, Foreman, attempting to evade Cotto, shuffled to his right and had his right knee go out from beneath him. Foreman was already wearing a knee brace on that leg – the result of an injury suffered 14 years prior, an injury that had bothered him occasionally since then.
Referee Arthur Mercante Jr. gave Foreman time to try to walk the pain off, just as Mercante had done a year before when, coincidentally, Joshua Clottey hurt his leg against Cotto.
Cotto was already beating Foreman; he was up 59-55 on two scorecards, 58-56 on the other. Foreman had resorted to moving away from Cotto. The injury would keep him from doing even that.
Foreman limped forward and threw a left hook. Cotto met him in the middle of the ring and did the same. With Foreman mostly immobilized, Cotto threw and landed more punches in the seventh than he would in any other round, going 29 of 65 (27 of 44 with power punches). Foreman tried absorbing the barrage, and then he tried avoiding it. At the round’s halfway point, his right leg gave out again.
Mercante called on a ringside physician to take a look at Foreman. But the physician didn’t – Foreman told Mercante he wanted to fight. When Foreman could find the strength to have his legs beneath him, he fired away with flurries. The rest of the round he was hunched over, a car driving on with a flat tire when it would be wiser to pull off to the side of the road.
Foreman’s leg buckled again halfway into round eight, though he remained standing. Fifteen seconds later, Foreman’s trainer threw a towel into the ring.
Cotto raised his glove. Foreman walked back to his corner. The crowd roared its disapproval. And Arthur Mercante Jr. wanted none of it, ordering the ring cleared of commission members and corner-men.
Mercante asked Foreman if he wanted to continue. “You fight hard,” Mercante said. “I don’t want to see you lose like that.”
Foreman’s trainer, Joe Grier, didn’t want to see Foreman lose the way he was losing.
“I recognized that it was a serious injury,” Grier said later. “It wasn’t something he’d be able to shake off. He was in it. It wasn’t like he was out of the fight. He was fighting back. He scored very well and was very effective. But then I started noticing he was starting to get hit even more. He was no longer mobile. He was no longer Yuri Foreman.
“I wanted him to leave with some dignity.”
Grier asked commission inspectors to stop the fight. They couldn’t get Mercante’s attention, Grier said. “I had to get this stopped,” he said. “I don’t know what else I was expected to do.”
Two minutes after the fight was off, it was on again.
After the eighth, Mercante walked Foreman back to his corner. “Who threw in the towel?” Mercante asked. “I did,” Grier said.
At the same time, ring announcer Michael Buffer tried to clarify the situation. “The towel that came into the ring came was from an outside source,” Buffer announced. “Not the corner.”
The fight didn’t last much longer. Thirty seconds into the ninth, Cotto landed a left hook to Foreman’s body. Foreman went down to one knee. Mercante waved it off.
Should he have waved it off earlier? Foreman had already been left without a leg to stand on. What about Mercante?
“The towel came in in the heat of the battle,” Mercante said afterward. “There was a good exchange going at the moment. The towel came in. I didn’t know where it came from. About 10 seconds prior to that, someone in the corner said stop the fight. There was no need to stop the fight.
“It was a great fight,” Mercante said “That’s what the fans came to see.”
Referees have ignored towels being thrown into the ring – notably, Mickey Vann during the 2007 brawl between Michael Katsidis and Graham Earl. Katsidis knocked down Earl twice in the first round and again in the second. Soon thereafter, Earl’s corner threw in the towel. Vann picked up the towel and tossed it out, and a little bit later Earl scored a knockdown of his own.
Referees have also let fighters continue fighting despite injuries: broken hands, broken jaws, bad cuts, eyes shut by swelling. It is up to the referee and the ringside physician – and the fighter’s corner – to protect a fighter from being too brave.
From ringside, Foreman looked to be a sitting duck taking unnecessary punishment. On second viewing, he never appeared to be badly hurt, and he was fighting back when he could.
But a referee is not there to care about a fight’s entertainment value. He is there to enforce the rules and protect the fighters. Whether it is a great fight, and whether the fans will be angered with a fight ending by injury, should never matter.
Foreman wanted to fight. He was willing to face Cotto despite the injury, willing to rise every time his knee failed him, willing to come out of his corner to face the onslaught.
He didn’t suffer severe consequences because of this. But it is dangerous to use hindsight when evaluating decisions.
Should Mercante have waved the fight off earlier because of Foreman’s injury? Perhaps not. But he shouldn’t have kept it going merely because it was a good fight – a fight that most of the 20,272 in attendance wanted to see end with the bull being brought down, with Foreman being thrown to the lions.
“People came to see a good fight,” Mercante said. “I felt I did the right thing.”
There isn’t an easy answer. We talk of boxing as a war. We cheer on action. We follow the drama.
We leave room for mercy.
The 10 Count
1. Don’t do it.
Don’t think that the first fight in the new Yankee Stadium having 20,272 in attendance makes it a disappointment.
It’s tempting to think that way. But it’s wrong.
Yes, Manny Pacquiao and Joshua Clottey brought 50,994 people into Cowboys Stadium in March. And yes, there was a massive amount of empty seats Saturday in Yankee Stadium – from the right-field dugout, clockwise around home plate, around left field and all the way to center field.
But those sections were not right for watching the fight. The ring, after all, was set up in right-center field, with field-level seating set up around it. The other sections of the baseball stadium that were much closer to the action than the other sections were full. And I do mean full – all the way up to the last row in the upper deck.
And Pacquiao-Clottey involved the best fighter in the sport at the prime of his popularity. As for Clottey, though he is not a draw, he is a somewhat-familiar face, having faced Cotto in a loss on HBO in 2009, beating Zab Judah on HBO in 2008, beating Diego Corrales on Showtime in 2007, losing to Antonio Margarito on Showtime in 2006, and beating Richard Gutierrez on HBO in 2006.
This was Cotto’s first fight back since losing to Pacquiao last year. He had lost two of his last four fights. And yet the Puerto Rican contingent from New York and beyond still came out for him, more than 20,000 strong, to see him face Yuri Foreman.
Until earlier this year, those few who knew who Foreman was had still rarely seen him. Some had previously thought of him as “Yuri Bore-man,” recalling specifically his stinker against Anthony Thompson in 2007 on the Cotto-Judah pay-per-view undercard. Foreman didn’t look good in a big fight until this past November, when he knocked down Daniel Santos two times en route to victory on the Cotto-Pacquiao pay-per-view undercard.
Leading up to the Foreman fight, Cotto had sold approximately 93,000 tickets in his six fights at Madison Square Garden in New York, according to publicist Fred Sternburg. His 2007 bout with Zab Judah at Madison Square Garden sold 20,658 – the arena had to open up an extra section to accommodate both Cotto’s fans and those there for Judah, who is from the city.
And while Foreman, like Judah, is a New York resident, he hasn’t built up a fan base from his past fights, and his ethnicity isn’t a tremendous selling point either.
Granted, there were definitely some Israeli flags in the stands and people singing along with the Israeli national anthem. But the Jewish market in America right now is largely untapped. There have only been two notable Jewish boxers of late in this country – Foreman and junior-welterweight Dmitriy Salita.
Foreman practices Orthodox Judaism. That means strict observance of the Sabbath. Foreman could not build an audience with appearances on Friday Night Fights. And members of the Orthodox community who would’ve wanted to come out Saturday to support him would not have left their homes for the arena until around 9 p.m. – hours after fans began arriving.
2. Quick side note:
There was a great headline on Wally Matthews’ piece on ESPNNewYork.com – “Cotto wins battle of wounded knee.”
Whomever the genius is behind that one, I bow down to thee…
3. In the immortal words of George Carlin… Here’s something you don’t see every day:
A fighter rising from a knockdown, pretending to, um, pleasure himself, and then getting knocked out.
It’s not something you’ll be able to see either, in case you wanted to. That’s because it happened in the very first bout on the Foreman-Cotto undercard, in a fight pitting junior welterweight prospect Christian Martinez against Nathan Cuba. It aired live online on Top Rank’s LiveStream, but I don’t believe it’s been archived anywhere on the promoter’s website.
Anyway, here’s what happened:
Martinez hurt Cuba and sent him down hard in the fourth round – the second knockdown of the night. Cuba got up, and while the referee was counting, he turned to a person in the crowd and used his right glove to make the aforementioned lewd gesture.
That takes balls.
Of course, Cuba got stopped shortly afterward. Timing is everything.
4. What Cuba did still isn’t as embarrassing as what Edison Miranda did in April.
In case you don’t remember, Miranda showboated after getting hit by Lucian Bute, putting his gloves at his hips and posing. And then Bute landed the left uppercut that ended Miranda’s night.
Oh, and it happened on HBO for the world to see.
5. We have a winner.
The prize for the most bizarre training routine for a boxer getting ready for a fight goes to longtime fringe heavyweight Timo Hoffmann.
Hoffmann… lifts sheep.
It’s better than testing positive for steroids, which Hoffman did in 2007.
Anyway, there was an article – accompanied by photos! – on the net, taking a look at Hoffmann’s preparations in some tiny, tiny, tiny German village.
“I had everything I need,” Hoffmann was quoted as saying. “Here I am man, here dare it to be!”
Chuck Norris, eat your heart out.
6. Even better? Hoffmann’s trainer is named Uwe.
7. Don’t do it.
Don’t think that Floyd Mayweather Jr. has retired again. Don’t believe it – not yet, at least.
Mayweather, interviewed while visiting a teenager on behalf of the “Make-A-Wish Foundation,” repeatedly said he will be “taking a couple of years off.”
Really? Really?
Video of the interview made its way online. A report by Ronnie Nathanielsz – a correspondent for several news outlets, including this very website – spread the story. And it spread indeed, to plenty of message boards, blogs and smaller websites.
It is far from official, however. That is because while the words came directly from Mayweather’s mouth, the sentiment behind them hasn’t been confirmed.
I mean, come on…
This is the guy who announced supposed retirements on more than one occasion at press conferences following fights. This is the guy who, when he really did take a sabbatical (one that didn’t last too long), announced he was doing so via news release.
Would he really break this news in this manner? And without confirming it with any of the major media outlets out there – thereby reaching the widest audience with his stated intention to focus on philanthropy?
Don’t believe it. Yet.
8. Mayweather’s last sabbatical came when negotiations for a rematch with Oscar De La Hoya weren’t going well. This seems like a similar situation, considering that we still don’t have a Mayweather-Pacquiao fight. That, or what Floyd Mayweather Jr. says one month has no bearing on what he says a month later.
To wit, here is Mayweather said following his May win over Shane Mosley:
“The only thing I want to do is continue to go out there and fight the best they got out there.”
Maybe Mayweather’s going to try to one-up Pacquiao and run for U.S. Senate. I keep reading that Harry Reid’s seat is in trouble…
9. Good Idea, Bad Idea:
Good Idea: If you’re part of the crew of four or five bodyguards trailing Manny Pacquiao, follow him to the bathroom at the Boxing Writers Association of America awards dinner and make sure he has privacy while in the privy.
Bad Idea: If you’re part of the mob of at least a dozen photographers and cameramen trailing Manny Pacquiao, follow him to the bathroom at the Boxing Writers Association of America awards dinner. Wait outside the door (thanks to those bodyguards), then get pictures of him as he exits.
…I wish I were kidding. Both actually happened at the dinner last week.
10. When Manny Pacquiao takes a leak? That’s not news.
When Manny Pacquiao takes the blood test? That’ll be news…
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
