What the heck happened to Stephen Fulton?

There are bad days for professional athletes. And then there are terrible, horrible, no good, very bad days for professional athletes.

This is the story of Stephen Fulton and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.

I use the word “day” liberally, as it was actually over a span of about 33 hours that everything for Fulton went terribly, horribly, no goodly, very badly wrong.

In the world of unscripted entertainment – i.e., sports – unexpectedly poor outcomes frequently happen. But this was on another level. Fulton totally dropped the ball.

Actually, that’s too PG-rated of a metaphor for what he did. He screwed the pooch. That’s the PG-13 way to say it.

Or if you want to go for the full rated-R, he shat the bed.

Whatever your MPAA rating of choice, Fulton had that bottom-one-percent outcome that nobody saw coming.

There is no shame and no shock – pun somewhat intended – in losing to O’Shaquie Foster in what the oddsmakers tabbed as a 50/50 fight. But the utterly listless, one-sided manner in which Fulton lost on Saturday night in San Antonio – that was a result nobody predicted.

And he produced that result some 33 hours after failing to make weight. Even though he was moving up from 126 to 130lbs, Fulton tipped the scales at 132. That combined with his performance turned this into the sort of epic disaster weekend for “Cool Boy Steph” that leaves the whole sport scratching its collective head.

It’s not just that he lost. It’s that he appeared lost. And he appeared that way on the heels of quite possibly the most meaningful win of his boxing career 10 months earlier.

In February, Fulton boxed beautifully – at least as beautifully as he could against an opponent intent on mauling him – in winning a clear-cut decision in his rematch with Brandon Figueroa. (And, for style points, he did it while wearing custom Timberland boxing boots and trunks that looked like jorts.)

And that’s why I wholeheartedly reject a comment I saw here and there on social media Saturday while Fulton was in the middle of screwing pooches and crapping beds: that he hasn’t been the same since he got stopped by Naoya Inoue in the summer of 2023.

Yes, the eighth-round stoppage to Inoue was a violent defeat with the potential to eviscerate a man’s confidence. And in its wake, Cool Boy Steph didn’t fight for 14 months, and didn’t look good at all in his first fight back, a split decision over Carlos Castro. But he shed the rust and the self-doubts and whatever else he was dealing with and boxed his way past Figueroa with relative ease.

Based on those 12 rounds, Fulton was all the way back, the Inoue loss just a blip to be filed under “occupational hazards of being willing to fight Naoya Inoue.”

And then he moved up, missed weight by two pounds and sleepwalked through 12 rounds with Foster. From the second round on, Fulton looked like he would have rather been anywhere else in the world than inside that boxing ring.

So what the heck happened to him?

I have four possible theories:

Theory 1: O’Shaquie Foster happened to him.

This is the glass-half-full theory, the theory that promotes credit rather than blame, the theory that behind every desultory loser, there is a dynamic winner.

Foster’s style presented problems for Fulton. “Shock” had the faster hands. He was the longer boxer and he used his jab masterfully. He spent much of the fight in the southpaw stance, which Fulton seemingly was not expecting.

Foster’s combinations weren’t especially creative, but they were often pinpoint and they were well-timed. By mid-fight, Fulton’s trainer, Derek “Bozy” Ennis, began imploring his charge to get inside, but the rangy Foster never made that easy for him.

Foster is a fighter who almost never wins with room to spare. He needed a 12th-round knockout to save his 130lbs alphabet title in a fight he was losing against Eduardo “Rocky” Hernandez. He eked by Abraham Nova by split decision. He split two bouts with Robson Conceicao, and even though Foster rightfully should have been 2-0 in the series, both fights came down to a round or two.

But despite this pattern, there was Foster taming Fulton fully on Saturday night and winning by scores of 119-109, 118-110 and a frankly too close 117-111.

It would be possible to give Foster credit and leave it at that.

Except I don’t think we can leave it at that.

Give Foster credit for an outstanding, disciplined, confident performance? Sure. But to chalk it all up to what O’Shaquie did well is to effectively say “Fulton could have beaten any junior lightweight other than Foster on this night.” And if you watched the fight, you can’t reasonably say that about the dismally disinterested Fulton we saw for those 36 minutes.

Theory 2: A delay that led to weight-cut challenges happened to him.

Fulton posted on social media back in May that he was walking around at 164lbs, 30% above what was at the time his fighting weight of 126lbs. That’s on him, of course. Some boxers can blow up between fights and bounce back, and some can’t, and maybe Fulton went too far this time.

But there’s also a complication here that was somewhat beyond Cool Boy Steph’s control.

His fight with Foster was originally tabbed, unofficially, for a slot supporting a proposed August rematch between Gervonta Davis and Lamont Roach. When that event fell apart, Foster-Fulton was scheduled for October 25, in the co-main to Sebastian Fundora-Keith Thurman. Fifteen days out from the event, Fundora withdrew with a hand injury, and the whole card was pulled. So Foster-Fulton moved to December 6.

Fulton went from thinking he was two weeks away from a fight to suddenly being eight weeks away, and he needed to maintain his weight over the course of what was now a double-length training camp.

To be clear, all the same challenges applied to Foster. So this is not an excuse. It’s just a possible explanation.

Fulton’s lone previous defeat, against Inoue, also came after a delay. That bout was set for May 7, 2023, but postponed to July 25, 2023, due to an Inoue hand injury.

In the media scrum at the end of the final pre-fight press conference for this past weekend’s PBC PPV card, Fulton was asked about that.

“And that was, like, a struggle,” Fulton said. “That part was like a struggle, like, not financial, but weight-wise. I can’t keep holding that motherfuckin’ weight for like three more fuckin’ months.”

He also insisted that going through that experience with Inoue helped prepare him for the delay against Foster. The evidence suggests it very much did not.

Again, not to excuse Fulton’s disaster on the scale, because Foster remained on weight and on point, but it’s logical to theorize that the postponement played a role in (a) a featherweight suddenly failing to make junior lightweight, and (b) Fulton failing to peak physically on fight night and instead looking lifeless for most of the contest.

Theory 3: Overconfidence happened to him.

Maybe I’m reaching here, but how else do you explain Fulton suddenly uncorking overhand rights with no regard for proper technique other than to say he believed he was so talented he could get away with doing things wrong? Call it Roy Jones Syndrome. (Except in Roy’s case, he was so talented he could get away with it.)

But seriously, I refuse to believe a trainer of Bozy Ennis’ experience and credentials spent weeks in the gym working on adding the looping-est right hand ever thrown to Cool Boy Steph’s repertoire.

Those unorthodox punch mechanics aside, it’s possible that overconfidence bred from the Figueroa win was at the root of Fulton’s weight problems and fight-night performance. The first time Fulton and Figueroa clashed, the Philly fighter escaped with a disputed majority decision. The second time, Fulton won going away.

That may have tricked him into believing he was simply a level above Foster.

Such a mindset could explain Fulton not pushing himself as hard as he needed to in training camp. And it could explain why he had such a blank look on his face when it became clear that Plan A – whatever the heck Plan A was – wasn’t working.

Theory 4: Some outside-the-ring distraction we don’t know about happened to him.

Take this with the proverbial grain of salt. I don’t know the first thing about Stephen Fulton’s private life. Some theories are grounded in reality and others are pure conjecture, and this fits into the latter category.

I’m not going to be so journalistically irresponsible as to speculate about what the outside-the-ring distraction could be. People have significant others, kids, parents, friends – and strained relationships with any of them can affect a boxer’s performance.

Some athletes block out the noise, and some even channel it into enhancing the way they fight. But some let it knock them off balance.

Look at some of these CompuBox numbers:

• Fulton landed eight punches in a round twice, and in the other 10 rounds, his high-water mark was five punches landed.

• He had a stretch of three rounds, from the fifth through the seventh, in which he went 0-for-57 on jabs.

• Fulton and Foster each were credited with five landed punches in the first round. In every round thereafter, Foster landed at least twice as many shots as Fulton.

• In total, Fulton landed 56 of 438 punches, just a 12.8% connect rate, and just 4.7 out of 36.5 as a per-round average.

That’s not the Stephen Fulton we had come to know. Maybe that was a Stephen Fulton dealing with things unrelated to boxing.

Again, it’s just a theory.

These are all just theories, and it may be that one of them is right, that all of them are partially right, or that none of them are quite right.

But there has to be some explanation for what was wrong with Fulton last weekend. You don’t suddenly go from skillful, slick, confident and well-conditioned to terrible, horrible, no good and very bad without a reason.

Eric Raskin is a veteran boxing journalist with nearly 30 years of experience covering the sport for such outlets as BoxingScene, ESPN, Grantland, Playboy, and The Ring (where he served as managing editor for seven years). He also co-hosted The HBO Boxing Podcast, Showtime Boxing with Raskin & Mulvaney, The Interim Champion Boxing Podcast with Raskin & Mulvaney, and Ring Theory. He has won three first-place writing awards from the BWAA, for his work with The Ring, Grantland, and HBO. Outside boxing, he is the senior editor of CasinoReports and the author of 2014’s The Moneymaker Effect. He can be reached on X, BlueSky, or LinkedIn, or via email at RaskinBoxing@yahoo.com.