a letter to ring magazine blog

hey guys, i was reading the comments after and there's this one letter, that totally defined what people "that don't know boxing" exemplifies. check it out, i really enjoyed it, and leave your thoughts (props, hehehe) of course. by the way, i'm not intending to infringe copyright, hurt ring magazine, do wrong or anything, so if this is not allowed, let me know. ARMCHAIR CRITICS Hi Dougie, I watched the match yesterday(night) it's always tough in Europe because you must wait til 5 in the morning and after because of the adrenaline I can't go to sleep before 8 :). Anyway I was absolutely impressed with Cotto guts. The guy could have easily quit after the fifth or the sixth round and win on points. He preferred to risk his health by fighting in this state and at some point I was afraid he was going to get brutally K.O again. Anyway he found a way to win the 11 and 12 round in my book and I had him won the fight by one point. Today I was amazed by all the b.s in the boxing forums. Speaking of Cotto as a finished fighter, damage goods and so on. Also explaining how poor was his performance and how he was never going to be a great boxer. For me Cotto is already a great man an showed great composure when opposing fierce adversity. Adversity that these armchair critics have never faced in their lives and if they face it they will crumble. These people don't box. A lot of them have never given 30% of a prize fighter’s efforts in any of their daily life activities. When they criticise maybe for a moment they forget how weak they are indeed in their real lives but they can comfortably hide behind their forum names. (P.S. If someone send you a very stupid E-mail do you put him in the spam list???) Ciao, all the best. -- Lubomir Vezenkov Why would I block someone’s stupid email when I can simply rip them a new a__hole in the mailbag? LOL. No, to my knowledge I’ve never blocked or forwarded anyone’s email -- no matter how rude or insulting -- to my spam file. However, I don’t always finish reading really dumb-ass emails (especially if they are long and drawn out rants). The older I get, especially now that I have two kids that demand and deserve my attention, the less time I spend arguing with dips__ts. That’s why I seldom visit boxing message boards. I cracked up when you wrote that you were “amazed by all the b.s in the boxing forums”. Hell, I thought that what they were for! Bulls__t! Anyway, you seem like you know how to handle the bulls__ters. Kudos to you. And amen to your take on Cotto. He’s not perfect, but he’s the real deal when it comes to guts. I’ve pointed this out before, but I’ll do it again because as far as I’m concerned this is what being a fighter is all about: when I look at THE RING’s welterweight top 10, I see that Cotto -- who stepped up to the 147-pound division in December of 2006 -- has fought FIVE of them (Mosley, Margarito, Clottey, Quintana and Judah)! And all five of those bouts have been dramatic, exciting and compelling in their own way. The Armchair Eddie Futches, as I like to call them, enjoy pointing out all of Cotto’s deficiencies and short comings. They think it makes them sound like experts. But the thing is, you don’t have to be an expert to know how good or how limited Cotto is because there’s no illusion with him. He’s tested himself against the best, and in doing so, we’ve seen his strengths and his weaknesses and we’ve been treated to glorious glimpses of his character. If everyone he fought was the caliber of Michael Jennings and Alfonzo Gomez, Cotto would look invincible. However, even though he’s paid seven figures to fight guys like that, he chooses to challenge himself against the best of his division and that’s why we’ve seen him struggle, get hurt, and even stopped. I think the adversity Cotto’s gone through helps define him as a fighter and I don’t believe he has anything to be ashamed of. If some goofy ass fans don’t understand that, it’s their problem not ours.