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By William Dettloff
The best boxers usually beat the best punchers, but until then, it’s good to be a hitter. It’s the best thing you can be.
How good is it?
Vic Darchinyan can’t fight a lick. Well, maybe he can, but he doesn’t have to. He’s such a good hitter he could follow Victor Burgos around the ring in that weird tarantula-like stance of his, show the punch he was going to throw (the left uppercut, typically), throw it, and then start again.
No jab, no setting anything up. Show the punch, throw it. If it lands, great. If not, no big deal. It would eventually.
You could say it was because Burgos was undersized against Darchinyan and not a big hitter either way, but that’s pretty much the way Darchinyan fights. He gets away with it because the other guy knows what can happen if he lands.
Burgos, who underwent emergency surgery after the fight to remove a blood clot, never appeared in great trouble until the last round and hadn’t taken a terrible beating, though Darchinyan did land some thunderous left hands.
How good is it to be a puncher?
Edison Miranda can’t fight much either. But the first right hand he landed let Allen Green know who the boss was going to be. Green, normally a fluid, quick-handed guy and a fair puncher himself, tensed up and never got into the fight.
Sure, he dropped Miranda and lumped up his face. But he wasn’t the relaxed, confident guy we’ve seen in the past. He spent more time complaining and holding than he did punching. He even turned Miranda into a boring fighter. That’s no easy task.
In most cases, I hate it when a referee admonishes the fighters to mix it up, but by about the seventh round I was hoping Jose H. Rivera would open up his wallet and offer each guy a $20 if he would just throw punches.
When Miranda finally got his hands loose, he knocked Green into next week. He turned a fight that had been boring us all stiff into one whose ending his promoter can add to his highlight reel.
How good is it to be a puncher?
Miguel Cotto looked slower than erosion against Oktay Urkal. I thought he looked a little disinterested too. A little flat. And Urkal is a rough assignment for anyone. Ask Kostya Tszyu or Vivian Harris.
Cotto still dominated him. Why? Because he’s a puncher and Urkal isn’t. It’s why Cotto will beat Zab Judah, if they meet as scheduled, and why I still pick him over Shane Mosley and maybe every other welterweight out there. He is like a block of cement in there and will be very hard to beat.
This is how good it is to be a puncher: You can be about as evenly matched against your opponent as can be, the way Rafael Marquez was against Israel Vazquez, and if you’re a better puncher, if your best punches break bones and the other guy’s do not, you win.
The Marquez-Vazquez match was as good as we knew it would be, right up until the point when Vazquez submitted because Marquez’ punches did more damage to him than his had done to Marquez.
It’s good to be a puncher.
Some miscellaneous observations from last week:
Like everyone else, I hope Burgos recovers and proceeds to live a long and fulfilling life. However, if the outcome is not good, the witch-hunt will start and so too will the hand-wringing. It should not; this is a perfect illustration of the unsettling reality that you cannot legislate risk out of this sport.
You can try—see the bigger gloves they’re using in Vegas and elsewhere—but nothing occurred during this fight that suggested that Burgos was going to suffer a serious injury, other than he was in a boxing ring. This kind of thing will happen when men hit one another on the head. It is unavoidable.
While we’re on the subject, here is why a fighter who says before a big fight, “he’ll have to kill me to win” almost never wins: He’s trying to convince himself of it. And any time you have to convince yourself of something it’s because you know it’s not true.
Now onto the lighter stuff:
Thomas Edison and Henry Ford have nothing on the guy (of course it was a guy) who came up with the idea of filling the ring with four gyrating round card girls. Brilliant.
Showtime: Enough with the commercials.
See a doctor if you didn’t laugh out loud when, after what seemed like an hour and a half of translations during the prefight interview, Vazquez looked right at Jim Gray and said in perfect English: “Thank you very much.”
Did Gray actually ask the ringside physician for Burgos’ vital signs? Who is he, Randolph Mantooth?
Speaking of Dr. Paul Wallace, I don’t know how good a doctor he is, but I think he should be the ringside physician for every televised fight from now on. His replies to an overwrought Gray’s questions were uproariously succinct. I want more.
Who else is waiting for Lennox Lewis to burst into tears on the air? One or two more questions from Jim Lampley in the postfight wrap-up and we might have seen a full-blown anxiety attack.
Puerto Rico may be the best place in the world for boxing, as Larry Merchant said in a stirring postfight editorial, but it’s not so good for Lampley’s hair.
I agree: Open scoring stinks.
Bill Dettloff can be contacted at dettloff@ptd.net.
The best boxers usually beat the best punchers, but until then, it’s good to be a hitter. It’s the best thing you can be.
How good is it?
Vic Darchinyan can’t fight a lick. Well, maybe he can, but he doesn’t have to. He’s such a good hitter he could follow Victor Burgos around the ring in that weird tarantula-like stance of his, show the punch he was going to throw (the left uppercut, typically), throw it, and then start again.
No jab, no setting anything up. Show the punch, throw it. If it lands, great. If not, no big deal. It would eventually.
You could say it was because Burgos was undersized against Darchinyan and not a big hitter either way, but that’s pretty much the way Darchinyan fights. He gets away with it because the other guy knows what can happen if he lands.
Burgos, who underwent emergency surgery after the fight to remove a blood clot, never appeared in great trouble until the last round and hadn’t taken a terrible beating, though Darchinyan did land some thunderous left hands.
How good is it to be a puncher?
Edison Miranda can’t fight much either. But the first right hand he landed let Allen Green know who the boss was going to be. Green, normally a fluid, quick-handed guy and a fair puncher himself, tensed up and never got into the fight.
Sure, he dropped Miranda and lumped up his face. But he wasn’t the relaxed, confident guy we’ve seen in the past. He spent more time complaining and holding than he did punching. He even turned Miranda into a boring fighter. That’s no easy task.
In most cases, I hate it when a referee admonishes the fighters to mix it up, but by about the seventh round I was hoping Jose H. Rivera would open up his wallet and offer each guy a $20 if he would just throw punches.
When Miranda finally got his hands loose, he knocked Green into next week. He turned a fight that had been boring us all stiff into one whose ending his promoter can add to his highlight reel.
How good is it to be a puncher?
Miguel Cotto looked slower than erosion against Oktay Urkal. I thought he looked a little disinterested too. A little flat. And Urkal is a rough assignment for anyone. Ask Kostya Tszyu or Vivian Harris.
Cotto still dominated him. Why? Because he’s a puncher and Urkal isn’t. It’s why Cotto will beat Zab Judah, if they meet as scheduled, and why I still pick him over Shane Mosley and maybe every other welterweight out there. He is like a block of cement in there and will be very hard to beat.
This is how good it is to be a puncher: You can be about as evenly matched against your opponent as can be, the way Rafael Marquez was against Israel Vazquez, and if you’re a better puncher, if your best punches break bones and the other guy’s do not, you win.
The Marquez-Vazquez match was as good as we knew it would be, right up until the point when Vazquez submitted because Marquez’ punches did more damage to him than his had done to Marquez.
It’s good to be a puncher.
Some miscellaneous observations from last week:
Like everyone else, I hope Burgos recovers and proceeds to live a long and fulfilling life. However, if the outcome is not good, the witch-hunt will start and so too will the hand-wringing. It should not; this is a perfect illustration of the unsettling reality that you cannot legislate risk out of this sport.
You can try—see the bigger gloves they’re using in Vegas and elsewhere—but nothing occurred during this fight that suggested that Burgos was going to suffer a serious injury, other than he was in a boxing ring. This kind of thing will happen when men hit one another on the head. It is unavoidable.
While we’re on the subject, here is why a fighter who says before a big fight, “he’ll have to kill me to win” almost never wins: He’s trying to convince himself of it. And any time you have to convince yourself of something it’s because you know it’s not true.
Now onto the lighter stuff:
Thomas Edison and Henry Ford have nothing on the guy (of course it was a guy) who came up with the idea of filling the ring with four gyrating round card girls. Brilliant.
Showtime: Enough with the commercials.
See a doctor if you didn’t laugh out loud when, after what seemed like an hour and a half of translations during the prefight interview, Vazquez looked right at Jim Gray and said in perfect English: “Thank you very much.”
Did Gray actually ask the ringside physician for Burgos’ vital signs? Who is he, Randolph Mantooth?
Speaking of Dr. Paul Wallace, I don’t know how good a doctor he is, but I think he should be the ringside physician for every televised fight from now on. His replies to an overwrought Gray’s questions were uproariously succinct. I want more.
Who else is waiting for Lennox Lewis to burst into tears on the air? One or two more questions from Jim Lampley in the postfight wrap-up and we might have seen a full-blown anxiety attack.
Puerto Rico may be the best place in the world for boxing, as Larry Merchant said in a stirring postfight editorial, but it’s not so good for Lampley’s hair.
I agree: Open scoring stinks.
Bill Dettloff can be contacted at dettloff@ptd.net.
These fighters always gives opponents "receipts" of what they dished out. They wait for their opponents to throw a punch timed the opening and slip their own punches in between.
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