Comments Thread For: Hunter on Kovalev: Russian Fighters Don't Do Well in Dog Fights!

[Shadoww702]

Bad examples

I dont think the fighters he cited have a lack of heart and russian fighters do have heart especially eastern europeans in general

Some fighters are more technical and more outside fighters. Perhaps a better way to put it is fighters like klitschko and kova have a lack of an inside game.

Is he gonna label all black american fighters weak hearted because of dirrel bros ?

DAMN!!! Wow! Uncle sucker punched a boxer. Andre flopped up and down like was trying to win an Oscar. Anthony was jumping fans that were booing with his posse. . The entire Dirrell family is a DISGRACE

[SugarRaRobinson]

without the multiple nut shots slappin soggy would have gone down to an ignominious defeat just like in the 1st fight

And without the refs help, Kov would of been KO'd through the ropes into his sons lap.

Thank God for Wards sense of humanity, cause had it not been for that Kov would of caught unmitigated hooks to both ears while heeled over unprotected.

I sometimes contrast that to what Kov did when he Killed that guy in the ring as he never let up !

Maybe he really is the Son of God.

[Kigali]

In my view Eastern Europeans are better than Americans in every department except for running and wrestling

You're selling that **** on the wrong side of the border.

[SugarRaRobinson]

that wasn't a dog fight...that was cat and mouse

canelito playing role as mouse.

exactly!!!

[BluDivision]

In any case, we can all agree on one thing, boxing is in a much better place now that it can move forward from an era where Andre Ward, Floyd Mayweather, and Bernard Hopkins took far too many significant dates in the boxing calender away from the next generation of true, clean boxers who are much less picky in who they choose to fight. It's time for boxing to focus on those guys, guys who will fight anyone and bring the sport back to where it should be. No more cherry picking. No more holding and elbowing and headbutting and cheating. Let's have real boxing, and real matchups, again!

Somebody doesn't like flavor at all! 😂😂😂😂😂😂

[Kigali]

And without the refs help, Kov would of been KO'd through the ropes into his sons lap.

Thank God for Wards sense of humanity, cause had it not been for that Kov would of caught unmitigated hooks to both ears while heeled over unprotected.

I sometimes contrast that to what Kov did when he Killed that guy in the ring as he never let up !

[Rip Chudd]

Lmao i told him to do what I do by cutting it into paragraphs but he won't listen!

He's basically posting for nothing at this point, everyones skipping that shid!
😂😂

Man i started on the first sentence then stopped for a sec cause I'm on my phone and thought to scroll down cause I have seen his posts before and they are usually long winded. It just kept scrolling though and i was like "screw that"

[BluDivision]

Lol. Imagine if someone lumped all blacks in together like this...

Russian/Eastern European fighters aren't all the "white fighters".

People label black fighters "tuff" out of Philly.

It's more of a region/area thing not so much race!

[TonyGe]

And Andre Ward doesn't do well in clean fights, or fights on even playing fields period, which is why fought almost his entire career in his home city, home-or-adjacent state(s), or home country, and which is why it has since been admitted by Ken Herschmann, head of Showtime sports at the time, that the foundation of Ward's so-called "legacy," the Super 6 tournament, was hand-picked and puppetered by Herschmann to advantage Ward or Dirrell, but especially Ward, in order to "create an American star," or "Showtime's Floyd Mayweather."

The entire Super 6 was "set up to create an American star," meaning they planned for Ward to win, and set up the tournament to accomplish just that outcome by making every other boxer travel besides Ward, and by selecting only slower, European style opponents, mostly past prime (Kessler) or blown-up in weight (Arthur Abraham), who they knew would favor Ward's style.

How did they know that would favor Ward's style? Well Virgil or Ward's team must have told them, because if you look at Ward's resumé, you'll find they knew the exact same thing, and kept Ward well protected from styles that would pull back the curtain on the illusion that he was some generational talent. They were willing to fight all the Arthur Abraham's, Mikkel Kessler's, and Carl Froch's of the world, and heck, even the apex of that style, Sergey Kovalev, but only after they caught wind that he was no longer dedicated to boxing anymore around the time of his son's birth, and that had started drinking and so forth, but they were never once willing to fight the athletic southpaws around their weight, from Lucian Bute to James Degale to Adonis Stevenson, or even the other athletic fighters period, such as Andre Dirrell.

Ward has always been a defensive boxer with a combination skills, speed, and power that ranged from B-level to A-minus, but never A-level or A-plus, so in order to create the illusion he was truly elite, despite lacking the A-plus elite level abilities of say a Floyd Mayweather or Roy Jones, they had to always match him only against guys with C-level to B-level speed, skills, and power. This created the illusion that Andre Ward had elite hand speed, when really Froch, Abraham, and Kessler simply had slow hand speed. This created the illusion that Ward had elite skills, when really it was that his opponents, and you can throw in Sakio Bika and Edwin Rodriguez as well, all fought the clumsier, slower, "pressure ****er" style that made Ward appear more than he was.

And of course, when Team Ward finally had to match Ward against a real opponent in order to get on PPV and attempt to make Ward a PPV star for the future, even if it was one who they had the advantage of knowing (another pre-fight advantage for Andre Ward! Has any boxer ever gotten more??) from spies in his camp that he hadn't been training the same, that he had been drinking, and that he was having major stamina problems, Team Ward knew they could no longer make Ward look dominant, so their plan was at least to keep undefeated... win today, look good tomorrow... and to do that, they needed major help from the referee and the judges. But, given that both Showtime, HBO, and the American boxing establishment at large have been trying to make Ward into a star for the last decade, and have poured lots of unreturned money into him, and were never going to jeopardize all that just to be fair to a "racist Russian" they all seem to dislike, that was never going to be a problem.

But it looks like the whole time they thought they were conning boxing fans in order to make big $$$ off the long-con later, it was actually Andre Ward conning them. They got him to agree to fight one single real, not incidentally pay-per-view, opponent, I guess because he knew his career would be seen as a joke if he never did, and then the mandated rematch, but only once they agreed to overpay him by a mile, expecting that a second fixed "win" over Kovalev would propel Ward to superstardom where they could make their money back off him, but instead, Ward took their money and ran off at age 33 with his money, his health, and the "AMAZING" legacy that exists in his head precisely because they put it there.

All this time they were busy brainwashing fans so they could make money off Ward, they didn't realize they were brainwashing Ward even worse than the fans, to the point that he become so self-satisfied with his "exceptional" career that he didn't even feel any desire to fight the best anymore.

But that's what Showtime and HBO never understood from the beginning: Ward never did. They made the mistake of trying to make a PPV star out of someone who didn't want to fight PPV opponents. I guess they got tricked by Floyd Mayweather, who was somehow able to sell millions of PPVs without fighting top opponents, but that was a very unique case. With Ward, that didn't work out so well, sales wise. But they were so in love with the fact he was an American gold medalist that they seemed to overlook everything else. In the future, they would be smart to learn from that, and start favoring the boxers who will fight the best, regardless of whether they are American, rather than always favoring American boxers, regardless of whether they will fight the best.

In closing, the formula for creating the illusion of Andre Ward's career has been as follows:

1. Cherry pick slow, unathletic, unskilled "plodder" style opponents in order to make Ward's good skills and athleticism appear "great," and then use refs that will let Ward foul those opponents endlessly on top of all that in order to fatigue those plodder opponents and take away one of the only two advantages they did have over Ward, power, and in order to protect Ward's chin, which is the other advantage they had. Also make every fight in Ward's backyard in order to help him feel more comfortable than his opponents, since small advantages add up in boxing.

2. The one time they had to pick a top opponent, delay the fight until the perfect time, when the opponent is 33 years old (1 year past the end of most offensive boxer's primes), and only after the moles in his camp, either paid off or friendly to Ward due to their own nationalist biases (i.e. more hometown favoritism for Ward), tell him that this opponent is not dedicated to boxing anymore, and has drinking problems, etc. Then after losing to that opponent even despite those things, have establishment Vegas judges in place to protect your record. Then for the rematch, juice up so much there is acne all over your back for the first time as a pro, and have the referee bought off too to stop the fight on a succession of fouls.

All of that was supposed to make Ward a PPV star, but not only did they overrate how many people would pay to see him cheat and be protected through another fight, it seems they underestimated Sergey Kovalev as well, because after 20 rounds with the Krusher, the man who was planning moves to Cruiserweight and Heavyweight afterwards has since retired. The biased judges saw one thing in those fights, but the fans saw another, and the toll those 20 rounds took on Ward's body is just more evidence of who really won their fights, as much as any winner can be declared for the second fight given the ref stopped it early (I believe Kovalev was on his way to winning that fight even with all the fouling and the resulting fatigue that got him caught and hurt. Ward fans will disagree. Due to Tony Weeks likely corruption, none of us will ever know). Judging the 20 rounds as one, however, which is really all you can do given the second fight was stopped on fouls, I had Kovalev winning more rounds than Ward, landing more punches than Ward, scoring more knockdowns than Ward, being the effective aggressor much more than Ward, and judging from Ward's retirement, doing more damage to Ward than Ward did to him. On the flipside, there were rounds where Ward landed the snappier shots, but I've had experts tell me that snappier does not always mean harder, and Ward's retirement may be evidence of that.

In any case, we can all agree on one thing, boxing is in a much better place now that it can move forward from an era where Andre Ward, Floyd Mayweather, and Bernard Hopkins took far too many significant dates in the boxing calender away from the next generation of true, clean boxers who are much less picky in who they choose to fight. It's time for boxing to focus on those guys, guys who will fight anyone and bring the sport back to where it should be. No more cherry picking. No more holding and elbowing and headbutting and cheating. Let's have real boxing, and real matchups, again!

Don't like Ward's boxing style. Don't like that he cheats. Calling him a total hype job isn't accurate. He has very good boxing skills is tough as nails and has a high boxing IQ. He should have been called out by the refs a long time ago an his headbutting clinching etc. etc. Poor officiating and the media with blinders on gave actually contributed to his low PPV numbers. He has to share some of the blame because of his inactivity. We'll never know how good he really was because of his dirty boxing. I think he would still be an elite fighter with maybe a lose on his record. At least he would have people's respect and a big fan base.

[Clegg]

I disagree with using Jirov as an example. Jirov was as tough a dog as anyone, mentally and psychically, he lost to Toney because JT was such a skilled counter puncher and caught him with so many good shots. In that fight, as with his fight with Joe Mesi, Jirov showed impressive determination and will to win despite not coming out on top.

Also Eastern Euro Fonfara showed a lot of grit and determinatiion and refused to fold in his dogfight with Adonis. Then hooked up with Hunter and got destroyed in 1 round in the rematch