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John Angus MacDonald
03/02/2018 9:20am
Tonight WBO super middleweight champion Gilberto Ramirez defends his title against Habib Ahmed. John Angus MacDonald went in search of the unheralded but undefeated Ghanaian and found information hard to come by...
Back in November when it was revealed that Gilberto Ramirez would make the second defence of his WBO supermiddleweight title against Habib Ahmed, my initial reaction was: ‘Who?'
A quick glance on social media proved I was not the only one who was unfamiliar with the man the Top Rank press release referred to as 'Wild Hurricane'.
My next port of call was Boxrec, to see if Ahmed had any standout names on his record.
He didn’t.
What I did learn is that he had a record of (25-0-1, 17 KOs). Oh, and that his profile picture has him standing in front of a superimposed, diagonal Ghanaian flag, so badly photo-shopped that the bottom right hand corner was cropped out to make his national flag red, yellow, green and white.
To be honest, I didn’t really pay any more attention to Habib Ahmed. I had always intended to watch one or two of his fights ahead of his world title challenge, but I wasn’t expecting an awful lot. I had presumed he was a ranked, available, challenger who would allow Top Rank to fulfil the requirements of their TV deal with ESPN.
However, on Sunday, my interest was piqued by a Tweet from Rian Scalia professing that he was struggling to find any footage of Ahmed. The reason this Tweet was significant, is because Scalia, according to his Twitter Bio, is a: ‘Combat sports “hipster” extraordinaire.’
This description actually does Scalia a disservice as it does not reveal the true extent of his fascination with people hitting other people, in the interest of sport. He is the only person I know who will watch both the Kazakh U12 Amateur Novice Boxing Championships and name every current kickboxing world champion (given that kickboxing is worse than boxing for its proliferation of titles, it is an impressive feat). Ok, that might be an exaggeration, but probably not as big of one as you may think - after all Steve Kim, boxing scribe for various outlets, has proclaimed: "If Scalia hasn’t seen him, I’m inclined to believe he doesn’t exist…"
Suddenly, it dawned on me; Habib Ahmed wasn’t just unheard of to the vast majority of fans – he was a complete unknown (to all, but the most ardent of Ghanaian boxing aficionados.)
In an age where you can watch countless hours of – almost – any fighter hitting the heavy bag, or shadow boxing, it is peculiar to have no footage of a fighter whatsoever. I found this both disconcerting and highly intriguing.
03/02/2018 9:20am
Tonight WBO super middleweight champion Gilberto Ramirez defends his title against Habib Ahmed. John Angus MacDonald went in search of the unheralded but undefeated Ghanaian and found information hard to come by...
Back in November when it was revealed that Gilberto Ramirez would make the second defence of his WBO supermiddleweight title against Habib Ahmed, my initial reaction was: ‘Who?'
A quick glance on social media proved I was not the only one who was unfamiliar with the man the Top Rank press release referred to as 'Wild Hurricane'.
My next port of call was Boxrec, to see if Ahmed had any standout names on his record.
He didn’t.
What I did learn is that he had a record of (25-0-1, 17 KOs). Oh, and that his profile picture has him standing in front of a superimposed, diagonal Ghanaian flag, so badly photo-shopped that the bottom right hand corner was cropped out to make his national flag red, yellow, green and white.
To be honest, I didn’t really pay any more attention to Habib Ahmed. I had always intended to watch one or two of his fights ahead of his world title challenge, but I wasn’t expecting an awful lot. I had presumed he was a ranked, available, challenger who would allow Top Rank to fulfil the requirements of their TV deal with ESPN.
However, on Sunday, my interest was piqued by a Tweet from Rian Scalia professing that he was struggling to find any footage of Ahmed. The reason this Tweet was significant, is because Scalia, according to his Twitter Bio, is a: ‘Combat sports “hipster” extraordinaire.’
This description actually does Scalia a disservice as it does not reveal the true extent of his fascination with people hitting other people, in the interest of sport. He is the only person I know who will watch both the Kazakh U12 Amateur Novice Boxing Championships and name every current kickboxing world champion (given that kickboxing is worse than boxing for its proliferation of titles, it is an impressive feat). Ok, that might be an exaggeration, but probably not as big of one as you may think - after all Steve Kim, boxing scribe for various outlets, has proclaimed: "If Scalia hasn’t seen him, I’m inclined to believe he doesn’t exist…"
Suddenly, it dawned on me; Habib Ahmed wasn’t just unheard of to the vast majority of fans – he was a complete unknown (to all, but the most ardent of Ghanaian boxing aficionados.)
In an age where you can watch countless hours of – almost – any fighter hitting the heavy bag, or shadow boxing, it is peculiar to have no footage of a fighter whatsoever. I found this both disconcerting and highly intriguing.
This is the only footage he was able to get of Ahmed
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