POST-FIGHT ANALYSIS

June 6, 2004 - by Bert Sugar

Last Saturday night it seemed for a moment as if history was playing one of its little tricks on us to see if we were paying attention the first time round. And the time before that; and the time before that, et cetera. For, going back almost to the time Cain rendered Abel hors de combat, every time boxing appears to have its planets aligned and all's right with the fistic world something tends to go awry.

Take the almost fight between Tommy Morrison and Lennox Lewis, for instance. With a signed contract in his back pocket, Morrison took a "warm-up" fight against Michael Bentt and got toasted. Then there was Ray Mercer who, on the cusp of a fight with Riddick Bowe for the heavyweight championship, fought what was thought to be nothing more than a walkover against Jesse Ferguson and lost not only the fight but his shot at the title. Or Steve Hamas, the-then Number One contender for Max Baer's title, who took on a supposed over-the-hill Jimmy Braddock, who took Hamas' measure as wll as his place versus Baer.

But all these carefully orchestrated set-ups that went wrong pale compared to the one the promoter of the De La Hoya-Sturm/Hopkins-Allen "Collision Course" card remembers all too well: the John Tate-Mike Weaver fight. With a multi-million dollar fight between Tate and Muhammad Ali in the offing, all Tate had to do was get by Weaver to cash in his chips against Ali in the fall of 1980. And for fourteen rounds Tate was winning. Handily, thank you. Now, with his huge promotion seemingly in the burlap, promoter Bob Arum and one of his associates leaned under the ring to grab Tate's WBA championship belt so's that they could wrap it around Tate's ample waist when the final bell rang.

But that final bell never rang. In Arum's words, "while I was below the ring, I heard it. 'Thud!' Great, I thought. Tate must have knocked out Weaver. In my excitement I dropped the belt and stood up to look at the knockout victim... only it was John Tate's face on the canvas near me, blood and saliva oozing from his mouth. Weaver had scored a sensationally dramatic come-from-behind kayo to win the title, and effectively destroy Tate's big match against Ali." Arum must have experienced the same feeling of dread last Saturday night.

It wasn't the first of the two match-ups, Hopkins-Allen that had Arum gnawing his fingers down to the nubs, for Bernard Hopkins did his part in the first of the "Collision Course" bouts. Although, truth to tell, Bernard Hopkins was so dominant that at times it looked less like a walk-over than a walk-through. One of the greatest hitters since Lizzie Borden went two-for-two in Fall River, Massachusetts a century ago, Hopkins threw only one punch of note, a crushing counter in the seventh that made his opponent, Robert Allen, one with the canvas. Other than that Hopkins, fighting ever-so cautiously, looked as if he were stretching his arms for exercise. It was almost like watching Richard Burton reading the Yellow Pages, Mario Andretti negotiating his driveway or just Bernard Hopkins wanting to preserve his September 18th date with Oscar De La Hoya as he dominated Allen as he had all of the 17 previous challengers for his middleweight crown to win his half of the twin bill.

Instead it was the parties of the second part, De La Hoya und Sturm, who prompted a large amount of weeping and gnashing of teeth. For De La Hoya, moving up to middleweight and a $20 million payday against Hopkins, had selected an opponent many thought to be nothing more than a German apfel strudel, the second-best fighter in Germany after 99-year-old Max Schmeling: WBO middleweight champion Felix Sturm.

But Sturm turned out to be one tough cookie, repeatedly pfeffering Oscar's handsome features with a heat-seeking left jab--landing 112 of them by CompuBox count, somewhat over the usual union limit--and constantly moving De La Hoya back with his right-hand uppercuts.

Maybe it was that Newton's Law of Equal and Opposite Reactions was being proven out in the boxing ring--that a heavier man's punch was more potent than the punches Oscar's opponents at 130, 135 and 147 could muster or that Oscar couldn't carry his own punch upstairs to 160--or that a pudgy Oscar was no middleweight. But whatever it was, Oscar was in trouble and so was Arum's ultimate September 18th "collision" going into the 12th and final round.

Watching the fight in his dressing room, Bernard Hopkins admitted, "if you had taken my blood pressure then, I'd have been dead." Likewise Arum, who was going through anguish straight out of the Book of Job.

But Oscar, aware he was blowing his big payday much like a pyromaniac sneezing on his last match and that there was no more rent to pay, no Sunday to rest and no tomorrow, somehow, someway reached into the smithy of his soul and, throwing full timber and palette into his last-round performance, filled to an inside straight and won the last round, --115-113, or seven rounds to five, on all three judges' scorecards--and preserved the ultimate September 18th "Collision."

And even though history didn't have the last laugh in derailing the carefully planned showdown on September 18th between Hopkins and De La Hoya, for a while there it almost dislocated a rib chuckling at the mischief it had come close to causing.