HEART & SOUL

Sometimes an eagerly awaited bout actually surpasses expectations, which I think is what happened when unbeaten lightweight champs Paul Spadafora and Leonard Dorin battled to a bloody 12-round draw at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on 17 May.

A crowd of 5,200 and a Home Box Office television viewing audience in the States saw the hometown favourite Spadafora, who was expected to be slick and elusive, dig in his heels and bang it out with the shorter Dorin.

It wasn't boxer versus fighter, rather fighter versus fighter. Spadafora refused to be bullied by a man known for physical strength and a style of insistent pressure. Even when cut and rocked, Spadafora came right back. And with each man sliced over the eyes it was Spadafora who surprisingly finished the stronger, outpunching a suddenly weary Dorin in the all-important final round.

And so Spadafora, 27, retained his International Boxing Federation title while Dorin, 33, kept his World Boxing Association championship. Rematch? At time of writing it looked inevitable. Both men left the ring with their reputations enhanced. Going in to the fight, Spadafora was the clear favourite. He had won 36 bouts in a row with 14 opponents halted while Dorin, the Romanian who fights out of Montreal, had a record of 21-0 with seven stoppages.

It seems only fitting that each boxer left the ring still without a defeat on his record, because they were so evenly matched that it was truly difficult to separate them. Dorin landed the harder single shots, his right hands snapping back Spadafora's head. But Spadafora had plenty of good moments, especially when he was banging to the body from out of his southpaw stance.  Judge Pat Russell of California saw Dorin winning, 115-113, Guillermo Perez of Panama had it 115-114 in Spadafora's favour while Gary Merritt, from Indiana, scored the fight all-even at 114 points each.

Pennsylvania commissioner Greg Sirb told me afterwards: "Both Pat Russell and Gary Merritt said it was one of the most difficult fights to judge that they'd ever worked." Dorin's camp had feared a hometown decision. In fact, at the end Dorin seemed almost relieved to get a draw while Spadafora was the one who felt hard done by. The HBO computer statistics showed Dorin landing 344 punches to Spadafora's 259, and the network's "unofficial official", Harold Lederman, had Dorin a big winner, 116-112. Watching the fight on TV I found myself leaning towards Spadafora in most of the rounds because he seemed to have greater moments of dominance in a fight in which each man took turns in seizing supremacy. But the consensus score of the judges - that is, when at least two of the three judges score a round the same way - came out as a 114-114 draw. So who can argue?

Spadafora's last-round surge surprised me. He is known to struggle to make the lightweight limit. If anyone figured to fade late, it was Spadafora. But Dorin, who outpunched Spadafora in the 11th, just seemed to hit the wall. The result hinged on the final round but Dorin, his face the proverbial mask of blood from a cut over his right eye that he suffered in the third round, simply couldn't summon up the late energy that was needed to win the fight.

"I gained respect in the boxing world because I finally let people know what I already knew, that I could fight like that," Spadafora told the post-fight conference afterwards. Spadafora's up-close involvement surprised many of us, but he believes he is actually a better inside fighter than he is at long range. In a rematch, he said, he would fight the same way except that next time he would throw more punches.

I thought Spadafora was taking too many right hands, but everything came out well in the end, in that he got a draw that could have been a win, enhanced his reputation and set up a rematch for, almost certainly, more money than the approximately half a million dollars he is believed to have received for this fight.
Did Spadafora fight the wrong fight? I don't think so. If he had tried to be cute, hitting and moving, he might have allowed Dorin to build up a head of steam. Tough though the fight was, by standing toe-to-toe for much of the 12 rounds he stopped Dorin from maintaining momentum. 

It looked around the seventh and eighth rounds that Spadafora might be wilting. But then he came back strongly in the ninth. That was the most memorable thing about the fight, to my mind. Every time you thought Spadafora was just about done, he would rally. 

The fight wasn't as fierce as Arturo Gatti-Micky Ward I, nor did it have an absolutely breath-taking, heart-in-your-mouth round such as the dramatic ninth of that fight, but there were similarities: two proud, determined fighters who had come to give it their all. Spadafora knew all along that this would be his toughest fight. 

He got away from the bad influences that have dogged him in the past - the drinking, the parties, the over-eating. He spent six weeks living with his chief trainer, Jesse Reid, in California, then finished off his training with a five-week stint at a hard-to-reach training camp in the hills 40-odd miles outside of Pittsburgh. His weight was kept under control. He was no more than 5lbs above the lightweight limit in the last two weeks before the fight. In short, he did everything the right way.


To give himself a little extra edge, Spadafora brought in the junior lightweight champ, Carlos Hernandez, for a week of high-quality, highly priced sparring. Hernandez has the same type of crowding, in-your-face style as Dorin. If ever a fighter gave himself every chance of winning by not cutting corners in any area, it was Spadafora in this fight.


And without the diligence and the sacrifices, he probably would not have been able to pull out the draw.
Dorin may have been affected by almost a year's inactivity after breaking his arm in a bicycling accident. In a rematch he could be a little sharper, a little more consistent and perhaps be able to finish stronger if, once again, the fight came down to the final three minutes.


But Spadafora, having faced Dorin once and fought him to a standstill, might be able to ratchet up his performance another couple of notches the second time around. While none of us can feel certain about what would happen in an encore, I think everyone in the business agrees that the fighters should get more money than they did this time.


After some lamentable big-fight mismatches this year (Barrera-Kelly, De La Hoya-Campas, Hopkins-Hakkar), Spadafora and Dorin gave us the sort of fight that got us hooked on boxing in the first place, a fight in which the contestants gave every ounce of everything they had and in which the viewer was kept in suspense, round after round, until the very end. It was the sort of fight that matched the HBO network's slogan: it was indeed the heart and soul of boxing.