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December 1999
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AN UGLY MESS
GRAHAM HOUSTON reports from Detroit as Naseem Hamed makes no friends with a shabby performance against Cesar Soto |
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OH DEAR!: too much of the fight between Hamed (under) and Cesar (over)
was an eyesore - Photo John Gichigi
- Get Big Pic After
the maul, the damage limitation.
What I thought I witnessed at Detroit on 22 October was Prince Naseem
Hamed win a messy, uninspiring, points verdict over a strong but limited
Mexican, Cesar Soto, in a foul-filled featherweight title fight.
To hear Hamed tell it after the fight, however, he had courageously
mastered a man who tried to intimidate him with brawling tactics. Beaten
the Mexican at his own game, in fact. It was, unsurprisingly, a view
strongly supported by Hamed’s British promoter, Barry Hearn.
I must be missing something.
Hamed, I thought, fought essentially a safety-first fight after
getting clipped by a left hook in the second round.
It seemed to me that he looked to steal rounds with a few quick shots
here and there, after which he would seek to tie up Soto. At other times
he would move around the ring with hands dangling by his sides in
typical Hamed fashion, turning his body this way and that while keeping
well clear of Soto.
The young British-Yemeni millionaire from Sheffield, central England,
won clearly, no doubt about that, with scores of 115-110, 115-110 again
and 116-109 from the three American judges - and this after having two
points deducted for infringements in the first five rounds.
The point is this, though: if a fighter promises to knock out the
other man, to put on a spectacular show, and then scrambles his way
through what may go down as one of the most unpleasing top-calibre title
fights of all time, then people have a right to feel disappointed. And
to be critical.
It wasn’t as if Hamed was meeting some monster, either. Soto, although
the World Boxing Council champion and a solid enough fighter, is hardly
exceptional. He barely defeated the Filipino, Luisito Espinosa, to win
the title in May: in fact, it was definitely a disputed decision if not
a controversial one. In Las Vegas, the odds favoured Hamed at 6-1 on.
So, this was a fight he was certainly expected to win.
You think of boxing’s epic fights and fighters, and somehow this
performance by Hamed does not exactly shine like a beacon.
He fought, in many ways, a strategically smart fight - in almost, dare
I say it, a Hector Camacho-type, hit-and-hold manner.
If winning is the most important thing, that and coming out
practically unmarked, then the night was a success.
It depends, perhaps, how you look at it. But the plain fact is that
Hamed did not deliver the daring and dynamic display that had been
promised.
True, Soto had something to do with it. The Mexican is not the easiest
fighter in the world to look good against. His style is to move in with
chin tucked down, gloves up in front of his face. Because he could not
get a clear shot at the more athletic, quicker Hamed, his tactics were
to rush his man and try to club away when he was inside. But Hamed was
having none of that, and so a wrestling, mauling affair developed.
The crowd at the Joe Louis Arena - estimated at 12,500 - booed in the
10th, and again in the last round, and at the finish of the fight.
Hamed’s brothers and Hamed himself had done a good job of promoting
the fight among greater Detroit’s Arabic community (the area has an
estimated 275,000 residents with ancestral roots in the Middle East),
and this helped account for a larger-than-expected turnout for a show
that did not feature an American in either of the two main bouts.
(Earlier we had seen Mexico’s Erik Morales pound out a unanimous but
never easy win on points over Wayne McCullough, of Belfast, in a
marvellous fight for the WBC super bantam title.)
But the crowd that expected so much, got so little.
Hamed entertained with his usual grand-theatre entrance: the
Temptations miming to their great Motown hit, Get Ready, then the Prince
himself appearing, gyrating to a rap rhythm while fireworks exploded
behind him on a stage that seemed a mixture of the Temple of Ra and a
desert oasis.
But once the fight started, the show was over. It was, in a word,
dreadful.
Soto’s promoter, Bob Arum, put the blame on Hamed and defied the media
to name a worse fight, at this level, that they had seen.
But Hamed’s on-site promoter, Cedric Kushner, interjected, reasonably,
that it takes two to make a good fight.
The troubling thing is, though, that Hamed has not looked good in his
last three fights. He was unimpressive when he outpointed Wayne
McCullough at Atlantic City a year earlier, while last April he seemed
to be running out of gas before nailing Paul Ingle with a big left in
the 11th round.
Now this.
On the plus side, Hamed’s stamina was impressive in his first fight
with Emanuel Steward as his trainer. There was no sign of the
late-rounds fade of the Paul Ingle fight. "I was fit tonight," Hamed
said. "We got into the 12th round and I felt I could have gone another
five to make it 15." He paused and, to laughter, corrected his
arithmetic: "Or 17."
And Hamed looked good in flashes, especially when he switched from the
southpaw stance to the orthodox position and fired left hooks. In fact,
the switch-hitter looked better in the orthodox posture than he probably
ever has, perhaps a sign of Steward’s tutoring.
Steward took the view afterwards that Hamed will look better against a
better class of opponent such as Erik Morales.
As they say in boxing: Get the win this time, look good next time.
But then, Hamed has not looked good for quite a while.
Not only did he not look good, but there were fears in his camp that
he might get disqualified by Michigan referee Dale Grable, who took a
point from the Prince for "unsportsmanlike conduct" in the fourth, when
Hamed had Soto in a headlock, and another point in the fifth, the round
in which the World Boxing Organisation champion lifted up Soto and
body-slammed him to the canvas.
Had Soto stayed down and claimed he could not continue, there might,
indeed, have been a DQ, but the Mexican got up. His trainer, Las
Vegas-based Miguel Diaz, and another cornerman, got into the ring to
protest to the referee, which technically was cause for the
disqualification of Soto.
At the end of the round, Emanuel Steward went over to the ref to point
out in a forceful way that Soto, too, was committing fouls, mainly the
use of his head as a weapon. And, in the eighth, the Mexican had a point
deducted for butting Hamed on the chin.
In short, as a fight it was a shambles.
There were no knockdowns, but, apart from being thrown down in the
fifth, Soto was pushed to the floor in the sixth, eighth and 11th rounds
although he was also holding on to Hamed each time, losing balance as
the Prince leaned in. When Hamed tried to help Soto up in the 11th he
fell down himself, so that both men were wrestling around on the canvas
as the round ended.
In the ninth, Soto slipped down to one knee. And in the 12th both men
went down briefly in yet another tangle.
Cautions? Hamed was warned for holding, using the shoulder, using the
heel of the glove and talking to his opponent, while Soto was
reprimanded for elbowing, hitting on the break and boring in with his
head.
There was little in the way of real boxing. Hamed looked good in
spurts, especially in the ninth round when he landed a series of sharp
punches and bloodied Soto’s nose.
"I remember one shot, off a clinch, I broke his nose with one
unbelievable nice shot," Hamed said afterwards. "He took it well - blood
was all over his face but he took it really well and he came back."
As to the untidy nature of the contest, Hamed said: "I showed him that
basically he wasn’t roughing me up, he wasn’t going to manhandle me like
he’s done with a lot of his opponents and then take them out in the late
rounds.
"His style was a bit awkward, but every time I wanted to fight, the
guy held, he butted after every break. I can’t believe he got away with
some of the things he got away with.
"I’m not saying I’m Mr. Goody Two Shoes, but if you’re going to try
and rough me up I’m gonna body-slam you, I’m going to do everything I
have to do to tell you that you are not stronger than me, you’re not
going to physically manhandle me - and he tried to do that.
"It was an ugly fight, but I won easily. The guy caught me a few times
but I don’t think he caught me with unbelievable, devastating shots.
"You have to realise, if we have to dig in them trenches, I’m digging.
And I’m gonna come out on top. He’s a good fighter, a strong fighter,
but he didn’t really want to fight. He wanted to use some dirty tactics.
He tried to butt me all night. But it’s all in God’s hands at the end of
the day I won the fight."
As for Hamed’s well-documented problems with his left hand, he said:
"My hand is not, basically, perfect - it wouldn’t be with a guy coming
in like that - but I don’t think it’s that bad. You’ve got to realise
that I’ve hurt my hand in my last 12 fights so it’s gotta be on my head
[mind].
"He had a hard head - I always seem to get the ones with hard heads.
If it goes 12 rounds or goes one round, it doesn’t matter to me as long
as I win. The styles just clashed tonight and made it a shit fight, and
that’s what it was."
Emanuel Steward said: "It was not a real good fight, but the guy was
rushing in with his head and smothering. But the main thing is, he
[Hamed] won the championship and now he can get on with his career and
fight some better fighters. Erik Morales, who you saw earlier, would
have been a much easier fight because he fights in an upright position.
But Soto’s main thing was to survive, not get knocked out and just
smother you."
Bob Arum, asked about the possibility of Hamed meeting Erik Morales,
whom Arum promotes, said: "I would not let a fighter I promote - if I
had my way - go in the ring with Hamed, because it’s not boxing. The
first fight [of the title double-header], you saw Erik with a tremendous
fight, one of the greats in the world fighting one of the most
courageous kids in Wayne McCullough. A tremendous, tremendous fight.
That was boxing. That made boxing proud.
"I’ve been in this sport for 35 years, and what we saw in the ring for
the second fight made me puke. That clowning, that wrestling.
"In wrestling, with the body slams, they practise it, so they can take
it. When you body-slam a fighter, you can break his back. You can’t
allow that to happen in a fight. To take away one point rather than
disqualify him was ludicrous."
Arum thought that the referee lost control of the fight. "In a normal
fight he’s a terrific referee, but I think everyone will admit this
wasn’t a normal boxing match tonight," Arum said.
"Name me a worse fight that you’ve ever seen in your life - not that
you’ve heard about but that you’ve ever seen, a world-class fight - than
Hamed-Soto. Tell me a worse world-class fight."
No one was disputing the fact that Hamed, to use the boxing term, won
ugly.
Lou DiBella, the executive vice-president for sports programming at
Home Box Office, which televised the fight, said: "Styles make great
fights, styles make shitty fights. Tonight, styles made a shitty fight.
The better fighter won. The true champion won. Soto’s a good fighter,
but he’s limited. Naz is unorthodox. You had a limited fighter whose
style didn’t mesh with Naseem’s."
That was the charitable view, and HBO still feels that the 25-year-old
Prince is the sort of in-your-face, crossover fighter who can attract
the younger viewer who normally would not watch boxing. So, no doubt, he
can. But the real fans must be wondering if Hamed is not only overrated
but overpaid (he earned about $5 million for the Soto fight).
Hamed remains unbeaten (now 33 wins in a row, 29 opponents stopped)
and this was his 13th defence of the WBO title.
But many observers at Detroit left the arena believing that Hamed is
in decline, that this could not be explained away as simply another bad
night, caused by a clash of styles.
A fight with someone such as Erik Morales could provide the definitive
answer. That's much more like it While
Naseem Hamed-Cesar Soto was a major letdown, the fight that
preceded it at the Joe Louis Arena, Detroit on 22 October surpassed
expectations as Mexico’s undefeated Erik Morales found himself in a
gruelling struggle before winning a unanimous decision over Belfast’s
Wayne McCullough in their super bantam title fight.
Morales made his eighth defence of the World Boxing Council title but
McCullough became the first to take him the full 12 rounds.
The scorecards (wrongly announced) were one-sided, all three judges
scoring 118-110 in favour of Morales, but they did not reflect the
intensity of the battle.
McCullough, 29, the former bantam champ who fights out of Las Vegas,
fought his heart out in only his second fight since losing a unanimous
decision to Naseem Hamed in October 1998.
Morales, 23, was an astonishing 22-1 on favourite at the Las Vegas
casinos but, like Hamed before him, discovered that McCullough is not
easily overcame.
For round after round, McCullough kept coming in and there were times
when he had success, especially when he drove Morales to the ropes and
punched to the body while the challenger also landed several clean
right-handers to the chin.
The problem for McCullough, though, was that he could not
significantly hurt the lanky Mexican, although his pressure was so
insistent that Morales afterwards conceded there were times in the fight
when he thought he could lose.
Morales was the superior ring general but it was his big advantage in
punching power that made the difference. The Mexican was throwing the
sort of punches that usually have the other man crumbling, but
McCullough stood up to everything - big, slamming, right hands, and left
hooks and uppercuts - and although forced to go back now and again he
never looked like going on the floor. In contrast, McCullough hit hard
enough to make his presence felt but no more than that.
Still, Morales looked a tired fighter as he slumped on his stool at
the end of some of the later rounds, and he was bruised and puffy under
the right eye.
But Morales showed why he is considered one of the best boxers in the
business because every time McCullough came on, so the champion would
answer back with his bigger blows.
McCullough was defiant and brave, gesturing to Morales in an "Is that
all you’ve got?" manner and at one point doing a little bicycling motion
with his legs to demonstrate he was fine and dandy. But the Mexican’s
bombs were piling up points. McCullough did not look particularly
battered, although his nose bled in the later stages of the fight and he
suffered a vertical cut on the left brow, near the bridge of the nose.
But he said he had suffered a burst left eardrum, and some of the hits
he took had ringsiders gasping.
Morales went to the body, too, and some of his right-handers
downstairs were of the rib-bending variety. But McCullough absorbed
everything although he signalled to Detroit ref Frank Garza that he was
being hit in the kidneys.
Afterwards, Morales praised McCullough’s heart and said through an
interpreter: "I wanted to be the first to knock him out, but if you
compare my fight and Hamed’s fight with McCullough, I think I did a
better job. At some moments I felt I could have lost the fight."
He said he hurt his right hand in the third round.
Asked about Hamed, he said: "He is a difficult opponent but his
technique is not very good. I don’t think he’s fighter enough to go in
the ring with me."
He said he would like to fight fellow-Mexican Marco Antonio Barrera,
the World Boxing Organisation champ in the 8st 10lbs (122lbs) division
but that he does not think his countryman wants to meet him.
"I’m not saying I’m the best," Morales said, "but every time you see
me fight I’m going to give everything."
McCullough said: "Erik’s a world-class fighter and he won the fight.
He hits harder than Hamed, but Hamed’s physically stronger. After a
couple of rounds Hamed started running away but Erik stood toe-to-toe,
and that’s what I like. Erik’s too big for super bantam - he’s the
biggest super bantam I’ve fought."
He said he will have a rest and consider what he does next.
But HBO’s Lou DiBella said: "If Wayne wants to come back, I’m sure
he’ll find a fight, and I’ll be proud to use Wayne McCullough again." |
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