Sound & Fury: Bute Upstages The Super Six, Funeka Bamboozled, False Narratives, and, A Strange Detour for Pacquiao-Mayweather?

Lucian Bute, now 25-0, was spectacular in demolishing tough Librado Andrade in four rounds.  This is what a boxer looks like, folks–clinch machines and headbangers in the super middleweight division should take note.  Andrade, artless but as tough as they come, was out of his league last night and probably realized it after walking into a perfectly timed left that sent him toppling to the canvas like the statue of a recently overthrown dictator.    Not long after, Bute scored his second straight one-punch body shot KO, dropping  Andrade, whose ability to absorb punishment is a truth and not a cheap cyberspace truism, to his knees for the count with a digging left.   It was a clean knockout without any of the shenanigans that have marred the Super Six tournament thus far.  Bute did not race across the ring to shamelessly embrace his opponent over and over, he did not headbutt Andrade into a bloody stupor, rabbit punches were not his most effective weapon, and he did not flop to the canvas every time Andrade got close to him. Gosh, maybe Bute should be in the Super Six tournament!

*****

To say that Joan Guzman got away with one last night against Ali Funeka in Quebec City is to utter the understatement of the year.  After taking a drubbing against Funeka, Guzman was shocked to see two judges present him with an early Christmas gift in the form of an unearned draw.   For six rounds the fight was more or less competitive. Guzman easily won the first two rounds by being  aggressive early and landing several clean blows.  He also mixed his shots with a fair amount of taunting as well.  Funeka stepped up the pace in the third, landing his long jab, straight as an arrowhead, with regularity.   Guzman, cut and swollen, began to give ground halfway through the fight.  Over the next six rounds Funeka picked Guzman apart with sharp combinations that stripped Guzman of his cockiness and left him pawing at his wounds.   In fact, for the last four or five rounds Guzman appeared one stiff punch away from being knocked out and his corner looked ready to stop the slaughter at any moment.  Guzman took a one-sided beating from the 8th to the 12th rounds and at times looked like he was just trying to survive.  He showed heart in lasting the distance, but was a gruesome mess at the final bell.  If one agrees with the following premise, that Guzman took a beating for the last five rounds, then in order for this fight to be a draw Guzman had to win six out of the first seven rounds of the bout.  This is fuzzy math, to say the least.

We are told over and over again that scoring a fight is subjective; that may be true to an extent, but there is nothing subjective about one fighter repeatedly pounding another for five or six consecutive rounds.  If there is room for debate, it is only among those who are drunk or underhanded or both.  Gary Shaw, his normal blasé self, hollered “fix” after the decision was announced.  Usually this kind of talk can be dismissed outright, but strange things do seem to happen when Golden Boy fighters are not knocked out for the count.

*****

According to Boxingscene.com, Bernard Hopkins is predicting that Manny Pacquiao and Floyd Mayweather Jr. will each take interim bouts before facing off in late 2010.  Hopkins, a partner in Golden Boy Promotions, claims that Pacquiao will fight Yuri Foreman in order to claim a title in a mind-boggling 8^th weight class.  Mayweather, in the meantime, would finally step into the ring with Shane Mosley.   Mosley would first have to get past Andre Berto in January.  These are the strange kinds of Rube Goldberg machinations that always leave jaws agape.  Not only could this scenario delay the biggest fight in years, but it could also jeopardize it.   Nothing in this sport is a given, and it would only take one cut, one lucky punch, one bad decision, or one twisted ankle to blow the whole thing to smithereens.  Pacquiao-Mayweather should be made as soon as possible.  Why tempt the gods?  Or, as Al Roberts, played by Tom Neal, put it in Detour: “Fate, or some mysterious force, can put the finger on you or me for no good reason at all.”

*****

John Molina, another of those exciting “prospects” you read about every fifteen minutes or so on the web, looks like Bobby Chacon and fights like Chris Calvin or Charlie “White Lightning” Brown…if Brown decided to get back into the ring today, that is.

In his first fight against an opponent who could raise his hands above his waist, Molina was kicked around like a  hackey sack.  Despite the usual lazy interpretations, no one was “exposed” and in no way could this fight be considered an upset; Molina simply does not have the talent to be a world-class fighter, and Honorio, typically a junior lightweight, had no trouble at all raking him with multi-punch combinations and pinpoint jabs.

The real question worth pursuing is why so much time was spent on Molina in the first place.  And why are we constantly being beaten over the head with stories about  “future champions” and “superstars” when most of these strawmen are busy bowling over tomato cans and professional losers?   The answer is simple.   More than anything, the boxing blogosphere- – a voracious creature whose cavernous maw needs to be fed 24/7- -demands “content“ and this is why so many dubious narratives pop up and gain a foothold.

This is also why hundreds, if not thousands, of articles and posts speculating about Jermain Taylor and his future in the Super Six tournament recently threatened to crash servers worldwide.  Without any confirmation or clues, the usual keyboard hacks transcended their hackdom and turned to fiction to fulfill their posting quotas.  Some of the plotlines drawn up over the last few weeks include the following: Allan Green was ready to step in, Edison Miranda and Green might fight to determine a replacement for Taylor, Chad Dawson might move down in weight to enter the Super Six, Lucian Bute would finally get a delayed invitation, etc.   Not exactly as inventive as Ray Bradbury or Lewis Carroll, of course, but a paucity of imagination should not take away from the fact that  all of these accounts were pure fantasy, like something out of an old Marvel Comics issue of “What If?”  The fascinating part is how these false narratives in turn spawned new ones until finally every so-called (and often self-proclaimed) expert chimed in on a story that DID NOT EXIST.

There are enough lies and liars in boxing these days without the usual suspects actually fabricating stories.  When one considers that most of these tall tales were made up for no other reason than to provide a new post for the day, things get pretty scary.  After all, some of these fabulists actually have a say in who gets into the Boxing Hall of Fame.