I haven’t written anything since UFC 110, the UFC’s debut in Australia, last February. I half lost interest in writing my thoughts about boxing and MMA without anyone really reading them and the other half was me not having the time. I now have the time and I just needed the inspiration which is the one thing I got out of the stinker of a fight tonight. The rematch between Garth Wood and Anthony Mundine tonight was the worst display of ‘boxing’ I’ve ever seen (the only thing that edged it out from the first fight was the fact that I got to see one of them lose consciousness at the end) on what was meant to be such a big stage. This is/will be the biggest domestic fight in the calendar year of 2011 for Australian boxing (until the inevitable rubber match) and these two fought like a pair of bums fighting for loose change. That isn’t the thing that pisses me off though; what pisses me off is that people actually enjoyed it.
Basically the fight went as the first one did except without the knockout. Garth Wood would get on his toes and try to make out like he has footwork with his goofy stance while Mundine would look at him with utter confusion as he, techinically, doesn’t have much of an idea of what he’s doing either. Then one of two things would happen; Mundine would lead at which Wood would tie him up and they’d start exchanging lowblows, rabbit punches, shoulders and elbows or Wood would lead then tie him up no matter what was happening in the exchange and then the fouls would start again. Rince, repeat (add boredom, nausea and migraine like symptoms) and that was the fight. (Mundine scored two knockdowns in the last two rounds to get the win, but I’ll get to that later). Anyone who saw the fight as anything different or enjoyed it in the slightest is either uneducated in the sport of boxing (what the majority of the people would fall into) or has a good sense of boxing but has serious short term memory problems/selective eyesight. The fight was TERRIBLE. If someone sits a bucket next to me to help with the vomitting I’ll go through it tomorrow with a stopwatch and see how much was spent clinching and how much was spent boxing and I’d be very susprised if there was 5 minutes of acceptable boxing in the whole contest. Garth Wood flat out has the worst style for a fighter with a winning record I’ve ever seen. He doesn’t box, he tackles and rabbit punches (and if I don’t want to hear anymore shit about his style being good for MMA, if he fought MMA not only would he have to learn the stand-up part, when he tied the guys up as his way of handling their better stand-up then he’d have to deal with someone who knew how to fight in the clinch or on the ground, at least in boxing he has some sort of niche market he can exploit with his disgusting style) and quite frankly I can think of multiple methods of masochism that would be more pleasurable then watching him ‘box’ again.
Now I’m sure by now if you hadn’t seen the fight you’d think that if the fight was as bad as I was making it out to be, the referee would have done something? I’m not sure who the referee was, but he was highly incompetent. I thought he did well early on trying to gain respect from the fighters, but it seemed he got tired of trying to break the fighters up and just let them do their own thing and it went downhill from there. For such a dirty fight, to not have a single point deduction is just laziness. In a ten round fight using the ten point must system, fighters usually score between 90-100 points for a fight that goes the full distance (as was tonight with Mundine winning 96-92, 96-92, 95-93). If I was refereeing this piece of shit fight I would have taken so many points off these two for their crude, primitive, rough-house fighting that those two would have been lucky to score 50! Sure that’s an exaggeration but the referee has to do more then just warn them, he has to do something extra if they ignore the warnings. Instead he did the opposite, he stopped physically breaking them and let them fight like a pair of bums. Then we get to the knockdown in round nine. Mundine landed (well, half landed) a left hook which caught Wood while he was off balance. Wood went down and the referee, not wanting to get between the two fighters incase he got sandwiched by Wood’s relentless clinch game, called a knockdown from the other side of the ring and started counting. Wood bounced back up and started punching which resulted in the referee giving him the mandatory eight count two punch exchanges and about 5-6 seconds after the Wood got up from the knockdown! If the referee can’t even handle a knockdown right (and if you want to argue it wasn’t a knockdown which I don’t really care about one way or the other because the fight was so shit to argue a single point of it would be to sink to it’s level, this was the only fight I’ve ever watched where I gave up keeping score about 30 seconds in because I wasn’t sure I was watching the right sport) then what can he do right?
And as usual we had tweedle dee and tweedle dum (Andy Raymond and Barry Michael) commentating. I had trouble hearing exactly what they were saying the whole time as I’m not a moron and I didn’t pay $50 for this shit, but from what I got they were saying the fight was a ‘war’ and were just laughing it off when Garth Wood would initiate a clinch and start rabbit punching or when Mundine would elbow him and push him into the ropes. This is probably the main problem with Australian boxing, the people who have a say about this aren’t getting angry when you have the biggest national fight of the year turn into a piece of shit. You need commentators who call a spade a spade and who call a piece of shit fight a piece of shit fight and not try to make it out like the viewing public got their moneys worth. Australian boxing needs their internal critics; thats how things get changed. You need people who know the sport to a) be commentators/analysts (yes that’s right, I just said Andy Raymond doesn’t know the sport of boxing) and b) to criticise how the sport is run down here. Boxing is facing a very serious threat in MMA and while I don’t see boxing ever being obsolete on aglobal scale, in Australia where boxing isn’t a first rate sport it has the potential for the scene in Australia to slip into a very poor state and that’s what will happen if shows like this are the pinnacle of the sport in this country!
I’m not in a position of power in the sport and I have no intention of being a commentator or anything other then the keyboard warrior that I am, but after the disgusting card I saw tonight (I didn’t even mention that the undercard was a piece of shit also) I feel that as someone who loves the sport of boxing and (and I don’t mean to toot my own horn, I only ever started writing on here because I was encouraged by numerous people I know in the industry who tell me I know what I’m talking about) has a solid knowledge of it that I need to write more about it. I need to write articles on the fox sport shows and critique the judges who score rounds with a knockdown 10-9 because they thought the round was even outside of the knockdown or score a six round fight 60-59 because they’re too incompetent to judge who won five of the rounds. I need to write articles about the piss poor matchmaking that goes on on local shows and how fighters like Lenny Zappavinga, a fighter who I think has the talent to be a world class fighter, needs to fight better ranked European and North American fighters instead of fighting a few good local fighters then stepping it up for a title shot without bridging the competitive gap first. If I’m going to let myself get as pissed off as I did tonight watching that horrible excuse for a pay per view card (and once again I DID NOT PAY FOR IT I watched it at the local) then I should try and do something about it, if not for the sport of boxing then for my own sanity. So this is me, officially restarting to rant about combat sports. I think someone has to be the mad prophet of the airwaves and if no one else is going to do it then it’ll have to be me. And if you enjoyed the fight tonight and don’t like what I’ve said about it, well I’ve given you one reason to be pissed off about it; it’s inspired me to start writing again!
