MEMORIES FROM MEMORIAL GYMNASIUM
I made the trek to Vanderbilt’s Memorial Gymnasium for the “All or Nothing” show this weekend, and the card, while fairly predictable on paper, definitely delivered.
Jermain Taylor dominated Jeff Lacy in a fight that was never boring – certainly not as boring as I anticipated; however, the final scores were how I predicted the fight to go with Taylor winning as many as ten and eleven rounds on the cards of the judges, who awarded him a unanimous victory.
This was the best Taylor had fought in years, probably since before his fights with Bernard Hopkins in 2005. To be fair, Taylor’s competition has been as intense as that of anybody else in the sport for the last four years, taking on Hopkins twice, Winky Wright, Kassim Ouma, Cory Spinks and Kelly Pavlik twice. He peppered Lacy with the jab experts are always talking about but have become unused to seeing often enough from the former Middleweight Champion.
I believe it was the third or fourth round when Taylor hurt Lacy pretty badly. Unfortunately, the shot – a left hook to the top of the head – came at the end of the round, giving Lacy a chance to survive. Then, in the only round he clearly won, Lacy appeared to drop Taylor in round five. The crowd, including myself thought it was a legitimate knockdown, but Referee Lawrence Cole ruled it a slip. He was right as replays confirmed it, and the crowd ceased debating the call after seeing that Lacy hadn’t landed a punch before Taylor went down.
Rounds eight, nine and ten were the closest of the night. I ended up giving Lacy round ten, but I wasn’t comfortable with it at the time. My final score was 118-110 for Taylor. I was glad to see the judges weren’t swayed by Lacy’s fewer but flashier punches in those rounds and called the fight the way it was: a pretty dominant Taylor win, but a spirited effort from Lacy.
Taylor should definitely take on the winner of the Jean Pascal-Carl Froch fight and see if he can’t immediately become a champion at super middleweight. He had a few spots where he faded in the later rounds but finished the fight strong and looks to be getting back to form. Lacy did about as well as you could expect him to, given the way he’s looked since the beat down from Joe Calzaghe. Taylor brings a lot more power to the table than Calzaghe, and Lacy managed to finish the fight without going down. He’s outmatched against the top level fighters, but I don’t think Lacy should hang up the gloves just yet, and hopefully he won’t.
I thought going in that Kermit Cintron’s fight against Lovemore NDou wouldn’t necessarily be close but certainly exciting. I was dead wrong.
NDou had a strong first round, landing several left hooks on Cintron to take an early lead, but after tasting some of Cintron’s power in round two, he might as well have not shown up at all. NDou held for almost the entire fight until the last couple of rounds. He might have hit Cintron more with his head than his fists, and Cintron let everyone know it as he complained constantly.
Cintron pulled out a funny move when he had NDou by the head with one hand and hit him with a shot around the back from the other. It was the same thing Mike McCallum lost a point for in either his first or second fight with James Toney. Another funny moment occurred when a raucous group of fans began to chant “Margarito” at Cintron from the upper decks in response to him complaining about the headbutts while other voices urged him to “quit crying.” The fight was so boring and the crowd so dead that he had to have heard them.
In any event, I didn’t give NDou any rounds after the first, bringing my tally to 119-108 (since NDou lost a point for one of the several headbutts). The judges were much closer, one of them somehow giving NDou five rounds. I haven’t checked who the judges were, but that seemed ridiculous to me watching live. Cintron never put NDou down like I predicted he would, but he did wobble him on a few occasions. If NDou hadn’t perfected the art of holding when hurt, he would have been down somewhere along the way, if not stopped altogether.
The best fight of the night by far was an unexpected one. Chazz Witherspoon took on a heavyweight they called the “Swamp Donkey,” Adam Richards. This has to be the heavyweight fight of the year at this point as they went toe to toe until Richards eventually could take no more and was stopped after about twenty unanswered blows when out on his feet.
“Swamp Donkey” was a local fighter and brought a huge contingent of his friends, most of whom were uneducated boxing fans that urged their friend to land low blows and “kill” Witherspoon dead. Early on, Richards did well, pressuring Witherspoon into a brawl as Chris Arreola had done. The verdict is clearly out on how to beat Witherspoon after seeing these two fights, but “Swamp Donkey” didn’t have the tools and stamina to get the job done, though he came surprisingly close.
I had “Swamp Donkey” ahead by a point after seven rounds, but that was when Witherspoon started taking over with better boxing and big time power shots. Finally, Witherspoon hurt Richards in round eight and never let up. “Swamp Donkey” didn’t go down, though it would have been better for him to take a knee to try to survive, but he was out on his feet. He never went down, but he was unmistakably done when Referee Bill Clancy stopped the fight.
Olympic heavyweight Deontay Wilder made his professional debut with a thunderous knockout over Ethan Cox in the second round. The shot that led to the second knockdown and ultimately kept Cox down drew the biggest crowd reaction all night as Wilder looked to wind up before hammering home a monster blow to finish the deed. This is why heavyweights will always draw, despite being a barren wasteland of a division.
Allan Green was already boxing when I arrived and looked to be biding his time in taking out Carl Daniels. Daniels’ corner threw in the towel in round seven, sending the crowd into an uproar. Daniels wasn’t taking big punishment, but he wasn’t fighting either, so there was no point in letting the fight go on.
Overall, it was an entertaining night at the fights that gave everybody something positive to talk about going home.
