Saturday Night HBO will show an interesting fight. When the Super Six Super Middleweight (168 pounds) tournament started, I thought they left some people out. One of them fought recently, in Allan Green, a decision win he looked kind of bored with. He did in fact say he wanted to be in the tournament. It was surprising to me that if they had the choice and would pick Andre Dirrell and Andre Ward over Green, but they did, and now, make no stake about it. A Gold Medalist has just won his first title. It was the WBA title. There’s three major titles, and another tournament winner, Carl Froch, holds the WBC. Well, there’s an undefeated guy with the IBF title not in the tournament named Lucian Bute (Beau-tay) There’s also another tough guy in Librado Andrade, and they fought last year.
On Saturday Night, they will fight again. So it must have been good, right? Kind of. But definitely interesting, as Andrade is always fun to watch, a come at you kind of fighter that wants to knock you out. Ironically, things didn’t start out too great for him. In the amateurs he was 3-13, yet turned pro. And, to show you how different pro boxing is to amateur, he compiled a 24-0 record, with a great knockout percentage, and in ’07 got a title shot against “then undefeated” Mikkel Kessler (yes, the man Andre Ward beat up to take his title) Kessler soundly beat Andrade.
Again, in another title shot, Andrade was dominated, but in the last round, with less than thirty seconds, Andrade floored Bute, and the ref started counting, but then stopped, and told Andrade to get back in his corner. But he wasn’t out of his corner. The ref picked up the count, then turned around again, and yelled at Andrade again, but he was over ten feet away from him, every camera angle showed that, being that Andrade was in no camera shot during the count, which went way over ten. Bute was out of it. He was done, and he may have gotten up at nine, but he was so hurt Andrade would have had time to finish him. It was also in Bute’s hometown. This got a lot of negative attention and most people think Andrade should be the champ.
Robert Earle Stanton is a freelance writer, short fiction author and novelist.
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