I realize this is very opinionated but to me, after years of being an MMA fan I have a tough time ever getting excited about boxing. It just seems so slow in comparison. I wasn't even aware of the records or the brevity of this fight until other friends of mine were insisting that I go and see it with them. I complied and in the bar was really trying to get into the action but in my mind there just wasn't very much action.
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Both fighters were undefeated going into this superfight bout and of course only one of them was going to emerge that way on the other side. There was a lot of trash talk going into it like you would expect but I wasn't really exposed to any of this because since I don't really follow boxing, whenever they were mentioned I didn't really know who they were talking about.
I tried to get excited as they spent nearly an hour doing a bunch of talking and of course the long and drawn out circus that is their ring walks. When the fight finally started, there wasn't much in the way of punches actually being thrown. This would bore me in MMA as well so I was groaning during the fight and actually finding myself peeking over at the LIV golf tournament that was on the adjacent screens at the same bar.
So for boxing purist fans out there please understand that I am not attacking you personally, but I think that MMA has taken the wind of out the sails of boxing to some degree. Comparatively speaking it is a rather boring sport in my eyes.
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The ending of the fight didn't make me feel any better about this because when Ryan Garcia took a body shot in I believe it was the 7th round, he just took a knee and then refused to continue. I am quite certain it was a hard shot that would floor any of us, but we haven't trained our abs for 10 years either. To me it looked like this fight could have gone on but Garcia just didn't want to.
He would later came that he wanted to get up but he couldn't breathe. The fact that just a few minutes later he gave a calm and not out of breath interview in the ring doesn't add a lot of credibility to this. I don't know if Garcia's corner had something to do with this by predicting that the cards were not going to be in his favor, but leading up to that point it really looked like the match could go either way at any moment. I'm not complaining that it ended early, I wanted it to be over so I could go home, but I just haven't seen many fights end with one fighter giving up, especially not at this level.
Another thing that passed through my mind was some sort of gambling fix. Could it be that there were a bunch of people put big bets on the fight being ended in the 7th? I don't do a lot of online gambling but seeing as how you can bet on almost anything, I would imagine that this is one of the options.
When I see a kick ass MMA fight, it is something that we end up talking about for weeks, months, or even years after the fact. I think in a couple of weeks I won't even remember these guys' names.
I guess I just don't find boxing exciting anymore. It takes hours to get to the main event and the walk-ins being as long as they are in my mind are not justified by the end product. Maybe I am just not the correct person for this sport but honestly, I think that when my pals are adamanet in the future that I must go and see such and such fight that I will decide to not go.
If someone out there more skilled in understanding boxing could explain to me how this fight was good I'd love to hear a defense of it.