Boxing

 

Nothing Beats the Professional Skill!

By Janne Romppainen

24.09 - As I am writing this article, there are the news that Prince Naseem Hamed will make an announcement about his future soon. This subject has been speculated a lot and people have wanted to get some answers. In fact, Hamed has raised a lot more questions in the year and a half after his first professional loss than perhaps ever earlier in his career. Everybody has been wondering, where is Hamed now, how come did he look so ringworn in his last fight against Manuel Calvo, how was Barrera able to defeat him so easily, was the man all hype and so on.

Of course when a fighter becomes the universally recognized best fighter of his division he can’t be just hype. And Hamed was not, he beat a whole bunch of world champs and contenders. But why is it that his peak was so short whereas fighters such as Evander Holyfield, Virgil Hill and Johnny Tapia are able to compete at the championship level for years? This can not be explained with the difference of styles, because Hamed’s style wasn’t particularly spending like for example Joe Frazier’s all-out attacking style, which is known to burn a fighter fast.

The truth is that guys like Holyfield, Hill, Tapia and other respectable veterans have one thing in common that Naseem Hamed never possessed. It is called professional skill. To be a long-term professional in boxing or in any other walk of life for the matter, you have to know your trade.

Talent and natural gifts can take you far, as Hamed proved they can even take you to the very top, but to stay in there, you have to know the basics of your profession and you have to know them well. Hamed’s whole fighting was based on his extraordinary talent; huge firepower and astonishing reflexes. But when he grew up in age, those reflexes started to fade. He wasn’t able to slip jabs by twisting his upper body as he used to. When he faced a fighter who was a master of basic boxing, Marco Antonio Barrera, he had no tools to compete with him. Barrera didn’t do anything weird in the ring that night, he just threw the basic jab and right hand, kept up solid defence and employed good movement and just like that, Hamed’s mystique was gone

A longtime heavyweight challenger Tim Witherspoon once said that back when he was an up-and-coming fighter, the competition was so hard that you had to learn your basics well to stay in the picture. Nowadays, he said, the fighters don’t do that anymore. Maybe that’s why The ‘Spoon was still knocking out youngsters twenty years later. Owning some athletic talent and a big punch can take you far, but sooner or later the lack of skill will be exposed. Michael Grant could be a good example from such a fighter. Even the heavyweight champion of the world Lennox Lewis had to go back to the basics after suffering a devastating knockout loss against Oliver McCall. He did it and he battled his way back to the top. Maybe Hamed is able to do that too, maybe not.

There is still place in the top of the boxing world for talented fighters who want to take their business seriously and it’s nice to see up-and-comers such as Wladimir Klitschko who have realized this rule of life: nothing beats the professional skill.

Comments/questions to: janneromppainen@hotmail.com

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