By Rahul Deb: Boxing, by its very nature, provides numerous opportunities for the athletes involved to lose their heads. As a result, there is no shortage of ridiculous moments in boxing. A few good ones come to mind. Mike Tyson breaking his hand after a street fight with Mitch Green, Andrew Golota’s needless low blows after beating up Riddick Bowe, Oliver McCall’s sudden eruption into tears against Lennox Lewis, Roy Jones’ disqualification for hitting Montell Griffin when he was down and recently, Vic Darchinyan claiming he was not hurt and then adding that it perhaps wasn’t even a knockdown in the post fight interview after getting knocked out by Nonito Donaire.
In the opinion of this writer, few moments in recent history (not involving Ricardo Mayorga) can match up to the blatant stupidity of Nate Campbell in his first fight against Robbie Peden. At the time Campbell was 24-1-1 and was trying to rebound after his loss to Joel Casamayor. The fight against Peden was for a shot at the IBF super featherweight title. Given Nate’s extremely modest background and his late introduction to the sport, this represented a life altering opportunity. Many considered him an underdog and the word on the street was that Peden was overlooking him and already talking about his potential showdown with IBF champ Carlos Hernandez.
Nate as always trained very hard and brought his A game to the fight. After a good first couple of rounds for Peden, Campbell started inflicting some serious punishment. In the fourth round Peden was beaten up badly and things weren’t looking good for him. In the fifth round Campbell resumed from where he left off in the fourth and continued punishing Peden. With about a minute left in the round he landed a vicious body shot and an uppercut and Peden was doubled over from the pain. That is when Nate lost the plot.
Confident from the beating he was administering Campbell began to swagger. Peden hit him with a left which really didn’t have much on it and Nate responded by smiling and dropping his hands, inviting Peden to hit him again. Peden obliged and with about 45 seconds left in round five, knocked Campbell out with a huge left hook. Campbell couldn’t beat the count although he did protest, somewhat unsurprisingly, about the stoppage. For the readers who didn’t watch the fight, I would strongly suggest searching for Nate Campbell on YouTube. It really is quite amusing.
While I’m glad everything worked out for Nate in the end (he does deserve to be champ), I am constantly amused by the some of the things boxers do. I guess a boxer’s occasional stupidity is another reason to love the sweet science.