By Jason Peck – Whatever happened to earning your paycheck? The latest issue of Ring Magazine bemoaned the fact that amazing talents like Steve Cunningham, Tim Bradley and Chad Dawson can’t get the respect – and money they deserve. Here’s my two cents: They never fight! Instead, they constantly wait for big-money battles like Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao, even if it means barely fighting in the meantime.
But guess what? Mayweather and Pacquiao didn’t make Maywather-Pacquiao money overnight. Surely fans remember that Manny’s renown really began with Marco Antonio Barrera – despite dominating several weight classes by that point. Likewise, Mayweather never headlined a PPV card until he destroyed Arturo Gatti in 2005 – despite 15 previous title fights. But you could make a more compelling case that neither truly went mainstream until even-more-recent victories over Oscar de la Hoya.
That’s why WBO cruiserweight champ Marco Huck is a model for today’s young fighters. Any of the above three fighters is vastly superior to him talent-wise. But Huck fights often, and keeps never waits for someone to give him a big-money fight. When he gets his payday, he’ll get it because he earned it. Not because someone owed it to him..
To recap: In 2007, the aforementioned top cruiserweight Cunningham defeated Huck by way of TKO in the 12th, blemishing Huck’s unbeaten record. That’s been the end for most with perfect resumes. By all rights, Huck should have ended there.
Instead, Huck did the opposite. He learned from the loss and improved. He wasted no time in his return – by the time of his second title shot, Huck had fought six times against respectable, albeit relatively regional competition. In a measured bout he took the WBO title, became the champion, and defended the title four times already, most recently against Matt Godfrey.
“Of course I do need proper resting after fights,” Huck told Boxingscene.com. “But I feel very fresh and have big goals. Another thing is, to fight often is a good way to keep in shape.”
Amen.
Did Huck make record money? No! Did he always fight A-list opposition? Surely not! But he did what a boxer should do. He fought. Answer this question, Huck haters: What would he have gained by staying inactive?
Instead he reaped the benefits of regular combat, just the Old School fighters of yesteryear. Huck never lost his conditioning, refined his skills, prevented even the faintest traces of ring rust, and made himself again a dominant player at cruiserweight. If he fights Cunningham again – and he will, for the numbers in Germany will surely be astronomical – the odds must be on Huck’s side this time. That’s saying something, considering that Cunningham’s technical ability is undoubtedly better than Huck’s.
Today’s most talented fighters seem ignorant to boxing’s cold, unfortunate realities. They think the biggest money fighters will fight high-risk, small-paycheck fighters because a real warrior would. Anyone with even a minimal boxing IQ knows that’s completely ridiculous. This is business. A promoter won’t take the risk until you bring something to the table.
I mean, consider Cunningham. Since the Huck fight, he’s fought only three times in three years! In the same time span, Huck fought 11 times. Tomas Adamek, who defeated Cunningham, fought six times to Cunningham’s two since their 2008 bout, and made himself a heavyweight contender. Krzysztof Wlodarczyk, another previous Cunningham victim, fought seven times since his Cunningham loss, compared to Cunningham’s four – and won the WBC title to boot.
Admittedly, Cunningham’s inactivity probably came from contractual issues – he left Don King for another promoter, after all. But there’s no mystery why he has no fan base – he never fights!
To Tim Bradley – forget about fighting Mayweather or Pacquiao. Start fighting 3-4 times a year. Neither will waste their time until Bradley cleans out his own division, which has more than enough big fights he could win. Superstar-in-the-making Amir Khan can avoid Bradley because no casual fan in Khan’s UK fan base cares who Bradley is. And if someone has a choice, they’ll always opt out.
Chad Dawson? Don’t even get me started on Dawson, perhaps boxing’s singular biggest waste of talent. He fought in a division – light heavyweight – with few big-money stars, and yet he sat around waiting for big-money fights anyway. His ONLY hope was to decisively clean the division out. That way, there would be no light heavyweight division. Just Chad Dawson.
Last weekend Dawson proved my point when in losing to Jean Pascal – a fighter far beneath Dawson’s talent. In chasing the paycheck, Dawson fought names like Antonio Tarver and Glen Johnson rather than young, hungry light-heavyweights. Then he barely fought at all. Worse yet, the late rounds against Pascal show that he probably could have won had he stayed active and pushed himself against the mandatories he avoided. (In retrospect, Tarvoris Cloud and Pascal don’t seem like undeserving mandatory fighters now, do they?)
He wasted time waiting for Bernard Hopkins to fight him. Dawson – and any other talented fighter – would benefit from considering the amount of fighting Hopkins had to do to before making it big! By the time of his breakthrough fight against Felix Trinidad fight, he defended his middleweight title 14 times. That doesn’t happen overnight.
It isn’t fair that some fighters get popular, and the Bernard Hopkins fighters of the world don’t. But that’s reality, and the unpopular must take measures to fix it. In the meantime we fans miss out on watching a fighter hit their peak.