While most Americans on Saturday night were watching Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, or Dave Chappelle, the sport of boxing was busy hitting a new low.
In Los Angeles, a scheduled 10-round bout at Microsoft Theater was over in less than a minute when Luis Ortiz took care of Alexander Flores in 45 seconds with the worst “punch” that’s ever been thrown.
Look at this.
WTF is that?
According to BoxingJunkie.com, Flores said he had a “problem with his left eye,” and he told a FOX reporter that his “vision went black and legs went numb.”
I mean, I guess…
I just don’t understand how a 6-foot-4 boxer who weighed 231 pounds and had a record of 18-2-1 with 16 knockouts before Saturday night could go down that easily after being hit with a bicep 45 seconds into one of the biggest fights of his career.
The “deciding blow” was the opposite of what we saw on Halloween when Gervonta Davis delivered one of the most devastating shots in boxing history in his defeat of Leo Santa Cruz.
Now, this is a knockout.
But as ridiculous as Saturday’s bout may have been, it doesn’t hold a candle to what happened in August of 2018 when Curtis Harper walked out the ring before the match even started, in one of the funniest/weirdest/most shocking moments in a sport in which bizarre things happen all the time.
“What happened here was, on Aug. 12, Curtis was given a contract to fight (Efe) Ajagba for $6,000. He specifically asked the person who gave him the contract whether the fight would be on TV and was told no,” said Harper’s representative Rick Glaser, according to The Sporting News.
“He signed the contract on Aug. 13 and sent it back that day. After that, he was treated like garbage. He and his wife didn’t get their plane tickets until Aug. 22 [the day of their flight]. They flew into Minneapolis and waited at the airport for an hour and 45 minutes before they were picked up. Then, at the weigh-in on Thursday, Curtis learned that, contrary to what he’d been told before, his fight was going to be on TV. And he still hadn’t been given a countersigned contract. So he wanted more money.”
Shaky business deals are the foundation that boxing was built on.
“I pretty much made up my mind in the dressing room, but I wasn’t sure,” said Harper. “Then, when we touched gloves and I saw one of the people who hadn’t done right by me in the other corner, that was it.”
The sweet science of boxing continues to be a flawed formula.