posted by Large

“Here’s my take in a nutshell – I think Margarito’s a little tougher, I think Cotto’s a lot better, and one of the things that I love about boxing is that generally better beats tougher nine times out of ten.” -Large

This would seem to have been that tenth time.

As I look back at Margo/Cotto from the distance of a day, I confess that my thoughts are still whirling. I’m not sure I’ll fully process the whole thing for a week or two. Somebody, I can’t remember who right now, wrote in on a comment to say that he hurled a few times before the fight because he was so worked up. I had similar problems ringside. The overall intensity level down there was so… intense that for the first couple rounds or so I felt like I was going to pass out. I’ve never been ringside for a fight that was contested at that kind of savage emotional pitch before. I found myself watching, near-hyperventilating, trying to remember to breathe, trying to pay close attention, and at the same time wondering how the fighters’ families can handle it, how they don’t have regularly have strokes and heart attacks in the arena. I haven’t seen the HBO coverage yet, but it’s my understanding that they showed a lot of gratuitous shots of Cotto’s family weeping after the stoppage. I can only imagine.

So, all of that said and in that I haven’t yet watched the replay, I will grant you that my memory of the affair is less than crystalline. Still, the narrative of the fight seems very clear to me. Cotto was simply, jaw-droppingly awesome for five rounds, Ray Leonard awesome. My colleague to my left was a guy from Sherdog who I intimated was heavily in Margarito’s camp, and in the middle of the fifth round he said out loud, “this is just embarrassing,” and we all knew exactly what he meant. Margarito wasn’t stalking at that point so much as just stumbling around the ring getting hit with one sweat-spraying flurry of bombs after another. The chatter at ringside about the punches was insistently centered on one observation – Cotto’s shots were stiff, head-snappers that sent like full water-bottles of sweat flying into the crowd, while Margarito seemed to rarely connect so cleanly or effectively because Cotto was so mobile and able to pick off Tony’s slower, more plodding combinations.

The final seconds of the fifth round really stick out in my mind . Cotto landed another in an endless series of big combinations and then Margo tried to return fire and Cotto dodged four or five punches in a row with this rubber-man upper-body shimmyshake that was pure virtuoso material. When the bell rang, the crowd erupted into a roar that was like a round of “brava!” at the opera for the maestro of the proceedings. Of course, none of us knew at that moment that we’d just witnessed the maestro’s last hurrah.

I felt like I saw instantly in the sixth round that Cotto was in a different mode. Even though he still boxed beautifully for the first half of the round, he’d slowed a step and the starch was out of his punches just a tad. It’s true that Tony never seemed hurt during the course of the onsalught that Cotto unleashed on him in the first five rounds, but he certainly seemed off-balance and tentative in the way of a fighter who is being outclassed speedwise. In the sixth, however, he started to seem emboldened to me, as Cotto more and more huddling down into that crouch in the corners to try and weather the storm rather than stick and move, flurry and circle away to milder climes.

Though most of my fellow writers seemed to think that Cotto won the sixth round, I gave it to Tony and I felt at that point… well, I don’t think that I felt like Cotto was in as much danger as he actually was, but I certainly had an inkling that this was going to be a much closer fight than it had been to that point.

Obviously, as he pointed out after the fight, Margarito knew this also. I loved his press conference recollection, in the Spanish translation, of his conversation with his trainer between the sixth and seventh rounds. Tony said something like, “I’m going to knock him out, I know it,” and his trainer replied, “I believe that this is true, but please do not get too excited and make foolish mistakes.”

In the seventh, of course, Cotto got seriously hurt for the first time, but even before that I have to tell you folks, after about a minute of the seventh I felt the knockout coming. Thinking back on it now, I can’t quite believe that the man lasted until the 11th. Suddenly the hunter was indeed the hunted – Cotto was spent, soft, fighting on fumes. We now know that a broken nose, which I think occurred in the second round, caused Cotto a world of trouble in there and affected his breathing. Watching it, I have to say, I had a similar feeling in the sixth round of this fight that I did in the ninth round of the Cotto/Mosley fight, where the previously dominant Cotto abruptly seemed to lose all of his energy and moxie in the space of about ten seconds. It’s never really been explained what happened in the Mosley fight, but here the nose issue makes perfect sense to me – one thing I definitely noted even when Cotto was ruling the fight in the early going was that he was breathing very heavily and often breathing out of his mouth and spitting blood to the canvas. If you think this is just a bogus excuse for a loss, well, number one, Cotto himself hasn’t offered a single excuse other than the fact that Margo was the better man, and number two, think back to Vasquez/Marquez I, when a grade-A decorated warrior of Israel Vazquez’s caliber quit on his stool due to breathing problems caused by a broken nose. When you can’t breathe, you can barely walk, let alone fight off a monster like Margarito.

Again, I’m on record as a pro-Cotto guy, so I don’t want to sound like I’m taking anything away from what Margo did the other night, far from it, because what he did was one of the most astonishing athletic spectacles I’ve ever witnessed in person. But to win this fight, Cotto needed twelve rounds of exhaustive mobility. Eventually the pace was going to wear on him, and that promised to be the drama of this fight – we all called that. But the way that Cotto wore down so suddenly, when I don’t think either the pace or the punishment he’d absorbed to that point warranted it, indicates that he was having some undue problems in there.

And hey, that’s boxing – getting punched really hard in the face often causes undue problems (unless, of course, you’re name is Antonio Margarito – then it just kind of makes you smile wistfully as if to say, “gee, you’re punching me really really hard… that’s cute”). Cotto nevertheless came back in the eighth and won the round, I thought, on pure guts, marshaling the last gasp of his resources to box effectively and stay out of harm’s way. The ninth was a close, inconclusive round that I gave to Margarito purely on ring generalship. At that point, things got almost unbearably exciting, because the chase was on. I started to wonder if Cotto’s survival was going to be as superhuman a display as Margarito’s seeming invulnerability to pain or fatigue, and I started to wonder about whether this was going to turn out to be one of the most disputed decisions in history. Because even though Cotto was badly wounded and hanging on by a thread going into the tenth, he was still winning the fight, and there was a very good chance that if he could finish on his feet that he would win the thing on points.

But that is where, as so many of you out there said he would, Margo closed the show where Shane Mosley couldn’t. I am simply astonished by Tony Margarito on two counts in this fight – that he was never hurt in the slightest by the unfathomable amount of punishment that he absorbed, and that he never seemed to begin to be slowed down by it either. Cotto himself must have been wondering about that shit – he must have thought that at least Tony would lose a step or two after those first five rounds of running around the ring and blocking punches with his face. I can imagine Cotto starting to despair as the exhaustion set in, thinking, “what the fucking FUCKING fuck? is this guy the Terminator… and not like the weakass robotron Arnold Terminator either, but like the liquid metal motherfucker from T2?” Because that’s about how tenacious and impenetrable Margarito was Saturday night. You definitely had the feeling that if Cotto had whipped out a vat of liquid nitrogen from his trunks and poured it on Tony’s head that Tony would have frozen, splintered into a million pieces, and then as Cotto was walking back to his corner with his hands raised, all the little rivulets of Tony’s being would have congealed back into a whole before the ref could count ten.

A note on the FOY business. I said in my post-fight recap at The Sporting Blog that this was unquestionably the fight of the year, and obviously I wrote that still at ringside with my ears still ringing with my rampant blood pressure and the chants of ecstatic Mexican fans. But you know, I’m sticking with my assessment today. Maybe in a week I’ll come down from this high I’m on and soberly realize that this fight didn’t quite stack up to Vasquez/Marquez III. But the reactionary type of “come on, this fight wasn’t that great” type of buzz going on in the boxing blog universe right now seems to me to be that tribal kind of protectionism that wants to assert its authority over the sport by championing a bout that was a little more outside of the sports mainstream than this one was.

And look, I admit that I’m biased, because I was at this fight and I wasn’t at Vasquez/Marquez III. But I think Margo/Cotto was a much more important fight, much more was ultimately at stake, and I think the fight itself was more dramatic, not to mention that it ended conclusively, which is always an essential component to me of a truly classic fight. Can an argument be made that Vasquez/Marquez was the better fight? Certainly. But if you hear or read someone making the case that Margo/Cotto was actually just a “very good” fight that is being blown out of proportion, well, I think you have a seriously crotchety boxing snob on your hands.

Finally, thanks to all of you for your kind words on my coverage of the fight. We had a very good week with it here at the Mas, and an additional thanks to those of you who piggybacked over to the Sporting Blog for my writing there. It was a pleasure, a real honor honestly, because I think this was a very special kind of event and I’m just glad to have been a part of it. Now we get a bit of a break sweet science-wise through the dog days of August before the A list comes back to the ring, although we have a nice little post-prandial snack this Saturday with Judah/Clottey. Until then, my people, Large out – I’m a go take a damn nap.