Middleweight Title Fight of the Day

It's Pavlik/Taylor II Week here on No Mas, and we're getting ourselves cranked up by, well, watching Pavlik/Taylor I and marveling at its righteousness. There's no denying the fact that one of the main things that made the fight so remarkable was the throwback feel of it - the provincial Youngstown contingent, the fact that it was for the undisputed title of one of the historic weight classes, and then just the type of fight it turned out to be, a rock-em-sock-em get-up-off-the-canvas and hold-on-for-dear-life slugfest that immediately warranted inclusion with the grand tradition of great middleweight wars, the much revered Zale/Graziano's, Robinson/Lamotta's and Hagler/Hearns's of the world.

Now look - I know the rematch isn't a 160 title fight, but still, it sort of feels like it, and the first one certainly was, and so with that in mind I thought I'd take us back to some of the epic middleweight championship bouts in history this week just to whet our appetites a little.

I begin with a lesser known donnybrook from 1977, the rematch between one of the true middleweight giants, Argentina's Carlos Monzon, and the great Colombian, Rodrigo Valdez. Like Pavlik/Taylor II, this was a highly anticipated rematch where one of the primaries claimed to have been off his game the first time around. Of course, Valdez's claim had a lot more legitimacy than Jermain's seems to have today. One week prior to Monzon/Valdez I in 1976, Rodrigo Valdez's brother was shot and killed in Colombia. Rodrigo was already in Monte Carlo for the fight and couldn't get out of his contract, so he went ahead and fought. Needless to say, he was far from his best in the ring, which resulted in a pretty easy unanimous decision for the Argentinian. In the rematch a year later, Valdez brought his A-game, sending Monzon to the canvas in the second round in a flash knockdown, one of only two times Monzon was down in his entire career. Early on, Valdez looked like he might pull off the upset, but Monzon mounted a comeback and pulled out a UD in one of the great wars of his career. Afterwards, he retired, having been the true champ at 160 for seven years.

Below is some action from the fight, the knockdown from the second round (a straight right preceded by some Frazier-like leaping left hooks), and the tenth and fifteenth rounds in their entirety.