29 years ago today: Isufu "Bazooka/Ike" Quartey vs. Moisés Rivera

Welterweight eliminator for the "Ah Emmay Bae" (the Spanish pronunciation of the initials for the Asociación Mundial de Boxeo - which us gringos know better as the WBA). Co-main event to Wilfredo Vázquez Sr. vs. Thierry Jacob for the WBA super bantamweight title (it would be the second of nine successful defenses for the Puerto Rican).

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The fighter hailing from Bayamón has an incomplete profile on BoxRec, as the graphic showed him already having 24 victories with 21 by KO heading into this contest. That is one more than his undefeated Ghanaian opponent, although BR credits him with less than half that experience, just 11-1.

Rivera put in a spirited effort but it effectively came all crumbling down around him in a disastrous round three. Quartey, known then and forevermore since as master of the stiff left jab, actually dropped him in short order with a sequence that didn't even feature the jab in a supporting role. A lead right to his face, thrown with that vaunted jab's same quickness and bullwhip accuracy, surprised Rivera. Left frozen in place momentarily, a second right chopped down between his eyes and sat him down. He would spend the remainder of the frame so woozy he needed to hold - which, in turn, got him docked a point after refusing to let a spinning Quartey go. By the next ringing of the bell he bore the look of a conquered man: whiffing desperate hooks badly, wide-eyed, and giving up ground. All in one three minute session a critical hit of 10-7 on the scoreboard and psychological coup from which there was really no path toward recovery for a non-elite.

Quartey took a unanimous decision, although my ears - and tenuous grasp on rapid vernacular Español - aren't quite sharp enough to pick out the judges' scores over the commentators (if the ring emcee did in fact even read them out). This was just a steppingstone for Ike, but an important one as it positioned him #1 in the WBA rankings. Just twenty days shy of a full year later, he would knock out Venezuelan southpaw Crisanto España to claim the gold. His subsequent half-decade reign, successfully defending the belt 7 times, was a consistent and solid campaign but it wouldn't be until a brush with superstardom the night lost it that his name was etched forever into the collective minds of the zeitgeist. That of course was his controversial defeat via split decision to boxing's then by far biggest cash-cow, Óscar de la Hoya.

So dignified was Quartey that after being thrice burned on American soil (in what he viewed as three consecutive robberies: first the draw against JLL, in which Ike set the Comp-U-Box record for connected jabs; then his losses against ODLH and Fernando "El Feroz" Vargas fourteen months later in a comeback attempt one division north at 154lbs) he did what few boxers in the sport's history have done, and the antithesis of what, for instance, contemporary Glen Johnson did for years - he stood on principle and took his ball & went home to protest his unfair treatment, instead of crying in the media chasing after rematches. Shades of Marvin Hagler retiring after the Leonard fight.

Not that he never fought again - but it was five years before he did, and that was in his native country. It took a bit of coaxing to get him to dust off his passport and revisit the USA, where he racked up a couple more decent rust-shaking victories before again suffering a pair of losses to highly regarded and p4p ranked American fighters. In this case, Vernon "The Viper" Forrest and Ronald "Winky" Wright. The latter is probably the only inarguably clear and one-sided defeat Quartey ever suffered professionally (and I'm pretty sure the only time he acknowledges his opponent truly besting him) - but then, he was in with a younger, bigger man in his middleweight debut after 18 years in the game. So, forgivable.

Now, if you were to wave a magic wand and grant him the decisions in all four of the matches he disputes - López, De La Hoya, Vargas, and Forrest - holy smokes, what a résumé!! And in all honesty, the only fight there I don't exactly agree with him on is Vargas (ironically, the one that prompted him to quit the biz) - that was close but clear for El Feroz in my recollection. As it stands though, despite being mostly remembered for what officially go in the books as "blemishes", he leaves behind a strong body of work h2h and was among the best in the world in a STACKED welterweight era.

His overarching legacy of course is having maybe the best jab since Larry Holmes. That kind of uncannily effective, generational, talk about it for the rest of your life jab. There have only been two such competitors IMO since the old Easton Assassin: Bazooka is one, and Ukrainian light middleweight lefty Sergiy "Dzyna (The Razor") Alexandrovich Dzinziruk, whose light began to wax around the same time Quartey's began to wane, is the other. Spare me your nominations for this or that person having a better one - there have been some mighty fine jabbers in the first 23 years of this century, and over same duration of the previous one, but Holmes, Quartey, and Dzinziruk stand apart. I've not seen a better jab, and that covers a lot of ground.

Not a fighter that gets discussed or looked at enough, when he was active nor afterward. Here then is a nice look at him dismantling a game but outmatched foe in his fresh & robust athletic prime, getting the ball of momentum rolling toward his near-future days as widely avoided titlist and - for a good long time - undisputed king of the left stick.

 

A quick glance at the readily available footage of him on YT (versus Meldrick Taylor, Donovan Boucher, Paul Wesley and Quartey) does confirm that you're right - left foot & hand in front when he fought. Strangely he's listed in multiple places online (including BoxRec) as southpaw. Probably the kind of mistake where a single place gets it wrong and then everyone just copies the data from there...including myself, as I didn't remember his stance well enough to clearly picture it and have alarm bells tinkle in my head. Good memory.

As for Rivera, the only time you may have seen him otherwise is his final outing, a KO2 loss to Bronco McKart several years later. Apparently that was televised, and it's mentioned in passing on some old VHS trading communities, but doesn't seem to be uploaded anywhere.

 

That third round's such an interesting study in ring psychology.

The mere fact that Quartey's jab wasn't even a piece on the board for a time ahead of that KD really spooked Rivera something fierce, I think.

"Heh, so you put in all this gym time preparing for a guy with a murderous jab, who's supposed to set everything up off his jab...and here I just rock up and plow you in the face with a somewhat hard & very quick jab-like right hand. Then you get to feel the somewhat quick & very hard version, and would you kindly be seated. And call me sir!"

Poor old Moisés was never going to able to rejoin the competition from then on, not in any serious way. The clinching, the flinching (at so much as the suggestion of a jab-feint by Quartey, in the final minute) - vato was in mental 404 error mode.

 

Might be due to make a thread on Dzinziruk, actually ..been retired over a decade, and, while I don't think he was as good p4p as Quartey, he may have been even more underrated & overlooked.

By default he's my pick for best southpaw right jab in my lifetime, since the only two better jabbers (Holmes and Quartey) are orthodox.

 

...well, Tommy wasn't a southpaw either.

But yeah I guess he was active in my childhood as much as Holmes was (in fact Tommy fought a few years past Larry). He'd completely slipped my mind tbh - and yes, may drop Dzyna from the top 3 overall...but again, that's no bearing on the lefties situation.

There are of course plenty of much better and more complete southpaws than Dzinziruk who just don't have quite as refined jabs specifically as his (ie Pac, Zab) and there's a couple that you could reasonably argue over him (Winky, Pea when he put intent behind relying on it) depending on your tastes, but for me he's up there.

 

Yeah, there were a good few of us in awe of how effective he was as basically a right jab specialist almost exclusively during his prime. The opposition during his WBO reign was middling to fair (Santos, Lujan, Nadirbegov, Nascimento, Konečný, Julio and Dawson) but he shut them all down with just the one really beautiful punch.

Circling back to Ike to contrast, the cool thing with Quartey is that he possessed a god-tier jab but could leave it holstered and still be super effective, as outlined above.