Naoya "El Monstruo de Japón/The 1.65m Godzilla/怪物 (Kaibutsu/Monster)" Inoue - acknowledge him!

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Just an utterly demented take by Abramowitz - who isn't some newjack hack, either, but a mostly sensible longtime veteran scribe.

It didn't ring the least bit true upon reading it, and having seen them both in the ring at the same time any tiny fleck of doubting in my own memory & judgment that article may have caused has dissipated.

(and yes the quote was put in poop-brown on purpose)

 

True but idk, feels like the goalposts move an awful lot for a guy that doesn't seem to have much about him to even dislike (let alone dogmatically hate).

Fan-friendly style, humble, always striving to improve, takes all comers. No major scandals in his personal life that we know of. Yet he gets second-guessed more than a lot of unsavory characters unfit to carry his wee jockstrap.

Canelo for instance - you get even people that aren't fans grumbling assent that yeah, he could probably move up to cruiser and grab a belt. Inoue meanwhile is leagues beyond him in p4p h2h terms and you had people confidently picking Fulton (who, granted, came off a string of four very nice victories in a row, but prior? And had only eight stoppages to his name, going in with a thunderous hitter that was always EMPIRICALLY faster than him, regardless of what Ring Mag said).

I think a lot of it may just be the smaller weight division bias. People ignore them and just assume the skill level is low because you sometimes have belts won at straw or fly by guys with ugly records with shallow talent pools of in some instances only a few dozen men around the world. Their loss, though, because when a gem like Inoue comes along, they're missing out seeing a lot of what all of us find best in boxing.

And some is general Western neglect of Asian pugilists, too (which largely goes hand-in-hand with the size thing, aside from oddities like Zhang or Murata)

 

Outside the USA, he is given mainstream hot shot repute.

Sure, now ESPN+ and Bob Arum have gotten their fingers in the pie, but the fact that it took until 2019 for major players of the Occident to get wise to what a commodity he could be is mind-boggling.

...and even now, they are shooting themselves in the foot and throttling his potential brand growth with their selfish & shortsighted ways. PPTV in Thailand was going to broadcast the fight live on a free legal stream this morning, but Top Rank hit their channel with a copyright strike - which is ****ing insane. They were a fellow licensed rebroadcaster of Lemino Boxing's feed in Japan (the same one Top Rank/ESPN were licensed to use), and the commentary was in Thai. Different product, for a different audience from those who may have wanted the high-definition stream and celebrity English-speaking commentary team; not impinging on those morons' "intellectual property". But the big powerful institution with the deep pockets bullied their way into not letting anyone deprive them of even a theoretical penny in revenue.

Not sure but I may have played a part in them finding about it, embedding the YT link in a post in the RBR. Hope not, and on the off chance that's what happened, **** me. No good deed, eh?

 

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How did you make this post and get banned all in the span of like 2 minutes?

 

We're weaker than we were a decade ago IMO, slightly:

https://www.boxingforum24.com/threads/the-american-boxing-manifest-destiny-express.459573/

(we technically have 17 different titlists now, as opposed to 16 when I made the above thread, but it's a more diluted field now with a few holding "WBC interim" and "WBA regular" nonsense. Plus, as far as pack leaders go Money May >>> Bud)

...but yeah, we're doing just fine.

 

Uncanny how identical their form is, this pair of greats landing the same low-high combination on very defensively stingy boxers:

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The only real difference is that Inoue keeps his right shoulder restrained so that he is still in position to attack or defend when he finishes, whereas SSM overcommitted and left himself open.

 

https://news.livedoor.com/article/detail/24678882/

Fulton praised Inoue's preparation and timing, saying that he couldn't ever see the body jab coming or read Inoue's movements in advance.