McCallum vs. Curry - awesome.

Truest sense of the word: I was in awe for all thirteen and a half minutes of action. This may be the best fight I've personally seen at 154.

You have a supremely skilled welterweight controlling - with apparent ease - a very good, strong middleweight (though Mike hadn't yet moved up) and rocking him badly several times - in what could have easily been an echo of the Leonard-Hagler showdown of only a few months prior - only to then be caught and destroyed in as economic fashion as it was brutal by a single, brilliant maneuver.

Like Roth, I had Donald sweeping the first four rounds (Merchant favored McCallum the first two) and he could have well been on his way to extending the shutout into the 5th. Without resorting to excessive shying away from exchanges, or pitty-pattying, Curry was able to land at a significantly higher rate and - as mentioned - cause the bigger man to stagger more than once with expertly crafted power combinations delivered with dizzying speed and just enough movement after each offensive was mounted to flummox Mike without ever really leaving punch range, let alone running.

And then...?

In the post-fight interview, McCallum states that he was able to identify a flaw and devise a way to exploit it all in the course of taking a 12 minute beating. He saw that Curry would finish combinations by pulling straight back and dropping his right to protect his body with a downturned elbow under the assumption that McCallum would predictably bang to the ribcage as they separated. A simple adjustment - timing Curry's movement, counting his punches (and taking a sharp one in the face), then bringing the hook up from his hip and arcing it toward Curry's chin - and just like that, four rounds of brilliant boxing work were flushed down the toilet beyond the reach of any plunger. So thorough was the domination of the previous rounds and so deep the respect earned by the fallen that Richard Steele actually approached the prone beautiful dreamer a few seconds into the count (at which point most refs looking down at most fighters would've acknowledged "Okay, that's it") and bent slightly toward him as though to communicate with his body language, "Hey, if you're going to make an attempt to beat this thing, now's the time to start because I'm going to keep it at the same pace and, well, tick-tock..." Gamely, Curry crawled out of whatever dark corner of his mind he'd been shuttered into and tried feebly to rise. No dice. He'd been napalmed.

That was a clean shot with full bodyweight torqued into it from a heavy-handed guy naturally about two weightclasses bigger, landing flush on the chin. That could be the most brutally I've seen someone that in control of a fight get stopped.

 

He sure looked two weight classes smaller in there next to Mike - which made it all the more impressive that he sent him careening back from single and double shots landing clean because (ironically) Mike never saw them coming, (due in Curry's case to handspeed, not timing and patient cunning). I guess I meant that Curry campaigned largely at welter and never ventured too much higher. McCallum of course made several pitstops at middleweight after their meeting, never again returning to 154 and eventually moving up as far as Cruiser. Less than a year later he fought at 168 (higher than Curry ever climbed).

 

I don't see what's so ambiguous here...McCallum threw a little fake-out to the body with his right, and as Curry's hands came down, the hook came (ascending with its initial momentum in Curry's blind spot due to their body positioning) - and while looping it wasn't a slow punch by any means. He cased his man while stoically taking a beating (only he knows when he began to hatch his plan) and timed exactly how long it took to separate after each combination, then caught Curry with his feet planted, on the chin, from the side, with torque.

I'm a huge Curry nut - I'd have loved for him to have won this fight, or get a rematch and fought wiser en route to a wide UD or late corner retirement - but even I'll give McCallum 100% credit for this. He was the lesser man for thirteen minutes but the greater for the two most important seconds - and thus owned the night.