Michael Nunn's KO over Sumbu Kalambay

I remember reading in a tabloid newspaper a couple of days before the Lewis-McCall fight McCall saying he'd knock Lewis out when Lewis throws a right hand by throwing his own right hand, exploiting a flaw in Lewis's defence.
To me that looked exactly what happened.

So, maybe a "well-planned fluke" or else Oliver McCall was possessed by some divine spirit and prophesizing unforseeable future events when he said that.

 

There was nothing in the Nunn-Kalambay fight to show Nunn wasn't being as cautious as he'd been against Frank Tate et al.
He hit Sumbu hard, that's all. He didn't put himself in any uncharacteristic danger to do so, he had a perfect angle to deliver the punch, and he did it.
It's there on film.
It's not as if Nunn suddenly went all Foreman-esque for this fight, throwing bombs from some new-fangled stance and aggressive style and achieving some unlikely success.
He boxed , and happened to put a nice bit of starch on a counter punch, which proved successful because it landed flush.
There's nothing more to it.

 

It has nothing to do with styles. I'm talking about the result. What other title fight involving Michael Nunn ended in the first round?

THAT is what the fluke is.

 

Don't remember what caused the knock-downs in Kalule-Kalambay, but it stands to reason that Nunn and his camp watched that fight carefully and maybe they noticed that Sumbu tended to place his left fort wrong and prepared for that. If that's the case, it certainly gets harder to argue it was a fluke.

For example, I don't think it was a coincidence that Tyson dropped Williams like he did in the first. He must have seen that he dropped his right when throwing the jab and practiced extra with the counter he then used.

 

He was fighter of the year in 91 BECAUSE of the Nunn stoppage, and he then followed it with 3 rapid fire defenses.

As stated, he was somewhat of of unknown contender going into the Nunn fght and a 20-1 underdog. Let me know if you somehow still do not understand because it was pretty easy to follow the first time.

 

"Seemed to" being the relevant description. You are making your own interpretation of what he said.

Using a bit of common sense i am going to go out on a limb and say he was using the phrase for emphasis on just how freakish of a happening it was. The phrase is used all the time.

 

Exactly.

 

Because everyone hangs off Sumbu's nuts. He's one of the least loved and heralded fighters around here. It's a shame Mantequilla doesn't post here anymore, he would be going for the jugular.

 

Opportunity presented, Opportunity acepted. If Sambu or any other fighter was presented in the same scenario any round of a fight and Michael tagged them flush, one. would it drop them ?, 2. Would they be able to continue?.

 

When I saw this had reached six pages, I figured someone Harry Greb had been inserted and it had gotten on a tangent about whether Greb had actually ducked both these guys while simultaneously hiding from Primo Carnera.

Anyway, I gather the debate over whether it was a fluke and whether that's an offensive or denigrating term to apply to this result comes from the part of the definition that involves luck.

To me, a fluke is like if a punter drops the snap in a football game, picks it up and blindly heaves it as far as he can throw it, and someone happens to be there to catch it and take it for a touchdown. This wasn't exactly that.

I'll go with the adage that luck is where preparation meets opportunity. In that sense, Nunn was lucky to land this "fluke" punch.

 

Okay. I was wondering about this. I thought perhaps the fluke was the fact of the "one punch KO", which are relatively unusual or slightly rare. Maybe all (or most) one-punch KOs are "flukes" ? I don't think so, my opinion differs..

But if it's the fact that it ended in the first round, there's no real answer to that. I don't think there's anything more flukey about scoring a one-punch KO in round 1 than there is in round 5 or 6 or 9. In fact the first round might be the most vulnerable round for a lot of durable skilled fighters, in theory.
And I think one punch KOs are something that every fighter is always aware of. If you leave yourself wide open and not in a position to see that punch coming, it can happen.

I'm starting to see that perhaps the list of "flukes" under your criteria must be very lengthy.

 

As an experienced skilled southpaw fighter Michael Nunn would be well practiced in capitalizing on these angles when they present themselves.

Just because we haven't seen or can't remember Nunn doing it so well in a professional fight (and certainly not against someone half as good as Kalmabay) doesn't mean it's not the result of years of practice, combined with specific training that made him sharper than he'd ever been.
It was the best punch he ever threw. But to me, that doesn't make it a fluke. One has to be the best.
It was the opportunity fighters plan for. He took it. It landed perfectly.

The fact that it happened in the first round, to me, seems perfectly natural.
Since the first round is before a fighter like Kalambay would find his full rhythm and measure, and be more likely to make that error, and less warmed-up physically to recover from the shock of the impact.

It's what we saw. The footage is self-explanatory.

 

So a hyperbolic phrase from Emanuel Steward is all you've got there.
If you find my explanations and opinions on why the fight isn't a fluke mistaken, that's fair enough.

Of course, no one needs to be told that Nunn didn't routinely knock guys out with 1 punch in the first round.
That seems to be why people say "fluke", but if that's he criterion for a fluke, there are a lot of flukes.

 

Sumbu Kalambay is well-respected by everyone here who knows boxing.
Kalambay was a brilliant operator.

If he was less well-regarded, I doubt anyone would be calling this a "fluke".

 

These posts sum up the position entirely, and the agenda to cushion Sumbu Kalambay is explicit.
It couldn't be expressed more clearly.

"no one can sit there and truthfully say that Nunn was THAT much better than Kalambay. Some could very well (and successfully) argue the exact opposite, regardless of what happened that night"

Like I said in a previous post, most of us fans react badly to 1st round KOs, and it's irrational.

salsanchezfan is consistent with the view though, because apparently "most fights that feature two true world-class fighters and happen to end in a one-round KO are flukes."

This confirms what I say about how fans are disturbed by 1st round KOs and it also shows how consistent salsanchezfan is with his view of what a fluke is.
So, it's really a sharply different view of what constitutes a fluke.