Are you serious? According to whom? Boxers won't let themselves get knocked out or hit clean by a guy coming up two weight classes (who hadn't knocked out angone at 154lbs and 160lbs apart from chinny 140lber Khan and nobody Kirkland) for millions of dollars? You want to explain why that is funny? Are you acting like boxing hasn't been corrupt since its inception? Are you that naive? Okay this is what I call a cop out response. You have no argument but to call it nonsense. Go on below I've quoted my post. Please claim where I'm wrong. And I'll provide a response back. I've set out my claim that it is a fix. I've provided my reasoning. You claim it wasn't and essentially refer to the judges or what was seen on TV (which by anyone eyes with sense, was a light spar). Your claim that it wasn't a fix is no more worthy than my claim it was a fix. The only difference is I've backed my claim up. You haven't. You've just said its nonsense. Which is something a person completely set in their views would syay.
No, I'm not acting like boxing hasn't been corrupt since its inception. I've got shelves full of books documenting as much. Boxing history is littered with confirmed (or practically confirmed) dives, and none of them looked nearly as convincing as that. If you were such a scholar of corruption in boxing, you'd know that dives arouse mass suspicion precisely because they don't tend to look very convincing. The reason they don't tend to look very convincing is they require simulation on the part of the sap taking the dive. The reason they require simulation on the part of the sap taking the dive is because nobody, not even a tough guy, wants to just let another guy hit them clean and hard enough to put them to sleep. A guy might drop his hands and get KTFO à la Peden-Campbell I — that's mistimed showboating, not an intention to take a clean shot and get laid out. Even a crazy like Mayorga made a point of riding the free shots he gave away. You might retort that you'd be willing to get slept for a million bucks, but, the reality is, when the time came, you'd be looking to lay down from a scuffing blow and do your best acting job. (Then again, a scuffing blow probably would be enough to put you to sleep, but that's another matter.) Nobody actually steps into a ring with the intention of getting his lights put out, even if he's being paid to take a dive. The clue is in the expression itself, taking a dive. You're not expected to let the guy discombobulate you, you're expected to make it look like the guy discombobulated you. Then factor in that we're not talking about any old sap here. We're talking about a proud, three-time champion. Top guys are the last guys to take dives, precisely because they've spent their careers pushing themselves to the pinnacle. It's not in their nature to lay down like a bum. Ask Jake LaMotta, who — not wanting to be a sap, but having very little choice in the matter if he wanted a shot at the middleweight title — made such a mess of his reluctant dive as to evoke the derision of everyone who bought a ticket for his bout with Billy Fox. Exactly where in that sequence is Kovalev allowing Álvarez to hit him? He's visibly fatiguing as he tries to box and keep Canelo at bay with his jab. Canelo beats Kovalev's guard down with a partially landed left-right combination, before using his forearm to line up a clean follow-up right. Kovalev does half a little dance before collecting himself, prodding the jab out (limp and ineffectual due to fatigue), then covering up in anticipation of another assault. Canelo initially shapes to shoot downstairs, then alters the hook's trajectory as Kovalev bends in to protect the body (a tendency Canelo has observed from the previous assault), bringing it up and behind the right glove of Sergey, who is too hurt by the punch to capably defend himself thereafter. Kovalev isn't an actor, nor a stuntman. He got tired, then he got finished off by a guy who knew how to place his punches. There's a reason you're the only individual I've come across who thinks he allowed himself to get KTFO. You talk about punching power like a child, besides. As if Canelo's failure to KO Golovkin is tantamount to being incapable of putting hurt on a badly fatigued light heavyweight with multiple accurate shots in a short frame of time. Kovalev wasn't putting enough into his shots or getting in and out enough for your liking, okay. Yet and still, despite this conservatism, he was exhausted by the 11th round. Did you never consider that a fighter with exposed stamina issues and a noted vulnerability to body shots might elect to moderate his exertion as much as competitively possible and bank on racking up points behind a busy jab, instead of starting out throwing heavy leather at a tough, defensively responsible fighter and leaving himself at risk of being spent by the middle rounds? We're not talking about Kovalev in his pomp. We're talking about a guy whose confidence in his durability and endurance (and, to some extent, his power) had been dented. Cherry-pick, yeah. Fixed fight, no. Nobody gives a damn about Avni Yildirim. Sure, he came to lose, but because he's a bum ([url]and I don't use the term lightly[/url]), not because the fight was fixed. Guy was never anything but a keep-busy snack for Canelo. Nobody touts him as a significant scalp. Callum Smith married a workaday skillset to great size at the weight, which was enough to get him so far in a mostly humdrum super middleweight division. He disposed of an old, broken George Groves and arguably lost to John Ryder in his most notable assignments. He had very little to offer Canelo and spent the night in survival mode, which shouldn't have been a shock to anyone who'd ever watched Callum Smith. That's not a fixed fight, that's Callum Smith being a deeply limited fighter. Still, as a result of catching Groves at the right time, he had a belt to sell. Plant fought kinda leery, seemed somewhat awed/intimidated, but did okay in spite of it. Guy actually had his best round a couple sessions before he got knocked out. It's worth noting that very few here were giving him a hope in hell of winning the fight. You were expecting a 168 lb Mayweather to turn up? Bivol had some assertive moments, but he wasn't exactly breathing fire throughout Saturday night. He was measured, restrained, fought mostly within himself. There were plenty passages that you'd probably describe as glorified sparring. Bivol won most of the rounds, however, because the marriage of size and freshness with pragmatism and considerable technical skill was a more effective compound than Smith or Plant had to offer. I just gave you the courtesy of an extended reply, but do you really wonder why anyone might pass on addressing your crude argument in favor of issuing you a summary dismissal? Others have attempted to reason with you prior to our conversation, only for you to remain not just "completely set" in your views, but belligerently so. You want to begin exchanges with disproportionate statements ("If you can't spot the obvious cherrypicking you are ****ing stupid"), but you also want to be taken seriously as a correspondent. Go figure.
