Not off their tits but feel free to mention that if you like. Honorable mentions go to Aaron Pryor vs Alexis Arguello ( or maybe both were? ) but where something was just wrong. Like a bad weight cut ( Erol Spence anybody? ) or a bad nights sleep etc. **** sleep can play a massive factor. On sleep and I read in Kostya Tszyu's book that in the amateurs his coach made him stay up all night not letting him sleep. Kostya won the fight. After the fight his coach said to him '' see. You didn't sleep at all yet you beat him. Remember this for later on in your career if it happens that you don't sleep before your fight, that you won without it '' Gotta love the Russians. I remember one fight Oscar had at the end of one of the rounds in his corner he said he couldn't move his legs. Maybe against Sturm. That **** can and does happen amongst many other things. Fighters being weight drained very common. Which fights stick out to you where one dude looked out of sorts?
Tomasz Adamek vs Chad Dawson. Came to the ring looking like a skeleton, then literally didn't do anything in there even when he had opportunities to do so. Ended up moving up to CW the very next fight and looked a million times better.
Povetkin in the rematch vs Whyte. He looked like a deer on ice and promptly retired despite knocking out Whyte only six months earlier. Of course he'd had Covid in between bouts.
Wasn't he also out and about at parties during the time he was allegedly laid up with covid. He must have had the same strain of the virus that Fury had. ;-)
I'll add Zhang v Forrest As someone who had kidney troubles toward the end of when I was competing in sport, I legit believe the reports that Zhang was experiencing renal failure during that fight.
Froch in the first Kessler fight. I was rooting for Kessler in that fight and at the time thought Froch was a KO waiting to happen but despite that my impression after that fight was Froch didn't show up. There were opportunities he had in that fight where he simply gave rounds up and didn't do enough. There were openings and instead of doing what he usually did and exploit them, he just didn't do it. Afterwards I learned of all the travel hassle he had getting to the venue due to the volcano ash grounding flights and it kind of made sense. While he wasn't massively off, I do think he didn't give a good account of himself in that fight. I actually gained some respect for Froch after that loss, I expected him to get KO'ed and even though he looked out of sorts made it a very close fight, despite that. It made me question my initial assessment of him.
Yeah, people bash Golota for that "performance", but the lidocaine shot (for a bad knee) he received before it was a real and extremely serious issue. It's strange how even boxing fans are seldom even aware of it or dismiss it as insignificant. Adverse effects of lidocaine include dizziness, blurred vision and seizures and that's what we really saw when he was getting up from the Lewis knockdown (the deer in headlights look), I think. He looked like something was off with his nervous system, not just hurt, I've never seen anyone react to a knockdown that way, before or since. In the locker room after the fight he actually had a seizure, stopped breathing and lost a pulse for 30 seconds, had to be resuscitated. He got 1mln $ of out of court settlement from the doctor for that. I'm not saying he wouldn't lose to Lewis anyway, I don't know about that, but Lewis was certainly saved from a lot more trouble that night. What happened didn't reflect the difference between their levels at all as they were quite similar at the time, I believe.
Wlad vs Brewster I. I have never seen a fighter lose energy from one round to another in that manner.
AJ Ruiz 1 Late ring walk (never happens) Neck massages in the ring Joshua looking and behaving very odd in the ring