17 years ago today: Takefumi "Burning Fist" Sakata vs. Masaki "Trash" Nakanuma II

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Not as celebrated or well remembered as their first meeting nearly a year earlier, the rematch between these scrappy and teak-tough compatriots was no less fun a watch or diverting a scoring experiment. When the Japanese flyweight title was first passed from Sakata to Nakanuma, they were the main event of a card on major free-to-air network Teretō (in a battle that has been uploaded countless times on the internet.*). For the return engagement, they were tucked away on the much smaller G+, a subsidiary of rival NTV, and it would subsequently become far more difficult to find ex post facto (this partitioned DailyMotion embed in the OP might be the only version widely available).

Round 1: 10-9 Sakata, dominant with the jab, straight underhanded body combos, and some late right hands. Trash overly reliant on his jack-in-the-box leaping ambush left hook, and only ever grazing with it at best.
Round 2: 10-9 Sakata, much closer, staying consistent but getting hit with hooks as Nakanuma feints him into freewheeling exchanges and starts dropping in rights from long range, and thus ups his contact rate. 20-18 Sakata
Round 3: 10-9 Nakanuma, turned it around two minutes in with a wild left upper-hook crashing home from seemingly underground and relentlessly stayed locked on target, pressuring until the bell. 29-28 Sakata
Round 4: 10-9 Sakata, good busy comeback round, only allowing the champ the odd sidewinding body shot or right looped into the neck. 39-37 Sakata
Round 5: 10-9 Sakata, working off the jab, very tidy, Nakanuma letting himself get peppered on the ropes too much, but hurting Sakata with occasional full-swivel body scythes. 49-46 Sakata
Round 6: 10-9 Sakata, his jab still the cleanest and most reliably accurate thing landing, but Nakanuma is tricking him with dive-in body-fakes and clipping him with the odd windmilled bomb. 59-55 Sakata
Round 7: 10-9 Sakata, moving in and out, using diagonals in his footwork, doubling the jab to blind Nakanuma to his right - just emptying his bag of tricks and stymieing the champion, limiting him to intermittent mace-like swings and misses. 69-64 Sakata
Round 8: 10-9 Nakanuma, close, with Sakata starting out jabbing the holy hell out of the guard and sides of Trash, in control until about halfway in. Nakanuma comes on following a headbutt, scoring hard lefts downstairs and then clapping some more down across the jaw and chest. 78-74 Sakata
Round 9: 10-9 Nakanuma, still looking for that perfect gravity-assisted counter left hook to explode and land unseen - and he gets one a minute in...then another twenty seconds later. Sakata in trouble for a long while but weathers it like a pro and even manages to shoeshine down the stretch, but no prayer of stealing this round back . 87-84 Sakata
Round 10: 10-9 Sakata, slipping and counter-uppercutting in the pocket, finding a second wind and with it some crisp offensive work as Nakanuma just wings the same wide shots, tiring, landing a few haphazardly. 97-93 Sakata

Official scorecards:

Referee 97-95
Two judges 96-95 ea.

UD for Sakata.

Old boy in the ring with them must have, mathematically, scored two rounds 10-10, while the pair of arbiters sitting ringside found three apiece they couldn't split. I guess there were a few close ones in there, but there weren't any I was frantically biting my nails over.

I kinda wish these guys had rubber-matched, over twelve. As it stands, their paths diverged (with very unlike trajectories) and never crossed again.

Sakata for his part would defend the national 112lb title, once regained, just a single time before spending the rest of his career from 2004 until 2010 singularly focused on the WBA flyweight title. He would go 5-5 competing for some version of it over those half a dozen years (nudged to a positive 5-4 if you do him the favor of counting just the 'real' title fights and omitting the SD loss to Roberto Gaspar Vásquez Ramírez for the "interim" belt, later avenged...), obtained in a cathartic TKO victory over Lorenzo Parra having lost a pair of controversial majority decisions to him in his first couple of attempts.

Trash, meanwhile, spent just three more years in the ring after Sakata II - but he spent them ambitiously. He failed to capture the OPBF championship in a direct rebound, and then made it three on the skid in a failed challenge of Pongsaklek Wonjongkam for the WBC title (although he did acquit himself well and run Pong very close). He ultimately did become Oriental & Pacific king, upsetting young unbeaten Noriyuki Komatsu - but after using it to springboard into another world title bid (losing to Lorenzo Parra in his last successful defense before - small world - dropping to Sakata) he would pad the scoreboard versus a couple of Filipino journeymen and then retire.

(* there are several, but you know I'm going to plug my dudes over at the fantastic asianboxing.info site. In fact, they're so good that I expected them to have Sakata vs. Nakanuma I, and was confused/disappointed to learn it was the rare one they didn't...)

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Nobody else want to have a whack at scoring this? @Boxing Prospect, where you been?

 

Neither of these guys were close to best on the planet contemporarily, but they were the solid 'bang for you buck' for which the iron-forges-iron Japanese domestic scene is typically known.