42 years ago today: "Marvelous" Marvin Nathaniel Hagler vs. Vito "Mosquito" Gabriele Antuofermo II

This content is protected

...and just like that, unsatisfying as the result's exact circumstances may have been, all of the blemishes The Marvelous One's record had accrued in the seventies were officially reconciled. Sugar Ray Seales, man in the opposite corner for that first draw before Antuofermo? Destroyed in under ninety seconds in '79. Boogaloo Watts and Willie Monroe both defeated Hag in 1976, and the constantly self-motivated and improving fighter collected from both his pound of flesh with vicious stoppage victories - in the latter's case, twice over. The man was, IMO, second only to Joe Louis in the running to bear mantle of all-time rematch GOAT. He won a dozen of them, eleven of those by stoppage and the other by disqualification. If only his career swansong had come with an opportunity to make it thirteen rematch victories...

Here, of course a cut from a butt isn't the way he ideally wanted to distinguish himself from his rival, fellow Hellenic deity statue come to life (Antuofermo quite a specimen himself but with a physique still only 80% as sculpted as Hagler's), and, effectively, foreign exchange student (Hagler born in the northeastern USA but emigrating to Italy after retirement; Antuofermo doing the inverse). That said, he was dialed in on the night and prime Hagler in 1981 likely isn't losing to any middleweight - not even one that had put him through his paces in the second half of their first encounter a couple of years earlier. Regardless of the narrative those crooks Panama Lewis and Freddie Brown tried spinning, the head clash and its consequences were solely Vito's fault. Purely accidental, but leading with your forward-tilting noggin versus a mirror-handed opponent who is known (to general audiences but also to you personally from twelve prior rounds' experience) for combining a left uppercut on the body with his right jab, when you are yourself a notorious bleeder - is unwise, to put it mildly.

As the commentators said, the contest was essentially over 45 seconds in with the rest an increasingly violent & senseless formality (it did yield a beaut of a knockdown in R3 off that short driving left to Vito's nose that he never saw coming as he recklessly barged in just the way he did in the sequence that produced the original cut) but even had it not shaken out that way the outcome was inevitable. The draw was going to be avenged by one route or another. Hagler, with eight years of seasoning and fine-tuning, was hungry - you can practically see him salivating at the mirage of paydays to come versus Hamsho, Leonard and Hearns. Meanwhile, the gritty Pugliese had experienced almost constant demoralization since the draw with Hagler - suffering consecutive losses to Alan Minter and then ignominiously getting put on the canvas twice in his comeback bout versus unheralded Mexican journeyman (and later, junkie & murderer) Mauricio "El Gato" Aldana Acosta.

For posterity's sake you might have wanted to see this made into a trilogy, just so there could be one clean and uncontroversial ending, but there was no doubt in the minds of anybody at my city's erstwhile Garden nor anybody watching the HBO broadcast live or since that bigger & brighter things awaited the champion. As he put it himself, "The Mosquito" had been swatted, it counted in the record books and that was good enough for him to keep his cold gaze fixed ahead.