Curry / Brooks was a true fight of hatred over a girl. Ward / Gatti was a professional fight. Since Curry got the girl, then I think he won the bigger prize.
I just finished watching Curry-Brooks... I will venture to say that I may never have witnessed such an impressive display of counterpunching than in this fight... Definitely in the top five. It was shocking to hear Clancy say he had Curry up by one round at the beginning of the 7th; I had Curry winning every round by countering the crap out of Brooks just about whenever he would try something meaningful, which was every three seconds, approximately... I can't conceive of anyone giving any round to Brooks, but maybe I'm just biased toward clean, sharp counterpunching while the other guy misses widely... It seemed every time Brooks was getting his foot in the door to do something, he'd get creamed with a counter... And it wasn't just one counter; he was being countered with just about everything in the book... The disparity in class was amazing. And to top it off, for the finish in the 9th, he hit him with the "Zale" (my pet name for this combination): a right to the body, left hook to the head- and that was a counter combination off a Brooks left to the body, right to the head! Gatti-Ward was contested on the same level; there wasn't much to choose between them- Curry-Brooks was a comprehensive ass-whipping. You could insert Brooks in the place of either Gatti or Ward in that fight and you would have a war- Curry beats the asses of both Gatti and Ward. It would be about as competitive.
