Just over 7½ weeks ago, Saúl "Canelo" Álvarez experienced his biggest - and most arduous h- lesson to date in coping with the world class application of the sweetest of sciences' cardinal rule: hit & don't get hit. Previously he received a taste of this versus Austin "No Doubt" Trout, and his pair of early career decisions over Miguel Ángel "El Titere" Vázquez - 3 fights he arguably could have lost. It wouldn't be until the prime Mexican star found himself chasing a smaller, older, gradually-declining Pretty Boy, however (forget this newfangled "Money" bull****, I refuse to indulge that nonsense, hopefully it doesn't stick; PBF >>>> Money) that he truly felt like a clumsy lummox for the first time since debuting 8 years ago, midway through his teens. He swung, and missed. Over & over. I didn't give him a single round, and was gobsmacked by CJ Ross finding half a dozen for him to render a draw, and throw a spanner in the works of what ought to have been a wide UD for Mayweather. Despite the small moral victory of Ross' (truly egregious) scorecard, this had to have been an embarrassing moment for Saúl. He put his all into this, his opportunity to seize the baton from the previous era's PPV king and establish himself as the rightful successor with a bold statement penned in blood, a display of ruthless aggression taking an old dog out to pasture and finally giving audiences worldwide the humbling loss they'd been wanting to see for the better part of two decades now. Instead he was made to look amateurish. His offense was thwarted at every turn, and he was forced to expend more force while landing fewer punches than probably ever before. It sucks. And I can relate. That same weekend, I fought in a smoker at my gym. I was matched with somebody they figured would be pretty easy for me to shine against despite my dearth of experience, with it being my unofficial 'debut' (not a sanctioned amateur contest, but also not just a "friendly" intramural spar - be it light or hard - with my own gym mates). He was some Irish kid, fresh off the boat from the Emerald Isle, named Stephen McClellan. His coach and mine were friends-of-friends so it was just a handshake arrangement. His lack of physical gifts or aptitude was supposed to cancel out my greenness. Unlike me, he was a feather-fist, slow-handed, with a pretty basic style. His game plan coming in was to avoid my left hook, which he probably had been advised was formidable given the scuttlebutt coming from my gym. Well, day of the fight, I came in with a bad cold and my nose - running with snot every few seconds - having been shattered in sparring less than a fortnight earlier (and then re-aggravated every time I had stepped in the ring since, the final time busted open by a glancing jab). So, the longer this went, I reasoned while pacing around like a caged tiger before my bout, the worse it was going to get for me. I had to knock this kid out in a hurry, before my schnoz filled with plasma like the bottom half of an hourglass - which could very well be a matter of minutes, let alone rounds. I never laid a single hook on him. With a minimalist application of spoiling tactics - just a lean or dip here, a sliding backward step there, nothing wasted - he magically transformed into Neo from the Matrix. Of course, my inability to breathe and mounting frustration didn't help matters - soon I was furiously hacking & slashing with heavily loaded, telegraphed solo blasts, throwing all my training, all the ABC's of boxing out the window. The fatigue quickly set in and I was trapped on a conveyor belt, dragging me involuntarily face-first into a stream of squirt-gun counter jabs - most connecting bluntly on my damaged cartilage & nasal tissue. This amounted to a vicious cycle of my ineffective aggression thwarted by his refusal to engage. We did three rounds, and to be perfectly honest I got schooled all three. Our master of ceremonies for the smoker happened to be my gym's owner (it was a fundraiser event, because the place is falling apart) - who very charitably ruled it a "draw" after the last bell, to my great embarrassment. McClellan, very classy fellow, walks up to me, no sour grapes, just a quick handshake and leans in to whisper in my ear with a heavy brogue "that's one hell of a right hand you got, brother, shook me to my socks..." My...right? :huh I don't even have much of a RH to speak of, I thought. I'd long since accepted being your archetypal one-handed fighter - I had a decent jab, a thunderous hook, and...that was about it. Other than maybe uppercuts and stray incidental shoeshines during body combos on the inside, my right had always been kept sheathed during sparring. Early on some coach had told me that my hook was far more powerful than my cross, so I ended up neglecting it. But these words resonated...and the fog began to lift. I swam downstream, through all the frothing wake of adrenaline, into my short-term memories of the ordeal that had just concluded, and began to remember that in that final round, yes, I started to absolutely smack the bejeezus outta McClellan - exclusively with my right. I'd kept spamming it, line-drive style, in the vague direction of my taller opponent's head - and there was nothing he could do about it! No amount of slinky/bendy movement could get him entirely clear of harm's way. His advantage in height actually began to work against him, because when he did try doubling his big monolithic target self over, I didn't give a damn, I just belted him with rabbit punches... Now, had these instincts (really one can't even call it "strategy" in a conscious sense for which you could give me any credit; it was total muscle-memory) kicked in during the first or second rounds, I remain convinced that I would have thrashed McClellan from pillar to post. Maybe forced his coach to chuck in the white towel. No sour grapes, I just do really believe that. Oh well. C'est la vie. The point is, for people with a proven modicum of realistic KO power, this is a possible road (though not a generally advisable one, from a strategic POV) to hunt down negative & slippery prey in the ring. You can pull it off if you have this particular tool in your tool-belt: https://www.boxingforum24.com/threa...g-sloppy-but-effective-overhand-right.400920/ ...and happen to get incredibly lucky. You shouldn't count on that bailing you out, however, unless you're okay with being soundly outpointed - and made to look foolish - 9 times of 10 at least. Really there are 3 principles one should abide when faced with a N.A.S.T.Y. (Negative Ass Spoiling Tricky You-Can't-Touch-Dis) individual: Don't panic. Do something. Avoid the sunk cost fallacy! 1. Don't panic. Seems pretty straightforward advice (nod to Douglas Adams for basically summarizing in three syllables - or at least popularizing, if not coining that expression - the most terse and effective advice that is almost universally applicable to every scenario), but you'd be surprised how difficult this can be to comply with under fight conditions. You already feel you're under immense pressure, having a crowd (whether a smoker with a few dozen lawn chairs strewn about your gym, or a sold out HBO WCB main event at Madison Square Garden or the MGM Grand) is a completely different animal than just sparring in with naught but your coach's and training partners' eyes on you. Every little error is under a magnifying glass, and not only are you conscious of it, but you can't help knowing that everybody outside the ring - including, most importantly, the judges - is also conscious of it. This isn't like being first chair in a symphony orchestra, where a stray note on your violin can be glossed over if you pick up in the right place a moment later, and your gaffe is sort of drowned in what all the other instrumentalists are doing. No, you're in that hot seat at the center of the panopticon solo, all eyes on you. Boxing is a strain of pressure unlike any other. You're putting your manhood on the line. Everybody observes you in a 1-on-1 struggle that is more viscerally about dominance than any other sport (and sports are really just conduits for 'civilized' humans to redirect some of those super aggressive pack supremacy instincts that when vented in more toxic ways amount to antisocial behavior) - and on top of that you now have the man in the other corner going out of his goddamn way to make you look bad, on purpose? That's maddening. It truly is. But just...chill. Don't let it get to you. :yep 2. Do something. Don't "chill" too much. DITH Syndrome (Deer In The Headlights) can strike in these circumstances, and the paralytic effects of nervous indecision, without being self-examined and neutralized, can be no less immobilizing than actual spinal cord trauma. Some people, all the more if predisposed to anxiety in daily life, can get stuck on that infinitely spinning hamster wheel and never feel the moment is right to jump off. You see this quite often: a fighter with a usually come-forward style, begin to just stand pat and maybe twirl like a weathervane facing up to a fleet-footed, slippery, hug-prone, or else-wise negative opponent but not attempting to cut off the ring, work the body, or anything else that a coach might (and usually does) advise in that situation. They just freeze. That's a psychological force in effect, no less debilitating than hardened cement around one's ankles. 3. Avoid the sunk cost fallacy! "Oh god, nothing's working, judges are now biased against me; they already think I'm some wild buffoon, their vision might grow selective, they might only see ½ my connections, or assume they're not as flush as they are, or..." - stop. Get outta that head-space, or you'll end up going full-on Leeroy Jenkins.
This becomes cyclical. A fighter will fail to comply with #3, which in turn renders them unable to comply with #1, and then like dominoes #2 is toppled. Somebody will be walking that fine tightrope between not violating the first two rules, and more and more time will go by, and they begin to grow conscious of that and overthink all that wasted time and ineffectiveness as perceived by the judges, and feel they need to "compensate" for that, falling prey to pitfall #3. It happened to me. I knew my breathing was compromised, and that my shots were getting slower & slower with every lunge and miss. So I would make a mindful effort to center myself, find an internal "zen" place and plot out each movement, without ever just sitting there doing nothing but eat McClellan's pot-shots. But nothing I tried worked, and he just tattooed my face with jabs and was unreachable whenever I was able to hoist up my increasingly heavy arms to retaliate. After two rounds, I was very much hyper aware of being two rounds in the hole, and thus got desperate to just bushwhack him with something big, on principle. It almost worked, he admitted I stung him a few times...but it ultimately was too little too late. And had I started blindly throwing haymakers like that in the 1st or 2nd, it would have just resulted in me gassing out and needing to quit with my nose filling with blood and causing me to feel it was impossible to draw a full inhalation for as long as half a minute at once. So what's the answer? How does one handle negativity in the ring? The answer is that, in fact, no answer exists, at least not any sort of all-purpose one-size-fits-all contextually-transcendent answer. Sorry. :conf Watching boxing telecasts you will often see commentators levy the criticism that a particular fighter, in their mounting frustrations, has "gone away from the game plan". Just as often you hear the seemingly contradictory opprobrium that a fighter in that position is just beating their head against the wall trying something over & over that has proven not to work. So how does one know which is the correct path, in the moment, when you are the one laced up and trading punches under the bright lights in front of a roaring audience? You feel it out. It depends. You need to be adaptive, which not everyone can be. Not everyone has what being a fighter takes. I'm not talking about speed or power, I mean the mental side of the game. You need discipline, yes, and to be able to ignore pain and potentially the sight of your own blood trickling down into your field of vision (or tasting it on your tongue, or feeling your sinus cavities swell up with its runoff), yes. But you also need a steady head on your shoulders. You need to be able to calmly & critically act, think, and react on the fly. This ability can be learned, but is extraordinarily difficult to acquire if you're not born with at least some innate vestige of it. Theoretically, by the moment you set foot in the ring, you've drilled every contingency a thousandfold over. You've built up your muscle-memory so that it can take over when it counts, so you're never left just floundering with no clue what to do and feeling too discombobulated to start thinking strategy in the blink of an eye whilst defending yourself from another man's fists cushioned only by a thin layer of cowhide/goatskin/vinyl and horsehair (or latex foam). You must trust in your own abilities, your own reactive instincts, and whatever program your coach has instilled within you, lodged in the deep recesses of your reptile brain through endless, tiresome repetition in the gymnasium long before you're deemed ready for competition. You need to, like that Demi Lovato song everyone's been going bananas over all week to promote that new Disney movie, "Let it go" - that is, all your inhibitions and doubts. You need to not worry about choosing the wrong course of action, but also not just take a swing for the sake of taking one, because that is also in a way overthinking it as much as staying petrified in one spot and studying every microscopic twitch of your opponent's body. You need to be like water, seeking a path through sluices to where it can expand freely. You need to remember every moment that your coach had a sparring partner drill spoiling tactics against you, with you in the role of the person that needs to "deal with it", and remember - not in a cognitive sense, thinking in abstract terms, but remember the feel of - whatever you ultimately managed to do to lay a glove on him, through however much trial & error, because if your coach was any good he wouldn't let up and permit either of you stop until you had begun to land a bit. This is how you negate the aforementioned unholy trinity of pitfalls. You don't panic, you stay calm, you treat it just like sparring, in that you allow yourself to feel no more pressure than when your coach expects you to grasp the lesson of the day. You plug away until you get the desired result. You don't just attack willy-nilly. You make an educated guess, try it out, and return to square one if you don't score a meaningful effective punch. Then, most importantly of all, you do not get discouraged when this fails to yield anything fruitful. You trust your training, your instincts, your muscle-memory, and you just plug away, by process of elimination, without dwelling too much on what you're going to do in the next moment, until something does work. This requires a special type of concentration and mastery of those nagging voices that so frequently lead us astray. Precious few people have it, and even a great many elite boxers, even world titlists, are lacking it as well. Canelo better hope that Austin Trout beats Erislandy Lara this December, because all his previous encounters with strategic willful negativity & spoiling (which Lara is far more well-versed in than Mayweather, let alone Trout) have shown that he doesn't possess that sort of mindfulness - at least not yet, at this point in his career. He is rumored to be facing the winner next year. In a rematch with Trout he can get the benefit of the doubt from munificent judges again. Lara, however, would completely befuddle him, and might not lose a minute, never mind a round.
Non-exhaustive list of some performances in example of, and general practitioners of, various N.A.S.T.Y. habits, a rogue's gallery of so-called runners, clinchers, and other experts at turning a fight into a non-fight: Calzaghe vs. Kessler/Lacy Dirrell vs. Stevens/Froch Ler vs. Arce B-Hop Cory Spinks Carlos Molina Iván Calderón Guillermo Rigondeaux Erislandy Lara John Ruiz Andre Ward Joan Guzmán Richar Abril Luis Alberto Lazarte etc. Watch their fights. Specifically watch their losses. Check for what opponents were able to do to counteract their negativity or skirt its harmful impact. Note the adaptability they have in common...
