Emanuel Steward sits firmly in your corner, i also have him in print somewhere saying something like it was a case of one guy throwing a punch with his eyes closed while the other guy caught it with his eyes closed. Certainly words to that effect - To Emanuel Steward, manager of Thomas Hearns, who Nunn wants to fight next, there were no surprises Monday night. Steward watched from ringside. "First of all, Nunn has never been a puncher," Steward said. "Nunn is a slapper. He's always been a slapper. That punch he knocked Kalambay out with was a one-in-a-million shot. The crowd didn't like him tonight, but I liked him. It was a tough fight, a survival fight, and he won it."
Again, no. I detest the word fluke. A man of Nunn's caliber had the ability to make world class opposition look inferior. Case in point.
What other sudden one punch Nunn ko's over similarly durable and skilled guys would you point to as proof it wasn't lucky or grossly out of the norm?
None. But it's not like he threw the shot with his eyes closed (Sergio/Williams II) or didn't go onto clown elite opposition in Tony.
It wasn't a fluke. The line that "if they fought ten times it wouldn't happen again", (a practical and hypothetical impossibility anyway), is a flawed argument. It probably could be believably applied to 50% of results and inside-the-ring events at least, between world class fighters. IF Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali fought 10 times, how many times would Frazier score a knockdown in the 15th round ? .... Must have been a fluke. It's an unncessary amount of guess work. The thing is, as fans we all seem to react badly to 1st round KOs. Especially when we rate the beaten man as a good fighter.
Why would the onus be on a fighter to replicate his best ever performance to prove something about that performance ? That's asking a lot. He did what he did. It was out of the norm. But then it was no normal fight. This was Nunn's biggest fight, right in his prime, and he rose to the occasion. There's nothing more to it. The "fluke" thing is wholly unnecessary.
Toney was hardly elite at the time tho, he was an unknown contender and a 20-1 underdog. The ko of Kalambay could barely be further left field. He was extremely durable and Nunn was hardly known for one punch power or stunning ko's.
The problem here is that some of you are taking "fluke" to be this grave insult or something, which is just bizarre to me. Especially when Unforgiven seems to have gone to the thesaurus in search of a synonym for that very word, to describe that fight himself......"out of the norm." Talk about hair-splitting . Why is everyone so afraid of this word, and so wanting to twist it's meaning? Weird. Anyway, onward and upward........
In the quote you provided he seemed to be pointing out that Nunn usually slapped with his punches and racked up the points, and the one-punch KO wasn't his usual modus operandum. He was actually defending Nunn for his subesquent performance, saying the slapping style was Nunn's normal style. The "one in a million shot" part makes no sense. What does it mean ? If Nunn had that opening against Kalambay a million times he'd only once land one KO punch ? Seriously? But somehow he managed to land it the first time ... it's ridiculous. If Steward believes that he's wrong.
I was replying to JT's comment "out of the norm". Actually I'm saying loads of big fights worth talking about are out of the norm. A GREAT performance is "out of the norm", that's why it's considered GREAT rather than ordinary. And I don't think the word "fluke" is being used here in that sense, nor in any sense other than to try to level up Kalambay's value against Nunn's, which is entirely unnecessary since Kalambay's record speaks for itself. I'm pretty sure that's the motivation. Fluke Noun An unlikely chance occurrence, especially a surprising piece of luck: Verb Achieve (something) by luck rather than skill. [url]https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/fluke[/url] Nunn's KO of Kalambay wasn't a "chance occurence", unless of course a boxer taking his chance to punch his opponent in the head - and achieving it - is considered such. It's absolutely what top level boxers do and expect to be done to them.