His next fight after Barrera, he didnt seem to give a toss in that either, lacklustre performance, but still easily beat him. Leaving Ingle was a massive mistake, he should have went back to Ingle after the Barrera fight, he would have been the best trainer to get him motivated, but instead chose to leave boxing.
I dont think Hamed had past his prime, he is the same age as Junior Witter, just that he lost his motivation or thought he could get by, by doing the mininum.
I hear people say that he would have been different if he'd stayed with Brendan, but ffs, why is it that a fighter automatically forgets everything he's ever learned when he drops his trainer? What a load of crap. If a fighter has any natural ability he will get the job done regardless of dropping his trainer. It's a **** excuse for what was a dire performance against a true great, and someone he stood no chance against, prime or not. MAB.
Can we ****in leave Hamed alone!!! I have never seen anyone ressurected in these forums quite like him as if he was freakin SSR. OK OK he beats everyone MAB, PAC, JMM, Erik..but still why keep talking about him like hes some kind of legend
Only started the thread because I genuinely didn't know the answer - if you dont want to fuel the debate why dont you just ignore the thread ?? Radical thinking I know !!
Funny but people talk about the supposed deterioration of his talents around the same time that the level of his opposition was climbing up. I'm sure Edwin Valero's fearsome talents will erode once he picks on Soto, Guzman, Juarez or even Raheem. He takes on Mosquera and he gets his ass on the canvas and gets extended 10 rounds. He picks on feather-fisted Honmo and was in danger of losing the bout until the ref decided to chicken-out and stop it prematurely due to a cut on the Japanese. I'm thinking there's a parallel here.
It's not about his boxing as much as it's about his image or personality. He's the guy you either loved or hated, much like how Ali was in his early days, pre-exile. He's going to keep cropping up here because of this. There's also the fact that the Barrera fight was in 2001 -- nowhere near as long ago as it feels, and so the shadow he cast is still far from gone. In regard to the buildup to the fight, there is also footage of Hamed playing on the playstation and making sure his haircut was perfect instead of training, and his sparring was downright awful. He's never been technically good in any sense, but he was especially bad in that footage -- he was trying to KO his sparring partners with big, single shot bombs rather than actually box them. He was jumping into them, swinging like a drunk, and sometimes he got tangled up with them and they nearly fell over. After the sparring there is also footage of Manny Steward looking utterly dismal about it all, and commenting that he didn't like Hamed's sparring at all. There is footage of Hamed dancing or screwing around while doing ab work and the speed bag, and you never quite get the sense that he's taking anything seriously. There was also mention of the fact that Hamed barely sparred at all in his training camp, and so that horrible session that was recorded was most likely one of the very few. You can see a lot of this stuff in the Little Prince, Big Fight documentary.
Hamed's sparring was embarrassing. The amount of times he ended up headbutting the other guy was amazing, it was so wild and hard to watch.