THE WAR ZONE II: Revisiting Classics, Revisited (Vol. 3 - Masahiko Harada vs. José Medel Navarro I)

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This is the much less remembered first encounter between then WBA 3rd-ranked contender "El Huitlacoche" and the "Fighting" man of Tokyo.

Harada led after five on all three official scorecards (ref + two judges) as well as that of the United Press International. This was thanks mostly to a full-blown wedge-formation assault orchestrated by the local fighter in what he may have been hoping would prove to be an overwhelming blitzkrieg. He may have invested too much into the gambit of that assault, too early...and may have underestimated the ability of the Mexican to mount a highly effective counteroffensive during his refractory period.

Dem body hooks, doe! Things of crystalline beauty while they lasted. Practically low-slung enough to be scraping the canvas, and with nary a heartbeat in between their percussive impacts, Harada wisely began to put cracks in the lankier Medal's foundation early & often, giving him no room nor time for getting set with a proper sniper's look as his style was apt to dictate. It was a good strategy, had it been sustainable...or had there been a contingency plan for Harada to switch gears and lay relatively low after emptying his first clips of ammunition. Instead he began an ill-advised campaign of darting in & out to instigate a jabbing duel against somebody with a very sharp jab and 3½″ reach advantage to boot.

By the final bell of round 3, even Lil Butt (my precocious progeny, who turns seven years old this Saturday) said "the shorter guy started out good but now I think maybe the other guy in the black trunks will knock him out...does he??" (LB already KSAB, just intuitively. s'in the blood...)...and, with attention spans being what they are for that age range, he couldn't even stand ten minutes' worth of suspense and insisted on me fast-forwarding until the very end so he could see his prediction ultimately proven correct.

Not that all that much exists to skip. The fourth round is missing from the surviving extant footage, which sucks. Contemporary reports have it very closely mirroring the action of the 5th, which is to say that Harada is widely considered to have brought the superior hustle. I personally feel the fifth was rather close, although I can see why Harada enthusiasts would see it as the ideal expression of his swarming method. Entering the sixth one could have a scoring array ranging from a 49-46 card for Harada (with a pair of victorious rounds sandwiching the third) or a 48-47 card for Medel (sweeping the 4th-6th), depending on whether you prefer the former's volume with his gearstick constantly shifted into overdrive and pummeling away on just a precarious balancing point on the ball of each foot ...or the latter's fine-edged jabs and windshield-wiper counter combos pasted in with diligent patience while backed against the ropes.

Much like his fictional yet equally beloved "compatriot" Eevee from the Pokémon video game franchise (an intellectual property that would, decades later, rank among the chief pop cultural exports of Harada's nation ...and hold millions of children under its thrall, Lil Butt included) the offense Harada meted out in the first 2½ sessions may have produced a "recoil" effect...both forcing a slowdown and making him susceptible to Medel's counters, and leaving him in ragged enough shape to exacerbate their damage. Had there been more time left at the conclusion of Round Three, he may well have found himself in just as much trouble as he would after this pattern repeated itself (post a superior work rate for two rounds, start blowing, and then get ripped with left hooks & uppercuts by the alert, crafty, and opportunistic "Corn Smut" (that's what his nickname means; a type of fungus that grows on maize...devastating to crops themselves but edible to humans and even highly valued in some corners...and fitting in this context, as, to get into some biology nerd granular detail here for a sec, the basidiomycete will use the plant's own anti-pathogen defense mechanisms against it; the stronger the oxygen burst produced, the more readily it falls into the fungus' clutches). Alas, even All Time Greats (which Harada is numbered among nowadays) are not infallible creatures, and the lesson presented in those initial moments of playing (literally) into Medel's educated hands didn't sink in before the disaster of their sequelae a few rounds later. Harada was stuck on what he wanted to do, cost be damned. Well, it cost him.

Once he got started, Medel ravaged the stunned Harada with forward-marching power shots, generating power from his legs, having previously subsisted largely off the jab and ear-boxing arm-punch combinations while lain on the ropes. While perhaps himself not quite in that same ATG class as Harada, the Mexican was still a very good fighter of his day, a specialist in waiting for the perfect moment and then pouncing...and here it paid dividends as Harada could not help but heave through in his misguided self-belief hoping to weather the storm and regain command by sheer force of will. Each of the knockdowns he suffered was increasingly more severe - and the distance between them grew shorter as Medel was able to just tee off and net the same result in shorter time before Harada was able to clear the cobwebs - but Harada believed, as surely did many of his Tokyo faithful, until the bitter end that he could battle his way back from the brink. Haruo Ishiwatarido - who didn't award Medel a single round of the previous five (giving Harada three, with two even) - mercifully, didn't let him keep trying quixotically past the point of reason.

This was the first stoppage loss of Harada's career, and there wouldn't be another for seven years in his final professional match (Famechon II). He would, in fact, experience the finest period of his career after the loss to Medel: twice defeating a fellow ATG in the Golden Rooster himself, Éder Zumbano Jofre of Brazil (who twice had knocked out Medel, in turn) and posting a vastly superior reign at bantam than flyweight (holding the WBA belt for a successful four defenses, and unified with the WBC; as compared with his fly tenure, capturing the belt with a kayo of Pone Kingpetch, only to hot-potato it straight away in an immediate rematch with the legendary Thai just eight months before Medel I). As for Corn Smut, his days of blighting greats (like Harada) or even being respectably competitive with them (as in Jofre I), and even his days of having fought on even terms with leading contenders of the day (going 1-1-1 against countryman Manny Barrios and splitting a pair with Fiilpino rankings mainstay Ray Asis) would soon be a thing of the past. He punched his ticket for a world championship rematch with Harada by emerging on top of a vicious knockdown-trading slug-fest with José de Jesús Pimentel Gutiérrez...but from Harada II, all was downhill for Huitlacoche, going just 6-11-2 in the remainder of his fighting days.

Harada fought Medel in the 1967 rematch with much different patterns...a more calculated version of his gangbusters swarming of '63, doling out his flurries and then knowing when to let up, scheduling himself enough reprieves to keep his stamina high throughout and never allow Medel to capitalize on any glaring mistakes. It was no walk in the park, but a clear and comfortable win for Harada, erasing the sting of defeat and separating himself from Medel in terms of historical legacy, showing the gulf that existed between them, and was hinted at in '63 by Harada's unbridled tornado mode netting him arguably four rounds (and even the first minute of the fateful rounds 3 and 6).

The moral of the story? Merely good fighters can beat great (or very good, world class) ones, and they don't even have to "have their number" to do so. It can suffice to catch them at the right time with the right game plan. Imagine, for instance, that Ricky Hatton got check-hooked into a turnbuckle not by Floyd Mayweather Jr., but, say, by Stevie 2lb Forbes. Hardly inconceivable, as Forbes had more or less the same tools in his kit to accomplish what PBF did, on paper...but it would have been a shock for most to watch play out in real time. And even the Hitman was less gung-ho committed to fearlessly/recklessly cannonballing himself at opponents than Fighting Harada (though I'd say the Japanese man is undoubtedly greater).

 

Medel could punch, and was a very successful ambush predator when allowed to be...and poor Harada just couldn't help what in '63 was the best of himself from crawling into that spider's web.