THE WAR ZONE: Revisiting Classics (Vol. 7 - Zachary Padilla vs. Roger Mayweather)

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Rough and nasty little scrap...but sweet all the same.

These men were both fighting to get themselves into the championship mix (for Mayweather, that meant he sought a third reign and for Padilla it meant hoping to validate his comeback after spending five years away from the sport after suffering his first defeat on national TV by stoppage at the hands of a losing record journeyman), and fought like it every minute. Accordingly, nobody wanted to surrender an inch. This led to as many genuinely accidental fouls - faulty brake mechanism headbutts, rabbit punches timed a bit off but originally aimed somewhere legal, kidney punches meant for the ribs, and slightly low blows peppered in during body combinations - as can be crammed into ten rounds...but also some beautiful give and take with some almost unreal sequences of neck-snapping uppercuts after which you can only marvel that nobody fell.

You can't really begrudge Padilla the decision no matter how you scored it. He did average over 110 punches a round - all while getting liberally countered by the still very dangerous Mamba. There was enough creditable work done by either man in each chapter that you could read it as either man's story. If you favor blistering accuracy, Mayweather could be your protagonist. If effective aggression is more your preferred genre, then it's a closed book on the official result.

This result led immediately to everything it promised - the brass ring for which Padilla had reached through a grueling half an hour. Six weeks after calling out Carlos Gonzalez in his in-ring tête-à-tête with Bernstein, he was a mile down the road in another Vegas casino beating the yet-unbeaten Gonzalez for the WBO 140lb title. Two more defenses that winter saw Padilla crowned the Ring mag Comeback of the Year recipient for 1993, and setting a long-standing CompuBox record for combined punches over twelve with Ray "Sucra" Oliveira (broken seven years later by Oliveira himself and Vince Phillips). 1994 was shaping up to be a second consecutive banner year until tragedy struck. After sparring more than a thousand rounds with partner and fellow champion Shane Mosley over the years and, quoth Mosley, standing up to some of the fiercest bombs ever thrown by sugar, bang on the chin - the camel's back gave out, and Padilla left a particularly intense gym war nursing a career-ending brain injury.

For Mayweather as well, the desperation he brought into the ring and sustained - that apparent fear of the consequence of failure, the feeling of this being a can't-lose affair - proved to have been well-founded. He never again wore a legitimate world title belt (forget the IBO and IBA) and only competed once more for one, hopelessly outmatched challenging the prime wunderkind Kostya Tszyu - nine years his junior. You could even say he never had a single meaningful victory after the loss to Padilla despite remaining active five years longer - his closest being a pair of decisions serving to stall Carl Griffith's march toward contention and being used for a pinata by ODLH, and the other thwarting an ill-advised comeback by Mike Mungin, several years removed from the glory of his bullying of Micky Ward.

Mayweather by this point was undoubtedly on the decline, in athletic talent if not heart, and had taken on eight losses and five stoppages already. Padilla, yes, had spent much of his career moonlighting with getting punched in the face by a prime Shane Mosley for the equivalent of a hundred championship bouts not for main event purses but for mere sparring partner fees. Be all that as it may - I think spending 30 minutes in the phone booth with each other took a lot from both men. Maybe if he doesn't get clouted at point blank 373 times by Padilla, he still has enough left to nudge over the hurdle of Darryl Tyson instead of dropping another even tighter split decision...thereby picking up a minor belt and opening up some different options for Mayweather, including going after Gonzalez himself. Maybe if Padilla doesn't eat nearly half the leather thrown by Rog in earnest, the probably accumulative effect that led to his condition is slowed and that one day of prep with Mosley doesn't clip his reign short...

They stood in close and gave it their all, literally.

 

:?

 

Rodriguez, Murray and Oliveira had respectable enough careers - the former two holding the IBF title for a short time and the latter despite never getting the big prize likely being the best of 'em. Rodriguez had the best victories (Bramble x2, LaPorte, Ward, Vanderpool, Green, Lopez) while Oliveira fought the best opposition and made for years of memorable TV...and Murray licked 'em both.

Padilla, who knows? He probably wouldn't have been a great quite like Tszyu but he could have extended his reign another couple of years and ended up much closer to Tszyu than to the trio above. (who, again, did plenty well themselves without becoming great).