Utter ruination of young prodigies

1. Félix Trinidad vs. Fernando Vargas - had it not happened about 10-15 years before the full bloom of the Meme Era, pics of this fight would have been the default association for the phrase "I wasn't ready". El Feroz was smashing his way to greatness at high velocity - but like Icarus, flew too near a greater celestial body that burned at temperatures he couldn't have prepared for. He went 6-4 afterward, defeating a couple of useful outside-looking-in pseudo-contenders, but he never again won a single important match - and copped some horrific beatings along the way from ODLH, SSM x2, and most embarrassingly a cherry-picked Ricardo Mayorga coming off his own savaging at the hands of Tito and ODLH, dragging him up two weight classes only to be dropped twice and outfought badly enough to never lace up again, while still technically in his twenties (his 30th birthday coming a month later)
   
2. Takashi Uchiyama vs. Tanakorn Phawachart (Jomthong Chuwatanna) - while most boxing fans reserve a healthy skepticism of crossovers from the sister-sport of kickboxing, sometimes you do find the odd athlete with multidisciplinary inclinations and championship potential (see: Vitali Klitschko, and maybe a small handful more - as compared with the more usual face-flops or toils in mediocrity that mark the nascent boxing careers of many ring veterans that previously found success in kickboxing - see Kyotaro Fujimoto for the latter and Pele Reid for the former) - and sometimes you get crazy amounts of hype, akin to what an Olympian turning pro might receive. Such was the case with Jomthong, and for a while the phenom seemed poised to actually break it big in a second pro combat sport. With his record still in single digits, opinions among lighter division hobbyists were split when he was scheduled to challenge respected champ Uchiyama, which says a lot about how very (perhaps in hindsight irrationally) high people were on him. He got destroyed, hasn't fought (in this sport) ever since, and even the quality of his work in kickboxing has taken a dip. He loses more frequently than he used to, and where his pre-2015 losses were all by decision, Jomthong has been KTFO multiple times since.
3. Marcos Rene Maidana vs. Victor Ortiz - no secret that I don't like Vic much, but even I had to admit that it was a bit unfair (and unwise) of Golden Boy Promotions tossing him in with El Chino that early in his development. Maidana had mixed with a much higher class, even having spent most of his time on the relatively low-key Argentine circuit - all culminating in his previous bout, a world title challenge where many observers felt he got the shaft and deserved the nod over very skillful Ukrainian technician Andreas Kotelnik. Ortiz, meanwhile, had languished on big event undercards and headlining spots on Telefutura while feasting on the sort of pablum that GBP felt he could easily look good against, to build up his marketability. Even in his previous main event on HBO, the opponent was on the down-slide, with Mike Arnaoutis having gone through a back-to-back gauntlet with major hitters (and future rivals) Kendall Holt & Ricardo Torres, never to be quite the same again. Ortiz himself almost seemed to acknowledge his unpreparedness in his post-loss interview, saying he "was too young to be getting beat up like this" - yeah, because they caged you in with a lion without first teaching you the first thing about taming one.

Any others that stand out?

 

By whom, Charlo? Im not sure he ate enough punches I'm under three minutes to be ruined, but I guess we shall have to see..

 

Also not sure Lubin was quite as good as the hype suggested. Ortiz, much as I dislike him, you can't deny was a prodigious raw talent.

 

Named him in the OP.

 

That factoid about Jomthong gets me - over his first eleven years in kickboxing, he fought about 200 times, with plenty of that against world class opposition, and was never stopped.

After his ill-fated transition, when Uchiyama was through with him, that chin has been left in tatters.

 

Goodnight, sweet wunderkind...

This content is protected