Pacquiao – Mosley Fight: Did Nazeem Richardson do the right thing?

By Boxing News - 06/02/2011 - Comments

Image: Pacquiao - Mosley Fight: Did Nazeem Richardson do the right thing?By Joss Goosman:

The morality of the Sports
Boxing has always been criticized, looked down, was even on the brink of being abolished altogether in the past because the casual layman cannot grasp and comprehend the concept of pitting two men against each other with the sole and only purpose of trying to jeopardize the health of each other. They see the sport as barbaric and immoral. But, unfortunately, there are still the vestiges of the inherent primal instinct in all of us. In all of humans. So boxing and most combat sports survived to cater to that need.

Safety of a Fighter.
“Protect yourselves at all times”…that mantra can never be truer than in any other sports. Even with a brutal sports like boxing, the safety and well being of fighters is still of paramount importance. Never more so in this day and age. Most of the times, fighters push their limits to the very boundaries of their own well-being. Sometimes they have so much heart even for their own good. So it is the responsibility of the trainers and referess to see to it that fighters do not get hurt more than they should. It is only the opinion of immoral and brainless barbaric individuals to think otherwise. The relics of the animalistic pleasure the Romans felt when they satiated their bloodlust with their “fights to the death” spectacles. Warrior mentality? What good is a dead warrior?

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Mike Tyson was a most feared man in the sports. Inside and outside the ring. Bigger, stronger opponents have already lost the fight even before the first bell rang. In the lower weights, apart from Edwin Valero (RIP), nobody instilled that fear more so than Manuel Dapidran Paqcuiao. Outside the ring, many of his opponents fell into the illusion of the nice guy image of Pacquiao. It is inside that ring that the Mr. Hyde of Pacquiao manifests himself. But even inside that ring, there are still moments that the Dr. Jekyll of Pacquiao still manages to peep out his head. Like when Pacquiao felt so sorry for Diaz and tried to help him up. Or when he carried Margarito into the championship rounds and let him finish the fight on his feet. Or the lovefest he had with Mosley, glove taps and all.

A raging mad Pacquiao
After the “knockdown” of Pacquiao, everybody surely noted that he was pissed. He got mad. We got a glimpse of the Pacquiao of old we so learned to love. The raging fighting machine. After that false knockdown, we saw Pacquiao take after Mosley with vengeance. Mosley realized that. He knew that Pacquiao will now go for the kill. This thought was foremost in his mind, hence the plea to Richardson. Common sense dictates that nobody can really fathom if a fighter is truly hurt, apart from himself. What many people fail to realize is that, in spite of it’s physical aspect, boxing is 80% brain and 20&% brawn. It is the brain which commands all those hooks and straights and uppercuts. It is from the brain that those commands to duck, to counter and to move away are issued. So when the determination and the will to fight is not there anymore, what is the use of going on? And make no mistake, when a fighter loses his will to fight, much less to win, then he is bound to get hurt more. The possibilities a multiplied a thousand fold. He risks the possibility of getting really, really hurt. It is a blessing for Mosley that Pacquiao ,the Dr. Jekyll side anyway, went easy on him and didn’t really try that hard to cut off the ring of which he does brilliantly. Otherwise the outcome of the fight could have been so drastically different.

Taking responsibility
There is the referee inside that ring. The third man, the one who oversees that the rules of the game are followed and most importantly, to ensure that fighters do get hurt unnecessarily. And is also the unwritten rule, the responsibilty of the trainers and cornermen to see to it that needless punsishment be avoided by their fighetrs. So to those who applaud the desicions of men like Cortes, or in this case Nazeem Richardson, to those who agree wholeheartedly to these decisions, I say to you, get inside that ring yourselves. To applaud such mindless desicions is plain stupidity that borders on idiocy.

To err is human
Human beings make mistakes all the time. It is not the fact itself that we make mistakes.
But the thing that separate the wise from the fool, is that the wise learn from his, and other’s mistakes. The fool forgives and forget…that is until the next time, the same mistake next time around. Good judgment comes from lessons learned from past mistakes, and a lot of those mistakes came from bad judgment.

I am not a wiseman, but for someone to applaud a mistake is, to me, just plain dumb.

“Wise men profit more from fools than fools from wise men; for the wise men shun the mistakes of fools, but fools do not imitate the successes of the wise” – Cato the Elder (234 BC – 149 BC)



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