International Boxing Federation # 1 ranked challenger Marco Huck (19-1, 14 KOs) has stated that he will “train even harder than before” and “I was too tense” in response to his 12th round TKO loss to International Boxing Federation cruiserweight champion Steve Cunningham on Saturday night in Germany. It would seem that Huck, 23, has a lot of work ahead of him in trying to restart his career. Most specifically, he needs to start with trying to fight better fighters, as up until he took on Cunningham, Huck had only faced one good cruiserweight in his entire career – 35 year-old Vadim Tokarev – and even then, Huck appeared to loss the fight.
I personally rate 14 cruiserweights better than Tokarev, which tells you how far Huck has to go to make it to the top of the division. The main problem is that Huck had an inflated record to begin with, having fought exclusively soft European competition during his entire career, which is typical of fighters based in Germany. So when Huck finally had to face a good cruiserweight in Cunningham, he wasn’t prepared for him physically or mentally. The sad part of it all, unfortunately, is that Cunningham isn’t a top five fighter either, despite being a champion.
I consider him well below those guys, perhaps as far down as #8 to #10 in terms of overall ability. In Cunningham’s case, he won the championship by beating a marginal cruiserweight, Krzysztof Wlodarczyk, by majority decision. Before that, Cunninham’s biggest win of his career was a split decision over Guillermo Jones in April 2005. If Huck is having trouble – and believe me, he had big problems – against a fighter of Cunningham’s caliber, he’s almost in a hopeless situation when he steps it up someday against even better fighters than Cunningham. That’s not to say that Huck doesn’t have the power to compete with the elite in the cruiserweight division, it’s that he has terrible stamina, in which he generally wears out by the midpoint of his bouts.
At 23, stamina is usually the least of a young fighters’ worries, but it’s a bad sign if this is one of their biggest problems this early on. The worst problem for Huck, however, is that he fights like a rank amateur. He uses little technique in fighting, mostly choosing to run at his opponents and flailing his arms when attacking. The style is oddly similar to a school child that has been enraged after being beaten up in a fight and has decided to attack all out based on the idea of revenge.
Huck is wide open for any type of punch when he comes rushing like that and it’s a minor miracle that he didn’t get knocked out or exposed by another fighter in the past by fighting like that. Well, because of his lowly opposition, it hardly mattered how Huck fought, as most of them were essentially C-class fighters with little ability to speak of and would quickly fold under the slightest pressure from a fighter like Huck. With not having faced the type of fighters were technique is essential in winning, Huck never really learned how to fight. Instead, he remained a crude slugger, with zero defense and poor stamina.
The fact that his German management rushed him into a fight with a top fighter at this early point in his career is rather telling, as they usually are more careful in building up their fighters, making sure that they give their fighters a lot of fights with which to learn from before putting them into a championship bout. It seems as if they threw him in there against Cunningham perhaps knowing that he might lose the fight, but figuring it was better to lose to him than one of the other top contenders.