Should Tarver Retire?

By Boxing News - 05/11/2009 - Comments

By Jim Dower: With Antonio Tarver’s 12-round unanimous decision loss to IBF light heavyweight champion Chad Dawson on Saturday night at the Hard Rock Café, in Las Vegas, Tarver finds himself facing an uphill battle in trying to resurrect his career.

Dawson, 26, fought well enough to defeat the 40-year-old Tarver for the second time in a year, even if it was one of the more fights I’ve seen in quite some time. Tarver threw a lot of punches, but couldn’t get through enough times to score with his shots to get the decision.

Tarver now is in a bad position, because he doesn’t have too many options available to him. A 40-year-old fighter like Tarver doesn’t have the time required to build his way back into contention, while at the same time Tarver isn’t popular enough for his non-title bouts to be shown on cable television in the same way that more established stars like Ricky Hatton, Oscar De La Hoya, Bernard Hopkins and Roy Jones Jr. are.

Tarver did only slightly better against Dawson in the rematch, coming up short by the scores of 116-112, 117-111 and 117-111 on the three judges’ scores. However, I personally had Tarver only winning one round – the third – and losing all the remaining rounds of the fight.

The problem is that even in the few rounds in which Tarver landed the more numerous shots, he was only able to outland Dawson by a small percentage, but Tarver’s punches were much weaker in comparison to Dawson’s big shots. Indeed, Dawson landed the much harder punches in every round of the fight, so even when Tarver had a few more punches landed, there was no comparison in terms of power compared to Dawson.

Many of Tarver’s punches were arm shots, which was pointed out after the fight by Dawson. Though Tarver may have gotten credit for the arm punches by one or two of the judges, it wasn’t the kind of punches that would win Tarver the fight or impress enough of the judges for him to get the decision.

I don’t really know how Tarver could have won this fight, because he was just too slow and weak for his own good. Tarver came forward at all times, holding his gloves up in front of his face, but he might as well have just stood in place because Tarver accomplished little whether coming forward or fighting stationary because of his lack of hand speed and ability to land.

In the later rounds of the fight, when supposedly Tarver was winning a couple of rounds, he was missing almost all of his punches as Dawson ducked and dodged the slow shots. In return, Dawson would fire back hard hooks to the head and body and connect with most of them. Dawson wasn’t throwing a lot of punches, but he was connecting with most of them while Tarver was missing.

I don’t really know what Tarver can accomplish by hanging around any longer in boxing. If he sticks around in the light heavyweight division, Tarver is going to have to wait a year, maybe more before he gets another title shot. And when that time comes, I doubt Tarver will be good enough to get the win.

He certainly won’t be beating Dawson if he gets another shot, which I hope for the boxing world he doesn’t, because it would likely be as boring and one-sided as this fight was. Tarver might be better off moving up to the cruiserweight division. The talent pool is weak in that division and even an old fighter like Tarver would have a decent chance of picking up a title against one of the weak champions.



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