by Joseph Hirsch – It is becoming increasingly clear, despite the chorus of HBO broadcasters singing his praises a bit too much even for this diehard fan’s taste, that Vasyl Lomachenko is not overhyped. He captured Olympic gold in Beijing in 2008 as a featherweight, and won gold again in London at the 2012 Games. He has a stunning amateur record of 396 wins and one loss (with that one loss avenged), and he has broken a record formerly set by the heavy-handed Naoya Inoue to become a two-division world champion in seven fights. He has gone 4-1-0 in fights against former or world titlists.
Point all this out to his detractors who think he losses to Mikey Garcia (maybe) or Guillermo Rigondeux (also possible) and the first thing they will do is bring up Orlando Salido. How can a guy who lost to “Siri” Salido (41-12-2 coming into their fight) seriously be mentioned in the same breath with an all-time great like Willy Pep (a comparison HBO’s unofficial scorer Harold Lederman is fond of making)?
Floyd Mayweather Jr., for instance, retired with a record of 49-0, a feat which it became impossible for Vasyl Lomachenko to match after his second fight. Can two such men even be compared? The question isn’t rhetorical, and the answer is “yes.”
Almost every fighter of quality gets what Roy Jones Jr. calls “a bum cushion,” a string of early matches against no-hopers, has-beens, and never-was types who have more losses than wins, who show up for meager paydays with the expectation that they’re just there to give the up-and-comer some experience fighting under lights and in front of a crowd. Boxing is not pro-wrestling, but a flawless record (especially in the early going) tells you as much about a fighter’s management as the fighter themselves.
Lomachenko frankly had no bum cushion. He went from the padding of the amateurs to the hard pavement of the pros in short order. His first fight was against Jose Ramirez, whose record was 25-3 at the time.
Some have argued that because Lomachenko fought in the World Series of Boxing, campaigning at lightweight, that his official “debut” should be considered his seventh match. True, the six fights Lomo had at lightweight were with gloves that he said didn’t close and thus allow him to make a fist, but the counter-argument runs that because he was fighting without headgear and for money, the matches were pro and should be counted.
Working from that premise, Lomachenko still comes out smelling like roses, forgoing his bum cushion still much earlier than Mayweather, whose 7th match was against Tony Duran, a man with a record of 12-15-1, who called it a day with a posted record of 13-20-2 (not exactly world class).
Floyd Mayweather is fond of saying “God only made one thing perfect, my boxing record.” This, however, is Floyd the shameless self-promoter, Floyd playing his role as the “heel” in the boxing drama. There is, believe it or not, an intelligent brain behind the arrogant façade, and that brain is a trove of boxing knowledge.
In his saner moments, Floyd has confessed to what we all know: that the best boxers don’t always have the best records. When asked about his toughest opponent, Mayweather confessed that it was an easy question to answer: “Emmanuel Augustus.”
Those who followed boxing especially closely in the 90s are smiling right now. Remember USA Tuesday Fight Nights? Troy Dorsey and Kevin Kelley? Those were the days.
Augustus was 22-16-4 going into his fight against Floyd Mayweather, while “Pretty Boy” (as he was then known) had a pristine record of 23-0. Augustus’s biggest win at this time was over Jon Thaxton, but he was still a crowd favorite due to his unorthodox style (described by Teddy Atlas as the “puppet”) in which he would allow his body to go slack and would wing his shots like a ragdoll and dance around his opponent. His footwork was phenomenal, and where most fighters pay for their showboating, Augustus seemed to do better and better the more he clowned.
Floyd beat him of course, but the Drunken Master put some hurt on the star, bloodying his nose and stunning Floyd a few times by piercing his guard when the young lion was on the ropes. Augustus also managed to get into Floyd’s head a bit, grinning and even blowing him a kiss. Augustus may have lost that fight, but that didn’t change the fact that he was the teacher that night and Floyd was the student.
Now, let’s perform a thought experiment and ask ourselves a “what-if?” What if Floyd had faced the rugged, tough, unorthodox Augustus not in his 24th bout as a pro, but in his second fight? Floyd’s second match was against Reggie Sanders, who retired with a slate reading 12-47-4. It is true, on the one hand, that Lomachenko will never know what it is like to be 49-0, but in the same breath let it be said that Floyd will never know what it feels like to try to climb a mountain in your 2nd (or even 7th) fight. Floyd aimed for a bird of prey and hit; Lomachenko shot for the stars, and overshot a bit.
The comparison between Floyd and Lomo can only be taken so far, as can that between Salido and Augustus.
Emmanuel Augustus always provided value for money, and could hang with sluggers (he was in “Fight of the Year” with Mickey Ward, and, as usual, was robbed), but he is nowhere near as durable or as hard-hitting as Orlando Salido.
Salido came into his match with “Hi-Tech” boasting a record of 41 wins, against 12 losses and two draws. His resume was a who’s-who, including Robert Guerrero, Juan Manuel Lopez, and Yuriorkis Gamboa. Most of his losses were distance fights, and it is possible that in his “No Decision” affair with the ghost his test for nandrolone was a false positive.
Orlando Salido came into his match against Vasyl Lomachenko well-over the contracted featherweight limit. He was unofficially a welterweight, and Lomo’s people would have been well within their rights to cancel the fight on the spot (as commentator Roy Jones Jr. pointed out).
“Siri” Salido seemed to start the fight with Fritzie Zivic’s aphorism in mind: “Always fight on the ref’s blind side.” It should be added that fighting dirty and not getting caught is a skill, that wily veterans employ these shady tactics to buy themselves time and to especially stymie inexperienced younger fighters who might be inclined to look to the ref to make an appeal, at which point they can be caught again with another shot or two.
Plus Salido isn’t just a fouling machine, as some people seem to describe him in the wake of his controversial win over Lomachenko. He did manage to probe to find holes in Lomo’s defense, and once he found them, he beat Hi-Tech’s body like a war drum from time to time. Lomachenko, having spent so much time in the amateurs, was clearly used to dealing with fighters who relied more on punching to score, whereas Salido was a seasoned vet who was punching to break his man down.
One sportswriter declared that the “old wolf” simply “ate” the younger fighter. This is uncharitable, but not exactly untrue. The only thing that not only tarnishes Salido’s victory (but calls it completely into question) is the horrible refereeing job done by Laurence Cole.
A body puncher is sometimes going to stray a little south of the border. It is just one of the hazards of that method of attack, and it is the ref’s job to warn the fighter, and if a stern warning isn’t enough, it is time to start penalizing him. If the ref isn’t doing his job, though, then that body snatcher has no incentive to watch where he throws his shots, and that is the ref’s fault, not the boxer’s.
By the sixth round anyone who wasn’t blind knew that Cole was not doing his job. Salido was no longer working the beltline, but was working low enough to make Andrew Golota proud. Without recourse to a decent referee, Lomachenko was forced to clinch in exchanges to give his lower body a break from the pummeling Salido was giving it, and then Cole gave a warning…but only to Lomachenko to stop holding.
Salido picked up exactly where he left off in the 7th round, straying low again. Max Kellerman finally suggested that if Lomachenko wanted to dissuade Salido, he would have to return fire to the crotch, but Lomo was either too sporting or not seasoned enough to dish out the kind of dirty tactics Salido was serving.
Referee Laurence Cole finally caught on to what the ringside commentators, crowd, and fighters themselves already knew, and he issued a warning to Orlando Salido in the eighth round, but by then the die had been cast. The welterweight Salido leaned on Lomachenko to further sap the younger man’s energy, another one of the old moves Salido and other grizzled vets carry in their bag of tricks.
Roy Jones called one blow “horribly low” in the eleventh, and Salido continued to land shots on Lomachenko’s legs and hip, and there was no question that Laurence Cole was in position to see the illegal work being done. He didn’t have a blindside. He had blindsides, both of them.
Despite the daunting, nigh-on impossible task before him, Vasyl Lomachenko came on like a hurricane in the eleventh, getting Salido into real trouble as he showed the brilliant hand-speed and angles we would come to know him for in his later matches. At one point in the 12th round Salido almost went down, but Laurence Cole interceded for no good reason and bought Salido more time to hang on to dear life and make it to the final bell.
Jim Lampley was fuming, and stuck his neck out to point out that Cole’s father, Dickie Cole, was a bigwig with the Texas State Athletic Commission (seeming to imply that Cole had only gotten his job because of who his father was). Lampley further went on to ask whether Cole was blind or incompetent. It was the worst night in Texas boxing since Paulie “Magic Man” Malignaggi’s robbery against Juan “Baby Bull” Diaz.
It was also honestly overreach and overconfidence on the part of Vasyl Lomachenko and his team. He had set out to be the first man to capture a world title in his second pro fight; he’d gambled big and lost.
But that still brings us back to the fact that many of the best fighters have losses on their records, and some men retire undefeated but without any legend accruing to their names. True, most great boxers who lose do it later in their career, when their reflexes are shot or they’re lured back into the ring for one last payday (or just to hear a crowd chanting their name in chorus), but not all fighters fit this profile. Some great fighters lose their first fight.
Bernard “The Executioner” (and onetime “Alien”) Hopkins debuted against Clinton Mitchell, who would go on to post a mediocre record of 3-1-1 against men with a combined record of 21-29-4. Bernard Hopkins was paid $350 for this night of work, and he lost. His ego was so shattered that he didn’t fight again for sixteen months. His career ended late last year as he was brutally knocked out of the ring by Joseph Smith Jr. and landed on his head. It was the roughest through-the-ropes KO since Oleg Maskaev destroyed Hasim Rahman in similar fashion. Hopkins was bleeding and limping after that fight, and claimed (ridiculously) that it was a push and not a punch that sent him into orbit.
Between the bookends of “Ls” on Bernard Hopkins’ record, there is one of the most spectacular careers in the history of pro prizefighting. There is a man with the longest reign in middleweight history, most consecutive defenses in middleweight history, and the oldest man in history to win a world title belt twice (first against first Tavoris Cloud and then against Jean Pascal).
We will be talking about Bernard Hopkins for much longer than many men who retired undefeated (it would be impolite to say names, but you know who they are). The same may eventually be said of Vasyl Lomachenko.
If we’re lucky, the next major test for Hi-Tech, will be a match one class north of where he currently resides, a lightweight showdown against Miguel “Mikey” Garcia, an undefeated fighter who came back from his layoff and displayed murderous power and good ring generalship in a pair of recent fights that show he also has something to prove.
Something tells me, though, that Lomachenko wants a rematch with Orlando Salido more than he covets any belt or major payday. Champions like to avenge their losses, and, assuming Orlando Salido agrees to the match, comes in at the agreed-upon weight, and someone besides Laurence Cole is refereeing, we will get to see whether or not that loss was a fluke, or if indeed the young amateur lamb did get devoured by the old pro wolf.