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"IT'S NOT A TUNE-UP WHEN IT'S A MANDATORY" |
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"IT'S NOT A TUNE-UP WHEN IT'S A MANDATORY" |
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Funny how nutty the fite game has evolved over the years ... sure, back in the Carbo era we had tank jobs ... LaMotta belatedly owned up to his doing biz in the Billy Fox fite - I was at the Garden for that one back in November of 1947 - and less than two years later Jake is rewarded with a championship winning stoppage of Marcel Cerdan in 1949.
Jake’s confession came out in a 1950 magazine article ... and Billy Fox you ask?
Fox gets a return light/heavy title shot with Gus Lesnevich off the LaMotta "win" ( March 5, '48 ) ... never makes it passed the opening candle as Gus drops him to the canvas just above Carbo’s ringside seat.
Ok, so them wasn’t tune-ups - altho’ Fox never really earned title recognition - and others ... my favorite of all featherweights Willie Pep ... year was 1954 and long after losing title to Saddler ... gets himself stiffed in two candles to Lulu Perez - let's just call that one the mother of all splashes.
But this is about tune-ups ... not dives ... and what we have today is a made to order system that pretty much converts the yesterday tune-up to a respectable today title defense ... comes under the heading of multi-belted champions per weight class.
Take that Hopkins laugher with the French imposter Hakkar ... back when, such a non-event would have been a tune-up affair with no title belt at stake ... of course, the payola would have been chump change by today’s standards ... still, Bernard baby would have gotten some quick walk around money and the tools sharpened at minimal risk.
Barrera ... that Kelley insult ... title or no title at stake ... on paper a tune-upper at best ... label it what you wish ... brutal covers it to the letter ... an HBO PPV in your face insult.
But blame the system not Barrera ... the guy has met them all ... from Morales to Hamed to Tapia ... saw a gimme and ran with it.
And there’s more of the same mismatches waitin’ round the bend ... and while I think of it, this:
Were I a fite manager - and had I one of them title shareholders - and suspected my guy was weakest of the lot but heads and shoulders above those others in our group, you don’t really think we’d be going the unification route now, do you?
Not a chance ... my guy would be a busy one that’s for sure ... and knocking them off from top to bottom ... and one day there we’d be traipsing together to our spot on the wall along them hallowed halls up there at Canastota, NY - me the
manager and him the champ with the longest ever reign at his weight in history of the game.
And one day I suspect there’d be a kid with his dad looking at the plaque and be heard saying something like, "Wow, dad ... looka that record ... that guy musta been some fighter."
Yeah, right!
Semper fi,
GEL
4-17-2003
Brought to you by Saratogamist
copyright 2001-2004
We once called them tune-ups ... a champ picking up change between title fights ... and sometimes surprises resulted - but that’s a story for another day.
