There was a point in the broadcast when Emanuel Steward really surprised me when he stated that James likes to spar and not do much else in the gym and if he (Emanuel) had to choose between having a guy either spar a lot or do all the other workouts in training he would choose the sparring and, man, do I ever disagree!!!! From experience I can tell you that sparring, on its own, is NOT what gets you ready for the conditions that often present themselves in a real professional fight. Sparring is just one aspect of the intense training needed to get a man ready for the grind. Look at me now. I am 38 years old and haven't fought in several years. I very rarely do roadwork anymore and I haven't hit the pads or the heavy bag in quite a while, either, but I can still spar ten rounds right now at a good pace on a moment's notice and I won't even be sore afterwards. But there is no way, due to the fact that I have not tortured my body and mind for quite sometime now in the gym with real preparation, that I could fight effectively in a real ten round fight right now. No way in the world. I would need a good five weeks at least of real training (not just sparring) to get to the point where I could move and box and recover well enough to beat a conditioned professional boxer. 

Ask anybody that fights for a living. You could spar twelve rounds in the gym three nights a week and not be sore in the least bit but one tough twelve round fight will leave you with aches and pains that most men have never felt before and never will. Now you can just spar for fights and get away with it because your opponent may not be able to implement a plan that would allow the lack of other types of conditioning to come into play but, like James found out last night, sooner or later someone will. Rock walked James down and kept his weight on him. Then when James would get off a good series of punches he would walk right back to him and not allow him to rest. James was either punching or defending. Rock didn't allow James much time to just stand back and gather himself and it worked for him. If anything, I thought Rock had a little too much respect for James in there (maybe those precise counters carried more sting than they looked to?) and could have used his body to manhandle James even more than he did. When James was laying back on the ropes obviously out of gas for a time, Rock should have used his own body more to rough James up and make it appear even more so that he physically was not up to the demands of a grueling fight.

Rock had a tired, weakened man in front of him who was forced to pick his shots and while James did so with some success it was, in my opinion, because Rock didn't wisely use his natural strength to force James into using muscles that were obviously not prepared for the hard work needed to beat Hasim. When you think about it, it appears that both men let opportunity slip away from them last night to do bigger and better things than they actually did.

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