I knew then what I know now: Hatton was making the biggest payday of his career, probably the biggest one he’d ever make. He’d still be the world junior welterweight champion either way. And even after Mayweather beat him, his fans would not desert him. In fact, the defeat would endear him even further.
Despite Larry Merchant’s well-intentioned insistence to the contrary, referee Kenny Bayless had no grounds whatever to penalize Eduardo Escobedo for his repeated “crouching” against Daniel Ponce De Leon. Fighters are allowed to crouch, even if doing so leads to some awkward wrangling. Moreover, if Ponce De Leon had the slightest idea how to land an uppercut, he’d have cured Escobedo of the habit in the fight’s first minutes.
I kept saying the exact same thing to Jeremy.
You would have thought Billy Graham’s prefight plea to Joe Cortez for a fair application of the rules around clinching would have elicited a response from Cortez that detailed, oh, I don’t know, what the rules are around clinching—at least as he sees them. Instead, Cortez replied with hurried platitudes and then proceeded to break the fighters whenever they got within three feet of each other.
Jeremy kept complaining about the same thing to me
Anyhow. I would just add that the telling factor of the fight- that one bit of pre-fight evidence that provided to best insight into who would win the fight- was in fact the Collazo fight. The fights were identical. Floyd's skill saved him from the Flash knockdown early, and enabled him to finish Hatton, when Collazo could only stun him, but other than that the fight were identical.
I believed that the Collazo fight was going to 'tell', as I put it. Hatton's Big Game mentality was the only counter argument that . I hoped it would be enough, but It wasn't enough.
Anyhow, I hope Hatton finds a foil at 140 so we can establish just how good he is at that weight. But right now this looks unlikely.
