The Full Nelson: Losers I have known and loved

This weekend I watched a fighter lose and it choked me up, which makes a change, 'cos unless I'm watching Juan Manuel Márquez I wait until a fight's over before I start on the auto-erotic asphyxiation. However, all the choking this weekend was of the tearful kind, because Stuie Hall, from Darlington, fought and lost for the IBF bantamweight title, a strap he'd lifted and defended before. His opponent was the unbeaten Nicaraguan-American, Randy Caballero, and the venue was a casino in Monaco.

Regular readers—not that I kid myself I have any regular readers, this is known as “employing a rhetorical device”—will be aware that I'm one of those strange people who watches sport (well, one, sport) but doesn't really care who emerges victorious. Unless, of course, I'm watching someone I have a Man-Crush on, in which case I will be completely insufferable and gladly howl at the television and jump up and down and punch the air like someone in a 1990s American beer advertisement.

Anyway. My strange distinterest toward the potential winner, if not the outcome, of a boxing match actually stands me in good stead, and not just because the sport is riven with incompetence over the arbitration of its contests. This is because boxing is fundamentally different from other sports.

Anyone who watched Hall and Caballero war for twelve solid rounds couldn't, surely, begrudge the winner having their hand raised at the end unless they were a blood relative of either man. The two engaged at such a torrid pace that surely any thoughts of a partisan nature were swept away with awe for what we were watching. Hall—sent to the canvas by a quick one-two in the second round, as he sought to make an uncharacteristically fast start—has always been a hard man, an unyielding pressure fighter who lifted this title when it was vacant in 2013 and conceded it earlier this year on a split decision to Paul Butler, of Liverpool, in a fight which came down to the wire.

But, unlike Hall's reverses to Butler and Bristol's Lee Haskins, good fighters both, here he was up against it in the literal sense: away from home, facing an unbeaten fighter with American promotional muscle behind him, a reputation as something of a puncher, and an amateur pedigree (bronze at the World Championships in 2008). Added to this was the small matter of a ten year gap in age (Caballero has just turned 24, in September).

Though the bout was marred somewhat by scoring that appeared to have been filled in before the first bell commenced (116-111 twice and a frankly ludicrous 118-110), Caballero deserved to win, and he too went up in my estimation, so exacting was the examination to which he was subjected. As Hall, huge at the weight, bit down on his gumshield and stormed forward, Caballero found out that engaging in trench warfare with a man who looked like a featherweight in the ring wasn't going to work out as well for him as it had in his 21 previous contests (all wins, 13 by stoppage). The American learned on the job, though, adapting quickly, mixing up his natural inclinations to slug it out with some nifty back-foot boxing and a work ethic that you could not fault, answering almost every one of Hall's frenzied attempts to overwhelm him.

Losing in boxing is like losing in life: it's going to happen, unless you have things carefully stage-managed for you or are incredibly lucky. Even those few who escape from boxing with no mark in the “L column” have merely ducked out before defeat found them, rather than achieved any amazing feat which means they were too good or too fearsome to ever come a cropper.

What defeat in boxing does—much like in life, and contra to the prevailing view amongst TV executives ever since television uprooted boxing from the social landscape—is throw new light on the things you achieved. It manages this remarkable bit of retrospective explication because you it demonstrates nothing less than how you handled yourself, in extremis, at the limits of what life can throw at you.

This is why I watch boxing. Well. That, and all the snazzy shorts.

Though I loved the fight, Hall stole my heart, throwing himself forward with such fervour that it seemed the younger man must break, if not from the punches delivered then by dint of the Northerner's sheer willingness to do battle. When he reigned as IBF champion—fighting a list of domestic fighters who I wouldn't have objected to in a Commonwealth title bout but whose presence seemed obscene the moment one attached the “world title” tag—I wondered what would happen if he shared the ring with a truly world-class fighter. Now we know, and I for one am a lot more fond of him because of it. I'm thinking, in fact, of opening up the Official Stuie Hall Fan-Club.

Apropos of nothing else, here are some more boxers whose defeat occasioned a wistful look into the ever-poignant middle distance, and a choked-back sob.

I first took against Donaire, the Filipino four divison champion, when he was running people over for the bantamweight and flyweight titles. It's not that I got bored of him wiping out guys out with huge left hooks, it was more the way certain sections of the boxing media anointed him a superhero, a wondrous boxing machine rather than a tall guy blessed with preternatural speed and power. But watching him go down to the younger, bigger and stronger Nicholas Walters the other weekend for the latter's WBA featherweight title, I found new reserves of charity for Mr Donaire. Rocked repeatedly, cut around both eyes, Donaire lashed back and stung Walters with a hook. Lots of fighters would, at that point, go into survival mode, hoping that this moment of success would afford them some breathing space. Instead, the Filipino dug his heels in and let fly with the sort of punches that had flattened world champions in three weight divisions... And got badly knocked out in the sixth round for his trouble. But as last stands go, it was pretty terrific.

The all-time king of winning your heart even as he crumbled, Hearns didn't just win world titles in umpteen weight categories, bouncing up and down divisions like a six-foot two yo-yo, he lost his biggest fights, against the best fighters he faced. But The Hit Man (no, I'm not qualifying that, and Ricky Hatton you have a special place in Hell reserved for you for nicking the best nom de guerre ever) went down not just with guns blazing, but widely in front on the scorecards, with his opponents bleeding profusely and seemingly vanquished. He was outdone by hubris, by the length and fragility of his elongated form, and because he was fighting such legends as Sugar Ray Leonard and Marvelous Marvin Hagler. The canny Leonard offered him a rematch of their epic first encounter eight years after the fact, after he'd seen Tommy slow down and suffer a few bad knockouts, thinking that the time was ripe to erase any doubts the closeness of their earlier encounter might have raised. Hearns decked him twice; Leonard barely scraped a draw. Cosmic justice had, in a way, been served, but no-one ever lost better than Tommy Hearns.

Zaragoza looked like something from a horror movie even in the rare fights where blood wasn't gushing from the cuts that seemed to blossom open on his face during his ring-walk. He fought for years around bantamweight, meeting a murderer's row of hard men and classy boxers, winning some, losing some. At age 39, he had grabbed the WBC super-bantamweight title and was still chugging away; in 1997 he outfoxed then-unbeaten Wayne McCullough in Boston.

But the wily southpaw's greatest moment came in his very next—and last—fight, at no lesser hands than those of Erik Morales, at that time a burning, brilliant youth of 21 (and he looked at least half that, all-a-gangle beneath his crew-cut). After eleven brutal back-and-forth rounds, a Morales straight right to the solar plexus sent an exhausted Zaragoza down so hard on his back he looked for a second as if the momentum was going to take him clean back over on to his heels. Gasping for breath from a sitting position, hands propped exhaustedly on his knees, Zaragoza looked up at Morales, caught his eye, nodded across the ring. He gave Morales the most touching, minimalistic salute, raising his left glove a couple of inches, nodded at his man again as the referee counted him out, rising a split-second too late.

The next time I lose something I've poured my heart into, I'd like to think I'm going to try to ensure I'll go down with guns blazing. But when I am beaten, I hope I have enough good humour and humility to give life a little salute, a quick nod as I go down.

It's what Daniel Zaragoza would've wanted.

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