Well, as HBO likes to say, it’s not television. And it’s not boxing, either, not at least boxing that people should care about.
It was another boring, pitiful heavyweight championship fight — this one on Saturday afternoon from Hamburg, Germany — with title holder Wladimir Klitschko taking 11 rounds to stop his former sparring partner, Washington’s own Tony Thompson.
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As Thompson went down from a Klitschko right hand, so did more fans of the sport, at least those who follow heavyweight boxing. It was plodding fight. Thompson, the 36-year-old District native who didn’t start fighting until he was 27, did give Klitschko some trouble early on — I actually had Thompson winning three of the first six round with his body shots and his busier style — but the second half of the fight was target practice for Klitschko.
Before the 11th round began, Tom Browner, one of Thompson’s trainers, yelled at his fighter, “You’re not trying. You’re better than that.” Then Thompson went out and got knocked out.
Lennox Lewis, one of the analysts on the telecast, called it a “great fight” for Klitschko. How would he know? He was never in a great fight. Fellow analyst Larry Marchant called it when he said, “The state of American heavyweight boxing has sunk so low that we don’t even recognize it,” referring to the next American heavyweight hope who you couldn’t pick out in a police lineup, Chris Arreola. Who?
- Thom Loverro
