Vic Darchinyan (40-7-1, 29 KOs) takes on Jesus Cuellar (26-1, 20 KOs) from the StubHub Center in Carson, California on Saturday night in what NBC is implying will be the off-air undercard (or on NBC Sports Network, not sure how that works) for the Premier Boxing Champions show featuring Robert Guerrero and Aaron Martinez.
Now that the Google robot has been pacified with a shiny lead paragraph…can I just drop the pretense and go full Teddy Atlas here? Good.
Vic Darchinyan is 39 years old, a year and a half older than I am, so old that if he were a cruiserweight he’d have attracted Denis Lebedev’s attention by now for a fight (Roy Jones, James Toney, Guillermo Jones, any questions?) Vic Darchinyan is also a puffed-up flyweight fighting at featherweight, a division that is so much a young man’s game that nobody tends to make it much past thirty at such a weight (see Manny Pacquiao, Juan Manuel Marquez, Robert Guerrero, most of the lightweight division at the championship level…)
Darchinyan is older than Floyd Mayweather. Older than Miguel Cotto. Older than Joshua Clottey, who turned pro when I was still in high school in 1995. Yet he’s fighting in a young man’s division at least eight and closer to 14 pounds above the weight he hit during his best days.
Vic Darchinyan has been knocked out three times, including twice in his last three fights. Nonito Donaire scrambled his brains not once but twice, and when the Armenian fought the consensus best featherweight Nicholas Walters, the Jamaican flattened him in five rounds, putting him on the floor three times.
This is the guy who’s supposed to have a chance at a world title? Haven’t we seen enough?
Jesus Cuellar is a guy who can flat-out fight. His knockout of a washed-up Juan Manuel Lopez in two rounds last year is quite possibly the best analogue we have available to Darchinyan’s chances against him. Cuellar is a no-mercy, big-shot puncher who hit Ruben Tamayo so hard to the body in his last fight that Tamayo might still be looking for his lunch even as he prepares to settle into a gatekeeper role against Alberto Machado in Brooklyn at the same time as Cuellar’s scrambling Darchinyan’s signals in California.
If this were any other sport, a guy could hang on way past his prime, take a farewell tour, and retire only when it was finally obvious that he was hurting his team (Derek Jeter, looking at you) or, if in an individual sport like tennis, getting bounced in the first round of some no-name event in Slovenia.
This is not baseball or tennis. This is boxing, a sport where anyone who’s been around for awhile can rattle off a list of names that includes Duk Koo Kim, Bee Scottland, Magomed Abdusalamov, Billy Collins, Sonny Boy West…guys who were killed or severely injured in the ring to the point where if they didn’t lose their actual lives, they lost their quality of life and were never the same as human beings afterward.
It’s not outside the realm of possibility that this has already happened to Vic Darchinyan—look at Muhammad Ali, and look at how Joe Frazier was during the waning years of his life. Look at every NFL player for whom the cumulative effects of concussions playing football made them husks of the men they once were.
Yes, yes, these are tough guys who know the risks they’re taking when they step into a ring (or onto a football field) and it is a peculiarly American trait to allow someone to make a living in their chosen profession even with all the moral hazard of actual death and dementia pugilistica and CTE and all of that.
But that’s why we have boxing commissions, isn’t it? At what point does it become pointless to even bother regulating the sport if a commission like California is going to allow a man who, while certainly not still young, still with a great deal of his future left in front of him, to step into a boxing ring where everyone and their sister expects him to be beaten utterly senseless, where the best that can happen is a quick stoppage and the worst that can happen is that he guts out a late-round stoppage or a decision but ends up collapsing after the fight and turning into a vegetable?
It’s not Jesus Cuellar’s fault any more than it was Cuellar’s fault that he got matched against JuanMa Lopez when Lopez was in this same position.
But for the good of Vic Darchinyan, for the people who love him and care about him and want to see him hurt no more than his profession strictly requires in the course of such a violent business, he needs to retire. Because this is the kind of thing that makes fight fans question why we continue to support such barbarity.
Stay safe in there, Vic.
