The fastest way to inspire a poor performance seems to be to say something nice about someone. Or so fans would be led to believe after all the glowing reviews of the 2011 Friday Night Fights season on ESPN2, where the matchmakers at the Worldwide Leader were rightly praised for putting on some tremendous fight cards, including the Fight of the Year between Pawel Wolak and Delvin Rodriguez along with Lamont Peterson?s win over Victor Cayo and a bunch of entertaining scraps involving guys who ought best to be known as ?the usual suspects? by now (John Molina, Hank Lundy, Ruslan Provodnikov?)
Which made the snoozer between Dyah Davis and Alfonso Lopez last week that much more disappointing. Even Teddy Atlas had an inkling from the first round onward that uh-oh, we?re going to have to work hard to keep the fans watching the commercials. Studio host Bernardo Osuna tried gamely to involve the social-media crowd to give the fans a reason to stay engaged, Joe Tessitore brought up the BCS national championship game (speaking of snoozers), and the fighters?well, let the record show that it was 64 seconds into the first round before Lopez even made a motion that could be charitably described as ?throwing a punch?, a pace that held for all ten rounds of the contest.
The fact remains however that any fool could have seen that result coming. Davis and Lopez are not sluggers, they are not TV-friendly fighters, and they are not even knockout-artist counter punchers like a Floyd Mayweather (of course, Mayweather is on a level all his own, but the style works at all levels of the fight game.) Styles make fights, and when neither fighter has the temperament to press the action and force a faster pace, nine times out of ten you get a boring fight.
