Let?s quickly inspect the respective 2017 r?sum?s of the fighting man from Nebraska alongside that of the masterful ring maestro from Ukraine?
As the final week of 2017 comes to a close, it?s likely safe to say that there won?t be any professional fights between now and December 31 to shake up the pot in regards to who may hold the honor of the year?s top boxer. Neither name will be mentioned as part of ?Fight of the Year? or necessarily ?Event of the Year? by any stretch. All things as they are and indeed nothing more than subjective, many agree that either Terence ?Bud? Crawford or Vasyl ?Hi-Tech? Lomachenko should grab the acclaim as 2017?s ?Fighter of the Year.? Without getting into oceans of detail or penning an article that can soon be made available in audiobook format, let?s quickly inspect the respective 2017 r?sum?s of the fighting man from Nebraska alongside that of the masterful ring maestro from Ukraine.
Let?s keep in mind the level of competition in addition to the amount of risk taken with each opponent. To be fair and without getting ahead of ourselves, we?ll acknowledge that any trip to the ring involves a great deal of risk. Terence Crawford (32-0, 23 KO?s) stuck to his promise to clean out the junior welterweight division and jumped high into the air after he accomplished that exact feat with a third round knockout of Julius Indongo at the Pinnacle Bank Arena in Lincoln, Nebraska this past August.
With the win, ?Bud? Crawford was now the proud owner of the WBC, WBO, WBA and IBF super lightweight titles. The bout itself was hardly a contest and even long before it, more than a few boxing scribes and more importantly boxing fans knew that Crawford?s biggest challenges likely awaited him seven pounds to the north as a welterweight. In any case, it?s often a fighter?s dream to be the absolute best in the division and rightly so, what better way to do so than to have each and every sanctioned championship within it? We can only hope that no other group decides to splash enough cash to create a new organization with a new title to be its crowning achievement, correct? If we?re sticking to just this year, we?ll quickly examine the two contests in which Crawford took part.
He dismantled Felix Diaz last May at Madison Square Garden. Keep in mind that Diaz was a two-time Olympian for his native Dominican Republic and he captured a gold medal at the Beijing Games in 2008. Crawford toyed with him and fought much of the contest in a southpaw stance as if he were sparring for fun during a free weekend. He pummeled Diaz for ten rounds until the bout was mercifully stopped by Felix?s corner.
Three months later, ?Bud? made Julius Indongo feel as if he?d stolen something from him in Manhattan. With the exception of his bout with Crawford and the two which had preceded it, Indongo had never fought outside of his native land of Namibia and he hardly looked as if he was the best that could be offered by any part of the light welterweight class. Either he was just that overrated or more to the point, Crawford was just that much better. Smart money is on the latter.
Now we?ll quickly look at Vasyl Lomachenko, who fought three times in 2017. The first outing was against Jason Sosa at the new MGM Grand National Harbor on the outskirts of Washington, D.C. The nine rounds elapsed in Maryland were but target practice sessions for the double gold medalist from Ukraine. There were even portions of the bout when ?Hi-Tech? playfully held out his arms to either side of his body as if he were a matador in Spain waving a red apron to effectively tease his bovine foe into a contest. Sosa?s corner stopped the bullfight after twenty-seven minutes in the ring had expired.
Four months later, Manuel Marriaga was made to feel content with being embarrassed on ESPN when he squared off against Lomachenko in Los Angeles. Marriaga was able to land a left hook upstairs at one point early on in the contest, after which Lomachenko?s unanswered as well as indefensible shots sounded much like a popcorn machine. Straight lefts resulted in knockdowns of Manuel in the third round and once again in the seventh. His corner indicated the Colombian fighter would fight ?no mas.?
All of this, of course, now brings us to what we witnessed a bit less than three weeks ago. Lomachenko (10-1, 8 KO?s) and Guillermo Rigondeaux (17-1, 11 KO?s) met in New York City for what was billed as the first-ever matchup between a pair of two-time Olympic gold medalists. Additionally, the respective amateur records of Lomachenko and his Cuban expat opponent boasted nearly eight hundred victories against very few defeats. Whether written on a cocktail napkin or a stories-high billboard, this contest was supposed to have it all.
Once a few rounds were in the record books, however, only one man had it all. Lomachenko frustrated, agitated and basically forced one of the absolute purest fighters in the world to quit. Jason Sosa lasted longer than Rigondeaux. The contest with ?El Chacal? was over after six rounds of one-sided showmanship on the part of Vasyl Lomachenko. Of course, it can be noted that Rigondeaux jumped two weight classes, from super bantamweight to super featherweight to face ?Hi-Tech,? yet most of us expected Guillermo to give his Ukrainian adversary perhaps the toughest challenge of his career. To date, it seems as if the only man able to shake up Lomachenko was back in March of 2014, when a crafty veteran in Orlando ?Siri? Salido used his bag of ring savvy and street knowledge to teach young Vasyl a lesson.
So, there you have it. Either Terence Crawford or Vasyl Lomachenko deserves the title of ?Fighter of the Year? for 2017. Not Canelo Alvarez, Gennady Golovkin, Anthony Joshua or Srisaket Sor Rungvisai. The fight, event or upset of the year are different categories. Where do you stand on the matter?
