July 20, 2011Any of you readers out there ever fancy a Big Mac? We know it?s not good for our bodies, but once in a while, they?re nice for a quick bite. I?ve never been a fan of the Big Mac. I could never understand why there needed to be a third piece of bread in the burger. This past Saturday night, I was unfortunate enough to be in an area without much Wi-Fi capabilities or mobile phone reception. Many of my fight friends were trying to send me texts about the Marquez/Ramos fight and how it was being streamed for free on Top Rank?s webpage. I had to walk up and down the street while holding my phone near my face in order to catch constantly-freezing glimpses of the fight card taking place in Cancun. I knew I?d be content as long as I could at least catch the gist of the main event. I told my wife I was going out for another stroll down the block so that maybe getting out in the open would clear up the bandwidth issues my phone was experiencing. I made it to the back gate just in time to see Likar Ramos lying on the mat. I thought to myself that surely he must have slipped or maybe he was doing situps the way Bernard Hopkins did pushups between rounds a few weeks ago. I kept walking down the street and thinking that maybe I?d get to see some replays. A little screen gave me just as much of a vantage point as an IMAX one would. Luckily this total sham of a fight wasn?t available in 3-D. Ramos may very well have fallen into your bowl of chips.
The idea was that Juan Manuel Marquez needed a warm-up fight before he faced Manny Pacquiao once again this coming November. Dinamita needed to put in the rounds against a southpaw so he could work on his strategy for his third fight with the Pac-Man. Such a plan would have proved beneficial if his opponent from Colombia was auditioning for a hit-and-run lawsuit. Manny Pacquiao slowly dragged Shane Mosley around for 12 rounds in May. After ?Sugar? got floored in the 3rd round, he could have easily taken a dive the way Ramos did, but instead he opted to go to ?Sugar Shell? mode. Was this fight simply to put another ?W? on Marquez?s record and also to show that he would not be taking a full 12 months off since his last fight? The bout against Ramos had already been talked up as the road back to MannyVille. One would think that approach would have filled the Colombian with some sort of drive to show the contrary. I?ve been watching Marquez fight for what feels like a long time now. I couldn?t remember the last 1st round knockout he had. You have to look back almost ten years ago to find one. It came in a fight against Johnny Walker, a journeyman fighter from Florida who lost his final 17 fights after losing to Juan Manuel. The Marquez many of us know now is very much a ?grind it out? boxer who often starts slow, but rarely fails to entertain in the end. I?ll leave it up to the reader to really determine if he truly has one-punch knockout power. Likar Ramos should enjoy his paycheck and become more reclusive than Howard Hughes was. I personally believe he took a dive. There?s no way for me to actually know it, of course.
Why else would this fight been 100% free? All you had to do was jump online and there it was. Most fights of this caliber, at least in terms of a big-name fighter that could especially pull on cross-cultural sensibilities would certainly have been on Pay-Per-View TV. I?m clearly not the first to rip this result. As he lay on the mat, Likar Ramos forcefully shut his eyes like a child does to make his parents think that he?s asleep. As a fan of boxing, the last two weeks have thrown a few duds our way. We have this farce of a fight and of course the previous week?s madness of the Paul Williams/Erislandy Lara fight. You can be sure that there will be no disciplinary hearings from the fact that the crowd in Quintana Roo was treated to the malingering of a lifetime. Hey, at least when the fight was over, those who paid to see it were still in Cancun. I wasn?t the happiest fight fan in the stands a few years ago when Manny crushed Ricky Hatton inside of two rounds, but I was still lucky enough to still be in Las Vegas afterwards. Speaking of, the aforementioned knockout is how it really looks when someone is out cold. You?re usually not able to brace your own fall before your head smacks off of the canvas. Either Ramos was acting or he possesses a mental power that we do not. It?s never fun to watch when the ring walk takes longer than the fight itself. Don?t fret, though. We were quickly reminded that the tickets for Pacquiao/Marquez III were to go on sale this Friday.
Getting back to my first thought. The Big Mac perhaps didn?t need that third slice of bun in it. Yank it out and the experience is better. We didn?t deserve to be treated to this useless, third slice in Cancun.
