Stressful.
That was the word junior welterweight titleholder Timothy Bradley used to describe the last nine months, a torturous stretch in which he has seen his stock rise to an all-time high (before his fight with Devon Alexander) and plummet to a shocking new low.
“Very stressful,” Bradley said in a telephone interview. “I felt like the world was crashing in on me.”
Bradley’s rise and fall traces to January, when he took on Alexander, a fellow junior welterweight titleholder, in a fight that HBO threw all its muscle behind and used its broad reach to champion as the anointing of boxing’s next big star.
Only it wasn’t. The show was a dud — Bradley won a unanimous decision after the fight was stopped in the 10th round due to a cut over Alexander’s eye caused by an accidental head butt. The bout drew poor ratings and an even poorer attendance (6,247) in a broken-down building (Detroit’s Pontiac Silverdome) that had no business hosting the fight to begin with.
? SI.com’s Pound-for-Pound Ratings
If the fight was bad, the fallout was worse. Next up, Bradley was supposed to face Amir Khan, who a month earlier had earned an emphatic — and entertaining — win over Marcos Maidana. But despite HBO’s push (and Khan’s willingness to sweeten the pot by nearly $500,000 by splitting the U.K., Middle East and African revenues 50-50), Bradley passed.
Some say it’s because Bradley was ducking Khan. Bradley, strongly, disagrees.
