Comments Thread For: Holyfield Reflects, Says Tyson Bit Him Out of Fear, Wanted Out

[A.K]

It was obvious I remember watching it as a youngin and telling my pops why is Tyson getting worked I thought he was goat, and from that day on I knew Tyson was hype.

[uppercut510]

tyson was getting his azz whooped

[juggernaut666]

Holyfield was also landing knees to Tysons body few caught . Tyson also wanted a steroid test but never got one .Obviously one of the two were on them . lol

[JK1700]

I wouldn't say it was due to fear. It was more frustration/craziness.

[Boxing Logic]

I've never boxed without headgear, so I can't say for sure what goes through these great boxers heads, but watching from the outside, that seems to be what it always is. Guys hit their opponent with their best punches, their opponent doesn't go anywhere, and they start to fatigue badly, not sure if they have the stamina to reach the final bell, and they are in a lot of physical discomfort in the ring, not sure that they can take too many more punches from their opponents, so I imagine they feel trapped. They want to quit, but their pride, and their anxiety about how the world will react, makes them feel like they can't quit, so instead they look for some other way to end the fight, such as fouling their opponent so blatantly that they get disqualified.

During the entire HBO Legendary Nights episode about the Andre Golata fights, when all the analysts were brainstorming about what could have possibly caused Golata to do this twice, it seemed extremely obvious to me, and in fact it was baffling to me that all those HBO analysts could speculate about every possible reason but the most obvious one. It was like they were playing out their fantasies of being psychiatrists and they wanted to pretend Golata was this super mysterious figure, who must have had some unique dark demons inside him to have just not even heard the referee tell him not to punch low. Whereas to me it seemed as simple as, Golata had never been 15 super hard rounds before, and he wasn't physically capable of it. He just didn't have the cardio, or at least he felt like he didn't. So, he gave it his all, and fought by the rules, for the first half of each fight, hoping to get his opponent out of there, but he couldn't, and then at a certain point Golata just didn't have the stamina to keep going, but he knew he couldn't quit, so he found a way out of the fight by fouling.

And you have to assume, Mike Tyson felt similarly.

It does make me wonder, and thanks to Tony Weeks we will probably wonder forever unless Ward decides to come out with the truth later in life out of respect for Kovalev or the fans (fat chance), what was going through Andre Ward's head in the 7th of 8th rounds of his rematch with Sergey Kovalev, behind on the (non-corrupt) scorecards again after losing the first fight (on non-corrupt scorecards), landing more shots than the first fight but also getting hit way more to both body and head than the first fight by a man who has killed someone in the ring, and also broken an opponent's ribs with a jab... and up until Ward realized the ref was going to let him do whatever he wanted, and the fouls took their toll on Kovalev which opened up the right hand to his head that wobbled but did not drop him, nothing Ward had been able to hit Kovalev with had affected him at all, while Ward had already been staggered by a Kovalev jab in the first fight and knocked down, and Ward seemed to some extent to feel every shot Kovalev landed...

You have to wonder what was going through Ward's mind. He was so fatigued by the end of the first fight that Kovalev almost knocked him down in the 12th round of that fight with just a tap to the liver. That was before Ward packed on all that extra muscle for the rematch, which causes you to fatigue much faster. And that was in a fight where Kovalev barely went to the body at all early, unlike the rematch.

So when you look at it, all the factors were there halfway through the Kovalev-Ward rematch to suggest that poker face or not, Ward may not have believed he was going to make it through the 12th round, and as a result, he may have wanted out of there. Because for all the talk by HBO's biased commentary team of Kovalev wanting out of the fight, Kovalev was not the one who came out blatantly fouling in rounds 7 and 8. Not once did Kovalev resort to fouling Ward intentionally, which would have been the mark of a truly desperate boxer.

No, that was Ward, and when you look back at the fight without the biased narrative-creating commentary of HBO on, and each time you watch Ward get drilled, even just by jobs, you remind yourself just how destructively hard Kovalev punches, even his jabs, then it actually makes perfect sense that Ward would feel that way. As I said at the top, we are unlikely to ever truly know how he felt, but the fact is, he is the one that started pulling his own version of what Mike Tyson and Andrew Golata each did, in their own ways, not Kovalev...

And as Holyfield explains in the quotes in this article, we know why they did it. We know why almost all the boxers who have done it, did it. So just because the official outcome was recorded differently than those two fights, should that really cause us to think the reason he did it was any different than the reason Golata and Tyson did? Ward is a black American, American Olympic gold medalist, who fought on American soil against a Russian, with a black American referee, and likely as a direct result of some or all of those factors, Ward was awarded the win for what he did rather than get disqualified, but just because of those circumstances, should we really be fooled into missing the forest through the trees?

Take those outside circumstances away, and I think the truth is Ward wanted out of that fight just as badly as Tyson and Golata wanted out of theirs. The only differences are, Ward is craftier than both of them were, and Ward is much more protected than either of them were at that point in their careers, but as much as that first difference is worth noting, it wouldn't have helped Ward one bit in escaping that ring with a better outcome than Tyson and Golata took with them from their ring escapes if not for the second difference. As a result of being protected, Ward escaped with an official win on his record, while Golata and Tyson received official losses, but in my opinion all three of them were beaten on the night. All three experienced some combination of their stamina failing them, taking too much of a physical beating, and perhaps the mental doubt and anxiety that can naturally stem from those two factors.

With all said and done on these six fights, Holyfield and Bowe got their moments in the sun, while Golata and Tyson hit rock bottom in the sport before either rebounding in their careers or moving forward with their lives into different, but positive, directions, but Sergey Kovalev never got the moment he had earned, while instead of hitting rock bottom, Ward was celebrated by many in the media as having reached the summit of the sport after that fight, before retiring. Funny how that works, right? Can you imagine Andrew Golata being showered in praise and adulation after the second Bowe fight? It seems that when enough corruption is involved, reality can be turned completely upside down, in terms of perception. Now Kovalev is the one seen as having to rebuild his career, and the one being criticized, when in all honesty, as much as a GGG fan as I am, when I went back and watched Kovalev-Ward II after Canelo-GGG, I saw a much higher level fight than where GGG is at this point in his career. Despite being in the heavier division, I saw both Kovalev and Ward throwing much faster punches than GGG. Without the HBO commentary in my ear distorting reality, I actually saw the #1 pound-for-pound boxer in the world in that fight, Sergey Kovalev, fighting someone around #5 in the world, and then in the GGG-Canelo fight, it looked more like two boxers between #6 and #10. And yet as it stands, the one who deserved the top spot most of those four is now the only one of those four to have been kicked out of the top 10 entirely, while the other three have all been moved up in light of their fights this year, and the one who I believe would have gotten kicked from the top 10 entirely had the fight been officiated fairly and the fight ended how I believe it would have ended had that been the case is the one who was elevated highest before his retirement.*

But, that's boxing! All the fans, and 99.9% of the boxers, wish it was different, but the promoters and the few cash cow boxers who benefit see financial benefit in keeping it exactly the way it is, so it's stayed this way for decades and looks like it will continue to stay this way until one of the true power players in boxing decides to think intelligent and bravely enough to come up with a financially viable business plan for boxing that does involve, you know, destroying boxing...

I mean, you would think there would be more money in growing a product, rather than destroying a product... but, so far, either the stewards of the sport have not seen it that way, or no one has been in position to act in the sport's best interest because they have always had responsibilities to their own promotional company and certain boxers under contract that have outweighed that. Either way, the results have been very bad for the sport, even in 2017, but it's been this way for so long, some fans are resigned to it never changing and don't even bring it up anymore. I still like to spread awareness though in the hope that boxing will improve and that the issues with it will become understood by more people and thus become a greater part of the boxing conversation, and that that will ultimately lead to the being addressed and fixed.

*His surprise retirement, by the way, only adds one more piece of supporting evidence to all the other circumstances that suggest he was not feeling or doing as well after 18 rounds in the ring with the Krusher as people think.

[Squ□redCircle34]

I've never boxed without headgear, so I can't say for sure what goes through these great boxers heads, but watching from the outside, that seems to be what it always is. Guys hit their opponent with their best punches, their opponent doesn't go anywhere, and they start to fatigue badly, not sure if they have the stamina to reach the final bell, and they are in a lot of physical discomfort in the ring, not sure that they can take too many more punches from their opponents, so I imagine they feel trapped. They want to quit, but their pride, and their anxiety about how the world will react, makes them feel like they can't quit, so instead they look for some other way to end the fight, such as fouling their opponent so blatantly that they get disqualified.

During the entire HBO Legendary Nights episode about the Andre Golata fights, when all the analysts were brainstorming about what could have possibly caused Golata to do this twice, it seemed extremely obvious to me, and in fact it was baffling to me that all those HBO analysts could speculate about every possible reason but the most obvious one. It was like they were playing out their fantasies of being psychiatrists and they wanted to pretend Golata was this super mysterious figure, who must have had some unique dark demons inside him to have just not even heard the referee tell him not to punch low. Whereas to me it seemed as simple as, Golata had never been 15 super hard rounds before, and he wasn't physically capable of it. He just didn't have the cardio, or at least he felt like he didn't. So, he gave it his all, and fought by the rules, for the first half of each fight, hoping to get his opponent out of there, but he couldn't, and then at a certain point Golata just didn't have the stamina to keep going, but he knew he couldn't quit, so he found a way out of the fight by fouling.

And you have to assume, Mike Tyson felt similarly.

It does make me wonder, and thanks to Tony Weeks we will probably wonder forever unless Ward decides to come out with the truth later in life out of respect for Kovalev or the fans (fat chance), what was going through Andre Ward's head in the 7th of 8th rounds of his rematch with Sergey Kovalev, behind on the (non-corrupt) scorecards again after losing the first fight (on non-corrupt scorecards), landing more shots than the first fight but also getting hit way more to both body and head than the first fight by a man who has killed someone in the ring, and also broken an opponent's ribs with a jab... up until Ward realized the ref was going to let him do whatever he wanted, and the fouls took their toll on Kovalev, opening up the right hand to Kovalev's head that wobbled him, nothing Ward had been able to hit Kovalev with had affected him at all, while Ward had already been staggered by a Kovalev jab in the first fight and knocked down, and Ward seemed to feel every shot Kovalev landed to some extent.

You have to wonder what was going through Ward's mind. He was so fatigued by the end of the first fight that Kovalev almost knocked him down in the 12th round of that fight with just a tap to the liver. That was before Ward packed on all that extra muscle for the rematch, which causes you to fatigue much faster. And that was in a fight where Kovalev barely went to the body at all early, unlike the rematch.

So when you look at it, all the factors were there halfway through the Kovalev-Ward rematch to suggest that poker face or not, Ward may not have believed he was going to make it through the 12th round, and as a result, he may have wanted out of there. Because for all the talk by HBO's biased commentary team of Kovalev wanting out of the fight, Kovalev was not the one who came out blatantly fouling in rounds 7 and 8. Not once did Kovalev resort to fouling Ward intentionally, which would have been the mark of a truly desperate boxer.

No, that was Ward, and when you look back at the fight without the biased narrative-creating commentary of HBO on, and each time you watch Ward get drilled, even just by jobs, you remind yourself just how destructively hard Kovalev punches, even his jabs, then it actually makes perfect sense that Ward would feel that way. As I said at the top, we are unlikely to ever truly know how he felt, but the fact is, he is the one that started pulling his own version of what Mike Tyson and Andrew Golata each did, in their own ways, not Kovalev...

And as Holyfield explains in the quotes in this article, we know why they did it. We know why almost all the boxers who have done it, did it. So just because the official outcome was recorded differently than those two fights, should that really cause us to think the reason he did it was any different than the reason Golata and Tyson did? Ward is a black American, American Olympic gold medalist, who fought on American soil against a Russian, with a black American referee, and likely as a direct result of some or all of those factors, Ward was awarded the win for what he did rather than get disqualified, but just because of those circumstances, should we really be fooled into missing the forest through the trees?

Take those outside circumstances away, and I think the truth is Ward wanted out of that fight just as badly as Tyson and Golata wanted out of theirs. The only differences are, Ward is craftier than both of them were, and Ward is much more protected than either of them were at that point in their careers, but as much as that first difference is worth noting, it wouldn't have helped Ward one bit in escaping that ring with a better outcome than Tyson and Golata took with them from their ring escapes if not for the second difference. As a result of being protected, Ward escaped with an official win on his record, while Golata and Tyson received official losses, but in my opinion all three of them were beaten on the night. All three experienced some combination of their stamina failing them, taking too much of a physical beating, and perhaps the mental doubt and anxiety that can naturally stem from those two factors.

With all said and done on these six fights, Holyfield and Bowe got their moments in the sun, while Golata and Tyson hit rock bottom in the sport before either rebounding in their careers or moving forward with their lives into different, but positive, directions, but Sergey Kovalev never got the moment he had earned, while instead of hitting rock bottom, Ward was celebrated by many in the media as having reached the summit of the sport after that fight, before retiring. Funny how that works, right? Can you imagine Andrew Golata being showered in praise and adulation after the second Bowe fight? It seems that when enough corruption is involved, reality can be turned completely upside down, in terms of perception. Now Kovalev is the one seen as having to rebuild his career, and the one being criticized, when in all honesty, as much as a GGG fan as I am, when I went back and watched Kovalev-Ward II after Canelo-GGG, I saw a much higher level fight than where GGG is at this point in his career. Despite being in the heavier division, I saw both Kovalev and Ward throwing much faster punches than GGG. Without the HBO commentary in my ear distorting reality, I actually saw the #1 pound-for-pound boxer in the world in that fight, Sergey Kovalev, fighting someone around #5 in the world, and then in the GGG-Canelo fight, it looked more like two boxers between #6 and #10. And yet as it stands, the one who deserved the top spot most of those four is now the only one of those four to have been kicked out of the top 10 entirely, while the other three have all been moved up in light of their fights this year, and the one who I believe would have gotten kicked from the top 10 entirely had the fight been officiated fairly and the fight ended how I believe it would have ended had that been the case is the one who was elevated highest before his retirement.*

Only in boxing!

His surprise retirement, by the way, only adds one more piece of supporting evidence to all the other circumstances that suggest he was not feeling or doing as well after 18 rounds in the ring with the Krusher as people think.

Bruh why do you constantly type essay's like a school project?

Tired of seeing your name and knowing that I'll have to scroll down for 2 hour's!

Nah I'm kidding, I don't like lots of your points on different things but I do agree with you about the "truth of who really runs the show" in the world if you get what I mean!

[apollocreed]

I've never boxed without headgear, so I can't say for sure what goes through these great boxers heads, but watching from the outside, that seems to be what it always is. Guys hit their opponent with their best punches, their opponent doesn't go anywhere, and they start to fatigue badly, not sure if they have the stamina to reach the final bell, and they are in a lot of physical discomfort in the ring, not sure that they can take too many more punches from their opponents, so I imagine they feel trapped. They want to quit, but their pride, and their anxiety about how the world will react, makes them feel like they can't quit, so instead they look for some other way to end the fight, such as fouling their opponent so blatantly that they get disqualified.

During the entire HBO Legendary Nights episode about the Andre Golata fights, when all the analysts were brainstorming about what could have possibly caused Golata to do this twice, it seemed extremely obvious to me, and in fact it was baffling to me that all those HBO analysts could speculate about every possible reason but the most obvious one. It was like they were playing out their fantasies of being psychiatrists and they wanted to pretend Golata was this super mysterious figure, who must have had some unique dark demons inside him to have just not even heard the referee tell him not to punch low. Whereas to me it seemed as simple as, Golata had never been 15 super hard rounds before, and he wasn't physically capable of it. He just didn't have the cardio, or at least he felt like he didn't. So, he gave it his all, and fought by the rules, for the first half of each fight, hoping to get his opponent out of there, but he couldn't, and then at a certain point Golata just didn't have the stamina to keep going, but he knew he couldn't quit, so he found a way out of the fight by fouling.

And you have to assume, Mike Tyson felt similarly.

It does make me wonder, and thanks to Tony Weeks we will probably wonder forever unless Ward decides to come out with the truth later in life out of respect for Kovalev or the fans (fat chance), what was going through Andre Ward's head in the 7th of 8th rounds of his rematch with Sergey Kovalev, behind on the (non-corrupt) scorecards again after losing the first fight (on non-corrupt scorecards), landing more shots than the first fight but also getting hit way more to both body and head than the first fight by a man who has killed someone in the ring, and also broken an opponent's ribs with a jab... and up until Ward realized the ref was going to let him do whatever he wanted, and the fouls took their toll on Kovalev which opened up the right hand to his head that wobbled but did not drop him, nothing Ward had been able to hit Kovalev with had affected him at all, while Ward had already been staggered by a Kovalev jab in the first fight and knocked down, and Ward seemed to some extent to feel every shot Kovalev landed...

You have to wonder what was going through Ward's mind. He was so fatigued by the end of the first fight that Kovalev almost knocked him down in the 12th round of that fight with just a tap to the liver. That was before Ward packed on all that extra muscle for the rematch, which causes you to fatigue much faster. And that was in a fight where Kovalev barely went to the body at all early, unlike the rematch.

So when you look at it, all the factors were there halfway through the Kovalev-Ward rematch to suggest that poker face or not, Ward may not have believed he was going to make it through the 12th round, and as a result, he may have wanted out of there. Because for all the talk by HBO's biased commentary team of Kovalev wanting out of the fight, Kovalev was not the one who came out blatantly fouling in rounds 7 and 8. Not once did Kovalev resort to fouling Ward intentionally, which would have been the mark of a truly desperate boxer.

No, that was Ward, and when you look back at the fight without the biased narrative-creating commentary of HBO on, and each time you watch Ward get drilled, even just by jobs, you remind yourself just how destructively hard Kovalev punches, even his jabs, then it actually makes perfect sense that Ward would feel that way. As I said at the top, we are unlikely to ever truly know how he felt, but the fact is, he is the one that started pulling his own version of what Mike Tyson and Andrew Golata each did, in their own ways, not Kovalev...

And as Holyfield explains in the quotes in this article, we know why they did it. We know why almost all the boxers who have done it, did it. So just because the official outcome was recorded differently than those two fights, should that really cause us to think the reason he did it was any different than the reason Golata and Tyson did? Ward is a black American, American Olympic gold medalist, who fought on American soil against a Russian, with a black American referee, and likely as a direct result of some or all of those factors, Ward was awarded the win for what he did rather than get disqualified, but just because of those circumstances, should we really be fooled into missing the forest through the trees?

Take those outside circumstances away, and I think the truth is Ward wanted out of that fight just as badly as Tyson and Golata wanted out of theirs. The only differences are, Ward is craftier than both of them were, and Ward is much more protected than either of them were at that point in their careers, but as much as that first difference is worth noting, it wouldn't have helped Ward one bit in escaping that ring with a better outcome than Tyson and Golata took with them from their ring escapes if not for the second difference. As a result of being protected, Ward escaped with an official win on his record, while Golata and Tyson received official losses, but in my opinion all three of them were beaten on the night. All three experienced some combination of their stamina failing them, taking too much of a physical beating, and perhaps the mental doubt and anxiety that can naturally stem from those two factors.

With all said and done on these six fights, Holyfield and Bowe got their moments in the sun, while Golata and Tyson hit rock bottom in the sport before either rebounding in their careers or moving forward with their lives into different, but positive, directions, but Sergey Kovalev never got the moment he had earned, while instead of hitting rock bottom, Ward was celebrated by many in the media as having reached the summit of the sport after that fight, before retiring. Funny how that works, right? Can you imagine Andrew Golata being showered in praise and adulation after the second Bowe fight? It seems that when enough corruption is involved, reality can be turned completely upside down, in terms of perception. Now Kovalev is the one seen as having to rebuild his career, and the one being criticized, when in all honesty, as much as a GGG fan as I am, when I went back and watched Kovalev-Ward II after Canelo-GGG, I saw a much higher level fight than where GGG is at this point in his career. Despite being in the heavier division, I saw both Kovalev and Ward throwing much faster punches than GGG. Without the HBO commentary in my ear distorting reality, I actually saw the #1 pound-for-pound boxer in the world in that fight, Sergey Kovalev, fighting someone around #5 in the world, and then in the GGG-Canelo fight, it looked more like two boxers between #6 and #10. And yet as it stands, the one who deserved the top spot most of those four is now the only one of those four to have been kicked out of the top 10 entirely, while the other three have all been moved up in light of their fights this year, and the one who I believe would have gotten kicked from the top 10 entirely had the fight been officiated fairly and the fight ended how I believe it would have ended had that been the case is the one who was elevated highest before his retirement.*

But, that's boxing! All the fans, and 99.9% of the boxers, wish it was different, but the promoters and the few cash cow boxers who benefit see financial benefit in keeping it exactly the way it is, so it's stayed this way for decades and looks like it will continue to stay this way until one of the true power players in boxing decides to think intelligent and bravely enough to come up with a financially viable business plan for boxing that does involve, you know, destroying boxing...

I mean, you would think there would be more money in growing a product, rather than destroying a product... but, so far, either the stewards of the sport have not seen it that way, or no one has been in position to act in the sport's best interest because they have always had responsibilities to their own promotional company and certain boxers under contract that have outweighed that. Either way, the results have been very bad for the sport, even in 2017, but it's been this way for so long, some fans are resigned to it never changing and don't even bring it up anymore. I still like to spread awareness though in the hope that boxing will improve and that the issues with it will become understood by more people and thus become a greater part of the boxing conversation, and that that will ultimately lead to the being addressed and fixed.

*His surprise retirement, by the way, only adds one more piece of supporting evidence to all the other circumstances that suggest he was not feeling or doing as well after 18 rounds in the ring with the Krusher as people think.

OMG just accept that Ward bested Kovalev twice. He was the better man over 12 rounds in the first and in the 2nd until it was stopped. It's not how you start it's how you finish in boxing. 'Kovalev was just a puncher' - Don Turner said that after the 2nd fight and he was in Kovalev's corner. You cannot accept reality. And to say Kovalev was P4P no 1 is ridiculous. You could say top 5 before he ran into Ward, but Ward proved he was not the full package, so even top 5 was actually over rating him. Ward is a master boxer, big difference in skill set to a knockout artist. Cue the 'low blows', 'hugging' bull**** excuses again.... (sigh)

[joseph5620]

tyson was getting his azz whooped

Yes he sure was.

[joseph5620]

I've never boxed without headgear, so I can't say for sure what goes through these great boxers heads, but watching from the outside, that seems to be what it always is. Guys hit their opponent with their best punches, their opponent doesn't go anywhere, and they start to fatigue badly, not sure if they have the stamina to reach the final bell, and they are in a lot of physical discomfort in the ring, not sure that they can take too many more punches from their opponents, so I imagine they feel trapped. They want to quit, but their pride, and their anxiety about how the world will react, makes them feel like they can't quit, so instead they look for some other way to end the fight, such as fouling their opponent so blatantly that they get disqualified.

During the entire HBO Legendary Nights episode about the Andre Golata fights, when all the analysts were brainstorming about what could have possibly caused Golata to do this twice, it seemed extremely obvious to me, and in fact it was baffling to me that all those HBO analysts could speculate about every possible reason but the most obvious one. It was like they were playing out their fantasies of being psychiatrists and they wanted to pretend Golata was this super mysterious figure, who must have had some unique dark demons inside him to have just not even heard the referee tell him not to punch low. Whereas to me it seemed as simple as, Golata had never been 15 super hard rounds before, and he wasn't physically capable of it. He just didn't have the cardio, or at least he felt like he didn't. So, he gave it his all, and fought by the rules, for the first half of each fight, hoping to get his opponent out of there, but he couldn't, and then at a certain point Golata just didn't have the stamina to keep going, but he knew he couldn't quit, so he found a way out of the fight by fouling.

And you have to assume, Mike Tyson felt similarly.

It does make me wonder, and thanks to Tony Weeks we will probably wonder forever unless Ward decides to come out with the truth later in life out of respect for Kovalev or the fans (fat chance), what was going through Andre Ward's head in the 7th of 8th rounds of his rematch with Sergey Kovalev, behind on the (non-corrupt) scorecards again after losing the first fight (on non-corrupt scorecards), landing more shots than the first fight but also getting hit way more to both body and head than the first fight by a man who has killed someone in the ring, and also broken an opponent's ribs with a jab... and up until Ward realized the ref was going to let him do whatever he wanted, and the fouls took their toll on Kovalev which opened up the right hand to his head that wobbled but did not drop him, nothing Ward had been able to hit Kovalev with had affected him at all, while Ward had already been staggered by a Kovalev jab in the first fight and knocked down, and Ward seemed to some extent to feel every shot Kovalev landed...

You have to wonder what was going through Ward's mind. He was so fatigued by the end of the first fight that Kovalev almost knocked him down in the 12th round of that fight with just a tap to the liver. That was before Ward packed on all that extra muscle for the rematch, which causes you to fatigue much faster. And that was in a fight where Kovalev barely went to the body at all early, unlike the rematch.

So when you look at it, all the factors were there halfway through the Kovalev-Ward rematch to suggest that poker face or not, Ward may not have believed he was going to make it through the 12th round, and as a result, he may have wanted out of there. Because for all the talk by HBO's biased commentary team of Kovalev wanting out of the fight, Kovalev was not the one who came out blatantly fouling in rounds 7 and 8. Not once did Kovalev resort to fouling Ward intentionally, which would have been the mark of a truly desperate boxer.

No, that was Ward, and when you look back at the fight without the biased narrative-creating commentary of HBO on, and each time you watch Ward get drilled, even just by jobs, you remind yourself just how destructively hard Kovalev punches, even his jabs, then it actually makes perfect sense that Ward would feel that way. As I said at the top, we are unlikely to ever truly know how he felt, but the fact is, he is the one that started pulling his own version of what Mike Tyson and Andrew Golata each did, in their own ways, not Kovalev...

And as Holyfield explains in the quotes in this article, we know why they did it. We know why almost all the boxers who have done it, did it. So just because the official outcome was recorded differently than those two fights, should that really cause us to think the reason he did it was any different than the reason Golata and Tyson did? Ward is a black American, American Olympic gold medalist, who fought on American soil against a Russian, with a black American referee, and likely as a direct result of some or all of those factors, Ward was awarded the win for what he did rather than get disqualified, but just because of those circumstances, should we really be fooled into missing the forest through the trees?

Take those outside circumstances away, and I think the truth is Ward wanted out of that fight just as badly as Tyson and Golata wanted out of theirs. The only differences are, Ward is craftier than both of them were, and Ward is much more protected than either of them were at that point in their careers, but as much as that first difference is worth noting, it wouldn't have helped Ward one bit in escaping that ring with a better outcome than Tyson and Golata took with them from their ring escapes if not for the second difference. As a result of being protected, Ward escaped with an official win on his record, while Golata and Tyson received official losses, but in my opinion all three of them were beaten on the night. All three experienced some combination of their stamina failing them, taking too much of a physical beating, and perhaps the mental doubt and anxiety that can naturally stem from those two factors.

With all said and done on these six fights, Holyfield and Bowe got their moments in the sun, while Golata and Tyson hit rock bottom in the sport before either rebounding in their careers or moving forward with their lives into different, but positive, directions, but Sergey Kovalev never got the moment he had earned, while instead of hitting rock bottom, Ward was celebrated by many in the media as having reached the summit of the sport after that fight, before retiring. Funny how that works, right? Can you imagine Andrew Golata being showered in praise and adulation after the second Bowe fight? It seems that when enough corruption is involved, reality can be turned completely upside down, in terms of perception. Now Kovalev is the one seen as having to rebuild his career, and the one being criticized, when in all honesty, as much as a GGG fan as I am, when I went back and watched Kovalev-Ward II after Canelo-GGG, I saw a much higher level fight than where GGG is at this point in his career. Despite being in the heavier division, I saw both Kovalev and Ward throwing much faster punches than GGG. Without the HBO commentary in my ear distorting reality, I actually saw the #1 pound-for-pound boxer in the world in that fight, Sergey Kovalev, fighting someone around #5 in the world, and then in the GGG-Canelo fight, it looked more like two boxers between #6 and #10. And yet as it stands, the one who deserved the top spot most of those four is now the only one of those four to have been kicked out of the top 10 entirely, while the other three have all been moved up in light of their fights this year, and the one who I believe would have gotten kicked from the top 10 entirely had the fight been officiated fairly and the fight ended how I believe it would have ended had that been the case is the one who was elevated highest before his retirement.*

But, that's boxing! All the fans, and 99.9% of the boxers, wish it was different, but the promoters and the few cash cow boxers who benefit see financial benefit in keeping it exactly the way it is, so it's stayed this way for decades and looks like it will continue to stay this way until one of the true power players in boxing decides to think intelligent and bravely enough to come up with a financially viable business plan for boxing that does involve, you know, destroying boxing...

I mean, you would think there would be more money in growing a product, rather than destroying a product... but, so far, either the stewards of the sport have not seen it that way, or no one has been in position to act in the sport's best interest because they have always had responsibilities to their own promotional company and certain boxers under contract that have outweighed that. Either way, the results have been very bad for the sport, even in 2017, but it's been this way for so long, some fans are resigned to it never changing and don't even bring it up anymore. I still like to spread awareness though in the hope that boxing will improve and that the issues with it will become understood by more people and thus become a greater part of the boxing conversation, and that that will ultimately lead to the being addressed and fixed.

*His surprise retirement, by the way, only adds one more piece of supporting evidence to all the other circumstances that suggest he was not feeling or doing as well after 18 rounds in the ring with the Krusher as people think.

Something is seriously wrong with you.

[Squ□redCircle34]

Prime Iron Mike would destroy Holyfield!

Shid, Holyfield would've gotten extra dirty to make it out of the early rounds against that Tyson!

The Mike he fought wasn't as disciplined, dedicated, didn't have the same motivation, the hunger, agility, speed, and defensive responsibility!

Cus D'Amato would've instructed Mike to stay calm, and give Holyfield a "phantom forearm or phantom elbow" to the face!

So basically, throw a punch but follow through with a forearm or elbow!

After awhile Evander will stop once he tastes enough bone on his nose and !

Prime Iron Mike with Cus D'Amato stops him in 8 rounds!