Reply to thread

Message: [QUOTE="SWC75, post: 3882157, member: 289"] ZZZZZzzzzzzzz... Shakur Stevenson defeated Jeremiah Nakathila with a 12 round unanimous decision. All three judges graded it 120-107, which is interesting as Nakathila went down three times but the referee declared two of them to be slips, even though the replay showed punches landed. I guess the judges are allowed to count knockdowns they see even if the referee didn't. Stevenson, who is naturally righthanded, chooses to box from a southpaw stance. Nakathila boxes from the right-handed stance, which means that his left foot and Stevenson's right foot were right up against each other. As the commentators, (Timothy Bradley and Andre Ward), explained, the guy who gets his foot to the outside is in position to throw his punches more directly with more power so it was battle for foot position that Stevenson repeatedly won. The referee spent much of the fight looking at those two feet. He constantly reminded the fighters to "watch the feet", stopped the fighting a couple of times to warn them about it and even threatened to take a point away. As the commentators pointed out, neither fighter was intentionally tripping or stepping on the other fighter's foot so who would have been penalized is unclear. But the referee's foot fetish apparently caused him to miss the punches that were actually landed in those two knockdowns. Fortunately, nothing the referee did could have made any difference in this fight as Stevenson clearly won every round. He landed 114 of 304, (37.5%), punches while Nakathila landed a pathetic 28 of 305, (9%). At one point, they showed a graphic saying that he had attempted 52 jabs and none of them had landed. As he was the taller fighter, that must have been disappointing. The thing, is Stevenson appeared capable of taking him out at any time but refused to commit himself to do so. He didn't throw combinations and also didn't take advantage of Nakathila's misses with counter-punches. He just stepped in occasionally for a quick shot, several of which staggered his opponent, then stepped back as if to admire his work. As the fight went on, Bradley and Ward became more and more impatient with this, suggesting that a fighter of Stevenson's talent should be trying to do more than this and if he wants to be the boxing superstar he claims he will be, he's going to have to give us more than that. here's a quote of the ESPN article about the fight: "I tried to [get him out of there] a little bit, but I started getting hit with some solid shots. I ain't really like it, but next time I'm going to work on moving my head a little bit more and step it up a little more." In other words, he didn't want to give him the "old 1-3". [/QUOTE]

Verification: What is a Syracuse fan's favorite color?