Quijano: Bullish on Andre Ward

Monday, December 19, 2011

WELCOME to the Andre Ward era. The new champion of Showtime’s Super Six Super middleweight tournament displayed the full range of his skills last Saturday with a dominating performance against Britain’s Carl Froch.

Ward (25-0, 13KOs), a true student of the game who is a stylistic nightmare for most opponents, used his speed to dominate the equally talented Froch.

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The confident Brit came into the fight with only one prior loss, a close and disputed one to Mikkel Kessler, but against Ward the verdict was never in doubt.

Ward scored with double, triple jabs and hooks and owned the inside game. While Froch had his moments and landed some body shots and uppercuts, Ward clearly won majority of the rounds with his accurate punches and flurries.

BULLISH. This writer has been high on Ward since the first time he read about him in the book “A Fighter’s Heart” and upon seeing his fight with Colombian banger Edison Miranda.

Coming into that fight, “Pantera” was a feared puncher who had been with the likes of Arthur Abraham and Kelly Pavlik. Ward was practically an 18-win novice, but he showed his poise and dominated Miranda.

What’s even more impressive is that he’s still young at 27 with only 25 fights to his credit, but his roster of victims already read like a Hall of fame dossier: Kessler, Arthur Abraham, Glen Johnson, Allan Green Froch.

All things considered, the Showtime tournament was also a very good vehicle to launch its winner into superstardom. I’m hoping other boxing promoters take their cue and follow that template as it invariably mandates several quality match-ups between top-tier fighters who are committed by contract to face each other regardless of the results.

For Ward, the fighter he must face and beat next seems to no other than undefeated southpaw Lucian Bute. That would be a guaranteed super-fight for 2012.

KHAN-QUERED. I’m not much of an Amir Khan (26-2, 18KOs) fan. He talks a lot of smack then runs around like a popinjay every time his opponent does something frightening.

Like you know, chase him down and throwing punches. (Go ask Marcos Maidana about it)
But regardless of how I feel, I think he got the short end of the deal in losing via split decision to Lamont Peterson (30-1, 15KOs) last week.

Khan was meted a two-point deduction for constantly shoving Peterson in their championship match. As it turns out those two points were crucial as it allowed Peterson to eke a win by scores of 115-110, 112-113 (twice) in an upset victory.

Given that it was a championship bout and taking into account that it’s become a common occurrence for fighters to try and gain every advantage they can get so long it’s short of Tyson biting an ear or Andrew Golota hitting low, it could have been reasonably inferred that the ref would not go as far as taking away those crucial two points.

But here’s where the rubber meets the pothole.

The rules clearly state that a ref can lawfully deduct a point after repeated warnings for a foul and by any book, pushing an opponent is not allowed in a fight, otherwise it will deteriorate into a shoving match.

Ergo, referee Joseph Cooper was well within his rights to impose that sanction. This means also that just because everybody is doing it, doesn’t make it right.

How then can you fault Cooper for basically just doing his job? How can we label his act an anomaly when he was just enforcing the standard?

I’m sitting on the fence on this one, but then again, for reasons cited above, I’m not complaining.

HE SAID IT. “This is not the end, it’s the beginning”- Andre Ward (fightnews.com)

LAST ROUNDS. Are on Jean Haydee Wang and Edward Mellana who are set to exchange I do’s this week. Cheers!

(jingo_quijano@yahoo.com)