Saddest sight: champions beaten up

<p>Manny Pacquiao beat up Oscar De La Hoya last Saturday night in Las Vegas, and it’s always sad when an all-time great fighter not only loses but gets beaten up. Not knocked out. Getting knocked out would, in a strange but honest way, be nobler than just getting beat up.</p><p>Looking at the pictures of De La Hoya shut out, having lost every round, beaten, alone on his stool and bereft of his skills, more unwilling than unable to come out for more punishment, so discouraged, his crushed will and deflated ego so exposed — it was all so sad, so naked.</p><p>Forget De La Hoya’s wealth and fame. Forget, for a moment, the fact that the Golden Boy will survive, quite nicely, thank you.</p><p>I’m just talking about last Saturday’s fight and how awful it is to see a once-great champion so exposed as a mere mortal or worse — a has-been, a bum. And no sport so thoroughly reveals a hero’s fatal flaws like boxing. For De La Hoya, so proud, so remarkable over a 16-year career, it had to be emotionally and psychologically shattering. It’s almost Shakespearean is its element of the theatrically tragic.</p><p>It reminded me of when Larry Holmes beat up Muhammad Ali on Oct. 2, 1980.</p><p>I was working for a paper in Visalia at the time and the day before had just written a column predicting that Ali, 38, one of the all-time greats, would defeat Holmes, 30.</p><p>I went to a closed-circuit showing of the fight with friends. We all wanted Ali to win. He had meant so much to boxing and, of course, had come to mean so much beyond the ring.</p><p>I knew he had no business being in the ring with Holmes, his former sparring partner who was then at the peak of his powers — tough, fast, deadly jab. I knew Ali hadn’t been the same for the previous five years, since his third fight with Joe Frazier, in Manila (a double Shakespearean tragedy, if you’ll indulge me), a fight Ali could have lost but didn’t, but at a terrible cost.</p><p>But my friends and I were going on emotion, not logic. We wanted Ali to prevail over Holmes, to pull out one more unlikely victory, like he had done in his third fight against Ken Norton, like he had done against Jimmy Young and in his rematch with Leon Spinks. We didn’t want the ride to end.</p><p>Watching Ali get beaten up by Holmes, unable to fight back, round after round, was sickening. Watching him sit on his stool and not come out for the 11th round was about the profoundly saddest thing I’ve ever seen as a sports fan.</p><p>Other instances of champions getting beat up, forced to quit while on their stools, vividly come to mind.</p><p>Sonny Liston was a big favorite when he entered the ring to defend the heavyweight title on Feb. 25, 1964, against Ali, then known as Cassius Clay. As a contender in the 1950s and early ’60s, Liston destroyed his competition, wiped out the division. Then he won the title with a first-round knockout of Floyd Patterson in 1962. The rematch was a replay.</p><p>But against Clay, Liston was exposed as overconfident and too slow. After six rounds, he was beaten and bloodied and looked as though he had aged 10 years in half an hour. When he refused to come out for the seventh round, he was widely ridiculed as a fraud or worse — a coward. Still, it was a sad sight. Just like that, he had gone from being perceived as an invincible champion to a sad-sack quitter.</p><p>And in the aforementioned Ali-Frazier fight in 1975, the third of their three confrontations, with the first and last being bona fide epics, it looked like either man was ready to quit after 14 grueling rounds.</p><p>But Frazier couldn’t see out of one eye. He risked blindness, even death, if he went out for the final round, even though it was questionable whether Ali had the strength for another round. Very reluctantly, Frazier went along with trainer Eddie Futch’s insistence he not continue.</p><p>It was sad to see Smokin’ Joe beat up and lose, almost as sad as seeing Ali beat up and win, but that fight did nothing but burnish their reputations as boxing’s greatest rivals.</p><p>De La Hoya’s reputation, though, wasn’t burnished. It was tarnished.</p><p>(Robert Rubino can be reached at robert.rubino@pressdemocrat.com or 521-5261.)</p>