Marquez-Lopez: Saving Face?

There are three kinds of injuries in professional boxing.

Every now and then (Sharmba Mitchell's sprained knee after Kostya Tzsyu threw him to the canvas in their first fight or Vitali Klischko's strained shoulder in his fight with Chris Byrd, a fight he was winning on the cards, come to mind) there is the genuine injury.

There is the frustration injury. A guy can't do a lot against the guy he's fighting and, even though he's not getting terribly hurt, he either takes advantage of a real but minor cut or claims a more severe injury and calls it in. We all might remember Robert Guerrero** getting criticized for this some time back. The classic example is Sonny Liston's wrenched shoulder in Liston-Clay I.

Finally, there is the 'getting one's ass kicked injury.' A guy is getting beat up, he's going to go down for the count eventually or really get hurt if he keeps fighting, but he can't just quit. He has to save face. He's going to lose by knockout, ultimately, anyway; so he claims an injury to get it over with.

It's hard not to suspect that Rafael Marquez's shoulder injury in Satuday's fight with Juan Manuel Lopez falls into this category. The only real opportunity Marquez had to injure his right arm (assuming it did not happen in training, prior to the fight, which is possible) was when he pointed to the back of his head trying to convince Tony Weeks that Lopez was hitting him in the back of the head. While this was a good strategy (Weeks deducted a point from JuanMa for rabbit punching in the only round Marquez won*) I don't think it was strenuous enough to cause the injury in question.

Marquez was competitive, just not competitive enough, in every round before cashing in. He did well with his left hook, but ate a lot of right hooks from JuanMa. The fight was getting near the point where a lot of corners would be considering stopping the fight because of the punishment their man was taking.

I don't like saying this. I think a prime Rafael Marquez would have beaten Lopez. He was just there to be hit too much for his own health. As it was, however, Marquez could not pull the trigger consistently enough to get it done.

This was a great fight with only two disappointments. The first, obviously, was Marquez's 'injury.' It would have been nice to see a dramatic finish instead of an anticlimax. Still, if it prevents Marquez from living in a wheelchair past 40, I'm willing to deal.

Less tolerable was Tony Weeks' refereeing of the fight. Weeks was just a little too eager to be involved and just a little too inconsistent after deciding he was going to be a visible ref. He broke the fighters on quite a few occasions when it was not necessary, but did not break the fighters on one or two occasions where it looked like it might actually be called for. He warned Lopez for rabbit punching that appeared to be as much the result of the angle at which Marquez chose to attack (it appeared that shots targeting the chin, temple, and ear hit the back of Marquez's head when he came in fast and low), even taking a point, but chose to ignore Marquez's habit of punching on the break. If you're going to break the fighters unnecessarily, try to make sure neither one of them punch each other while you're doing it.


*I did not actually score this fight. It's the first fight I've watched since getting Showtime back in October and I wanted to just enjoy and not be distracted by scoring. I'll give my usual more detailed breakdown the next time around. I'll be willing to watch with a notebook then.

**This originally read Robert Garcia, which is not just a mistake but a pretty dumb one.