IBHOF host Graham Houston looks at the timing of boxers’ touted debuts backing off after the successful professional bows of blue-chip prospects Galal Yafai, Cheavon Clarke and Kurt Walker last weekend. .
It was a weekend to make a professional debut. Olympic gold medalist Galal Yafai kicked off his professional career in a scheduled 10-round bout while former amateurs Kurt Walker, Cheavon Clarke, Kieran Molloy and Scott Forrest all started. predictable victory.
However, not every professional debut is successful. Bernard Hopkins lost his first professional match. So does Juan Manuel Marquez (according to DQ). One of the greatest boxers of all time, Henry Armstrong, was knocked out on his professional debut.
Now, Hopkins, Marquez, and Armstrong were essentially unknowns when they started. It’s rare for a celebrated amateur star to lose his first professional match. But it can happen, as we saw when Olympic gold medalist Robeisy Ramirez made the decision for an intrepid boxer from Denver named Adan Gonzales.
It was a shocking result. Gonzales lunged at Ramirez and repeatedly punched him. However, Ramirez quickly bolstered the ship with a string of wins, including an easy decision against Gonzales in the rematch, only to set a consecutive record.
When Ramirez stopped Eric Donovan in Glasgow last weekend, he looked like the boxer we expected to see on his debut. What happened in that initial pro game? One conjecture was that Ramirez was simply overconfident, not expecting much resistance, and before he knew it the four-round fight was over.
Another case of an unsuccessful professional debut occurred when a teenager Joe Bugner was knocked out in the third round by a test horse named Paul Brown in December 1967.
Bugner vs Brown was played at the members-only Anglo-American Sports Club at the Hilton Hotel in London. Bugner had reached the semi-finals of the London Amateur Championship in April of that year, losing to Billy Wells, a more experienced opponent who had represented England at the Mexico City Olympics.
Despite his young age, Bugner has grown (6ft 4ins) and manager and coach Andy Smith has seen great potential in him. The idea was that it would be easy for Bugner to enter professional boxing against a safe opponent. Paul Brown looks safe enough. He had a 1-3 record. All three of his losses were by KO. In his final bout, Brown was stopped in the first round by Terry Daly, a tough but rather flimsy London heavyweight.
However, there was a warning sign. Brown’s only win was a KO, so obviously, if nothing else, he can at least punch a bit. He hit Bugner on the chin and the prospect touched the canvas.
The immediate assumption was that Bugner couldn’t make a punch. But these quick things can go wrong. Of course, Bugner went on to win British and European heavyweight titles, crossing the gap twice with Muhammad Ali and hitting a thrilling 12-round bout with Joe Frazier. And Bugner got his revenge on Brown, twice in fact, with a TKO in the fourth round and then a halt in the third round.
Brown never won another fight after a nasty victory over Bugner. He retired with a 2-11 record. Eight of his losses were in the gap.
Bugner isn’t the only British heavyweight to lose his professional debut but go on to big things. Back in 1954, Welsh heavyweight boxer Dick Richardson lost to Henry Cooper’s twin, Jim Cooper, losing points in a showdown between two debutant boxers. (Henry won his first knockout that night in his first professional fight.) While Jim Cooper never made it far as a boxer, Richardson did became a European champion and featured in some of the biggest British and European heavyweight fights of the 1950s and 60s.
Then came a night at the Royal Albert Hall in London in October 1966 when two crowd-pleasing amateur champions failed to win their professional bout.
Commonwealth Games gold medalist Mark Rowe lost to Hugh Lynch, a Trinidadian boxer from Brixton in South London, in a six-round middleweight bout, while British amateur champion Johnny Clark got only could hold a draw against the Scottish boxer. named Tommy Connor in another six-round game.
Both Rowe and Clark won British titles, Rowe in middleweight, Clark in bantamweight.
Clark won 26 straight games after the first draw, including Tommy Connor’s seventh-half winner. Great British boxer Alan Rudkin twice defeated Clark in British title challenges, but when Rudkin retired, Clark won the vacant title and also became the European champion.
I’ve always thought that Hugh Lynch was an odd opponent choice for Rowe’s first battle. Lynch is just starting out as a southern figure, and he’s already floundering — what the US trade war would call “difficult”.
Although Lynch had an impressive 3-3-1 record, two of his wins were in overtime. It was a fight that practically no one thought Rowe could lose, but as I recall, he never started until it was too late in the fight. At the time, the Boxing Council used a scoring system in which rounds were decided by 1/4 point, and Rowe lost by 1/4 point. (I counted 3-2-1 in the innings for Lynch.)
The two met again in an eight-round main event at a packed Manor Place Baths in Walworth, South London, and Rowe secured a tough victory.
Rowe lost the British championship in his first defense but he took part in some thrilling battles in London. I always remember Mark as a powerful close-in boxer with a great left hook to the body, but he can be quite tall. Bunny Sterling, who has taken the British title from him, has a fast-moving style that’s completely wrong for the heavy-handed but more methodical Rowe.
Oh, yes, Sterling also lost his first professional match. Sterling actually lost the first three games. But the British Jamaican, Londoner, Sterling persevered, starting to win consistently and winning the British and European middleweight titles as well as successfully defending the Commonwealth title in Australia and Canada. He was also the first immigrant from a Commonwealth country to win the British title.
Winning a professional debut is obviously always a priority, but, as the examples above show, a disappointing debut doesn’t necessarily define a boxer’s career.
Main photo: Gonzales (left) stuns Ramirez 2019. Photo: Mikey Williams / Top Rank.
