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| Is Ike Quartey The Sacrificial Lamb Of Boxing? |
12/22/2006 |
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Ample comments have already been made about the dance between Ike Quartey and Winky Ronald Wright but I still want to shed some light on the undercurrents of the dance because they were not observable to every one. I call it a dance because I feel that, to the disadvantage of unsuspecting fans, the boxing world and Ike Quartey, are in a win-win or ''chop, make I chop'' connection - Ike''s name is being used to sell tickets and he gets paid to loose fights in return.
At the outset, let me acknowledge that because it is not a government-sanctioned sport like the NBA (basketball), NFL (American football), or MLS (soccer), boxing is one of the most corrupt sports in America today. It is the only individual sport where the athlete gets a prior agreed compensation whether he wins, looses or draws, in all other sports the winner of a particular event gets more money than the looser. The boxing syndicates, WBA, WBC, WBF, and WBO are often referred to as alphabet soup because anyone can make up an acronym of three letters, choose his administrative body, and name his champions as long as the acronym begins with a ''double you''. (Please don''t bring up wrestling for if you think wrestling is a sport and not just entertainment, I will sell you seawater behind the Elmina Castle.)
Floyd Mayweather, is an unbeaten welterweight champ and arguably the pound-for-pound king of boxing, meaning if all active boxers were the same size, Floyd would beat them all. Yet, with four loses, Oscar de la Hoya is getting paid more than Floyd to fight each other. Amusingly, Mayweather Senior (Floyd''s father) will train Oscar to beat his own son, while Floyd will be trained by his father''s brother, Roger. I am keeping my fingers crossed and eyes open to see how this interesting Mayweather trinity of Father, Son, and the Holy Uncle will play out. I can write volumes about fraud in boxing from the Jack Johnson age to that of Winky Wright because they come at a dozen for a pesewa.
Ike has been allowed into fights that he has slim chances to win. He has not been getting winnable fights for two reasons. One, he is a small welterweight whose body size should only allow him to campaign as a welterweight or super welterweight but not as a middleweight. For him to get fights he has been accepting opponents who are big enough to fight as light heavies. After loosing to Oscar, Ike moved up in weight to meet Fernando Vargas, who is even bigger than Oscar, for his title. Why that fight was even allowed puzzles me to this day. If you are a champ you can move up in weight class to challenge the bigger champion. But if you move up without a belt, you are not even considered as a contender until you fight someone in the new weight class. The Vargas-Quartey fight was simply illegal and it clearly shows the dishonesty in boxing. Ike has disbelievingly been taking fights that the opponents and promoters know that he is going to loose. It is not coincidental, but rather by design, that in his last fight, the opponent, co-promoter, hometown boy, and the bigger man in the ring was one person. Winky Ronald Wright. Winky''s previous fight was a draw with the middleweight champ Jermain Taylor who looks like he can add a few more pounds and fight Mike Tyson in two months.
Secondly, despite being a former world champion, Ike Quartey is not a household name in international boxing circles mainly because he lives permanently in Ghana - his voice is neither heard nor his face seen until he steps in the ring. In Ghana he is notorious for being arrogant but outside, he only talks with his fists in the ring and quickly disappears after each fight. He has a good record to sell descent fights but not the persona to sell blockbuster fights. When he held a title it made sense to challenge him but now that he is only a contender, fighting him means taking a big risk for a little reward. This is the reason that it took so long for him to get the change to fight Oscar and the closeness of that fight proves that Oscar took a big gamble.
There are other clues that make the Wright-Quartey fight look fishy. Winky and Ike are longtime friends. They have trained and fought on occasions in the same ring in the same gym but not against each other. If you did not know this fact, you could sense it by the way they touched gloves as soon as they both mounted the ring and before they were introduced - an act that you hardly see in boxing. There was no pre-fight bad-mouthing between them and they exchanged pats at the end of several rounds. Winky said after the fight that he wanted to win without hurting Ike and this was exactly what Ike was also trying to do. The first knock down was due to interlocking of feet but I have no qualms about it since the ref followed the official rules of boxing. The second fall was a bad call by the ref - Ike was just off balance, no part of his body touched the canvass or the ropes except the base of his shoes - yet neither he nor his corner protested the call. At the final bell the squeezes and smiles on the faces of Ike''s cornermen looked as if their man had won the fight. To the shock of other boxers at ringside, namely de la Hoya, Hopkins, Mosley and Mosley Snr, some pro-Winky fans occasionally screamed as if someone was parachuting into the ring. This, the announcers did not even bother to mention because there was nothing exciting happening in or out of the ring. Usually, when a boxer of Ike''s caliber looses often in a weight class, the commentators inquire if he would move down in weight but that did not happen. I am not professing that Ike was robbed. What I am saying is that the boxing authorities are aware (and possibly in complicity) that Ike has lately been fighting men who are bigger than him and this last one looked like two brothers (not the slang meaning African-American men) trying to deceive the gathering by pretending to be fighting. For a million dollars Ike has to find a way to thank his friend so I won''t be surprised if Winky shows up in Ghana on a visit following the heels of Serena Williams and I am watching out for Ike''s next opponent, if he ever fights again. Actually, Ike is a circumstance to make more money for loosing fights than some good boxers are for winning.
Source:
kamonu (kamonu@comcast.net)
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